Death on the Holy Mountain

by David Dickinson

  Father O’Donovan Brady walked over to his sideboard and took out a full decanter and two large glasses. ‘Would you care for a small glass of sherry, Lord Powerscourt? I normally take one myself at this time of day.’

  Powerscourt noted with interest that the Reverend’s glass was filled to a much higher level than his own. He wondered if the need for alcohol could overcome suspicion or even dislike of Protestants.

  Father Brady sat down with his glass and drank deeply. ‘I fear,’ he shook his bald head as he spoke, ‘there will always be mischief in Ireland as long as the landlords are here.’ Powerscourt wondered suddenly if the man was actually a Fenian, or a secret member of the vicar’s Irish Republican Brotherhood, inciting revolt from the pulpit perhaps, withholding the sacrament from supporters of the status quo. ‘You ask if I can be of assistance to you in your sordid inquiries. Would you have me incriminate members of my own congregation, if I knew anything germane to the matter, which I do not? Are you asking me, in effect, to become an informer, virtually a spy for the Intelligence Department up at Dublin Castle?’

  Tout, informer, Judas, there were few more dangerous words in Ireland where hatred of informers was as prevalent as the willingness of the native Irish to betray their own for money. The United Irishmen, Powerscourt recalled, had been riddled with informers, like a rotting honeycomb.

  ‘Of course I would not ask you to incriminate one of your own flock, Father. I was merely seeking information of a more general sort,’ said Powerscourt, watching Brady take another deep draught of his pale sherry.

  ‘Perhaps we can be clear about things, Lord Powerscourt. I cannot complain if you come to me looking for help in your squalid activities. But I am under no obligation to help you. I refuse to incriminate or betray any member of my congregation. I understand you reside most of the time in England now, Lord Powerscourt. Perhaps it would be better for this poor benighted country if all the Protestants, even the Butlers, went to live in England. Ireland is a land largely populated by Catholics, it always has been. One day, I am sure, God willing, it will be a proper Catholic nation. Whether or not there will be any significant place in that Catholic nation for other faiths is not for me to say, thank God.’

  He went and poured himself a generous refill. He did not offer one to his guest but Powerscourt’s glass was hardly touched. ‘We have had landlords too long in Ireland, Lord Powerscourt, far too long.’

  Powerscourt thought the time had come to beat a retreat. ‘Thank you very much for your time, Father,’ he said, heading for the door. ‘I can see little point in continuing this conversation.’

  The priest showed him out. ‘We have conversion classes here in this house every other Thursday, Lord Powerscourt. Church of Ireland Protestants, Presbyterians, Methodists, all are welcome. It is never too late to welcome the sinner and the heretic into the true faith.’ With that he slammed the door shut. As he left Powerscourt was just able to see through the window Father O’Donovan Brady pouring himself another refill. It was only a quarter to six.

  As he approached the steps leading up to Butler’s Court Powerscourt was passed by a carriage travelling at considerable speed. The passenger rushed inside. As Powerscourt entered the great white hall with its glorious staircase he heard Richard Butler cry, ‘Oh no! Oh, my God! How dreadful! How truly dreadful! How many this time?’

  ‘Ten altogether this time, Richard,’ the man from the carriage said. ‘Seven ancestors, all male, a Titian and couple of Gainsboroughs, well, maybe Gainsboroughs or attributed to Gainsborough as they say. I never did understand anything about this damned painting business.’

  ‘Allow me to make the introductions,’ said Richard Butler. ‘Lord Francis Powerscourt, come to investigate the theft of the earlier pictures, Mr William Moore, of Moore Castle in the neighbouring county.’

  Just as they were shaking hands, they heard the sound of another pair of boots racing up the steps. The boots appeared to be in as great a hurry as the carriage had been earlier.

  ‘Francis,’ said a panting Johnny Fitzgerald, nodding politely to the others. ‘I have news. Important news, I think.’ He fished a note from his pocket. ‘This,’ he said, ‘from a leading New York newspaper several days ago. The text was sent over by cable. “Eight Anglo-Irish portraits by distinguished Irish and English artists, eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Four full-length, four half. Available for sale as a group or individually. Price on application to Goldman and Rabinowitz, Picture Restorers and Dealers in Fine Art, 57 Fifth Avenue, New York City.”’

  4

  Richard Butler led them rapidly out of the hall, talking loudly about a horse he had seen that morning. The beast, he declared, was a most promising animal, the finest he had seen since the German-bred Wolfgang years before.

  ‘Didn’t want the women to hear,’ he said, panting slightly as he reached the security of his study. ‘Sylvia would be on the first boat to Holyhead if I told her this evening, so she would. God, this is terrible news.’

  Further introductions were effected, William Moore telling Johnny Fitzgerald that he had known a cousin of his at school. ‘Tell us, William, in God’s name,’ said Butler, ‘tell us when it happened, how it happened.’

  ‘The theft took place sometime in the middle of the night. There’s a broken window down in the kitchen. That’s where they came in, I think. One of the footmen noticed the vanished pictures on his rounds first thing this morning.’

  ‘Was anything else taken?’ asked Powerscourt, sitting himself down on a small sofa by the fireplace.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said Moore, a small wiry man with red hair and a bright red beard, ‘and the silver in that room is worth a fortune, far more than the bloody pictures.’

  ‘And how did the family take it?’ asked Butler.

  ‘Well,’ Moore said, ‘the wife initially didn’t seem to mind very much. Said she’d never really cared for the portraits anyway. She’s always maintained they make the place look like a bloody mausoleum, like the one Victoria built for the dreadful Albert over at Frogmore, all those damned dead men looking at her every time she entered a room. I thought it wasn’t going to bother her very much. She ate a huge breakfast, eggs, bacon, tomatoes, sausages, fried potato bread, mushrooms, toast, and I began to feel a bit better myself. Then I found her an hour later crying on the terrace, saying the rebels were back and we’d all be murdered in our beds. Her people came from Wicklow, you know. They had a terrible time there with those rebels back in ’98. I think three of them were killed.’

  ‘What are we to do, Lord Powerscourt? What on earth are we going to do now?’

  Richard Butler was twisting his hands round and round each other, as if he were in pain. He and Moore looked at Powerscourt with the air of children expecting a parent to rescue them from some especially unpleasant predicament. Powerscourt had no idea what to say. Temporarily, he was lost for words.

  ‘Let us begin with the practicalities,’ he said at last, trying to sound more authoritative than he felt. ‘The first thing is to decide what to do about the women and the wives. I do think, Butler, that you will have to tell them, and tell them as soon as possible. For all we know Mrs Moore may arrive here at any moment to pour out her woes to your wife. You know what women are like about talking to each other, talk all bloody day if you give them half a chance.’

  Richard Butler peered anxiously out of the window in case another carriage was bringing a distraught Mrs Butler to his quarters. All he could see was an old man raking the gravel on the drive.

  ‘I suggest,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘that Mr Moore should stay the night here, and, with your approval, Johnny and I will accompany him back to Moore Castle in the morning. We can make a full inspection of the house and an inventory of the missing pictures and so on.’

  The prospect of another guest and activity of some kind seemed to restore Butler’s spirits slightly.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I’ll get that sorted in a moment. But tell me, Powerscourt, are you c
ertain I have to tell Sylvia? Tell her that more paintings have disappeared?’

  ‘In my opinion,’ replied Powerscourt, sure of this if of nothing else, ‘you have no choice. Or rather, you have two very disagreeable options. Either you tell her yourself, or you wait for rumour to reach her. News, as you know as well as I do, travels very fast over here. You wouldn’t want her to hear about it from the cook as they’re discussing the menus for the week first thing in the morning now, would you?’

  Richard Butler looked racked by the choice. ‘I’ll tell her in the morning,’ he said finally. ‘She’ll be able to bear it better in the morning.’

  For a moment nobody spoke. The only sound was the methodical swish of rake on gravel.

  Then Johnny Fitzgerald tried a diversion. ‘These are wonderful horses you have here on your walls, Mr Butler,’ he said. ‘Are any of them yours?’ Powerscourt wondered briefly if one of the horses lining three walls of the study was the fabled Wolfgang, triple winner at the Punchestown Races. He knew that horses were the only subject that might distract attention from the calamity of the vanished paintings over at Moore Castle. A vigorous debate followed, Butler telling the two strangers to Ireland that all the horses on the walls were, or had been, his and that he thought he had spent far more money on them than his ancestors had on the paintings.

  ‘There’s a thing,’ said Moore, suddenly animated, ‘why haven’t they taken any of the horses? In Ireland you can turn horseflesh into cash faster than almost anything else. How would anybody know, Richard, if some of your animals turned up in Tipperary, or Waterford or Cork?’

  ‘It’s a poor eye for a horse they have down there in Cork,’ said Richard Butler darkly. ‘Those buggers wouldn’t know a racehorse from a dray.’

  ‘Forgive me for bringing the conversation back into the human world, gentlemen,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but did the thieves leave you any kind of message, Mr Moore? A ransom note? Demands for money, that sort of thing?’

  William Moore blinked rapidly. ‘No note, no ransom, nothing at all. Do you think it’s going to be like the boycott all over again, Powerscourt? Not that nobody’s going to talk to us, though with some of them that would be a blessing, but a new . . .’ He paused briefly, searching for the right word. ‘. . . a new tactic, a new device to confound the landlords? Do you think it’s that, Powerscourt?’

  ‘I don’t think we should alarm ourselves with talk of boycotts and fresh campaigns at this stage, Mr Moore,’ said Powerscourt diplomatically, wishing he could believe it. ‘I know this is all very difficult to bear, but only three houses have been affected so far. And nobody’s lives or livelihoods are affected.’

  On that note the little party broke up, Butler and Moore going to sort out his accommodation and the loan of a pair of pyjamas, Powerscourt and Fitzgerald to walk by the river in the late afternoon sun.

  ‘That advertisement from the New York paper, Johnny. How did you get hold of it?’

  ‘Do you think there’s something wrong with it, Francis?’ said Fitzgerald.

  ‘I can only answer that when I know how you came by it,’ Powerscourt replied, staring across the Shannon from the bottom of Butler’s gardens.

  ‘Well,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘I’d made the rounds of most of the Dublin art dealers, shysters most of them. Then there was this man called Farrell in a gallery of the same name in Kildare Street, just along from the Kildare Street Club, Dublin’s answer to the Garrick and the Reform. He thought I was you, to start with, Francis. Seemed most disappointed that I wasn’t you, if you see what I mean. Damned unfair of him, I thought, nothing wrong with me. Anyway, when I said I was a great friend of yours and that we’d worked on all sorts of cases together, he relented a bit. He said nobody had been trying to sell any ancestor paintings at all, so maybe the thieves are keeping their powder dry. Then he gave me the advertisement but he wouldn’t say where it came from. He said, the Farrell man, that he could only tell you in person. It was all very secretive, like we were all trying to sell him a couple of fake Leonardos. He even bolted the door and closed the shop up for a few minutes while he talked to me. What do you make of that, Francis?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think it means, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt, bending down to trail a hand in the water. He told Fitzgerald about his conversation with Michael Hudson in Old Bond Street some time before and Hudson’s idea of placing an advertisement in one of the American newspapers. ‘Appropriately enough, from where we’re standing now, this is a fishing expedition. Hudson’s trying to see if there is a market for these ancestral portraits in New York. If there are a number of replies, then we will know there is a market for these things, a market that the thieves might have known about.’

  ‘And what happens if they are queuing up round the block to buy the bloody things?’ asked Johnny. ‘Goldman and Rabinowitz don’t have a heap of Irish landowners lying about in their basement, do they?’

  ‘I don’t think that matters very much,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Paintings gone for cleaning, unavoidable delay in transshipment from Ireland, customs formalities to be finalized, you could keep the ball in play for months.’

  ‘By God, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘your lines of communication here are longer than they ever were in South Africa or India. London, New York, London, Dublin. That’s a bloody long way. Are you going to tell them in the Big House about it?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Powerscourt firmly. ‘That would be like putting it on the front page of the Irish Times. Father O’Donovan Brady down in the town, my favourite Catholic priest in all the world, would hear of it inside twenty-four hours.’

  Dinner that evening was a rather subdued affair in Butler’s Court. The blank spaces reproached them from the walls. Butler carried on a desultory conversation with Alice Bracken about the prospects for the forthcoming hunting season. Powerscourt had a halting discussion with the tall thin young man called James about Irish songs and ballads, a subject on which the young man possessed an encyclopedic knowledge. Only Johnny Fitzgerald seemed to be on top form, entertaining Sylvia Butler with anecdotes about the Dublin art dealers he had recently met, all of them, without exception, he maintained, thieves and villains of the darkest hue, not a single one of them a man you would buy a tea caddy from. After the consumption of a spectacular trifle, almost all the ingredients originating on the premises, Richard Butler proudly told the company, the ladies withdrew. As their host placed a bottle of port in the centre of the table they were joined by a very old gentleman with white hair, a straggly white moustache and a thin white beard. He shuffled slowly to an empty chair, bringing with him a large black notebook. He was wearing a faded dinner jacket under a very old green dressing gown decorated with Chinese dragons of considerable ferocity. Powerscourt wondered if it had come from the East with Marco Polo.

  ‘Uncle Peter,’ said Richard Butler rather wearily. ‘How good of you to join us.’

  ‘Didn’t feel like the whole thing, dinner, I mean,’ said the aged uncle, eyeing the port greedily. ‘Had something in my rooms.’

  By the look of him, Powerscourt thought, he had been doing rather more drinking than eating in his rooms. His eyes were bloodshot and he carried with him a general air of faded dissipation, like an old sofa that had been left out in the rain.

  ‘Heard you had visitors,’ Uncle Peter went on. ‘Educated men. Cambridge, one of them. Young James told me.’

  The old man nodded firmly at this point, looking with even greater interest at the glasses and the bottle. ‘Thought they’d like to hear some of my book.’ He patted the volume in front of him.

  ‘Uncle Peter’s been writing a history of Ireland,’ Richard Butler said loudly in the tone he might have used when talking to a small child. ‘He’s been working at it for the past fifteen years.’

  ‘Really?’ said Powerscourt, wondering what was to follow. Johnny was eyeing their visitor with a look of fellow feeling for a man who so obviously liked a glass of something every now and then to ease th
e pain of the day.

  ‘Parnell’s funeral,’ said Uncle Peter, rummaging about in his book. ‘That’s the end of my story. That’s the bit I thought the gentlemen would like to hear.’

  Butler filled four glasses and handed them round. ‘Moore,’ he said, laying down the lines for his escape, ‘I want to ask your advice about a piece of land that’s up for sale over at Carryduff. I think it’s quite promising. Did I tell you, by the way, that the bloody man Mulcahy down in the square tried to buy some of my land? Bloody cheek!’ Land, Powerscourt remembered, a subject almost as dear to these people as horses. Powerscourt was to learn later that William Moore was said to have the sharpest eye for a piece of land in the four provinces of Ireland. With that, and a slight bow, Richard Butler led his neighbour from the room.

  ‘Why did you finish your book with Parnell’s funeral?’ asked Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘That’s nearly fifteen years ago now.’

  ‘Will you tell me,’ the old man said, downing most of his glass in a single gulp, ‘what’s happened in Ireland since? I’ll tell you now, so I will. Power, real power, flowing away from the landlord class like an ebb tide. More priests, more bloody nuns, more schools, more of the young playing those stupid games of Irish football and that ridiculous hurling they go in for. Who’s ever going to give them a proper international match in hurling, will you tell me that now?’

  ‘We’d be most interested to hear about Parnell’s funeral,’ said Powerscourt politely. ‘You see, we were both there, Johnny and I.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll be able to give me some advice then,’ said Uncle Peter. ‘You’d be amazed at how hard it is to find accurate information in this country. It’s the newspapers, you see. They can’t even agree on the date the great Charles Stewart Parnell was buried. I’m sure the man from the London Times was there on the spot, and the man from the Irish Times and the fellow from the Freeman’s Journal, but I don’t think the chap from the Cork Examiner was there at all, or the man from the Mayo News. Some of them have got the funeral on a different day. One of them, can’t remember which one now, memory’s going like a clock winding down, said Parnell died on a Tuesday and was buried the next day, on the Wednesday. Would you believe it? As if they could put his body in a coffin, transport it from Brighton to Holyhead and then get it on a boat from there to Kingstown inside twenty-four hours. The thing’s not possible. Do you think they make it up, the newspapermen, I mean?’ During this speech Uncle Peter had extracted a pair of battered spectacles from a dragon’s pocket in his dressing gown and was ferreting about in his book, looking for the right place to start.