Death on the Holy Mountain

by David Dickinson

  ‘One hundred Orangemen,’ he boomed once more, ‘one hundred of them! God bless my soul!’ His hands began stroking the great silver crucifix that hung from his neck. ‘I’ll come back to them in a moment if I may, Lord Powerscourt. Let me try to make clear in my mind the story so far, as it were. Some twenty portraits, all of them male, all of them the predecessors of these great landlords, have been stolen, and some Old Masters. Blackmail notes have been dispatched demanding we know not what. Do you know, Lord Powerscourt, if any of these blackmail threats have been met? Have the Butlers or the Moores paid up?’

  ‘I wish I knew the answer, Your Grace. I think not. There is an air of desperation abroad in all these houses now, I think. There may be a deadline for payment. Again, I do not know. I suspect they are waiting for the threats at the end of the letters to be carried out. And they are hoping against hope that the thieves will be caught before they can carry out their threats.’

  ‘These Orangemen now,’ the Archbishop was taking notes again, ‘you said they are, for the moment, a threat rather than a reality. Is that so? And, if so, under what circumstances will they come?’

  ‘My apologies, Your Grace, I should have made myself clearer. Ormonde has sent to Dublin Castle for an inspector and a colleague from the Special Branch, or the Intelligence Department to come and investigate the thefts. Ormonde is giving them a week to find the perpetrators. If they fail, the Orangemen and their bands will set forth from Enniskillen. They could be here in a day. I believe Ormonde intends to charter a special train to bring them down.’

  ‘Just one point, Lord Powerscourt, if I may, you’re not serious when you talk of bands? There are all kinds of things I can put up with as a proper Christian pilgrim but Orange bands are not one of them. Please tell me you jest here.’

  ‘I was speaking metaphorically, Your Grace, I have no idea if they propose to bring a band or not. But if you think about their activities, those Orangemen are scarcely able to move about in any numbers in Belfast and their other strongholds without a band. It would seem to be part of the Orange mind.’

  ‘You’re right, Lord Powerscourt,’ said the Archbishop sadly, ‘they are hardly capable of leaving their front doors without those terrible Lambeg drums. Maybe they will bring a band. God save Ireland.’

  The Archbishop frowned. His hands moved faster round his crucifix now.

  ‘By my calculations, Your Grace, these Dublin Castle men should have arrived three days ago. There are four days left.’

  ‘I can see your concerns, Lord Powerscourt. You were certainly right to come to me. Tell me, do you have particular fears or is it just the general situation that concerns you? And do you envisage any particular role for the Church in these events?’

  Powerscourt paused for a moment. ‘I think,’ he began, ‘that the situation becomes so combustible with the arrival of the Orangemen that anything might happen. But let me try out, if I may, some possibilities. Your Grace will, no doubt, be able to think of more. Look at it from the beginning. Suppose those Orangemen arrive in Westport station in their special train. At least they won’t have had to share their carriages with anybody else. The most logical way for them to reach Ormonde House is to walk or march – even Dennis Ormonde hasn’t enough carriages to carry a hundred of them there. Suppose they do bring a band and march out down the Mall in Westport towards the Louisburg road. Do you think they would reach the end of the town without bricks or bottles being thrown at them? I doubt it. Then suppose they arrive in Ormonde House and are put up in one of those great barns and outhouses out the back. How long before the buildings go up in flames? Or suppose these Orangemen go out drinking at one of those pubs like Campbell’s underneath Croagh Patrick. They’re nearly as fond of drinking as they are of marching. How long before a fight or a brawl breaks out and spreads? How long before the Protestant houses with the paintings guarded by the Orangemen are torched? Or boycotted? Trouble could come in any one of a number of ways, Your Grace.’

  ‘Trouble might indeed be coming, in battalions. What a terrible situation, Lord Powerscourt. The original wrong is done to the Protestants in the Big Houses. I don’t approve of their presence here any more, I think their day is done, but having your ancestors stolen off your walls must be terrible. It’s as if their past has been violated in front of them. I know how I would feel if somebody stole some of my Irish landscapes and I’m not even descended from them. I think I can sense where you see the Church might fit in, but tell me your thoughts first, if you will.’

  ‘I do not see,’ said Powerscourt, ‘how I can ask anything from you at all, Your Grace. You have been more than kind in hearing me out today and at such short notice too. I am not a member of your faith. I no longer live in this country. But I do care about it, about Ireland, I care passionately about it, and I pray that the peace should not be broken and more misery heaped on a population who have endured far too much of it already in the last hundred and twenty years. The people, Your Grace, will look to the Church for guidance. Moral leadership in Ireland today rests with you and your bishops and priests. The Church is more powerful today than it has ever been. When these outrages start, or rather if these outrages start between Orangemen and Catholics, the local priests will need guidance. You know far better than I do about the various ranges of opinion in the priesthood in your diocese, but I suspect that some of them would condemn any violence and others would condone it, either by word or by inaction.’

  Powerscourt found the Archbishop’s next question truly astonishing. ‘Have you come across our local priest in the Butler’s Cross area, Lord Powerscourt? Father O’Donovan Brady?’

  ‘I have,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘There are many like him,’ said the Archbishop. ‘Sorry, I interrupted you. Please continue.’

  ‘Please don’t think I would like the Church to turn into some kind of auxiliary police force, Your Grace, encouraging people to turn their neighbours in to the authorities or anything like that. But if there is no message, no instruction to the faithful through the priesthood, the men of the night may think they have the Church’s blessing. If, on the other hand, the Church urges calm, encourages people not to resort to violence, then there might be hope.’

  ‘I see,’ said the Archbishop, closing his eyes briefly. ‘I do not think I could give you any guidance on what my position might be until we have something more concrete to deal with. I do not believe that the men of the night, as you call them, would pay any attention to what the Church might say. Only at the end, when they need to confess their sins and receive the last rites, do they take any heed of priests at all. And then, of course, we cannot fail them in their hour of need. But the Church must give a lead, we must offer guidance. I am as concerned in a way – I speak freely in front of you as you have with me – with some of the priests and the younger Christian Brothers as I am with the men of the night. In many of them, second or third generation descendants of the dark years of the 1840s, the fires of hatred left by the famine burn very bright. They blame the landlords and what they describe as the English garrison. But we cannot build a new Ireland on theft and robbery by night and letters of blackmail by day. Certain principles will guide me. If these Orangemen come, with or without the bands, we must be patient. Our congregations must remember that however objectionable their presence may be, it was the actions of our own people that brought them here in the first place. Restraint and calm must be our watchwords. Of course, I shall have to be very circumspect in what I say. I shall pray for God’s guidance to find the right language, and I shall pray that He guide me in the right path.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Powerscourt.

  Then the Archbishop produced another of his astonishing changes of tack. ‘Tell me, Lord Powerscourt, how soon do you think your leg will be better?’

  ‘My leg?’ said Powerscourt in astonishment. Did the man possess healing powers?

  ‘Your leg. I noticed you were in some difficulty when you came in.’

  ‘Oh, that,�
� said Powerscourt, ‘it’s nothing. The doctors say it should be fine in a week or so.’

  ‘In that case,’ the Archbishop was smiling now, ‘let me issue you an invitation. I shall explain. As Archbishop of Tuam I am charged, along with my other duties, with the supervision of the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s Holy Mountain. It takes place on the last Sunday in July. I am sure you know of it. All these papers here’ – he waved an enormous fist at the documents on his desk – ‘are concerned with it. We are consecrating a new chapel on the summit this year. I think this pilgrimage is a very special event, Lord Powerscourt. Few who take part are unmoved by it. Surrounded by all these pilgrims, most of them saying their prayers as they go, some climbing barefoot, I have often felt very close to God. Certainly His Grace is present on the hillside that day, I am sure of it. I am inviting you and your wife and your friends to take part this year, as my guests. Of course I am not asking you to be in my party. We shall be many and shall stop many times for moments of devotion. Nor would I dream of asking you to take part in any of our services. But St Patrick is the patron saint of all Irishmen, whatever their particular denomination. As Protestants you would be most welcome. I think it would be good for your immortal soul, Lord Powerscourt, and I am certain you will find it a moving experience.’

  ‘I am most touched and honoured, Your Grace,’said Powerscourt. ‘I accept. Of course I accept. It will be a privilege to be your guest on that day.’

  ‘And now, if you will forgive me, I must attend to three local MPs who have come to talk to me about secondary education. They have been waiting fifteen minutes already.’ The Archbishop was ushering Powerscourt to the door in person. ‘We must keep in touch. Write to me for another appointment if you need. Don’t hesitate. I can find you through Butler’s Court?’ Powerscourt nodded. ‘Good.’ The Archbishop opened his massive front door. ‘If we don’t meet before I shall hope to see you on that Sunday. On the Holy Mountain.’

  8

  Johnny Fitzgerald was in the Mitre, a mere hundred yards from the Archbishop’s Palace. Tuam, he said sadly, did not have a Cathedral Arms. He would have to wait another day.

  ‘Satisfactory meeting?’ he asked his friend. ‘Archbishop well? Holy pictures in good order?’

  ‘All well,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’ll tell you about it when we get back to Butler’s Cross.’

  After less than three minutes in the train Johnny Fitzgerald was asleep, possible tribute to the powers of the Mitre’s ministrations. Powerscourt stared idly out of the window, thinking about the threat of violence that might erupt when the Orangemen came to town. He noticed a brown ruined tower with no windows, sitting in a field enclosed by the remains of the walls that once surrounded it, another memorial to the violence of Ireland’s past. Ireland is a land of stone walls and ruins, he thought, Franciscan friaries, abandoned in Elizabeth’s time, with jagged walls etched against the sky. A whole religious settlement at Clonmacnoise, founded in the sixth century, finally destroyed by the English garrison in Athlone a thousand years later, the remains of the buildings now lying open to the sun and the rain and the clouds by the side of the Shannon. Great Norman castles like Ballymote, square in construction with round towers for extra protection, where Red Hugh O’Donnell marshalled his forces in 1598 before marching south to defeat at Kinsale, ransacked and ruined. Only the crows are left, Powerscourt remembered, perched happily on the rough edges of the battlements. Manor houses and castles burnt in those wars like that of the poet Edmund Spenser who had composed his Faerie Queen in County Cork. After the rebels destroyed his house, his son burnt to death inside it, Spenser had written that Ireland would never find peace until all the native Irish were killed. Catholic abbeys and churches ravaged by Cromwell’s men, raven and crow now living where the host had once been present and the peasant Irish had knelt to receive the sacrament. Anglo-Irish houses which had once been loud with music and laughter at the balls of the gentry, now stark ruins, torched in the 1798 rebellion. Tiny cottages in Connemara, roofless now and windowless, abandoned to death or emigration in the famine years. Cairns and dolmens that bore witness to earlier times, relics of earlier Irish in an earlier Ireland. Sprinkled all over the thirty-two counties of Ireland, like jewels fallen from a casket, bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

  Two days later Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald were sitting in the library of Ormonde House, talking to Dennis Ormonde. His anger had faded slightly though Powerscourt thought it could erupt at any moment.

  ‘No wife?’ had been his first words to Powerscourt. ‘Couldn’t come? What a pity.’

  ‘It’s Sylvia Butler,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Lucy sends her deepest apologies but feels her place is with her at this time.’

  ‘Women,’ said Dennis Ormonde. ‘Do you know what my one has done? She’s gone and locked the Picture Gallery, both doors, and she won’t let me have the keys, that’s what she’s done. If I want to work myself into a rage about the missing pictures I have to go and peer in through the window like a bloody burglar.’

  Powerscourt and Fitzgerald made sympathetic noises.

  ‘Now then,’ he went on. ‘Our friend from Dublin Castle is working on a bench in the garden. Doesn’t come in here very much. Doesn’t trust the servants, he says. Can’t say I blame him really. Ulsterman, funny little man with one of those ghastly accents they all have up there. Name of Harkness, William Harkness, probably named after King Billy at the Battle of the Boyne. Seems strange to have one Ulsterman here one day when we may have a hundred of them the day after. Anyway, preparations are well under way for the reception and feeding and sleeping of the Orangemen in the barns and outhouses out the back. Cook is baking mountainous quantities of potato bread. She says they like potato bread, the Ulster people. Harkness does most of his business in the evening. He’s got a lad with him, can’t be more than twenty-five, comes from Dingle, name of O’Gara. One from one end of the island, one from another. God help us all.

  ‘Now then …’ He rummaged around in a pile of papers on a table beside him. ‘I’ve got a list of all the houses they’ll guard when they come. This copy’s for you, Powerscourt.’

  Powerscourt looked at a neat list of grand houses. There was a line drawn halfway down.

  ‘Don’t think we can manage those places at the bottom of the list,’ Ormonde said. ‘Only got one or two pictures anyway. I’m banking on the thieves only going for houses with pictures. Can’t think of any other means of elimination.’

  Ormonde looked at his watch. ‘You’d better go and make your mark with our friend from the Castle. He’s got to go into Westport soon. Must be the only bloody policeman in the whole of Ireland with his office on a park bench.’

  ‘Just one thing before we do that,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘Do you know if they’re bringing a band?’

  ‘Do I know if who is bringing a bloody band?’ Ormonde sounded cross.

  ‘The Orangemen,’ Johnny persisted, ‘are they bringing a band?’

  ‘Do I know if the Orangemen are bringing a band? How the hell should I know?’

  ‘I just thought you might know,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Could be a bit tricky, having an Orange band marching about the place banging those big drums.’

  ‘Bugger the band,’ Ormonde was working himself up well now, ‘why don’t you go and talk to Harkness and I’ll see what I can find out about Orange bands. Damn Orange bands!’

  William Harkness’s bench was strategically placed two-thirds of the way between the back of Ormonde House and the sea. If he looked to his right he had a clear view of any miscreants who might be foolish enough to approach the house in broad daylight. To his left he could spot any piratical invasion sailing across Clew Bay.

  ‘How are ye, Lord Powerscourt, are ye well?’ he began. ‘It’s great to meet ye. They’ve got a file on you back there in Dublin, you know, all of it very complimentary.’

  ‘Have they indeed, Inspector?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Tell us this, sorry to be brief but
I understand your time is short, what do you think your chances are of finding the thieves?’

  Harkness looked at the two of them carefully. ‘To be honest with you, to be truthful with you now, and I wouldn’t say this in front of your man Ormonde, I don’t think we’re going to do it. Not in a week. Might do it if it was longer. The trouble is that the word has got out about these Orangemen. The constabulary here and in Castlebar are worried sick about them. The commanding officer of the Castlebar garrison has cancelled all leave for the foreseeable future. Everybody’s clammed up.’

  ‘I don’t want to pry,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but do you have any informants inside the gang of thieves who stole Ormonde’s paintings?’

  ‘I couldn’t swear that we do,’ admitted Harkness. ‘If we did they’d all be locked up and under interrogation.’

  Powerscourt shuddered slightly. He knew what interrogation could mean in these parts.

  ‘Are you able to tell us,’ asked Johnny, ‘how many informants you do have? Just so we have an idea.’

  ‘I don’t think that would be helpful at all,’ Harkness replied.

  ‘You mean you haven’t got any,’ said Johnny.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’ Harkness’s attention was suddenly drawn to a figure who must have been O’Gara from Dingle, ambling slowly towards the house. ‘How’s about ye, O’Gara, you hoor!’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing going over to the house, for Christ’s sake? We’re here, you fool, not there.’ O’Gara broke into a slow run. ‘What do you have to tell us, man? What news?’

  ‘The policeman has done as you asked, sir,’ he said. ‘All the senior officers from Westport and round about will be meeting you when you go into Westport later this morning. It’s all arranged.’

  ‘I’ve been to Castlebar and Newport and lots of places talking to the police,’ Harkness told Powerscourt and Fitzgerald. ‘Some good may come of it. I’d better be off.’