Death on the Holy Mountain

by David Dickinson

  13

  Powerscourt and Fitzgerald watched Butler Lodge for almost an hour. The smoke continued to pour regularly from the chimneys. The only human they saw was a young man who came out of the front door and returned five minutes later with a bundle of logs. There was no sign of any women. Powerscourt crept back into the wood and beckoned to his friend.

  ‘What do you think, Johnny?’

  Fitzgerald pulled his Daniel O’Connell memorial bottle out of a side pocket and took a tentative swig of the clear liquid. ‘I think they’re in there, Francis. I really do. I know we haven’t seen any of the ladies, but I wouldn’t let them out of the house if I could help it. Christ, this stuff has got a kick in the tail. At first sip you think it’s lightly spiced water or something like that. Then it tries to knock your head off. It reminds me of some Polish vodka a fellow gave me once. It was so powerful the authorities banned its manufacture altogether in case it killed off half the population of Poland.’

  ‘I agree with you, Johnny, I think they’re here. I wish I knew what to do tomorrow, mind you. I hope that bloody hotel has got a telegraph.’ Powerscourt rubbed his leg, stiff from lying by the edge of the water. ‘Could you stay here for a while, and keep watch? I’m going back to see if young Bradshaw has spotted anything up that damned mountain. I’ll see you in the hotel about nine o’clock.’

  Powerscourt found himself wondering what the cuisine would be like in Butler Lodge. If the kidnappers were all young men of the age he had seen so far, the bill of fare might not be too elaborate. He speculated about how Lucy would survive on a regimen of ham and eggs for five days or so. He had to climb some way up the hill before he found Bradshaw. The young man had veered off a couple of hundred yards to the right to find a better view.

  ‘Have a look for yourself, sir,’ he grinned, handing over the instrument. Powerscourt now had the back view of the lodge. He saw part of the drive leading up to it and the woods stretching out on either side. On the far side of the lawn he thought he could see a small river, flowing into the lake. Two of the rooms on the first floor were visible, one of them with a window open to let in the evening sunshine, but his eyesight was not good enough to spot a person inside. He asked the young man if he had seen any female inhabitants of the house on the upper floor, but Bradshaw shook his head.

  ‘Keep watching for half an hour or so and then make your way to the hotel,’ Powerscourt said, patting the young man on the shoulder, and he set off to find his other watcher. Jones was so well hidden that Powerscourt walked past him twice before he realized Jones was there. ‘Nobody’s gone in, nobody’s come out, nothing at all, sir,’ he said. Powerscourt asked him to watch for another half an hour and then make his way to the Leenane Hotel. He wondered if they should take turns to watch the house through the night but he didn’t see what purpose would be served. As far as he knew the kidnappers were not yet aware that there was a rescue mission at the gates.

  Later that evening, after enormous helpings of Irish stew, Powerscourt outlined his plans for the following morning. Operations were to begin at first light. He and Johnny were going to watch the road leading from Leenane to Butler Lodge, at a safe distance from the house. Bradshaw and Jones were to maintain a similar vigil on the other side. Anybody who looked as if they were going to the place of captivity was to be seized, and any messages taken from them. Prisoners, Powerscourt explained, were to be taken to a secure room in the basement of the hotel which was fitted with a great many locks. It was, the hotel keeper explained, where they had concealed contraband in days gone by.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Powerscourt said to Johnny after the two young men had gone to bed, ‘how long it will be before those thieves know we are here. Not long, I shouldn’t think. Even if we intercept all the messages coming from Westport or wherever enemy headquarters is, it’s going to leak out of here somehow. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the hotel isn’t supplying them with food. I’ve sent a message to the authorities saying I think we’ve found them. I’ve asked for reinforcements, twenty men, police or soldiers I don’t care, but I don’t suppose they’ll get here until the afternoon at the earliest.’

  Johnny took another swig of his stout. His bottle of Daniel O’Connell memorial liquid seemed to have been reserved for emergencies. ‘Do you have a plan to get them out, Francis? It’s going to be bloody difficult.’

  ‘I’m just trying to make it up as we go along,’ Powerscourt said, trying to sound more cheerful than he felt. ‘I keep thinking about those two women and what they must be going through. I keep thinking about Lucy too, and how I should feel if she was locked up down there in Butler Lodge.’

  As he went to sleep that night Powerscourt reminded himself that there were now two days left until the expiry of the deadline, two days to spring Mary Ormonde and her sister Winifred from the grasp of their captors. And while he knew that they only had value as long as they were alive, he was unsure how the terms of trade would change once the deadline had expired.

  Low cloud lay over the mountains the following morning. The party of four rode past Killary Harbour, Ireland’s only fjord, snaking its way back into the hills and forward to the sea. We may as well hang a banner round our necks saying rescue mission come to Butler Lodge, Powerscourt thought, as a few of the locals peered out of their windows to watch them go by. Whose side would these people be on? he wondered. He suspected the loyalty of the inhabitants would not be with them. An hour and a half after they had set out Jones and Bradshaw brought the first catch of the day, a defiant young man of about twenty years.

  ‘This is the fellow we saw on the road yesterday, sir,’ said Bradshaw, ‘or at least it’s the same horse. It had a little cross of white in the middle of its head. We’ve left the horse tied to a tree up the road.’

  Powerscourt looked at the young man. Was this the enemy he had been wrestling with all these weeks, a lad scarcely more than twenty who had barely started shaving?

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  The young man said nothing.

  ‘I said, what’s your name?’ Powerscourt repeated his question.

  Once more the young man said nothing.

  ‘We’re not asking for anything other than your name.’ Powerscourt asked his question for the third time. ‘Remember that if you co-operate with us you will receive much better treatment than if you don’t.’

  ‘I’m not co-operating with you,’ the lad suddenly found his voice, ‘you’re a bloody traitor, that’s what you are. Doing the work of the occupying power like some posh Uncle Tom. You should be ashamed to call yourself Irish, so you should.’

  With that he spat into the road right at Powerscourt’s feet. ‘Search his pockets,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’m sure he was bringing a message to the people in the lodge.’

  Jones found a battered envelope in his inside pocket. There was no name on it. Powerscourt ripped it open and laughed. There was indeed a message but it was written in Irish. None of the four could understand a word. It was, Powerscourt realized, even worse than India where they had often intercepted messages written in native languages. There the servants would translate for them. No doubt they could find some Gaelic speaker in Leenane but he would share, almost certainly, the political sentiments of the young man and might suffer from a temporary bout of amnesia. Powerscourt stuffed the letter into his back pocket. ‘Take him to the basement down in Leenane, and see if you can find anything about him when you get him there.’

  ‘Traitor!’ shouted the young man as he was led away. ‘You’re a disgrace to your country!’

  ‘If you don’t shut up,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald savagely, ‘you won’t get any food for the next two days, so keep your bloody mouth closed from now on!’

  Powerscourt and Fitzgerald returned to their position behind a clump of trees overlooking the road from Butler Lodge to Leenane. ‘If they send us some policemen,’ Powerscourt said, ‘rather than English soldiers from the garrison at Castlebar, one of them might speak Irish.’


  ‘I doubt it,’ said Fitzgerald gloomily. ‘The kind of people who learn Irish round here aren’t the kind of people who join the police force.’

  They stopped talking. They heard a whistling sound coming up the road. As they stepped out from their cover to intercept the whistler they had a brief glimpse of another youth of about twenty years old wearing a bright green shirt. He turned and fled back down the road. Then they heard the voice.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt! Johnny Fitzgerald! Stay right where you are! You are surrounded!’

  They didn’t wait to hear any more. They raced across the road and dived into the undergrowth. Both began wriggling down the hill towards the lake. Two shots followed them into the scrub. ‘It’s no good!’ The voice sounded very self-assured. ‘You are still surrounded. You’ll only get yourselves killed.’ Another shot ricocheted off a tree a couple of yards away.

  Johnny Fitzgerald wrestled a gun out of his coat pocket and fired in the general direction of the voice. ‘God save Ireland from people like you!’ he shouted defiantly and was rewarded with a bullet that passed six feet over his head. Powerscourt was cursing himself. If his reinforcements arrived that afternoon he had been intending to surround the house and give the kidnappers an ultimatum. Now, while he and his men thought they were secretly observing the approach roads to and from Butler Lodge, the people inside had been observing them and claimed to have them encircled. Powerscourt doubted if the forces from the lodge had sufficient manpower to have himself and Johnny completely surrounded but he had no idea where the ring would be weakest. He and Johnny had been moving in the direction of the lodge. Now, he felt sure that would be the wrong course of action. However he deployed his forces, the voice would want to be able to bring his men home within the secure walls of Butler Lodge. Powerscourt pointed in the opposite direction, towards Leenane, and began half walking half crawling through the gorse and bracken.

  ‘Give yourselves up now! Come out with your hands up!’

  Johnny Fitzgerald fired off a little salvo of two shots and the voice kept its peace. Where were the horses? How far back had they tied them?A hundred yards? Two hundred yards? Certainly they were on the other side of the road. In a straight running contest Powerscourt felt sure they would be outpaced by these young men, if indeed they were all young, but on horseback they might get clean away. Did the voice know they had horses? Had they been apprehended? Were they even now safely accommodated in the Butler stables, ready to serve one side as loyally as they had the other? Powerscourt dismissed his speculations and hurried on through the undergrowth. Suddenly he saw the first piece of good news they had received that morning. He could just see the horses fifty yards away by the trees. And lying on the ground beside them was Trooper Bradshaw, rifle at the ready, prepared to fire away at all and sundry. This could be turned to his advantage. Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald shot out of the undergrowth and raced across the road. Then they positioned themselves behind the prostrate figure of Bradshaw. ‘Fire!’ shouted Powerscourt. Three shots rang out, aiming in an arc down the road. ‘Fire!’ Powerscourt shouted once more. ‘Fire!’ he gave the order a third time and then all three mounted their horses and fled back, heads down, in the direction of Leenane, Bradshaw turning round from time to time to send yet more covering fire in the direction of their enemies. They might not have been caught but they had been forced to flee the field. It was not, Powerscourt said to himself as they finally reached Leenane, the most auspicious start to their operations. There were thirty-two hours to go before the expiry of the deadline.

  The cavalry came shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon. The man in charge was a Major Piers Arbuthnot-Leigh, a veteran of the Boer Wars. ‘I’ve got twenty-three of my chaps with me, Powerscourt,’ he informed his host, ‘all well blooded in pursuit of the Boer, not so much experience against the native version over here.’ He had one of those braying voices that can cut through the noises on the hunting field. His troops all looked young and fit.

  Powerscourt led the Major and a detachment of his men off on a reconnaissance mission towards Butler Lodge. Arbuthnot-Leigh peered down at the house through a powerful pair of binoculars from a position hidden among the trees.

  ‘I say, Powerscourt, that looks pretty damn fine to me.’

  ‘The Lodge, do you mean?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘No, no, man, not the wretched lodge, haven’t had time to look at that yet, the fishing, salmon, I should say in that river, and in that lake in front of the house. Some of the finest prospects I’ve seen since I was last at my place in Scotland. Bloody fine!’

  ‘I think,’ Powerscourt said acidly, ‘that our business on this occasion is with the humans in the lodge rather than the fish in the river.’

  ‘Quite so, quite so, another sort of bag altogether, what?’ Arbuthnot-Leigh turned his binoculars in a slightly different direction and continued staring down the mountain. ‘Didn’t stint themselves when they built the bloody lodge, these Butlers, did they? Place is huge. Expect they went in for wild parties down there, compliant females of good proportions imported from Dublin, what? Let me see.’ He swung his glasses round the exterior. ‘With sixteen of my chaps I could have every door and window covered, bag any Paddy trying to make a hasty getaway to the pub or the bog or wherever they come from, seven more as a mobile reserve. Trouble is, don’t have to tell you this, Powerscourt, what about the fillies inside? Bloody difficult with the two fillies, if you ask me.’

  Powerscourt realized that the Major might not be as dense as he sounded.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ Arbuthnot-Leigh went on. ‘Would you like my chaps to put on a show of force? Ten of them ride down the hill, rifles in hand, like something out of the Wild West and shoot a few rounds in the air? Give the Paddies something to think about, what?’

  ‘They might panic,’ Powerscourt said rather sadly, ‘and think this is a full frontal attack. Then they might shoot the women.’

  ‘Pity, that,’ said the Major. ‘We could launch an attack in stages, like a proper siege. Begin firing at the little green people from the top of the hill, work our way down, surround the building, knock on the front door and offer them surrender terms, if there are any of them left, what do you say?’

  ‘Same objection as before,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Fillies?’ said Arbuthnot-Leigh.

  ‘Fillies,’ nodded Powerscourt.

  ‘Bit like real life, don’t you think, Powerscourt, damned women causing a lot of trouble, whichever way you look at it.’

  The Major looked round at the six men under his command, all staring down the hill at Butler Lodge. ‘Tell you what, Powerscourt, what do you think of this as a suggestion? These six chaps of mine here, all damned good at tracking the enemy, creeping about in the bushes, not making a sound, that sort of thing. Bit like the fox in the hen coop, only know he’s been there after he’s gone, if you see what I mean. We need to know how many Paddies are on guard duty in that damned place. If I leave these fellows and our sergeant here in charge, they can try to come up with an estimate of the number of the other team. Are we playing cricket or rugby or tennis, what? Be damned useful to know that. What do you say?’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it would be very helpful to know how many of the rogues there are.’

  ‘Good show,’ said the Major, and moved off to confer with his sergeant. A few moments later he was back. ‘Operation’s going to start in a few moments,’ he announced. ‘I’m going to stay with them for a while, Powerscourt, so I’ll see you back at the hotel. Must remember to organize nosebag and sleeping bag for my chaps. I’m completely hopeless at all this crawling about in the undergrowth business. My ghillies tell me I make more noise than a herd of cattle but I’ll see my chaps started. Bloody poachers in an earlier life, three or four of them, the buggers would crawl through the jaws of hell if they thought there was game on the far side.’

  Powerscourt thought he was dreaming when he walked into the reception area of the
Leenane Hotel. He thought he saw Lady Lucy sitting in a corner by the window drinking tea. He thought the phantom figure waved at him. Then the phantom spoke.

  ‘Francis, my love, how very good to see you. You’re looking rather dishevelled, I must say. I’ve changed our room upstairs, you know. We’ve got a huge place now and I’ve moved some of the furniture and I’ve filled as much of it with flowers as I could. Would you like some of this tea? It’s rather good.’

  Powerscourt held the ghostly apparition in his arms and realized from the strength of the embrace that this was no apparition but the wife of his bosom and the mother of his children.

  ‘Lucy,’ he said, looking into her face, ‘what on earth are you doing here? How did you arrive? How long are you staying?’ Part of his brain said he should add ‘Are you out of your mind?’ to his list of questions but he resisted.

  ‘One thing at a time, Francis,’ she said brightly. ‘I was talking to that nice Dennis Ormonde yesterday and he was wondering how his wife and her sister were going to get back from a place as remote as this. That Chief Constable person popped in to tell us you’d found them, you see. And Mr Ormonde said he wanted them back as quickly as possible and that he would send his coachman and one of his finest carriages once he heard they were free. He’s absolutely convinced, you see, Francis, that you’ll secure their release. It’s quite touching, really. So I said why didn’t he send it today, with me in it, as the ladies would welcome another female to talk to on the way back. So here I am!’

  ‘So you are,’ said her husband, unsure of his feelings. For while he was delighted to see Lucy, he didn’t like her to be as close to the point of danger as she was now. Still less did he like to have her on the spot when he thought of what he was contemplating for the morrow. ‘Is there any news of the paintings, Lucy? Any word of any more people being taken? Orangemen still behaving themselves, are they?’