Death and the Jubilee

20

Powerscourt couldn’t decide about the horse. Should a mounted Powerscourt set off in pursuit of the coffin-laden cart? Or should it be a single infantryman running along the country roads? He had a very thick coat for the night was cold. He had stout boots in case the going got rough. He had heavy leather gloves. He took another look at his quarry. The cart, little clouds of pipe smoke drifting up into the moonlight, had reached the end of the village and was heading south on the coast road. He sped down the stairs and led his horse in pursuit. The binoculars were his only weapon. He didn’t like to think what might happen if the enemy found out they were being pursued. He smiled grimly to himself as he remembered that they had the coffins ready for him, an unknown body to be buried in an unknown grave. He wondered for the tenth time since he first saw them what was inside the coffins that arrived from the sea so secretly, now trotting serenely along the lanes of Wicklow.

The hearse was going quite slowly, no more than five or six miles per hour. Occasional bursts of conversation or laughter drifted back towards Powerscourt trotting very slowly on his horse. It was called Paddy, not a name that would have found favour with Old Mr Harrison and his collection of classical heroes. Hercules, Powerscourt thought, that’s what you would want your horse to be called on a night like this.

The road was still skirting the coast, the moonlight bright on a silver sea. Owls were calling from the woods ahead. They were passing the walls that surrounded a great estate. Powerscourt remembered playing there as a child. Just beyond the main entrance, a proud and elaborate pair of gates topped by a couple of stone lions, there was a church, flanked by a handsome vicarage and a row of empty houses. My God, that’s clever, Powerscourt thought to himself. They’re going to bury the coffins in a Protestant cemetery. Nobody in authority would think of looking there. Catholic ones, of course, but the dead of the Church of Ireland would never be suspected of harbouring German coffins with their unknown cargo.

He left Paddy tied to a tree some hundred yards from the church and tiptoed forward to get a better view. These were grave robbers in reverse, he said to himself, come to leave rather than take, their mission unknown, the coffins to stay with their dead companions until Judgement Day was closer. The Irishmen had their spades out and were digging fast but quietly. The first layer of turf was carefully removed and laid in neat piles beside the headstone. Then the dark Wicklow earth was thrown as quickly as they could into a mound. Powerscourt could hear the dull thud as the spade hit the coffin.

Like figures in a dance the men moved automatically towards the two ends. Powerscourt wondered if they were undertakers by profession. After a couple of grunts the old coffin was hauled out of the hole. A further period of digging followed. The hole was being made deeper. They’re superstitious, Powerscourt thought. They’re going to leave the body in its grave. They’re just going to put a couple of German coffins in underneath. Neither man spoke. Some bird or animal howled in the distance, a protest at the desecration of the dead. They stopped digging. Two of the coffins were lowered into the open grave. The original coffin was put in on top. The earth was replaced. Powerscourt was getting pins and needles in his leg. He hoped the horse was all right, waiting by its tree. Only two of the seaborne coffins were interred. There must be two left. Powerscourt wondered if another grave was going to be opened up, or if they were destined for a different resting place.

Powerscourt had to know what was inside those dark boxes. He searched desperately in his pockets. He didn’t have a penknife. He didn’t even have a screwdriver. He doubted if he could open one of those coffins with his bare hands and the stones that lay around the paths. He swore to himself. If only Johnny Fitzgerald was here. He always carried a strange miscellany around in his pockets.

It seemed the burial party was about to move on. Powerscourt drew back into the shadows as the two men mounted the cart once more. There was a certain amount of business with matches being struck to relight the pipe. No smoking in church or cemetery, he thought. Take off your hats when you go in and make the sign the of the cross.

As he strained forward from his tree, Powerscourt’s prayers were answered. The gravediggers were having a conversation. The words floated back to Powerscourt across the cemetery.

‘Do you think those rifles will be safe in there, Michael?’ asked the first gravedigger. The man called Michael laughed. ‘Oh yes, they will. But not as safe as where we’re going to take the others.’

So that was it. Rifles, German rifles, the latest German rifles were in the coffins. Deadly rifles, Mausers or Schneiders, with the very newest sights, no doubt, capable of killing a man at eight hundred yards or more. Snipers’ rifles. He remembered his dream. With one of these an accurate marksman, perched on top of Admiralty Arch, could pick off somebody in a carriage leaving Buckingham Palace before they were half-way down the Mall.

The deadly cortege moved off away from Greystones towards the mountains. Powerscourt crept quietly into the churchyard. The grass on the top had been perfectly replaced. Two bunches of withered flowers had also been left to conceal the disturbance. They must have brought those with them, he thought, hidden on the back of the cart. He felt renewed respect for his adversaries. George Thomas Carew, the tombstone said, of Ballygoran, 1830-1887. Powerscourt had eaten his strawberries as a child. The Carews said they were the finest strawberries in Ireland, eaten with lashings of home-grown cream on the Carews’ immaculate lawn, Carew children playing happily on the grass, George Thomas Carew presiding happily at the head of his table. Powerscourt remembered the smell that followed Mr Carew wherever he went. He smoked a pipe. His children used to joke that he smoked it in his sleep. May he rest in peace, he said to himself, tiptoeing back towards his horse. One of the Carew daughters had been very pretty, he remembered. She must be married now with a family of her own. Pray to God she never hears what has been done to her father’s grave.

Distant smoke signals told him the way to go. The road was rising now, going away from the sea into the dark of the mountains. Clouds had obscured the moon once more, Paddy’s muffled feet sounding very soft on the grass verge. He remembered McKenzie, the tracker he had worked with in India who could follow anybody anywhere, telling him about the American Indians and the smoke signals they could send hundreds of miles across the plains. Much more efficient than that bloody telegraph, McKenzie had said.

Quite soon there was a crossroads, he recalled. The left-hand fork led down into a valley and a little village at the bottom. The right-hand turn took you up into the heart of the mountains through a bare and bleak landscape where the wind howled across the empty scrub. The cart was about two hundred yards ahead of him, he thought. He paused regularly in case he got too close. Suddenly he remembered the date. This was 1897. In one year’s time it would be the hundredth anniversary of the rebellion of 1798, a terrible, doomed uprising that left thousands of Irish dead, slaughtered on the battlefield or hanged in reprisal for revolt. Powerscourt shuddered as he remembered the atrocities done to innocent Catholics, the punishment triangles set up in the squares of the little towns of Wexford forty miles south of here, fathers forced to kneel while their sons were lashed until the blood dripped down on to their parent beneath them. Then the roles were reversed, the bleeding sons forced to kneel while the fathers were lashed until a father’s blood ran down to mix with the son’s. This is my blood. He recalled the flights of oratory as the Irish protested in vain at the reign of terror imposed on them: ‘Merciful God what is the state of Ireland, and where shall you find the wretched inhabitants of this land? You may find him, perhaps, in jail, the only place of security – I had almost said of ordinary habitation! If you do not find him there, you may see him flying with his family from the flames of his own dwelling – lighted to his dungeon by the conflagration of his hovel; or you may find his bones bleaching on the green fields of his country; or you may find him tossing on the surface of the ocean, and mingling his groans with those tempests, less savage than his persecutors, that drift him to a returnless distance from his family and his home without charge, or trial or sentence.’

A sixteen-year-old Powerscourt had once declaimed the whole speech from the rooftop of Powerscourt House when his parents were away, his sisters a captive audience on the steps beneath. Two of them had fallen asleep, he remembered bitterly. One of the men in the cart was whistling softly as they headed into the mountains at the crossroads. The road had turned into little more than a track now. Puddles left from the recent rain glistened in the moonlight. Powerscourt wondered if the muffled feet would slip more easily. He checked his watch. It was a quarter to four. Not much time left for the second burial of the night. The cart was moving slowly now as the path wound its way ever higher into the mountains. On Powerscourt’s left the hill sloped precipitously down to a stream below. Then disaster struck.

A dog barked from up ahead. It seemed to come from the cart. Powerscourt hadn’t noticed any animals at all in the vehicle, only the straw and the tarpaulins and then the coffins beneath them. He stopped. The cart stopped. The barking did not. He heard one of the men get out. He could hear whispering up ahead. Did they suspect they were being followed? You could suspect anything in the shadows of this night, carrying cases of German rifles across a darkened landscape to be interred with the already buried dead. Powerscourt swore. If they thought they were being followed they would come back another night and dig up the grave of George Thomas Carew and move his companion coffins somewhere else. They might not bury the other two at all tonight, merely returning the cart to the remote farm it had come from and turning gravediggers again another time. The knowledge he had was priceless. Once the authorities in Dublin Castle knew where the rifles were buried they had the manpower to watch them right round the clock. But even the suspicion of a follower, the fear that they had not been alone, and the guns would be moved. The dog kept barking. Powerscourt thought it could bark all night. Maybe it had enjoyed a long sleep and its lungs were fit to bark until dawn.

He heard somebody coming down the path towards him, very quietly. He retreated towards the trees behind. The man held something in his hand. Still the dog barked. It was enough to wake the dead, even though they had been disturbed once already this evening.

The pistol shot was louder than the dog. It echoed around the mountains. Powerscourt knew nobody would take any notice. Turn your faces to the wall, While the gentlemen go by. One hundred yards was too far for a pistol. Powerscourt thanked God they hadn’t taken out any of those German rifles from their coffins. But then, he smiled incongruously, they would come with pages and pages of instructions, impossible to read in the dark, probably impossible to understand in the daylight.

The man fired again. Powerscourt felt the bullet pass a few yards away from him and land with an ominous plop in a pine tree further down the hill. He could run. His horse would be faster than man or dog. He didn’t like the thought of running away.

A third pistol shot. The dog was barking non-stop now, engaged in a trial of noise with its master.

Powerscourt looked down at the terribly steep slope to his left. The man fired again, twice in quick succession. Powerscourt screamed. He fell to the ground. His body rolled down the slope, slowly at first, then with increasing speed, bumping into rocks, bouncing off trees, until it came to a stop two hundred and fifty yards beneath, the head dangling forward into the stream. The other man came from the cart to peer down below.

‘Who the divil was that, do you suppose?’ said the first gravedigger.

‘God knows. He’s dead now. If the bullet didn’t get him, the fall will have done,’ replied his friend with the pipe.

‘Do you want me to go down and make sure he’s dead? Finish him off if he’s not?’

‘I’m sure the bullets got him. He’ll have been dead before he reached the bottom.’

The man with the pipe was a regular winner at shooting competitions all round the county. He was certain. The two men made their way back to the cart. At the bottom of the slope, his curly hair floating in the stream, the body of Lord Francis Powerscourt lay very still. By the side of the path above, the horse waited for its master.

21

The cart moved off up the hill deeper into the impenetrable mountains. The dog was quiet now, its duty done. A mile and a half further up, the cart stopped by a tiny chapel on the hillside. Stunted trees, their branches bent into weird positions by the wind, guarded a desolate graveyard. The headstones were poor up here, not the marble slabs that graced the tombs of the Protestants in the lush valleys below. The gravediggers resumed their routine in silence, the pipe once again left burning fitfully by the side of the road. The earth was rockier here and it took longer to dig down the extra depth to hide the German visitors. Faint streaks of dawn were appearing in the Irish Sea behind them as the two men mounted their cart once more, their mission accomplished, the weapons hidden where no one would know their burial place.

‘Are you going back to Dublin this morning?’ said the first gravedigger.

‘I am that,’ replied the man with the pipe. ‘I’ve a class to teach at nine o’clock this morning. I’ll get the train from Greystones if you can drop me off.’

At the bottom of the hill Lord Francis Powerscourt was examining every bone in his body, very slowly and very carefully. Christ, he was sore. He remembered the training McKenzie had given them in falling down hills without being hurt. He thanked God he had paid attention. He thought he would try standing up. It was extremely painful. His left ankle didn’t feel too good. It was a sprain, a bad sprain, he told himself. He could feel bruises, nasty bruises, all over his arms and his legs. Blood was running from a deep cut on his temple, dripping on to his coat. His head felt as if it had been battered by a hundred rocks. But he wasn’t dead. Not yet anyway.

Powerscourt looked up the slope. He could just see the horse, still waiting by its tree. With the horse he could go back to his hotel or he could try to complete his mission. He had heard the cart going on up the path. Then the sound had been blown away by the wind. If he waited an hour or so he could ride after them in the hope of discovering where the other rifles were buried. Then he would know all there was to know, all except, he reflected wearily, the names of the two men, the dates of their proposed assassinations, the destinations of any bombs.

Afterwards he told Lady Lucy that he hadn’t thought he would ever make it back to the path on the hill. Every step was painful with his bad ankle. His head throbbed. The blood was still flowing on to his coat. The various bruises around his body ached with a throbbing pain.

He crawled the last hundred yards to the horse, inching his way up the slope, digging his bruised elbows into the hard ground, stray rocks doing him fresh injury on his via dolorosa. He thought of his children to ease the pain. He thought of sitting in some quiet English garden with Lady Lucy, green lawns spread in front of them, a river or a lake at the bottom. Sometimes he thought he was hallucinating and Lucy was actually beside him, helping him up the slope.

‘Don’t worry, Francis, not much further to go. Just a few more steps, my darling.’ Lady Lucy was mopping the blood from his face, stroking a soothing salve on to the bruises that pulsated all over him.

At last he reached the horse. He leaned against Paddy’s side for a full five minutes, thanking the horse for waiting for him. He knew it would be painful getting up into the saddle. It was excruciating, the pain shooting up his left ankle in blinding flashes. Then he began to ride very slowly up the hill in pursuit of the cart. He hoped he would find another church. He thought he might collapse inside it, sanctuary for the wounded man, respite from his enemies.

Our Lady of Sorrows, the name perfectly matching his mood, held no secrets for him. The gravediggers must have run out of flowers by now, he thought. But then maybe any flowers would have looked out of place in this desolate spot. The eternal rest of Martha O’Driscoll, 1850-1880 had been disturbed. Poor woman, Powerscourt thought, she had only lived for thirty years before having to wait for the Second Coming up here with the mountains glowering down on her and the wind whistling through the damaged trees. And then she got company, German rifles come to disturb the long sleep of the dead.

Powerscourt set out to ride back to the hotel. The horse seemed to know the way. Once or twice he nearly passed out on the road down the mountain. At a quarter to seven in the morning Paddy trotted slowly into the stables of the Imperial Hotel. Powerscourt noticed that the wind had caused some damage to the roses in the night. Red petals lay strewn across the lawn like patches of dried blood.

As he staggered upstairs and fell asleep the first train of the morning was pulling out of Greystones station on its journey up the coast towards Dublin. Sitting very quietly, looking out to sea, a man lit a fresh pipe.