Death on the Holy Mountain

2

The gate lodge of Kincarrig House, ancestral home of the Connolly family, recently deprived of the painted records of six of their own ancestors, was set back slightly from the road. On either side the stone walls that marked the outer edge of the demesne seemed to stretch away into infinity. Powerscourt was beginning his investigation here as Kincarrig House was closest to Dublin and the Holyhead boat. He had made his appointment before leaving Markham Square. Then he planned to move further west to Butler’s Court. Powerscourt’s cabby was a cheerful soul, pointing out the places of interest as they went along.

‘This gate lodge now,’ he said, ‘and the arch and the drive here, sure they’re among the finest in Ireland.’

Powerscourt made appreciative noises. He gazed upwards at the Triple Gothic Arch that towered above the road. It was completely useless. All over Ireland, he thought, at the entrance to the Big Houses with their long drives of beech and yew curling away to hide the property from the prying eyes of the public and people of the wrong religion, the owners had built monumental gates of one sort or another. Anglo-Irish mansions were guarded by a strange stone menagerie of lions and unicorns, of falcons and eagles, of hawks and harriers, tigers and kestrels and merlins. Powerscourt had heard stories of a house with a stone dinosaur on guard. The animals were often surrounded by great stone balls, as if, in times of emergency, they might return to life and begin hurling this weighty ammunition at their enemies. Powerscourt remembered his father telling him of one estate belonging to a Lord Mulkerry in County Cork where the demesne walls and the monumental gates became one side of the town square. And on the side of the town square was a large plaque on which was written: ‘Town of Ardhoe, property of Lord Mulkerry’. Badges of ownership, marks of superiority, symbols of arrogance, Powerscourt disliked them intensely. And as his cab rattled along this very long drive he remembered too the prestige that attached to the length of the approaches to the Big House. Less than half a mile and you were virtually going to a peasant’s cabin. Half a mile to a mile, pretty poor, little better than a cottage you’ll find at the end, a mile to a mile and a half, there might be a pillar or two to greet you at the end but nothing much, anything over two miles and respectability is attained at last. Over to his left he could see the sun glittering on a fast-flowing river which must, he suspected, pass the Connolly house to enhance the Connolly view.

The house was Regency with a front of seven bays and a Doric entrance porch with eight pillars. Well-tended grass ran down the slope towards the river. Inside was a magnificent entrance hall with a marble floor that ran the whole length of the front of the house with a dramatic enfilade of six yellow scagliola pillars and dozens and dozens of drawings and etchings and paintings of horses. A huge elk head guarded the doorway. A very small butler greeted Powerscourt, asking him to wait while he found his master.

The architecture of this house and the houses like it whispered a strange language of their own, a language that came back to Powerscourt from years before.

It spoke of parapets, and turreted gateways, of rectangular windows with mullions and astragals under hood-mouldings, of quatrefoil decoration on the parapets, of vaulted undercrofts and great halls, of carved oak chimney pieces and overmantels, of segmental pointed doorways, battlemented and machiolated square towers, of portes cocheres and oriels, of ceilings in ornate Louis Quatorze style with much gilding and well-fed putti in high relief supporting cartouches and trailing swags of flowers and fruit, of entablature enriched with medallions and swags and urns, of halls with screens of Corinthian columns and friezes, of tripods and winged sphinxes, of quoins and keystones, of Imperial staircases and rectangular coffering, of rusticated niches and doorways, of scaglioli columns, of friezes and volutes and many more, stretching out across centuries through hall and drawing room and dining room the length and breadth of the country.

Out in the parks and walkways, many of them by lakes or rivers, were great fountains, houses with obelisks in their grounds, gardens guarded by forts with cannon to fire salutes on family birthdays, conventional orangeries and unconventional casinos, ornate gardens, Japanese gardens, Chinese gardens, Palladian follies, in one case a herd of white deer to mark the exclusivity of the Big House and the Big Garden.

This, Powerscourt thought, was architecture as political statement, an arrogant damn your eyes architectural declaration of superiority. We are the masters here. Don’t even think, any Irish Catholic peering through the trees at the house over the top of the wall, that one day this might be yours. It won’t. And yet, Powerscourt thought, and yet . . . The temples and the churches and all the great palaces of Rome were still standing the day before the barbarians came to town. He wondered if those stone sphinxes that adorned the Ascendancy Big Houses might not have one or two riddles left for their masters, riddles that might rather speak of Descendancy.

‘Mr Connolly is in the library, sir,’ the butler said, rousing Powerscourt from his reverie, as he ushered him into a handsome room with great gaps on its walls. The word library can have many different meanings in Ireland, Powerscourt remembered. Put a great many books in them and nobody will ever use the room in case they’re meant to read a book. But hostesses like to have libraries in their houses. It adds an air of learning to the predominant themes of hunting and shooting. Hence there are many libraries in these houses with very few books in them. And as Peter Connolly rose to give him a very short and rather perfunctory handshake, Powerscourt realized he was in the latter category of library. He had seen bedrooms in England with more books in them. A solitary bookshelf, no more than waist high, gave its name to the room.

‘Thank you for coming to see us, Lord Powerscourt. How can I be of assistance?’

Even before the man finished the first sentence, Powerscourt knew something was wrong. There was a coldness that was on the edge of rudeness. Never mind the traditional Irish hundred thousand welcomes, he was hardly getting a single one in the Connolly household.

‘I would like to see where the pictures were, and any details you have of them, who the artists were, that sort of thing.’ He noticed suddenly that there were four picture cords hanging from the rail above, but no paintings in them. Connolly noticed his glance.

‘The police asked us to leave everything as it was,’ he explained. ‘Not that they will be any use. The oldest Connolly was placed just above the fireplace, the others followed him in line of inheritance. The last two of the sequence were in the dining room with the Titian and the Rembrandt in the gold drawing room.’

‘Do you have any details of the artists who did the portraits? Do you have any records of what the gentlemen were wearing?’

‘I fail to see how that is relevant,’ said Connolly coldly, looking pointedly at his watch.

Powerscourt felt he was on the verge of losing his temper.

‘Look here, Mr Connolly, I presume you want to get your pictures back. Suppose the thief sells them in Dublin or they are carried over to one of the big London firms. The proprietors know that six male Connolly ancestors have gone missing and a couple of Old Masters. I have made it my business to see that they are so informed. If one of your ancestors were to appear, how in God’s name are they going to know that he is a Connolly? He could be an Audley or a Fitzgibbon or a Talbot or anybody at all in Christendom. Without descriptions the whole attempt to recover them is a waste of time.’

Connolly looked at him very coldly. ‘I do not believe the pictures will ever be recovered. The villains will destroy them. Soon they will come back here for more, whether for more pictures or for the people who live here, I do not know. Our time has come, Lord Powerscourt, and all that is left to us is to face it with the courage of our race. I have asked for police protection and the sergeant laughed in my face. All this talk of descriptions of pictures is futile, fiddling while Rome burns.’ Connolly was working up a fine head of steam. His wild talk sounded even stranger in such elegant surroundings, the marble fireplace, the intricate plasterwork on the ceiling, the distant whisper of the river through the open windows.

‘Are you not jumping to conclusions, Mr Connolly? You had two other paintings stolen, I believe, one Titian and one Rembrandt. Taken all together, those pictures could fetch tens of thousands of pounds. It’s perfectly possible that this is the work of a gang of art thieves who are even now arranging the dispatch of the paintings to New York. It would help enormously if you and your family could manage to write out descriptions of all the paintings. It would help to recover them.’

Connolly was shouting now. ‘You just don’t understand! You haven’t lived here for years! You’re not even Irish any more! We made it our business to find out about you, Powerscourt, betraying your past and your people to swan about in London playing at being a detective! You’ve no idea what it’s been like to live here these last thirty years, the Land War, the boycotting, the plan of campaign, the betrayal of a Protestant people by a Protestant government in London trying to force us to sell our land to appease the Catholics. Well, we have lived through all that here in this house. I do not believe that a gang of art thieves broke into my home to steal our pictures. I just don’t believe it. This is the final act, Lord Powerscourt. Who is there to defend us any more? Politicians? The Irish Members of Parliament want Home Rule for Ireland, that means Catholic rule with no room for Protestants. To a man, they’re all Papists, Rome rulers all, waiting and waiting for their day to dawn. There’s a hunger for land out there, Powerscourt, our land. Sometimes on market days in the town square, you can almost smell it.’

Powerscourt was suddenly struck by a thought that had absolutely no relevance to the conversation. He was not going to be asked to stay. He was certain of it. There had been no mention of green bedrooms or the most comfortable room in the attic. In landlord Ireland, famed for its hospitality and its generosity, this was unthinkable. He knew the stories, of houses where over a hundred guests would stay for weeks at a time, head after head of prime cattle slaughtered to fill the table. One apocryphal story concerned an assistant surveyor who had come to do some work on the house and stayed for a year and a half. After a week the family forgot his name and felt it rude to inquire again. Short of a slap in the face, a refusal to invite a visitor to stay for the night was one of the biggest insults you could offer.

‘I’m sure you’re being too pessimistic, Mr Connolly,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I thought things had been relatively peaceful here over the last few years. But tell me this, did you get a letter from the thieves? Demands of some sort? Blackmail perhaps?’

‘I have not,’ said Connolly and something in his downward look told Powerscourt the man was lying. ‘You talk of peaceful times over here. Things are never what they seem in Ireland, never,’ said Connolly darkly. ‘And now, if you will forgive me, I have work to do. We can’t all spend our time swanning round other people’s houses asking damn fool questions. My coachman will take you into the town. I booked a room for you in the Kincarrig Arms. It is a perfectly respectable hotel. I do not wish to have you staying in my house. Good afternoon.’

With that Peter Connolly ushered Powerscourt to the door and vanished into another part of the house.

The Connolly house had a little river running past its front door. Butler’s Court, the Butler residence a few miles south of Athlone, stood a couple of hundred feet above Ireland’s greatest river, the Shannon. Visitors to the house could arrive by road or water. In summer the river meandered gently south towards the sea; in spring and autumn when the rains were heavy it flooded slightly. In winter it looked sullen, dark and forbidding, its waters swirling their way into black eddies as it rumbled down to Limerick and the Atlantic Ocean.

Powerscourt’s first thought as he looked at the house was that he had seen it before. He was in some great square in Italy, in Siena or Perugia perhaps, looking at the great town house of some local aristocrat. Dimly, he remembered that the principal architect of Butler’s Court was Italian. He felt relieved that the front of the house appeared to be unchanged. So many Irish houses had been altered, defaced in his view, in the previous century by a fad for neo-Gothic that included turrets and battlements and fake towers. Maybe it was because the leading architects of the day preferred this style of building. Maybe it was keeping up with your neighbours. Powerscourt had the rather fanciful notion that somewhere in the back of their minds these Irish patricians felt threatened by the world around them. The peaceful Regency fronts, all proportion and good taste, would not be enough to defend them from the hostile forces that surrounded them. So they felt safer with their walkways and their turrets. Nobody had taken the style so far back in history as to have a moat and a drawbridge, but Powerscourt thought these would have sold well.

Butler’s Court’s central block was built of grey stone with thirteen bays along the front. Two curved colonnades of golden Ardbroccan stone linked the main building to two flanking pavilions which contained the kitchen and the stables. There was no pillared porch to mark the front door of the house. The front door sat unobtrusively in its place as if it were just another window. A set of steps led down to the gravel drive. It should look heavy, massive, Powerscourt thought as he approached the front door, but it didn’t. Butler’s Court looked light and graceful.

In the Connolly house he had only met the diminutive butler and the disagreeable Mr Connolly. Here it was rather different. A Butler’s Court footman, a tall and imposing fellow called Hardy with military bearing, had scarcely opened the door to him when a balding middle-aged gentleman shot forwards from one of the many doors to shake him firmly by the hand.

‘Lord Powerscourt, welcome to Butler’s Court! Delighted to meet you! I am Richard Butler and this is my house.’ Powerscourt was just about to reply when he heard the singing. The front hall had a chequered black and white marble floor and a mighty staircase of cantilevered Portland stone. The sound was coming from a gallery on the first floor.

‘We soldiers of Erin, so proud of the name,

We’ll raise upon rebels and Frenchman our fame.

We’ll fight to the last in the honest old cause

And guard our religion, our freedom and laws.

We’ll fight for our country, our King and his crown

And make all the traitors and croppies lie down.

Down, down, croppies lie down.’

The children were coming into the gallery, holding hands, boys and girls together. There were so many that Powerscourt wondered if he had wandered into a school.

‘The rebels so bold, when they’ve none to oppose,

To houses and haystacks are terrible foes.

They murder poor parsons and also their wives

But soldiers at once make them run for their lives,

And whenever we march, through country to town,

In ditches or cellars the croppies lie down.

Down, down, croppies lie down.’

‘They’re not all mine,’ whispered Richard Butler as the leading couple in this strange procession reached the top of the stairs and began the descent into the hall below past one of the few remaining portraits of an early Butler and elaborate rococo stuccowork on the wall.

Powerscourt wasn’t sure he would teach his children this song. It referred to the defeat of the rebels in the rising of 1798. Croppies were called croppies because they wore their hair cut short in the style made popular by the French Revolution. Croppies, with a few exceptions, would have been Catholic. It was, in effect, a cry of triumph, particularly popular with the Orange Lodges and the Protestant hardliners in the north of Ireland.

The front rank were now passing the chimney piece of black Kilkenny marble and heading straight for the front door, looking neither to the right nor to the left of them. Richard Butler was smiling affectionately at them all as they passed. At last the supply of singers seemed to have dried up. Then Powerscourt saw who was in charge. Bringing up the rear was a tall, almost emaciated young man in a black suit that had seen better days.

‘Oh, croppies, ye’d better be quiet and still,

Ye shan’t have your liberty, do what ye will.

As long as salt water is formed in the deep,

A foot on the necks of the croppy we’ll keep,

And drink, as in bumpers past troubles we drown,

A health to the lads that made croppies lie down.

Down, down, croppies lie down.’

The tall thin young man with the fair hair and the soft blue eyes saluted Powerscourt and Richard Butler gravely as he passed into the garden to join his charges.

‘James, James Cuffe is the young man’s name,’ said Richard Butler. ‘He’s the eighth son of a family nearby. Poor woman always wanted a daughter. She ended up with a cricket team of boys and a twelfth man. A dozen boys! Can you imagine it! James comes here to teach some of the younger children like the ones in the garden. We’ve got cousins’ and neighbours’ children as well. He’s wonderful with them. Never seems to raise his voice at all. Don’t know how he does it. Wife believes the small children think he’s a giant and will cast wicked spells on them if they misbehave.’

Butler began to steer Powerscourt towards a pair of double doors. The noise inside seemed to have stopped. ‘Forgive me, Powerscourt, let’s get things sorted. We’ve put you in the green bedroom on the first floor. There’s a good view of the river and the housemaids are all convinced it’s haunted by a man with his head in his hand. Don’t believe a word of it myself. No work for you today. There are three people who knew the lost pictures well, myself, Hardy the senior footman and the parlour maid Mary who dusted the frames. We’re all going to assemble for you at ten o’clock in the morning. Now then,’ he showed Powerscourt into the Green Drawing Room, so called because the walls were lined with green silk, ‘the young people have all gone off for a walk, so there’s just the three of us for tea.’

Sylvia Butler looked about forty and still retained most of the beauty that must have dazzled her husband into marriage all those years ago. She captured Powerscourt’s heart with a charming smile as she indicated he was to sit beside her.

‘How was our cousin Brandon when you saw him?’ she inquired sweetly. ‘Was he afflicted with that gout at the time?’

‘Alas, Mrs Butler, it was bad with him, very bad. I think he suffers a great deal.’

‘The doctors tell him he must stop drinking. That would be the best cure,’ Mrs Butler said, ‘but I think he would find it difficult. Tell me, did he have to take any of those special pills of his, the ones he calls Davy Jones’s Lockers?’

A footman entered with a tray of tea, laden with cakes and scones and barm brack, a fruity sort of cake to be consumed with butter as if it were toast, very popular in Ireland.

‘The last time we saw cousin Brandon,’ Mrs Butler went on as the footman disappeared out of the door, ‘he had to take one of these pills. After a quarter of an hour he collapsed on a sofa and slept for five hours.’

‘He took one just before I departed,’ said Powerscourt as Mrs Butler began to pour the tea, ‘but he was still compos mentis as I left the house. I think he must have had a minute or two to go. He was still swearing at the doctors as I went down the stairs.’

‘Scone, Lord Powerscourt? Barm brack?’

Powerscourt suddenly wondered how many teas were served in an afternoon in a grand house like Butler’s Court. He put the question to Mrs Butler.

‘Three,’ she said. ‘Otherwise the whole thing gets out of hand. We have one for the children, one for the servants and one for us.’

‘You must be remembering the stories,’ said her husband with a smile. ‘There’s a family near here where the servants valued the distinctions in status between themselves so much that they ended up serving lots of different teas every day. On most afternoons tea would be served in ten different places. The Lord and Lady and their guests had it in the drawing room. The elder children and their governess had it in the schoolroom: the younger children and their nannies and the nursery maids had it in the nursery. The upper servants, together with the visiting ladies’ maids, had it in the housekeeper’s room. The footmen had it in the servants’ hall. The housemaids had it in the housemaids’ sitting room, the kitchen maids had it in the kitchen and the charwomen had it in the stillroom. The laundry maids had it in the laundry and the grooms took it in the harness room. Once a week a riding master came from Dublin to give the children a lesson and the number of places where tea was served went up to eleven; for while he was too grand to have tea with the servants or the grooms, he was not grand enough to have it with the gentry in the drawing room, so he was given a tray on his own.’

Powerscourt laughed. His eye was drawn to three gaps on the walls. Over the mantelpiece was an enormous hole, with two smaller ones on either side of it. He supposed all would be revealed in the morning. At dinner that evening – he had forgotten how much food was consumed in these houses – he noticed another eight empty spaces on the green walls, dark lines marking where the edges of the paintings had met the wall, the paint a paler green than the surrounding area, the squares or the rectangles looking like undressed wounds.

All through the afternoon and evening a great number of people asked Powerscourt the same question. ‘Have you met Great Uncle Peter yet?’ The children asked him with great interest, running away in fits of giggles when he answered. The grown-ups would smile to themselves when they too learned that Powerscourt had not yet made the gentleman’s acquaintance. With great difficulty he managed to discover that the great uncle was extremely old, so old that even he had forgotten how old he was, and that he was writing a history of Ireland.

James Cuffe, Young James as everybody called him, the tall thin young man who looked after the children, played the piano after dinner. He was unobtrusive, rattling through some pieces by Chopin with restraint. Then he was persuaded to accompany a young army wife, Alice Bracken, as she sang some songs by Thomas Moore.

‘Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,

Which I gaze on so fondly today,

Were to change by tomorrow, and fleet in my arms,

Like fairy-gifts fading away,

Thou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art,

Let thy loveliness fade as it will,

And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart

Would entwine itself verdantly still.’

Powerscourt felt himself sinking into a languid draught of nostalgia. His mother used to sing this song, leaning on the edge of the piano with the drawing-room doors wide open to the garden in spring and summer, the waters of the great fountain just audible from the bottom of the steps, faint evening noises blending in with the music. His father would be playing the piano, rather badly, for he had taught himself to play and his finger movements would have appalled the fastidious music teachers of Dublin. And Powerscourt himself, a small boy of eight or nine, rather an earnest child, he thought, would be staring at his mother and praying that she would not stop and send him to bed. Sometimes when more expert hands were available at the keys, his mother would sing duets with some of the guests, two voices twinning and twisting round each other and floating out into the Wicklow air. He thought that was his favourite memory of his mother. His mind turned suddenly to Lady Lucy. Maybe he would bring her over and she too could sing for Ireland in this great house by the river.

‘It is not while beauty and youth are thine own,

And thy cheeks unprofaned by a tear

That the fervour and faith of a soul can be known,

To which time will but make thee more dear;

No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets,

But as truly loves on to the close,

As the sunflower turns on her god, when he sets,

The same look which she turned when he rose.’

Richard Butler along with his footman and Mary the parlour maid were on parade in the dining room promptly at ten o’clock the next morning. Hardy the footman looked even more military today, standing to attention as if he were a sergeant major on parade. Mary was shuffling anxiously from foot to foot as if she were about to undergo some disagreeable medical procedure.

‘Now then,’ Richard Butler was brisk and cheerful this morning, ‘let’s begin with this full-length over the door. Can you remember who it was?’

There was a silence from his two experts, the footman who saw the painting at least a dozen times a day and the girl who dusted the frame every morning except Sundays when she was given time off to go to Mass. Finally Hardy coughed slightly.

‘There was a name on the bottom right of the frame, sir, but I can’t remember what it said.’

‘Very well,’ said Butler, pausing to write something in a small black notebook, ‘what was the gentleman wearing?’

‘Blue?’ said Hardy hesitantly.

‘Black?’ said Mary.

‘I thought it was green, a green cloak over his shoulders,’ said Richard Butler, a slight irritation beginning to show. He made some more notes. ‘How about this other full-length Butler, the one over the fireplace?’

‘He was sitting at a table, that one,’ said the footman, ‘with papers all over it.’

‘No, he wasn’t, he was sitting on a horse,’ said Mary defiantly. ‘An enormous horse.’

‘That was your man on the other wall, opposite the door,’ said Hardy, ‘not this fellow here.’

‘The man on the horse, surely,’ said Butler, frowning slightly now, ‘was in the drawing room by the door. Big black horse.’

‘Brown,’ said Hardy, ‘the horse, I mean.’

‘Well,’ said Richard Butler, ‘I’m not sure we’re making much progress. If the one on the other wall was on a horse, then this one can’t have been on a horse too, can he? What was he doing?’

‘No reason why he shouldn’t have been on a horse,’ said the footman, ‘logically, I mean.’

‘Are you saying,’ asked Butler, ‘that this one was on a horse too?’

‘No, I’m not,’ replied Hardy, ‘I was only pointing out that there was no reason why he shouldn’t have been on a horse.’

‘Well,’ said Butler, a note of exasperation coming into his voice now, ‘if he wasn’t on a horse, what was he doing?’

‘Sure, he wasn’t doing anything,’ said Mary, rejoining the argument, ‘he was just standing there, looking at something, like those country fellows leaning on a gate.’

‘You’re not saying my distinguished ancestor was just leaning on a gate, are you, Mary?’

‘No, no, sir, it was just the look of him.’

‘I think you’ll find, sir,’ said Hardy with a note of finality, ‘that this gentleman here, over the fireplace, was the legal gentleman, with a judge’s red cloak and a lot of papers on a table in front of him.’

‘No, he wasn’t,’ said Mary with spirit, ‘your man with the wig and stuff was above the other door, so he was. There was a crack in his frame, you see, and I always remember thinking that the legal man was going to sentence me to be transported to Tasmania or some dreadful place.’

‘You sound very definite about that, Mary,’ said Butler. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I am sure, so I am,’ said the girl firmly.

‘Not so, you are mistaken,’ said the footman firmly. ‘The legal party was not above that door. He was by the mantelpiece here, watching his descendants eat their meals, so he was.’

‘The devil he was, Augustus Hardy. Isn’t it your eyes that need testing now, and you hardly able to read the headlines in the Freeman’s Journal?’

‘Please, please,’ said Richard Butler, ‘let us not fall out. Why don’t we have a look in the drawing room next door?’

Another gaping wound stared at them from above the fireplace. ‘I’m sure we can agree about this one,’ said Butler hopefully. ‘This was the painting of the hunt, done fairly recently. I forgot to mention it to Lord Brandon, Powerscourt. Most of the county hunt, all in their scarlet coats, were assembled by the front door of the house, mostly men, including myself, of course, but a few women as well. The house was in the background.’

Both footman and parlour maid agreed about that. They ventured back into the dining room. But that was all they could agree about. On the dispositions and dress of the other two portraits they disagreed violently. One, according to Hardy, showed a Butler leaning on his fireplace, a book in his left hand, a dog asleep at his feet. Nonsense, said Mary, none of those Butlers were shown with a book, heaven only knew if they could read or not, some of them, it was all so long ago, and if anybody thought she, Mary, would not remember whether one of the gentlemen was reading or not, they were a fool. The other painting, the footman maintained, showed a Butler resplendent in cricket clothes, a cap over his head, a bat in his hand, pads on his legs, obviously waiting to stride out to the wicket. Mary agreed that there had been such a Butler, but it was a smaller Butler and he had been positioned between the fireplace and door. There was, Powerscourt thought, very considerable disagreement among the witnesses. If it had been a court case the judge might well have thrown it out because of the gross confusion about the evidence. The only thing the participants agreed on was that the people in the paintings were Butlers. Their hair might be black or brown or grey or silver or white or non-existent. Their jackets, likewise, might be blue or black or brown or red; they might be wearing cloaks of dark blue or red; they could be lawyers or hunters or cricketers. They could be smiling or scowling, their noses great or small, their eyes any colour of the rainbow, their chins clean shaven or covered with a beard that might also be black or brown or even white. There was no certainty about any of these Butlers. They were changelings to the footman who tended them and the girl who dusted their frames. Richard Butler was looking very cross indeed.

‘There is confusion everywhere,’ he said. ‘How can I give an accurate description of the vanished pictures to the authorities?’ Powerscourt thought Hardy and the girl had looked at the paintings so often that they didn’t really see them any more; they had all merged into a kind of composite Butler for all rooms and for all seasons in their minds. Once the paintings had gone from the walls, they rearranged themselves in the footman’s and the girl’s brains until they were seriously confused. They might have been clearer had they only seen the paintings once.

‘I wonder,’ said Powerscourt, ‘if you have many visitors to this house, people who like looking at old houses, that sort of thing?’

‘We do,’ said Butler, ‘we have them all the time. Most of them are very well behaved.’

‘Do you have any architectural people, Butler? People who might take photographs of the house and its rooms?’

‘I see what you’re driving at, Powerscourt,’ said Richard Butler, beginning to look much more cheerful. ‘We have had such people though I don’t think they ever sent us any photographs. But we did have a chap ourselves, now I come to think about it, a chap to take photographs of the place about five years ago. I’d completely forgotten about the fellow. We wanted a record of how the place looked at the turn of the century. I’ve still got them in my study. Hold on, I’ll be back in a second.’

Richard Butler departed at full speed. The footman was looking rather disappointed, as if he thought the parlour maid had got the better of him in the discussion about the missing paintings. The girl was looking defiant.

‘Tell me, Hardy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘could one man lift one of those full-length portraits off the wall and carry it outside?’

‘He would have to be very strong, my lord,’ Hardy replied. ‘The things are a very awkward shape, if you see what I mean. Much easier with two.’

The owner of Butler’s Court returned with his wife and the biggest photograph album Powerscourt had ever seen. ‘It’s a pretty big house,’ he said to Powerscourt apologetically, laying the album out on the dining-room table.’ Powerscourt wondered if he had brought Sylvia, as charming in the mornings as she was in the afternoons, to keep the peace between the squabbling servants. Gradually, over an hour or so, the various Butler ancestors were restored to life as they had lived it on the walls of their dining room and their drawing room. Hair of the right colour was finally restored to the right head. The hunter, the lawyer and the cricketer all returned to their proper places. Clothes that had been blue were finally adjudged to have been black, clean-shaven men were transformed into men with beards and vice versa. It was, Powerscourt thought, a most pleasing transformation, and he joined Richard Butler in entering all the details in his notebook. Mary the parlour maid departed to dust the rest of the paintings. The footman shimmered off to his own quarters. Mrs Butler went upstairs to change for a picnic lunch on an island in the river. Mr Butler carried off his giant album back to his study. Powerscourt announced his intention to walk all round the ground floor and inspect the windows. He would, he said, follow them to the island. He might be late as he had some more notes to take.

A determined burglar could have found his way into the house easily enough. There were one or two places where the windows were not quite secure. After half an hour or so Powerscourt returned to the dining room. He perched on the edge of a chair and stared at the empty patches on the walls. He checked the notes he had made of the Butler inventory of the paintings. A number of blank rectangles marked the spaces where the second, third, fourth, sixth and seventh Thomas Butler had claimed their places to a surrogate eternal life on the walls of their dining room. The first Thomas, Powerscourt had been told by the seventh, had been too busy building his house and establishing himself in the extra acres given to his grandfather by Cromwell so that he never had the time to sit for his portrait. Another Thomas had flatly refused to sit for his portrait at all. He was constitutionally incapable of sitting still, Richard Butler said, his restless irritability only soothed by sitting on a horse, or rather, charging around on his horse more or less permanently, which is why he hunted six days a week when he could and even threatened to hunt on Sundays as well until the local bishop intervened with telling quotations from the Book of Genesis about six days shalt thou labour. All those family portraits gone from here altogether, all male, the women still demure in their places. And a few Old Masters.

The great house was very quiet now, the inhabitants all departed in high excitement on their trip on the river, rowing boats prepared for the journey to the island in the middle where, by long tradition, the family had their picnic lunch during the summer in some style with three sorts of wine and a bottle of port that could solve the problem for the more elderly among the Butlers of what to do in the afternoon. Powerscourt walked down to the library and stared out of the great windows, the air very clear this morning, the Shannon bright and close, the line of the trees where the forest began sharp in the light.

Powerscourt was looking at the books now, column after column of them marching silently towards the ceiling. Many of his favourites were here, Thucydides and Tacitus, gloomy chroniclers of the failings of their great powers, George Eliot, Tolstoy. But it wasn’t the contents of the leather volumes that interested him. It was words, the words that made up the books, the words the authors used to tell their stories. Words, he thought, words were very dangerous in Ireland. Theobald Wolfe Tone, a not very successful barrister in the Dublin of the 1790s, became intoxicated with words that had crossed the seas from France. Liberty. Freedom. Equality. They featured large in the thinking of the United Irishmen, formed to unite Catholic and Protestant and set Ireland free from English rule. Some men made their living by cutting cloth or growing corn or selling provisions or dealing in livestock. Lawyers looked at words on a page and invested them with meaning. Illiterate peasants in the west of Ireland swore the Oath of Tone’s United Irishmen, not understanding what most of the words meant. ‘I will persevere in endeavouring to form a brotherhood of affection among Irishmen of all persuasions.’ Freedom or Equality meant little when you lived in a mud cabin and had scarcely enough food to feed your family. Freedom meant little when a man with a different religion whose ancestors came from England to take your land, a man who lived in a great stone house with lakes and tall windows and libraries with portraits of his family, could throw you out of your tiny patch of earth and pull down your stinking hovel. Liberty. Equality. Fraternity. Words. Words written on a page by lawyers. Words that took those Mayo peasants far from their homes in the rebellion of 1798 to fight their last battle at Ballinamuck in County Longford, slaughtered by the English dragoons on the hillside or butchered in the bog. Words had killed them. And those who were taken prisoner by the English that day? Words killed them too. A word called treason saw them hanged. Powerscourt wondered what might have happened if Theobald Wolfe Tone had been more successful as a lawyer. Or, indeed, that other lawyer associated with freedom, liberty, equality, Maximilien Robespierre, a man so drunk with words that he tried to abolish religion and replace it with rituals and celebrations in honour of reason. Reason, another word. God wasn’t dead yet. Not that time anyway. He was soon back, if he had ever really gone away. It was Robespierre who perished instead, consumed on the guillotine by his own words.

Words were dangerous in Ireland. Catholic. Protestant. Mass. The Virgin Mary. Fenian. Informer. All had been dangerous in their time. Some still were. Now new words were coming, boycott already officially entered in the dictionaries. Captain Charles Boycott was a land agent in the west of Ireland who refused to grant a reduction in rents to his tenants in 1880 after two years of bad harvests. Powerscourt strolled over to one of the bookshelves and pulled out a biography of the Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell which included his description of what boycott meant at a huge meeting in Ennis in County Clare. This was what was to happen to a landlord who refused to reduce rents or a man who took over the farm of an evicted tenant: ‘You must show what you think of him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him on the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop counter . . . even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a sort of moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed.’ Many people in Ireland other than Boycott were boycotted. Powerscourt’s father had told him of Ascendancy families who had refused to reduce their rents. Unable to bear the psychological strain of the ordeal, they had fled their houses and their lands, conceding victory to the foe. They settled instead in quiet English towns like Cheltenham or Tunbridge Wells where the respectability of the suburbs could atone for the eternal silences of the Irish shopkeepers and the defection of their own servants. But, Powerscourt thought as he returned the book to its place, it was the abstract words that were the most dangerous. The words that represented ideas that could send men to deaths as it had those Mayo peasants in the 1798 rebellion. He thought of another category of words, designed to describe the proper functions of society as if it were a well-made watch or clock. Political economy. Laissez-faire. People being forced to stand on their own two feet. Words written by people in great libraries like this one perhaps, remote from reality, that encouraged the British Government in the 1840s to believe that it was wrong to interfere with the workings of the market, that the starvation in Ireland was an act of God and the Irish needed a lesson to tell them how to farm their land properly. One million Irish dead in the famine testified to the wisdom of those words and the political economists who wrote them and gave that advice. Another million or more fled to America in the next generation. More words on a page, the flies’ feet of an alphabet that could send men and women to mass graves, unmarked and unmourned, thrown into fields by the hundred and left to rot in the Irish earth that had failed them.

There was the sound of loud complaint coming from the garden. Another Thomas Butler, this one only seven years old, had apparently fallen into the water and was being brought back to the house for a change of clothing. This he regarded as a monstrous injustice, depriving him not just of the company of his brothers and sisters, but of the innumerable fish of unimaginable size he would have caught during his time of banishment. Powerscourt smiled as the argument moved past his windows and into the great hall. He looked round the library once more, filled with words, millions of them. The most dangerous word in Ireland, he decided, inspecting critically a section devoted to theological works, was God. God or perhaps Nation. On balance, he thought, God had it.