Death on the Holy Mountain

3

Mrs Alice Bracken was lying on her back on the grass circle in the middle of Butler Island in the centre of the River Shannon where the Butler family had repaired for lunch. It was a beautiful day. The sun was beating down on Alice’s face though she thought she would only have to move a couple of feet to her left to be in the shade. A young cousin of the Butlers, currently staying at Butler’s Court, John Peter Kilross was lying on the ground at right angles to Alice and dropping strawberries into her mouth very slowly. They were cool and fresh as she bit into them. The girl rather liked receiving her fruit in this fashion, though she thought it would be more difficult with the larger specimens like the melons or pineapples currently ripening in the great glasshouses at the back of the house.

Alice Bracken had been born Alice Harvey twenty-three years before, third of five daughters of Mr and Mrs Warwick Harvey who owned an estate at Ballindeary near Castlebar in County Mayo. Many people thought all Irish patricians lived in enormous mansions like Butler’s Court, with vast estates, innumerable horses and virtually uncountable wealth. It was not always thus. Often in his cups Mr Harvey would mutter to his children about the Encumbered Estates Court and how close they were to being delivered into it. When she was very young Alice had thought an Encumbered Estates Court was just another big house with a demesne like Florence Court in County Fermanagh where her cousins lived. Only later did the terrible truth dawn on her as her elder sisters told her what it really meant. It was, she reflected ruefully at the time, rather like learning the truth about Father Christmas, only worse. The Encumbered Estates Court was where the law sent people who were bankrupt, who owed so much money they could not pay their debts. They could languish for years in these insalubrious surroundings while the lawyers collected their fees and decided what do with the land and the house. Warwick Harvey’s father and grandfather had both borrowed large amounts of money to extend their house. Their grandson and son had to pay the interest and the bills. When the harvest was bad, the diet in Ballindeary Park was little better than that of their poorest tenants. When they were invited to the local hunt balls only one girl was able to go at a time as there was only one ball gown fit to be seen in public and it had to be altered to fit one of five different shapes every time it left the house. Most of the girls’ days after they reached maturity were spent wondering if they could ever escape, if their lives were to be spent in something worse than genteel poverty, eking out the tea leaves for another afternoon, water the only drink in the house apart from the cheap whiskey which her father consumed to ease his sorrows. Even then he diluted it so heavily that the taste of the whiskey was like a noise heard far away, remote and distant as though a visitor was tiptoeing away from your house in the dark.

In these circumstances it was not surprising that the thoughts of the girls should concentrate on young men. Maybe middle-aged men. Even older men if they had an income and a roof to put above their wife’s head. Any visitor who came to see their father, surveyor, bailiff, parson, was inspected in minute detail by ten voracious eyes. Young curates, when they could be found, were often a source of fevered speculation, but their mother had to remind the girls that young curates in the parish of Ballindeary, soon to be united with the neighbouring parish to form the larger unit of Ballindeary and Carryduff, were not likely to be rich men. One of the curates appeared to be so poor that he could not even afford a horse and walked everywhere. Officers provided the most regular source of fantasy and imaginary escape. The neighbouring town of Castlebar was a garrison town, regularly furnished with English soldiers. The officers, almost all English with a sprinkling from Scotland, were forever looking for excuses to dance with the local young ladies, to flirt with them, to pass the time in whatever romantic entanglements they could manage. Very occasionally one of the officers would overstep the mark, or one of the girls would forget herself, and the young man would be transferred so fast that the girl’s family might never find where he had gone, the girl herself sent off to Dublin to stay with her aunt for a while. Into this slightly desperate world of longing, where both parties longed for completely different things, came a tall, very handsome young officer called Captain Rufus Bracken with soft brown eyes and perfectly twirled moustaches. It was the moustaches rather than the face that most people remembered, should they chance to think about the Captain in his absence. He was the fifth son of a small landholder in Derbyshire, and though he talked loud and often to the young ladies about his vast estates in England, he was entirely dependent on his family for of fortune he had none at all.

One fateful Saturday nearly three years before it had been Alice’s turn to wear the ball dress and she had been swept off her feet by Captain Rufus Bracken, so tall and slim, so handsome in his uniform, so distinguished with his moustaches, so obviously rich with his estates in Derbyshire. Six weeks later they were married after a whirlwind romance. The cynics or the realists hinted that Alice must have been pregnant. It was widely known that his commanding officer at the time, unlike his predecessors or his successors, was a convinced puritan who did not approve of conniving at the sudden dispatch of young Englishmen about to become fathers off to far distant shores. In his book they had to stay and do their duty. And, in fact, the cynics were wrong. Alice was not pregnant. She was, however, not entirely pleased with her first glimpse of the vast estates in Derbyshire. The house, she declared, was little better than a fishing lodge in Ireland; the income, she realized all too soon, was non-existent. They returned to Ireland where they were eventually given a small house to live in and a modest allowance by her mother’s second cousin, Richard Butler of Butler’s Court.

The wooing, the pursuit, the chase had interested Captain Bracken greatly. The reality of marriage did not. He had no interests apart from masculine pursuits. It was perfectly fine to woo a girl with tales of the past heroism of his regiment. As the marriage lengthened from weeks into months, the stories began to pall. On his time away from military duties at Butler’s Court he found it hard to relate to the Butlers with their endless talk of horses he hadn’t seen or hunts he hadn’t attended. After one terrible row about money Captain Bracken had applied, in his fury, to be posted abroad. He had been sent to India, to the North-West Frontier, where his relations with the Pathan tribesmen were no more satisfactory than they had been with the Anglo-Irish gentry. The Captain was an indifferent correspondent, his letters sometimes taking months to arrive and containing little but inane gossip about army wives and the tiresome intrigues at The Club. Alice did not mourn his passing, except in one respect. She missed him physically. Of the loss of his conversation she was not concerned. Sometimes she wished he would never come home and would leave her to a lifetime of flirting with Ireland’s young men. Sometimes she even wished he was dead so she could marry again. Then she would reproach herself greatly and tell herself that she was a wicked person who deserved no portion of God’s grace in this world or the next.

And so it was that she came to be lying on the ground with John Peter Kilross dropping strawberries into her mouth as she toasted herself in the sunshine. Had she thought about it – but Alice was not a great one for thought – she might have realized that this Johnpeter, the two Christian names usually run together for reasons nobody could now remember, was remarkably similar to the departed Captain Bracken of the moustaches. Only it was the voice with the young man Kilross, a voice so soft and charming that the young ladies would flock round him to hear the latest poetry or listen to him singing. Like the absent husband, Johnpeter was the fifth son of a moderate estate in County Kildare and, like Alice, a cousin of Richard Butler on his mother’s side. And while the Irish peasants divided their holdings among their children so they became smaller and smaller over time, the Anglo-Irish landlords always passed the estate on intact to the eldest son in the hope that it would grow larger and larger. So Johnpeter had few possessions apart from a pair of fine hunters and a set of silver goblets left him by his grandmother.

‘I wish I could lie here for ever,’ said Alice languidly, as the strawberries continued to drop into her mouth.

‘Don’t worry,’ replied the young man, and his voice was like honey in the girl’s ears, ‘there are still plenty left.’

Some fifty feet away, Lord Francis Powerscourt was sitting opposite Mrs Butler in the island’s summerhouse. Normally, when the grown-ups remained in their proper places on the mainland, this summerhouse was an Indian camp out in the wilds of Wyoming, or a beleaguered British outpost in South Africa like Ladysmith or Mafeking, under siege to the terrible Boers. The children would crouch in it, firing imaginary guns from its windows, assaulting it from the roof, a position perilously reached by jumping some six feet from a nearby tree. Today the grown-ups had taken it over and the children played elsewhere, recreating great naval battles with a couple of canoes or disappearing completely up into the tops of the tall trees. It wasn’t even, the children said to themselves, as if the grown-ups did anything sensible in the summerhouse when they took it over. They just talked to each other, apart from one memorable evening when Alice and Johnpeter had been spotted kissing vigorously as the light faded when the Butler children were meant to be going to bed, but had decamped to the island instead for a midnight feast of buns and biscuits liberated from the kitchen.

‘This must be a very worrying time for you, Mrs Butler,’ Powerscourt began, ‘with all these pictures disappearing.’

Sylvia Butler smiled. ‘I’ve been trying to find out,’ she said, ‘if there is any history of this sort of thing. I’ve often wondered if the ancient Celts had a tradition of this kind of activity. You steal my pelt or my club or my best stone and there is some sort of curse placed on me. Like voodoo or whatever it’s called in the West Indies. The stealing of the paintings is meant to be a mark of doom for the family. Sometimes,’ she laughed what Powerscourt thought was rather a false laugh as if she was trying to conceal her real feelings, ‘I do feel cursed. I feel not wanted. I feel some people want us to go. But it never lasts very long.’

Powerscourt wondered if this wasn’t precisely the effect the thieves had wanted. It would be impossible, he thought, to have lived in Ireland for the last thirty years or so without realizing that some, if not a great many people wanted you to go. He thought it prudent not to mention the fact.

‘Your steward was mentioning to me yesterday,’ he said, ‘that one of the Christian Brothers at the school in the town down below is a great expert on the ancient Celts. Apparently he spends his holidays digging around in old ruins or ferreting about in the bogs for relics of those times.’

‘They always strike me as being rather sinister, those Christian Brothers,’ said Mrs Butler, ‘especially when they move about in packs. They look like ravens or crows about to do some damage or attack somebody. He is called Brother Brennan, the antiquary fellow. They say he hopes all the young farmers who pass through his hands will search their land for antiquities for him. He has great hopes of opening a museum some day with all his treasures in the main square down in Butler’s Cross, the town at the bottom of our drive. Perhaps you should go and see him, Lord Powerscourt.’

‘Tell me, Mrs Butler,’ Powerscourt shifted slightly in his seat to catch a view of the river through the trees, ‘who do you think is responsible for these thefts?’

Sylvia Butler paused. Should she tell him the truth? She had only known him for twenty-four hours or so. She had met too many Irishmen with charming and plausible manners in her life who had later turned out to be men of straw. Powerscourt, she decided suddenly, was not a man of straw. Lord Brandon had spoken of him in the most glowing terms. ‘If it was a joke, a practical joke,’ she began, ‘we would know by now. Even in Ireland the practitioners would have put us out of our misery after all this time. That leaves an interesting choice, Lord Powerscourt. Thieves who intend to make a great deal of money from selling the paintings? Or men of violence, advanced nationalists as I believe they call themselves nowadays, though why it should be advanced to break into innocent people’s houses and steal their possessions I do not know.’

She paused suddenly, as if conscious of the contrast between what she was about to say and what surrounded her, the birds singing happily in the trees on their island, the Shannon gurgling quietly on its long journey to the Atlantic, the distant laughter of the children, the heat growing stronger as they passed into early afternoon.

‘I’m sure it’s the men of violence,’ she said very quietly, ‘they want to get rid of us. They always have. Our land is very fertile. Richard has made it much more profitable with his improvements and his educated farm managers. We even had one from Germany once, you know, Lord Powerscourt, a very earnest young man who wore enormous black boots all the time. I remember wondering if he wore them in bed but I never found the answer. Richard said he had a great feel for horse breeding. We did have one horse after he left, I recall, who won everything at the Punchestown Races three years in a row. Richard called it Wolfgang. Everybody gets richer these days, the tenants, the shopkeepers in the town, ourselves. We’ve cleared all the debts now. Richard looks so proud when he tells people that the Butlers don’t owe anybody a penny. I’m sure those Fenians or whatever they call themselves these days – the vicar is convinced their new name is the Irish Republican Brotherhood, but I wouldn’t trust the vicar to know about a thing like that – they all want to drive us out. It’s been going on for centuries. We may lose in the end, Richard and I tell ourselves in our darker moments, but we won’t go out without a fight. We’ll dance until dawn at the last hunt ball, we’ll drink the last of the stirrup cup and finish the port in the cellar, we’ll kill the last fox in Ireland and exhaust ourselves at the last tennis party. We’ll go out in glitter and glory, dressed up in our finest with Young James playing the Dead March from Saul on the piano.’

She laughed, a rather desperate laugh, Powerscourt thought. ‘Tell me,’ he said, looking at her small delicate hands, ‘are you frightened?’

Mrs Butler paused and looked closely at Powerscourt. ‘I thought you were going to ask me that sooner or later,’ she said. ‘It’s not an easy question to answer. Of course I could tell you that I’m not frightened at all, but that wouldn’t be true.’ She paused again. ‘Sometimes I am very frightened indeed. I think I can say in all honesty that I’m not afraid for myself. It’s the children I worry about. If these dreadful thieves can steal into our house and take the dead from the walls why can’t they take the living children from their beds? Sometimes in the night when Richard is snoring away beside me – I shouldn’t have told you he snores, should I? – and I hear the creaks and strange noises all these old houses make in the night, I think the thieves have come back. Twice now I have crept into the children’s rooms to make sure they are still there.’

She looked at him defiantly. ‘I know what you’re going to ask me now. You’d better ask me, Lord Powerscourt.’

‘I’m not going to ask you that question just at the moment,’ said Powerscourt, smiling across at her, ‘I want to ask if you are sure your husband has not had a note from somebody, asking him to do something to get the pictures back. You see, Mrs Butler, surely, I have said to myself many times now, they must want something, these thieves. Why go to all the trouble of organizing these thefts, unless, of course, you want to sell the paintings and I’m not convinced that is the case, though I wouldn’t rule it out altogether. Why bother? So what do they want? They have to tell us at some point.’

Mrs Butler folded the hands Powerscourt admired so much together and looked down at the grass. ‘I know Richard doesn’t tell me everything. It wouldn’t be natural if he did. But he hasn’t mentioned a word to me about any messages. Is he telling the truth? To be perfectly honest with you, Lord Powerscourt, I just don’t know. He might be or he might not. He can be quite devious sometimes, though not,’ she giggled like a girl at this point, ‘when he’s snoring. I’m sorry,’ she went on, ‘I know that’s no help to you at all.’

Now Powerscourt asked the question. ‘Would you think of taking the children away, Mrs Butler?’

‘Please call me Sylvia,’ she said inappropriately, perhaps playing for time. ‘I’ve thought about that a lot. I think if any more pictures are stolen from any more houses – why stop at two, after all – then I might take all the younger ones to England. Except I would miss Richard terribly, even when he snores away in the middle of the night. There I go again. I can’t give you a straight answer to anything, Lord Powerscourt. How very Irish of me!’ And she laughed a nervous little laugh but her eyes were locked on Powerscourt’s face and they were very serious indeed.

‘I wish I could offer you some reassurance,’ Powerscourt said, ‘but I wouldn’t want to give you false comfort.’

Their conversation was suddenly interrupted by a couple of fiendish war whoops as two small children with blackened faces shot across the grass and disappeared up a tree.

‘I’ve taken up enough of your time,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet. ‘I’ve got an idea. I think I’m going to have a look at the opposition, or what might be the opposition. Time to seize the initiative,’ although even as he said it, he knew he didn’t quite believe it.

‘Are you going to see the antiquated Christian Brother, sorry, I mean the antiquary Christian Brother?’ Sylvia Butler asked.

‘Nearly,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘nearly, but not quite. I’m going to call on the parish priest, who rejoices, if your steward’s information is accurate and I’m sure it is, in the name of O’Donovan Brady. With a name like that he could have fought in the Williamite wars or fled to France with Patrick Sarsfield.’

One bribe to an angelic child had Powerscourt rowed back to the mainland. Another, slightly larger one, sent a young footman on horseback to ask if it would be convenient for Lord Francis Powerscourt to call on Father Brady later that day. And so, shortly after five o’clock, Powerscourt had walked down the long drive and was standing in the main square of the little town of Butler’s Cross. Mulcahy and Sons, Grocery and Bar, seemed to be the main shop, dominating one side of the arena. It was flanked by O’Riordan, Bookmaker and Bar. Opposite them was the emporium of Horkan and Sons, Agricultural Suppliers and Bar. A pretty eighteenth-century house next door carried the discreet message, Delaney, Delaney and Delaney, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths. Just in front of the Roman Catholic church was MacSwiggin’s Hotel and Bar, fine rooms and wholesome Irish food. That meant ham and eggs, Powerscourt remembered, served twenty-four hours a day. Only in the legal establishment, he noted wryly, was it not possible to obtain alcoholic refreshment on the premises. Even then, the solicitors in their dark suits would probably whip out a bottle of John Powers finest whisky from their bottom drawer to close the transaction.

At precisely five thirty Powerscourt rang the bell of the priest’s house. The door was answered by a remarkably pretty girl, presumably the housekeeper, in her early twenties who showed him into what she assured him was the Father’s study. The walls were lined with books, some of them in Latin, some printed in Rome. The walls carried a heady cocktail of political and religious messages. Directly above the fireplace was a full-length portrait of Daniel O’Connell, the man they called the Liberator, widely credited with securing Catholic Emancipation some eighty years before and the final repeal of the Penal Laws that had discriminated against his co-religionists. To the left of it, in a much smaller frame – Powerscourt wondered if this indicated the true strengths of the priest’s convictions, politics looming larger than God in his mind – a weary-looking Christ was dragging his cross up the hill they called Golgotha. To the right, the empty tomb, brilliant bursts of light pouring from its depths and the women kneeling in awe on the stony ground. Opposite them, posing in front of a barricade in the fashionable clothes of a French revolutionary of the mid-1790s, Theobald Wolfe Tone, leading member of the United Irishmen who fomented the rebellion in 1798. And a Protestant. A Protestant, moreover, from the unholy city of Dublin. Powerscourt thought that there must be rejoicing, even for the sinner that repenteth. Perhaps, after this passage of time, Tone had become an honorary Catholic, received into the faith with the compassion the Church was famed for from the hellfires where his heretic religion would have undoubtedly carried him. Powerscourt was not surprised that there was no place on these walls for Charles Stewart Parnell, Protestant leader in the Westminster Parliament of a group of largely Catholic MPs who almost brought Home Rule, a form of self government, to Ireland, only to be brought down by his adultery with the married Mrs Katherine O’Shea, an adultery condemned from the pulpits of most of the Catholic churches in Ireland.

‘Good afternoon, Lord Powerscourt, how can I be of assistance?’ Father O’Donovan Brady was a short tubby man of about forty years, red of face, bald on top and with small suspicious eyes. His tone was polite but cold. Powerscourt thought he looked like Mr Pickwick, a billiard ball of a man, might have done had he been employed in the rack and thumbscrew department of the Inquisition, a priest more interested in sniffing out sin than in offering the consolation of salvation.

‘Thank you very much for seeing me at such short notice, Father,’ Powerscourt began. ‘I am staying with the Butlers up at Butler’s Court.’

Father Brady interrupted him. ‘I know who you are, Lord Powerscourt, and I know the nature of your business here with us.’ Of course, Powerscourt remembered. Word of his arrival and his mission would have travelled down the long drive to the little town as fast as the kingfishers that flew across the river. Johnny Fitzgerald had once observed that the sending of telegrams or maybe even important and interesting letters was not a safe practice in Ireland – the contents might have been read long before they reached the intended recipient.

‘A fine family, in spite of their religion, the Butlers,’ the priest went on. ‘The local people will always remember them for the work they did here in this barony at the time of the famine, slaughtering their cattle and handing over their crops to feed the starving. Not that you could say that about most of the landlord class, not by a long way.’

‘I was wondering, Father,’ Powerscourt was picking his words very carefully now. He had spoken more truthfully than he knew when he talked to Mrs Butler earlier that day about entering enemy territory, ‘if you could offer me any advice about the missing paintings, whether or not this has happened before, that sort of thing.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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