Death on the Holy Mountain

4

Richard Butler led them rapidly out of the hall, talking loudly about a horse he had seen that morning. The beast, he declared, was a most promising animal, the finest he had seen since the German-bred Wolfgang years before.

‘Didn’t want the women to hear,’ he said, panting slightly as he reached the security of his study. ‘Sylvia would be on the first boat to Holyhead if I told her this evening, so she would. God, this is terrible news.’

Further introductions were effected, William Moore telling Johnny Fitzgerald that he had known a cousin of his at school. ‘Tell us, William, in God’s name,’ said Butler, ‘tell us when it happened, how it happened.’

‘The theft took place sometime in the middle of the night. There’s a broken window down in the kitchen. That’s where they came in, I think. One of the footmen noticed the vanished pictures on his rounds first thing this morning.’

‘Was anything else taken?’ asked Powerscourt, sitting himself down on a small sofa by the fireplace.

‘Nothing at all,’ said Moore, a small wiry man with red hair and a bright red beard, ‘and the silver in that room is worth a fortune, far more than the bloody pictures.’

‘And how did the family take it?’ asked Butler.

‘Well,’ Moore said, ‘the wife initially didn’t seem to mind very much. Said she’d never really cared for the portraits anyway. She’s always maintained they make the place look like a bloody mausoleum, like the one Victoria built for the dreadful Albert over at Frogmore, all those damned dead men looking at her every time she entered a room. I thought it wasn’t going to bother her very much. She ate a huge breakfast, eggs, bacon, tomatoes, sausages, fried potato bread, mushrooms, toast, and I began to feel a bit better myself. Then I found her an hour later crying on the terrace, saying the rebels were back and we’d all be murdered in our beds. Her people came from Wicklow, you know. They had a terrible time there with those rebels back in ’98. I think three of them were killed.’

‘What are we to do, Lord Powerscourt? What on earth are we going to do now?’

Richard Butler was twisting his hands round and round each other, as if he were in pain. He and Moore looked at Powerscourt with the air of children expecting a parent to rescue them from some especially unpleasant predicament. Powerscourt had no idea what to say. Temporarily, he was lost for words.

‘Let us begin with the practicalities,’ he said at last, trying to sound more authoritative than he felt. ‘The first thing is to decide what to do about the women and the wives. I do think, Butler, that you will have to tell them, and tell them as soon as possible. For all we know Mrs Moore may arrive here at any moment to pour out her woes to your wife. You know what women are like about talking to each other, talk all bloody day if you give them half a chance.’

Richard Butler peered anxiously out of the window in case another carriage was bringing a distraught Mrs Butler to his quarters. All he could see was an old man raking the gravel on the drive.

‘I suggest,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘that Mr Moore should stay the night here, and, with your approval, Johnny and I will accompany him back to Moore Castle in the morning. We can make a full inspection of the house and an inventory of the missing pictures and so on.’

The prospect of another guest and activity of some kind seemed to restore Butler’s spirits slightly.

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I’ll get that sorted in a moment. But tell me, Powerscourt, are you certain I have to tell Sylvia? Tell her that more paintings have disappeared?’

‘In my opinion,’ replied Powerscourt, sure of this if of nothing else, ‘you have no choice. Or rather, you have two very disagreeable options. Either you tell her yourself, or you wait for rumour to reach her. News, as you know as well as I do, travels very fast over here. You wouldn’t want her to hear about it from the cook as they’re discussing the menus for the week first thing in the morning now, would you?’

Richard Butler looked racked by the choice. ‘I’ll tell her in the morning,’ he said finally. ‘She’ll be able to bear it better in the morning.’

For a moment nobody spoke. The only sound was the methodical swish of rake on gravel.

Then Johnny Fitzgerald tried a diversion. ‘These are wonderful horses you have here on your walls, Mr Butler,’ he said. ‘Are any of them yours?’ Powerscourt wondered briefly if one of the horses lining three walls of the study was the fabled Wolfgang, triple winner at the Punchestown Races. He knew that horses were the only subject that might distract attention from the calamity of the vanished paintings over at Moore Castle. A vigorous debate followed, Butler telling the two strangers to Ireland that all the horses on the walls were, or had been, his and that he thought he had spent far more money on them than his ancestors had on the paintings.

‘There’s a thing,’ said Moore, suddenly animated, ‘why haven’t they taken any of the horses? In Ireland you can turn horseflesh into cash faster than almost anything else. How would anybody know, Richard, if some of your animals turned up in Tipperary, or Waterford or Cork?’

‘It’s a poor eye for a horse they have down there in Cork,’ said Richard Butler darkly. ‘Those buggers wouldn’t know a racehorse from a dray.’

‘Forgive me for bringing the conversation back into the human world, gentlemen,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but did the thieves leave you any kind of message, Mr Moore? A ransom note? Demands for money, that sort of thing?’

William Moore blinked rapidly. ‘No note, no ransom, nothing at all. Do you think it’s going to be like the boycott all over again, Powerscourt? Not that nobody’s going to talk to us, though with some of them that would be a blessing, but a new . . .’ He paused briefly, searching for the right word. ‘. . . a new tactic, a new device to confound the landlords? Do you think it’s that, Powerscourt?’

‘I don’t think we should alarm ourselves with talk of boycotts and fresh campaigns at this stage, Mr Moore,’ said Powerscourt diplomatically, wishing he could believe it. ‘I know this is all very difficult to bear, but only three houses have been affected so far. And nobody’s lives or livelihoods are affected.’

On that note the little party broke up, Butler and Moore going to sort out his accommodation and the loan of a pair of pyjamas, Powerscourt and Fitzgerald to walk by the river in the late afternoon sun.

‘That advertisement from the New York paper, Johnny. How did you get hold of it?’

‘Do you think there’s something wrong with it, Francis?’ said Fitzgerald.

‘I can only answer that when I know how you came by it,’ Powerscourt replied, staring across the Shannon from the bottom of Butler’s gardens.

‘Well,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘I’d made the rounds of most of the Dublin art dealers, shysters most of them. Then there was this man called Farrell in a gallery of the same name in Kildare Street, just along from the Kildare Street Club, Dublin’s answer to the Garrick and the Reform. He thought I was you, to start with, Francis. Seemed most disappointed that I wasn’t you, if you see what I mean. Damned unfair of him, I thought, nothing wrong with me. Anyway, when I said I was a great friend of yours and that we’d worked on all sorts of cases together, he relented a bit. He said nobody had been trying to sell any ancestor paintings at all, so maybe the thieves are keeping their powder dry. Then he gave me the advertisement but he wouldn’t say where it came from. He said, the Farrell man, that he could only tell you in person. It was all very secretive, like we were all trying to sell him a couple of fake Leonardos. He even bolted the door and closed the shop up for a few minutes while he talked to me. What do you make of that, Francis?’

‘I’ll tell you what I think it means, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt, bending down to trail a hand in the water. He told Fitzgerald about his conversation with Michael Hudson in Old Bond Street some time before and Hudson’s idea of placing an advertisement in one of the American newspapers. ‘Appropriately enough, from where we’re standing now, this is a fishing expedition. Hudson’s trying to see if there is a market for these ancestral portraits in New York. If there are a number of replies, then we will know there is a market for these things, a market that the thieves might have known about.’

‘And what happens if they are queuing up round the block to buy the bloody things?’ asked Johnny. ‘Goldman and Rabinowitz don’t have a heap of Irish landowners lying about in their basement, do they?’

‘I don’t think that matters very much,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Paintings gone for cleaning, unavoidable delay in transshipment from Ireland, customs formalities to be finalized, you could keep the ball in play for months.’

‘By God, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘your lines of communication here are longer than they ever were in South Africa or India. London, New York, London, Dublin. That’s a bloody long way. Are you going to tell them in the Big House about it?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Powerscourt firmly. ‘That would be like putting it on the front page of the Irish Times. Father O’Donovan Brady down in the town, my favourite Catholic priest in all the world, would hear of it inside twenty-four hours.’

Dinner that evening was a rather subdued affair in Butler’s Court. The blank spaces reproached them from the walls. Butler carried on a desultory conversation with Alice Bracken about the prospects for the forthcoming hunting season. Powerscourt had a halting discussion with the tall thin young man called James about Irish songs and ballads, a subject on which the young man possessed an encyclopedic knowledge. Only Johnny Fitzgerald seemed to be on top form, entertaining Sylvia Butler with anecdotes about the Dublin art dealers he had recently met, all of them, without exception, he maintained, thieves and villains of the darkest hue, not a single one of them a man you would buy a tea caddy from. After the consumption of a spectacular trifle, almost all the ingredients originating on the premises, Richard Butler proudly told the company, the ladies withdrew. As their host placed a bottle of port in the centre of the table they were joined by a very old gentleman with white hair, a straggly white moustache and a thin white beard. He shuffled slowly to an empty chair, bringing with him a large black notebook. He was wearing a faded dinner jacket under a very old green dressing gown decorated with Chinese dragons of considerable ferocity. Powerscourt wondered if it had come from the East with Marco Polo.

‘Uncle Peter,’ said Richard Butler rather wearily. ‘How good of you to join us.’

‘Didn’t feel like the whole thing, dinner, I mean,’ said the aged uncle, eyeing the port greedily. ‘Had something in my rooms.’

By the look of him, Powerscourt thought, he had been doing rather more drinking than eating in his rooms. His eyes were bloodshot and he carried with him a general air of faded dissipation, like an old sofa that had been left out in the rain.

‘Heard you had visitors,’ Uncle Peter went on. ‘Educated men. Cambridge, one of them. Young James told me.’

The old man nodded firmly at this point, looking with even greater interest at the glasses and the bottle. ‘Thought they’d like to hear some of my book.’ He patted the volume in front of him.

‘Uncle Peter’s been writing a history of Ireland,’ Richard Butler said loudly in the tone he might have used when talking to a small child. ‘He’s been working at it for the past fifteen years.’

‘Really?’ said Powerscourt, wondering what was to follow. Johnny was eyeing their visitor with a look of fellow feeling for a man who so obviously liked a glass of something every now and then to ease the pain of the day.

‘Parnell’s funeral,’ said Uncle Peter, rummaging about in his book. ‘That’s the end of my story. That’s the bit I thought the gentlemen would like to hear.’

Butler filled four glasses and handed them round. ‘Moore,’ he said, laying down the lines for his escape, ‘I want to ask your advice about a piece of land that’s up for sale over at Carryduff. I think it’s quite promising. Did I tell you, by the way, that the bloody man Mulcahy down in the square tried to buy some of my land? Bloody cheek!’ Land, Powerscourt remembered, a subject almost as dear to these people as horses. Powerscourt was to learn later that William Moore was said to have the sharpest eye for a piece of land in the four provinces of Ireland. With that, and a slight bow, Richard Butler led his neighbour from the room.

‘Why did you finish your book with Parnell’s funeral?’ asked Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘That’s nearly fifteen years ago now.’

‘Will you tell me,’ the old man said, downing most of his glass in a single gulp, ‘what’s happened in Ireland since? I’ll tell you now, so I will. Power, real power, flowing away from the landlord class like an ebb tide. More priests, more bloody nuns, more schools, more of the young playing those stupid games of Irish football and that ridiculous hurling they go in for. Who’s ever going to give them a proper international match in hurling, will you tell me that now?’

‘We’d be most interested to hear about Parnell’s funeral,’ said Powerscourt politely. ‘You see, we were both there, Johnny and I.’

‘Maybe you’ll be able to give me some advice then,’ said Uncle Peter. ‘You’d be amazed at how hard it is to find accurate information in this country. It’s the newspapers, you see. They can’t even agree on the date the great Charles Stewart Parnell was buried. I’m sure the man from the London Times was there on the spot, and the man from the Irish Times and the fellow from the Freeman’s Journal, but I don’t think the chap from the Cork Examiner was there at all, or the man from the Mayo News. Some of them have got the funeral on a different day. One of them, can’t remember which one now, memory’s going like a clock winding down, said Parnell died on a Tuesday and was buried the next day, on the Wednesday. Would you believe it? As if they could put his body in a coffin, transport it from Brighton to Holyhead and then get it on a boat from there to Kingstown inside twenty-four hours. The thing’s not possible. Do you think they make it up, the newspapermen, I mean?’ During this speech Uncle Peter had extracted a pair of battered spectacles from a dragon’s pocket in his dressing gown and was ferreting about in his book, looking for the right place to start.

‘Sunday it was,’ said Powerscourt, ‘the day they buried him.’

‘Friday, I’m sure it was Friday,’ said Johnny.

‘There you are,’ said the old man triumphantly, ‘and you’re not even newspapermen. Young James would have told me if you were newspapermen.’

Richard Butler made a brief reappearance in his dining room. He was carrying a large tray with three further bottles of port and an enormous jug of iced lemonade.

‘I thought it might be a long evening, boys,’ he said, depositing his precious cargo directly in front of Uncle Peter. ‘This should keep the vocal cords in working order.’

‘The commissariat has arrived,’ said Uncle Peter thankfully to the departing Butler. ‘Supplies.’ He had the air of a man who has just found the Ark of the Covenant. As he looked again in his book for the right place to start, his eyes peering down at the pages, his right hand, guided by apparently unseen forces, reached out for the port bottle and refilled his glass. Not a drop was spilt. Even Johnny Fitzgerald, a man with some experience in these areas, nodded his appreciation.

‘Excuse me, Uncle Peter,’ said Powerscourt apologetically, ‘don’t you think it would be helpful if you gave us a brief biography of Parnell before we start? You and Johnny and I have lived through it, after all, but Young James here was only a child when the man died.’ Powerscourt watched as the old man’s mouth opened and closed several times.

Then Powerscourt understood. This was a change of plan. Old men didn’t like changes of plan. In his mind Uncle Peter was already lost in the details of Parnell’s funeral. Now he was asked for the view from the mountain top.

‘Let me try,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it won’t be very good but it might help.’ He paused briefly, marshalling his thoughts. ‘Born in famine times. Protestant landowner from County Wicklow. Elected to Westminster Parliament mid-1870s. By the end of that decade two bad harvests in a row filled the island with the terror of another famine. With Michael Davitt Parnell founded the Land League. Farmers asked their landlords for reduction or cancellation of their rents. Widespread agrarian violence. Landlords who refused were sometimes boycotted. Two results. Gladstone passed a law that made it easier for the tenants to purchase their land. And he imprisoned Parnell in Kilmainham Jail for inciting violence, which guaranteed Parnell immortality in Ireland. Became Leader of Irish Parliamentary Party in 1880. Turned it from undisciplined rabble into formidable fighting force. Parnell and his MPs fought for Home Rule for Ireland. Gladstone was converted to Home Rule, a form of devolution. Through the ’80s Parnell carried on a passionate affair with Katherine O’Shea, wife of another Irish MP. Cited as co-respondent in 1889 divorce case. Savaged by hostile publicity when details of the adultery came out in court. A few MPs stayed loyal, remainder fought him tooth and nail. Pro- and anti-Parnellites contested three by-elections in Ireland through 1891. Parnell lost them all. Married Katherine O’Shea June 1891.’

‘Admirable,’ said Uncle Peter. ‘Now then,’ he went on, wiping his mouth quickly with the sleeve of his jacket, ‘let us begin.’ He read in a light tenor voice that gradually filled the dining room. ‘“Chapter Twenty-Seven,”’ he said. ‘“Charles Stewart Parnell died at a quarter to midnight on 6th October 1891 in Mrs Parnell, formerly Mrs O’Shea’s house at Number 10 Walsingham Terrace in Brighton. He had been ill for some days. The months of strain as he campaigned unsuccessfully to hold on to his political base at those three by-elections in Ireland, the Irish Parliamentary split into bitter faction fighting after the shock of his divorce case, must have taken their toll. He had endured levels of abuse and hostility unparalleled even in Ireland. Lime had been thrown in his face. On another occasion eggs had been hurled at him and his trousers were torn in a scuffle in a hotel, the waiter repairing his breeches under the table while Parnell ate the remains of his supper. Everywhere he went he was pursued by the national anthem of his opponents, ‘Three Cheers for Kitty O’Shea’. Sometimes his enemies would shake battered clothes on poles at him, proclaiming to all and sundry that these were Kitty O’Shea’s knickers.

‘“On his last evening he asked his wife to lie down on the bed beside him. His old dog Grouse, at his request, was also present in the bedroom. He had not slept for two days and a local doctor had given him some medicine. Throughout his life Parnell was a superstitious man – the colour green had always been anathema to him – and he believed that his lack of rest was a bad omen. And it was October, a month he always said was his unlucky time of year. During the evening he dozed and Mrs Parnell thought she heard him mutter ‘Conservative Party’ as if he were planning some further political manoeuvre. If she touched him, he smiled. Later he said, ‘Kiss me, sweet wifie, and I will try to sleep a little.’ Those were the last words on earth of the man who changed the face of Irish politics. Just before midnight he was gone. He was only forty-five years old.”’

Uncle Peter’s voice began to crack towards the end, whether due to lack of refreshment or emotion unclear. As he topped up his glass he turned to his little audience of three.

‘What do you think of it so far?’ he asked. ‘Do you like it well enough?’

‘Excellent start,’ said Powerscourt.

‘Splendid,’ said Johnny.

‘Let’s have some more, Uncle Peter,’ said Young James in an uncharacteristically long speech.

‘Short sentences wherever possible,’ the historian declared, ‘nothing too ornate in the prose style department. Gibbon. Always liked Gibbon. Never got to the end of that Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, mind you. Don’t suppose many people did.’

He peered down at his black book once more, checking on the way that there were still plentiful supplies of port to hand. ‘“The news of his death travelled round the world. In New York’s fourth ward, heavily populated with Irish immigrants, portraits of the dead leader appeared in the windows, draped in black. About twelve o’clock on the morning of Saturday 10th October Parnell’s body set out on the long journey back to Dublin for his funeral and burial. A number of Irish MPs accompanied him on his journey. Mrs Parnell was too upset to travel, but her wreath went with him every step of the way: ‘My true love, my darling, my husband.’ Rain was falling heavily as his coffin, almost covered with wreaths of large white flowers, was carried out to an open-sided funeral carriage drawn by four black horses. The umbrellas of the small crowd were useless in the violent squalls of rain. They took shelter in the doorways and in the rooms of houses being redecorated close by, saluting the coffin respectfully as it passed. The route went along the King’s Road on the sea front, past Regency Square and the West Pier whose great girders were being pounded by the waves, its promenades totally deserted, and up West Street to Brighton station. The coffin was lifted into a van attached to a special saloon on the 1.45 to Victoria station in London. En route to the capital it was decoupled at Croydon and diverted to Willesden where many Irish men and women came to pay their last respects. Another wreath bore the message, ‘Charles Stewart Parnell, Salutation. He died fighting for freedom.’ Shortly before seven o’ clock the train set off from Willesden on its melancholy eight-hour journey through the dark heart of England to Holyhead and the Irish boat. Sixteen men carried Parnell’s coffin on to the steamer, the Ireland, where it was wheeled on a trolley into the smoking saloon on the lower deck, an appropriate, if temporary, resting place for a man so devoted to cigars. A black cloth was laid over it, covered in its turn by a green flag. Twenty-eight more wreaths, which had travelled north with the coffin, were placed alongside it. ‘Died fighting for Ireland’. ‘In fond memory of one of Ireland’s greatest chieftains who was martyred in the struggle for her independence.’ At two forty-five in the morning, nearly fifteen hours after the corpse left the house in Brighton, the Ireland set off to carry Charles Stewart Parnell on his very last crossing of the Irish Sea to Dublin.”’

‘Still awake, are ye?’ croaked the old man, pouring himself a tumbler of iced lemonade. ‘Plenty more to go.’

Johnny Fitzgerald rose and took one of the bottles of port from in front of the old man. ‘Thought we’d better keep you company,’ he said cheerfully.

Powerscourt was thinking that the political questions raised by Parnell in his lifetime, the land question, the precise relationships to exist between England and Ireland, the thorny conundrum of Home Rule, had not been answered yet. Gladstone had promised that it would be his life’s mission to bring peace to Ireland or perish in the attempt. It had been one of the chief political objectives of his long career. Well, Gladstone had perished. Ireland still did not have peace. Maybe another act in the long drama was being played out in these Irish rooms with the great holes on the walls where ancestors from centuries before had rested in their great houses. Maybe the theft of these paintings was the start of another chapter. Maybe they were all part of a story that went back eight hundred years.

‘“The Ireland was late arriving in Kingstown,”’ Uncle Peter continued, staring down at his book, ‘still battered by the storm, angry waves lashing at the harbour walls. Great crowds had often welcomed Parnell home from his Parliamentary triumphs here in the past, bands playing ‘The Wearing of the Green’ or ‘A Nation Once Again’. They were silent this morning except for a low moan as the coffin came into view. Among the crowd in Kingstown early that morning was the young Irish poet W.B. Yeats, come to greet his friend Maud Gonne who had met Parnell in Ireland in the days before his death.”’

‘Bitch goddess!’ said James, with sudden and unexpected force.

Uncle Peter looked up at him like an elderly bishop whose sermon has just been interrupted by a junior member of the choir. ‘I beg your pardon, Young James? What did you say?’

‘Bitch goddess!’ James repeated with the same vigour as before. ‘Maud Gonne is Yeats’s bitch goddess. She wouldn’t marry him and she wouldn’t leave him alone. She’s tormented him for years, the cow!’

‘Maybe,’ said Uncle Peter, ‘but perhaps it’s just as well the poet man met his bitch goddess. Answer me this, Young James, would we have had Homer’s Iliad without Helen of Troy? She was somebody’s bitch goddess, though I’m damned if I can remember whose just at this moment. Would your man Shakespeare have written Antony and Cleopatra without Cleopatra and her snake, best thing that ever happened to her in my view? Or John Donne written his verses without all those mistresses of his? What would have happened if they had married anyway, Yeats and Maud Gonne? Maybe they’d have lived happily ever after, taking out the tarot cards under the fruit trees in the garden in the afternoon and writing obscure papers for the Theosophical Society in London in the evening. No pain, no poem. I’ve never had much to do with the women myself,’ he admitted, ‘too temperamental for me, but I’ve always understood that the one thing they’re good for is a bit for inspiration for the poetry writing classes when the normal things like drink have failed.’

‘Anyway,’ Uncle Peter went on, fuelling his cynicism with another large gulp of Cockburn’s finest Old Tawny, ‘your man Yeats, so a professor from Trinity told me once – don’t ask me his name, that’s gone too for the present – he told me Yeats thought he and his friends could create an alternative version of the Irish past to fill the political vacuum left by the death of Parnell and the squabbling of his associates. Horse manure!’ He paused for just one more mouthful. ‘Horse manure and gobshite! How many people from Carrick-on-Shannon or Ballywalter know where the bloody Abbey Theatre Yeats founded actually is? How many people have bought tickets for the performances? How many Catholic farmers and shopkeepers and solicitors are ever going to buy a book of poetry, any damned poetry, let alone stuff with titles like “The Song of the Wandering Aengus” or “The Valley of the Black Pig” or “The Host of the Air”, for God’s sake? And how many Christian Brothers are going to teach poetry written by a Protestant from Sligo, if they teach poetry at all?

‘Damn. I’m lost now. Where was I?’

‘Parnell’s just off the boat, Uncle Peter,’ said Johnny, ‘and it was still raining. This was Ireland, after all.’

Uncle Peter looked as if he was going to continue his diatribe, but he went back to his book.

‘“The body was carried quickly ashore and placed on the waiting train. There was a short delay while the mail was unloaded from the Ireland. Charles Stewart Parnell began his last journey into Ireland’s capital on track laid in 1834 by the Dublin and Kingston Railway Company, at the time the first commuter line in the world. At seven thirty on Sunday morning it reached Westland Row station. As the coffin, six feet four inches long, was finally removed from the large deal case which had protected it on its rough journey across the sea, the crowd surged forward and hacked the case to pieces, breaking the wood up into fragments to be treasured as relics, as if they had come from a dead saint. A soaking escort of nearly a thousand members of the Gaelic Athletic Association, a nationalist body devoted to Irish games, widely believed to be infiltrated by Fenians or members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, more devoted to insurrection than to ball games, formed an honour guard round the bier as it was laid on its hearse. They were all dressed in green and carrying hurling sticks tied with black crepe and green ribbon. Here was a blatant warning to any anti-Parnellites who might have thought of trying to disrupt the proceedings. Violence would be met with violence.”’

Johnny Fitzgerald had been holding his hand up and waving it for a minute or so. ‘Those bits of the deal case enclosing the coffin, Uncle Peter,’ he said, ‘I know something that might be useful for this section of your book when you next revise it. You could buy bits of them, the relics I mean, in many of the Dublin pubs that evening when the funeral was over. They were changing hands in some places for a pound or more. Mind you, one of the publicans told me afterwards that there was enough wood on sale that night to cover fifty coffins. Maybe they increased and multiplied, like those loaves and fishes on the mountain.’

‘Thank you, Johnny,’ said Uncle Peter. ‘I am seriously thinking of banning all interruptions in the manner of a French teacher of mine who punished any disturbances when he was giving dictation with a severe thrashing.’ Uncle Peter took advantage of the diversion to open another bottle. ‘Anybody else wish to interrupt? Young James, have you further comments on the personalities involved you would like to impart to us? Powerscourt, you have been commendably quiet so far?’

All three shook their heads.

Uncle Peter’s appearance was rather wild now, wisps of hair falling down on to his lined forehead. He looked, Powerscourt thought, like an aged prophet come out of the wilderness with his book to lead his people on a last crusade, or a man who had spent too long in solitary confinement. A large drop of port had fallen on to his green dressing gown. At any moment, Powerscourt felt, a dragon’s mouth might dart forth and gulp it down. Uncle Peter’s drinking continued regularly, like the beat of a metronome. From outside the dining room came faint noises of doors being bolted and creaky sash windows closed. The household was going to bed.

‘“Parnell’s last journey across the city resembled a secular version of the Stations of the Cross, the stops at the great memorials to Ireland’s past replacing the final stages of Christ’s journey. The procession moved slowly away from Westland Row station, outriders on either side, the honour guard of the hurling stick youths surrounding the coffin, crowds marching six abreast behind them, the pavements packed with mourners, women kneeling down and crossing themselves as it passed by. Down College Street they went, stopping at the Old Parliament building on College Green. Here, until its abolition in 1800, an Irish Parliament had sat, composed entirely of Protestant members and looking after entirely Protestant interests, able to pass limited amounts of legislation. Parnell’s great grandfather had been a prominent member of this Assembly. Now the cortege rested for a minute to honour the great grandson who had nearly secured the return of an Irish Parliament to Dublin, one that would have been dominated by Catholics. Nobody in an Irish crowd would have failed to see the symbolic significance of this moment. At the rear one of the thirty-three bands on duty that day began playing the Dead March from Saul. The procession continued through the rain, crossing the river Liffey and advancing along the northern quays to St Michan’s Church, one of the oldest in the city. As the coffin entered the church one of the officiating clergy said at the porch, ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life, he that believeth in me shall not perish but have everlasting life.’ As the coffin went through the church it passed under the archway of the organ which, according to legend, Handel himself had played at the first performance of the Messiah. Down in the crypt of St Michan’s, some special atmospheric properties, unique to the church, had kept a number of corpses in a state of remarkable preservation, the wooden caskets cracked open to reveal skin and strands of hair. There is even a figure, deep from Ireland’s past, known as The Crusader. Up above, as the prayers for the dead were intoned, Parnell’s own body was beginning its long rot towards eternity. For most of the congregation this was the first, and probably the last, Protestant funeral service they would ever attend.

‘“Elsewhere in the city groups of mourners began forming up for the final procession. Societies and clubs assembled on St Stephen’s Green at twelve, members of Dublin and provincial Corporations gathered in Grafton Street. The Parnell Leadership Committee, the small remnant of his Parliamentary supporters, met in the National Club. Fresh mourners were still pouring into the city on special trains from all over Ireland, the carriages filled with people wearing the black armband with a ribbon of green.”’

‘Still here, are ye?’ Uncle Peter asked, pausing to pour another glass. ‘Not dropping off yet?’

No, no, his little audience assured him, they were all fine.

‘“The most dramatic farewell of all the farewells that day came in the City Hall, the municipal headquarters of Dublin Catholicism where Daniel O’Connell himself had been Mayor back in the 1840s. Parnell’s coffin was placed on a catafalque on the marble floor of the great circular chamber, ringed with statues of dead heroes from Ireland’s past. He lay in front of a statue of O’Connell himself. There were railings round the body, guarded by members of the Dublin Fire Brigade with their polished helmets to allow the mourners to pass round it to pay their last respects. Some thirty thousand were believed to have done so. All around were flags from that earlier Protestant Parliament which had been brought up from Parnell’s family estate at Avondale in County Wicklow. Behind O’Connell’s statue was a huge Celtic cross of flowers, six feet high, of arum and eucharis lilies, white chrysanthemums and ferns. It came from Parnell’s Parliamentary colleagues. The building was draped with black all the way up to the dome and a great white banner ran across the room bearing what was meant to be Parnell’s last message to his country, ‘Give my love to my colleagues and the Irish people.’ There were other wreaths, of course, from Limerick, from Navan, from Waterford, from Arklow, from Tralee, from Kilkenny, from Donegal, but none more poignant than the simple three of lilies and roses, from the children of Mrs O’Shea, now Mrs Parnell, which said, ‘To my dear mother’s husband, from Nora,’ ‘From little Clare,’ and ‘From little Katie.’ Few in the City Hall that sad Sunday would have known it, little Clare and little Katie themselves did not know it at the time, but it was Parnell who was their father. Other inscriptions spoke of murder and martyrdom in Erin’s cause. Parnell, a man who spent more time in his lifetime cultivating the Roman Catholic hierarchy than he had his own Protestant bishops, was being turned into a human sacrifice in the sacred cause of Irish freedom. The torch of heroic martyrdom had passed in apostolic succession from Wolfe Tone to Daniel O’Connell and from O’Connell to Charles Stewart Parnell. Who would be next?”’

‘That’s good,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘that’s very good, Uncle Peter.’

‘Do you like it now?’ Uncle Peter replied, gazing at them like a very old owl over the tops of his battered spectacles, as eager and hungry for praise as authors usually are.

‘Oh yes,’ Powerscourt said, ‘it’s very good indeed.’

‘“Now came the last journey,”’ Uncle Peter went on, ‘“the last apocalyptic journey to the graveside. As the procession moved out from the sombre gloom of the City Hall the weather changed and sunshine arrived to bless Parnell’s last moments on the streets of Dublin. The young men of the Gaelic Athletic Association formed up in their honour guard around the hearse once more, many of them now holding their hurling sticks like rifles on a drill parade. Behind them came the City Marshal on horseback and in full uniform. Behind the Marshal, Parnell’s horse, riderless, saddled, with the boots in place in reverse position, tribute and symbol to the dead leader since the days of Genghis Khan. Then the carriages, over a hundred of them, with the Mayor and the members of the Corporation and Parnell’s family. There was one carriage, observed but not apprehended by the plain clothes men from Dublin Castle who mingled with the crowds that day, believed to be carrying three veteran Fenians, with whom Parnell had enjoyed ambiguous relationships throughout his life. They, along with the members of the Corporation, had organized the funeral. Behind them a vast procession, most of them wearing black armbands with a green ribbon, said to be two hundred thousand strong.

‘“The great cortege left the City Hall and moved slowly through Christ Church Place into Thomas Street. Here were two more symbolic stops, the first at the house of Robert Emmett, another martyred Protestant rebel who had launched a pathetic postscript to the ’98 Rising in 1803 and been executed for his pains. Emmett’s true claim for inclusion in the pantheon of Irish saints and heroes was his speech from the dock at the close of his trial where he declared that no man should write his epitaph until Ireland was free. Emmett’s epitaph,”’ Uncle Peter looked up at them sternly at this point, ‘“remains unwritten to this day. A little further up the same street came the last stop, the last of Parnell’s Stations of the Cross, at the house where another Protestant rebel, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, was betrayed and fatally wounded at the end of the 1798 rising. Lord Edward had been born into the bluest of blue-blooded Irish families. His father was the Duke of Leinster and he was a child of the vast wealth and splendour of Carton House in County Kildare. Even after he was betrayed for his role with the United Irishmen, his relatives were arranging with the authorities for blind eyes to be turned at selected ports while Lord Edward fled the country. He died in prison several days after the shooting.

‘“It was now taking an hour and three-quarters for the procession to pass a given point. The bands were playing with muffled drums, many of them now working their way through Chopin’s Funeral March. From Thomas Street they took the body of the man they had called The Chief or The Uncrowned King of Ireland in a great loop around the city, showing Parnell Dublin as if he were a living visitor, east into James Street, across the river at King’s Bridge, back along the northern side of the Liffey, running brown and dirty after the rains, over the river once more at Essex Bridge, down Parliament Street, close to the City Hall where they had started, back into College Green for a last look at the old Parliament building, north up Westmoreland Street and over the river again, past O’Connell’s statue at the bottom of Sackville Street and along Cavendish Row to the last resting place at Glasnevin Cemetery.”’

The last bottle of port was open now. Young James was looking tired. Johnny Fitzgerald had a slight smile on his face as if some other memories of the day had come back to him. Uncle Peter’s voice was slowing now, on the last lap of his marathon read.

‘“It was evening by the time the hearse finally stopped at the gates. A group of pallbearers, some of them Parnell’s colleagues in the Parliamentary party, carried his coffin to the grave. Mrs Parnell’s wreath was first into the ground, ‘My true love, my darling, my husband,’ followed by many more. The rest of the funeral service was read by a Reverend Fry from Manchester and the Reverend Vincent, the Chaplain of the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. Parnell’s last resting place was not far from O’Connell, the two ready to lead Ireland once more when the dead shall rise from their graves at the last day. The crowd, after a last look at the grave, peeled off to make their way back to their pubs or their tenements or their homes, ‘their homesteads’ as Parnell had called the peasant cabins at the time of the Land War in the early 1880s. Maud Gonne,”’ Uncle Peter stared balefully at Young James at this point, daring him to speak, ‘“told her friend Yeats later that evening that a shooting star had appeared in the sky during the actual burial itself. Both she and the poet were greatly impressed, discussing the astral significance for some hours. Another poet, Katherine Tynan, also a friend of Yeats, began a poem about the apparition.

‘“That night our chief we laid

Clay in the ice cold sod,

O’er the pale sky sped

A strange star home to God.

Ran the East sky cold,

The bright star glistened and went,

’Twas green and glittering gold

That lit the firmament.”’

Uncle Peter closed the book. He folded his dressing gown around him and shuffled towards the door, pausing only to grab the remains of the last bottle of port. He didn’t bother with the glass.

‘Goodnight to you all,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t say another word. Thank you for listening,’ and then he was gone, the sound of his feet shuffling slowly across the marble floor of the hall gradually fading.

‘I met a man,’ said Johnny, ‘on the way out of the cemetery that day, selling hurling sticks with that ribbon round them like the boyos had. He must have had teams of women making them up for him all day. He reckoned he’d sold hundreds and hundreds of the things. He thought he might have made enough money for the deposit on a pub, the man. Said he’d always wanted to own a pub. He was going to call it the Parnell Arms.’

Johnny and Young James departed, Johnny telling stories of pubs with strange names. Powerscourt went to the window and pulled back the curtains. There were no shooting stars by the Shannon this evening. A fox was patrolling by the edge of the river. He opened the window and peered sideways at the facade of this great house, built in the early eighteenth century when any talk about Home Rule for a Catholic Ireland would have sounded like the ravings of the insane.

That night he had a strange dream. He was looking at a great long beach that he thought was Silver Strand in a wild and remote corner of Connemara. At the end was a pier with a small sailing ship. There was a crowd of gentlemen on the beach in those long frock coats worn centuries before, coats of scarlet and black and dark blue, with great white and cream stocks at the top. Their brightly polished shoes with heavy buckles were being slowly stained by the sand. They had just finished building a large number of sandcastles, formidable structures that looked as though they could withstand the Atlantic waves. The more imaginative of them had placed shells along the front to denote where the doors and windows would have been. Some had elaborate turrets and tower-like structures on the top. Gentlemen’s houses in a gentlemen’s Ireland. They clapped as he watched and went off together, arm in arm, towards the pier to board their boat. They sailed slowly away towards the south. Perhaps these were the Wild Geese, Powerscourt reflected, a great body of Irish lords and their followers who fled the country after the Elizabethan Wars. Suddenly Powerscourt began to run after the vessel, shouting helplessly as he went. The wind took his words and blew them back past his face towards the mountains. He wanted to tell them. He so much wanted to tell them but it was too late. They had misjudged the tide. Their castles were not safe. The waves were beginning to lap around the foundations now, to swirl along the sides, to curl relentlessly around the back and turn the structures into small islands, cut off from the main. The sandcastles lasted longer than he would have imagined possible. In the end it was hopeless. Undermined at the front, falling away at the back, they were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the waves. They began to collapse, slowly at first, and then erosion lapped away at them until there was almost nothing left. By the time this tide went out, Powerscourt was certain, the sands would be like the ones in Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’, lone and level and stretching far away.