David Dickinson - Death on the Holy Mountain

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.

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.