David Dickinson - Death on the Holy Mountain

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.’