David Dickinson - Death on the Holy Mountain

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.