David Dickinson: Death on the Holy Mountain

Powerscourt wondered if the Caravaggio and a couple of Rubens were the real target and the portraits a diversion. Or was it the other way round?

‘And what about the neighbours, Lord Brandon? Did the same thing happen there?’

‘Ten out of ten, Lord Powerscourt. I can see now where your reputation comes from.’ Powerscourt wasn’t sure if he was being ironic.

‘Damn and blast these doctors!’ Another spasm had taken over the left leg. Brandon turned very red as he fought the pain and reached into his pocket for a bottle of pills. ‘Not meant to take one of these for another two hours,’ he said bitterly, gulping down his medicine, and washing it down with a glass of red liquid from the lower shelf of his table that might have been claret, or port. ‘Afraid we’ll have to be quick now, Powerscourt. I call these pills Davy Jones’s Lockers. Send you straight down in ten minutes or so.’

‘The other pictures?’ asked Powercourt.

‘Six generations of Connollys gone. One Titian. One Rembrandt. That’s it.’

‘Were the Connollys also in a straight line? Father to son to son without a break?’

‘They were,’ said Brandon.

‘Were there any requests left for the families? Any letters, any demands that they leave the country or anything like that?’

‘Not that I know of. Why should the thieves leave letters? Thieves don’t leave letters. Not as a rule. Not round here.’

‘They might in Ireland,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It could be the first stage in a rebel campaign to get them to hand over their money or their land, or sell it. You can get excellent terms now if you want to dispose of your Irish estates.’

‘Damned if I see why we should have to sell our land if we don’t want to, to some Irish peasant or the Christian Brothers or the bloody Roman Catholic Church. Do you?’

‘I don’t think that’s the point at the moment,’ said Powerscourt, reluctant to plunge into the thickets of the Irish land question where so many had perished before him. ‘How are the families taking it?’

‘That’s just the point, Powerscourt,’ said Brandon. ‘The women are terrified. If the women go, they’ll take the children with them. The families will be destroyed. The bloody rebels will have won without firing a shot. Will you take the case, Lord Powerscourt? I think they would all feel easier if they knew you were coming.’

‘Of course I’ll take the case, Lord Brandon. Be delighted to.’ Powerscourt did not say how ambivalent he felt about the whole thing. In one sense, these were his people. He had been born into that class and that caste and their values must run in his veins. He had, earlier in his life, sold the great house in Ireland that carried his name because he and his sisters could not bear to live there any more after their parents died. With that break had come a different break, a break with the anomalies and injustice that could, from time to time, tear his country apart. Why should one man own fifteen thousand acres and another one only be allowed ten?

‘I’ve had my people make copies for you of all the correspondence so far. All the addresses and so on are in there.’ He handed over a large envelope which, for some reason, reminded Powerscourt of the box with his books. ‘Next time you come,’ he waved a hand dismissively towards the Double Cube Room as if it were the servants’ quarters, ‘I’ll show you all the stuff.’

Brandon rubbed his leg once more. ‘I’m obliged to you, Powerscourt. Any time you need anything, money, influence, the House of Lords, just let me know.’ Powerscourt dimly remembered his friend Lord Rosebery telling him that the gout-ridden aristocrat was a formidable fixer in the Upper House.

As he made his way down the staircase towards the front door he wondered just how strong Lord Brandon’s pills actually were. He was pursued by the familiar cry, ‘Damned doctors! Damned gout! Damned pills!’

‘So there we have it,’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt, as he finished recounting the story of his trip to Kingsclere to Lady Lucy and Johnny Fitzgerald early that evening in the drawing room at Markham Square. He left the documents lying on the table. Johnny had spent the day working on his next book, called Northern Birds . He had just finished the first draft, he told the company, and proposed taking a break from birds before revising it. Powerscourt was astonished to see that his friend, a great consumer and connoisseur of wine, a man with an account at no fewer than three of London’s leading wine merchants, was drinking tea.

‘Francis, Johnny,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘what do you make of it?’ She sensed, even at the very beginning of this case, that there was something about it, perhaps the return to Ireland, that was making her husband uneasy.

Powerscourt looked at Johnny, who seemed to send him a nod that said the floor is yours.

‘It could be any one of a number of things,’ he began. ‘It could be a practical joke. The Irish landlord class are rather better at practical jokes than they are at many other things.’

‘But not twice, surely, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy.

‘If you were a serious practical joker in Ireland, Lady Lucy,’ said Johnny, who was also of Irish extraction, peering sadly at his empty teacup and making a preliminary reconnaissance of a bottle of Fleurie on the sideboard, ‘you could keep going till you’d done four or five or maybe even six houses. It would show people you were serious, if you see what I mean.’

Lady Lucy wasn’t sure that she did see.

‘The real question, in a way,’ said Powerscourt, ‘is who is behind it. If it is a practical joker, then that seems to me, from the point of view of the Butlers and the Connollys, to be tremendous news. An apple pie bed is infinitely preferable to a bullet in the back. One possibility is that the thieves are in it for the money. Either the pictures will turn up in some gallery, probably in America, in the next year or so. Or there will be a blackmail note asking for so many thousands of pounds for the return of the paintings. The Irish landlord class have always been devoted to their ancestors, they believe that the longer the line the more secure their claim to their lands.’

‘Do you think, Francis,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘that the same people would be as interested in buying the portraits as the Old Masters? The Old Masters could be the real target after all, and the portraits just a series of red herrings on canvas. These Americans are paying fabulous prices just now.’

‘Or it could be the other way round,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Tomorrow morning I have an appointment to see a Mr Michael Hudson at the art dealers Hudson’s in Old Bond Street. He is said to be London’s leading expert on the transatlantic market.’ Powerscourt paused to open the bottle of Fleurie and fill three glasses.

‘We’re tiptoeing round the problem, you know,’ he said. ‘We haven’t faced up to the truth that dare not speak its name in this affair. The women in the Connolly and the Butler families are not frightened because one of their ancestors may end up on a wall in Boston or New York. The real issue is quite different.’

‘And it is?’ asked Lady Lucy quietly, wondering if this would provide a clue as to what was upsetting her husband.

‘Violence,’ said Powerscourt and he felt the word change the atmosphere. ‘Men of violence. Men who used to hough or maim cattle or horses in the night when they wanted the landlords to leave. They have had many names, White-boys, Steel Men or Hearts of Steel, raparee men, Fenians, Irish Republican Brotherhood, Clann na Gael if you’re American. They all believe in solving the land question or the political question by violence. They have rebellions or uprisings in Ireland almost as often as the French – 1798, thirty thousand dead, 1848, 1867. Who is to say it is not time for another bout in the long battle against the landlords and the English garrison? This could be a refinement in tactics. You wouldn’t have put money on the Irish inventing something so sophisticated and brutal as the boycott, would you? After all, there was no physical violence associated with boycotts. Maybe this is some further refinement. Paintings go today, maybe people go tomorrow. God knows. And there’s one thing I find very confusing. Lord Brandon with his gout assured me there had been no letters. Letters, whether threatening or warning, have always been associated with agrarian violence in Ireland.’