David Dickinson - Death on the Holy Mountain

It was not long before the full scale of the disaster hit Butler’s Court. The servants, with their normal invisible sources of information, learnt very quickly what had happened in the Protestant church. The steward, acting as spokesman for the footmen and the parlour maids and the kitchen staff, informed Richard Butler of the sermon of Father O’Donovan Brady. The steward felt it was only fair. Richard Butler turned pale but merely thanked the man for his news. The soup that lunchtime came in a silver tureen and was ladled into the Spode bowls by Richard and passed down to the guests. Butler himself carved the meat with a great German carving knife and handed it round. Disaster struck with the vegetables. These were being served from a large silver salver by a pretty parlour maid of about twenty years who looked very correct in her smart black and white uniform. When she reached Johnpeter Kilross she simply walked straight past him as if he wasn’t there. The same fate, accompanied by a slight toss of the head, awaited Alice Bracken. Everybody else was served in the normal way. The girl took the empty salver back to the kitchens. There was complete silence in the dining room. The blank spaces on the walls where the paintings had been stared down at them. Alice Bracken burst into tears and fled the room. Johnpeter Kilross followed her a moment later. Richard Butler stared helplessly at his wife. The rest of the meal was taken in complete silence. The boycott, or a form of boycott, had come to add to the woes of Butler’s Court.

Richard Butler and his wife held a crisis meeting in his study after lunch. ‘Did you know this was going on?’ he asked her.

‘Certainly not. Do you know precisely what was going on?’

Richard Butler made a disagreeable face. ‘From what I was told just before lunch, Father O’Donovan Brady named Kilross and the Bracken female as having carried on in broad daylight in the Head Gardener’s Cottage. He told his flock, if they worked here, that is, to think before they served their food or washed their clothes, that sort of thing.’

‘My God, Richard, this is terrible! So soon after the paintings and everything. What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t think we have any choice,’ said Butler. ‘They’ll have to go away. They’ll have to go almost at once before things get out of hand.’

‘We can’t do that. They may have misbehaved, those two, but they’re our kith and kin. We can’t let them down. What will people say? That Father O’Donovan Brady, that horrible little man, preaches a sermon at half past eleven and the Protestants cave in first thing in the afternoon? You can’t take a high and mighty line with the blackmailers, Richard, and then betray your own after they miss out on the carrots and the cauliflower!’

‘Ah, but there’s a difference,’ said her husband. ‘We’re in the right over the paintings. We’re in the wrong, very much in the wrong, about the adultery. Would you have the locals say our house is a refuge for adulterers, that the people who break God’s commandments can find sanctuary at my house? It won’t do. My mind is made up, Sylvia. They’ve got to go. You might tell them to pack their bags right away. I wish Powerscourt was here. He’d have something sensible to suggest. I’m going to speak to the vicar. Maybe he’ll have some thoughts about where they could go. I don’t think anywhere in the south of Ireland is going to be safe for them. The word will shoot round the Catholic grapevine at lightning speed.’

Five days after his escape from his captors on the Maum road Lord Francis Powerscourt was sitting in the reception area of Messrs Browne and Sons, Land Agents and Valuers, of Eyre Square in the heart of Galway.

The dinner at the Leenane Hotel had been a riotous affair, graced with lobsters and champagne. The Major had indeed attempted to sing a song, ‘The Ash Grove’, deemed too English by local taste and drowned out by Dennis Ormonde and Johnny Fitzgerald belting out ‘The West’s Awake’ and ‘The Wearing of the Green’. The dining room, the landlord observed to his wife, was little better this evening than the public bar on a Saturday night. Ormonde had brought some correspondence for Powerscourt, the letter from Inspector Harkness that had arrived at Ormonde House just ten minutes after he left in search of the missing women. It was cryptic. ‘It is as you thought. Here are the dates and the figures for the person you mentioned. H.’ And there was a note from the Archbishop’s Chaplain reminding Powerscourt that the Archbishop of Tuam was anxious to see him before he left Ireland. An appointment had been fixed for later that day. Johnny Fitzgerald had been dispatched on a fishing expedition to locate and investigate Pronsias Mulcahy’s brother, Declan Mulcahy, believed to be a solicitor somewhere in the west of Ireland.

Richard Browne, senior partner in the firm that bore his name, was a small, silver-haired man in his middle sixties. He was wearing a very elegant dark suit that Powerscourt did not think had come from a Galway tailor with a cream shirt adorned by ornate silver cufflinks. He carried about him an air of great respectability. The room was large, with a fine marble mantelpiece, a desk by the window, a sofa and some easy chairs loosely grouped round a Regency table. Powerscourt was relieved to see that there were no stuffed animals in sight.

‘Lord Powerscourt, a very good morning to you. How can I be of assistance?’

‘Dennis Ormonde of Ormonde House suggested I call on you, Mr Browne,’ Powerscourt began. ‘Let me give you a little background, if I may. I am an investigator, sir, summoned to Ireland to look into a delicate matter of stolen paintings. So far there have been two deaths and a serious kidnapping during the course of my inquiries. I need to know about land, who is buying, who is selling, the general state of the market. Land is always central to what goes on in Ireland, I think. Dennis Ormonde said you would be the best person to consult in the whole of the west of Ireland.’

The old man laughed and began filling his pipe. ‘He flatters me, Lord Powerscourt. I shall be happy to oblige though I find it hard to detect the link between land and pictures. But tell me, didn’t your people once own a huge estate in County Wicklow? And Powerscourt House itself? All sold now, of course, but in its day, surely, it was one of the finest of its kind in Ireland.’

‘We did own it, Mr Browne. It was I who sold it, for reasons I won’t burden you with. There are no lands or houses owned by Powerscourts in Ireland now, I’m afraid.’

‘Pity, that,’ said Richard Browne. ‘The family went back a very long way. Now then.’ He forced a final lump of tobacco into his pipe and began fiddling with his matches. ‘Land, Lord Powerscourt, land in Ireland. Dear me. Where should I start? Two years ago, I tell you, I was going to retire. My wife and I had spent over a year planning a great journey round Europe by train. It was going to take three months. I have always wanted to see some of the great art galleries. My wife is very keen on gardens and great chateaux. We had the route planned, we even had the names of the hotels where we were going to make reservations. Then I heard about this Wyndham Act, the one that encourages the landlords to sell out and gives them a bonus of twelve per cent on the price for doing so. You know about this Act, Lord Powerscourt?’

Powerscourt remembered William Moore talking about it. He nodded.

‘Mabel, I said,’ the land agent went on, thin wisps of smoke beginning to curl out of his pipe, ‘in forty years in this trade I have never seen an opportunity like this. Business for a while will be brisker than we have ever known. I could not sit happy in Gstaad or Portofino and think of all those missing profits. So we postponed the trip. I had to buy Mabel a new house to make up for it, mind you, a Georgian place out near the coast, cost me a packet but it was well worth it.’