David Dickinson - Death on the Holy Mountain

Powerscourt laughed. His eye was drawn to three gaps on the walls. Over the mantelpiece was an enormous hole, with two smaller ones on either side of it. He supposed all would be revealed in the morning. At dinner that evening – he had forgotten how much food was consumed in these houses – he noticed another eight empty spaces on the green walls, dark lines marking where the edges of the paintings had met the wall, the paint a paler green than the surrounding area, the squares or the rectangles looking like undressed wounds.

All through the afternoon and evening a great number of people asked Powerscourt the same question. ‘Have you met Great Uncle Peter yet?’ The children asked him with great interest, running away in fits of giggles when he answered. The grown-ups would smile to themselves when they too learned that Powerscourt had not yet made the gentleman’s acquaintance. With great difficulty he managed to discover that the great uncle was extremely old, so old that even he had forgotten how old he was, and that he was writing a history of Ireland.

James Cuffe, Young James as everybody called him, the tall thin young man who looked after the children, played the piano after dinner. He was unobtrusive, rattling through some pieces by Chopin with restraint. Then he was persuaded to accompany a young army wife, Alice Bracken, as she sang some songs by Thomas Moore.

‘Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,

Which I gaze on so fondly today,

Were to change by tomorrow, and fleet in my arms,

Like fairy-gifts fading away,

Thou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art,

Let thy loveliness fade as it will,

And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart

Would entwine itself verdantly still.’

Powerscourt felt himself sinking into a languid draught of nostalgia. His mother used to sing this song, leaning on the edge of the piano with the drawing-room doors wide open to the garden in spring and summer, the waters of the great fountain just audible from the bottom of the steps, faint evening noises blending in with the music. His father would be playing the piano, rather badly, for he had taught himself to play and his finger movements would have appalled the fastidious music teachers of Dublin. And Powerscourt himself, a small boy of eight or nine, rather an earnest child, he thought, would be staring at his mother and praying that she would not stop and send him to bed. Sometimes when more expert hands were available at the keys, his mother would sing duets with some of the guests, two voices twinning and twisting round each other and floating out into the Wicklow air. He thought that was his favourite memory of his mother. His mind turned suddenly to Lady Lucy. Maybe he would bring her over and she too could sing for Ireland in this great house by the river.

‘It is not while beauty and youth are thine own,

And thy cheeks unprofaned by a tear

That the fervour and faith of a soul can be known,

To which time will but make thee more dear;

No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets,

But as truly loves on to the close,

As the sunflower turns on her god, when he sets,

The same look which she turned when he rose.’

Richard Butler along with his footman and Mary the parlour maid were on parade in the dining room promptly at ten o’clock the next morning. Hardy the footman looked even more military today, standing to attention as if he were a sergeant major on parade. Mary was shuffling anxiously from foot to foot as if she were about to undergo some disagreeable medical procedure.

‘Now then,’ Richard Butler was brisk and cheerful this morning, ‘let’s begin with this full-length over the door. Can you remember who it was?’

There was a silence from his two experts, the footman who saw the painting at least a dozen times a day and the girl who dusted the frame every morning except Sundays when she was given time off to go to Mass. Finally Hardy coughed slightly.

‘There was a name on the bottom right of the frame, sir, but I can’t remember what it said.’

‘Very well,’ said Butler, pausing to write something in a small black notebook, ‘what was the gentleman wearing?’

‘Blue?’ said Hardy hesitantly.

‘Black?’ said Mary.

‘I thought it was green, a green cloak over his shoulders,’ said Richard Butler, a slight irritation beginning to show. He made some more notes. ‘How about this other full-length Butler, the one over the fireplace?’

‘He was sitting at a table, that one,’ said the footman, ‘with papers all over it.’

‘No, he wasn’t, he was sitting on a horse,’ said Mary defiantly. ‘An enormous horse.’

‘That was your man on the other wall, opposite the door,’ said Hardy, ‘not this fellow here.’

‘The man on the horse, surely,’ said Butler, frowning slightly now, ‘was in the drawing room by the door. Big black horse.’

‘Brown,’ said Hardy, ‘the horse, I mean.’

‘Well,’ said Richard Butler, ‘I’m not sure we’re making much progress. If the one on the other wall was on a horse, then this one can’t have been on a horse too, can he? What was he doing?’

‘No reason why he shouldn’t have been on a horse,’ said the footman, ‘logically, I mean.’

‘Are you saying,’ asked Butler, ‘that this one was on a horse too?’

‘No, I’m not,’ replied Hardy, ‘I was only pointing out that there was no reason why he shouldn’t have been on a horse.’

‘Well,’ said Butler, a note of exasperation coming into his voice now, ‘if he wasn’t on a horse, what was he doing?’

‘Sure, he wasn’t doing anything,’ said Mary, rejoining the argument, ‘he was just standing there, looking at something, like those country fellows leaning on a gate.’

‘You’re not saying my distinguished ancestor was just leaning on a gate, are you, Mary?’

‘No, no, sir, it was just the look of him.’

‘I think you’ll find, sir,’ said Hardy with a note of finality, ‘that this gentleman here, over the fireplace, was the legal gentleman, with a judge’s red cloak and a lot of papers on a table in front of him.’

‘No, he wasn’t,’ said Mary with spirit, ‘your man with the wig and stuff was above the other door, so he was. There was a crack in his frame, you see, and I always remember thinking that the legal man was going to sentence me to be transported to Tasmania or some dreadful place.’

‘You sound very definite about that, Mary,’ said Butler. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I am sure, so I am,’ said the girl firmly.

‘Not so, you are mistaken,’ said the footman firmly. ‘The legal party was not above that door. He was by the mantelpiece here, watching his descendants eat their meals, so he was.’

‘The devil he was, Augustus Hardy. Isn’t it your eyes that need testing now, and you hardly able to read the headlines in the Freeman’s Journal ?’

‘Please, please,’ said Richard Butler, ‘let us not fall out. Why don’t we have a look in the drawing room next door?’

Another gaping wound stared at them from above the fireplace. ‘I’m sure we can agree about this one,’ said Butler hopefully. ‘This was the painting of the hunt, done fairly recently. I forgot to mention it to Lord Brandon, Powerscourt. Most of the county hunt, all in their scarlet coats, were assembled by the front door of the house, mostly men, including myself, of course, but a few women as well. The house was in the background.’

Both footman and parlour maid agreed about that. They ventured back into the dining room. But that was all they could agree about. On the dispositions and dress of the other two portraits they disagreed violently. One, according to Hardy, showed a Butler leaning on his fireplace, a book in his left hand, a dog asleep at his feet. Nonsense, said Mary, none of those Butlers were shown with a book, heaven only knew if they could read or not, some of them, it was all so long ago, and if anybody thought she, Mary, would not remember whether one of the gentlemen was reading or not, they were a fool. The other painting, the footman maintained, showed a Butler resplendent in cricket clothes, a cap over his head, a bat in his hand, pads on his legs, obviously waiting to stride out to the wicket. Mary agreed that there had been such a Butler, but it was a smaller Butler and he had been positioned between the fireplace and door. There was, Powerscourt thought, very considerable disagreement among the witnesses. If it had been a court case the judge might well have thrown it out because of the gross confusion about the evidence. The only thing the participants agreed on was that the people in the paintings were Butlers. Their hair might be black or brown or grey or silver or white or non-existent. Their jackets, likewise, might be blue or black or brown or red; they might be wearing cloaks of dark blue or red; they could be lawyers or hunters or cricketers. They could be smiling or scowling, their noses great or small, their eyes any colour of the rainbow, their chins clean shaven or covered with a beard that might also be black or brown or even white. There was no certainty about any of these Butlers. They were changelings to the footman who tended them and the girl who dusted their frames. Richard Butler was looking very cross indeed.