Death on the Holy Mountain lfp-7 Read online

  Death on the Holy Mountain

  ( Lord Francis Powerscourt - 7 )

  David Dickinson

  David Dickinson

  Death on the Holy Mountain

  PART ONE

  THE WILD GEESE

  Consider Ireland. Thus you have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church – and, in addition, the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish Question.

  Benjamin Disraeli, 1844

  1

  The box was brown and tightly bound with string. It sat happily on a small table in the front hall of the Powerscourt residence in London’s Chelsea. Indeed it looked as if the person in charge of wrapping the parcel believed it would only survive the journey if virtually encased in strong twine. The top had so many lines criss-crossing it that it resembled a master cobweb. Occasional loops under the knots bore witness to the fact that the wrapper might have preferred a different profession, pastry cook perhaps, or ornamental plasterer. Lord Francis Powerscourt approached the object gingerly. The box bore his name on the front. He knew what was inside. He felt reluctant to open it. Maybe, he said to himself, the expectation is always better than the reality. And he knew that one of the many divisions into which the world’s population is split – those who can whistle and those who can’t, those who adore Venice and those who complain about the smell, those who can order drinks in theatre bars at the interval and those who can’t – was the distinction between those who can unwrap parcels neatly and those who can’t. Powerscourt knew that his wife Lucy would have the thing open, the string tied neatly into a ball, the box itself virtually intact and available for reuse, in a minute or two. And he knew, as night followed day, that his own efforts would be similar to those of his three-year-old twins, torn strips of cardboard lying all over the floor, pieces of string also strewn on the ground to trip the unwary, a general sense of mess and disorder. Sighing slightly, he opened the drawer of the table and brought out a pair of scissors. Why did they have to put on so much bloody string? he said to himself after a few minutes, with only three of the fetters broken. And why was the top of the box so hard to open? With growing irritation he forced the lid open at last.

  The Cathedrals of England, Volume One, by Francis Powerscourt, it said on the cover of the book. He stared at it in wonder and disbelief. His name. His book. His cathedrals. Had he not visited them all, walked their cloisters and their clerestories, climbed up their towers where the great bells rang out over fen and plain? Had he not worshipped at Matins in the morning and with the sombre beauty of Evensong as the light faded from the day? He began to smile as he unpacked his treasures. There are a few great moments in a man’s life, he said to himself, catching your first fish, scoring your first century, getting married, looking at your own newly arrived children so small and cross in their tiny white clothes. This was another, opening the first book you had written. He remembered his oldest friend and companion in arms, Johnny Fitzgerald, telling him about the intense joy these occasions called forth, how for days afterwards you would be drawn to the place where these very special first editions were being displayed, to touch them, to open them at random, caring little for the content, to smile once more, maybe even to laugh. Johnny had compared it to the first time he tasted Chassagne-Montrachet, a sensation he, Johnny, had described as being akin to being received into heaven with a band of angels serenading you with anthems of celestial glory.

  There was a sudden burst of noise coming down the stairs. The twins, Christopher and Juliet Powerscourt, seemed to have escaped the attentions of whoever was meant to be guarding them. They were singing some strange song that might once have been a nursery rhyme. They stopped when they saw the remains of the parcel and the string. Christopher pointed at the box and nudged his sister in the ribs. He looked, his father thought, like a person who has forgotten the word for something in a foreign language.

  Juliet eyed the object carefully.

  ‘Box,’ she said with a great effort, as if some mammoth feat of mental arithmetic had just been performed. ‘Box.’

  ‘Box good,’ said Christopher and led the charge down the rest of the stairs. Powerscourt noticed that their clothes were still clean even though they had been up for an hour or more, a minor miracle where the twins were concerned. He thought of trying to explain to them that he had written the book but decided that it was no use. He might as well tell them that a man from Mars had just landed in their back garden. They pulled the box on to the floor and Christopher climbed in. Juliet began gathering bits of string and said ‘Pull’ firmly to her father. Quite what they had in mind was not apparent for at that moment two things happened simultaneously. Powerscourt’s wife, Lady Lucy, appeared at the top of the stairs and began summoning the children back to their normal place of confinement at the top of the house, and there was a firm, confident knock at the front door.

  Powerscourt ushered into his hall an immaculate footman, clad in black breeches and a black jacket with a rather daring yellow waistcoat and brilliantly polished black boots.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt?’ said the apparition with the yellow waistcoat.

  ‘I am he,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at the young man.

  ‘I have a message for you, my lord.’ The clothes, Powerscourt thought, might be the clothes of Mayfair and the West End, but the vowels were pure Whitechapel. ‘From my lord, my lord,’ and he pulled an envelope from his inside pocket with the panache of a conjuror.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and who might your master be?’

  ‘Sorry, my lord,’ said the footman, ‘forgive me, my lord. I work for Lord Brandon, the Earl of Lincoln, my lord. And forgive me,’ the young man began to stammer slightly as if the whole ordeal of two lords in one sentence might be proving too great a burden, ‘my lord wonders if you could give an answer straight away, my lord.’

  Powerscourt opened the envelope. ‘Dear Lord Powerscourt,’ he read, ‘I wish to take advantage of your wisdom in a troubling and troublesome matter. I do not feel able to vouchsafe any details in this letter. Ill health leaves me unable to come up to town at present. I would be most grateful if you could feel able to come down and see me here at Kingsclere as soon as possible. The matter appears trifling at present, but I fear greatly for the future. Your experience and your expertise are badly needed. Yours, Lincoln.’

  ‘Is there any reason, Lucy, why I shouldn’t go to Kingsclere in the morning?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘None at all,’ said Lady Lucy, seizing a twin firmly in each hand.

  ‘Please send the Earl my best wishes,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and tell him that I will call on him round about eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.’

  The young man bowed and took his leave. The twins were transported to the top floor. Powerscourt grabbed half a dozen of his books and brought them up to the drawing room to show his wife. The Cathedrals of England, he read on the title page, by Francis Powerscourt, published by Constable, Orange Street, London, MCMV.

  Lord Francis Powerscourt had been an investigator for many years now. He had served in Army Intelligence in India and South Africa and had recently returned from investigating the murder of a British diplomat on the Nevskii Prospekt in St Petersburg. Apart from the twins, he and Lady Lucy had two older children, Thomas, aged twelve, and Olivia, aged ten. He had written the book during a two-year gap when he gave up detection at the request of his wife, after he was nearly killed investigating a couple of deaths in one of London’s Inns of Court.

  ‘Oh, Francis,’ was all Lady Lucy could say when she saw the books. ‘Oh, Francis,’ she said again, and began to flick through the book and the illustrations. ‘I’m so proud of you, Francis, we’l
l have to have a party. But tell me, what did that yellow waistcoat man want with you? Why are you going to Kingsclere in the morning?’

  ‘I don’t know, my love,’ said Powerscourt, handing over the letter. ‘When you have read that, you will know as much as I do.’

  ‘A troubling and troublesome matter.’ Lady Lucy looked up at her husband. ‘Do you suppose it has to do with divorce, people running off with other people’s wives and husbands, that sort of thing?’

  ‘I do hope not,’ said her husband. ‘We shall find out tomorrow.’ Powerscourt stretched out in his favourite armchair by the fire and began to read his book. He began, as is only proper, with the introduction. He did not feel it necessary to tell his wife that, as well as vast properties in the south of England, the Earl of Lincoln also had great estates in Ireland.

  Gervase St Clair de Bonneval Brandon, eighth Earl of Lincoln, was waiting for Powerscourt in what the butler told him was the Great Ante Chamber of Kingsclere, a vast Palladian mansion just outside the little town of the same name. Powerscourt had often wondered why most of these people ended up living somewhere other than their names. The Dukes of Norfolk were not to be found near Diss or Fakenham or Cromer, but in the heart of rural Sussex. The Earls of Pembroke were nowhere close to Haverfordwest or Fishguard but outside Salisbury. And these Lincolns you might expect to see near Boston or Grantham or Louth were nestling happily in the peaceful county of Hampshire.

  Brandon was in his early sixties with a formidable shock of black hair on top of a broad forehead. His jowls were very heavy, his eyes dark brown. Powerscourt thought they showed a lot of pain. He was wearing dark trousers and a rather raffish black smoking jacket over a cream shirt. Behind him Powerscourt glimpsed a vision of gold leaf and elaborate plasterwork, of proportions made in heaven, of red Chippendale chairs and a painted ceiling, of marble-topped tables and embossed doors, of Axminster carpets and the seventeenth-century heiresses and long-faced aristocrats created by the Court painter to Charles the First, Sir Anthony Van Dyck. Ladders and great planks were being moved around the room and there was a subdued muttering in French which Powerscourt couldn’t quite catch. He felt privileged to have caught even a fleeting sight of one of the great rooms of England, the Double Cube Room, made, he believed, to designs by Inigo Jones. The owner of this slice of earthly paradise stared at Powerscourt from his deep red leather armchair. There was a small table beside him with papers scattered across it as if the Earl had been reading them before Powerscourt’s arrival.

  ‘Damned doctors!’ said Brandon, trying unsuccessfully to rise from his chair to shake his visitor’s hand. ‘Damned medicines!’ He placed his hands on the side of his chair and made another attempt to lever himself upright. His face grew red from the exertions. Powerscourt felt that offers of help would be inappropriate for this grounded aristocrat.

  ‘Damned gout!’ he spluttered. ‘Why does the bloody thing have to come back the day you come to call? Damn my calf! Damn my other calf! Damn the bloody medicine! Damn the bloody doctors!’

  ‘Please don’t trouble yourself,’ said Powerscourt emolliently. ‘Please stay right where you are,’ and he leaned forward and shook Brandon by the hand in his sitting position.

  ‘Damned doctors!’ said the irascible Earl. ‘Do you know I once got this bloody gout in my big toe? Not once, twice, now I think about it. Do you think those damned medicine wallahs could do anything about it? Of course not!’

  Powerscourt wondered if the whole morning would be spent on an extended philippic against his physicians. There was a loud bang from next door and the sound of a body falling to the floor. A string of French expletives followed, most of them completely new to Powerscourt who would, until now, have described himself as reasonably fluent in Gallic oaths. The accident seemed to cheer the invalid up, somebody perhaps more seriously handicapped than himself and about to be equally dependent on the passing whims of the medical profession.

  ‘Damned picture restorers!’ he said. ‘Cost me a bloody fortune and all they can do is fall off their ladders all day.’ With enormous effort and a continuous salvo of oaths the Earl managed to put one leg over the other. It appeared to bring some relief.

  ‘Damn my leg, Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘damn the bloody gout, we’d better get down to business, what!’

  ‘By all means,’ Powerscourt replied, accompanied by a groan from the picture-restoring department next door.

  ‘Don’t know if you know this, Powerscourt, but we own large estates in Ireland as well as round here.’ Brandon waved an arm in a circular fashion as if to indicate the range of his English holdings. ‘Good land, Westmeath and places like that, none of your damned peat bogs and perpetual rainfall out there in the mists of County Mayo. Damn this disease!’ The unfortunate Earl had apparently just endured a twitch of great ferocity in his lower leg which he was rubbing incredulously, as if in amazement that a part of his own anatomy could cause him so much distress.

  ‘Thing is,’ Brandon winced as he carried on, ‘there has recently been a series of robberies. Not just at our place but the one next door as well.’

  Powerscourt felt slightly let down. If asked, he would have said he didn’t do burglaries. Murders, yes. Blackmail, yes. Disappearing diplomats, yes. But men with blackened faces climbing through a downstairs window and making off with the family silver, no. Some of his distaste must have made itself apparent. Brandon almost managed a laugh.

  ‘Don’t go looking down your nose at our little bit of crime yet,’ he said, holding firmly on to his calf. ‘Wait till you hear what they took, these Celtic burglars.’

  ‘What did they take?’ said Powerscourt, feeling like the feed man in the music hall.

  ‘They didn’t take the obvious things,’ Brandon carried on, interrupted by a torrent of French from the Double Cube Room. ‘They didn’t take the silver, they didn’t touch any of the antiques, they didn’t look for any cash, they just took paintings.’

  ‘Paintings?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘What sort of paintings?’

  ‘In my place, called Butler’s Court, the family is called Butler. We own a great heap of land there, the Butlers own another great heap, they’re our relations, they live there, they farm the land for us. They’ve been there for hundreds of years and they’re related to those other Butlers who own half of Munster. Come to that, they’re related to about half the quality in the south of Ireland. So damned few of them left they’ll all be bloody well interbreeding soon.’ He paused briefly as if contemplating incest rife from Offaly to the Kerry peninsula. ‘I digress,’ he went on. ‘Eight generations of Butlers have disappeared from the walls, going right back to a Sir Thomas Butler in the seventeenth century. Four more Sir Thomases have gone – Butlers win no prizes for originality in naming their sons. And a Caravaggio. And a couple of Rubens.’

  ‘Do you know, Lord Brandon, if any of these portraits were by famous artists, any Romneys, Gainsboroughs, Reynolds, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Damned if I know, Powerscourt,’ said Brandon, eyeing his leg suspiciously. ‘I can just about keep it in my head that the stuff on the walls next door is by some character called Van Dyck. Not a clue who did these Irish daubs at all. Funny thing, here I sit, surrounded, they tell me, by all this priceless stuff, and it doesn’t mean a thing to me. My father said they should have bought horses with the money the ancestors spent. His father believed it would have been better invested buying vineyards in France. Never mind.’

  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 p
ills. ‘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.’