Death on the Holy Mountain Read online

  ‘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 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.’

  ‘Do you think he was lying, Francis?’ asked Johnny.

  ‘I don’t think he was lying, I think the people in Ireland may have been lying to him.’

  ‘So what are your plans, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy.

  ‘Well,’ said her husband, ‘I think you should stay here for the time being. When the situation is clearer I hope you will be able to join me. I am going to see the good Mr Hudson in the morning and a day or so after that I shall set off for Holyhead and the Irish Midlands. Johnny,’ he paused to refill his friend’s glass, ‘could you do something for me? Go to Dublin and make a mark with the picture dealers so they will let us know at once if anything appears on the market. Better send it to me care of the Butler house for now.’

  ‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald cheerfully. ‘I haven’t been to Dublin for years. They say it’s one huge slum nowadays but there are great birds down in the Wicklow Mountains.’

  Later that evening Lady Lucy found her husband staring moodily at a map of Ireland spread out on the dining-room table.

  ‘What’s the matter, Francis?’ she said in what she hoped was her gentlest voice.

  ‘It’s all this,’ said Powerscourt, waving his hand in the general direction of Powerscourt House, Enniskerry, County Wicklow. ‘This is my past. This is where I was born. This is where my parents lived and died. They’re buried there, for God’s sake. If you could belong to one of the great pillars of the Protestant Ascendancy, the landlord class, the Anglo-Irish, call it what you will, then I belong to it. Don’t get me wrong, Lucy. I love Ireland very deeply. Those Wicklow Mountains where I was brought up, the west with its rivers and lakes and the dark ocean, they are among the most beautiful places in the world to me.’ He paused and looked down at his map again.

  ‘Forgive me, my love, I don’t see why that should be upsetting you.’

  ‘Sorry, Lucy. I’m not explaining myself very well.

  ‘Much have I seen and known: cities of men

  And manners, climates, councils, governments . . .

  ‘I’ve been lucky enough to see all kinds of societies all over the world. But where Ireland is concerned I don’t know whose side I am on. Who am I? Irish or English? Can you be both? History tells me I am one of the Protestant Ascendancy. I should be on their side. But I’m not. Or I think I’m not. I’d like to be neutral. But if that’s not possible I think I’m probably with the other side. In a democratic age, after all, only the Catholic side can win. The Protestants are so heavily outnumbered. But I’m not Catholic. I’m Protestant. Even so, if you think the Catholic side should win, if anybody wins at all in these circumstances, don’t you see that in this case maybe I should be advising the people who stole the paintings rather than the other way round?’

  Lady Lucy didn’t know what to say. She took her husband by the hand and led him upstairs. ‘It’s a long time since you’ve been to Ireland, Francis,’ she said brightly, trying to sound more cheerful than she felt. ‘Perhaps it’ll all seem very different when you get there.’

  At nine o’clock the following morning a group of three bedraggled men and an even more bedraggled donkey were making their way up Ireland’s Holy Mountain. The mountain was Croagh Patrick, some seven miles outside Westport on the Louisburg road in County Mayo, about as far west as you could go in Ireland without setting sail for the New World. The Reek, as the locals called it, was wreathed in cloud this morning, a light rain falling. Below it the waters of Clew Bay with their three hundred and sixty-five islands, one for every day of the year, were almost invisible. Even before Christian times Croagh Patrick had been a place of pilgrimage and mystery to the inhabitants of ancient Ireland. St Patrick himself, Ireland’s patron saint, had fasted on its barren slopes for forty days and nights, giving the mountain its name. Every year on the last Sunday in July a great throng of pilgrims, many of them brought by boat or by special train, climbed to the summit and celebrated Mass nearly three thousand feet above ground. All of the three men could remember the words of the Archbishop of Tuam, the Most Reverend John Healey, the previous year. He had been standing on the roof of the old, rotten church to address the faithful. The Archbishop was a great bull of a man and within minutes a Westport bookmaker was offering odds on whether he would fall through before he finished. Healey was a passionate believer in pilgrimage, which he linked to the sufferings of his people.

  ‘Think of this mountain,’ he roared forth to the assembled multitude, over ten thousand strong, ‘as the symbol of Ireland’s enduring faith and of the constancy and success with which the Irish people faced the storms of persecution during many woeful centuries. It is therefore the fitting type of Irish faith and Ireland’s nationhood which nothing has ever shaken and with God’s blessing nothing can ever destroy.’

  Charlie O’Malley, Tim Philbin and Austin Ruddy were all builders from Westport. They were part of a team of a dozen men charged with the construction of a new oratory for the celebration of Mass on the summit of Croagh Patrick. Three men, including the contractor, Mr Walter Heneghan, lived in a tent on the summit complete with cooking and cleaning facilities stolen from the British Army. Wages were paid on a Friday afternoon in Campbell’s public house at the foot of the mountain, the tented party descending to make sure that the porter had not changed its taste or been diluted while they had been on vigil at the summit. Everything that could be pre-fabricated or part fabricated was assembled at the bottom of the mountain and carried up by man or beast later.

  This morning, as so often, it was Charlie O’Malley’s donkey who raised the standard of revolt. The beast was heavily laden with sand and cement. It sat down and refused to move.

  ‘For God’s sake, Charlie,’ said Tim Philbin, ‘what’s the matter with your bloody donkey this morning? This isn’t the same beast we had up the mountain yesterday. How many bloody donkeys do you have anyway?’

  ‘I had three at the beginning,’ said Charlie defensively. Charlie was a well-built man in his early forties, his brown hair growing thin on top. ‘As you well know, I said we shouldn’t have laden one of the animals so heavily last week. It took one look at Saturday morning and passed on straight up to donkey heaven.’

  ‘What do you want with so many bloody donkeys in the first place?’ said Austin Ruddy.

  ‘I am operating on a very important principle,’ Charlie replied haughtily, ‘taught at school with great pain from that evil black strap of his by Brother Gilligan.’

  ‘And what was the principle?’ asked Tim Philbin, poking the donkey’s back to see if he would get up. He didn’t.

  ‘It was first set out,’ said Charlie rather pompously, as if he had been turned into Brother Gilligan for the morning, ‘by a man with a strange Christian name, like Swede or Carrot, something like that.’

  ‘Potato?’ said Tim sarcastically.

  ‘No, it wasn’t Potato,’ said Charlie. ‘Cabbage maybe? Parsnip? Bean? Pea?’

  A smile of triumph spread across Austin Ruddy’s face. ‘You boys can’t have been paying attention to Brother Gilligan. I shall have to drop him a line when I’m next in Westport. Turnip, that’s the name of the fellow. Turnip Townsend. Lived in the early 1800s, I believe. No record of him coming on pilgrimage to the mountain.’
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  ‘The christening must have been very strange,’ Charlie mused. ‘John Joseph Turnip Townsend, I baptize thee in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.’

  ‘It was a nickname, you fool,’ said Tim, giving the donkey another prod.

  ‘And what, Austin,’ said Charlie O’Malley, ‘was the theory that the great vegetable man gave to the world?’

  ‘Well, you have me there,’ replied Austin Ruddy defensively. ‘I can remember that classroom clearly, I can see that great brute Gilligan in his black soutane or whatever they call it, but the theory of your man with the turnips has gone from my mind. I can’t have been paying attention at the time.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what it was,’ said Charlie triumphantly. ‘The Rotation of Crops, that was his thing. Turnips one year, carrots the next, then cabbages. All change every year. I had an Uncle Fergus who used to go on about it. His wife used to say that he should rotate his drinks as well as the bloody vegetables for he was a walking whiskey distillery by the end.’

  ‘It’s just grand to hear about your Uncle Fergus, Charlie,’ said Tim, ‘but what in God’s name has the theory to do with donkeys?’

  ‘Simple,’ said Charlie. ‘Rotation of donkeys. With three of them you could work them one day in three. Better service from the donkeys. Longer life for the donkeys. Lower replacement costs for me. Just like the man Swede said. Sorry, sorry, not Swede, Turnip. Now with two, if you bastards don’t load them up with too many bits and pieces, they work every other day. Rotation principle, only less of it.’

  The animal at the centre of this learned discussion gazed sadly up the mountain as if it were a climb too far. The three men scowled at it.

  ‘Should we pray?’ asked Austin Ruddy.