Death on the Holy Mountain Page 9

  ‘Still here, are ye?’ Uncle Peter asked, pausing to pour another glass. ‘Not dropping off yet?’

  No, no, his little audience assured him, they were all fine.

  ‘“The most dramatic farewell of all the farewells that day came in the City Hall, the municipal headquarters of Dublin Catholicism where Daniel O’Connell himself had been Mayor back in the 1840s. Parnell’s coffin was placed on a catafalque on the marble floor of the great circular chamber, ringed with statues of dead heroes from Ireland’s past. He lay in front of a statue of O’Connell himself. There were railings round the body, guarded by members of the Dublin Fire Brigade with their polished helmets to allow the mourners to pass round it to pay their last respects. Some thirty thousand were believed to have done so. All around were flags from that earlier Protestant Parliament which had been brought up from Parnell’s family estate at Avondale in County Wicklow. Behind O’Connell’s statue was a huge Celtic cross of flowers, six feet high, of arum and eucharis lilies, white chrysanthemums and ferns. It came from Parnell’s Parliamentary colleagues. The building was draped with black all the way up to the dome and a great white banner ran across the room bearing what was meant to be Parnell’s last message to his country, ‘Give my love to my colleagues and the Irish people.’ There were other wreaths, of course, from Limerick, from Navan, from Waterford, from Arklow, from Tralee, from Kilkenny, from Donegal, but none more poignant than the simple three of lilies and roses, from the children of Mrs O’Shea, now Mrs Parnell, which said, ‘To my dear mother’s husband, from Nora,’ ‘From little Clare,’ and ‘From little Katie.’ Few in the City Hall that sad Sunday would have known it, little Clare and little Katie themselves did not know it at the time, but it was Parnell who was their father. Other inscriptions spoke of murder and martyrdom in Erin’s cause. Parnell, a man who spent more time in his lifetime cultivating the Roman Catholic hierarchy than he had his own Protestant bishops, was being turned into a human sacrifice in the sacred cause of Irish freedom. The torch of heroic martyrdom had passed in apostolic succession from Wolfe Tone to Daniel O’Connell and from O’Connell to Charles Stewart Parnell. Who would be next?”’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘that’s very good, Uncle Peter.’

  ‘Do you like it now?’ Uncle Peter replied, gazing at them like a very old owl over the tops of his battered spectacles, as eager and hungry for praise as authors usually are.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Powerscourt said, ‘it’s very good indeed.’

  ‘“Now came the last journey,”’ Uncle Peter went on, ‘“the last apocalyptic journey to the graveside. As the procession moved out from the sombre gloom of the City Hall the weather changed and sunshine arrived to bless Parnell’s last moments on the streets of Dublin. The young men of the Gaelic Athletic Association formed up in their honour guard around the hearse once more, many of them now holding their hurling sticks like rifles on a drill parade. Behind them came the City Marshal on horseback and in full uniform. Behind the Marshal, Parnell’s horse, riderless, saddled, with the boots in place in reverse position, tribute and symbol to the dead leader since the days of Genghis Khan. Then the carriages, over a hundred of them, with the Mayor and the members of the Corporation and Parnell’s family. There was one carriage, observed but not apprehended by the plain clothes men from Dublin Castle who mingled with the crowds that day, believed to be carrying three veteran Fenians, with whom Parnell had enjoyed ambiguous relationships throughout his life. They, along with the members of the Corporation, had organized the funeral. Behind them a vast procession, most of them wearing black armbands with a green ribbon, said to be two hundred thousand strong.

  ‘“The great cortège left the City Hall and moved slowly through Christ Church Place into Thomas Street. Here were two more symbolic stops, the first at the house of Robert Emmett, another martyred Protestant rebel who had launched a pathetic postscript to the ’98 Rising in 1803 and been executed for his pains. Emmett’s true claim for inclusion in the pantheon of Irish saints and heroes was his speech from the dock at the close of his trial where he declared that no man should write his epitaph until Ireland was free. Emmett’s epitaph,”’ Uncle Peter looked up at them sternly at this point, ‘“remains unwritten to this day. A little further up the same street came the last stop, the last of Parnell’s Stations of the Cross, at the house where another Protestant rebel, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, was betrayed and fatally wounded at the end of the 1798 rising. Lord Edward had been born into the bluest of blue-blooded Irish families. His father was the Duke of Leinster and he was a child of the vast wealth and splendour of Carton House in County Kildare. Even after he was betrayed for his role with the United Irishmen, his relatives were arranging with the authorities for blind eyes to be turned at selected ports while Lord Edward fled the country. He died in prison several days after the shooting.

  ‘“It was now taking an hour and three-quarters for the procession to pass a given point. The bands were playing with muffled drums, many of them now working their way through Chopin’s Funeral March. From Thomas Street they took the body of the man they had called The Chief or The Uncrowned King of Ireland in a great loop around the city, showing Parnell Dublin as if he were a living visitor, east into James Street, across the river at King’s Bridge, back along the northern side of the Liffey, running brown and dirty after the rains, over the river once more at Essex Bridge, down Parliament Street, close to the City Hall where they had started, back into College Green for a last look at the old Parliament building, north up Westmoreland Street and over the river again, past O’Connell’s statue at the bottom of Sackville Street and along Cavendish Row to the last resting place at Glasnevin Cemetery.”’

  The last bottle of port was open now. Young James was looking tired. Johnny Fitzgerald had a slight smile on his face as if some other memories of the day had come back to him. Uncle Peter’s voice was slowing now, on the last lap of his marathon read.

  ‘“It was evening by the time the hearse finally stopped at the gates. A group of pallbearers, some of them Parnell’s colleagues in the Parliamentary party, carried his coffin to the grave. Mrs Parnell’s wreath was first into the ground, ‘My true love, my darling, my husband,’ followed by many more. The rest of the funeral service was read by a Reverend Fry from Manchester and the Reverend Vincent, the Chaplain of the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. Parnell’s last resting place was not far from O’Connell, the two ready to lead Ireland once more when the dead shall rise from their graves at the last day. The crowd, after a last look at the grave, peeled off to make their way back to their pubs or their tenements or their homes, ‘their homesteads’ as Parnell had called the peasant cabins at the time of the Land War in the early 1880s. Maud Gonne,”’ Uncle Peter stared balefully at Young James at this point, daring him to speak, ‘“told her friend Yeats later that evening that a shooting star had appeared in the sky during the actual burial itself. Both she and the poet were greatly impressed, discussing the astral significance for some hours. Another poet, Katherine Tynan, also a friend of Yeats, began a poem about the apparition.

  ‘“That night our chief we laid

  Clay in the ice cold sod,

  O’er the pale sky sped

  A strange star home to God.

  Ran the East sky cold,

  The bright star glistened and went,

  ’Twas green and glittering gold

  That lit the firmament.”’

  Uncle Peter closed the book. He folded his dressing gown around him and shuffled towards the door, pausing only to grab the remains of the last bottle of port. He didn’t bother with the glass.

  ‘Goodnight to you all,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t say another word. Thank you for listening,’ and then he was gone, the sound of his feet shuffling slowly across the marble floor of the hall gradually fading.

  ‘I met a man,’ said Johnny, ‘on the way out of the cemetery that day, selling hurling sticks with that ribbon round them like the boyos had. He must have had te
ams of women making them up for him all day. He reckoned he’d sold hundreds and hundreds of the things. He thought he might have made enough money for the deposit on a pub, the man. Said he’d always wanted to own a pub. He was going to call it the Parnell Arms.’

  Johnny and Young James departed, Johnny telling stories of pubs with strange names. Powerscourt went to the window and pulled back the curtains. There were no shooting stars by the Shannon this evening. A fox was patrolling by the edge of the river. He opened the window and peered sideways at the façade of this great house, built in the early eighteenth century when any talk about Home Rule for a Catholic Ireland would have sounded like the ravings of the insane.

  That night he had a strange dream. He was looking at a great long beach that he thought was Silver Strand in a wild and remote corner of Connemara. At the end was a pier with a small sailing ship. There was a crowd of gentlemen on the beach in those long frock coats worn centuries before, coats of scarlet and black and dark blue, with great white and cream stocks at the top. Their brightly polished shoes with heavy buckles were being slowly stained by the sand. They had just finished building a large number of sandcastles, formidable structures that looked as though they could withstand the Atlantic waves. The more imaginative of them had placed shells along the front to denote where the doors and windows would have been. Some had elaborate turrets and tower-like structures on the top. Gentlemen’s houses in a gentlemen’s Ireland. They clapped as he watched and went off together, arm in arm, towards the pier to board their boat. They sailed slowly away towards the south. Perhaps these were the Wild Geese, Powerscourt reflected, a great body of Irish lords and their followers who fled the country after the Elizabethan Wars. Suddenly Powerscourt began to run after the vessel, shouting helplessly as he went. The wind took his words and blew them back past his face towards the mountains. He wanted to tell them. He so much wanted to tell them but it was too late. They had misjudged the tide. Their castles were not safe. The waves were beginning to lap around the foundations now, to swirl along the sides, to curl relentlessly around the back and turn the structures into small islands, cut off from the main. The sandcastles lasted longer than he would have imagined possible. In the end it was hopeless. Undermined at the front, falling away at the back, they were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the waves. They began to collapse, slowly at first, and then erosion lapped away at them until there was almost nothing left. By the time this tide went out, Powerscourt was certain, the sands would be like the ones in Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’, lone and level and stretching far away.

  PART TWO

  THE BLACK ROOM

  No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation. No man has a right to say to his country, ‘Thus far shall you go and no further.’

  Charles Stewart Parnell, 1885

  5

  There was more trouble at the summit of Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s Holy Mountain. The men building the chapel at the top, a place where pilgrims could rest and celebrate Mass after climbing the twisting two thousand seven hundred feet to the summit, had lost some vital supplies which they needed that day for a key stage in the construction. Rather, they hadn’t lost the supplies, they had lost the donkey that had carried them up. In their haste to get started before the weather broke and the rains came that day, the workmen had only unloaded one side of the animal. The other side, along with the donkey, had disappeared.

  ‘Jameson! Jameson!’ Charlie O’Malley shouted in despair. ‘Where the divil are you, in God’s name?’ After the earlier occasion when one of his two donkeys, working in rotation according to the principles of the great agriculturalist Turnip Townsend, had been persuaded to abandon its sit-down strike and proceed to the summit by the aroma from a whiskey bottle, Charlie had christened the animal Jameson after the makers of the golden liquid in Dublin. The other beast, currently munching contentedly at what was left of the thin grass in the O’Malley back yard, was called Powers in honour of the John Powers whiskey establishment in Cork. If he was ever able to afford a third, Charlie was going to christen it Bushmills. Bushmills, Charlie thought, would be a fine name for a donkey, giving his stable a neat geographical balance with donkeys and distilleries placed at Cork and Dublin and one in Bushmills in the north.

  ‘You can’t lose a bloody donkey on the top of a mountain,’ said Tim Philbin. ‘It’s not possible. It’s ridiculous. There’s nothing higher than the top of my boot between here and the water down below.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have hit it yesterday, Charlie,’ said Austin Ruddy, staring helplessly towards the mountains behind Croagh Patrick. ‘I’m tired of telling you. You’re not kind to the beast, never have been.’

  ‘Eats enough, so it does,’ said Charlie O’Malley. ‘They’ll eat me out of house and home, those damned donkeys, the wife says.’

  ‘What’s all this?’ A great roar came from inside the tent where the contractor, Mr Walter Heneghan of Heneghan and Sons, Builders and Surveyors of Louisburg, had his headquarters. A small wiry man with grey hair emerged, clutching in his hand a little book which contained, as all his workmen knew, what Mr Heneghan referred to as The Skedule. He had never been a master in the reading and writing department, Walter Heneghan, in spite of all the best efforts of the straps and the canes of the Christian Brothers, and the maintenance of this document, its daily updating with the latest developments, kept him occupied at a rickety card table in the tent and seemed to fill most of his days. He did not actually do much of the work himself, leaving his mind free for his more important duties and calculations. The rest of the men were convinced Walter spent most of the afternoon sleeping under his canvas roof while they laboured on in rain or sunshine but they never dared open the canvas flap to look inside.

  Heneghan’s immediate employer was a very difficult man, even for a priest. The Reverend Michael Macdonald, Administrator of Westport, was a nervous churchman. He worried. Every day he worried. Eight years after the event he still remembered as if it were yesterday the disaster that had struck him in his previous incarnation as parish priest in Ballinrobe. He had been responsible there for the erection and consecration of a new convent for the Order of the Immaculate Conception a mile or so outside the town. One of the nuns, a Sister Mary Magdalene, had been his particular friend in those times. Six months before the completion date he had organized the grand opening. The bishop was to come. A couple of local MPs had promised to attend. Nuns of every sort to be found in the west of Ireland were coming in their finest wimples to bless their sisters in their good fortune. In the months that followed he believed the assurances of his building foreman that all would be finished on time. All, as the Reverend Michael Macdonald remembered far too clearly, even now, was not going to be finished on time. Only three days before the ceremony did he discover that the dignitaries would be opening a building where the cells had no walls, the kitchen had no cooking facilities and the chapel had no windows. Everything had to be cancelled, the invitations withdrawn, Galway’s and Mayo’s nuns instructed to stay in their places. The bishop had shouted at him. The Mayo News ran the story for three editions in a row, coming as close as Irish journalists dared in those days to criticizing the clergy. Every night for the next two years he had included in his prayers a plea to his God that never, never again should he be called upon to supervise the construction of a building, secular or religious. He would not even contemplate the erection of a badly needed shed in the garden of the priest’s house. And now he was lumbered with it all again. God had singled him out for punishment once more. His sins were not numerous, he knew, but the penance for them was huge. A late convent was one thing. A late chapel on the summit of Ireland’s Holy Mountain would be far far worse. He might be expelled from the priesthood in disgrace, or sent on the worst punishment any Irish bishop could deliver, a life sentence to a parish in the slums of Dublin which had ruined many a better man than he.

  This was the origin of The Skedule. Once a week Father Macdonald would pore over it w
ith Heneghan, checking every entry and every planned completion date of every section of the work. Heneghan, whatever his other qualities, was a deeply religious man – his faith, he was sure, had won him the contract, after all – and he too feared for the late completion. The wrath of the priests would be as nothing compared with the wrath of God. And at that moment Walter knew that they were two weeks behind Skedule. With luck, they could make it up, but a spell of bad weather could prove fatal. He too joined the search for Jameson.

  ‘Bloody donkey gone? With all that glass still strapped to its side? You stupid buggers, why didn’t you unload it all? God in heaven, what fools am I given to carry out His wishes! Fools!’

  He strode to the other side of the half-finished building and peered down at the waters of Clew Bay beneath. ‘Jameson!’ he roared. ‘In the name of St Patrick, come back here at once, you daft animal!’

  Jameson did not choose to reply.

  ‘Jameson! In the name of St Patrick and all the saints of Ireland, come back here at once!’ Charlie O’Malley sent his message to the other side of the Holy Mountain. Still there was neither answer nor sighting of the donkey.

  ‘Jameson! In the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Patrick and all the saints of Ireland, shift your bloody arse up here!’ Not surprisingly, Tim Philbin’s message found no answer either. Walter Heneghan thought of gathering his little band together and leading them in prayer to St Anthony of Padua, Hammer of Heretics and patron saint of all things lost, but he thought it might work better if he said it to himself when he was safely back in the tent.