Death on the Holy Mountain (5 page)

‘Are you not jumping to conclusions, Mr Connolly? You had two other paintings stolen, I believe, one Titian and one Rembrandt. Taken all together, those pictures could fetch tens of
thousands of pounds. It’s perfectly possible that this is the work of a gang of art thieves who are even now arranging the dispatch of the paintings to New York. It would help enormously if
you and your family could manage to write out descriptions of all the paintings. It would help to recover them.’

Connolly was shouting now. ‘You just don’t understand! You haven’t lived here for years! You’re not even Irish any more! We made it our business to find out about you,
Powerscourt, betraying your past and your people to swan about in London playing at being a detective! You’ve no idea what it’s been like to live here these last thirty years, the Land
War, the boycotting, the plan of campaign, the betrayal of a Protestant people by a Protestant government in London trying to force us to sell our land to appease the Catholics. Well, we have lived
through all that here in this house. I do not believe that a gang of art thieves broke into my home to steal our pictures. I just don’t believe it. This is the final act, Lord Powerscourt.
Who is there to defend us any more? Politicians? The Irish Members of Parliament want Home Rule for Ireland, that means Catholic rule with no room for Protestants. To a man, they’re all
Papists, Rome rulers all, waiting and waiting for their day to dawn. There’s a hunger for land out there, Powerscourt, our land. Sometimes on market days in the town square, you can almost
smell it.’

Powerscourt was suddenly struck by a thought that had absolutely no relevance to the conversation. He was not going to be asked to stay. He was certain of it. There had been no mention of green
bedrooms or the most comfortable room in the attic. In landlord Ireland, famed for its hospitality and its generosity, this was unthinkable. He knew the stories, of houses where over a hundred
guests would stay for weeks at a time, head after head of prime cattle slaughtered to fill the table. One apocryphal story concerned an assistant surveyor who had come to do some work on the house
and stayed for a year and a half. After a week the family forgot his name and felt it rude to inquire again. Short of a slap in the face, a refusal to invite a visitor to stay for the night was one
of the biggest insults you could offer.

‘I’m sure you’re being too pessimistic, Mr Connolly,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I thought things had been relatively peaceful here over the last few years. But tell me
this, did you get a letter from the thieves? Demands of some sort? Blackmail perhaps?’

‘I have not,’ said Connolly and something in his downward look told Powerscourt the man was lying. ‘You talk of peaceful times over here. Things are never what they seem in
Ireland, never,’ said Connolly darkly. ‘And now, if you will forgive me, I have work to do. We can’t all spend our time swanning round other people’s houses asking damn fool
questions. My coachman will take you into the town. I booked a room for you in the Kincarrig Arms. It is a perfectly respectable hotel. I do not wish to have you staying in my house. Good
afternoon.’

With that Peter Connolly ushered Powerscourt to the door and vanished into another part of the house.

The Connolly house had a little river running past its front door. Butler’s Court, the Butler residence a few miles south of Athlone, stood a couple of hundred feet
above Ireland’s greatest river, the Shannon. Visitors to the house could arrive by road or water. In summer the river meandered gently south towards the sea; in spring and autumn when the
rains were heavy it flooded slightly. In winter it looked sullen, dark and forbidding, its waters swirling their way into black eddies as it rumbled down to Limerick and the Atlantic Ocean.

Powerscourt’s first thought as he looked at the house was that he had seen it before. He was in some great square in Italy, in Siena or Perugia perhaps, looking at the great town house of
some local aristocrat. Dimly, he remembered that the principal architect of Butler’s Court was Italian. He felt relieved that the front of the house appeared to be unchanged. So many Irish
houses had been altered, defaced in his view, in the previous century by a fad for neo-Gothic that included turrets and battlements and fake towers. Maybe it was because the leading architects of
the day preferred this style of building. Maybe it was keeping up with your neighbours. Powerscourt had the rather fanciful notion that somewhere in the back of their minds these Irish patricians
felt threatened by the world around them. The peaceful Regency fronts, all proportion and good taste, would not be enough to defend them from the hostile forces that surrounded them. So they felt
safer with their walkways and their turrets. Nobody had taken the style so far back in history as to have a moat and a drawbridge, but Powerscourt thought these would have sold well.

Butler’s Court’s central block was built of grey stone with thirteen bays along the front. Two curved colonnades of golden Ardbroccan stone linked the main building to two flanking
pavilions which contained the kitchen and the stables. There was no pillared porch to mark the front door of the house. The front door sat unobtrusively in its place as if it were just another
window. A set of steps led down to the gravel drive. It should look heavy, massive, Powerscourt thought as he approached the front door, but it didn’t. Butler’s Court looked light and
graceful.

In the Connolly house he had only met the diminutive butler and the disagreeable Mr Connolly. Here it was rather different. A Butler’s Court footman, a tall and imposing fellow called
Hardy with military bearing, had scarcely opened the door to him when a balding middle-aged gentleman shot forwards from one of the many doors to shake him firmly by the hand.

‘Lord Powerscourt, welcome to Butler’s Court! Delighted to meet you! I am Richard Butler and this is my house.’ Powerscourt was just about to reply when he heard the singing.
The front hall had a chequered black and white marble floor and a mighty staircase of cantilevered Portland stone. The sound was coming from a gallery on the first floor.

The children were coming into the gallery, holding hands, boys and girls together. There were so many that Powerscourt wondered if he had wandered into a school.

‘They’re not all mine,’ whispered Richard Butler as the leading couple in this strange procession reached the top of the stairs and began the descent into the
hall below past one of the few remaining portraits of an early Butler and elaborate rococo stuccowork on the wall.

Powerscourt wasn’t sure he would teach his children this song. It referred to the defeat of the rebels in the rising of 1798. Croppies were called croppies because they wore their hair cut
short in the style made popular by the French Revolution. Croppies, with a few exceptions, would have been Catholic. It was, in effect, a cry of triumph, particularly popular with the Orange Lodges
and the Protestant hardliners in the north of Ireland.

The front rank were now passing the chimney piece of black Kilkenny marble and heading straight for the front door, looking neither to the right nor to the left of them. Richard Butler was
smiling affectionately at them all as they passed. At last the supply of singers seemed to have dried up. Then Powerscourt saw who was in charge. Bringing up the rear was a tall, almost emaciated
young man in a black suit that had seen better days.

The tall thin young man with the fair hair and the soft blue eyes saluted Powerscourt and Richard Butler gravely as he passed into the garden to join his charges.

‘James, James Cuffe is the young man’s name,’ said Richard Butler. ‘He’s the eighth son of a family nearby. Poor woman always wanted a daughter. She ended up with a
cricket team of boys and a twelfth man. A dozen boys! Can you imagine it! James comes here to teach some of the younger children like the ones in the garden. We’ve got cousins’ and
neighbours’ children as well. He’s wonderful with them. Never seems to raise his voice at all. Don’t know how he does it. Wife believes the small children think he’s a giant
and will cast wicked spells on them if they misbehave.’

Butler began to steer Powerscourt towards a pair of double doors. The noise inside seemed to have stopped. ‘Forgive me, Powerscourt, let’s get things sorted. We’ve put you in
the green bedroom on the first floor. There’s a good view of the river and the housemaids are all convinced it’s haunted by a man with his head in his hand. Don’t believe a word
of it myself. No work for you today. There are three people who knew the lost pictures well, myself, Hardy the senior footman and the parlour maid Mary who dusted the frames. We’re all going
to assemble for you at ten o’clock in the morning. Now then,’ he showed Powerscourt into the Green Drawing Room, so called because the walls were lined with green silk, ‘the young
people have all gone off for a walk, so there’s just the three of us for tea.’

Sylvia Butler looked about forty and still retained most of the beauty that must have dazzled her husband into marriage all those years ago. She captured Powerscourt’s heart with a
charming smile as she indicated he was to sit beside her.

‘How was our cousin Brandon when you saw him?’ she inquired sweetly. ‘Was he afflicted with that gout at the time?’

‘Alas, Mrs Butler, it was bad with him, very bad. I think he suffers a great deal.’

‘The doctors tell him he must stop drinking. That would be the best cure,’ Mrs Butler said, ‘but I think he would find it difficult. Tell me, did he have to take any of those
special pills of his, the ones he calls Davy Jones’s Lockers?’

A footman entered with a tray of tea, laden with cakes and scones and barm brack, a fruity sort of cake to be consumed with butter as if it were toast, very popular in Ireland.

‘The last time we saw cousin Brandon,’ Mrs Butler went on as the footman disappeared out of the door, ‘he had to take one of these pills. After a quarter of an hour he
collapsed on a sofa and slept for five hours.’

‘He took one just before I departed,’ said Powerscourt as Mrs Butler began to pour the tea, ‘but he was still compos mentis as I left the house. I think he must have had a
minute or two to go. He was still swearing at the doctors as I went down the stairs.’

‘Scone, Lord Powerscourt? Barm brack?’

Powerscourt suddenly wondered how many teas were served in an afternoon in a grand house like Butler’s Court. He put the question to Mrs Butler.

‘Three,’ she said. ‘Otherwise the whole thing gets out of hand. We have one for the children, one for the servants and one for us.’

‘You must be remembering the stories,’ said her husband with a smile. ‘There’s a family near here where the servants valued the distinctions in status between themselves
so much that they ended up serving lots of different teas every day. On most afternoons tea would be served in ten different places. The Lord and Lady and their guests had it in the drawing room.
The elder children and their governess had it in the schoolroom: the younger children and their nannies and the nursery maids had it in the nursery. The upper servants, together with the visiting
ladies’ maids, had it in the housekeeper’s room. The footmen had it in the servants’ hall. The housemaids had it in the housemaids’ sitting room, the kitchen maids had it in
the kitchen and the charwomen had it in the stillroom. The laundry maids had it in the laundry and the grooms took it in the harness room. Once a week a riding master came from Dublin to give the
children a lesson and the number of places where tea was served went up to eleven; for while he was too grand to have tea with the servants or the grooms, he was not grand enough to have it with
the gentry in the drawing room, so he was given a tray on his own.’

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.