Death on the Holy Mountain (21 page)

‘My God, it’s one of Butler’s stolen paintings.’

‘It’s been recovered, thank the Lord.’

‘One of the pictures, it’s come back.’

One or two people cast admiring glances at Powerscourt as if he were responsible for the miracle but he was apprehensive, very apprehensive.

‘Let’s have a knife and a pair of scissors, by God,’ said Butler, advancing towards his property.

Powerscourt had shoved his way through the crowd to stand at his side.

‘Don’t open it now, Butler, for heaven’s sake. Not in front of all these people.’

‘Damn it,’ said Butler, ‘it’s my house, it’s my picture. I’ll open it whenever I bloody well like.’

‘Don’t you see,’ Powerscourt pleaded, ‘there’s going to be some trick or other, maybe some horrible message contained in the thing. Please don’t open it now.
Do it later. Somewhere quieter.’

Everybody in the room was staring at the parcel left at the bottom of the drive. The scissors and knife had appeared. Powerscourt made one last plea.

‘Please do it later, I beg you, when all the visitors have gone. You can open it then.’

‘I’m going to open it now, damn your eyes,’ said Richard Butler, beginning to hack at the brown paper and string. When it was finally clear, he placed it on a chair for
everybody to see before he turned and had a look at the contents.

In one sense this certainly was one of the stolen paintings. It was the one called
The Master of the Hunt
. There was Butler’s Court, looking elegant as ever. There were the riders
in their scarlet coats and the horses ready to ride off. There in the background were the hounds. But the faces were different. Richard Butler’s had been replaced with a passable likeness of
Pronsias Mulcahy, proprietor of Mulcahy and Sons, Grocery and Bar. The rider to his left now had the disagreeable features of Father O’Donovan Brady. Two of the Delaneys of the
solicitors’ firm of Delaney, Delaney and Delaney, down in the town square, were sitting happily on horseback to one side of Pronsias Mulcahy, formerly Richard Butler. Diarmuid McSwiggin of
MacSwiggin’s Hotel and Bar was there, and Horkan the man who sold agricultural machinery and offered drink in his bar. The cast of the original painting had been replaced with the leading
citizens of Butler’s Cross. The Town had replaced the Big House. ‘I’m sure Papa was in the middle of that picture,’ said a small Butler, his voice breaking the shocked
silence that filled the room, ‘but he’s changed into that nice Mr Mulcahy who sells you sweets down in the square.’

‘My God,’ said Richard Butler and fled the room. Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald managed to remove the painting before anybody could stop them. Sylvia Butler, assisted by Lady
Lucy, ushered her guests down the stairs and out the front door. By the time they had all gone Richard Butler had reappeared in his Long Gallery. He looked as if he had been weeping.

‘My God, Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘you were right and I was wrong about the painting. Forgive me. But what, in heaven’s name, does it mean?’

‘Mean?’ said Powerscourt. ‘It’s a message. Your time is up. You’re not wanted. Others are going to replace you.’

‘I think it means something else too, Mr Butler,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald.

‘And what might that be?’

‘It’s this,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘It’s the changing of the guard. Welcome to the new Ireland.’

I do most earnestly beseech you, as Irishmen, as citizens, as husbands, as fathers, by everything most dear to you, to consider the sacred obligation that you are called upon to
discharge, to emancipate your country from a foreign yoke, and to restore to liberty yourselves and your children; look to your own resources, look to those of your friends, look to those of your
enemies; remember that you must instantly decide; remember that you have no alternative between liberty and independence, or slavery and submission.

Theobald Wolfe Tone

Lord Francis Powerscourt took himself for a walk by the Shannon the next morning. A mist was rising slowly from the waters. He was thinking about the returned painting and the
havoc it had caused in Butler’s Court. For Richard Butler, he felt, it must have been like a lash from a whip across his face, an assault this time not upon the faces of his ancestors but on
himself and his family, and all the current residents of the Big House. There was, he thought, one small consolation. The painting left at the bottom of the drive was a copy, he was sure of it. He
had checked it again early that morning. Where had it been painted? The unknown artist must have taken a good look at Messrs Mulcahy, Horkan, MacSwiggin and the rest of them. Had he been hidden
away in the store rooms of the grocery or some unused part of Father O’Donovan Brady’s disagreeable residence? Nobody, he was sure, nobody who was in on the secret would tell him a
thing. Down there in the square where they sold sweets to the Butler children, that was now enemy territory. Then another terrible thought struck him. If there was one copy there could be another.
Who would be the new faces next time? Would
The Master of the Hunt
effect a second coming into Butler’s Court, adorned with the faces of Theobald Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmett and
Charles Stewart Parnell and the martyred heroes of the nation’s past? Even worse perhaps, would they replace the Master and his companions with the servants, the steward and the footmen now
riding off to hounds, the cook and the parlour maids bringing up the rear? God in heaven.

He met Lady Lucy on his way back.

‘Francis,’ she said, smiling rather feebly at him, ‘is there nothing we can do for these poor people? It’s like a funeral in there only the corpse is still in the
building. I’ve seldom seen people look so miserable. The only consolation is the children, they think the whole thing is the most enormous joke. They’ve a theory the other pictures will
come back soon with famous cricketers in them or stars from the stage and the music hall.’

‘I’ll have to go and talk to Richard Butler about it all,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Maybe he’ll show me the original blackmail letter now, though I rather doubt it. Have
you seen him this morning, Lucy? How is he bearing up?’

‘I saw him a few minutes ago. He was picking at his breakfast as if the sausages were poisoned and the tomatoes about to explode. Oh, I nearly forgot, Francis, there’s a letter for
you, forwarded from London. I don’t know if it’s important or not.’

‘“Dear Lord Powerscourt,”’ her husband read aloud, ‘“Thank you for sending me the details of the stolen paintings. I am writing to inform you of the results
of our fishing expedition in the American art market with the New York firm of Goldman and Rabinowitz. You will recall that they offered eight Irish ancestor portraits for sale, four full-length
and four half. So far, they have received sixteen queries about the works, all of them serious, none of them over-concerned about price. For the time being the dealers are fobbing off their
potential clients with excuses about complications with customs, that sort of thing. But Goldman’s have asked me to secure a dozen or more of these pictures with all possible speed in case
their clients lose interest. I have therefore placed advertisements in a number of Irish newspapers offering good prices for such material. Mr Farrell, of Farrell’s Gallery, is also looking
for such portraits for me. Maybe, Lord Powerscourt, we have discovered a new niche in the art market! I trust the Irish air is refreshing, Yours etc, Michael Hudson.”’

‘What does that mean, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘I don’t think it takes us much further forward apart from finding this market for Irish ancestors in the United States. But if our thieves reply to the next round of advertisements
with some of these stolen paintings, we’ll be home and dry. We’d just have to wait until somebody turned up with them under their arm, as it were, and then we could all go
home.’

Powerscourt found Richard Butler half an hour later sitting in his study, the door closed, staring at the horses on his walls, a bottle of Bushmills and a crystal glass
sitting on the little table to the side of his desk.

‘Powerscourt,’ he said, and his voice was the voice of a beaten man, ‘do you have any comfort for us all this morning?’

‘Well,’ Powerscourt replied, trying to sound more hopeful than he felt, ‘perhaps you’d be able to show me that letter you had from the thieves now, the blackmail
letter.’

Butler shook his head. ‘Can’t do that,’ he said, the words slurring slightly, ‘especially now, can’t do it. Swore an oath, you see. To my father. Promised to keep
all we had.’

‘Let me try again in a different way then. Was there a deadline in the letter, a date by which you had to do whatever it is you’re meant to do? I think there must have been a
deadline.’

Butler nodded and poured himself a Johnny Fitzgerald sized slug of his whiskey. ‘Yes, there was, bloody deadline.’

‘Two more things then, if I may,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Whatever it was that they asked you to do, have you done it?’

Butler shook his head once more. ‘Haven’t done it. Couldn’t do it. Told you. Impossible.’

‘My other question then, has the deadline passed?’

‘No, it hasn’t,’ said Butler, ‘not yet.’

‘But it’s close now?’

‘Very close.’

‘How close is very close, Butler?’

‘Can’t tell you that either. Not safe.’

‘What do you mean, not safe? Have they threatened violence? Have they said they’ll take away some people rather than some pictures?’

‘Can’t say.’

‘Can’t say, won’t say. Damn it, man, how am I supposed to find out what’s going on if I don’t know most of it?’

‘Sorry,’ said Butler, ‘can’t say.’

‘Let me tell you a couple of things which I can say at any rate. That picture that came yesterday is not the one that was taken all those weeks ago. It’s a copy. And, if you think
about it, the thieves have got very cocky. I think they must have brought the artist into the town to look at the people and paint their faces unless Pronsias Mulcahy or one of the Delaneys is a
dab hand with the paintbrush. He may have spent a couple of days here, staying perhaps in the best room in MacSwiggin’s Hotel and drinking in his bar with the locals. Word may leak out in the
next few days. You know, Butler, how everybody in these Big Houses thinks the servants listen in to everything they say? Well, I think the boot’s on the other foot now. We must all listen in
to whatever they’re saying whenever we can, without being too obvious about it. You never know what we might find out.’

‘I didn’t sleep last night, Powerscourt,’ said Butler, ‘didn’t sleep at all. Tell me, do you think that because Mulcahy and all those people appear in the painting,
that means they are the ones behind it all?’

‘The same thought occurred to me,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘but I don’t think it does mean that. They may know everything that has gone on, some of those people down in the
town, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they planned the whole thing.’

‘I suppose I’d better try to cheer everybody up,’ said Butler, locking his bottle of Bushmills away in a cupboard. ‘Can’t go hiding behind the whiskey bottle when
times are hard. What would the ancestors have said about such behaviour?’

‘That’s the spirit,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Tell me, how many of those great battles in Ireland’s past did you ancestors actually fight in?’

‘All of them,’ said Richard Butler, ‘every single one that mattered. God save Ireland.’

Only one person in Butler’s Court was grateful for the furore over the return of
The Master of the Hunt
. Johnpeter Kilross had discovered an empty cottage in a
clearing in the woods about a mile from the main buildings. There was, he saw as he peered through the windows, a little sitting room, a kitchen, a tiny bathroom and a bedroom. The bedroom, oddly
enough, was the only place that appeared to have clean windows. It was known as the Head Gardener’s Cottage and the Head Gardener had indeed lived there until he secured a position close to
Dublin to be near his sick mother. The place had been empty ever since, as the new Head Gardener already had a tiny house of his own near the town. Nothing seemed to have been moved. Johnpeter had
infiltrated his way with a stable lad into the room at the back of the scullery where all the keys were kept and had spotted two stout specimens hanging on a hook labelled Head Gardener’s
Cottage. Under normal circumstances it was virtually impossible to get into this room alone and unspotted. Kitchen maids were forever bringing things in or taking things out to the scullery. But
the curiosity aroused by
The Master of the Hunt
was so great that every single servant shot out into the hall or pretended to be busy in the gallery above on the first floor. Johnpeter had
nipped down the back stairs and removed one of the keys. Now he and Alice would have a place where they could go in the afternoons. Or the mornings come to that. Johnpeter was certain he would be
able to persuade her to join him there.

Powerscourt drove himself into Athlone early that afternoon. He had sent a cable to Inspector Harkness in Ormonde House requesting a meeting at three fifteen, the hour when
the Westport–Dublin express was due to stop at Athlone. Harkness came striding down the platform, the briefcase with the enormous lock clutched firmly in his left hand.