Death on the Holy Mountain (7 page)

Words were dangerous in Ireland. Catholic. Protestant. Mass. The Virgin Mary. Fenian. Informer. All had been dangerous in their time. Some still were. Now new words were coming, boycott already
officially entered in the dictionaries. Captain Charles Boycott was a land agent in the west of Ireland who refused to grant a reduction in rents to his tenants in 1880 after two years of bad
harvests. Powerscourt strolled over to one of the bookshelves and pulled out a biography of the Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell which included his description of what boycott meant
at a huge meeting in Ennis in County Clare. This was what was to happen to a landlord who refused to reduce rents or a man who took over the farm of an evicted tenant: ‘You must show what you
think of him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him on the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop counter . . . even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely
alone, by putting him into a sort of moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation of the crime he has
committed.’ Many people in Ireland other than Boycott were boycotted. Powerscourt’s father had told him of Ascendancy families who had refused to reduce their rents. Unable to bear the
psychological strain of the ordeal, they had fled their houses and their lands, conceding victory to the foe. They settled instead in quiet English towns like Cheltenham or Tunbridge Wells where
the respectability of the suburbs could atone for the eternal silences of the Irish shopkeepers and the defection of their own servants. But, Powerscourt thought as he returned the book to its
place, it was the abstract words that were the most dangerous. The words that represented ideas that could send men to deaths as it had those Mayo peasants in the 1798 rebellion. He thought of
another category of words, designed to describe the proper functions of society as if it were a well-made watch or clock. Political economy. Laissez-faire. People being forced to stand on their own
two feet. Words written by people in great libraries like this one perhaps, remote from reality, that encouraged the British Government in the 1840s to believe that it was wrong to interfere with
the workings of the market, that the starvation in Ireland was an act of God and the Irish needed a lesson to tell them how to farm their land properly. One million Irish dead in the famine
testified to the wisdom of those words and the political economists who wrote them and gave that advice. Another million or more fled to America in the next generation. More words on a page, the
flies’ feet of an alphabet that could send men and women to mass graves, unmarked and unmourned, thrown into fields by the hundred and left to rot in the Irish earth that had failed them.

There was the sound of loud complaint coming from the garden. Another Thomas Butler, this one only seven years old, had apparently fallen into the water and was being brought back to the house
for a change of clothing. This he regarded as a monstrous injustice, depriving him not just of the company of his brothers and sisters, but of the innumerable fish of unimaginable size he would
have caught during his time of banishment. Powerscourt smiled as the argument moved past his windows and into the great hall. He looked round the library once more, filled with words, millions of
them. The most dangerous word in Ireland, he decided, inspecting critically a section devoted to theological works, was God. God or perhaps Nation. On balance, he thought, God had it.

Mrs Alice Bracken was lying on her back on the grass circle in the middle of Butler Island in the centre of the River Shannon where the Butler family had repaired for lunch. It
was a beautiful day. The sun was beating down on Alice’s face though she thought she would only have to move a couple of feet to her left to be in the shade. A young cousin of the Butlers,
currently staying at Butler’s Court, John Peter Kilross was lying on the ground at right angles to Alice and dropping strawberries into her mouth very slowly. They were cool and fresh as she
bit into them. The girl rather liked receiving her fruit in this fashion, though she thought it would be more difficult with the larger specimens like the melons or pineapples currently ripening in
the great glasshouses at the back of the house.

Alice Bracken had been born Alice Harvey twenty-three years before, third of five daughters of Mr and Mrs Warwick Harvey who owned an estate at
Ballindeary near Castlebar in County Mayo. Many people thought all Irish patricians lived in enormous mansions like Butler’s Court, with vast estates, innumerable horses and virtually
uncountable wealth. It was not always thus. Often in his cups Mr Harvey would mutter to his children about the Encumbered Estates Court and how close they were to being delivered into it. When she
was very young Alice had thought an Encumbered Estates Court was just another big house with a demesne like Florence Court in County Fermanagh where her cousins lived. Only later did the terrible
truth dawn on her as her elder sisters told her what it really meant. It was, she reflected ruefully at the time, rather like learning the truth about Father Christmas, only worse. The Encumbered
Estates Court was where the law sent people who were bankrupt, who owed so much money they could not pay their debts. They could languish for years in these insalubrious surroundings while the
lawyers collected their fees and decided what do with the land and the house. Warwick Harvey’s father and grandfather had both borrowed large amounts of money to extend their house. Their
grandson and son had to pay the interest and the bills. When the harvest was bad, the diet in Ballindeary Park was little better than that of their poorest tenants. When they were invited to the
local hunt balls only one girl was able to go at a time as there was only one ball gown fit to be seen in public and it had to be altered to fit one of five different shapes every time it left the
house. Most of the girls’ days after they reached maturity were spent wondering if they could ever escape, if their lives were to be spent in something worse than genteel poverty, eking out
the tea leaves for another afternoon, water the only drink in the house apart from the cheap whiskey which her father consumed to ease his sorrows. Even then he diluted it so heavily that the taste
of the whiskey was like a noise heard far away, remote and distant as though a visitor was tiptoeing away from your house in the dark.

In these circumstances it was not surprising that the thoughts of the girls should concentrate on young men. Maybe middle-aged men. Even older men if they had an income and a roof to put above
their wife’s head. Any visitor who came to see their father, surveyor, bailiff, parson, was inspected in minute detail by ten voracious eyes. Young curates, when they could be found, were
often a source of fevered speculation, but their mother had to remind the girls that young curates in the parish of Ballindeary, soon to be united with the neighbouring parish to form the larger
unit of Ballindeary and Carryduff, were not likely to be rich men. One of the curates appeared to be so poor that he could not even afford a horse and walked everywhere. Officers provided the most
regular source of fantasy and imaginary escape. The neighbouring town of Castlebar was a garrison town, regularly furnished with English soldiers. The officers, almost all English with a sprinkling
from Scotland, were forever looking for excuses to dance with the local young ladies, to flirt with them, to pass the time in whatever romantic entanglements they could manage. Very occasionally
one of the officers would overstep the mark, or one of the girls would forget herself, and the young man would be transferred so fast that the girl’s family might never find where he had
gone, the girl herself sent off to Dublin to stay with her aunt for a while. Into this slightly desperate world of longing, where both parties longed for completely different things, came a tall,
very handsome young officer called Captain Rufus Bracken with soft brown eyes and perfectly twirled moustaches. It was the moustaches rather than the face that most people remembered, should they
chance to think about the Captain in his absence. He was the fifth son of a small landholder in Derbyshire, and though he talked loud and often to the young ladies about his vast estates in
England, he was entirely dependent on his family for of fortune he had none at all.

One fateful Saturday nearly three years before it had been Alice’s turn to wear the ball dress and she had been swept off her feet by Captain Rufus Bracken, so tall and slim, so handsome
in his uniform, so distinguished with his moustaches, so obviously rich with his estates in Derbyshire. Six weeks later they were married after a whirlwind romance. The cynics or the realists
hinted that Alice must have been pregnant. It was widely known that his commanding officer at the time, unlike his predecessors or his successors, was a convinced puritan who did not approve of
conniving at the sudden dispatch of young Englishmen about to become fathers off to far distant shores. In his book they had to stay and do their duty. And, in fact, the cynics were wrong. Alice
was not pregnant. She was, however, not entirely pleased with her first glimpse of the vast estates in Derbyshire. The house, she declared, was little better than a fishing lodge in Ireland; the
income, she realized all too soon, was non-existent. They returned to Ireland where they were eventually given a small house to live in and a modest allowance by her mother’s second cousin,
Richard Butler of Butler’s Court.

The wooing, the pursuit, the chase had interested Captain Bracken greatly. The reality of marriage did not. He had no interests apart from masculine pursuits. It was perfectly fine to woo a girl
with tales of the past heroism of his regiment. As the marriage lengthened from weeks into months, the stories began to pall. On his time away from military duties at Butler’s Court he found
it hard to relate to the Butlers with their endless talk of horses he hadn’t seen or hunts he hadn’t attended. After one terrible row about money Captain Bracken had applied, in his
fury, to be posted abroad. He had been sent to India, to the North-West Frontier, where his relations with the Pathan tribesmen were no more satisfactory than they had been with the Anglo-Irish
gentry. The Captain was an indifferent correspondent, his letters sometimes taking months to arrive and containing little but inane gossip about army wives and the tiresome intrigues at The Club.
Alice did not mourn his passing, except in one respect. She missed him physically. Of the loss of his conversation she was not concerned. Sometimes she wished he would never come home and would
leave her to a lifetime of flirting with Ireland’s young men. Sometimes she even wished he was dead so she could marry again. Then she would reproach herself greatly and tell herself that she
was a wicked person who deserved no portion of God’s grace in this world or the next.

And so it was that she came to be lying on the ground with John Peter Kilross dropping strawberries into her mouth as she toasted herself in the sunshine. Had she thought about it – but
Alice was not a great one for thought – she might have realized that this Johnpeter, the two Christian names usually run together for reasons nobody could now remember, was remarkably similar
to the departed Captain Bracken of the moustaches. Only it was the voice with the young man Kilross, a voice so soft and charming that the young ladies would flock round him to hear the latest
poetry or listen to him singing. Like the absent husband, Johnpeter was the fifth son of a moderate estate in County Kildare and, like Alice, a cousin of Richard Butler on his mother’s side.
And while the Irish peasants divided their holdings among their children so they became smaller and smaller over time, the Anglo-Irish landlords always passed the estate on intact to the eldest son
in the hope that it would grow larger and larger. So Johnpeter had few possessions apart from a pair of fine hunters and a set of silver goblets left him by his grandmother.

‘I wish I could lie here for ever,’ said Alice languidly, as the strawberries continued to drop into her mouth.

‘Don’t worry,’ replied the young man, and his voice was like honey in the girl’s ears, ‘there are still plenty left.’

Some fifty feet away, Lord Francis Powerscourt was sitting opposite Mrs Butler in the island’s summerhouse. Normally, when the grown-ups remained in their proper places on the mainland,
this summerhouse was an Indian camp out in the wilds of Wyoming, or a beleaguered British outpost in South Africa like Ladysmith or Mafeking, under siege to the terrible Boers. The children would
crouch in it, firing imaginary guns from its windows, assaulting it from the roof, a position perilously reached by jumping some six feet from a nearby tree. Today the grown-ups had taken it over
and the children played elsewhere, recreating great naval battles with a couple of canoes or disappearing completely up into the tops of the tall trees. It wasn’t even, the children said to
themselves, as if the grown-ups did anything sensible in the summerhouse when they took it over. They just talked to each other, apart from one memorable evening when Alice and Johnpeter had been
spotted kissing vigorously as the light faded when the Butler children were meant to be going to bed, but had decamped to the island instead for a midnight feast of buns and biscuits liberated from
the kitchen.

‘This must be a very worrying time for you, Mrs Butler,’ Powerscourt began, ‘with all these pictures disappearing.’

Sylvia Butler smiled. ‘I’ve been trying to find out,’ she said, ‘if there is any history of this sort of thing. I’ve often wondered if the ancient Celts had a
tradition of this kind of activity. You steal my pelt or my club or my best stone and there is some sort of curse placed on me. Like voodoo or whatever it’s called in the West Indies. The
stealing of the paintings is meant to be a mark of doom for the family. Sometimes,’ she laughed what Powerscourt thought was rather a false laugh as if she was trying to conceal her real
feelings, ‘I do feel cursed. I feel not wanted. I feel some people want us to go. But it never lasts very long.’