Death on the Holy Mountain (12 page)

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 teams 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.

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

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 with 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.

The men were sullen for the rest of the day. Charlie O’Malley would go on sad little missions a couple of hundred yards at a time looking for Jameson and calling out promises of extra
carrots, or a fine cauliflower for the donkey was strangely fond of cauliflower. Only at the end of the day, when they were taking a well-earned rest in Campbell’s public house at the foot of
Croagh Patrick, did Walter Heneghan realize that his prayer under canvas to St Anthony, Hammer of Heretics, had been answered. The landlord took him to one side.

‘Have any of youse lost a donkey?’ asked the landlord.

‘A donkey?’ said Heneghan, as if he had just heard the word for the first time. ‘We bloody well have lost a donkey.’

‘Well, it’s here,’ said the landlord. ‘It’s out the back, so it is.’

‘Thank God for that,’ said Walter, shaking the man firmly by the hand. ‘What’ll you have? A donkey found is worth a drink any day in my book. But tell me this. Did the
beast have any glass with it?’

‘Glass?’ said the landlord. ‘What sort of glass, for God’s sake? Beer glass, whiskey glass, that kind of thing? Does the animal drink like a human?’

‘No, no,’ said Heneghan. ‘Glass for building, windows, that sort of stuff.’

‘That sort of glass?’ replied the landlord innocently. ‘What would a bloody donkey want with window glass, for Christ’s sake?’

‘It’s for the chapel,’ said Heneghan sadly, ‘the chapel at the top of the mountain.’

‘Glass with the donkey, is it now?’ said the landlord. He turned to the crowd in his bar, most of whom looked as though they had spent the entire afternoon, if not the entire week,
on the premises, ‘We haven’t seen any glass with that donkey, boys, have we?’

‘No no, no glass. Donkey yes, glass no,’ they chorused.

As he trudged back up to his tent, clutching half a dozen beer bottles, Walter Heneghan added a spiritual question to the long list of temporal ones he had to ask Father Macdonald. Why was it
that St Anthony of Padua was so good with donkeys and so bloody useless with glass?

Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald and William Moore were on their way from Butler’s Court to Moore Castle to inspect the site of the vanished paintings. Moore Castle,
its owner proudly informed Powerscourt and Fitzgerald as they approached its entrance, had been in his family since the days of Cromwell. The place, Powerscourt realized as the carriage drew to a
halt at the Castle’s lower section, had had many builders over the years. Somewhere there must be a bit of Georgian, but it was in Victorian times that every single generation seemed to have
extended, rebuilt, knocked down or restructured. Architects must have regarded the place as a treasure trove, Kubla Khan miraculously translated to County Roscommon.