Death on the Holy Mountain (15 page)

Dennis Ormonde walked back down his gallery and closed the door. He went back to stand by the empty spaces once again. They seemed to reignite his anger.

‘I’m bloody well not going to take this lying down, I can tell you. They may be taking over the land, they may have all the bloody MPs in that useless bloody Parliament in
Westminster, but they can’t steal my property, they damned well can’t. I’ve talked to the local police, might as well have talked to the man who referees the hurling matches for
all the good that’ll do. I’ve wired to Dublin Castle and an inspector and his colleague from the Intelligence Department are on their way. I’ve sent word to the Grand Master of
the Orange Lodge and the man who runs the Royal Black Preceptory in Enniskillen asking for one hundred men, aged between twenty-five and forty and in good health, to come and report for orders.
They’re to bring their own weapons. One hundred stout Protestants to carry the battle to the foe. Croppies lie down. And I’ve asked the Apprentice Boys in Derry to stand by with another
hundred if we need them. I’m going to station guards on duty all night at every Big House with reasonable paintings in Mayo and the neighbouring counties. And, one last thing, I’m going
to post a notice in Westport and Castlebar tomorrow afternoon when the thing’s back from the printers, offering thirty pounds reward for information leading to the return of the paintings,
all of them, mine and yours, Butler, and Connolly’s and Moore’s, and the capture of the bastards who took them. They’ve always betrayed their own for money in the past, the
spineless scum, maybe they’ll do it again.’

The look of fury never left Ormonde’s face. If the thieves had known the response they were going to receive, Powerscourt thought, they might have stayed in bed. Posting a reward for such
an enormous sum was one thing, importing one hundred armed Protestants into a predominantly Catholic county was another, fraught with dire political consequences. Orthodox Catholic opinion would be
appalled and might contemplate reprisals. The Church itself might feel bound to take a stand. They could not watch from their pulpits and their altars while armed Protestant gangs patrolled the
countryside and threatened their parishioners. As for less orthodox Catholic opinion, Powerscourt was filled with foreboding. The men who came out in the night in these parts knew all about
houghing or mutilating their landlords’ cattle and lighting up the night sky as they torched the Big Houses. Not far from here, not all that long ago, they had invented the boycott at Lough
Mask House. Would it travel twenty or thirty miles and devastate the Ormondes of Ormonde House? If the angry man with the black hair and the black eyebrows went ahead with all his plans, it could
plunge the west of Ireland into a political crisis. Powerscourt felt he had to try to prevent his investigation ending up in a whirlpool of sectarian violence.

‘Lunch,’ announced Dennis Ormonde. ‘Can’t let the bastards put us off our food.’

The Ormonde House dining room was one of the most beautiful in Ireland but Powerscourt had little time to admire the plaster glories on the ceiling. Still muttering to himself, Ormonde began to
carve a great side of beef, the blood dripping down on to the serving dish. ‘Got to have it rare, this Mayo beef,’ he said. ‘Well cooked it tastes like roasted string.’ He
paused and looked around the table, heavy with ornate silver.

‘Horseradish!’ he shouted at the butler. ‘Where’s the bloody horseradish, for Christ’s sake? Twenty years I’ve been eating beef in this house with you serving
at the table and you still manage to forget the horseradish!’ He shook his head. ‘Wife’s fond of it too, oddly enough,’ he added, nodding at his guests and heaping enormous
portions of Mayo beef on to the three plates. ‘She’s even planted some of the stuff in the kitchen garden so we can make our own.’

Two footmen sidled in and began serving roast potatoes and peas. The butler who had fled the room at great speed reappeared with the offending horseradish. Ormonde took a giant’s helping.
‘Now bugger off,’ he shouted at the servants. ‘Come back in twenty minutes with the pudding. And if I catch any of you listening at the doors, you’re fired!’

‘Now then, Butler,’ he said between mouthfuls of meat, ‘what do you think of my plan? Shake the bastards up a bit, don’t you think, when they find a brace of Orangemen
waiting for them as they creep out of the shrubberies?’

‘Well,’ said Butler in a hesitant tone of voice and Powerscourt knew it was going to be a difficult afternoon, ‘it’s certainly bold. It has merit. But I just wonder if it
might not be a little inflammatory.’

‘Inflammatory? Inflammatory?’ Ormonde yelled, pausing to lower his fork. ‘Just tell me this, who’s doing the inflammatory round here? Is it me? Have I been inflaming
things? I have not. These bastards are the ones with the inflammatory, breaking into people’s houses and stealing their pictures. If that’s not inflammatory then I don’t know what
is!’

‘I have every sympathy with your plight, after all I am in the same position as yourself,’ said Butler, ‘but I do think we have certain responsibilities as landlords not to
start something which could lead to a great deal of violence.’ Powerscourt saw Butler was pressing himself back into his chair as hard as he could as if it were a defensive wall or
rampart.

‘Responsibilities as landlords?’ Ormonde was in full cry again, his face as red now as his beef, ‘What horseshit! And what about the responsibilities of those bastards out
there to keep the law? You keep talking as though I was about to commit some sort of crime. I am not. My Orangemen will be sworn in as militiamen or special constables or some other damned thing
the lawyers can invent. Those bastards out there broke the law when they broke into my house. They started it, not me. You’re being most unhelpful, Butler, you really are.’

‘I’ve got another idea,’ said Butler, ‘I thought of it in the train on the way over. Why don’t we just collect all the paintings from the Big Houses and lock them
away in a vault in Galway or even in Dublin? That way there won’t be any paintings for the thieves to steal.’

‘That,’ Ormonde snarled, ‘is just about the feeblest and most defeatist talk I’ve heard in months. Lock the paintings away? For one thing we’d never catch the
thieves that way. For another they’d just take to stealing something else. Why don’t we take ourselves away too while we’re at it and lock ourselves up in some vault in Tunbridge
Wells or Wells-next-the-sea? The Orangemen, one hundred Orangemen, that’s what we need.’

‘You seem to forget, Ormonde,’ said Richard Butler in the tone he might have adopted if he was talking to a small and rather stupid child, ‘the laws of action and counter
action that have always applied in this island. You mutilate my cattle or damage my land and I’ll have a Coercion Bill through Parliament inside three months and a whole lot of those
bastards, as you call them, are going to be locked up, many of them perfectly innocent people. At the end of it everything will blow over but the amount of hatred each side has for the other in the
deposit boxes of their collective memory will have increased yet again. So the next round will be even worse.’

‘So what do you suggest I do?’ Ormonde was shouting now. The butler and the footmen, Powerscourt thought, wouldn’t need to be listening at the door, they could probably hear
him if they were halfway up Croagh Patrick. ‘Ride into Westport with a fistful of Treasury notes in my pocket and hand them out to the local gombeens, asking them to be nice to us in future?
Have an Open Day in Ormonde House? Come on in, boys, take all you want, everything must go?’

‘That’s absurd, and you know it.’

‘And you,’ Ormonde turned to glower at Powerscourt, munching loudly on a roast potato, ‘the great investigator, what do you have to say for yourself? What do you think we
should do?’

Powerscourt paused for three or four seconds to add weight to his question.

‘Did you get a letter?’ he asked, in what he hoped was his mildest voice.

‘A letter? Of course I got a bloody letter!’ Ormonde pointed a finger at Butler. ‘He got a letter, Moore got a letter, Connolly got a letter, all God’s children with the
stolen paintings got letters. It’s in the rebel rule book, sending letters on occasions like this.’

Out of the corner of his eye Powerscourt noticed Richard Butler turning a bright shade of pink. Ormonde noticed it too. He stared at Butler, and suddenly he knew.

‘You bloody fool,’ he said, speaking very quietly now. ‘You had a letter too but you didn’t tell our investigating friend here anything about it, did you? And the same
goes, I’d bet a hundred pound, for Connolly and Moore. You were all in it together, fools all of you. How do you expect the man to find out anything when you don’t give him the facts?
God in heaven!’ In a gesture of the more worldly sort he leant forward and helped himself to two more slices of his beef. He took more of his horseradish too.

‘It seemed for the best,’ said Butler. ‘It was done for the best of motives, I promise you.’

‘And what, Ormonde,’ said Powerscourt, ‘did the letter say?’

‘Damned if I’m going to tell you that,’ said Ormonde indistinctly, his mouth full. ‘Blackmail, that’s all you need to know, bloody blackmail.’

‘Let me ask you just one more question about the letter, if I may. Did it contain any bloodcurdling threats about what would happen if you did tell anybody about it?’

‘Didn’t curdle me,’ said Ormonde, still chomping at his beef, ‘didn’t curdle my blood at all. Obviously curdled Butler and all the rest of them. Well curdled, they
are, all three of them. Ask yourself, Powerscourt, you’re obviously an intelligent man, the kind of thing a blackmailer would say if he wanted his bloody letter to stay a secret.’

And with that Ormonde gave his attention to his previously neglected peas. Richard Butler was looking at Powerscourt, his eyes pleading for support.

‘I really do feel, Ormonde,’ said Richard Butler, preparing, Powerscourt thought, to place his head in the lion’s jaws once more, ‘that this plan with the Orangemen is
unwise. Understandable, of course, but unwise. I would like to consult with my relation Brandon over in England, to see what his view is. He owns some of the land I farm, after all. They say he has
great influence in the House of Lords, you know.’

‘Your man Brandon,’ Ormonde had completed the rout of his peas now and was staring at Butler with thinly disguised contempt, as if he too was about to join the ranks of the bastards,
‘your man Brandon is scarcely able to get out of his seat. The gout’s got him. The chances of Brandon’s managing to get out of his house and park his arse alongside all the other
well-upholstered arses on the red benches in the House of Lords over there in Westminster are pretty remote, if you ask me. Nobody’s walked into his house in the middle of the night and made
off with his bloody Van Dycks, have they? Brandon wouldn’t be able to stop the thieves even if they walked up and shook his hand as they left with the canvases under their arm. Wouldn’t
be able to get out of his bloody chair. Ask him his opinion if you want, I can’t stop you. Any more than you can stop me bringing in my Orangemen.’

The butler and the footmen glided in and removed the plates. A great dish of meringue and cream and fruit replaced the beef at the place of demolition. Ormonde began hacking large portions out
of the pudding and handed them round.

‘And you, Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘what is your view of my Orangemen? Are you in favour?’

‘I must ask you a question first,’ Powerscourt replied, trying to look as grave as he knew how. ‘Will they be wearing those dark suits with the Orange sashes? Will they have
those hard black hats on their heads? Will they bring a marching band with those terrible Lambeg drums? Will they sing “The Sash My Father Wore” as they march along the Mall in
Westport?’

For the first time that day Dennis Ormonde laughed. He laughed with the same energy with which he carved his beef or cursed his enemies.

‘Lambeg drums! “Sash My Father Wore”! That’s good, Powerscourt. Very good. I say,’ he went on, crunching his way through a mouthful of meringue and cream,
‘this pudding’s good, damned good.’

There was a brief moment of silence as he enjoyed his sweet course. Powerscourt was trying to find a way to buy time. The hands of the clock were ticking fast towards those two hundred Ulster
boots stamping their way down the Louisburg road towards Ormonde House. Even a couple of days would help. He had a sudden vision of Father O’Donovan Brady mounting the steps of his pulpit to
harangue the faithful after Mass. He shuddered when he thought of what the priest might say about an invasion of Protestant heretics from the north. Ormonde returned to the assault, siege engines
refuelled by the cream and fruit.

‘Seriously though, Powerscourt, what do you think? Out with it, man!’

‘In one sense it is an admirable plan, Ormonde,’ said Powerscourt. ‘You should congratulate yourself for having thought of it. I say admirable because for one purpose, that of
catching these thieves, it is the best plan possible. Mind you, I do have certain reservations about the possible side effects. However, I have a suggestion to make.’ Ormonde was helping
himself to a third helping of the pudding. Powerscourt hoped it would ease his anger. ‘Please continue with the arrangements with the Grand Master of the Orange Lodge and the people from the
Royal Black Preceptory, but with one slight change of plan. They are not to set forth immediately. Rather they are to be on standby, ready to go at a moment’s notice, boots polished, sashes
cleaned, all that sort of thing. Because, gentlemen, we have forgotten a couple of very important people who should be with us in a day or so. I refer to the inspector and his colleague from the
Intelligence Department in Dublin. They will have access to sources of intelligence and information in the local community which we do not possess. They will need time to conduct their
investigations in as low a key as possible. I am certain that they will find it easier to carry out their work in what you might call a low temperature. Once the Lambeg drums begin to beat, as it
were, the temperature will rise dramatically, it may go right off the scale, and it will be much harder for them, people will be less likely to talk. If they fail, so be it. The Ulstermen set off
the very next day.’