Death on the Holy Mountain (24 page)

Johnpeter Kilross and Alice Bracken were getting dressed. This was their third or fourth visit to the place and they felt quite at home now. Soon, Johnpeter reckoned, they would be able to come
here once a day.

‘Why are you in such a hurry?’ asked Alice, inspecting herself in a rather dirty mirror.

‘I’ve been asked to see Richard Butler,’ Johnpeter replied, ‘at five o’clock and I don’t want to be late.’

‘Sure, you’ve got plenty of time left,’ said the girl. ‘You don’t suppose he knows about us, do you?’

‘I don’t see how he could know anything about it at all. I expect it’s something to do with these paintings. Maybe he wants to ask my advice.’

‘The day Richard Butler asks you for your advice, Johnpeter Kilross, I shall ride naked down the drive and out into the main square in Butler’s Cross, so I shall.’

‘I expect it’s to do with those paintings,’ said Johnpeter.

‘Those wretched paintings,’ said Alice with great feeling. ‘I wish oil paint had never been invented. I did enjoy that one that came back, mind you, with Mr Mulcahy and the
rest of them on horseback. I thought that was really funny.’

‘Richard didn’t think it was funny. To this day the man Powerscourt and his friend haven’t told him where they put it.’

‘Maybe it’s in here, up in the attic,’ Alice laughed. ‘Maybe the Powerscourt man comes down to look at it first thing in the morning. What do you think of the wife, by
the way, Lady Lucy or whatever she’s called? She seems well set on her husband, I’ll say that for her.’

‘She’s very attractive,’ said Johnpeter, fiddling with a shirt button.

‘Oh, is she now?’ said Alice, turning to reach for her stockings. ‘Is she more attractive than me then, Johnpeter Kilross?’

‘Of course not,’ said the young man loyally. He had frequently noticed with women that any praise of another was taken almost as a personal insult.

Cathal Rafferty was crouching behind the hedge that marked the boundary of the Head Gardener’s Cottage garden. He could hear voices coming from the bedroom but he couldn’t make out
the words. He thought it strange that people were in a bedroom in the late afternoon. If he stood up he could take a quick look in the window. The curtains were not properly closed. He was
astonished at what he saw. There was a man and a woman getting dressed. The man had no trousers on and had very hairy legs. The woman had almost nothing on at all and was pulling up her stockings.
What on earth was going on? Cathal ducked down behind the hedge and began to move away from the cottage as quickly as he could. There was some sort of grown-up secret going on in there. He
remembered an overheard conversation between his eldest brother Michael and his friend in which they talked about a whore taking off her clothes faster than the winners at the Galway Races. It was
something grown-ups did in private, though he didn’t know what it was. And if it was all above board, why had these two people crept out to the cottage? Why hadn’t they just taken their
clothes off in Butler’s Court? Plenty of rooms there for taking your clothes off, at whatever speed you fancied. It must be something bad. Suddenly he remembered something he had been told
only very recently. ‘If you see or hear of any wickedness going on round here, you just come and tell me, young Cathal Rafferty. The Devil never sleeps, you know, not even in Ireland.’
As he crept out one of the side entrances of the demesne Cathal made up his mind. He would go and tell everything he had seen to Father O’Donovan Brady. He thought the priest might even pay
good money for such promising information.

Five minutes later Johnpeter Kilross opened the front door of the cottage and poked his head cautiously outside. ‘All clear,’ he whispered. ‘We can go back now.’

‘Look, Lucy, look! Can’t you see? Halfway up on the first bit of track that leads to the summit.’ Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were in a carriage going to
Westport station to catch a train to Moore Castle to inspect the returned painting. They had been on a detour to the fishermen at Old Head to collect a couple of lobsters for Moore and were passing
the bottom of Croagh Patrick, where the pilgrims’ path began.

‘I can’t see anything, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy rather sadly, peering up at the Holy Mountain.

‘Moving very slowly, Lucy, just to the right of a line going up from the chimney of that little cottage over there.’

‘My goodness.’ Lucy had spotted the little convoy now. ‘It’s two men and a couple of donkeys. Those donkeys seem to be going very slowly, Francis. Do you think
they’re all right?’

‘I expect they’re carrying things up to the top, Lucy, materials maybe, stuff they need for fitting out the inside of the church. Are you looking forward to climbing to the
top?’

‘I am,’ she replied, looking suspiciously at the summit which seemed a very long way off. ‘I do hope I get to meet your Archbishop. I’ve met plenty of bishops but never
the top man.’

Powerscourt was not to know it, but the building at the top had been completed ahead of Skedule a couple of days before. Charlie O’Malley and Austin Rudd were actually transporting yet
another consignment of bottles of Guinness to the summit, to be sold off at outrageous prices to thirsty pilgrims a safe distance from the oratory when Mass was over. The idea had come to Charlie
in Campbell’s public house as he finished his first pint after coming down from the mountain in the days of overtime a week before.

‘God,’ he had said to Austin Rudd, ‘how much do you think a man would pay for a bottle of stout when he’s reached the top on Reek Sunday? There’ll be thousands of
thirsty buggers up there, their throats parched like lost travellers in the desert. Think of it, man. If we can get the damned donkeys to ferry enough bottles up there we’ll make our
fortune!’

Johnny Fitzgerald was not with them on this day. He had, he said at breakfast, an appointment in Westport with a man who claimed to be a defrocked Christian Brother. Of the reasons for the
defrocking Johnny was not aware but he thought the man might have a story to tell. Dennis Ormonde was busy on estate business, saying that in any case it was a damned long way to go to look at some
picture of one of Moore’s bloody ancestors.

‘Do you think the painting will be the real thing, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy as their cab carried them up the long drive to the crenellated castle.

‘I don’t believe it will be the real thing at all,’ said Powerscourt gloomily.

One look at a crestfallen Moore at the top of the steps told them that Powerscourt’s fears were correct. Moore looked like a man who has just lost his fortune, or suffered a bereavement.
His face was pale and his hands were trembling slightly.

‘Thank God you’ve come, Powerscourt, Lady Powerscourt, I’m in despair, I really am.’ He led them up the stairs with the stags’ heads and across the great hall with
its gallery into the dining room. There indeed was the painting, a full-length of Alexander William O’Flaherty Moore hanging above the fireplace. Or rather, Powerscourt thought, inspecting it
closely, it might have been turned into the ghost of a painting. The colours were fading, all of them, what must have been the deep blue of the cloak around Moore’s shoulders turned pale, the
hair no longer receding from his forehead but virtually disappeared back into the off-white of the canvas, the colours everywhere ebbing away like the smile of the Cheshire cat. As he looked,
Powerscourt thought you could almost see the painting vanishing away in front of your eyes. By the end of the day, or by the end of tomorrow, he thought, it would have disappeared completely, only
the canvas and the frame remaining in their place of honour above the fireplace. Alexander William O’Flaherty Moore, here today, gone tomorrow.

‘How terrible, Mr Moore,’ said Lady Lucy, putting her hand on his arm in a gesture of sympathy, ‘and this is your grandfather, I think you said?’

‘It was,’ said Moore bitterly, ‘it bloody well was.’

Powerscourt was looking very closely at the painting. ‘When did it start to disappear, if you see what I mean?’

‘It was fine for the first two days,’ said Moore, breaking off suddenly to sneeze violently. ‘Damn, I thought I’d got rid of the wretched influenza. It was on the third
day I thought it looked odd but I put it down to the medicinal whiskey. Then yesterday there was no doubt about it, it had started its disappearing act.’

What a way to send messages, Powerscourt thought. It was a form of Celtic voodoo, a desecration of the ancestors to discomfit and almost unman your enemies. If you had no ancestors, even
symbolic ones, then who were you? You had lost your past to a cruel and unforgiving present. Your entire family history, a commodity very dear to these Irish patricians in their great houses, was
under attack, the history stretching back far into the past to confirm your ancient right to these houses and these lands. That, after all, was why they put these paintings on the walls in the
first place, a defiant statement of their right to be here, to be the masters in their Castles and Parks and Courts and Halls. Not for the first time Powerscourt wondered about the mind that had
dreamt up this vicious onslaught. He thought briefly of Father O’Donovan Brady nursing his hatred of the Anglo-Irish along with his drink in the evenings in the priest’s house. He
doubted if somebody who did not understand the mentality of these Butlers and Ormondes and Moores and Connollys could have worked out such a clever plan. It had to be somebody who knew how they
thought, somebody who had lived in one of these houses perhaps. A servant with a grudge maybe? He remembered suddenly that some of the greatest fighters for Ireland’s freedom – and that
would have meant a Catholic freedom, surely – had been Protestants. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, mortally wounded on the run, Parnell himself, the man who nearly brought Home Rule to Ireland. Did
the Anglo-Irish generation of 1905 harbour a traitor in their midst?

‘Tell me, Powerscourt,’ Moore was speaking very quickly, as if he thought the remains of his ancestor on the wall might hear him, ‘what does it mean?’

‘Come away, man,’ said Powerscourt. ‘We can talk better away from the poor chap on the wall.’

Moore led them into the sitting area at the back which had once been the entrance hall. He ordered coffee and a stiff whiskey for himself.

‘Let me say first of all,’ Powerscourt draped himself in an elegant chair and stared out at the lawns and the fountain that led down to Moore’s little river, ‘that in one
sense it is the same as the Butler picture. That isn’t the original, I’m virtually certain of it. So, with luck we may recover the real thing in the end and your grandfather can go back
on his walls. That picture in there is a copy, maybe done by the same man who painted the different version of
The Master of the Hunt
for Butler’s house. And the artist has used some
very inferior paint, or he’s treated it with some fancy chemical so the paint fades away completely in a week. Some of the Old Masters, you know, in the days before commercially manufactured
paint, used to mix their own. Sometimes the very same thing happened to them as has happened to yours – the work just faded away in a very short time.’ Powerscourt hoped that Moore
might take some comfort in being bracketed with the likes of Albrecht Dürer and Filippo Lippi, but if he did he was hiding it well. He continued scowling at his floor. ‘As to what it
means, it’s the same thing as Butler’s. You’re not wanted. Your ancestors and what they stand for are repudiated. Your view of history and your family’s view of history and
your class’s view of history are discredited, not valid any more. But it means something else as well, I think.’ Powerscourt paused to take a sip of his coffee. A great peacock was
strutting outside on the lawn.

‘Can I just take you up on one thing you said earlier, Powerscourt? You said you thought we might recover the real painting in the end, that we might get my grandfather back again. Do you
really believe that?’

‘I do, Moore, I believe it very strongly. I have a feeling, no, more than a feeling, that the paintings are safe. People who manipulate pictures and their significance as cleverly as these
thieves must have an understanding of what they mean. They’re not likely to destroy them.’

‘You were about to say something more when I interrupted,’ said Moore, looking slightly happier though Powerscourt suspected it might be due to the whiskey which was disappearing at
a rapid rate.

‘Yes,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I must ask you a question. In the original blackmail letter there was a deadline, a day by which you were meant to have done whatever it is they
wanted you to do. Is that correct?’

Moore nodded.

‘And has that day arrived, or are we very close to it?’

There was a pause. Powerscourt looked over at Lady Lucy who never took her eyes off Moore’s face.

‘It’s very close,’ Moore murmured, ‘but it’s not quite yet.’

‘And have you given in to their demands, the blackmailers?’

‘No, I have not.’ Moore was firm and defiant now.

‘Very good,’ said Powerscourt, ‘then that is the other message from the disappearing grandfather next door. It’s a warning. They’re trying to frighten you. If you
don’t agree to our demands, terrible things are going to happen to you. Vanishing relations in the family portraits for a start.’

‘You don’t think some more of my paintings are going to come back with things wrong with them, do you, Powerscourt?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Powerscourt firmly. ‘I don’t think they’ll try that particular stunt again.’

Just what the thieves were going to try next became apparent all too soon. Ormonde House was in chaos when Powerscourt and Lady Lucy returned there in the late afternoon.
Groups of Orangemen were searching the woods to the side of the house. Other Orangemen could be heard clumping about in the attics, opening doors and rooms that had not seen a visitor in years.
Clouds of dust floated down from the top storey on to the floors below. The butler, Hanrahan, gave them the news. ‘It’s Mrs Ormonde and her sister Winifred that just came to visit her
today, sir, they’ve disappeared. We can’t find them anywhere. The Chief Constable’s in with Mr Ormonde now, sir, if you’d like to join them.’