Death on the Holy Mountain (33 page)

‘Of course,’ the Major had replied. ‘Let’s pray it doesn’t come to that.’

‘Look, Lucy,’ Powerscourt turned to his wife, ‘there’s nearly an hour before I have to go. Why don’t we take the hotel boat out on the water? It’s a lovely
morning.’

Five minutes later Powerscourt was stroking the little boat up the dark waters of Killary Harbour. Lady Lucy was wearing an enormous hat to shade her from the sun. She thought you could hide all
sorts of things under a wide brim. ‘Is Butler Lodge up there, Francis?’ she said, pointing towards the mountains on the right.

‘It is, my love,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it’s on the far side of that mountain with an unpronounceable name, Mweelrea I think it is. It’s got its own lake in the front
and a river that’s supposed to be full of fish.’

‘Is it pretty?’ said Lady Lucy. Powerscourt knew she was trying to form a picture in her mind of the site where she might lose another husband, another one lost not to the fogs of
war but in the mists of civil strife.

‘I can’t say that I have been inspecting it with the eyes of a tourist,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but it would be very beautiful if it was being used properly.’

Lady Lucy fell silent. A couple of fishermen shouted good morning at them from a hundred yards away. A herd of cows was making a leisurely progress towards Leenane, mooing loudly as they went.
Powerscourt turned the boat round and began the return journey towards the hotel.

‘Francis,’ she said at last, ‘you will be careful, won’t you. You see, I’ve just worked it out, we’ve been married for thirteen years now, it’s scarcely
credible, is it, and I love you as much now as I did on the day I married you. More even. I couldn’t bear it to end. Not here. Not now. Not like this. I want to be with you till the end,
Francis, as I hope you’ll be there for me. Please remember that I love you so much. Take care. Take very great care. I shall be thinking of you and praying for you every moment of every day
until you come back.’ She held his hand and kissed it. ‘Now, I won’t say any more. Semper Fidelis, Francis.’

Semper Fidelis, forever faithful, was a sort of motto, or talisman, between the two of them. It had first been mentioned to Powerscourt by a young man who killed himself in an earlier
investigation when he first met Lady Lucy. It had followed them through their lives ever since, a punctuation point on their journey through love and time.

‘Semper Fidelis, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt gravely. Out there on the still waters of Killary Harbour, under the wide Connemara sky, he wished he did not have to continue his
investigation, to embark on his hazardous mission to Butler Lodge. He wanted to be somewhere else, to stay with Lucy and row out to the mouth of the great fjord. Then he thought of the Ormonde
family, of husbands whose wives had been abducted, of the Butlers and the Moores whose very identity was under threat from forces they neither knew nor understood. He kissed Lady Lucy after he
handed her out of the boat and set out to prepare for his ordeal.

Half an hour later he and Johnny Fitzgerald were standing by the front door of Butler Lodge. They knew that the hills around the house concealed the Major’s troops, rifles at the ready in
case things went wrong.

‘Your round or mine, Francis?’ said Johnny, looking at the bell.

‘Mine, I think,’ said Powerscourt and pushed it firmly. A clear peal could be heard inside. Powerscourt wondered if the two ladies had heard it. They heard footsteps. The door opened
to reveal the redhead who had answered it earlier that day. Perhaps he was acting as butler for the duration.

‘Come in, please,’ said the young man politely. ‘Would you wait here for a moment now?’

Powerscourt looked around the hall. The floor was marble, you could find marble everywhere in Connemara, he remembered. A couple of hurling sticks were resting in an umbrella stand. There was a
table to the left of the door. A pair of fish in glass cases looked across at them from the opposite wall. Powerscourt suddenly remembered the fascination of stuffed creatures for the Anglo-Irish.
The birds of the air and the beasts of the field were all fair game for the taxidermists, owls and badgers, voles and squirrels, pike and salmon and trout, otters and owls, bream and perch, all
ended up stuck on the walls of the Anglo-Irish in their glass coffins. Powerscourt had been to houses in his youth where they were so numerous that he would not have been surprised to see a stuffed
human staring out at him from hall or passageway. Privately he suspected that the gentry identified with these dead creatures. Were they not preserved too, pickled in their past and their history
until they had little relevance to the modern world?

‘Come this way, please,’ the redhead interrupted his reverie and showed them into a little sitting room on the left of the hall. There were bookcases here from floor to ceiling and a
great window that looked out over the lake. The redhead motioned them to a sofa and indicated they were to sit down.

‘Posh dentist’s waiting room, Francis?’ said Johnny.

‘Doctor’s, I think,’ said Powerscourt. ‘No magazines at all here.’

Two slim young men of average height came in through the other door and sat down on the chairs opposite the sofa. They were both wearing dark trousers and green shirts, some kind of private
uniform, Powerscourt suspected. One had black hair. The other one was so fair he was almost blond.

‘Which of you is Powerscourt?’ asked the black-haired one.

‘I am he,’ said Powerscourt.

‘Then you must be Johnny Fitzgerald.’

‘The same,’ Johnny nodded gravely, wondering if he should mention his ancestor. Not yet, he thought, not yet, maybe later.

‘Traitors, the pair of ye,’ muttered the blond.

‘You can call me Seamus,’ said the black-haired young man, making it abundantly clear that whatever he was called, it was not Seamus, and that he had no intention of revealing his
true identity. ‘And he’s Mick,’ he added, pointing to his companion. ‘Now then,’ he continued, ‘it was youse who asked for this meeting. What do you have to say
for yourselves?’

‘Principally this,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I think it’s time you considered your own position. You have pulled off a most daring piece of kidnapping. But for our good fortune
in finding you here, everything would have gone your way.’

‘We were betrayed,’ said Mick viciously, ‘another bloody traitor in the ranks. Well, he’ll get what’s coming to him, youse mark my words.’

Powerscourt did not bother to tell the blond that they had not been betrayed. Dissension in the ranks might work to his, Powerscourt’s, advantage.

‘But now,’ he continued, ‘think of it. You are surrounded here. Over twenty cavalrymen are on patrol in the woods. More are expected this afternoon. I do not know how many of
you there are in this house but I do not believe you number more than six or seven at the most. And with the greatest possible respect, these men outside are more experienced in battle than you
are. They fought in the Boer War after all.’

Even as he said it he knew mention of the Boer War was a mistake.

‘Imperialist racket!’ said the blond in anger. ‘Whole war just so the City of London could get its hands on the South African diamonds! Women and children herded into
concentration camps to die! Bloody disgrace!’

‘Then think of the position of the two women you have seized. I presume they are still alive, they certainly were yesterday afternoon. If anything were to happen to them now, the
authorities would know who to charge.’

Powerscourt sensed as he spoke that he was not making much impression. Rational argument might not be the best way to reach these young men. He felt that they rejoiced in what they saw as their
emotional and moral superiority. They probably thought he was old. He suddenly remembered the appeal of a glorious death fighting in Ireland’s cause against overwhelming odds. He wondered if
they would prefer death to a prison sentence, a blood sacrifice in the cause of Ireland’s freedom. That, he felt, might be their most likely and the most dangerous option. He ploughed on.

‘If anything were to happen to the women, if they were to be killed for instance, it would go very badly for you. I am certain you would hang. If you give them up, and give yourselves up,
the authorities would, I am sure, look at your cases sympathetically.’

He felt even more like a schoolteacher who has lost all rapport with his pupils. He felt that he was probably making things worse.

‘Is that what you came here to say?’ Mick was almost on his feet. ‘Hand ourselves over to the authorities, as you call them? We’d rather die.’

‘I don’t think you do want that really,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald affably. ‘You’re young, for heaven’s sake. You’ve got your whole life in front of you.
Think of all the wine and women and song waiting for you in the years ahead. Give yourselves a chance, lads.’

‘The wine and the women and the song may appeal to people like you from the Big Houses,’ said Seamus. ‘We have a higher cause, the rights of the Irish people to their freedom,
the rights of the Irish people to own the land of Ireland, the rights of the Irish people to govern themselves in their own way.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Johnny, ‘but you won’t be able to advance that cause very much if you’re in a wooden box. By the time you become a hero and a martyr in Ireland
you don’t know about it, it’s too late, you’ve gone to join your ancestors in the cemetery up on the hill.’

‘What about the two of you?’ said Seamus. ‘Intelligent men, well educated, plenty of talent. And you’re Irish. Why do you run around doing the bidding of those people in
the Big Houses? Why are you trying to support the crumbling Protestant Ascendancy? For I tell you, I am certain that I will see it disappear in my lifetime. The struggle may be long, it may be
bloody, or the whole pack of them may fall in like a pack of cards, but their day is passing. I’m sure of it. Why support all that if you’re Irish? Wolfe Tone rose above his Protestant
heritage to advance the cause of liberty in Ireland. Charles Stewart Parnell was a bloody Protestant landlord in County Wicklow, for Christ’s sake, and he nearly brought us Home Rule. Why
can’t you join the right side?’

‘Perhaps we’re too old,’ said Powerscourt, nodding at Johnny by his side on the sofa, ‘and perhaps you’re too young. I was brought up into one world, it may be
passing now, I grant you, but it was the world my parents lived in. It was the only one I knew. You are growing up in a different world. Each fresh generation embraces a cause, certain with all the
certainty of the young that their mission is just and all earlier missions misguided and wrong. As they grow older, that generation is surprised in its turn by the fact that their children espouse
different causes, take up another mission. Their creed, their beliefs that they held so strongly in their youth are now ancient history. They’ve been washed away, like sandcastles on a beach.
So it goes on, down the generations, like the rising and the setting of the sun or the passing of the seasons. I don’t apologize for my beliefs. I don’t condemn you for yours. All I
would remind you is that you’re going to be better placed to advance them if you’re alive rather than if you’re dead.’

Powerscourt suddenly realized that he had another problem. Pride, the pride of the young, the pride that would not let them lose face. He remembered himself as a young man, willing to argue on
long after he had lost because he did not want to back down. He suspected it would be almost impossible for Seamus to agree to his requests. He would only show himself to be a leader without
courage, a general who surrendered without a fight. He tried to find a way to ease his path but he couldn’t do it. There were no inducements he could think of offering.

He tried all the same. ‘Perhaps you’d like to take a break from our conversation and confer with your colleagues elsewhere in the house? Give yourselves a bit of time to think? As
long as you go on holding those two women, I think your position is very difficult. If you start a fight here and they are injured or killed you’re in a desperate state, Seamus, you really
are.’

It was Mick who replied. ‘Weasel words!’ he cried. ‘Time to think? You people have had centuries to think and you haven’t come up with anything better for Ireland than
croquet on the lawn and hunting six days a week in the winter. You’re a bloody disgrace, the pair of you!’

Seamus was boxed in. He could not, Powerscourt knew, give way now in face of the defiance of his friend. Powerscourt felt sick inside.

‘I have made my mind up,’ said Seamus finally with an air of slight reluctance as if he might have behaved differently on his own. ‘Thank you for coming. Your offer is
rejected. One of my men will escort you to the front door. The truce will end half an hour from now.’

This is not the best of times, Powerscourt said to himself, it is the worst of times. It is not the season of Light, it is the season of Darkness. Suddenly he remembered
reading Charles Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
at the age of fourteen, lying on the grass in the summer at Powerscourt House, oblivious to the noises of his sisters, and weeping
uncontrollably at the end.

‘Perhaps I could make another proposal,’ he said firmly.

‘And what is that?’ replied Seamus.

‘Take no bloody notice,’ cried Mick, ‘it’ll just be another piece of Protestant trickery!’

‘My proposal, quite simply, is this. You let the two ladies go. They must have suffered enough by now. Johnny and I replace them as your hostages. You lose nothing. You still hold a couple
of hostages of some value to the authorities here and in England.’

‘Just let me make sure I understand you, Lord Powerscourt, I find it hard to comprehend. We let the women go. You volunteer to replace them. Is that right?’

‘It is.’

‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ said Seamus. ‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Quite sure,’ said Powerscourt.

‘This time I do need to talk to the others,’ said Seamus, ‘I think I may have to put it to the vote. Wait here. Don’t try anything stupid.’

So, Powerscourt said to himself, their fate was to be decided by half a dozen twenty-year-olds, their heads probably filled with the nationalist rhetoric of the Christian Brothers and the wild
songs of rebel Ireland. He took comfort in one thought. He did not think that these young men would have felt happy holding female hostages. They might have rejected orthodox religion or they might
have not, but the Marian cult was probably stronger in Ireland than in any other country in Europe. They had been looking at statues of the Virgin Mary by the roadside, paintings of her on the
walls of convent and schoolroom, huge representations with halo and sanctity on the altars of their churches, further icons no doubt displayed in their own homes since before they could walk. She
was everywhere. Reverence for her was instilled into every generation. The young men would probably be relieved to be rid of the two women. Then he realized to his horror what else the Marian cult
meant. Seamus and Mick would have fewer scruples killing men. Especially Protestant men.