Death on the Holy Mountain (38 page)

‘No, no, not stout. It’ll puff him out like a football,’ said a small farmer. ‘whiskey, that’s the thing.’

‘Brandy,’ said the landlord, who had left his seat of custom for a close inspection of Charlie. ‘Here, take this very slowly. Don’t rush it or you’ll be ill.’
He handed over a large glass half filled with cognac and Charlie sipped it gently, like a man taking his medicine after a long illness. Gradually he felt himself returning to something approaching
normal. Certainly the state of semi-inebriation brought on by the brandy was a condition well known to Charlie. And when he outlined the recent events concerning Jameson, he had the attention of
every single person in the public bar.

‘He’s mad, the animal,’ said one. ‘Who ever heard of a mountaineering donkey?’

‘Take him to the Alps, Charlie,’ said another, who had not excelled at geography with the Christian Brothers. ‘See if he can climb the Horn of Matter!’

‘Matterhorn, you eejit,’ said his friend. ‘Why don’t we organize a donkey race up Croagh Patrick every summer? Jameson would be hot favourite. I’d put five
shillings on him now, so I would.’

‘It just goes to show,’ said a solicitor’s clerk, ‘that all donkeys are mad. You can never tell with them, they’re so stupid.’

‘The spirit of St Patrick has entered the animal,’ said a teacher who had once contemplated a career in the priesthood. ‘Jameson has taken on the mantle of the patron
saint.’

Charlie paid little attention to any of these theories. Jameson had certainly returned to health. He even attained a brief moment of local fame when the editor of the
Mayo News
, a veteran
of the journalistic profession, florid of countenance and portly of figure, heard about the mountaineering donkey and sent one of his brightest young men to interview Jameson. The reporter quickly
realized that donkeys, like the dead, cannot sue for libel and that he was therefore free to print whatever took his fancy. Jameson, he informed his readers, was an avid supporter of Home Rule as
he much preferred staying in the field next to Charlie O’Malley’s house to going to work. And he deduced from the considerable amount of time the donkey spent outside Campbell’s
public house that Jameson would favour a relaxation of the licensing laws and a lowering in the duty on the spirit that bore his name. Parties of schoolchildren would make appointments to come and
see Jameson after this, bringing gifts of vegetables and stroking him happily. Twice a month Charlie took him up to the summit of Croagh Patrick to keep his health up. Charlie rejected all the
theories about his donkey’s behaviour. Charlie knew the truth. Jameson was a pilgrim.

The Archbishop of Tuam, the Very Reverend John Healey, was perusing a large pile of documents on his desk as Powerscourt was shown into his study.

‘Lord Powerscourt, how good to see you again. Please take a seat. Is your mission to Ireland nearly completed?’

Powerscourt quite liked the thought of his mission. It linked him to the saints and scholars of Ireland’s past, perhaps even to Patrick himself out here in the country where a great
mountain was named in his honour.

‘I believe I am on the last lap, Your Grace. I hope so anyway.’

‘So you think you have found the answer?’

‘In this case, Your Grace, I think it will come down to answers in the plural rather than answer in the singular. So often in my investigations there has been one perpetrator, one single
individual who committed the crime or murdered the innocent or forged the paintings. Here I think there may be a number of individuals. It has made it very difficult to work out the links that held
them together.’

‘I’m sure you will get to the bottom of it all. Tell me, Lord Powerscourt, I have received a great many letters complaining about the shooting of a young man on the Maum road very
recently. My correspondents say that the young man was totally innocent and was victimized by the soldiers for no reason. And his companion, another young man, had been badly beaten up. Do you know
anything about this?’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘Is it possible, Your Grace, that some of these letters are in the same hand? Or that the words in one are remarkably similar to those in another?’

The Archbishop frowned. He riffled through the stack of letters. ‘God bless my soul! Both of those statements are true,’ he said in surprise. ‘How very strange. Do you think
somebody is orchestrating this campaign?’

‘That might indeed be the case, Your Grace,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but let me give you the facts. You see, I was present, or almost present, at the time. Those two young men were
responsible for the kidnapping of two Protestant women from Ormonde House. They kept them locked up in a fishing lodge near Leenane for some days. The ladies were only freed when Johnny Fitzgerald
and I substituted ourselves for them, and became hostages in our turn. We were all going to Galway in the finest Ormonde coach, with Johnny and I told not to move or we would be shot.’

Dr Healey’s ample eyebrows shot high up the archepiscopal forehead. ‘Goodness me,’ he said, ‘what colourful lives you people lead. I’m sure Lord Edward Fitzgerald
would have been proud of his descendant’s gallantry, mind you. Please go on.’

‘Well, Your Grace, we managed to set ourselves free by a violent assault on the young men when they were nearly asleep and kicking them out of the coach. Then they were intercepted by a
party of troopers who were following our progress at a discreet distance. The young man who was shot could have allowed himself to be arrested. He must have known he and his colleague were
outnumbered. But he did not. We only knew him as Mick, Your Grace. That was not his real name and he was a very excitable young man. He fired at the cavalrymen. They fired back. He was killed. I am
sure he preferred death and glory to capture and a prison sentence in Castlebar Jail. No doubt there will be a ballad about him soon.’

‘I think there already is,’ said the Archbishop. ‘One of the grooms here heard it last night in the Mitre across the road. I see, Lord Powerscourt. I feel I should pay little
attention to these protesters. But tell me, I only saw you on the way up the mountain, not on the way down. Did you enjoy the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage? Did it have meaning for you?’

‘It most certainly did,’ replied Powerscourt. ‘It was, for me, a spiritual experience. I am most grateful to Your Grace for inviting us. Could I extend, on behalf of Lucy and
myself, an invitation to you, Your Grace, to come and see us when you are next in London? You could meet the children. We live in Markham Square in Chelsea. Sir Thomas More lived not far away, we
have the Royal Hospital close by, one of the most beautiful buildings in London, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, we have the river Thames, but we have no mountains and no pilgrimages.’

‘Thank you, thank you.’ The Archbishop beamed with pleasure. ‘Are you familiar with the works of John Donne, Lord Powerscourt? He began life in a very distinguished Catholic
family and ended up as Protestant Dean of St Paul’s. I have had this quotation from him on my desk these twenty years now.’ The Archbishop opened up a little notebook which Powerscourt
saw was filled with neat copperplate handwriting. ‘It comes from the passage about for whom the bell tolls: “And when the Church buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of
one author, and is one volume: when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several
translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves
again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.” Donne talks of many translations, my friend. I like to think there are many mountains, too, not only ones made out of
stone and rock and rough scree like our Croagh Patrick. There are mountains of hatred and bigotry in men’s hearts here in our little island which the Church must try to remove. There are
mountains or lofty places of the spirit, if we are to believe Donne and the mystics and the poets, where love can take its adherents to the highest peaks of happiness or ecstasy. There are many
translations, Lord Powerscourt. There are many mountains too and many different paths to the summit, whether in Mayo or Chelsea.’

Two days later Powerscourt was back in Butler’s Court, reading another letter from the art dealer Michael Hudson. ‘You will be as astonished as I was to hear of
the response to our advertisements in the Irish newspapers. So far we have had eighty-seven replies! When Mr Farrell has inspected them I will let you have further details. Unfortunately not one of
them is on your lists. It may be that the thieves did not steal them in order to sell them on. It may be that they are biding their time. In my experience thieves are usually anxious to dispose of
their booty at the earliest possible opportunity. Yours etc.’

Powerscourt laughed out loud. For all their protestations about their devotion to their ancestors, the Anglo-Irish were queuing up to sell their forebears for American dollars in great numbers.
There might, he thought, be more to come when word about the high prices travelled round the thirty-two counties. The answer to his problem did not lie with selling the stolen paintings.

He had met with the land agent in Athlone earlier that day and been given a report very similar to the one he had received in Galway. Some of these Protestant patricians, he had been told, were
so happy with the Wyndham bonus that they were even building new houses for themselves, though little thought appeared to have been given to how they were to be maintained. What they ought to have
done, the agent from Athlone had informed him, was to invest the proceeds from the sales in sensible stock and maintain their standard of living from the income, but that had little appeal. One
single man from Tralee was believed to be working his way through the proceeds of the Wyndham Act at the gambling tables of Monte Carlo. The name Mulcahy produced the same instant frisson of
recognition as it had done in Eyre Square but no details of his dealings could be extracted. Powerscourt had also met with Inspector Harkness to co-ordinate the final arrangements of his
investigation. ‘If this works,’ he told the Inspector, ‘we’ll be heroes, temporary kings for twenty-four hours. If it fails we’ll be humiliated.’

Powerscourt filled Lady Lucy in with the details in the Butler’s Court gardens late on the Sunday afternoon. ‘At nine o’clock tomorrow morning, my love, Inspector Harkness and
a team of eight men, all from areas remote from here in case of leaks, are going to search Mulcahy’s premises. If that fails, they’ll try his house. If that fails they’ll try the
priest’s place. I’d love to see Father O’Donovan Brady’s face when they start ripping his house apart.’

‘Is all this legal, Francis? Can you actually raid those places?’

‘Oh, yes, Lucy,’ replied her husband, ‘the Inspector has got search warrants falling out of every pocket in his suit. And, at the same time, exactly the same time so there can
be no tip-offs, another party of police, escorted by Johnny Fitzgerald, is going to raid the offices of the solicitor brother Declan Mulcahy in Swinford. His speciality is land and he is believed,
Johnny said in his note, to have parcels of land coming out of his ears. Johnny also tells me that there is some mass grave over there from famine times with over five hundred and fifty souls in
the ground but our boy Declan isn’t going to starve. Not by any means. There’s property and land and prize cattle in his empire apparently, and it’s growing by the
hour.’

‘Are you sure you’re right?’ Lady Lucy looked worried suddenly.

Powerscourt smiled and took her hand. ‘We’ll find out tomorrow. Let’s go and see what’s on the menu this evening, Lucy. But, please, don’t breathe a word of any of
this to anybody. If a whisper of a rumour goes down the hill, we’re sunk.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt slept badly that night. In his dreams he watched as grave Anglo-Irish gentlemen walked out of the frames on their walls, sat down at their dining
tables and demanded food. He saw another empty beach where the sandcastles were being washed away by the tide. He found himself in an enormous throng of persons walking very slowly through the
streets of Dublin. He thought they might be mourners at Parnell’s funeral, but he had lost Lady Lucy and the press of people was so great he could not break out to find her. He was locked
again in the red velvet of the Ormonde carriage, Johnny Fitzgerald by his side. They seemed to be hurtling down a hill with no coachman on top to halt their progress. He knew without being able to
see them that there were rocks and boulders at the bottom. Just when he felt they were certain to crash into them and perish, he woke up and grabbed hold of Lady Lucy who muttered to him sleepily
that they were on the first floor of Butler’s Court and the birds were already singing outside. It promised to be a beautiful day.

Shortly after half past eight Powerscourt set out to walk down to the main square. He told Richard Butler that he would like to see him about half past ten, if that was convenient, nothing
important, he assured his host, just a couple of pieces of routine administration for his accounts. Lady Lucy followed him about fifteen minutes later. She did not go all the way to the bottom but
seated herself on a bench halfway down the hill. She had brought a book of poetry to keep her company if the wait proved long. At precisely nine o’clock Inspector Harkness and a sergeant from
Longford called Murphy marched their men into the main square of Butler’s Cross. At three minutes past they were lined up outside the front entrance to the emporium of Mulcahy and Sons,
Grocery and Bar. The rest of the square was empty except for a stray dog who limped along the road by Horkan’s the agricultural supply people. MacSwiggin’s Hotel did not begin to serve
breakfast to its clients until ten o’clock except in cases of emergency. There was one customer in the shop already, an old lady preparing to pay for a couple of slices of bacon and half a
dozen eggs. Sergeant Murphy escorted her gently to the front door and closed it firmly behind her.