Death on the Holy Mountain (6 page)

Powerscourt felt himself sinking into a languid draught of nostalgia. His mother used to sing this song, leaning on the edge of the piano with the drawing-room doors wide open
to the garden in spring and summer, the waters of the great fountain just audible from the bottom of the steps, faint evening noises blending in with the music. His father would be playing the
piano, rather badly, for he had taught himself to play and his finger movements would have appalled the fastidious music teachers of Dublin. And Powerscourt himself, a small boy of eight or nine,
rather an earnest child, he thought, would be staring at his mother and praying that she would not stop and send him to bed. Sometimes when more expert hands were available at the keys, his mother
would sing duets with some of the guests, two voices twinning and twisting round each other and floating out into the Wicklow air. He thought that was his favourite memory of his mother. His mind
turned suddenly to Lady Lucy. Maybe he would bring her over and she too could sing for Ireland in this great house by the river.

Richard Butler along with his footman and Mary the parlour maid were on parade in the dining room promptly at ten o’clock the next morning. Hardy the footman looked even
more military today, standing to attention as if he were a sergeant major on parade. Mary was shuffling anxiously from foot to foot as if she were about to undergo some disagreeable medical
procedure.

‘Now then,’ Richard Butler was brisk and cheerful this morning, ‘let’s begin with this full-length over the door. Can you remember who it was?’

There was a silence from his two experts, the footman who saw the painting at least a dozen times a day and the girl who dusted the frame every morning except Sundays when she was given time off
to go to Mass. Finally Hardy coughed slightly.

‘There was a name on the bottom right of the frame, sir, but I can’t remember what it said.’

‘Very well,’ said Butler, pausing to write something in a small black notebook, ‘what was the gentleman wearing?’

‘Blue?’ said Hardy hesitantly.

‘Black?’ said Mary.

‘I thought it was green, a green cloak over his shoulders,’ said Richard Butler, a slight irritation beginning to show. He made some more notes. ‘How about this other
full-length Butler, the one over the fireplace?’

‘He was sitting at a table, that one,’ said the footman, ‘with papers all over it.’

‘No, he wasn’t, he was sitting on a horse,’ said Mary defiantly. ‘An enormous horse.’

‘That was your man on the other wall, opposite the door,’ said Hardy, ‘not this fellow here.’

‘The man on the horse, surely,’ said Butler, frowning slightly now, ‘was in the drawing room by the door. Big black horse.’

‘Brown,’ said Hardy, ‘the horse, I mean.’

‘Well,’ said Richard Butler, ‘I’m not sure we’re making much progress. If the one on the other wall was on a horse, then this one can’t have been on a horse
too, can he? What was he doing?’

‘No reason why he shouldn’t have been on a horse,’ said the footman, ‘logically, I mean.’

‘Are you saying,’ asked Butler, ‘that this one was on a horse too?’

‘No, I’m not,’ replied Hardy, ‘I was only pointing out that there was no reason why he shouldn’t have been on a horse.’

‘Well,’ said Butler, a note of exasperation coming into his voice now, ‘if he wasn’t on a horse, what was he doing?’

‘Sure, he wasn’t doing anything,’ said Mary, rejoining the argument, ‘he was just standing there, looking at something, like those country fellows leaning on a
gate.’

‘You’re not saying my distinguished ancestor was just leaning on a gate, are you, Mary?’

‘No, no, sir, it was just the look of him.’

‘I think you’ll find, sir,’ said Hardy with a note of finality, ‘that this gentleman here, over the fireplace, was the legal gentleman, with a judge’s red cloak and
a lot of papers on a table in front of him.’

‘No, he wasn’t,’ said Mary with spirit, ‘your man with the wig and stuff was above the other door, so he was. There was a crack in his frame, you see, and I always
remember thinking that the legal man was going to sentence me to be transported to Tasmania or some dreadful place.’

‘You sound very definite about that, Mary,’ said Butler. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I am sure, so I am,’ said the girl firmly.

‘Not so, you are mistaken,’ said the footman firmly. ‘The legal party was not above that door. He was by the mantelpiece here, watching his descendants eat their meals, so he
was.’

‘The devil he was, Augustus Hardy. Isn’t it your eyes that need testing now, and you hardly able to read the headlines in the
Freeman’s Journal
?’

‘Please, please,’ said Richard Butler, ‘let us not fall out. Why don’t we have a look in the drawing room next door?’

Another gaping wound stared at them from above the fireplace. ‘I’m sure we can agree about this one,’ said Butler hopefully. ‘This was the painting of the hunt, done
fairly recently. I forgot to mention it to Lord Brandon, Powerscourt. Most of the county hunt, all in their scarlet coats, were assembled by the front door of the house, mostly men, including
myself, of course, but a few women as well. The house was in the background.’

Both footman and parlour maid agreed about that. They ventured back into the dining room. But that was all they could agree about. On the dispositions and dress of the other two portraits they
disagreed violently. One, according to Hardy, showed a Butler leaning on his fireplace, a book in his left hand, a dog asleep at his feet. Nonsense, said Mary, none of those Butlers were shown with
a book, heaven only knew if they could read or not, some of them, it was all so long ago, and if anybody thought she, Mary, would not remember whether one of the gentlemen was reading or not, they
were a fool. The other painting, the footman maintained, showed a Butler resplendent in cricket clothes, a cap over his head, a bat in his hand, pads on his legs, obviously waiting to stride out to
the wicket. Mary agreed that there had been such a Butler, but it was a smaller Butler and he had been positioned between the fireplace and door. There was, Powerscourt thought, very considerable
disagreement among the witnesses. If it had been a court case the judge might well have thrown it out because of the gross confusion about the evidence. The only thing the participants agreed on
was that the people in the paintings were Butlers. Their hair might be black or brown or grey or silver or white or non-existent. Their jackets, likewise, might be blue or black or brown or red;
they might be wearing cloaks of dark blue or red; they could be lawyers or hunters or cricketers. They could be smiling or scowling, their noses great or small, their eyes any colour of the
rainbow, their chins clean shaven or covered with a beard that might also be black or brown or even white. There was no certainty about any of these Butlers. They were changelings to the footman
who tended them and the girl who dusted their frames. Richard Butler was looking very cross indeed.

‘There is confusion everywhere,’ he said. ‘How can I give an accurate description of the vanished pictures to the authorities?’ Powerscourt thought Hardy and the girl had
looked at the paintings so often that they didn’t really see them any more; they had all merged into a kind of composite Butler for all rooms and for all seasons in their minds. Once the
paintings had gone from the walls, they rearranged themselves in the footman’s and the girl’s brains until they were seriously confused. They might have been clearer had they only seen
the paintings once.

‘I wonder,’ said Powerscourt, ‘if you have many visitors to this house, people who like looking at old houses, that sort of thing?’

‘We do,’ said Butler, ‘we have them all the time. Most of them are very well behaved.’

‘Do you have any architectural people, Butler? People who might take photographs of the house and its rooms?’

‘I see what you’re driving at, Powerscourt,’ said Richard Butler, beginning to look much more cheerful. ‘We have had such people though I don’t think they ever sent
us any photographs. But we did have a chap ourselves, now I come to think about it, a chap to take photographs of the place about five years ago. I’d completely forgotten about the fellow. We
wanted a record of how the place looked at the turn of the century. I’ve still got them in my study. Hold on, I’ll be back in a second.’

Richard Butler departed at full speed. The footman was looking rather disappointed, as if he thought the parlour maid had got the better of him in the discussion about the missing paintings. The
girl was looking defiant.

‘Tell me, Hardy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘could one man lift one of those full-length portraits off the wall and carry it outside?’

‘He would have to be very strong, my lord,’ Hardy replied. ‘The things are a very awkward shape, if you see what I mean. Much easier with two.’

The owner of Butler’s Court returned with his wife and the biggest photograph album Powerscourt had ever seen. ‘It’s a pretty big house,’ he said to Powerscourt
apologetically, laying the album out on the dining-room table.’ Powerscourt wondered if he had brought Sylvia, as charming in the mornings as she was in the afternoons, to keep the peace
between the squabbling servants. Gradually, over an hour or so, the various Butler ancestors were restored to life as they had lived it on the walls of their dining room and their drawing room.
Hair of the right colour was finally restored to the right head. The hunter, the lawyer and the cricketer all returned to their proper places. Clothes that had been blue were finally adjudged to
have been black, clean-shaven men were transformed into men with beards and vice versa. It was, Powerscourt thought, a most pleasing transformation, and he joined Richard Butler in entering all the
details in his notebook. Mary the parlour maid departed to dust the rest of the paintings. The footman shimmered off to his own quarters. Mrs Butler went upstairs to change for a picnic lunch on an
island in the river. Mr Butler carried off his giant album back to his study. Powerscourt announced his intention to walk all round the ground floor and inspect the windows. He would, he said,
follow them to the island. He might be late as he had some more notes to take.

A determined burglar could have found his way into the house easily enough. There were one or two places where the windows were not quite secure. After half an hour or so Powerscourt returned to
the dining room. He perched on the edge of a chair and stared at the empty patches on the walls. He checked the notes he had made of the Butler inventory of the paintings. A number of blank
rectangles marked the spaces where the second, third, fourth, sixth and seventh Thomas Butler had claimed their places to a surrogate eternal life on the walls of their dining room. The first
Thomas, Powerscourt had been told by the seventh, had been too busy building his house and establishing himself in the extra acres given to his grandfather by Cromwell so that he never had the time
to sit for his portrait. Another Thomas had flatly refused to sit for his portrait at all. He was constitutionally incapable of sitting still, Richard Butler said, his restless irritability only
soothed by sitting on a horse, or rather, charging around on his horse more or less permanently, which is why he hunted six days a week when he could and even threatened to hunt on Sundays as well
until the local bishop intervened with telling quotations from the Book of Genesis about six days shalt thou labour. All those family portraits gone from here altogether, all male, the women still
demure in their places. And a few Old Masters.

The great house was very quiet now, the inhabitants all departed in high excitement on their trip on the river, rowing boats prepared for the journey to the island in the middle where, by long
tradition, the family had their picnic lunch during the summer in some style with three sorts of wine and a bottle of port that could solve the problem for the more elderly among the Butlers of
what to do in the afternoon. Powerscourt walked down to the library and stared out of the great windows, the air very clear this morning, the Shannon bright and close, the line of the trees where
the forest began sharp in the light.

Powerscourt was looking at the books now, column after column of them marching silently towards the ceiling. Many of his favourites were here, Thucydides and Tacitus, gloomy chroniclers of the
failings of their great powers, George Eliot, Tolstoy. But it wasn’t the contents of the leather volumes that interested him. It was words, the words that made up the books, the words the
authors used to tell their stories. Words, he thought, words were very dangerous in Ireland. Theobald Wolfe Tone, a not very successful barrister in the Dublin of the 1790s, became intoxicated with
words that had crossed the seas from France. Liberty. Freedom. Equality. They featured large in the thinking of the United Irishmen, formed to unite Catholic and Protestant and set Ireland free
from English rule. Some men made their living by cutting cloth or growing corn or selling provisions or dealing in livestock. Lawyers looked at words on a page and invested them with meaning.
Illiterate peasants in the west of Ireland swore the Oath of Tone’s United Irishmen, not understanding what most of the words meant. ‘I will persevere in endeavouring to form a
brotherhood of affection among Irishmen of all persuasions.’ Freedom or Equality meant little when you lived in a mud cabin and had scarcely enough food to feed your family. Freedom meant
little when a man with a different religion whose ancestors came from England to take your land, a man who lived in a great stone house with lakes and tall windows and libraries with portraits of
his family, could throw you out of your tiny patch of earth and pull down your stinking hovel. Liberty. Equality. Fraternity. Words. Words written on a page by lawyers. Words that took those Mayo
peasants far from their homes in the rebellion of 1798 to fight their last battle at Ballinamuck in County Longford, slaughtered by the English dragoons on the hillside or butchered in the bog.
Words had killed them. And those who were taken prisoner by the English that day? Words killed them too. A word called treason saw them hanged. Powerscourt wondered what might have happened if
Theobald Wolfe Tone had been more successful as a lawyer. Or, indeed, that other lawyer associated with freedom, liberty, equality, Maximilien Robespierre, a man so drunk with words that he tried
to abolish religion and replace it with rituals and celebrations in honour of reason. Reason, another word. God wasn’t dead yet. Not that time anyway. He was soon back, if he had ever really
gone away. It was Robespierre who perished instead, consumed on the guillotine by his own words.