‘I wish I could lie here for ever,’ said Alice languidly, as the strawberries continued to drop into her mouth.
‘Don’t worry,’ replied the young man, and his voice was like honey in the girl’s ears, ‘there are still plenty left.’
Some fifty feet away, Lord Francis Powerscourt was sitting opposite Mrs Butler in the island’s summerhouse. Normally, when the grown-ups remained in their proper places on the mainland, this summerhouse was an Indian camp out in the wilds of Wyoming, or a beleaguered British outpost in South Africa like Ladysmith or Mafeking, under siege to the terrible Boers. The children would crouch in it, firing imaginary guns from its windows, assaulting it from the roof, a position perilously reached by jumping some six feet from a nearby tree. Today the grown-ups had taken it over and the children played elsewhere, recreating great naval battles with a couple of canoes or disappearing completely up into the tops of the tall trees. It wasn’t even, the children said to themselves, as if the grown-ups did anything sensible in the summerhouse when they took it over. They just talked to each other, apart from one memorable evening when Alice and Johnpeter had been spotted kissing vigorously as the light faded when the Butler children were meant to be going to bed, but had decamped to the island instead for a midnight feast of buns and biscuits liberated from the kitchen.
‘This must be a very worrying time for you, Mrs Butler,’ Powerscourt began, ‘with all these pictures disappearing.’
Sylvia Butler smiled. ‘I’ve been trying to find out,’ she said, ‘if there is any history of this sort of thing. I’ve often wondered if the ancient Celts had a tradition of this kind of activity. You steal my pelt or my club or my best stone and there is some sort of curse placed on me. Like voodoo or whatever it’s called in the West Indies. The stealing of the paintings is meant to be a mark of doom for the family. Sometimes,’ she laughed what Powerscourt thought was rather a false laugh as if she was trying to conceal her real feelings, ‘I do feel cursed. I feel not wanted. I feel some people want us to go. But it never lasts very long.’
Powerscourt wondered if this wasn’t precisely the effect the thieves had wanted. It would be impossible, he thought, to have lived in Ireland for the last thirty years or so without realizing that some, if not a great many people wanted you to go. He thought it prudent not to mention the fact.
‘Your steward was mentioning to me yesterday,’ he said, ‘that one of the Christian Brothers at the school in the town down below is a great expert on the ancient Celts. Apparently he spends his holidays digging around in old ruins or ferreting about in the bogs for relics of those times.’
‘They always strike me as being rather sinister, those Christian Brothers,’ said Mrs Butler, ‘especially when they move about in packs. They look like ravens or crows about to do some damage or attack somebody. He is called Brother Brennan, the antiquary fellow. They say he hopes all the young farmers who pass through his hands will search their land for antiquities for him. He has great hopes of opening a museum some day with all his treasures in the main square down in Butler’s Cross, the town at the bottom of our drive. Perhaps you should go and see him, Lord Powerscourt.’
‘Tell me, Mrs Butler,’ Powerscourt shifted slightly in his seat to catch a view of the river through the trees, ‘who do you think is responsible for these thefts?’
Sylvia Butler paused. Should she tell him the truth? She had only known him for twenty-four hours or so. She had met too many Irishmen with charming and plausible manners in her life who had later turned out to be men of straw. Powerscourt, she decided suddenly, was not a man of straw. Lord Brandon had spoken of him in the most glowing terms. ‘If it was a joke, a practical joke,’ she began, ‘we would know by now. Even in Ireland the practitioners would have put us out of our misery after all this time. That leaves an interesting choice, Lord Powerscourt. Thieves who intend to make a great deal of money from selling the paintings? Or men of violence, advanced nationalists as I believe they call themselves nowadays, though why it should be advanced to break into innocent people’s houses and steal their possessions I do not know.’
She paused suddenly, as if conscious of the contrast between what she was about to say and what surrounded her, the birds singing happily in the trees on their island, the Shannon gurgling quietly on its long journey to the Atlantic, the distant laughter of the children, the heat growing stronger as they passed into early afternoon.
‘I’m sure it’s the men of violence,’ she said very quietly, ‘they want to get rid of us. They always have. Our land is very fertile. Richard has made it much more profitable with his improvements and his educated farm managers. We even had one from Germany once, you know, Lord Powerscourt, a very earnest young man who wore enormous black boots all the time. I remember wondering if he wore them in bed but I never found the answer. Richard said he had a great feel for horse breeding. We did have one horse after he left, I recall, who won everything at the Punchestown Races three years in a row. Richard called it Wolfgang. Everybody gets richer these days, the tenants, the shopkeepers in the town, ourselves. We’ve cleared all the debts now. Richard looks so proud when he tells people that the Butlers don’t owe anybody a penny. I’m sure those Fenians or whatever they call themselves these days – the vicar is convinced their new name is the Irish Republican Brotherhood, but I wouldn’t trust the vicar to know about a thing like that – they all want to drive us out. It’s been going on for centuries. We may lose in the end, Richard and I tell ourselves in our darker moments, but we won’t go out without a fight. We’ll dance until dawn at the last hunt ball, we’ll drink the last of the stirrup cup and finish the port in the cellar, we’ll kill the last fox in Ireland and exhaust ourselves at the last tennis party. We’ll go out in glitter and glory, dressed up in our finest with Young James playing the Dead March from Saul on the piano.’
She laughed, a rather desperate laugh, Powerscourt thought. ‘Tell me,’ he said, looking at her small delicate hands, ‘are you frightened?’
Mrs Butler paused and looked closely at Powerscourt. ‘I thought you were going to ask me that sooner or later,’ she said. ‘It’s not an easy question to answer. Of course I could tell you that I’m not frightened at all, but that wouldn’t be true.’ She paused again. ‘Sometimes I am very frightened indeed. I think I can say in all honesty that I’m not afraid for myself. It’s the children I worry about. If these dreadful thieves can steal into our house and take the dead from the walls why can’t they take the living children from their beds? Sometimes in the night when Richard is snoring away beside me – I shouldn’t have told you he snores, should I? – and I hear the creaks and strange noises all these old houses make in the night, I think the thieves have come back. Twice now I have crept into the children’s rooms to make sure they are still there.’
She looked at him defiantly. ‘I know what you’re going to ask me now. You’d better ask me, Lord Powerscourt.’
‘I’m not going to ask you that question just at the moment,’ said Powerscourt, smiling across at her, ‘I want to ask if you are sure your husband has not had a note from somebody, asking him to do something to get the pictures back. You see, Mrs Butler, surely, I have said to myself many times now, they must want something, these thieves. Why go to all the trouble of organizing these thefts, unless, of course, you want to sell the paintings and I’m not convinced that is the case, though I wouldn’t rule it out altogether. Why bother? So what do they want? They have to tell us at some point.’
Mrs Butler folded the hands Powerscourt admired so much together and looked down at the grass. ‘I know Richard doesn’t tell me everything. It wouldn’t be natural if he did. But he hasn’t mentioned a word to me about any messages. Is he telling the truth? To be perfectly honest with you, Lord Powerscourt, I just don’t know. He might be or he might not. He can be quite devious sometimes, though not,’ she giggled like a girl at this point, ‘when he’s snoring. I’m sorry,’ she went on, ‘I know that’s no help to you at all.’
> Now Powerscourt asked the question. ‘Would you think of taking the children away, Mrs Butler?’
‘Please call me Sylvia,’ she said inappropriately, perhaps playing for time. ‘I’ve thought about that a lot. I think if any more pictures are stolen from any more houses – why stop at two, after all – then I might take all the younger ones to England. Except I would miss Richard terribly, even when he snores away in the middle of the night. There I go again. I can’t give you a straight answer to anything, Lord Powerscourt. How very Irish of me!’ And she laughed a nervous little laugh but her eyes were locked on Powerscourt’s face and they were very serious indeed.
‘I wish I could offer you some reassurance,’ Powerscourt said, ‘but I wouldn’t want to give you false comfort.’
Their conversation was suddenly interrupted by a couple of fiendish war whoops as two small children with blackened faces shot across the grass and disappeared up a tree.
‘I’ve taken up enough of your time,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet. ‘I’ve got an idea. I think I’m going to have a look at the opposition, or what might be the opposition. Time to seize the initiative,’ although even as he said it, he knew he didn’t quite believe it.
‘Are you going to see the antiquated Christian Brother, sorry, I mean the antiquary Christian Brother?’ Sylvia Butler asked.
‘Nearly,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘nearly, but not quite. I’m going to call on the parish priest, who rejoices, if your steward’s information is accurate and I’m sure it is, in the name of O’Donovan Brady. With a name like that he could have fought in the Williamite wars or fled to France with Patrick Sarsfield.’
One bribe to an angelic child had Powerscourt rowed back to the mainland. Another, slightly larger one, sent a young footman on horseback to ask if it would be convenient for Lord Francis Powerscourt to call on Father Brady later that day. And so, shortly after five o’clock, Powerscourt had walked down the long drive and was standing in the main square of the little town of Butler’s Cross. Mulcahy and Sons, Grocery and Bar, seemed to be the main shop, dominating one side of the arena. It was flanked by O’Riordan, Bookmaker and Bar. Opposite them was the emporium of Horkan and Sons, Agricultural Suppliers and Bar. A pretty eighteenth-century house next door carried the discreet message, Delaney, Delaney and Delaney, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths. Just in front of the Roman Catholic church was MacSwiggin’s Hotel and Bar, fine rooms and wholesome Irish food. That meant ham and eggs, Powerscourt remembered, served twenty-four hours a day. Only in the legal establishment, he noted wryly, was it not possible to obtain alcoholic refreshment on the premises. Even then, the solicitors in their dark suits would probably whip out a bottle of John Powers finest whisky from their bottom drawer to close the transaction.
At precisely five thirty Powerscourt rang the bell of the priest’s house. The door was answered by a remarkably pretty girl, presumably the housekeeper, in her early twenties who showed him into what she assured him was the Father’s study. The walls were lined with books, some of them in Latin, some printed in Rome. The walls carried a heady cocktail of political and religious messages. Directly above the fireplace was a full-length portrait of Daniel O’Connell, the man they called the Liberator, widely credited with securing Catholic Emancipation some eighty years before and the final repeal of the Penal Laws that had discriminated against his co-religionists. To the left of it, in a much smaller frame – Powerscourt wondered if this indicated the true strengths of the priest’s convictions, politics looming larger than God in his mind – a weary-looking Christ was dragging his cross up the hill they called Golgotha. To the right, the empty tomb, brilliant bursts of light pouring from its depths and the women kneeling in awe on the stony ground. Opposite them, posing in front of a barricade in the fashionable clothes of a French revolutionary of the mid-1790s, Theobald Wolfe Tone, leading member of the United Irishmen who fomented the rebellion in 1798. And a Protestant. A Protestant, moreover, from the unholy city of Dublin. Powerscourt thought that there must be rejoicing, even for the sinner that repenteth. Perhaps, after this passage of time, Tone had become an honorary Catholic, received into the faith with the compassion the Church was famed for from the hellfires where his heretic religion would have undoubtedly carried him. Powerscourt was not surprised that there was no place on these walls for Charles Stewart Parnell, Protestant leader in the Westminster Parliament of a group of largely Catholic MPs who almost brought Home Rule, a form of self government, to Ireland, only to be brought down by his adultery with the married Mrs Katherine O’Shea, an adultery condemned from the pulpits of most of the Catholic churches in Ireland.
‘Good afternoon, Lord Powerscourt, how can I be of assistance?’ Father O’Donovan Brady was a short tubby man of about forty years, red of face, bald on top and with small suspicious eyes. His tone was polite but cold. Powerscourt thought he looked like Mr Pickwick, a billiard ball of a man, might have done had he been employed in the rack and thumbscrew department of the Inquisition, a priest more interested in sniffing out sin than in offering the consolation of salvation.
‘Thank you very much for seeing me at such short notice, Father,’ Powerscourt began. ‘I am staying with the Butlers up at Butler’s Court.’
Father Brady interrupted him. ‘I know who you are, Lord Powerscourt, and I know the nature of your business here with us.’ Of course, Powerscourt remembered. Word of his arrival and his mission would have travelled down the long drive to the little town as fast as the kingfishers that flew across the river. Johnny Fitzgerald had once observed that the sending of telegrams or maybe even important and interesting letters was not a safe practice in Ireland – the contents might have been read long before they reached the intended recipient.
‘A fine family, in spite of their religion, the Butlers,’ the priest went on. ‘The local people will always remember them for the work they did here in this barony at the time of the famine, slaughtering their cattle and handing over their crops to feed the starving. Not that you could say that about most of the landlord class, not by a long way.’
‘I was wondering, Father,’ Powerscourt was picking his words very carefully now. He had spoken more truthfully than he knew when he talked to Mrs Butler earlier that day about entering enemy territory, ‘if you could offer me any advice about the missing paintings, whether or not this has happened before, that sort of thing.’
Father O’Donovan Brady walked over to his sideboard and took out a full decanter and two large glasses. ‘Would you care for a small glass of sherry, Lord Powerscourt? I normally take one myself at this time of day.’
Powerscourt noted with interest that the Reverend’s glass was filled to a much higher level than his own. He wondered if the need for alcohol could overcome suspicion or even dislike of Protestants.
Father Brady sat down with his glass and drank deeply. ‘I fear,’ he shook his bald head as he spoke, ‘there will always be mischief in Ireland as long as the landlords are here.’ Powerscourt wondered suddenly if the man was actually a Fenian, or a secret member of the vicar’s Irish Republican Brotherhood, inciting revolt from the pulpit perhaps, withholding the sacrament from supporters of the status quo. ‘You ask if I can be of assistance to you in your sordid inquiries. Would you have me incriminate members of my own congregation, if I knew anything germane to the matter, which I do not? Are you asking me, in effect, to become an informer, virtually a spy for the Intelligence Department up at Dublin Castle?’
Tout, informer, Judas, there were few more dangerous words in Ireland where hatred of informers was as prevalent as the willingness of the native Irish to betray their own for money. The United Irishmen, Powerscourt recalled, had been riddled with informers, like a rotting honeycomb.
‘Of course I would not ask you to incriminate one of your own flock, Father. I was merely seeking information of a more general sort,’ said Powerscourt, watching Brady take another deep draught of his pale sherry.
‘Perhaps we can be clear about thin
gs, Lord Powerscourt. I cannot complain if you come to me looking for help in your squalid activities. But I am under no obligation to help you. I refuse to incriminate or betray any member of my congregation. I understand you reside most of the time in England now, Lord Powerscourt. Perhaps it would be better for this poor benighted country if all the Protestants, even the Butlers, went to live in England. Ireland is a land largely populated by Catholics, it always has been. One day, I am sure, God willing, it will be a proper Catholic nation. Whether or not there will be any significant place in that Catholic nation for other faiths is not for me to say, thank God.’
He went and poured himself a generous refill. He did not offer one to his guest but Powerscourt’s glass was hardly touched. ‘We have had landlords too long in Ireland, Lord Powerscourt, far too long.’
Powerscourt thought the time had come to beat a retreat. ‘Thank you very much for your time, Father,’ he said, heading for the door. ‘I can see little point in continuing this conversation.’
The priest showed him out. ‘We have conversion classes here in this house every other Thursday, Lord Powerscourt. Church of Ireland Protestants, Presbyterians, Methodists, all are welcome. It is never too late to welcome the sinner and the heretic into the true faith.’ With that he slammed the door shut. As he left Powerscourt was just able to see through the window Father O’Donovan Brady pouring himself another refill. It was only a quarter to six.
As he approached the steps leading up to Butler’s Court Powerscourt was passed by a carriage travelling at considerable speed. The passenger rushed inside. As Powerscourt entered the great white hall with its glorious staircase he heard Richard Butler cry, ‘Oh no! Oh, my God! How dreadful! How truly dreadful! How many this time?’
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