Distant smoke signals told him the way to go. The road was rising now, going away from the sea into the dark of the mountains. Clouds had obscured the moon once more, Paddy’s muffled feet sounding very soft on the grass verge. He remembered McKenzie, the tracker he had worked with in India who could follow anybody anywhere, telling him about the American Indians and the smoke signals they could send hundreds of miles across the plains. Much more efficient than that bloody telegraph, McKenzie had said.
Quite soon there was a crossroads, he recalled. The left-hand fork led down into a valley and a little village at the bottom. The right-hand turn took you up into the heart of the mountains through a bare and bleak landscape where the wind howled across the empty scrub. The cart was about two hundred yards ahead of him, he thought. He paused regularly in case he got too close. Suddenly he remembered the date. This was 1897. In one year’s time it would be the hundredth anniversary of the rebellion of 1798, a terrible, doomed uprising that left thousands of Irish dead, slaughtered on the battlefield or hanged in reprisal for revolt. Powerscourt shuddered as he remembered the atrocities done to innocent Catholics, the punishment triangles set up in the squares of the little towns of Wexford forty miles south of here, fathers forced to kneel while their sons were lashed until the blood dripped down on to their parent beneath them. Then the roles were reversed, the bleeding sons forced to kneel while the fathers were lashed until a father’s blood ran down to mix with the son’s. This is my blood. He recalled the flights of oratory as the Irish protested in vain at the reign of terror imposed on them: ‘Merciful God what is the state of Ireland, and where shall you find the wretched inhabitants of this land? You may find him, perhaps, in jail, the only place of security – I had almost said of ordinary habitation! If you do not find him there, you may see him flying with his family from the flames of his own dwelling – lighted to his dungeon by the conflagration of his hovel; or you may find his bones bleaching on the green fields of his country; or you may find him tossing on the surface of the ocean, and mingling his groans with those tempests, less savage than his persecutors, that drift him to a returnless distance from his family and his home without charge, or trial or sentence.’
A sixteen-year-old Powerscourt had once declaimed the whole speech from the rooftop of Powerscourt House when his parents were away, his sisters a captive audience on the steps beneath. Two of them had fallen asleep, he remembered bitterly. One of the men in the cart was whistling softly as they headed into the mountains at the crossroads. The road had turned into little more than a track now. Puddles left from the recent rain glistened in the moonlight. Powerscourt wondered if the muffled feet would slip more easily. He checked his watch. It was a quarter to four. Not much time left for the second burial of the night. The cart was moving slowly now as the path wound its way ever higher into the mountains. On Powerscourt’s left the hill sloped precipitously down to a stream below. Then disaster struck.
A dog barked from up ahead. It seemed to come from the cart. Powerscourt hadn’t noticed any animals at all in the vehicle, only the straw and the tarpaulins and then the coffins beneath them. He stopped. The cart stopped. The barking did not. He heard one of the men get out. He could hear whispering up ahead. Did they suspect they were being followed? You could suspect anything in the shadows of this night, carrying cases of German rifles across a darkened landscape to be interred with the already buried dead. Powerscourt swore. If they thought they were being followed they would come back another night and dig up the grave of George Thomas Carew and move his companion coffins somewhere else. They might not bury the other two at all tonight, merely returning the cart to the remote farm it had come from and turning gravediggers again another time. The knowledge he had was priceless. Once the authorities in Dublin Castle knew where the rifles were buried they had the manpower to watch them right round the clock. But even the suspicion of a follower, the fear that they had not been alone, and the guns would be moved. The dog kept barking. Powerscourt thought it could bark all night. Maybe it had enjoyed a long sleep and its lungs were fit to bark until dawn.
He heard somebody coming down the path towards him, very quietly. He retreated towards the trees behind. The man held something in his hand. Still the dog barked. It was enough to wake the dead, even though they had been disturbed once already this evening.
The pistol shot was louder than the dog. It echoed around the mountains. Powerscourt knew nobody would take any notice. Turn your faces to the wall, While the gentlemen go by. One hundred yards was too far for a pistol. Powerscourt thanked God they hadn’t taken out any of those German rifles from their coffins. But then, he smiled incongruously, they would come with pages and pages of instructions, impossible to read in the dark, probably impossible to understand in the daylight.
The man fired again. Powerscourt felt the bullet pass a few yards away from him and land with an ominous plop in a pine tree further down the hill. He could run. His horse would be faster than man or dog. He didn’t like the thought of running away.
A third pistol shot. The dog was barking non-stop now, engaged in a trial of noise with its master.
Powerscourt looked down at the terribly steep slope to his left. The man fired again, twice in quick succession. Powerscourt screamed. He fell to the ground. His body rolled down the slope, slowly at first, then with increasing speed, bumping into rocks, bouncing off trees, until it came to a stop two hundred and fifty yards beneath, the head dangling forward into the stream. The other man came from the cart to peer down below.
‘Who the divil was that, do you suppose?’ said the first gravedigger.
‘God knows. He’s dead now. If the bullet didn’t get him, the fall will have done,’ replied his friend with the pipe.
‘Do you want me to go down and make sure he’s dead? Finish him off if he’s not?’
‘I’m sure the bullets got him. He’ll have been dead before he reached the bottom.’
The man with the pipe was a regular winner at shooting competitions all round the county. He was certain. The two men made their way back to the cart. At the bottom of the slope, his curly hair floating in the stream, the body of Lord Francis Powerscourt lay very still. By the side of the path above, the horse waited for its master.
21
The cart moved off up the hill deeper into the impenetrable mountains. The dog was quiet now, its duty done. A mile and a half further up, the cart stopped by a tiny chapel on the hillside. Stunted trees, their branches bent into weird positions by the wind, guarded a desolate graveyard. The headstones were poor up here, not the marble slabs that graced the tombs of the Protestants in the lush valleys below. The gravediggers resumed their routine in silence, the pipe once again left burning fitfully by the side of the road. The earth was rockier here and it took longer to dig down the extra depth to hide the German visitors. Faint streaks of dawn were appearing in the Irish Sea behind them as the two men mounted their cart once more, their mission accomplished, the weapons hidden where no one would know their burial place.
‘Are you going back to Dublin this morning?’ said the first gravedigger.
‘I am that,’ replied the man with the pipe. ‘I’ve a class to teach at nine o’clock this morning. I’ll get the train from Greystones if you can drop me off.’
At the bottom of the hill Lord Francis Powerscourt was examining every bone in his body, very slowly and very carefully. Christ, he was sore. He remembered the training McKenzie had given them in falling down hills without being hurt. He thanked God he had paid attention. He thought he would try standing up. It was extremely painful. His left ankle didn’t feel too good. It was a sprain, a bad sprain, he told himself. He could feel bruises, nasty bruises, all over his arms and his legs. Blood was running from a deep cut on his temple, dripping on to his coat. His head felt as if it had been battered by a hundred rocks. But he wasn’t dead. Not yet anyway.