‘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.