‘“That night our chief we laid
Clay in the ice cold sod,
O’er the pale sky sped
A strange star home to God.
Ran the East sky cold,
The bright star glistened and went,
’Twas green and glittering gold
That lit the firmament.”’
Uncle Peter closed the book. He folded his dressing gown around him and shuffled towards the door, pausing only to grab the remains of the last bottle of port. He didn’t bother with the glass.
‘Goodnight to you all,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t say another word. Thank you for listening,’ and then he was gone, the sound of his feet shuffling slowly across the marble floor of the hall gradually fading.
‘I met a man,’ said Johnny, ‘on the way out of the cemetery that day, selling hurling sticks with that ribbon round them like the boyos had. He must have had teams of women making them up for him all day. He reckoned he’d sold hundreds and hundreds of the things. He thought he might have made enough money for the deposit on a pub, the man. Said he’d always wanted to own a pub. He was going to call it the Parnell Arms.’
Johnny and Young James departed, Johnny telling stories of pubs with strange names. Powerscourt went to the window and pulled back the curtains. There were no shooting stars by the Shannon this evening. A fox was patrolling by the edge of the river. He opened the window and peered sideways at the facade of this great house, built in the early eighteenth century when any talk about Home Rule for a Catholic Ireland would have sounded like the ravings of the insane.
That night he had a strange dream. He was looking at a great long beach that he thought was Silver Strand in a wild and remote corner of Connemara. At the end was a pier with a small sailing ship. There was a crowd of gentlemen on the beach in those long frock coats worn centuries before, coats of scarlet and black and dark blue, with great white and cream stocks at the top. Their brightly polished shoes with heavy buckles were being slowly stained by the sand. They had just finished building a large number of sandcastles, formidable structures that looked as though they could withstand the Atlantic waves. The more imaginative of them had placed shells along the front to denote where the doors and windows would have been. Some had elaborate turrets and tower-like structures on the top. Gentlemen’s houses in a gentlemen’s Ireland. They clapped as he watched and went off together, arm in arm, towards the pier to board their boat. They sailed slowly away towards the south. Perhaps these were the Wild Geese, Powerscourt reflected, a great body of Irish lords and their followers who fled the country after the Elizabethan Wars. Suddenly Powerscourt began to run after the vessel, shouting helplessly as he went. The wind took his words and blew them back past his face towards the mountains. He wanted to tell them. He so much wanted to tell them but it was too late. They had misjudged the tide. Their castles were not safe. The waves were beginning to lap around the foundations now, to swirl along the sides, to curl relentlessly around the back and turn the structures into small islands, cut off from the main. The sandcastles lasted longer than he would have imagined possible. In the end it was hopeless. Undermined at the front, falling away at the back, they were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the waves. They began to collapse, slowly at first, and then erosion lapped away at them until there was almost nothing left. By the time this tide went out, Powerscourt was certain, the sands would be like the ones in Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’, lone and level and stretching far away.
PART TWO
THE BLACK ROOM
No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation. No man has a right to say to his country, ‘Thus far shall you go and no further.’
5
There was more trouble at the summit of Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s Holy Mountain. The men building the chapel at the top, a place where pilgrims could rest and celebrate Mass after climbing the twisting two thousand seven hundred feet to the summit, had lost some vital supplies which they needed that day for a key stage in the construction. Rather, they hadn’t lost the supplies, they had lost the donkey that had carried them up. In their haste to get started before the weather broke and the rains came that day, the workmen had only unloaded one side of the animal. The other side, along with the donkey, had disappeared.
‘Jameson! Jameson!’ Charlie O’Malley shouted in despair. ‘Where the divil are you, in God’s name?’ After the earlier occasion when one of his two donkeys, working in rotation according to the principles of the great agriculturalist Turnip Townsend, had been persuaded to abandon its sit-down strike and proceed to the summit by the aroma from a whiskey bottle, Charlie had christened the animal Jameson after the makers of the golden liquid in Dublin. The other beast, currently munching contentedly at what was left of the thin grass in the O’Malley back yard, was called Powers in honour of the John Powers whiskey establishment in Cork. If he was ever able to afford a third, Charlie was going to christen it Bushmills. Bushmills, Charlie thought, would be a fine name for a donkey, giving his stable a neat geographical balance with donkeys and distilleries placed at Cork and Dublin and one in Bushmills in the north.
‘You can’t lose a bloody donkey on the top of a mountain,’ said Tim Philbin. ‘It’s not possible. It’s ridiculous. There’s nothing higher than the top of my boot between here and the water down below.’
‘You shouldn’t have hit it yesterday, Charlie,’ said Austin Ruddy, staring helplessly towards the mountains behind Croagh Patrick. ‘I’m tired of telling you. You’re not kind to the beast, never have been.’
‘Eats enough, so it does,’ said Charlie O’Malley. ‘They’ll eat me out of house and home, those damned donkeys, the wife says.’
‘What’s all this?’ A great roar came from inside the tent where the contractor, Mr Walter Heneghan of Heneghan and Sons, Builders and Surveyors of Louisburg, had his headquarters. A small wiry man with grey hair emerged, clutching in his hand a little book which contained, as all his workmen knew, what Mr Heneghan referred to as The Skedule. He had never been a master in the reading and writing department, Walter Heneghan, in spite of all the best efforts of the straps and the canes of the Christian Brothers, and the maintenance of this document, its daily updating with the latest developments, kept him occupied at a rickety card table in the tent and seemed to fill most of his days. He did not actually do much of the work himself, leaving his mind free for his more important duties and calculations. The rest of the men were convinced Walter spent most of the afternoon sleeping under his canvas roof while they laboured on in rain or sunshine but they never dared open the canvas flap to look inside.
Heneghan’s immediate employer was a very difficult man, even for a priest. The Reverend Michael Macdonald, Administrator of Westport, was a nervous churchman. He worried. Every day he worried. Eight years after the event he still remembered as if it were yesterday the disaster that had struck him in his previous incarnation as parish priest in Ballinrobe. He had been responsible there for the erection and consecration of a new convent for the Order of the Immaculate Conception a mile or so outside the town. One of the nuns, a Sister Mary Magdalene, had been his particular friend in those times. Six months before the completion date he had organized the grand opening. The bishop was to come. A couple of local MPs had promised to attend. Nuns of every sort to be found in the west of Ireland were coming in their finest wimples to bless their sisters in their good fortune. In the months that followed he believed the assurances of his building foreman that all would be finished on time. All, as the Reverend Michael Macdonald remembered far too clearly, even now, was not going to be finished on time. Only three days before the ceremony did he discover that the dignitaries would be opening a building where the cells had no walls, the kitchen had no cooking facilities and the chapel had no windows. Everything had to be cancelled, the invitations withdrawn, Galway’s and Mayo’s nuns instructed to stay in their places. The bishop had shouted at him. The Mayo News ran the story for three editions in a row, coming as close as Irish journalists dared in those days to criticizing the clergy. Every night for the next two years he had included in his prayers a plea to his God that never, never again should he be called upon to supervise the construction of a building, secular or religious. He would not even contemplate the erection of a badly needed shed in the garden of the priest’s house. And now he was lumbered with it all again. God had singled him out for punishment once more. His sins were not numerous, he knew, but the penance for them was huge. A late convent was one thing. A late chapel on the summit of Ireland’s Holy Mountain would be far far worse. He might be expelled from the priesthood in disgrace, or sent on the worst punishment any Irish bishop could deliver, a life sentence to a parish in the slums of Dublin which had ruined many a better man than he.