This was the origin of The Skedule. Once a week Father Macdonald would pore over it with Heneghan, checking every entry and every planned completion date of every section of the work. Heneghan, whatever his other qualities, was a deeply religious man – his faith, he was sure, had won him the contract, after all – and he too feared for the late completion. The wrath of the priests would be as nothing compared with the wrath of God. And at that moment Walter knew that they were two weeks behind Skedule. With luck, they could make it up, but a spell of bad weather could prove fatal. He too joined the search for Jameson.
‘Bloody donkey gone? With all that glass still strapped to its side? You stupid buggers, why didn’t you unload it all? God in heaven, what fools am I given to carry out His wishes! Fools!’
He strode to the other side of the half-finished building and peered down at the waters of Clew Bay beneath. ‘Jameson!’ he roared. ‘In the name of St Patrick, come back here at once, you daft animal!’
Jameson did not choose to reply.
‘Jameson! In the name of St Patrick and all the saints of Ireland, come back here at once!’ Charlie O’Malley sent his message to the other side of the Holy Mountain. Still there was neither answer nor sighting of the donkey.
‘Jameson! In the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Patrick and all the saints of Ireland, shift your bloody arse up here!’ Not surprisingly, Tim Philbin’s message found no answer either. Walter Heneghan thought of gathering his little band together and leading them in prayer to St Anthony of Padua, Hammer of Heretics and patron saint of all things lost, but he thought it might work better if he said it to himself when he was safely back in the tent.
The men were sullen for the rest of the day. Charlie O’Malley would go on sad little missions a couple of hundred yards at a time looking for Jameson and calling out promises of extra carrots, or a fine cauliflower for the donkey was strangely fond of cauliflower. Only at the end of the day, when they were taking a well-earned rest in Campbell’s public house at the foot of Croagh Patrick, did Walter Heneghan realize that his prayer under canvas to St Anthony, Hammer of Heretics, had been answered. The landlord took him to one side.
‘Have any of youse lost a donkey?’ asked the landlord.
‘A donkey?’ said Heneghan, as if he had just heard the word for the first time. ‘We bloody well have lost a donkey.’
‘Well, it’s here,’ said the landlord. ‘It’s out the back, so it is.’
‘Thank God for that,’ said Walter, shaking the man firmly by the hand. ‘What’ll you have? A donkey found is worth a drink any day in my book. But tell me this. Did the beast have any glass with it?’
‘Glass?’ said the landlord. ‘What sort of glass, for God’s sake? Beer glass, whiskey glass, that kind of thing? Does the animal drink like a human?’
‘No, no,’ said Heneghan. ‘Glass for building, windows, that sort of stuff.’
‘That sort of glass?’ replied the landlord innocently. ‘What would a bloody donkey want with window glass, for Christ’s sake?’
‘It’s for the chapel,’ said Heneghan sadly, ‘the chapel at the top of the mountain.’
‘Glass with the donkey, is it now?’ said the landlord. He turned to the crowd in his bar, most of whom looked as though they had spent the entire afternoon, if not the entire week, on the premises, ‘We haven’t seen any glass with that donkey, boys, have we?’
‘No no, no glass. Donkey yes, glass no,’ they chorused.
As he trudged back up to his tent, clutching half a dozen beer bottles, Walter Heneghan added a spiritual question to the long list of temporal ones he had to ask Father Macdonald. Why was it that St Anthony of Padua was so good with donkeys and so bloody useless with glass?
Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald and William Moore were on their way from Butler’s Court to Moore Castle to inspect the site of the vanished paintings. Moore Castle, its owner proudly informed Powerscourt and Fitzgerald as they approached its entrance, had been in his family since the days of Cromwell. The place, Powerscourt realized as the carriage drew to a halt at the Castle’s lower section, had had many builders over the years. Somewhere there must be a bit of Georgian, but it was in Victorian times that every single generation seemed to have extended, rebuilt, knocked down or restructured. Architects must have regarded the place as a treasure trove, Kubla Khan miraculously translated to County Roscommon.
‘I’ll show you round the place later,’ Moore said, leading them up an enormous marble staircase, adorned on both sides with the inevitable antlers of elk and stag. ‘Pictures first.’ Moore brought them through an astonishing entrance hall, a vast, long, high room with a gallery running round the top and a stained-glass window off to the left halfway up the stairs, and into the dining room, a beautiful room, the walls painted in pale yellow, adorned with well-fed putti and elaborate highly decorated plasterwork.
‘This used to be the drawing room,’ Moore began, ‘but my grandfather thought it would work better as a dining room. Used to be seven portraits, four full-lengths in here,’ Moore said sadly, nodding at the series of blank spaces on his walls, ‘oldest the one above the fireplace there, Josiah Moore from the 1720s. Then on the opposite wall, his grandson, Joshua, 1770s, on the other two walls his son and grandson. I don’t know if the money ran out, but the other three, my grandfather and his brother and great grandfather on either side of the fire, were much smaller, portrait size is what I believe you call them, head and shoulders only, no greatcoats or uniforms.’
Outside they could hear the noises of grass being cut. There was a distant view of dark mountains.
‘I’m quite lucky in one respect,’ Moore went on, sitting himself down at the head of his table and waving a hand inviting his guests to be seated too. ‘I heard about the difficulties they had over at Butler’s Court in identifying their pictures. I actually had a great uncle who was interested in Irish portraits – can you believe it? – and he made a catalogue of them all.’ Powerscourt thought he made his ancestor sound like a man who claimed he could fly to the moon or empty the Irish Sea. ‘He tried to cover all the paintings in all the great houses in Connaught, you know,’ Moore went on. ‘Mind you, he went mad before he could finish it.’ Fitting fate for the fellow, in Moore’s book at any rate, Powerscourt thought. ‘Anyway,’ Moore nodded at a neat pile of papers in front of him, ‘here are the details of all the ones that went missing. This is for you, Powerscourt, obviously.’ Powerscourt saw that the entries were full and comprehensive, easily sufficient for any art dealer to identify a picture if it passed through his hands.