The Ormonde carriage drove them at breakneck speed along the Louisburg road. Butler pointed out Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s Holy Mountain, towering over the landscape, brooding over the dark waters of the bay, imposing itself on the grey frontage of cut stone that was Ormonde House. A tall figure with black hair and prominent black eyebrows was pacing restlessly in front of the steps of his home.
‘Butler,’ he said, pumping his visitor’s hand, ‘glad you could come. Powerscourt, I presume you are Powerscourt, welcome to Ormonde House. And a sorry welcome it is too!’ There was, Powerscourt thought, a terrible anger flowing through this man, a rage that he was going to share with his visitors. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Come and see what the bastards have done!’
He brought them into an elegant entrance hall and through a door on the right into the Picture Gallery. Or, Powerscourt thought sadly, what had been the Picture Gallery. It was a beautiful room, long and broad with a polished parquet floor and great windows looking out over the gardens at the far end.
‘Look at it!’ roared Ormonde, pointing to the five gaps on the blue wall, one after the other as if they had taken a sudden burst from a machine gun. ‘Look at what they have done, God damn their eyes! Two full-lengths, three portrait-sized paintings of my ancestors! All gone! Stolen by some thieves whose own ancestors probably rotted to death in the workhouse with the typhus in the famine years! And a bloody good thing too!’
Dennis Ormonde was literally shaking with fury. His face was almost purple. ‘When I think of what they did, my family, for this county and for this country, I despair. I tell you what I would like to do, what one of my forebears actually did,’ he pointed, his hand shaking as he did so, at the first of the full-length gaps in the wall, ‘in the last rebellion in these parts. The authorities – my people have always been the authorities round here – brought the punishment triangles out in the main square over there in Westport. If the bastards talked before the action started they were released. If not they were lashed to the triangles, stripped and flogged by the yeomanry till their blood was running in the gutters and they were screaming for their mothers. But they talked after a while. My great grandfather got the names of the rebels from the victims on the triangles. And when they were caught, the bloody rebels, they were hanged, hundreds of them. Bloody good thing too. Too soft a fate for some of them, hanging!’
Dennis Ormonde walked back down his gallery and closed the door. He went back to stand by the empty spaces once again. They seemed to reignite his anger.
‘I’m bloody well not going to take this lying down, I can tell you. They may be taking over the land, they may have all the bloody MPs in that useless bloody Parliament in Westminster, but they can’t steal my property, they damned well can’t. I’ve talked to the local police, might as well have talked to the man who referees the hurling matches for all the good that’ll do. I’ve wired to Dublin Castle and an inspector and his colleague from the Intelligence Department are on their way. I’ve sent word to the Grand Master of the Orange Lodge and the man who runs the Royal Black Preceptory in Enniskillen asking for one hundred men, aged between twenty-five and forty and in good health, to come and report for orders. They’re to bring their own weapons. One hundred stout Protestants to carry the battle to the foe. Croppies lie down. And I’ve asked the Apprentice Boys in Derry to stand by with another hundred if we need them. I’m going to station guards on duty all night at every Big House with reasonable paintings in Mayo and the neighbouring counties. And, one last thing, I’m going to post a notice in Westport and Castlebar tomorrow afternoon when the thing’s back from the printers, offering thirty pounds reward for information leading to the return of the paintings, all of them, mine and yours, Butler, and Connolly’s and Moore’s, and the capture of the bastards who took them. They’ve always betrayed their own for money in the past, the spineless scum, maybe they’ll do it again.’
The look of fury never left Ormonde’s face. If the thieves had known the response they were going to receive, Powerscourt thought, they might have stayed in bed. Posting a reward for such an enormous sum was one thing, importing one hundred armed Protestants into a predominantly Catholic county was another, fraught with dire political consequences. Orthodox Catholic opinion would be appalled and might contemplate reprisals. The Church itself might feel bound to take a stand. They could not watch from their pulpits and their altars while armed Protestant gangs patrolled the countryside and threatened their parishioners. As for less orthodox Catholic opinion, Powerscourt was filled with foreboding. The men who came out in the night in these parts knew all about houghing or mutilating their landlords’ cattle and lighting up the night sky as they torched the Big Houses. Not far from here, not all that long ago, they had invented the boycott at Lough Mask House. Would it travel twenty or thirty miles and devastate the Ormondes of Ormonde House? If the angry man with the black hair and the black eyebrows went ahead with all his plans, it could plunge the west of Ireland into a political crisis. Powerscourt felt he had to try to prevent his investigation ending up in a whirlpool of sectarian violence.
‘Lunch,’ announced Dennis Ormonde. ‘Can’t let the bastards put us off our food.’
The Ormonde House dining room was one of the most beautiful in Ireland but Powerscourt had little time to admire the plaster glories on the ceiling. Still muttering to himself, Ormonde began to carve a great side of beef, the blood dripping down on to the serving dish. ‘Got to have it rare, this Mayo beef,’ he said. ‘Well cooked it tastes like roasted string.’ He paused and looked around the table, heavy with ornate silver.
‘Horseradish!’ he shouted at the butler. ‘Where’s the bloody horseradish, for Christ’s sake? Twenty years I’ve been eating beef in this house with you serving at the table and you still manage to forget the horseradish!’ He shook his head. ‘Wife’s fond of it too, oddly enough,’ he added, nodding at his guests and heaping enormous portions of Mayo beef on to the three plates. ‘She’s even planted some of the stuff in the kitchen garden so we can make our own.’
Two footmen sidled in and began serving roast potatoes and peas. The butler who had fled the room at great speed reappeared with the offending horseradish. Ormonde took a giant’s helping. ‘Now bugger off,’ he shouted at the servants. ‘Come back in twenty minutes with the pudding. And if I catch any of you listening at the doors, you’re fired!’
‘Now then, Butler,’ he said between mouthfuls of meat, ‘what do you think of my plan? Shake the bastards up a bit, don’t you think, when they find a brace of Orangemen waiting for them as they creep out of the shrubberies?’
‘Well,’ said Butler in a hesitant tone of voice and Powerscourt knew it was going to be a difficult afternoon, ‘it’s certainly bold. It has merit. But I just wonder if it might not be a little inflammatory.’
‘Inflammatory? Inflammatory?’ Ormonde yelled, pausing to lower his fork. ‘Just tell me this, who’s doing the inflammatory round here? Is it me? Have I been inflaming things? I have not. These bastards are the ones with the inflammatory, breaking into people’s houses and stealing their pictures. If that’s not inflammatory then I don’t know what is!’
‘I have every sympathy with your plight, after all I am in the same position as yourself,’ said Butler, ‘but I do think we have certain responsibilities as landlords not to start something which could lead to a great deal of violence.’ Powerscourt saw Butler was pressing himself back into his chair as hard as he could as if it were a defensive wall or rampart.