‘Not yet,’ said Fitzgerald cheerfully. ‘When that hits town it’ll probably be an army three thousand strong, enough to take Galway in a siege. I tell you one sad thing, Lady Lucy and Francis. I was talking to the middle Delaney – who’s one of the three Delaneys, solicitors with offices in the square, Lady Lucy,’ – Johnny remembered she had only arrived recently – ‘in the saloon bar of MacSwiggin’s, a nice place to take a drink if you like to be surrounded by religious pictures, and he was telling me sad stories about the cricket team. He’s a great fan of the cricket, Bartholomew Delaney, been playing for the local team for ages. He says it’s dying out, the Butler’s Cross Eleven, no new recruits coming in at all. Soon, according to Bartholomew, there won’t be any young fellows left out in the field to chase the ball and cut it off before it reaches the boundary. The opposing batsmen, he said, will just have to hit the bloody ball and it’ll go for four. Butler’s Cross fielders will all be too decrepit to run after the thing. The opposing side will make hundreds and hundreds of runs. Butler’s Cross cricket team, old age pensioners a speciality, will never win a match again.’
‘What’s happened, Johnny?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Where have all the young men gone?’
‘They’ve gone Gaelic, that’s what they’ve done. The Gaelic Athletic Association, or GAA as it’s called, is very strong in these parts. They’re allowed to play Gaelic football and hurling, but only Irish games. Once you sign up, you can’t play cricket or soccer, it’s against the rules. Ping pong, Bartholomew Delaney maintained sourly, was still allowed but the rest are proscribed as the games of the occupying power.’
‘And who runs this GAA, Johnny?’ Powerscourt had an improbable vision of the Pickwickian Father O’Donovan Brady, whistle in hand, refereeing a match, whiskey flask concealed in his baggy shorts.
‘Ah,’ said Johnny, ‘there’s a thing now. It’s the Christian Brothers, so it is. Militant for independence and Home Rule, most of them. There’s another thing, Francis, I nearly forgot. They’ve heard all about you down there in MacSwiggin’s – well, in the public they have. I’m not sure about the saloon. They say you’re a great detective man from London who’s never failed to solve a crime, so they do. You’ve got almost magical powers, according to them, a Merlin come to Meath.’
‘God in heaven,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m not sure I want my name bandied about in Diarmuid MacSwiggin’s Bar and Hotel. I might pick up all sorts of unappetizing clients.’
‘At least they’d be able to pay you,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Quick loan from Mulcahy the grocer and they can pay you straight away.’
Powerscourt turned to Lady Lucy. ‘Time to get serious. Lucy, we need some advice. This case seems to revolve around the men, Connolly, Butler, Moore, Ormonde, but I’m sure the wives are at least as important. Have you had time to have a proper talk with Mrs Butler? What would you do if you were the mistress of one of these embattled houses?’
‘I know what I would do,’ Lady Lucy said firmly, ‘and I think I know what they are going to do. This being Ireland, you won’t be surprised to hear that they are not the same thing. It’s the children, you see, for me. And there seem to be so many of them running around. They would be even easier to steal than the pictures. Maybe the thieves would face such unpopularity if they kidnapped little ones that they couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t take the chance, myself. I’d take the whole lot of them over to England and wait till everything’s blown over.’
‘And Mrs Moore and Mrs Butler and the rest?’
‘I think they will stay. You and Johnny would understand this much better than I do, coming from here in the first place. It’s all this history, Francis. I’ve never known a place with so much history. They’ve been through so much of it, these families, wars in Cromwell’s time, the Battle of the Boyne and all that, the rising in 1798 I think it was,’ she looked at Powerscourt who nodded encouragement, ‘the famine, the land wars, it never seems to stop. At any point these Moores and Butlers and Connollys could have sold up, packed their bags and left.’
‘Wouldn’t have got very much for the land, selling up during those upheavals,’ said Johnny. ‘Sorry for interrupting.’
Lady Lucy smiled. ‘The point is, Johnny, that they didn’t sell up. They stuck it out. Sticking it out seems to be a key component of the Anglo-Irish character. They’ve all inherited these places from their fathers. When they look at all these adorable children they can see the Big Houses passing on to them. The children are tomorrow. If you take them away you take away the future. What’s the point of being here if you run away when a painting is taken from the walls?’
‘Too much history, that’s the trouble with Ireland,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Pity you can’t sell bits of it off to some of these new places where they haven’t got any at all.’
He rose from the tea table and went to the window. A loud game of tennis was taking place on the grass. Three small boys were having climbing races up the trees.
‘Johnny,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to keep your eyes and ears open down in Butler’s Cross. Somebody may say something they shouldn’t one day soon. Lucy, can you keep us informed about the state of feminine opinion about the place? I’d be most interested to know exactly what was in that letter the thieves sent Richard Butler. If you can winkle that out of Sylvia Butler it’ll be champagne all round. Now I must go down to the town to post this letter.’
Powerscourt went round to the far end of the stable block to collect his bicycle. It was a fairly old model with no known owner. He had been riding it for some days now and the stable lads kept it in a special place for him. He was thinking about what he might say to the Archbishop as he set off. The ground between Butler’s Court and the town rose slightly as you left the house and then dropped down steeply towards the square. Heavily laden carriages had been known to slow to walking pace or less as they toiled up the slope. Cyclists preferred the outward to the inward journey. Powerscourt pedalled hard as he began the descent for the last post was but minutes away. About halfway down his hair was streaming out behind his head and he thought he should slow down. He pulled on the brakes. Nothing happened. He tried the other right-hand brake. Nothing happened. He was travelling very fast now as he tried both brakes again. Nothing. At the bottom of the drive there was a great stone wall. Powerscourt knew he couldn’t control the bicycle much longer. It was never designed to move at this speed and it had begun to shake violently. Anything could happen now. He turned the handlebars slightly to the left and tried to steer a path into the woods where the undergrowth would slow him down. That wall at the bottom would surely kill him. Still travelling at slightly over twenty miles an hour he crashed into the brambles. The front wheel ran over a branch on the ground and Powerscourt was catapulted out of the saddle and dragged along the ground by the momentum until he hit a tree. For a moment or two he was unconscious. He had a gash on his right leg. His wrist ached. Blood was pouring from a long wound on his head. Briefly he thought of Lady Lucy. They were sitting in the drawing room in Markham Square. Then some sense of duty called him. He remembered his letter. Limping, lurching, occasionally dragging himself along the ground, he made his way to the end of the drive. He reeled across the street and posted his letter in the box. He turned and crawled back towards Butler’s Court and Lady Lucy. He collapsed by the ornamental arch at the gates, his blood dripping on to the hard hot ground. His last thought before he passed out was that if he was going to die, it was good that his last letter should have been to an archbishop. A stone lion with a stone ball stood sentry above him. Outside MacSwiggin’s an elderly customer nursing his pint watched in astonishment as the apparition vanished from sight. He didn’t think he’d been drinking that much. Later on, as he retold his story in the public bar, he remembered that the wraithlike figure reminded him of an engraving in his auntie’s parlour. It was, he averred, and many believed him, the ghost of Theobald Wolfe Tone, the man had a definite look of Tone about him, come to post a last letter to the French, asking for reinforcements.