‘And I don’t suppose you know their names? Protestants, I presume, seeing where they were.’
‘They looked like Protestants all right,’ said Cathal, ‘but I don’t know their names, I’m afraid.’
Father Brady dug into his pocket and handed over five shillings. ‘That is your reward, young man. I fear great sin is taking place in our midst. I want you to do two things, young Cathal. I want you to find out their names and if they are married or not. And I want you to see if you can watch them before they put their clothes back on. Before we name the Devil’s work, we have to know precisely what it is. You did well to come to me today.’ He showed the young man to the front door. ‘I’m very pleased with you. Remember, Cathal, if doubts should come, that you are doing the Lord’s work.’
Johnny Fitzgerald returned late that evening to a depressed Ormonde House. The host had retired to bed early with a bottle of Armagnac. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were having a disconsolate conversation about where you might hide two women of the Protestant Ascendancy.
‘Word of the kidnap reached Westport about five o’clock in the afternoon, Francis,’ said Johnny. ‘Must have travelled round the town in about half an hour flat, I should think. Probably reached Galway by now. Limerick tomorrow morning, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘What of your defrocked Christian Brother, Johnny?’ asked Lady Lucy.
‘He was rather disappointing, really,’ said Johnny with a laugh. ‘I’d imagined all sorts of terrible crimes he might have committed but all he’d done was to fall in love with a young widow whose son was in his class. He was going to resign but the authorities got in first. They said he must have broken his vow of celibacy with this woman before he handed in his resignation. He said it would be difficult to maintain your vows in the company of this girl. She was very beautiful. He did have one interesting theory, though, about how to start a revolution in Ireland.’
‘And what was that?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘All you needed, the former Brother Mooney maintained, was the Christian Brothers and all the young men from the Gaelic Athletic Association on your side. You take over the towns of Ireland one by one. Then you march on Dublin. It’s revolution by hurling sticks, if you follow me. The only snag, as your man pointed out, was that the whole bloody country would end up being run by the Christian Brothers. He didn’t fancy that too much.’
‘What do you think about this pilgrimage?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘It’s two days away now and I’m not sure we should do it with all this fuss about the missing women. It wouldn’t look right, would it?’
‘But I thought you promised the Archbishop, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘that you and some friends were going to accept his invitation.’
‘That was before this latest tragedy.’
‘I think we should do it,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald.
‘So do I,’ said Lady Lucy.
‘Very well,’ said Powerscourt. ‘We’ll have to look out our stoutest boots and walking sticks. I want to go anyway. Perhaps I’ll find inspiration half-way up the Holy Mountain.’
11
They didn’t find the Ormonde women the next day. Hundreds of policemen knocked on doors, checked rooms, wrote down details of who might be absent from the house in case they should prove to be the kidnappers. All of this information was laboriously copied into great ledgers whose pages began to resemble the early stages of a census, a Domesday Book of Westport and the surrounding countryside in 1905. More policemen were expected the following day and on the Monday, although their work would inevitably be confused by the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick. The Chief Constable himself made periodic inspections of the information, making sure his systems were working properly and had not been diluted by human weakness.
Powerscourt roamed round the gardens of Ormonde House. The last Orangemen not out on the hillsides were completing the search of the woods, singing strange Orange hymns and ballads as they worked. He would sit in the meagre library from time to time, cursing himself for his failure. Lord Francis Powerscourt did not like failure. He had rarely experienced it in his professional life. For him, failure in this case would be a scar on his reputation, something he would never be able to erase. Lady Lucy tried to console him, to appease his restlessness. She knew from experience that if Francis worried away at a problem with the front of his mind, as it were, little would happen. The mysteries he set himself to solve did not often yield to a full frontal assault. In Lady Lucy’s opinion it would not be the siege engines that broke the defenders, but a flash of insight that said there must be a path up the cliff at the rear end of the castle.
‘I’m useless, Lucy,’ he said as they took tea in the library. ‘The only reason these people haven’t pensioned me off is that they’re too polite. I’ll become a tolerated guest, rather like Uncle Peter back at Butler’s Court. Maybe I should start work on the rest of his history of Ireland. He stopped in 1891, you see. That would keep me out of mischief. I couldn’t raise anybody’s hopes that I might actually improve their lot by solving the mysteries that are ruining their lives then.’
‘What nonsense, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, who had seen him in these moods before. ‘You know you’ll solve the mystery, you know you will. You mustn’t be so hard on yourself, my love.’
‘Hard on myself?’ said Powerscourt bitterly. ‘How can I not be hard on myself when I can’t even solve the mystery of a few disappearing pictures, for Christ’s sake. It’s pathetic.’
Lady Lucy suspected that Powerscourt’s sense of himself would take a severe blow if he ever failed in a case. But then he never had. Not yet, anyway. Perhaps, she said to herself, anxious to find something that would cheer up her husband, perhaps the pilgrimage would do him good.
It was Charlie O’Malley who found the body in the oratory on top of Croagh Patrick at a quarter to four in the morning. Charlie, accompanied by two of his fleet of donkeys, Bushmills and Jack Daniels, had been making a last push towards profit from the stout. His donkeys had reached the summit laden with the stuff. The dead man was young, not more than eighteen or twenty in Charlie’s view, slight of build and with black hair. He had been shot twice, once in the chest and once in the back of the head. Dark matter from these wounds had congealed on his clothing. He had been placed, in a sitting position, with his back to the altar. Dead eyes gazed down at the empty pews and the non-existent congregation. ‘Jesus Mary and Joseph!’ Charlie had said and knelt down beside the corpse. He said two Hail Marys and one Our Father. At first Charlie thought it was a punishment sent by God to warn him of his sins and wickedness in intending to sell alcohol at greatly inflated prices to the penitents after they had attended Mass on the summit. Perhaps he should bring his prices down to those at ground level. That thought didn’t last for long as Charlie reasoned that God would not have bothered to have somebody killed just to reprove him for a few bottles of stout. He said a Creed and a couple more Our Fathers and staggered out into the open air.
The omens were not good for the pilgrims that day. Low cloud enveloped the mountain from about halfway up. A fine but persistent rain was falling. Five to four in the morning on Reek Sunday, Charlie said to himself, surely to God somebody is going to arrive soon. Charlie knew that the body would have to be moved out of the church. It couldn’t be left there, not on this day, of all days, but he felt reluctant to take the responsibility himself. And what would they do with the body when it was outside the church, for God’s sake? You couldn’t take it down the mountain to meet all these pilgrims coming the other way. Some of these buggers, religious maniacs in Charlie’s view, liked to come to the summit very early to pray. There were even, Charlie knew, some fanatics come from Australia for this pilgrimage today. Charlie wasn’t quite sure where Australia was as a matter of fact, come to think of it he didn’t think the geography Christian Brother, whose name Charlie could never remember, knew where it was either, he always shifty about the place, but Charlie did know Australia was inhabited by convicts who liked playing cricket and counting sheep. You couldn’t very well pass the time of day with one of these devout Australians or some other zealot, ‘Have a good pilgrimage, I’ve just got to take this corpse to the morgue if you don’t mind.’