‘Look, Lucy,’ Powerscourt turned to his wife, ‘there’s nearly an hour before I have to go. Why don’t we take the hotel boat out on the water? It’s a lovely morning.’
Five minutes later Powerscourt was stroking the little boat up the dark waters of Killary Harbour. Lady Lucy was wearing an enormous hat to shade her from the sun. She thought you could hide all sorts of things under a wide brim. ‘Is Butler Lodge up there, Francis?’ she said, pointing towards the mountains on the right.
‘It is, my love,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it’s on the far side of that mountain with an unpronounceable name, Mweelrea I think it is. It’s got its own lake in the front and a river that’s supposed to be full of fish.’
‘Is it pretty?’ said Lady Lucy. Powerscourt knew she was trying to form a picture in her mind of the site where she might lose another husband, another one lost not to the fogs of war but in the mists of civil strife.
‘I can’t say that I have been inspecting it with the eyes of a tourist,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but it would be very beautiful if it was being used properly.’
Lady Lucy fell silent. A couple of fishermen shouted good morning at them from a hundred yards away. A herd of cows was making a leisurely progress towards Leenane, mooing loudly as they went. Powerscourt turned the boat round and began the return journey towards the hotel.
‘Francis,’ she said at last, ‘you will be careful, won’t you. You see, I’ve just worked it out, we’ve been married for thirteen years now, it’s scarcely credible, is it, and I love you as much now as I did on the day I married you. More even. I couldn’t bear it to end. Not here. Not now. Not like this. I want to be with you till the end, Francis, as I hope you’ll be there for me. Please remember that I love you so much. Take care. Take very great care. I shall be thinking of you and praying for you every moment of every day until you come back.’ She held his hand and kissed it. ‘Now, I won’t say any more. Semper Fidelis, Francis.’
Semper Fidelis, forever faithful, was a sort of motto, or talisman, between the two of them. It had first been mentioned to Powerscourt by a young man who killed himself in an earlier investigation when he first met Lady Lucy. It had followed them through their lives ever since, a punctuation point on their journey through love and time.
‘Semper Fidelis, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt gravely. Out there on the still waters of Killary Harbour, under the wide Connemara sky, he wished he did not have to continue his investigation, to embark on his hazardous mission to Butler Lodge. He wanted to be somewhere else, to stay with Lucy and row out to the mouth of the great fjord. Then he thought of the Ormonde family, of husbands whose wives had been abducted, of the Butlers and the Moores whose very identity was under threat from forces they neither knew nor understood. He kissed Lady Lucy after he handed her out of the boat and set out to prepare for his ordeal.
Half an hour later he and Johnny Fitzgerald were standing by the front door of Butler Lodge. They knew that the hills around the house concealed the Major’s troops, rifles at the ready in case things went wrong.
‘Your round or mine, Francis?’ said Johnny, looking at the bell.
‘Mine, I think,’ said Powerscourt and pushed it firmly. A clear peal could be heard inside. Powerscourt wondered if the two ladies had heard it. They heard footsteps. The door opened to reveal the redhead who had answered it earlier that day. Perhaps he was acting as butler for the duration.
‘Come in, please,’ said the young man politely. ‘Would you wait here for a moment now?’
Powerscourt looked around the hall. The floor was marble, you could find marble everywhere in Connemara, he remembered. A couple of hurling sticks were resting in an umbrella stand. There was a table to the left of the door. A pair of fish in glass cases looked across at them from the opposite wall. Powerscourt suddenly remembered the fascination of stuffed creatures for the Anglo-Irish. The birds of the air and the beasts of the field were all fair game for the taxidermists, owls and badgers, voles and squirrels, pike and salmon and trout, otters and owls, bream and perch, all ended up stuck on the walls of the Anglo-Irish in their glass coffins. Powerscourt had been to houses in his youth where they were so numerous that he would not have been surprised to see a stuffed human staring out at him from hall or passageway. Privately he suspected that the gentry identified with these dead creatures. Were they not preserved too, pickled in their past and their history until they had little relevance to the modern world?
‘Come this way, please,’ the redhead interrupted his reverie and showed them into a little sitting room on the left of the hall. There were bookcases here from floor to ceiling and a great window that looked out over the lake. The redhead motioned them to a sofa and indicated they were to sit down.
‘Posh dentist’s waiting room, Francis?’ said Johnny.
‘Doctor’s, I think,’ said Powerscourt. ‘No magazines at all here.’
Two slim young men of average height came in through the other door and sat down on the chairs opposite the sofa. They were both wearing dark trousers and green shirts, some kind of private uniform, Powerscourt suspected. One had black hair. The other one was so fair he was almost blond.
‘Which of you is Powerscourt?’ asked the black-haired one.
‘I am he,’ said Powerscourt.
‘Then you must be Johnny Fitzgerald.’
‘The same,’ Johnny nodded gravely, wondering if he should mention his ancestor. Not yet, he thought, not yet, maybe later.
‘Traitors, the pair of ye,’ muttered the blond.
‘You can call me Seamus,’ said the black-haired young man, making it abundantly clear that whatever he was called, it was not Seamus, and that he had no intention of revealing his true identity. ‘And he’s Mick,’ he added, pointing to his companion. ‘Now then,’ he continued, ‘it was youse who asked for this meeting. What do you have to say for yourselves?’
‘Principally this,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I think it’s time you considered your own position. You have pulled off a most daring piece of kidnapping. But for our good fortune in finding you here, everything would have gone your way.’
‘We were betrayed,’ said Mick viciously, ‘another bloody traitor in the ranks. Well, he’ll get what’s coming to him, youse mark my words.’
Powerscourt did not bother to tell the blond that they had not been betrayed. Dissension in the ranks might work to his, Powerscourt’s, advantage.
‘But now,’ he continued, ‘think of it. You are surrounded here. Over twenty cavalrymen are on patrol in the woods. More are expected this afternoon. I do not know how many of you there are in this house but I do not believe you number more than six or seven at the most. And with the greatest possible respect, these men outside are more experienced in battle than you are. They fought in the Boer War after all.’
Even as he said it he knew mention of the Boer War was a mistake.
‘Imperialist racket!’ said the blond in anger. ‘Whole war just so the City of London could get its hands on the South African diamonds! Women and children herded into concentration camps to die! Bloody disgrace!’
‘Then think of the position of the two women you have seized. I presume they are still alive, they certainly were yesterday afternoon. If anything were to happen to them now, the authorities would know who to charge.’
Powerscourt sensed as he spoke that he was not making much impression. Rational argument might not be the best way to reach these young men. He felt that they rejoiced in what they saw as their emotional and moral superiority. They probably thought he was old. He suddenly remembered the appeal of a glorious death fighting in Ireland’s cause against overwhelming odds. He wondered if they would prefer death to a prison sentence, a blood sacrifice in the cause of Ireland’s freedom. That, he felt, might be their most likely and the most dangerous option. He ploughed on.
‘If anything were to happen to the women, if they were to be killed for instance, it would go very badly for you. I am certain you would hang. If you give them up, and give yourselves up, the authorities would, I am sure, look at your cases sympathetically.’