‘Thank you for coming to see us, Lord Powerscourt. How can I be of assistance?’
Even before the man finished the first sentence, Powerscourt knew something was wrong. There was a coldness that was on the edge of rudeness. Never mind the traditional Irish hundred thousand welcomes, he was hardly getting a single one in the Connolly household.
‘I would like to see where the pictures were, and any details you have of them, who the artists were, that sort of thing.’ He noticed suddenly that there were four picture cords hanging from the rail above, but no paintings in them. Connolly noticed his glance.
‘The police asked us to leave everything as it was,’ he explained. ‘Not that they will be any use. The oldest Connolly was placed just above the fireplace, the others followed him in line of inheritance. The last two of the sequence were in the dining room with the Titian and the Rembrandt in the gold drawing room.’
‘Do you have any details of the artists who did the portraits? Do you have any records of what the gentlemen were wearing?’
‘I fail to see how that is relevant,’ said Connolly coldly, looking pointedly at his watch.
Powerscourt felt he was on the verge of losing his temper.
‘Look here, Mr Connolly, I presume you want to get your pictures back. Suppose the thief sells them in Dublin or they are carried over to one of the big London firms. The proprietors know that six male Connolly ancestors have gone missing and a couple of Old Masters. I have made it my business to see that they are so informed. If one of your ancestors were to appear, how in God’s name are they going to know that he is a Connolly? He could be an Audley or a Fitzgibbon or a Talbot or anybody at all in Christendom. Without descriptions the whole attempt to recover them is a waste of time.’
Connolly looked at him very coldly. ‘I do not believe the pictures will ever be recovered. The villains will destroy them. Soon they will come back here for more, whether for more pictures or for the people who live here, I do not know. Our time has come, Lord Powerscourt, and all that is left to us is to face it with the courage of our race. I have asked for police protection and the sergeant laughed in my face. All this talk of descriptions of pictures is futile, fiddling while Rome burns.’ Connolly was working up a fine head of steam. His wild talk sounded even stranger in such elegant surroundings, the marble fireplace, the intricate plasterwork on the ceiling, the distant whisper of the river through the open windows.
‘Are you not jumping to conclusions, Mr Connolly? You had two other paintings stolen, I believe, one Titian and one Rembrandt. Taken all together, those pictures could fetch tens of thousands of pounds. It’s perfectly possible that this is the work of a gang of art thieves who are even now arranging the dispatch of the paintings to New York. It would help enormously if you and your family could manage to write out descriptions of all the paintings. It would help to recover them.’
Connolly was shouting now. ‘You just don’t understand! You haven’t lived here for years! You’re not even Irish any more! We made it our business to find out about you, Powerscourt, betraying your past and your people to swan about in London playing at being a detective! You’ve no idea what it’s been like to live here these last thirty years, the Land War, the boycotting, the plan of campaign, the betrayal of a Protestant people by a Protestant government in London trying to force us to sell our land to appease the Catholics. Well, we have lived through all that here in this house. I do not believe that a gang of art thieves broke into my home to steal our pictures. I just don’t believe it. This is the final act, Lord Powerscourt. Who is there to defend us any more? Politicians? The Irish Members of Parliament want Home Rule for Ireland, that means Catholic rule with no room for Protestants. To a man, they’re all Papists, Rome rulers all, waiting and waiting for their day to dawn. There’s a hunger for land out there, Powerscourt, our land. Sometimes on market days in the town square, you can almost smell it.’
Powerscourt was suddenly struck by a thought that had absolutely no relevance to the conversation. He was not going to be asked to stay. He was certain of it. There had been no mention of green bedrooms or the most comfortable room in the attic. In landlord Ireland, famed for its hospitality and its generosity, this was unthinkable. He knew the stories, of houses where over a hundred guests would stay for weeks at a time, head after head of prime cattle slaughtered to fill the table. One apocryphal story concerned an assistant surveyor who had come to do some work on the house and stayed for a year and a half. After a week the family forgot his name and felt it rude to inquire again. Short of a slap in the face, a refusal to invite a visitor to stay for the night was one of the biggest insults you could offer.
‘I’m sure you’re being too pessimistic, Mr Connolly,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I thought things had been relatively peaceful here over the last few years. But tell me this, did you get a letter from the thieves? Demands of some sort? Blackmail perhaps?’
‘I have not,’ said Connolly and something in his downward look told Powerscourt the man was lying. ‘You talk of peaceful times over here. Things are never what they seem in Ireland, never,’ said Connolly darkly. ‘And now, if you will forgive me, I have work to do. We can’t all spend our time swanning round other people’s houses asking damn fool questions. My coachman will take you into the town. I booked a room for you in the Kincarrig Arms. It is a perfectly respectable hotel. I do not wish to have you staying in my house. Good afternoon.’
With that Peter Connolly ushered Powerscourt to the door and vanished into another part of the house.
The Connolly house had a little river running past its front door. Butler’s Court, the Butler residence a few miles south of Athlone, stood a couple of hundred feet above Ireland’s greatest river, the Shannon. Visitors to the house could arrive by road or water. In summer the river meandered gently south towards the sea; in spring and autumn when the rains were heavy it flooded slightly. In winter it looked sullen, dark and forbidding, its waters swirling their way into black eddies as it rumbled down to Limerick and the Atlantic Ocean.
Powerscourt’s first thought as he looked at the house was that he had seen it before. He was in some great square in Italy, in Siena or Perugia perhaps, looking at the great town house of some local aristocrat. Dimly, he remembered that the principal architect of Butler’s Court was Italian. He felt relieved that the front of the house appeared to be unchanged. So many Irish houses had been altered, defaced in his view, in the previous century by a fad for neo-Gothic that included turrets and battlements and fake towers. Maybe it was because the leading architects of the day preferred this style of building. Maybe it was keeping up with your neighbours. Powerscourt had the rather fanciful notion that somewhere in the back of their minds these Irish patricians felt threatened by the world around them. The peaceful Regency fronts, all proportion and good taste, would not be enough to defend them from the hostile forces that surrounded them. So they felt safer with their walkways and their turrets. Nobody had taken the style so far back in history as to have a moat and a drawbridge, but Powerscourt thought these would have sold well.
Butler’s Court’s central block was built of grey stone with thirteen bays along the front. Two curved colonnades of golden Ardbroccan stone linked the main building to two flanking pavilions which contained the kitchen and the stables. There was no pillared porch to mark the front door of the house. The front door sat unobtrusively in its place as if it were just another window. A set of steps led down to the gravel drive. It should look heavy, massive, Powerscourt thought as he approached the front door, but it didn’t. Butler’s Court looked light and graceful.