In the Connolly house he had only met the diminutive butler and the disagreeable Mr Connolly. Here it was rather different. A Butler’s Court footman, a tall and imposing fellow called Hardy with military bearing, had scarcely opened the door to him when a balding middle-aged gentleman shot forwards from one of the many doors to shake him firmly by the hand.
‘Lord Powerscourt, welcome to Butler’s Court! Delighted to meet you! I am Richard Butler and this is my house.’ Powerscourt was just about to reply when he heard the singing. The front hall had a chequered black and white marble floor and a mighty staircase of cantilevered Portland stone. The sound was coming from a gallery on the first floor.
‘We soldiers of Erin, so proud of the name,
We’ll raise upon rebels and Frenchman our fame.
We’ll fight to the last in the honest old cause
And guard our religion, our freedom and laws.
We’ll fight for our country, our King and his crown
And make all the traitors and croppies lie down.
Down, down, croppies lie down.’
The children were coming into the gallery, holding hands, boys and girls together. There were so many that Powerscourt wondered if he had wandered into a school.
‘The rebels so bold, when they’ve none to oppose,
To houses and haystacks are terrible foes.
They murder poor parsons and also their wives
But soldiers at once make them run for their lives,
And whenever we march, through country to town,
In ditches or cellars the croppies lie down.
Down, down, croppies lie down.’
‘They’re not all mine,’ whispered Richard Butler as the leading couple in this strange procession reached the top of the stairs and began the descent into the hall below past one of the few remaining portraits of an early Butler and elaborate rococo stuccowork on the wall.
Powerscourt wasn’t sure he would teach his children this song. It referred to the defeat of the rebels in the rising of 1798. Croppies were called croppies because they wore their hair cut short in the style made popular by the French Revolution. Croppies, with a few exceptions, would have been Catholic. It was, in effect, a cry of triumph, particularly popular with the Orange Lodges and the Protestant hardliners in the north of Ireland.
The front rank were now passing the chimney piece of black Kilkenny marble and heading straight for the front door, looking neither to the right nor to the left of them. Richard Butler was smiling affectionately at them all as they passed. At last the supply of singers seemed to have dried up. Then Powerscourt saw who was in charge. Bringing up the rear was a tall, almost emaciated young man in a black suit that had seen better days.
‘Oh, croppies, ye’d better be quiet and still,
Ye shan’t have your liberty, do what ye will.
As long as salt water is formed in the deep,
A foot on the necks of the croppy we’ll keep,
And drink, as in bumpers past troubles we drown,
A health to the lads that made croppies lie down.
Down, down, croppies lie down.’
The tall thin young man with the fair hair and the soft blue eyes saluted Powerscourt and Richard Butler gravely as he passed into the garden to join his charges.
‘James, James Cuffe is the young man’s name,’ said Richard Butler. ‘He’s the eighth son of a family nearby. Poor woman always wanted a daughter. She ended up with a cricket team of boys and a twelfth man. A dozen boys! Can you imagine it! James comes here to teach some of the younger children like the ones in the garden. We’ve got cousins’ and neighbours’ children as well. He’s wonderful with them. Never seems to raise his voice at all. Don’t know how he does it. Wife believes the small children think he’s a giant and will cast wicked spells on them if they misbehave.’
Butler began to steer Powerscourt towards a pair of double doors. The noise inside seemed to have stopped. ‘Forgive me, Powerscourt, let’s get things sorted. We’ve put you in the green bedroom on the first floor. There’s a good view of the river and the housemaids are all convinced it’s haunted by a man with his head in his hand. Don’t believe a word of it myself. No work for you today. There are three people who knew the lost pictures well, myself, Hardy the senior footman and the parlour maid Mary who dusted the frames. We’re all going to assemble for you at ten o’clock in the morning. Now then,’ he showed Powerscourt into the Green Drawing Room, so called because the walls were lined with green silk, ‘the young people have all gone off for a walk, so there’s just the three of us for tea.’
Sylvia Butler looked about forty and still retained most of the beauty that must have dazzled her husband into marriage all those years ago. She captured Powerscourt’s heart with a charming smile as she indicated he was to sit beside her.
‘How was our cousin Brandon when you saw him?’ she inquired sweetly. ‘Was he afflicted with that gout at the time?’
‘Alas, Mrs Butler, it was bad with him, very bad. I think he suffers a great deal.’
‘The doctors tell him he must stop drinking. That would be the best cure,’ Mrs Butler said, ‘but I think he would find it difficult. Tell me, did he have to take any of those special pills of his, the ones he calls Davy Jones’s Lockers?’
A footman entered with a tray of tea, laden with cakes and scones and barm brack, a fruity sort of cake to be consumed with butter as if it were toast, very popular in Ireland.
‘The last time we saw cousin Brandon,’ Mrs Butler went on as the footman disappeared out of the door, ‘he had to take one of these pills. After a quarter of an hour he collapsed on a sofa and slept for five hours.’
‘He took one just before I departed,’ said Powerscourt as Mrs Butler began to pour the tea, ‘but he was still compos mentis as I left the house. I think he must have had a minute or two to go. He was still swearing at the doctors as I went down the stairs.’
‘Scone, Lord Powerscourt? Barm brack?’
Powerscourt suddenly wondered how many teas were served in an afternoon in a grand house like Butler’s Court. He put the question to Mrs Butler.
‘Three,’ she said. ‘Otherwise the whole thing gets out of hand. We have one for the children, one for the servants and one for us.’
‘You must be remembering the stories,’ said her husband with a smile. ‘There’s a family near here where the servants valued the distinctions in status between themselves so much that they ended up serving lots of different teas every day. On most afternoons tea would be served in ten different places. The Lord and Lady and their guests had it in the drawing room. The elder children and their governess had it in the schoolroom: the younger children and their nannies and the nursery maids had it in the nursery. The upper servants, together with the visiting ladies’ maids, had it in the housekeeper’s room. The footmen had it in the servants’ hall. The housemaids had it in the housemaids’ sitting room, the kitchen maids had it in the kitchen and the charwomen had it in the stillroom. The laundry maids had it in the laundry and the grooms took it in the harness room. Once a week a riding master came from Dublin to give the children a lesson and the number of places where tea was served went up to eleven; for while he was too grand to have tea with the servants or the grooms, he was not grand enough to have it with the gentry in the drawing room, so he was given a tray on his own.’
Powerscourt laughed. His eye was drawn to three gaps on the walls. Over the mantelpiece was an enormous hole, with two smaller ones on either side of it. He supposed all would be revealed in the morning. At dinner that evening – he had forgotten how much food was consumed in these houses – he noticed another eight empty spaces on the green walls, dark lines marking where the edges of the paintings had met the wall, the paint a paler green than the surrounding area, the squares or the rectangles looking like undressed wounds.