Read Online Death on the Holy Mountain by David Dickinson - Free Book Online

Often in his cups Mr Harvey would mutter to his children about the Encumbered Estates Court and how close they were to being delivered into it. When she
was very young Alice had thought an Encumbered Estates Court was just another big house with a demesne like Florence Court in County Fermanagh where her cousins lived. Only later did the terrible
truth dawn on her as her elder sisters told her what it really meant. It was, she reflected ruefully at the time, rather like learning the truth about Father Christmas, only worse. The Encumbered
Estates Court was where the law sent people who were bankrupt, who owed so much money they could not pay their debts. They could languish for years in these insalubrious surroundings while the
lawyers collected their fees and decided what do with the land and the house. Warwick Harvey’s father and grandfather had both borrowed large amounts of money to extend their house. Their
grandson and son had to pay the interest and the bills. When the harvest was bad, the diet in Ballindeary Park was little better than that of their poorest tenants. When they were invited to the
local hunt balls only one girl was able to go at a time as there was only one ball gown fit to be seen in public and it had to be altered to fit one of five different shapes every time it left the
house. Most of the girls’ days after they reached maturity were spent wondering if they could ever escape, if their lives were to be spent in something worse than genteel poverty, eking out
the tea leaves for another afternoon, water the only drink in the house apart from the cheap whiskey which her father consumed to ease his sorrows. Even then he diluted it so heavily that the taste
of the whiskey was like a noise heard far away, remote and distant as though a visitor was tiptoeing away from your house in the dark.
    In these circumstances it was not surprising that the thoughts of the girls should concentrate on young men. Maybe middle-aged men. Even older men if they had an income and a roof to put above
their wife’s head. Any visitor who came to see their father, surveyor, bailiff, parson, was inspected in minute detail by ten voracious eyes. Young curates, when they could be found, were
often a source of fevered speculation, but their mother had to remind the girls that young curates in the parish of Ballindeary, soon to be united with the neighbouring parish to form the larger
unit of Ballindeary and Carryduff, were not likely to be rich men. One of the curates appeared to be so poor that he could not even afford a horse and walked everywhere. Officers provided the most
regular source of fantasy and imaginary escape. The neighbouring town of Castlebar was a garrison town, regularly furnished with English soldiers. The officers, almost all English with a sprinkling
from Scotland, were forever looking for excuses to dance with the local young ladies, to flirt with them, to pass the time in whatever romantic entanglements they could manage. Very occasionally
one of the officers would overstep the mark, or one of the girls would forget herself, and the young man would be transferred so fast that the girl’s family might never find where he had
gone, the girl herself sent off to Dublin to stay with her aunt for a while. Into this slightly desperate world of longing, where both parties longed for completely different things, came a tall,
very handsome young officer called Captain Rufus Bracken with soft brown eyes and perfectly twirled moustaches. It was the moustaches rather than the face that most people remembered, should they
chance to think about the Captain in his absence. He was the fifth son of a small landholder in Derbyshire, and though he talked loud and often to the young ladies about his vast estates in
England, he was entirely dependent on his family for of fortune he had none at all.
    One fateful Saturday nearly three years before it had been Alice’s turn to wear the ball dress and she had