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

Mrs Butler in the island’s summerhouse. Normally, when the grown-ups remained in their proper places on the mainland,
this summerhouse was an Indian camp out in the wilds of Wyoming, or a beleaguered British outpost in South Africa like Ladysmith or Mafeking, under siege to the terrible Boers. The children would
crouch in it, firing imaginary guns from its windows, assaulting it from the roof, a position perilously reached by jumping some six feet from a nearby tree. Today the grown-ups had taken it over
and the children played elsewhere, recreating great naval battles with a couple of canoes or disappearing completely up into the tops of the tall trees. It wasn’t even, the children said to
themselves, as if the grown-ups did anything sensible in the summerhouse when they took it over. They just talked to each other, apart from one memorable evening when Alice and Johnpeter had been
spotted kissing vigorously as the light faded when the Butler children were meant to be going to bed, but had decamped to the island instead for a midnight feast of buns and biscuits liberated from
the kitchen.
    ‘This must be a very worrying time for you, Mrs Butler,’ Powerscourt began, ‘with all these pictures disappearing.’
    Sylvia Butler smiled. ‘I’ve been trying to find out,’ she said, ‘if there is any history of this sort of thing. I’ve often wondered if the ancient Celts had a
tradition of this kind of activity. You steal my pelt or my club or my best stone and there is some sort of curse placed on me. Like voodoo or whatever it’s called in the West Indies. The
stealing of the paintings is meant to be a mark of doom for the family. Sometimes,’ she laughed what Powerscourt thought was rather a false laugh as if she was trying to conceal her real
feelings, ‘I do feel cursed. I feel not wanted. I feel some people want us to go. But it never lasts very long.’
    Powerscourt wondered if this wasn’t precisely the effect the thieves had wanted. It would be impossible, he thought, to have lived in Ireland for the last thirty years or so without
realizing that some, if not a great many people wanted you to go. He thought it prudent not to mention the fact.
    ‘Your steward was mentioning to me yesterday,’ he said, ‘that one of the Christian Brothers at the school in the town down below is a great expert on the ancient Celts.
Apparently he spends his holidays digging around in old ruins or ferreting about in the bogs for relics of those times.’
    ‘They always strike me as being rather sinister, those Christian Brothers,’ said Mrs Butler, ‘especially when they move about in packs. They look like ravens or crows about to
do some damage or attack somebody. He is called Brother Brennan, the antiquary fellow. They say he hopes all the young farmers who pass through his hands will search their land for antiquities for
him. He has great hopes of opening a museum some day with all his treasures in the main square down in Butler’s Cross, the town at the bottom of our drive. Perhaps you should go and see him,
Lord Powerscourt.’
    ‘Tell me, Mrs Butler,’ Powerscourt shifted slightly in his seat to catch a view of the river through the trees, ‘who do you think is responsible for these thefts?’
    Sylvia Butler paused. Should she tell him the truth? She had only known him for twenty-four hours or so. She had met too many Irishmen with charming and plausible manners in her life who had
later turned out to be men of straw. Powerscourt, she decided suddenly, was not a man of straw. Lord Brandon had spoken of him in the most glowing terms. ‘If it was a joke, a practical
joke,’ she began, ‘we would know by now. Even in Ireland the practitioners would have put us out of our misery after all this time. That leaves an interesting choice, Lord Powerscourt.
Thieves who intend to make a great deal of money from selling the paintings? Or men of violence, advanced nationalists as I believe they call