Death on the Holy Mountain Read Free

neighbours, Lord Brandon? Did the same thing happen there?’
    ‘Ten out of ten, Lord Powerscourt. I can see now where your reputation comes from.’ Powerscourt wasn’t sure if he was being ironic.
    ‘Damn and blast these doctors!’ Another spasm had taken over the left leg. Brandon turned very red as he fought the pain and reached into his pocket for a bottle of pills. ‘Not
meant to take one of these for another two hours,’ he said bitterly, gulping down his medicine, and washing it down with a glass of red liquid from the lower shelf of his table that might
have been claret, or port. ‘Afraid we’ll have to be quick now, Powerscourt. I call these pills Davy Jones’s Lockers. Send you straight down in ten minutes or so.’
    ‘The other pictures?’ asked Powercourt.
    ‘Six generations of Connollys gone. One Titian. One Rembrandt. That’s it.’
    ‘Were the Connollys also in a straight line? Father to son to son without a break?’
    ‘They were,’ said Brandon.
    ‘Were there any requests left for the families? Any letters, any demands that they leave the country or anything like that?’
    ‘Not that I know of. Why should the thieves leave letters? Thieves don’t leave letters. Not as a rule. Not round here.’
    ‘They might in Ireland,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It could be the first stage in a rebel campaign to get them to hand over their money or their land, or sell it. You can get
excellent terms now if you want to dispose of your Irish estates.’
    ‘Damned if I see why we should have to sell our land if we don’t want to, to some Irish peasant or the Christian Brothers or the bloody Roman Catholic Church. Do you?’
    ‘I don’t think that’s the point at the moment,’ said Powerscourt, reluctant to plunge into the thickets of the Irish land question where so many had perished before him.
‘How are the families taking it?’
    ‘That’s just the point, Powerscourt,’ said Brandon. ‘The women are terrified. If the women go, they’ll take the children with them. The families will be destroyed.
The bloody rebels will have won without firing a shot. Will you take the case, Lord Powerscourt? I think they would all feel easier if they knew you were coming.’
    ‘Of course I’ll take the case, Lord Brandon. Be delighted to.’ Powerscourt did not say how ambivalent he felt about the whole thing. In one sense, these were his people. He had
been born into that class and that caste and their values must run in his veins. He had, earlier in his life, sold the great house in Ireland that carried his name because he and his sisters could
not bear to live there any more after their parents died. With that break had come a different break, a break with the anomalies and injustice that could, from time to time, tear his country apart.
Why should one man own fifteen thousand acres and another one only be allowed ten?
    ‘I’ve had my people make copies for you of all the correspondence so far. All the addresses and so on are in there.’ He handed over a large envelope which, for some reason,
reminded Powerscourt of the box with his books. ‘Next time you come,’ he waved a hand dismissively towards the Double Cube Room as if it were the servants’ quarters,
‘I’ll show you all the stuff.’
    Brandon rubbed his leg once more. ‘I’m obliged to you, Powerscourt. Any time you need anything, money, influence, the House of Lords, just let me know.’ Powerscourt dimly
remembered his friend Lord Rosebery telling him that the gout-ridden aristocrat was a formidable fixer in the Upper House.
    As he made his way down the staircase towards the front door he wondered just how strong Lord Brandon’s pills actually were. He was pursued by the familiar cry, ‘Damned doctors!
Damned gout! Damned pills!’
    ‘So there we have it,’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt, as he finished recounting the story of his trip to Kingsclere to Lady Lucy and Johnny Fitzgerald early that
evening in the drawing room