Atop Mount Peleir Hill

Atop Mount Pelier Hill

By J.P. Lynch

‘When rakish gentlemen wished for congenial society they rode up to Mr. Conolly’s hunting-lodge, perched like Noah’s Ark on the top of Mount Pellier, among the Dublin Mountains. Here they were reported to drink heavily, indulging in blasphemous oaths, and amusing themselves with preposterous orgies. This may have been, as it is said, a haunt of the notorious Hell-Fire Club…’

Maxwell, C. 1956. Dublin Under the Georges: 1714–1830.

Sir Thomas Fitzgerald pulled on his sturdy woollen overcoat as he stepped out the door of his house on Dame St. The black garment was longer than the usual fashion, reaching down past his thighs where his waistcoat ended and down to where his breeches meet his white stockings just below the knee. He removed his spectacles from his breast pocket, placed them on the bridge of his nose and examined his gold pocket watch. It wouldn’t do for him to be late, even if he were visiting individuals far outside his own social circle. Fast as it was growing, Georgian Dublin was still a small city in contrast to London or the other great European capitals, and gossip travelled fast.

The watch face told he had an excess of time on his hands so he thought he’d take his time and stroll up by the river. The silver lion headed cane rapped against the cobblestones as he turned up by Dublin Castle into Temple Bar, his constant reminder of his service during the Seven Years War. A French bullet in the knee during the capture of Quebec had left him with a constant limp and inconstant pain; it had also earned him his knighthood and an honourable discharge. Though the current insurrections in the colonies had driven that conflict from the memories of most, his body never let him forget.

The taverns of Temple Bar were doing a brisk trade even at this early hour, and a couple of ladies of the night could be viewed working the early shift. There was always call for drink and whores at any hour in a busy port city like Dublin, where sailors came off ships round the clock. As if to prove his point, several men in naval garb staggered out of a particularly filthy looking shebeen and commenced to brawl drunkenly mere feet from him. Disgusted, Thomas hurried his loping gait towards the river, cursing the ruffians for the pain shooting through his leg. The familiar rank smell of the Liffey hit his nostrils as he turned onto Merchants Quay. As he strolled towards his final destination, he watched ships unloading all along the waterfront. Men black with soot shovelled coal onto horse drawn carts to be taken to new fangled factories, others moving deftly as apes along the planks and rigging unloaded exotic goods from the Asian and African colonies, a trade that was turning Dublin into Britain’s fastest growing port. Eventually he turned away from the bustle of the quays into the chaotic refuge of the Gaelic speaking natives, the warren of dark back-streets and alleys they called the Liberties. He had to wrack his memory to find his destination amongst the routes covered with filthy children, livestock and drying laundry, but after several wrong turns and sights he’d rather never view again, Thomas arrived at the house of Mrs. Bridget Clarke.

*

Thomas’ first encounter with Mrs. Clarke had been twenty years earlier as a young major home from the colonies, barely thirty and his promising career in the military brought to a close. A friend of his in the expeditionary force had remarked about his tracking and information gathering skills while they were fighting Iroquois Indians in New England, and after his injury had told him of a fledging occupation popping up in cities across Europe and the colonies, men who looked into crimes and helped customers for pay. Detective was the word being given to the new profession. He decided to try it out of sheer boredom really. He’d never been stuck for money with his military pension and his not insubstantial family fortune as a minor member of the house of Fitzgerald, the Dukes of Leinster and highest-ranking nobles in Ireland. He swiftly found he had an aptitude for it, using his connections in the aristocracy to garner information.

His first major case, also the one where he encountered Mrs. Clarke, was the case of a missing servant girl, a young Ms. Emily McMahon. A tragic tale, but one he would hear often in the coming years; young girls were easy targets for the more unscrupulous traders in human chattel. However, the case took more than one turn towards the bizarre and full of the zeal of youth, he had endeavoured to follow it to its conclusion. Ms. McMahon was employed by one of Dublin’s most important and notorious nobles, Richard Parsons, the Earl of Rosse. The young girl’s mother had become convinced that the earl had had something to do with her daughters disappearance. Rumours amongst the nobility and peasantry alike didn’t do much to assuage the rumours.

Of course, these only joined the multitude of allegations surrounding Rosse already. For he was a member of a secretive and scandalous society, the Hellfire Club. Boasting the names of some of Dublin’s most illustrious young nobles on its roll-book, it was for all outward appearances a collection of young wealthy rakes who caroused and played outrageous pranks on members of high society. It was the organisations more esoteric aspects that generated stories though. Numerous pledges in multiple languages and blood oaths were required for admittance. Although they gathered mostly in the Eagle Tavern on Cork Hill, their more arcane meetings supposedly occurred in a hunting lodge on the top of Mount Pelier Hill in the Dublin Mountains, twenty miles outside the city. There, if legend was to be believed, they gathered to drink scaltheen (an atrocious concoction of whisky and hot butter) and pledge themselves to the devil. It was said that an ancient passage tomb had been destroyed during construction, cursing the place. A ginormous black cat was seen in the area and Satan himself appeared at card games. All of this added both a glamour and infamy to the attendees and they revelled in it.

Thomas had met Lord Rosse on one or two occasions and had thought him a rude and cruel man, well capable of making a young girl disappear if she knew compromising information about him. So, he had taken the case. He spoke to friends of Ms. McMahon and servants of Rosse, at their homes of course. He had no desire for the earl to discover his inquires, which he doubted he would take kindly. However, he never got far with the investigation. Any of the servants he spoke to just babbled about Ms. McMahon being asked to serve at some satanic ritual in Mount Pelier lodge along with the head of the Lord Rosse’s household, Mrs. Clarke, and never being sighted again afterwards. Thomas tried to speak to the woman on several occasions but was always rebuffed, so fiercely he came to the conclusion the earl had knowledge of him and silenced Mrs. Clarke. He even made the trek up Mount Pelier Hill but could find no evidence of the girl,  nor any trysts with Beelzebub or any hell-spawn for that matter. The case went cold.

*

The letter arrived as he was eating breakfast that morning. It had taken him a minute to remember who Mrs. Bridget Clarke had been and why this note was informing him of her death. Her daughter, the author, also informed him that her mother had written him a letter prior to her death and that it was to be handed to him in person, lest it fall into the wrong hands, and her families name be shamed. Twenty years had gone by since the case; Lord Rosse had been killed in the latter stages of the French Indian War, and many of the other members of the Hellfire Club had passed away in the intervening years, their hedonistic lifestyles catching up with them. Their secret society had crumbled without them. Yet Thomas set out as soon as he received he letter. It was still too intriguing a mystery to leave unsolved.

The daughter opened the door and ushered him inside. She sat him down at the table and drew an envelope from inside her dress, handed it to him and walked out of the room. Not a word had been exchanged between them. He looked around the kitchen he had failed to gain admittance to all those years ago. Shabby yet tidy, clearly owned by a house-proud woman, so unlike his own, grand house. Strange that he had never actually known this woman, yet here he was in her home about to read her most intimate secret. He removed his spectacled from his breast pocket and them on. He took a deep breath and opened the letter.

“Dear Sir,

           Before I tell you of poor young Emily, I must explain why I could not talk to you all those years ago and why I waited until my death when every day since I felt like confessing to you. Lord Rosse was not a forgiving man, indeed he gave up his soul to darkness many years past. I would have suffered a similar fate to Emily if I had spoken to you, and most likely my family also. After he died I feared that other members of that accursed club would come for me and so did not speak up. It is only now that every sharer of the secret is in the ground, including myself, that I feel I can share the manner of Ms. McMahon’s death. For she did die that awful October night twenty years ago, as I’m sure you’ve assumed all these years.

           That day, Lord Rosse asked me and Emily to come in his carriage to an event his club was having in Mount Pelier Lodge. The poor girl was so frightened, all the servants knew of the sort of blasphemies they got up to out there. Any good catholic would fear it. We set off that afternoon and the dark was settling in as we reached the summit. Many other carriages were parked along the pathway, but no other servants could be seen. That was what I found most strange at first; that these notorious lay abouts would drive their own carriages. We were brought into the kitchen and told to serve a strange hot creamy alcoholic brew to the men playing cards in the drawing room, many of which I knew as the upper-crust of Dublin society. Also, we served them food at one point. Late in the night, Lord Rosse told he I might retire to the servants quarters, while Emily would stay on to serve drinks until the men went to bed. I thought this odd but did not dare disobey the earl. I did not go to my quarters, however. Some strange curiosity, mixed with a sense of dread, had gripped me and I hid in the kitchen, watching the horrific events unfold through a gap in the door.

           Lord Rosse sat Emily down beside himself and offered her a drink. The poor girl was so terrified off him she dared not refuse. Shortly after, the girl seemed to become woozy and eventually slipped into unconscious. While they waited the men had donned black hooded robes and began to clear the large hexagonal table that they had been playing cards. They stripped the poor girl of her clothes, not a stitch she had on her, I was mortified! They began tying her to the table and chanting I did not understand, it may have been Latin, though it could have been the devils own tongue for all I knew. Without warning, Lord Rosse drew a large, black handled knife from his sleeve and plunged it into poor Emily’s chest! The chanting grew louder, almost into a droning and Rosse began drawing symbols on the table in the poor girls blood, seeming to be invoking some higher being to show itself. At that point I could take no more and fled in terror. The next morning no sign of the diabolical ritual remained and Lord Rosse made no mention of Emily as we travelled back to the city. In fact, he never mentioned her again.

           Now you know my tale, and I hope you can forgive an aged, dying woman her cowardice. I do not know what justice you can get for Emily McMahon now that her killers are long in the ground and that dreadful building lies in ruins. I only hope her mother understands my actions; I do not expect forgiveness from her.

           Mrs. B. Clarke”

Sir Thomas sat in that impoverished woman’s kitchen, stunned. He never had expected a crime as heinous as this. Would the police be able to help in this? He was unsure. Then he knew clearly that it was not his decision to make. He would go to Mrs. McMahon, Emily’s mother. She could decide if the killers deaths were enough. She was owed that much. He got up and walked out of the house. Ms. Clarke watched him go, never uttering a word.

*