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  Death of a Pilgrim

  ( Lord Francis Powerscourt - 8 )

  David Dickinson

  David Dickinson

  Death of a Pilgrim

  PROLOGUE

  The message carved in stone is very simple. It tells of a choice, a choice between eternity and salvation, a choice between paradise and the torments of the damned, a choice between heaven and hell. The work is divided into three horizontal sections. In the centre stands the largest figure of them all, Christ risen from the dead and wearing a long tunic with a scarf of white wool embroidered with black crosses, usually reserved for the Pope and certain church dignitaries. Above him is a cross carried by two angels holding a nail and a spear. His right hand points upwards and to his right. There a procession of the chosen ones, the Virgin Mary and St Peter, carrying the keys of the kingdom, lead the elect into paradise. On the strips of stone that divide the panels there are Latin inscriptions. For Peter and Mary and Abraham, seated with the other victors in this religious race, the message is clear: ‘Thus are given to the chosen who have won, the joys of heaven, glory, peace, rest and eternal light.’

  On the other side of the work there is neither peace nor glory nor eternal light. Christ’s left hand points to the left and sharply downwards. Beneath him is a panel enclosed by two doors, one ornate and graceful with two keyholes for the locks, the other with heavy metal supports and no keyholes. The chosen are led by the hand to heaven’s gate, but in front of the gateway to hell diabolical monsters pummel the damned and force them into the vast open jaws of Leviathan: in the words of the Book of Isaiah, ‘Sheol, the land of the damned, gapes with straining throat and has opened her measureless jaws: down go nobility and the mobs and the rabble rousers.’ Presiding over hell is Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, with a hideous grimace, bulging eyes and short hair pleated to resemble a crown. To his left a miser or a thief has been hung up with a pouch of hoarded or stolen money wrapped round his neck, killed by the weight of his own greed. To his right a messenger devil is whispering into Lucifer’s ear the news of the latest torments in his kingdom. Lucifer’s legs are adorned with serpents and his feet are pressing down to hold a sinner being roasted on a brazier. In the panel above, an abbot is holding on to his crozier, prostrate in front of a deformed and bestial demon. In his net the demon has captured three other false monks and is preparing further torture. Behind him, a heretic, his lips shut and a closed book in his hand, is having his mouth crushed while a demon devours his skull. To the right a false banker or moneychanger is about to atone for his sins. A demon is melting the metal in a fire. He is tilting back the false banker or moneychanger’s head and preparing to make him swallow the liquid of his infamy. A king has been stripped naked and a demon is preparing to pull him off his throne with his jaws. A glutton has been hung upside down with a pulley and forced to vomit his excesses into a bowl while another fiend prepares to beat his feet with an axe. There is a couple taken in adultery and fornication, possibly a monk and a nun, now tied together for ever with a rope joining their heads at the neck. The sins of pride and power are here in stone. A knight in an expensive mailcoat has been forced upside down by a demon pushing a pole into his back. Another seems to be trying to tear his arms off. A scandalmonger, forced to sit in a fire, the flames licking round his waist, is having his tongue pulled out. A glutton with an enormous belly is going head first into a piece of kitchen equipment, a cauldron or a boiling casserole. Love of money, love of power, love of women who are not your wife, love of gossip are all portrayed here, surrounded by demons with fire and snakes and pulleys and axes and prongs to welcome you into hell. ‘The wicked’, the inscription proclaims, ‘suffer the torments of the damned, roasting in the middle of flames and demons, perpetually groaning and trembling.’

  These scenes are carved in the tympanum, the space above the doorway, in the Abbey Church of Conques in southern France. They were put in place early in the twelfth century, possibly around 1115. For a couple of hundred years they would have acted as inspiration and warning, threat and reward, to the tens of thousands of pilgrims passing through Conques on their journey to Santiago de Compostela, the field of stars on the north-western coast of Spain, final resting place and shrine of St James the Apostle, which was the ultimate destination of one of Europe’s most important pilgrimages. As they came into the great square in front of the church in Conques the pilgrims would have stared in awe, and possibly terror, at this visible representation of the likely fate of all their souls in the world to come.

  And now, in this year of Our Lord 1906, another group of pilgrims, bringing perhaps the same hopes and the same vices, are preparing to set out on the same pilgrims’ path to Santiago and stand in front of the great tympanum at Conques. For them, as for their predecessors eight hundred years earlier, the inscription at the bottom of the sculpture still rings true: ‘Oh sinners, if you do not mend your ways, know that you will suffer a dreadful fate.’

  PART ONE

  NEW YORK-LE PUY-EN-VELAY

  Be for us, a companion on the journey, direction at our crossroads, strength in our fatigue, a shelter in danger, resource on our travels, shadow in the heat, light in the dark, consolation in our dejection, and the power of our intention; so that with your guidance, safely and unhurt, we may reach the end of our journey and, strengthened with gratitude and power, secure and happy, may return to our homes, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Apostle James, pray for us. Holy Virgin, pray for us.

  Pilgrim’s prayer, Cathedral of Le Puy

  1

  A bell was ringing, somewhere close. As the man struggled towards consciousness he thought he was deep, deep underwater. A ship was sinking slowly beneath him, heading straight down for her last resting place on the sea bed. Maybe it was one of his ships. Ghostly figures, their clothes streaming behind them, were struggling towards the surface through the murky water. Other figures, the fight abandoned, were falling backwards towards the ocean floor. Still the bell rang on. Now the picture in the man’s mind changed. He was in a coal mine. The bell meant danger, a rock fall perhaps, or a collapsed shaft. Miners were running as hard as they could towards the way out, trying to escape before they were buried alive. Maybe it was one of his mines.

  Then the bell stopped. The clanging was replaced by a loud knocking on the bedroom door. The man woke up and peered at his watch. It was a quarter to three in the morning.

  ‘Sir, sir, it’s the telephone, sir! It’s the hospital, sir!’ The butler’s voice was apologetic, as if he felt hospitals had no right to disturb his employer at this time of night. He was still suspicious of telephones.

  ‘Of course it’s the bloody hospital, you fool,’ shouted the man, beginning to pull on the clothes he had dropped on the floor the night before. ‘Who else would telephone at this time, for Christ’s sake? What did they say?’

  ‘You’re to come at once, sir. I’ve ordered the carriage.’

  ‘God in heaven!’ said the man. ‘I’ll be with you in a moment.’

  This man didn’t answer telephones. He didn’t open letters. In normal times he didn’t tidy his clothes away. He didn’t clean his shoes. He paid other people to perform these mundane tasks for him. They marked, these triumphs over the trivia of modern life, the milestones on his journey to unimaginable wealth, his town house in New York, his mansion in the Hamptons, his yacht, his servants, the great industrial empire, the mountains of money sleeping in the vaults of the Wall Street banks.

  As the carriage rattled through the empty streets of Manhattan, Michael O’Brian Delaney thought bitterly that he would happily give them all away in return for just one thing, the life of his only son.

  Michael Delaney was in his late fifties. He was slowly tur
ning into a patriarch. He was over six feet tall and with a great barrel of a chest. Dark eyebrows hung over brown eyes that were liable to flash with anger or excitement. His hair was brown, turning silver at the temples. He radiated a vast energy. One of his employees said that if you could somehow plug yourself into Delaney you would light up like a candelabrum. Oil paintings of a more peaceful Delaney adorned the boardrooms of his corporations.

  By the time his carriage drew up at the hospital entrance there was only one candle burning, to the left of his son’s bed. The little ward looked out on one side to the night streets of Greenwich Village, on the other to the main ward for the terminally ill in St Vincent’s Hospital. Not that the nuns or the doctors ever referred to the ward in terms of terminal illness. It was St James’s Ward to them. All the wards on this floor were named after one of the twelve apostles. Only in private did some of the less religious nurses refer to it as Death Row. As Delaney tiptoed into the room on this November evening, nearest the main section an elderly nun, her entire working life spent in tending the sick and the dying on these wards, sat perched lightly on a chair and stroked a young man’s hand, as if her caress could prolong his stay in these sad surroundings.

  ‘Thank you so much for coming, Mr Delaney. We felt we had to call you. We thought the end might be near, you see, but the crisis seems to have passed. He is no better, of course, but at least he’s still with us.’

  ‘Thank God,’ said Michael Delaney, and sat down on the other side of the bed. These were familiar surroundings to him now, the dim lighting, the crisp white of the sheets, the antiseptic pale green paint on the walls, the picture of a saint – Delaney didn’t know which one – on the wall above the bed, the faint smells of soap and disinfectant, the light rumble of the trolleys outside taking away the dead on their last journey to the morgue, or bringing fresh consignments of the dying into the terminal ward. But he could not sit still for long. He was restless, now leaning forward to peer into the young man’s face, now pacing on tiptoe over to the window and staring out into the snow swirling round the streets of his city.

  This elder man was the father of the patient lying unconscious in the bed. Michael Delaney was one of the richest men in America. The patient was his only son, James Norton Delaney, and the doctors were convinced he could not last more than a day or two. He was suffering from a rare form of what the doctors thought was leukaemia but knew little about. He was eighteen years old, James Delaney, and this evening he was lying on his left side. He had been on the other side when the father sat on vigil until ten o’clock the evening before. Perhaps, the father thought, the nuns had turned him over to make him more comfortable. James was a couple of inches shorter than his father’s six feet two. He had, as Michael Delaney recognized every time he looked at him, his mother’s pretty nose and his mother’s mouth. Only in that high forehead, Michael Delaney thought, had he left his own print on the face of his only son. The young man’s forehead was lined and wrinkled as if he had added thirty or forty years to his age. He was deathly pale. The light brown hair, almost straw in colour, straggled dankly across the pillow. His father had lost count of the number of days his James had been in this isolation ward on his own now. Four? Five? Days and nights blended into one another; the vain hope that those light brown eyes might open, that the lips in his mother’s pretty mouth might part and speak even a few words, was dashed as the ritual timetables of the nurses and doctors measured out their patients’ days. Still there was no movement. Delaney leant down and kissed his son very lightly on the forehead. Every time he did this he wondered if it would be the last time his lips touched a living creature rather than a corpse.

  Shortly before seven o’clock in the morning the order changed in the Hospital of St Vincent. The elderly nun was replaced by a younger one. Delaney was conscious of shadowy figures flitting silently to their places along the main ward. The Matron of the hospital materialized by his side and led him away.

  ‘You must have a change for a little while,’ she whispered. ‘Come with me.’

  She led him through a series of passageways, the walls now pale blue and filled with paintings of the Stations of the Cross or scenes from the Gospels. Then she slipped away and he nearly lost her. The Matron, Sister Dominic, was a considerable force in St Vincent’s. Almost all the male patients she met, even the very sick ones, were absolutely certain that she had chosen the wrong profession. Think, they said to themselves, of those translucent pale blue eyes. Think of that face with its delicate features and that soft blonde hair. Think of that figure, alluring to some of them even through the folds of the habits of her order. Quite what the right occupation for Sister Dominic might be they had no idea, but central to it, in the male view, was non-nunnery. No veils, no wimples, no rosary beads, no strange garments, no prayers, let her be just another example of that great institution, American womanhood, available for courting, wonder, romance and, for the lucky one, love and marriage. Often the male patients would dream about Sister Dominic, coming slowly back from drugged sleep after visions of nights spent in her company. Matron herself was well aware of these strange currents of male interest, even male desire, that flowed invisibly around her person. She prayed regularly that God would punish her every time she thought about her appearance. There was one quality, central to her personality, that most of the male patients did not see. Her faith was the most important facet of her life. And she had a deep, intense, very personal calling to heal the sick. Sometimes she would tell herself that somebody in her care was just not going to be allowed to die. It would be too unfair. Sister Dominic never told any of her colleagues about these missions of salvation. When all her efforts failed she would repair to her bare cell and weep bitterly until she was next on duty, sometimes refusing to eat or sleep for days at a time. Failure did not come easy to the Matron of St Vincent’s Hospital.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Delaney whispered.

  ‘We are going to the chapel,’ she replied. ‘We are going to pray.’

  The man stopped suddenly. He told her he had forgotten how to pray. Bitterly he remembered the times he had ignored all forms of religious instruction as a boy and had played truant, the church services where he had deliberately ignored the words and the responses, the Sunday mornings he had managed to flee from the Church of the Blessed Virgin and gone to hang around the waterfront, the beatings from his father for not taking his faith seriously. He remembered too his father shouting at him that one day he would be sorry he had not paid attention to the priests. One day the sins of his past would come back to haunt him. Well, Judgement Day had finally arrived, here in this place where the sheets were changed twice a day and crucifixes and rosary beads were as common as top hats on Fifth Avenue.

  Matron told Delaney he should not worry about the praying on this occasion. She would find him something else to do. She asked him to wait for a moment outside the main entrance to the chapel. When she came back there was a ghost of a smile about her face. She led him into the little church, for so many of the nuns the very heart of the hospital. There were enough pews to hold about forty people. All of them were filled, mostly with kneeling women. All of these Sisters, she told him, had come to pray for his son James. It was a special effort for a special young man. When Delaney asked her what he had to do, she gave him a box of matches. She pointed to the great banks of candles inside all the side chapels and below the paintings on the walls.

  ‘You must light these,’ she said, ‘and as you light each one, you must pray to God in his mercy to save the life of your son. Do not worry if we have gone before you have finished. You must light them all and then return to the bedside. Later on this morning I am going to find you a priest or a chaplain to teach you how to pray.’

  With that Matron knelt to the ground in the pew beside him. Delaney turned to the candles to his left and began lighting them very slowly. Please God, spare the life of my son James, he said to himself, feeling coarse and awkward as he did so. Gradually, as he repeated h
is prayer, he began to weep. The tears poured down his face and would not stop. Sometimes they would drop on to his match and extinguish the possibility of lighting another symbolic message before it had even begun. The nuns took little sideways glances at the weeping tycoon but left him to his ordeal. At eight o’clock the Sisters began to peel away, walking quietly back to their nunnery or their places on the wards. Matron sent word to a Father Kennedy, asking him to come to the hospital and to James Delaney’s ward later that day. Michael Delaney had not finished yet, though one wall was a blaze of light, dancing off the faces of the saints or the waters of the Lake of Galilee. It was so strange for Delaney, asking an unknown and invisible God to save the life of his only son. His was not a world made up of these religious or metaphysical certainties. His was a world of balance sheets, of strike-breaking, of amalgamations, of mighty trusts, of personal enrichment, of power, power over the lives of the thousands of people who worked for him, power over the local politicians who might need a subvention to help them through their next election, power over grander politicians, aspirant statesmen perhaps, whose need for invisible assistance was often as great as their hunger for high office. Alone in the chapel with his matches and his candles he thought of Mary, the boy’s mother, who had died three years before. She too had come to this last resting place of Manhattan’s Catholics and been tended by the nuns until she died. There had been, he shuddered slightly, a great deal of pain. It was a mercy, they said, when she was called home. Delaney didn’t think it had been a mercy then and he didn’t think it was a mercy now. This God person, he reckoned, reaching up to the top of a sconce almost out of reach, He had a lot to answer for. If He took James as well, Delaney thought, he would write God out of his account books, sell Him off to a competitor, even at a knockdown price, put Him out of business, close this God outfit down once and for all.