Death of a Pilgrim Page 13

  Michael Delaney felt a proprietary pride as he entered the Cathedral of Notre Dame. This, after all, was another of his buildings now, or it would be when twenty thousand of his francs had been spent. He wondered briefly about hourly rates of pay for French workmen, the cost of building materials, the profit margin the contractors would charge even when working for the Church. He gave up. There were too many unknowns for him to estimate how much work could be done with his money. But some small part of it would be his. Future visitors would point to some section of nave or chancel and tell each other, ‘That was repaired thanks to the generosity of an American called Michael Delaney.’

  He had not thought much of the Black Madonna the first time he had looked at her on his fleeting visit a few days before. He thought even less of her now. Why was she so small? Why couldn’t they get themselves a decent-sized statue like the pink Virgin on the Rocher Corneille, fifty-two feet high, not counting the base? A visitor to Notre Dame with bad eyesight sitting halfway down the nave wouldn’t even know the thing was there. It would be invisible, a black hole rather than a Black Madonna. He wandered over to an enormous painting dating from the year 1630 on the wall. It showed a great procession of town worthies going into the cathedral to commemorate the lifting of a plague that had carried off ten thousand citizens of Le Puy. In the top right-hand corner a group of hooded White Penitents were entering the cathedral. Behind them a group of monks in brown, then another group of monks in grey. Behind them a great party of religious, dressed in their more colourful vestments, escorted the Bishop, a bearded prelate with an oriental look about him, carrying his crook. Then, in the centre of the painting, a group of consuls dressed in red with black underneath and broad white collars were carrying the Black Madonna protected by a canopy above her. Ranged to the right of them were further groups of citizens wearing the robes of their guilds or their orders. Delaney felt sure that these consuls and the other citizens were the leading men of Le Puy in their time, merchants probably, men of business, come to join with their colleagues from the church in proper celebration, thanking God for their deliverance. Delaney felt sure that he would have been in this painting had he been alive then. A consul, he thought, a leading man. He rather liked the look of those red robes.

  Maggie Delaney would not have believed it, but Michael Delaney had been thinking about God too. He always thought about God when he thought of his James for the one had saved the other.

  Michael Delaney’s God was not a great patriarch like Moses parting the Red Sea, bringing the Ten Commandments down from the mountain top, leading an unruly people towards the Promised Land. He wasn’t the Christ figure who preached the Sermon on the Mount and said blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Michael Delaney didn’t have much time for the meek, life’s losers in his book. Nor was his God an immanent presence in the world like the Holy Ghost, bringing God’s grace to his subjects. Michael Delaney’s God was the Chairman of the Board. He, Delaney, Michael Delaney like to think, was Managing Director of the outfit. Above him, remote, wise, all-seeing and all-knowing, was the Chairman. God.

  On his way out Michael Delaney passed a statue. It showed a saint, dressed in brown with a broad-brimmed hat on his head. He carried a satchel or scrip slung round his neck and hanging by his waist. In his right hand was a large staff reaching up to the top of his hat, and in his left, a book of scripture. The bearded face seemed to Michael Delaney to be saying welcome. For this was St James the Great, the saint of the pilgrims who walk to his shrine and his memory in the Cathedral of St James in Santiago de Compostela. It was the same saint who had watched over James Delaney in his hospital bed all those months before.

  9

  The walking party were still crossing the rocky Margeride Mountains, a damp pastureland speckled with broom and with great granite boulders sticking up out of the ground, stone sentries left on duty from an earlier age. The farmhouses here were squat with small windows and doors and steep roofs to cope with the snows of winter. Saugues itself, their destination for the night, was, Powerscourt noted, a handsome town with many old houses including an English Tower, a great fortress of forbidding grey stone said to be have been the base for bands of marauding English brigands in the twelfth century. Like Le Puy, Saugues had a fraternity and a chapel of White Penitents who paraded round the town on Maundy Thursday in white robes with the hoods pulled over their faces and a couple of other penitents, barefoot, dressed in red, carrying a cross and the instruments of Christ’s passion. The hotel owner serenaded all who would listen with stories of the Beast of Gevaudan, a deadly creature from two centuries before who caused a reign of terror all across the region, killing women and children, decapitating them, sometimes eating them. Was it a wolf? Or some alien creature that had survived unmolested in the forests before coming out to kill?

  The pilgrims progressed from Saugues across a mountain landscape dotted with medieval towers and simple stone crosses. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were walking now, trying to draw out from the pilgrims any stories of their past or the history of the Delaney family that might help find the reason for the death of John Delaney.

  Lady Lucy was walking with young Christy Delaney who had looked, she noticed, quite disturbed as the hotel owner told them of the marauding Beast of Gevaudan. She asked him what he had thought of the story. Christy Delaney laughed.

  ‘It reminded me of my grandmother,’ the young man told her.

  ‘Your grandmother?’ asked Lady Lucy incredulously, unable to discern a connection between man-eating wolves and human grandparents.

  ‘Sorry, I’m not explaining myself properly,’ said Christy. ‘When I was little we often used to go to my grandparents’ house. They used to leave me and my sister in this unused drawing room on the first floor. It smelt, that room. The whole house smelt, of damp and mothballs and dirty clothes. My grandmother didn’t believe much in washing, you see, never had. Every now and then, either in that drawing room or when we were upstairs in our horrid little bedroom, she would come and tell us stories. She was especially fond of Little Red Riding Hood and she was particularly good at horrible voices for the wolf and those eat you all up bits of the story. She would lean over the bed, smelling, like the house, of damp and dirt and mothballs, and more or less shout at you. I always wanted to hide under the bedclothes but I knew that would be rude.’

  ‘So you stayed still and got scared?’ asked Lady Lucy.

  ‘I did,’ said Christy Delaney. ‘Very scared.’ He was thinking that Lady Lucy reminded him of his mother. ‘But I don’t think it’s anything relevant to your husband’s investigations, Lady Powerscourt. Mind you, she did tell us all kinds of other stories when we were older, the Big Bad Wolf.’

  ‘The Big Bad Wolf?’

  ‘That’s how my sister and I referred to our grandmother. Anyway, I don’t suppose these stories have much truth left in them, they’ve been handed down the family rumour factory for so long.’

  Lady Lucy thought young Christy showed a true historian’s scepticism about his sources. It would serve him well, she felt, among the dusty libraries and the eccentric dons of Cambridge.

  ‘What did the stories say, Christy, even if they were unreliable?’

  ‘The main incident, around which all the others seemed to revolve, involved a comparatively rich Delaney refusing to help other, poorer Delaneys in the famine years. The poor ones were said to have died in the workhouse, but lots of people were said to have died in the workhouse in those times. Thousands and thousands of people were dying all over Ireland.’

  ‘God bless my soul,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘is that all that is known? No names?’

  ‘No names that had reached the Big Bad Wolf,’ said Christy Delaney.

  ‘Let me ask you another question,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Do you think John Delaney killed himself?’

  ‘I do not,’ said the young man firmly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’d be a very painful way to kill yourself, Lady Powerscourt. You
wouldn’t be dead the first time you hit your head or your leg on a rock on the way down. You probably wouldn’t be dead the second time either. You could bounce all the way down to the ground and still be half alive when you reached the bottom. You’d lie there, maybe, blood pumping out all over you, waiting to pass away from your injuries. Surely that’s not a good way to kill yourself. The Romans used to slit their wrists in a bath of hot water, didn’t they? They thought, those Romans, that that was a painless way to die. They just got weaker and weaker until they went. The bath water must have been a very odd colour by the end, mind you. So that’s why I don’t think he killed himself, Lady Powerscourt.’

  ‘So what should we be looking for, do you think?’

  ‘There’s only one thing all these people have in common, Lady Powerscourt. Whether they’re from Ireland or England or America, they’re all Delaneys. There must be some mystery in their past that could explain the murder of John Delaney.’

  ‘What sort of mystery?’ said Lady Lucy.

  ‘That’s for your husband to find out,’ said Christy Delaney cheerfully. He had often thought of a career as an author after he left university. ‘Be a good title for a book, don’t you think, Lady Powerscourt, Delaney’s Dark Secret.’

  Between St-Alban-sur-Limagnole and Aumont-Aubrac they came down from the mountains and crossed the river Truyère, flowing fast towards the great gorges that bore its name. Now they were in more alien territory, the Aubrac plateau, the most southerly of the volcanic uplands of the Auvergne, grazing country with vast stretches of pasture enclosed by dry stone walls. Higher up the dwarf beeches carried the scars of harsh winters and a long line of conifers along the side of the roads protected them against snowdrifts. There were still fragments of buildings left standing which had provided food and shelter for the pilgrims in the Middle Ages. Ruined donjons and medieval keeps bore witness to more shadowy figures from distant times, the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers of St John. The skies were huge up here on the Aubrac Massif. On a clear day you could see thirty or forty miles. Herds of cattle or sheep were brought up to the plateau to graze in the summer. The shepherds lived in strange dwellings called burons, home to cattle and pigs as well as humans, where the shepherds made Laguiole cheese which they stored in their cellars. But it was, even on a sunny day, a place where the solitude was almost oppressive. Looking out at the great expanse that surrounded them, most of the pilgrims fell silent. For many on the long road to Compostela the passage of the Aubrac, with the heavens stretching away towards infinity and the eternal quiet all around, was the most memorable part of the entire journey. ‘There is the Aubrac,’ a French author wrote, ‘a lofty belvedere both bare and sublime, more lunar, more outstretched, more windswept than the paramos of the Andes.’

  Powerscourt was talking with another of the Irish pilgrims as they crossed this extraordinary landscape, Willie John Delaney, in his early forties, the man dying of an incurable disease. Willie John’s illness had left him completely bald. In his past life, he told Powerscourt, he had been a builder in Westport, County Mayo, home to another pilgrimage, to the summit of Ireland’s Holy Mountain, Croagh Patrick on the last Sunday in July every year.

  ‘And have you left a wife and family behind?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘I have not, thank God,’ said Willie John, ‘there’ll be no wife and children left behind when I go.’

  ‘Do you know how long you’ve got?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘It could be next week, it could be three months, that’s what Dr McGreevy said to me in his little surgery on The Mall before I left now.’

  ‘Do you find the pilgrimage helpful?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘I do and I don’t, if that’s not too Irish an answer for you. I’ve been praying a lot, you see. I’m never quite sure about praying, are you, Lord Powerscourt? You know how it is when you’ve got a bad connection on these telephones. Maybe the other end isn’t plugged in right or the girl on the switchboard hasn’t put you through in the proper manner. You can’t hear what the other person is saying, there’s just a fuzzy noise on the line. Sometimes praying is like that for me, Lord Powerscourt, you’ve just got a bad line. God isn’t linked up properly. He can’t hear you. You can’t get through. You know that little Black Madonna back there in Le Puy?’ Powerscourt nodded. ‘I had a terrible thought the second time I was on my knees in front of her. Some little voice in the back of me head was saying, It’s only a doll, Willie John, it’s only a doll like you could buy a child for a birthday or Christmas and the little girl could make different outfits for the doll to wear, just like they have for the Black Madonna with those different sets of clothes for different seasons of the Church’s year. I couldn’t even manage a Hail Mary after that.’

  ‘But you implied that there were times when prayer was helpful, Willie John,’ said Powerscourt.

  Willie John Delaney stopped and leant on his staff for a moment. He pointed his arm in the general direction of the sky. Way over to their right, dots on the landscape, a herd of Aubrac cows were making their way slowly into fresh pasture.

  ‘I’ve never seen anywhere like this in my entire life,’ said Willie John. ‘I’ve seen most of the great barren spaces, littered with mountains and lakes and sodden peat, in the west of Ireland, but nothing like this here.’

  He pointed up at the great canopy of sky, stretching away to impossibly distant horizons. ‘God’s here,’ he said, ‘I’m sure of it. It’s so quiet here He doesn’t need the telephone. I thank Him for allowing me to see Him in this landscape of His majesty, God’s own country.’

  Powerscourt asked if there were any details of Delaney family history which might help him in his inquiries.

  ‘There’s enough stories about the past of the Delaneys to fill an entire library,’ said Willie John. ‘I don’t think it would be helpful to you, Lord Powerscourt, if I regaled you with the family gossip. Most of it is almost certainly wrong.’

  They passed La Roche and Chabanes-Planes, la Chapelle de Bastide and les Quatres Chemins, they passed Nasbinals and its eleventh-century church with the basalt walls. Outside Nasbinals they climbed up over five thousand feet on the road to Aubrac itself, a little town almost as high as the high point on the road. This was bandit country, famous in the past for marauding wolves and wild boar and brigands. Over the next four miles the path dropped fifteen hundred feet to St-Chély-d’Aubrac.

  Johnny Fitzgerald had been busy on Powerscourt’s behalf in London. He had to find information about Brother White and the dead man John Delaney. Johnny had smiled when he read Powerscourt’s request to find out if the man suffered from vertigo. He had helped his friend down from innumerable high places in his time. Johnny’s only surprise was that Francis was still foolish enough to try once again to reach some lofty and isolated place. Surely, Johnny said to himself, he must know himself better by now than to try again. It was bound to end in failure.

  He picked up the trail of Brother White by asking Powerscourt’s brother-in-law William Burke, a mighty power in the City of London, if there were any banking or counting houses likely to employ old boys of the school where Brother White taught. Burke had been astonished when he learnt of Michael Delaney and his pilgrimage, for Delaney’s fame and his fortune had spread to London many years before.

  ‘If you’d told me that the great Michael Delaney was going on a pilgrimage halfway across France and Spain, Johnny, I’d have said it was about as likely as the Pope coming here and taking a post as a junior clerk in some insurance business. Never mind. I’m sure I can find a couple of Brother White’s old boys for you, that shouldn’t be any problem at all.’

  The following evening, shortly after six o’clock, Johnny had bought the first round of drinks in a pub called the City Arms, just off Lombard Street, close to the Bank of England.

  ‘I gather you’re looking for information about that bastard Brother White,’ said the First Old Boy, whose name was Robert. ‘He’s not dead by any chance, is he?’

&nbs
p; ‘Not yet,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Pity, that,’ said the Second Old Boy, whose name was Patrick. ‘He should have been dead years ago.’

  ‘What was the trouble with the Christian Brother?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Flogger White?’ said Robert. ‘Just that, he loved beating people, the bastard.’

  ‘Trousers up, trousers down,’ said Patrick, ‘it made no difference. He once beat an entire class in an afternoon. Think about it. Any normal person would have been exhausted by the end of that. Not Brother White, oh no. He was as fresh at the end as he was at the beginning. He enjoyed it, you see. You could tell by looking at his face afterwards. The bastard was always smiling, as if he’d just scored a goal.’

  ‘They say he has a special collection of canes, about fifty of the things,’ Robert went on, warming to his theme. ‘He’d ordered up some pretty evil specimens from the Far East where they go in for beatings and that sort of stuff.’