Death of a Pilgrim Read online

‘That is entirely up to you. I think I would say that you should go home and rest before you come back. Lack of sleep is well known for causing lack of judgement. You have to weigh in the balance the possibility of his leaving us while you are away against the need to remain strong for the days ahead, as you certainly have done up till now, Mr Delaney. Dr Moreland or I will stay on duty by the bedside.’

  ‘I see,’ said Delaney. ‘Thank you so much for keeping us in the picture.’

  Father Kennedy added his weight to the doctor’s opinion. ‘I too think you should go home, Michael. I’m sure we can leave the young man in the hands of the medical staff. And, of course, in the hands of God.’

  Delaney made up his mind quickly. In his own kingdom of finance he was famous for it. Father Kennedy accompanied him down the long corridor that led out of the hospital. They would both return in a couple of hours.

  ‘Father, can you tell me some more about that saint on the wall? I’ve been looking at him all day. St James the Greater, you said he was called?’

  ‘Fisherman, disciple, martyr,’ Father Kennedy replied. ‘He was beheaded for his beliefs by Herod Agrippa, grandson of the biblical Herod, in about 44 AD. Legend has it that his body was taken to the north-western coast of Spain in a stone boat. His remains were discovered centuries later.’

  ‘And what was he made a saint for?’ asked Delaney, pausing suddenly.

  ‘If you were a disciple and a martyr,’ said Father Kennedy, ‘it was virtually certain that you would become a saint some day. In fact, St James the Greater became much more famous after his death than he had been in his life. They made him the patron saint of Spain, for one thing. In the countries where they speak Spanish or Portuguese, the name Santiago is the same as our James. There are cities and churches and statues of him all over the Iberian Peninsula and in South America. During the centuries when the Spanish were trying to expel the Moors from Spain, the story goes that Santiago would appear on the battlefield on a mighty horse, wielding a great sword and urging his troops on to victory. “Santiago Matamoros!” was the battle cry of the Spanish soldiers. “Santiago the Slayer of Moors!”’

  ‘You implied, Father,’ said Delaney, resuming his walk towards the main doors, ‘that his military powers were one of the reasons for him becoming famous after his death. Are there others?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Father Kennedy. ‘A great city grew up close to the place where the body was found. A great cathedral was built in his honour and in his name. It became a place of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, one of the most important pilgrimages in Christendom. Jerusalem and Rome were the most important sites, but Jerusalem was not a healthy place to go to at the time of the Crusades and Rome was in the hands of the barbarians. Thousands and thousands of pilgrims from all over Europe made the journey.’

  Father Kennedy paused and looked Delaney in the eye. ‘I think we may have witnessed a miracle here tonight, my friend. If that is the case, and your son James survives, as I believe and pray he will, we must put it down to the intervention of St James the Greater, praying for your son in his picture on the wall.’

  ‘And what was the name of the city with the cathedral?’ asked Delaney.

  ‘The city? I forgot to tell you. The city is still there. It is called Santiago de Compostela, James of the field of stars.’

  As the two men passed out into the wet night the bells of New York began to peal the midnight hour. It was Sunday in Manhattan.

  3

  James Delaney didn’t die on Sunday. He was still alive on Monday.

  Always now, Delaney had a special prayer of his own as he roamed the corridors of the hospital and watched over his son. On Tuesday James opened his eyes and smiled weakly at his father. The snows and rain of November turned into the snows and rain of December. Early that month the doctors told Delaney his son was getting better. They were perfectly honest with him, saying that their ignorance of the disease worked both ways. They hadn’t been sure in the past that they knew how to treat his illness. Now they were not sure why he was getting better. All they could say was that doing virtually nothing seemed to work best of all and they proposed to continue with that course of non-treatment. Five days before Christmas they pronounced James Delaney out of danger. It would be a long time yet, they said, before he could come home. Delaney offered the hospital unlimited funds to study the disease that had nearly carried off his boy, saying he didn’t see why anybody else should have to suffer as much as he and his son had done. He presented monies for a five-year supply of candles for the chapel in new designs approved by Matron and Father Kennedy. He wondered then if he had fulfilled his obligations to God and man. All through the month, as the Christmas trees and Christmas decorations filled the shop windows and New York prepared to celebrate the birth of Christ, Michael Delaney was haunted by the image of St James the Greater, the brown saint in his brown background praying with fingertips joined, on the wall above his son’s bed. A strange idea haunted him too, an idea he could not shake off. Two days before Christmas he invited Father Kennedy to join him for a festive drink.

  Father Kennedy had been telling all his parishioners about the miraculous recovery of James Delaney. It was, he assured them, a blessing from God and St James the Greater. He had amended his sermon on the workings of God’s grace around the theme of the Miracle in Manhattan, as he referred to it. He was going to preach the sermon after Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

  The Father had been thinking a lot about Delaney’s pact with his creator. Such pacts, he knew from personal experience, were sometimes found in families struck with terminal diseases and desperately trying to buy a reprieve for their loved ones with the promise of some unspecified future conduct. He knew, Father Kennedy, that he could ask for a new hospital, new schools, fresh charities to support the starving and destitute of New York. But all Michael Delaney would have to do would be to hand over the money. There would not be any sacrifice, for Father Kennedy had private intelligence of the relative wealth of the New York patrician classes in his parish which told him that Delaney was one of the richest of the rich, a millionaire’s millionaire.

  ‘Come in, Father,’ said Delaney, ‘come in! Would you care for a glass of John Powers?’ Father Kennedy nodded and settled down in a chair by the fire.

  All through his son’s illness Delaney had lost weight. His shirt collars grew loose. His trousers sagged at the waist. He discussed with his valet the possibility of buying a whole new wardrobe to suit his new figure. The man advised him to wait. Now, very slowly, he was beginning to fill out again.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about my deal with God, Father.’ Delaney plunged straight into business. He made the Delaney Compact sound like a commercial contract, a takeover perhaps, or the sale of some of his blocks of New York real estate. ‘And I’ve been thinking about that St James the Greater man and the pilgrimage to Santiago.’

  ‘I am glad you have been thinking about such matters, Michael. It may do some good to your immortal soul.’

  Delaney resisted the temptation to say ‘To hell with my immortal soul.’ He pressed on.

  ‘Can you tell me some more about the pilgrimage, Father? Has it died out completely, or do people still go on it?’

  Father Kennedy had no idea what was coming next. He wondered if Delaney was going to offer to buy up the city of Santiago, or to turn the memory of the pilgrimage into a subsidiary of one of his great companies.

  ‘Well,’ he began, ‘it hasn’t died out completely, the pilgrimage. But it’s only a trickle, a tiny trickle of what it used to be. It takes a long time, you see, to walk from one of the starting places in France all the way to the far corner of Spain.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Father, and I want to put a proposition to you. It may sound strange. You may think I’m mad. But what about this? Why don’t I and selected members of my family go on this pilgrimage? I’d pay for them all, of course. It would be a thank-you to God, don’t you see? For my James’s life.’

  Father
Kennedy thought another miracle had come to Manhattan. Deeds in the service of the Almighty were going to replace the bankers’ drafts to New York’s charities. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. The good of the Delaney soul, for a while at least, was going to replace the good of the Delaney wallet. Maybe Michael Delaney would get to meet St Peter up above after all.

  ‘What a splendid idea, Michael! I’m sure our Lord would approve. Would you like me to think about some of the details, possible starting points and so on? Do you have any idea of when you would like to set off?’

  ‘Not in this weather certainly,’ said Delaney. ‘I don’t know if James will be strong enough to do the whole thing – if we go, that is. I’d have to hire somebody to work out the details. Easter perhaps? Early summer? To start, I mean.’ Delaney was not an expert on European weather patterns but he thought it might be easier to make the journey once the rains and storms had gone.

  ‘Easter might be good, very propitious to start a pilgrimage at one of the greatest festivals of the Christian year.’ Father Kennedy thought of the amount of prayer power, nun power, candle power expended on the salvation of young James Delaney. Surely this would be a fitting recompense.

  ‘And would you come with us, Father? To be our spiritual guide? I don’t know very much about pilgrimages, you see. I can dimly remember the garish cover of a book in one of my school classrooms called The Pilgrim’s Progress. Will we visit the Slough of Despond? The City of Destruction? Will we see those strange places on the way? Would we dally in Vanity Fair?’

  ‘I think those places are metaphors, if you like, of the mental state of the particular pilgrim at any particular point along the route,’ said Father Kennedy with a smile. ‘There were many reasons for pilgrimage in those earlier times. Some went to seek forgiveness for their sins. Some went as part of a pact with the Lord. Some went seeking spiritual enrichment in the long journey and the adventures that would surely befall a traveller on such an expedition. Some, no doubt, went partly for fun. It was a holiday, as it were, as well as a quest. Plenty of different food and wine to sample on the way to Santiago, the city of James after whom your own son is named.’

  Father Kennedy spent a morning in the New York Public Library in the days after Christmas. On New Year’s Eve he was back in his usual seat in the Delaney drawing room with another glass of John Powers whiskey. He brought various suggestions with him. Their great trek – for Father Kennedy had decided that he would accompany the pilgrims for part of the way at least – could start from the town of Le Puy-en-Velay in the Auvergne in southern France, one of the traditional setting-off places for the pilgrimage, and proceed down through France to Spain and the great cathedral in Compostela. Le Puy and the other starting places like Vézelay, he told Delaney, were like medieval railway stations in the busiest times for pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, a cross-over point for converging pilgrims coming from Germany and the countries of the East who were funnelled down through Le Puy-en-Velay on to the route to Compostela. An earlier version of Grand Central Station in New York perhaps. Father Kennedy didn’t expect them to walk all the way. Sometimes they would be able to take a train or a boat. Horse lovers would be able to ride for part of the journey.

  Contemplating the scale of the enterprise, the vast distances, the enormous expense, Father Kennedy wondered, as he had wondered in the hospital, about the scale of Delaney’s response to the salvation of his son. He didn’t think disproportionate was the right word to describe it – it is not every day after all that a man’s only son is rescued from death’s embrace. And yet. And yet. Was Delaney trying to buy a clean slate for all the sins of his previous life? Were there hidden crimes, now buried deep in the Delaney past, that he wished to atone for? Was the pilgrimage a gesture to the past as much as to the present?

  Michael Delaney had evolved a number of maxims for the conduct of his affairs, developed over his many years in business. Always pay your men enough to stop them from striking. In his early days he had been involved in a lockout, with blackleg labour and picket lines and hired detectives, and it had nearly finished him off. Always try to buy out your competitors – nothing succeeds like monopoly. Always invest in the latest technology, it will pay for itself in no time. For the management positions at the top of the organization, always look for the very best men in America. Quality managers, Delaney believed, would never let you down. Even he had never drafted a job advertisement quite like the one inserted for the pilgrimage in the New York Times. Organizer Required, it said, for pilgrimage to France and Spain, Europe. Duties to include finding as many members of the Delaney clan as possible in Europe and America, route planning, hotel reservations, liaison with church authorities. Fluent French essential. In return he obtained the services of one Alexander Eliot Bentley, son of a French mother and a doctor father from Rye, New York, graduate of Princeton and Yale Law School, aged twenty-four years.

  From the start Alex Bentley regarded the whole thing as an improbable joke. He thought they might get as far as France, but he doubted if this strange collection of Delaneys who passed through his basement office in the Delaney mansion on missions of inspection and research would ever get to the Spanish border, never mind the final promontory beyond Santiago that rejoiced in the name of Finis Terre, the end of the world. But he persisted. He wrote to Irish Delaneys in Donegal and Ballyhaunis, in Macroom and Mullingar, in Westport and Wicklow and Waterford. Across the Irish Sea he wrote to Delaneys in Hammersmith and Kentish Town, in Birmingham and Liverpool. Across the Atlantic he wrote to more of the clan scattered across the eastern seaboard and the Midwest of America. On the wall opposite his desk in the basement Alex Bentley constructed a family tree of Delaneys that grew at the rate of four or five entries a week, each one carefully inscribed in Bentley’s immaculate copperplate. Next to the family tree was his pride and joy. This was a map of the route of the pilgrimage that snaked out from just below the high window, worked its way in a wiggly line down the wall, then turned right once you crossed the Pyrenees by the edge of the carpet and carried on to Santiago. Le Puy-en-Velay, La Roche, Aumont-Aubrac, Espalion. You could, Alex Bentley thought, almost hear the rivers gurgling the sounds of the names, the Lot, the Truyère, the Dourdou, the Celé. Estaing, Espeyrac. Conques, Figeac. Symbols were added to the route as he completed his preparations on every stop of the journey, little signs for hotels, signs for railways, signs for places with acceptable roads. Limogne-en-Quercy, Cajarc, Montcuq, Cahors, Moissac. Names were added to the map as it travelled beneath the window towards the Pyrenees, names of priests and abbots and mayors in all the little towns they would pass through. St-Martin-d’Armagnac, St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, Roncesvalles, Pamplona, Burgos.

  4

  The little train, its three carriages full of French and Americans, pulled slowly out of the station in the town of St-Etienne in southern France and began the long climb up into the hills. In the front of the first carriage sat Michael Delaney and his party, on the last leg of their journey towards the starting point of their pilgrimage, Le Puy-en-Velay in the Auvergne. Alex Bentley was very excited, peering out of the window at the rivers and forests they were travelling past. This, for him, was the culmination of months of planning, finding as many Delaneys as he could in Ireland, England and the United States, trying to establish that these were genuine Delaneys, not some freebooters come to scrounge a holiday in Europe at his employer’s expense, inviting them, if suitable, to join the pilgrimage. Now he was coming to see the fruits of his labour.

  One grave doubt about his own position was gnawing away all the time in a corner of his mind. He couldn’t understand much of the spoken French. He could read the newspapers. He could understand the great advertisements plastered along the sides of the boulevards. But when they spoke to him, these living Frenchmen, he grasped very little. If he was honest with himself, he knew he could latch on to the occasional word or phrase but complete sentences eluded him. They
sped past him like an express train, a torrent he could not, for the moment, comprehend. They could have been speaking Hottentot to him, or Ancient Greek. Alex Bentley’s grandmother, who had taught him French, had died when he was only six years old. His mother had always spoken to him in English. The knowledge seemed to have vanished from his mind, as if a conjuror had spirited it away. For most of his expensive education in French literature and culture he had been concerned with the words of dead Frenchmen. Alex Bentley could remember huge chunks of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. He could read Flaubert and Stendhal, Balzac or Zola as easily as he read the baseball scores. He could have written leaders about the Dreyfus Case for Le Monde or elegant diplomatic memoranda for the French Foreign Office in the Quai d’Orsay. But at one of the greatest universities in America he had spoken no French at all. He had written his essays in English. His lectures were in English. The professors spoke to him about French literature and its glories in English. But when the taxi drivers or the hotel porters of Paris spoke to him in French, he could only guess at what they were saying. He wondered if he should tell Michael Delaney.

  Father Kennedy had endured an unhappy crossing of the Atlantic. Even though the great liner they sailed on from New York to Le Havre did not give them a particularly rough passage, the Father was seasick all the way. At first he consoled himself with the thought that it would pass, that after a day or so the illness would abate, and that he would be able to walk the decks like the other passengers and gaze at the vast mystery of the ocean. He dimly remembered reading a book about Nelson which reported that the great Admiral himself suffered from mal de mer, as the French doctor on board called it, for the first few days as he sailed off from Portsmouth or Plymouth to wage war in Egypt or the West Indies. But then, for Nelson, it passed. For Father Kennedy, it did not pass. He had consulted his small travelling library of religious books but could not find what he sought. There appeared to be no patron saint of seasickness to whom he should address his prayers. The liner’s library did not help either. It contained no religious volumes at all. So he spent virtually the entire crossing lying on his bunk, trying not to move.