Death of a Pilgrim

by David Dickinson

  ‘Why would you spend most of the day praying to the Black Madonna? Does she have any special educational powers, as far as you know?’

  ‘I don’t know the answer to that, Francis. But there’s something rather horrid about Brother White. I can’t put my finger on it just yet.’

  ‘Then we have the late John Delaney himself. Cousin again of Michael Delaney. He went to St Michel and the Rocher Corneille in the morning, and the cathedral in the afternoon. The last sighting we have of him was about four thirty when two of our pilgrims saw him going into the hotel.’

  ‘And nobody saw him go out after that?’

  ‘No,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘You’re going to like this last one, Francis. Stephen Lewis, mid-fifties, mother’s side again, solicitor from Frome in Somerset. Come on pilgrimage for the sake of his immortal soul and because he likes trains. Our Mr Lewis, if his story is to be believed, and I think it is, did not go to the Rocher Corneille. He did not climb the two hundred and sixty-eight steps to the chapel at the summit of St Michel. Nor he did he go up or down the one hundred and thirty-four steps that lead up to the Cathedral of Notre Dame.’

  ‘So what did the man do, in heaven’s name?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Mr Stephen Lewis, solicitor, from Frome in Somerset, went to the railway station in Le Puy. He looked at the engines for some time. Then he took a train south, travelling first class he tells us, to the next port of call, a stop called La Bastide St Laurent Les Bains. It’s on the Nîmes line, apparently. Our Mr Lewis took lunch in the Hôtel Bristol in the main square, some local pâté with cornichons, duck à l’orange, and returned to Le Puy on the 2.55, arriving just before half past four. He said he didn’t have time for coffee or he’d have missed his train.’

  ‘He may have had a more interesting day than the rest of them,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully. ‘I don’t suppose anybody can corroborate any of that?’

  ‘Well,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘one or two people did see him coming back into the hotel. They report that Mr Lewis was carrying a book of timetables.’

  ‘Excellent!’ said Powerscourt. ‘A little bedtime reading, no doubt.’

  ‘I’ve forgotten one person,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘Michael Delaney himself. He went briefly to the cathedral in the morning. He didn’t go to either of the rocks. During the afternoon he was in the hotel, working on the plans for the pilgrimage with Alex Bentley.’

  ‘Well, Lucy,’ said her husband, rising from his little table and pacing about the room, ‘these witness statements are about as much use to us as the smile on the face of the Sphinx. This is what I think we should do tomorrow. Could you have another word with our friend Maggie Delaney before she leaves in the carriage? If Michael Delaney has any great sins in his past she may know something about them. Could you see what crimes she comes up with? And ask her about how all these people are related. I’m going walking tomorrow with the young ones and the men of God. Let’s see what they’ve got to say for themselves on the pilgrim trail and the — ’ Powerscourt stopped suddenly in mid-sentence. He looked at Lady Lucy. ‘Wait here a moment, darling. I’ve been a fool, a stupid, stupid fool.’ He headed for the door.

  ‘Where are you going, Francis? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Only this, Lucy. Here we have all these statements about people coming in and out of the hotel. All of them refer, unless I’m very much mistaken, to the front door. What about the back door? Side doors? Fire escapes? Balconies? We may have been looking in the wrong direction altogether.’

  Jack O’Driscoll and Christy Delaney were in a great hurry. They were both very thirsty, completely parched as Christy put it. They had left their own party far behind. They sped past the religious brethren who had stopped to pray at a wayside shrine to St James. As they drew near to St-Privat-d’Allier a passer-by would have noted that Jack kept writing a couple of phrases in a small notebook which he passed to his companion.

  ‘I think this is it,’ he said finally, as they passed an ancient mill on the side of an old bridge.

  ‘Oon boo tile van rouge, seal voo play, that should do it.’

  ‘Oon boo tile van rouge, seal voo play,’ Christy repeated.

  ‘Good,’ said Jack.

  ‘And I presume on core stays the same?’

  ‘On core oon boo tile van rouge seal voo play might be better,’ said Jack.

  ‘Bien, très bien,’ said Christy.

  Powerscourt returned from his inspection of the entrances and exits to the Hôtel St Jacques in sombre mood.

  ‘It’s hopeless, Lucy, quite hopeless,’ he said to his wife. ‘The place has got more ways in and out than a honeycomb. Round the back there are two back doors, not locked during the daytime, a rickety fire escape, and rooms on the ground floor all of which have windows that open wide enough for a man to get out. All this work’, he waved helplessly at the notebook, ‘is rendered null and void. Anybody could have got in and out without being seen. All of that evidence is all right for the front but not for the back.’

  ‘What do we do now, my love?’ asked Lady Lucy.

  ‘God knows,’ said her husband.

  Lady Lucy Powerscourt was taking morning coffee the next day with Maggie Delaney in a corner of the dining room at the Hôtel St Jacques. She noticed that her companion ladled in three spoonfuls of sugar.

  ‘Can you tell me how you are related to Mr Michael Delaney, Miss Delaney?’ she began brightly.

  ‘That walking heap of wickedness?’ Maggie peered crossly at Lady Lucy as if she had just taken the name of the Lord in vain. ‘It goes back to our grandparents, I don’t know the precise details. I’ve tried, of course. But it isn’t easy to find out what happened in Ireland in the famine years. There’s a story that Delaney’s father did something incredibly wicked in a place called Macroom, wherever that is, something to do with the workhouses. I wouldn’t be surprised. Like father, like son.’

  ‘So when did your own particular interest in your cousin and his activities begin?’

  Maggie inspected Lady Lucy once more. ‘Twelve years ago, it would have been. Somebody on the parish committee for the reclamation of fallen women mentioned that he’d seen the Delaney name in the papers. That’s when I started to read those money pages in the newspapers.’

  ‘Money pages?’ said Lady Lucy. Had Maggie been picking up tips on domestic thrift, How to Make Your Household Budget Go Further and Keep a Happy Husband? She had not.

  ‘I believe the proper term is the financial and business pages of the New York Times,’ she said primly.

  ‘You read those pages every now and again, Miss Delaney? That’s very advanced, if I might say so.’

  ‘I do not read those pages every now and then, as you put it,’ said Maggie Delaney crossly, ‘I read them every day. I have great files of them at home, sorted year by year, going back to 1894.’

  Lady Lucy would have been the first to admit that she was not a regular reader of this material. She hardly ever looked at them at all, moving on to higher things like the accounts of forthcoming auctions, or society weddings that might feature members of her family. She dimly remembered row upon row of numbers, of company reports, of the details of the flotation of new companies on the London or New York Stock Exchanges. For some, perhaps, there was romance in all these dry figures.

  ‘And what was the first evidence you found about Mr Delaney’s activities?’

  ‘His crimes, you mean,’ said Maggie Delaney. ‘The first evidence? There was so much of it, so many sins. Did you know that somebody wrote a book about Delaney’s crimes round about that time?’

  ‘Really?’ said Lady Lucy, ‘What was it called? Did it do well?’

  Maggie Delaney laughed. Or rather she cackled and a look of twisted triumph passed across her face. ‘The book was called Michael Delaney, Robber Baron.’

  Lady Lucy thought the author hadn’t minced his words. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Was it perhaps not a very flattering portrait? Of Mr Delaney, I mean.’

  ‘It was not flatt
ering, oh no. The author had got hold of the details of most of Delaney’s crimes over the previous fifteen years. It would have been very powerful. Two hundred pages of Delaney’s sins, bound for ever in a hardback cover.’

  ‘But what became of it, Miss Delaney? You make it sound as if something happened to the book. Did you manage to read it?’

  ‘Nobody, as you put it, managed to read it. When Delaney found out about it – he must have heard people were making inquiries about him – he went straight to the publishers. He bought every single copy just as they were about to start sending them out to the bookshops. Then he had them all destroyed, pulped is the term, I believe. He paid the author all the royalties he would have earned if he’d sold every single copy and a bit more to keep his mouth shut. And the author’s mouth has remained shut from that day to this. I tried to find him, of course, the author, but he’s vanished. That was the end of Michael Delaney, Robber Baron.’

  Lady Lucy wondered if the author too had been pulped, like his books. Another crime for Maggie Delaney to put on her cousin’s charge sheet.

  ‘If you will excuse me, Lady Powerscourt,’ Maggie Delaney was gathering up her prayer book and rosary beads, ‘perhaps we could continue our conversation over lunch. I must go to the cathedral to pray in front of the Black Madonna.’

  An improbable image rose to the front of Lady Lucy’s mind. She could see Maggie Delaney sitting at a table in her little apartment in New York, the walls lined, no doubt, with religious pictures of the Holy Land and the saints, the business pages of the New York Times in front of her. She had a pair of scissors in her hand and was cutting out selected paragraphs to be inserted in a large black file. Chicago meat prices. New York Stock Exchange closing prices. Timber futures. Report from London. Steel stocks firmer.

  Powerscourt had ridden over to St-Privat-d’Allier and abandoned his horse at the hotel, hoping to catch up with some of the pilgrims on their march to Saugues. A party of schoolchildren in crocodile formation passed him in the village square on their way to the church, escorted by a couple of nuns. The locals stared at him with that rude and never-ending stare reserved for foreigners and people from the next village. The road was climbing now, climbing upwards towards the vast empty plateau of the Aubrac. Small farms were littered across the landscape, the occasional cart trundling past him. Two birds of prey, buzzards he thought, were performing great acrobatic swoops in the pale blue sky, waiting for a glimpse of lunch before hurtling to the ground at unimaginable speed. He found Girvan Connolly, the man who described himself as a merchant from Kentish Town, sitting beside a great rock, swearing.

  Pilgrimage was not being kind to Girvan. Those two young men, Christy Delaney and Jack O’Driscoll, had stopped their consumption of St Privat’s finest red fairly early the evening before. It had, Girvan realized now, been a mistake to carry on drinking the stuff with Willie John Delaney, the man dying from an incurable disease. That pilgrim had leaned over to Girvan as he opened their third bottle and announced thickly, ‘You know the old saying, Girvan, my friend? Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die? In my case that’s almost literally true. This bloody incurable disease I can’t pronounce could take me away tomorrow, so help me God. So I may as well have a glass while I can. I can’t drink to my health so I’ll drink to yours instead.’ And with that Willie John Delaney launched a steady campaign down the third bottle.

  Not only did Girvan have a hangover. His feet, in the cheap boots he had bought from a man in the market at Kentish Town, were hurting. Charlie Flanagan’s repairs were holding out but only just. When he had tried to ask by sign language in the village that morning if there might be a cobbler in the place, they had shaken their heads and pointed vaguely in the general direction of western France. Now here was this detective person arrived from nowhere and looking very cheerful. Nothing, Girvan knew, is more annoying to people with hangovers than their fellow citizens being cheerful around them.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Connolly,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Are you having trouble with your boots?’

  Girvan pointed sadly to the offending objects. ‘They’re bad now,’ he said morosely, ‘they’re going to get worse.’

  ‘I’ve got a very thick pair of socks in my pack somewhere,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Would you like to borrow them?’

  The socks seemed to improve things. The two men set off along the path.

  ‘Your business must have been doing well back in London, Mr Connolly, for you to be able to take the time off to come over here.’

  Connolly laughed bitterly. ‘I wish it was,’ he said.

  Powerscourt said nothing. He wondered if Girvan Connolly might tell him things out here in the wilds of the French countryside that he would never mention in the more crowded quarters of the hotel. He waited as a party of cows were driven in front of them into a neighbouring field.

  ‘The thing is . . . ’ Connolly began. He was tired of the lies, the lies he had told his wife, the lies he had told to the various bailiffs who had come to call at his run-down house, the lies he had told to his fellow pilgrims. He felt a sudden irresistible urge to tell the truth in the same way people sometimes tell their entire life stories, sins and all, to complete strangers on transatlantic liners or long train journeys.

  ‘It wasn’t going well at all,’ he said, looking not at Powerscourt but at the woods in front of them.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Connolly,’ said Powerscourt.

  Then his woes poured out of Girvan Connolly. The trouble with the business, the plates and the cups and saucers and the saucepans not selling as well as they should. The little loan taken out to tide them over. The slightly larger loan at a slightly higher rate of interest taken out to buy the consignment of cheap sheets and blankets that would restore his fortunes when sold off in the market stalls of Kentish Town. Further trouble when early customers reported angrily that the sheets virtually disintegrated on washing. Yet another loan, larger still, to pay off the first instalments on the earlier loans while there was still time. And then no moneylenders left to advance him credit to pay off the loan that had accounted for the purchase of the wretched sheets and blankets. His creditors threatening to come round and sort him out. All of this poured forth like a torrent of disaster.

  ‘I see,’ said Powerscourt. ‘What a run of bad luck, Mr Connolly.’ He didn’t think any of these troubles would give Girvan Connolly cause to murder one of his fellow pilgrims. He carried on, ‘So what, pray, is the condition of your creditors now, Mr Connolly? Do they know you are here? Do they know they may have to wait longer yet for the debts to be repaid?’

  Connolly was speaking very softly now. ‘They don’t know I’m here,’ he said. ‘Nobody knows I’m here. At least I hope they don’t.’ He looked behind him rather desperately but there were no moneylenders on the path behind, lining up for the kill.

  ‘Tell me this, Mr Connolly, what is the grand total that would be needed to clear your debts today? You’d better add in something for the interest racked up since you’ve been here.’

  ‘Fifteen pounds? Twenty pounds?’ said Connolly.

  Powerscourt thought that meant twenty-five.

  ‘Could I make a suggestion?’

  ‘Please do,’ said Connolly.

  ‘Why don’t you speak to Michael Delaney about it? He might be able to help. Twenty or twenty-five pounds seems a lot to you, but to him it’s a drop in the ocean. You’re family, after all. He might be very happy to help.’

  ‘Thank you, Lord Powerscourt, thank you so much.’ Ahead they could just see a group of pilgrims bathing their feet in a stream. Powerscourt had always thought there would be no single reason that had brought this disparate group of people to the Auvergne, some of them travelling over four thousand miles to get here. Religion and piety would serve for some. Guilt would account for others, and love of travel and the excitement of adventure in unknown lands. He thought of the variety of pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the different stories of the Miller and th
e Franklin and the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath. Thinking about Girvan Connolly, he hadn’t expected to find among these pilgrims a man on the run from his creditors.

  ‘I’ve only just remembered this one, this crime of Delaney’s.’ Maggie Delaney seemed to have gained fresh strength from her visit to the cathedral and the Black Madonna. She and Lady Lucy were taking lunch in the Hôtel St Jacques, a dish of veal today with sweetbreads in cream accompanied by sauté potatoes and carrots. Lady Lucy loathed the feel and the taste of sweetbreads and hid hers under a cairn of potatoes. ‘This,’ Maggie Delaney continued, ‘was the crime that set him on the path to riches, may God have mercy on his soul.’

  ‘What did he do then?’ asked Lady Lucy, preparing to make another mental note to tell Francis about when she met up with him later that day.

  ‘He arranged to buy a railroad with another man. I think the man was called Wharton. He, Wharton, I mean, put up most of the money. Delaney swindled him, I don’t know how. Wharton, poor man, lost the lot!’ With that Maggie Delaney speared three sweetbreads on to her fork and popped them into her mouth.

  ‘What happened? Surely Mr Delaney must have got caught? Shouldn’t he have been arrested for fraud or something like that?’

  ‘Every day, Lady Powerscourt, every day the man should be arrested for fraud or something like that. There was a great court case. Delaney hired better lawyers. He’s always hired better lawyers than his opponents. He got off. Isn’t that terrible? I doubt if God will forgive him.’

  ‘What happened to the man Wharton?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Did he recover?’

  ‘As far as I know, he never recovered. Very bitter he was apparently, very bitter.’

  Francis will like this story, Lady Lucy said to herself, he’ll like it very much indeed.

  Michael Delaney was not aware of the catalogue of his sins being rehearsed in the dining room of the Hôtel St Jacques. He was using his last afternoon in Le Puy to walk up to the cathedral. The party travelling by carriage was due to set off for Saugues at four o’clock that afternoon to meet up with the pedestrian pilgrims. Michael Delaney was thinking about his son James. He thought of his boy many times a day. He remembered with a shudder the deathly colour on his face as he fought with death, lying motionless on that hospital bed. He remembered how pale and wan he had been for weeks afterwards, the tottering steps when he began to move about again, like a toddler learning to walk for the first time. He remembered how healthy James had looked when they had said farewell with a long embrace on the ship preparing to take Delaney back to the Old World. He wondered what James was doing now. Playing golf, he suspected, with that elegant swing the older members admired so much. Maybe he was sailing with his friends, the wind in his hair and the spray racing along the sides of the Delaney yacht. He had only bought it for James.