Death of a Pilgrim

by David Dickinson

  ‘You don’t sound convinced about that, Father,’ said Lady Lucy.

  ‘I’m not,’ replied Father Kennedy. ‘I think a spell in one of the poorer parishes of Boston or New York would have served as a more fruitful apprenticeship. I know I have the good fortune to serve in one of the richest parishes in New York City, Lady Powerscourt, but I have applied many times now to be transferred to a less wealthy location. Always I am refused. I don’t know why.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Father. It must be hard if you do not feel at home in your work. Did young Patrick talk about his family, his past at all?’

  ‘All he ever said was that his mother was overjoyed when he was called to the priesthood. She was very devout. Patrick was an only child, you see. It was the father who complained about the grandchildren he would never see. That was all I can remember him saying about that side of his life. I believe the young think more about the future than the past.’

  The road to Espeyrac turned right off the main road. The pilgrims were now on a narrow path that went up and down the hills in a series of sharp curves. Lady Lucy found herself thinking about Mr and Mrs MacLoughlin in Boston mourning for an only son lost twice, once to the call of the priesthood and once to the hands of a murderer. She wondered if they would ever make their own pilgrimage to see his grave on the hill above the Lot, looking out over the river and the valley and the woods on the far side. Her husband had been walking with Waldo Mulligan but Mulligan seemed to prefer his own company and Powerscourt let him go ahead on his own.

  Waldo Mulligan knew he should have engaged Powerscourt in conversation. Anything would have been preferable to his own thoughts. But he remained locked inside his own head. Even trying to forget about Caroline, his mistress back in Washington, married to a colleague on the staff of the senator he worked for, involved thinking about her, he had decided. You could only stop remembering her once you had remembered her in the first place. And then there was that other, even darker shadow. He could recall every detail of the day he heard about his parents’ death in a rail crash some six months before, the time of day, just after four o’clock, the clothes he was wearing, the dark blue suit with the white shirt, the weather, a light rain falling, what he had for lunch, a ham roll with melted cheese, his work, a routine meeting with the senator just about to start. And then several days later, opening the desk with his father’s papers so meticulously filed going back nearly forty years and the shock that had changed his life.

  At the front of the party marched one of Inspector Léger’s policemen. Another one walked roughly in the centre of the group surrounded by Jack O’Driscoll and Christy Delaney trying to improve their French by learning some of the words you might use when talking to young French women. The Inspector himself brought up the rear, some twenty yards behind Powerscourt. In Le Puy-en-Velay, Powerscourt thought, the French police virtually locked us up inside the hotel. Here we are under a form of mobile house arrest. Certainly the murderer would find it hard to strike here, surrounded by the officers of the law.

  Powerscourt was thinking about vendettas and how long they could last. Did they extend down two or even three generations? Would a family be able to maintain a hatred of their enemies that would stretch out over fifty or sixty years? In one of his earlier cases he remembered a vendetta in Corsica, but that had only just started. It certainly hadn’t been running for decades. He dimly recalled the myths of the Ancient Greeks where people wreaked frightful vengeance on their foes across the generations. But they had often been cursed by the gods, ever random and even whimsical in their choice of victims. He looked at the party of pilgrims ahead of him. Which one was carrying a terrible secret with him? Was he, even now, here among the trees and the lowing cows and the sunshine, deciding on his next victim?

  Still the road twisted up and down the hills. They passed smaller, overgrown paths that curved their way into the woods and forests. Stepping into one of them Powerscourt realized that he was in a totally green world. This was what everything would look like if the creator had made the skies green instead of blue. Powerscourt bent down and stepped further along the path, dodging the overhanging branches. There were so many different shades in here. Emerald, sea green, olive green, pea green, grass green, apple, mint, forest, lawn green, lime, leaf green, fir, pine, moss, viridian. Dark green, he remembered, is associated with ambition, greed and jealousy. Maybe one of the pilgrims was green at heart. He turned about and made his way back into the blue universe outside and almost bumped into the Inspector.

  ‘They say there are wild mushrooms growing in these forests, Lord Powerscourt. Did you find any? And tell me, what do you think of our security arrangements? The killer would find it difficult to strike now, is that not so?’

  Powerscourt resisted the temptation to say that the killer had struck on the last occasion in the middle of the night. ‘Very fine,’ he replied.

  ‘I hope to keep some sort of guard during the hours of darkness as well,’ the Inspector went on. ‘I have to work it out with my men later. Maybe we shall take watches like the sailors do but without those damned bells ringing all through the night.’

  Lady Lucy found herself walking alongside Wee Jimmy Delaney now, the steel worker from Pittsburgh. She reckoned he was nearly a foot taller than she was. He must be at least six foot four, she told herself, with big calloused hands and masses of black curly hair. His eyes were pale blue and hinted that there could be a gentler soul behind them than outside appearances might suggest. Wee Jimmy had a great staff in his hand which seemed a puny thing in his huge fist, like a matchstick.

  ‘Are you enjoying the pilgrimage so far, Mr Delaney?’ Lady Lucy asked brightly. ‘Maybe enjoy is the wrong word, I don’t know. People have so many different reasons for being here after all.’

  ‘I like it very much, Lady Powerscourt. I like this rolling countryside hereabouts.’

  Lady Lucy paused. She didn’t quite know how to put the substance of her next question without sounding rude or impertinent or both. They walked on. A herd of light brown cattle stared at them from a neighbouring field. The stare, Lady Lucy felt, was exactly the same as the stare from the local French people, impertinent and lasting far too long. In the end Wee Jimmy solved the problem for her.

  ‘You know, Lady Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘I haven’t told anybody yet why I’m here, why I’ve come on the pilgrimage.’

  Lady Lucy waited. The cows were still staring. They looked as if they could stare all day.

  ‘It’s strange, I think, how we hope we or our loved ones could be made better by walking all this way and going to church in Santiago de Compostela. It’s not rational.’

  ‘I’m not sure that religion is rational at all, Mr Delaney. We’re meant to have faith and that really means believing in things that aren’t rational at all.’

  ‘I’ve got a little sister, Lady Powerscourt.’ Wee Jimmy Delaney tucked his staff under his arm and bent down to speak nearer to Lady Lucy’s height. ‘She’s why I’m here.’

  Lady Lucy didn’t want to ask if the girl was dying or suffering from some other terrible problem. She waited, walking more slowly now.

  A strange look passed over Wee Jimmy’s face. Lady Lucy thought it combined compassion and anger at virtually the same time.

  ‘She’s deaf and she’s dumb and she’s blind. Has been since the day she was born, poor little thing. Four children before her, all perfectly healthy, three children after her, all perfectly healthy, all faculties in working order. My mother thinks to this day that she is being punished for some crime, only she can’t remember ever having committed a crime the size of this punishment.’

  ‘How old is your little sister?’ asked Lady Lucy.

  ‘Marianne? She’s eight years old, she’ll be nine on the Fourth of July. She’s well looked after, all her brothers and sisters would do anything for her. She can still taste.’ Lady Lucy saw a gentle smile on the face of the man from Pittsburgh. ‘Every time you give her a piece of chocolate she s
miles this lovely smile. And she can smell. She always knows when I’ve come in from the steelworks and haven’t cleaned myself up yet. You see these hands, Lady Powerscourt.’ Wee Jimmy held out his great clubs for inspection. ‘You could tell that I work in something like a steelworks or a coal mine. It’s very hard work. I don’t mind. I do as much overtime as I can. Sometimes I carry on right through the weekends. I do it to take Marianne to the best doctors in Pennsylvania, God, they’re so expensive, these doctors, but I don’t care about the money. We’ve been to two specialists in Philadelphia but they can’t do anything for Marianne. I’m saving up to take her to a man in New York they say is the best man in America.’

  Lady Lucy tried to imagine what it must be like to be the mother of a child who could neither see nor speak nor hear. The knowledge that you had brought this person into this world must be with you every minute of every day, as if you had been cursed by God or whatever deities you believed in.

  ‘Is that why you’re here?’ she asked quietly, looking up into Wee Jimmy’s face. ‘For Marianne?’

  ‘Well, it is. I’m here, I suppose, as the representative of our family on this pilgrimage to pray that Marianne may get better. We don’t want everything, you see. It would be unrealistic to expect all three faculties to come back, I think. Just something, however small, some improvement to take her a little way out of the eternal darkness and the eternal silence as my father puts it. It’s strange, our family, Lady Powerscourt. All the children born in even years, 1890, 1892, 1894, are believers, like our mother is a true believer. All the ones born in the odd years, 1895, 1897 and so on, are more doubtful, like our father. They all go to church and so on, the odd-year Delaneys, but they don’t believe like the rest of us do.’

  ‘Was it a family decision, then, that you should come?’ said Lady Lucy trying to hold a picture of Marianne in her mind.

  ‘It was my father who suggested it, oddly enough. He’d heard about the pilgrimage and Michael Delaney paying for everyone. He said to me that we’d tried all these doctors, we’d probably have to try some more later on. “Science hasn’t worked for us,” he said, he’s a great reader, my father, always getting books out of the library, “so let’s try religion.” Here I am, Lady Powerscourt, praying for Marianne in every church we pass and out in the open too.’

  ‘Can I ask you a favour, Mr Delaney?’ said Lady Lucy.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Can I pray for her too?’

  The village of Espeyrac boasted yet another river, the Daz, now a thin trickle running down the valley below the hotel, the Auberge des Montagnes. The place did not have enough rooms so Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were to stay in a house owned by the hotelkeeper’s brother a mile or so outside. A long track led up to it past a couple of empty houses and a number of barns. Powerscourt noticed the roofs, all of which, whether designed for man or beast, had a slight outwards curve at the bottom rather than running straight down to the gutters. It gave them a slightly feminine appearance as if the male builders had been thinking of their wives or their lovers or their mistresses as they worked.

  ‘What a charming little place,’ said Lady Lucy, disturbing a couple of goldfinches minding their own business in the little courtyard outside the house, and opening the front door with the hotel proprietor’s key. The house was on four floors with an attic at the top and a fine sitting room. But it was the view from the terrace at the back that really delighted them, a view that could also be seen, in different sections, from various windows on the other floors. The countryside, a mixture of clumps of trees and rolling pastureland, spread out down towards a valley. Over to the left the spire of the Espeyrac church seemed to hold the picture together like the altarpieces in the paintings of Renaissance Madonnas. On the far side the hills rolled upwards again. Behind them, their own hill climbed to a rocky peak. Later that evening, before they made their way to the hotel for supper, Powerscourt and Lady Lucy walked back up the road towards Entraygues. A smaller road led off to the right at the top of a crest in the hills. The sun was going down fast. They watched, hypnotized, as the colours faded from the bottom of the valleys while the tops were still bathed in sunlight. The lower half of some of the trees was a black and white etching, the rest still coloured by the sun. Soon only the highest parts of the trees and the ground were bright. Shadow and dark grey were covering the rest of the landscape that rolled away in great folds in front of them. The sun eventually sank behind the top of one of the hills, a blazing ball of yellow and gold, gone to light up another part of the world. Powerscourt took Lady Lucy’s hand as they walked down the hill to the Espeyrac hotel. They were both too humbled to speak.

  In the Auberge they found themselves translating in an animated discussion between the hotel owner, Michael Delaney and Alex Bentley. The hotel proprietor was expounding on the need for more pilgrims, more visitors, more money to pass through his little village. ‘So many of the towns on the pilgrim route grew rich and ever richer from the proceeds of those pilgrims hundreds of years ago,’ he said, the bright light of profit in his eye. ‘When the wars of religion and that terrible man Napoleon came along it all got too dangerous for the people. But we have peace now. Why can’t we do it again? Why can’t the pilgrims come back?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Michael Delaney, scenting perhaps or playing with a possible business opportunity. ‘Tell me, Alex, how many Catholics are there in France? How many in Spain? How many in Germany? And how many in America, for God’s sake? Just think of the size of the potential market!’

  ‘Millions of them,’ said Alex Bentley, ‘probably tens of millions across Europe and the United States. Enormous numbers.’

  ‘It just needs some proper marketing, that’s all.’ Delaney was warming to his theme now. ‘They say that the art of advertising is to make people buy things they never knew they wanted. Well, imagine what they could do with the pilgrim route to Compostela! Come save your soul in Spain! Forgiveness of Sins! Salvation of Souls! Pilgrim’s Progress! Redemption on Route! French food on the road to God! French wines on the Pilgrim Path! Just think what those early Christians did in terms of marketing when all they had were those four little Gospels and some of them pretty hard to understand. They converted most of the bloody Roman Empire in a couple of hundred years. All done with no proper slogans. No billboards. No newspapers to place advertisements in, for God’s sake. Surely modern American methods can do better than that.’

  ‘My little hotel here might be full for most of the summer,’ the owner enthused, doing complicated calculations of potential gains in his head. ‘We might never be poor again. My Yvonne could have a carriage of her own!’

  ‘Hotels?’ said Delaney. ‘A man might do very well with hotels. I could buy or build a whole chain right across the routes from France and Spain. All called the St Jacques with a statue of the saint fellow with his staff and his sandals right above the main entrance. I know a man in stonework up in Westchester County who could knock those off at a reasonable price. Discount for large numbers, of course. Scallop shells in every bedroom. Pilgrim food, maybe not, now I think about it, that was probably inedible and the Americans wouldn’t eat it. We could have shops in all the hotels selling staffs and rosary beads and maps and special prayer books for the pilgrims. I’m sure some medieval professor could dig us out a lot of the old prayers the people said along the way. If not, the Jesuits or some order or another could run off a few for us at a good fee. And once you had the whole system up and running you wouldn’t have to do another thing. The business would look after itself, it’d be like selling water in the desert. It could be tremendous, simply tremendous. Have to get the Church on side, of course. I’m sure Father Kennedy could work out how to buy a couple of bishops, maybe even a cardinal or two. God bless the pilgrims. Confession en route. Absolution in the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. We’d probably have to work out an easier means of transport for the older citizens, mind you. Should appeal to the old, pilgrimage, when they’re so close to the e
xit themselves. Not long to go now. Pilgrim’s passport to the next world. Maybe we could get some of those liners to make special cruises from New York, dropping the elderly close to the final destination so they didn’t have far to walk.’

  Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were walking back to their little house in the hills when they heard footsteps behind them. It was Stephen Lewis, the solicitor from Frome. He paused every now and then to look behind him, as if to make sure he was alone. ‘I had to catch you on your own, Lord Powerscourt, forgive me, Lady Powerscourt, I didn’t want anybody listening in to what I have to say.’ He paused.

  ‘You can speak freely in front of Lucy, Mr Lewis,’ said Powerscourt. ‘She’s tougher than she looks.’

  ‘It’s probably nothing,’ said Lewis, panting slightly as they climbed up the hill out of Espeyrac, ‘but I felt I should tell you all the same. It’s only a fragment of conversation, but I think you ought to know about it.’

  Powerscourt remembered that Lewis was a solicitor by profession. Heaven only knew what secrets he held about the inhabitants of Frome locked up in his office safe.

  ‘The other evening, in the hotel at Estaing, I felt unwell last thing at night. I thought I’d try a glass of brandy to settle the stomach. That’s often worked for me in the past. Maybe the local cooking is too rich for me. Mabel, that’s my wife, always likes to put plain food on the table. Anyway, the bar was still serving customers and I took my drink out on to the terrace. The windows were open and I could hear two men having a heated discussion at the other end of the bar. They were quite drunk, the barman didn’t understand a word of English, they had no idea I was there. I could only hear fragments of what they said.’