Death of a Pilgrim

by David Dickinson

  Powerscourt knocked on the door of the house and found no reply. In front of him was a set of steps with the word cave or cellar written on a piece of wood above the entrance. From somewhere down below he thought he could hear music, a rather tinny sort of music. As he reached the bottom of the steps he saw that he was in quite a large cave. In the centre a feeble electric light tried and failed to illuminate all the interior. There were racks and racks filled with wine bottles reaching from floor to ceiling. The music, he realized, was the Marseillaise and it must be coming from a musical box by one of the enormous wooden vats at the far end of the cellar.

  Powerscourt headed towards the noise, his footsteps echoing off the stone floor. The music changed. Now it was playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Maybe it was one of those sophisticated machines that could play three or four different tunes. One of the vats had a sliding door cut into the front, presumable to make the cleaning out of the lees easier. Powerscourt stepped inside.

  And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,

  Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.

  O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave

  O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?

  Powerscourt hummed the words to the himself as he knelt down to inspect the little box. Some distant memory told him that the most sophisticated of these machines were manufactured in Switzerland. Just as he had it in his hands the light went out. Then he heard a rasping noise. The sliding door of the vat was moving. There was a harsh clang as it closed and a bolt was rammed home. Then another one. The music stopped. Powerscourt was trapped in the dark inside a wine vat over ten feet tall with no means of communication with the outside world. The winemaker Mr Leon seemed to have disappeared.

  For a moment he cursed himself for his folly. Why hadn’t he stayed with his family trees, drawing innocent lines of dead Delaneys across the page? Something told him that his ordeal had only just begun. There would be something else. He prayed that it wasn’t rats, rats about to be released into his wooden tomb through some secret opening. All his life he had been terrified of rats, rats runnning all over his clothes, patrolling across his face, scratching at his hands, biting, clawing, driving him slowly insane.

  Then he heard his fate. It wasn’t rats that were to mark his passing. At first he thought it might be condensation coming off the roof of the wooden vat. There were drips falling on to the floor. The drips turned into a slow trickle. A couple of them landed on his head. Then he knew. This wasn’t going to be Ordeal by Rat. It wasn’t even going to be Ordeal by Water. It was going to be Ordeal by Wine. There must be some sort of funnel or entrance up there through which the murderer had released this slow trickle that seemed to be growing more powerful by the second. Presumably there was a link to some other container that was now being emptied all over him. He couldn’t get out. He doubted if anybody would hear him shout, if there was anybody out there in the cave who was listening. He remembered some English king who had always delighted junior students of history by dying in a butt of malmsey. Well, unless he was very lucky, he, Powerscourt, was going to drown in a vat of wine. He hoped flippantly that it was good quality stuff. He didn’t fancy drowing in vin ordinaire. He wanted to pass away to Premier Cru, maybe even Grand Cru. He wondered where Johnny Fitzgerald was. So often in the past he had thought that the two of them would die together on the battlefield.

  Powerscourt patted his pockets to see what feeble weapons he might have at his command. He had left his pistol in the little house in the hills. He doubted it would have served him well even if he had it. The bullets might ricochet off the staves and kill him on the rebound. He had a book of matches. This vat, soaked in wine for heaven knew how many years, would never burn, and even if it did, he would burn with it. He had a clasp knife, complete with two blades and a corkscrew. The one thing he didn’t need in here, he told himself bitterly, was a bloody corkscrew. The stuff was lapping at his ankles now. He bent down and picked up the music box. He placed it on a ledge level with the top of his head. He felt for the button or the handle to turn it on. The Marseillaise sounded forth again. He could meet his end to the song of the men marching from Marseilles to Paris in 1792. He would have a suitably French end.

  He tried shoulder-charging the walls of his tomb. His only reward was a bruised shoulder. Then he began feeling with his hands along the wooden staves used to build the giant barrel. The cooper who made it would have known all about how to make it waterproof. He tried inserting the stronger blade of his knife into the overlap between the planks. Nothing happened. He wondered if he could make a hole, just a little hole that would let the wine escape. It was up to his calves now. A quick bend down and a dab of his fingers told Powerscourt that he was going to meet his maker in a sea of red rather than a sea of white. Jordan river, for him, would be rouge not blanc. He began working with his knife at the wood about halfway up the side of the vessel. He realized that the corkscrew might be more useful in trying to gouge out tiny sections of wood. With a knife in one hand and the corkscrew in the other he launched a furious assault on the walls of his tomb. The music box played on.

  Aux armes, citoyens!

  Formez vos bataillons,

  Marchons, marchons!

  Qu’un sang impur

  Abreuve nos sillons . . .

  Powerscourt sang along in French to raise his spirits. He remembered that the soldier who wrote the words in a single night was a captain of engineers. Maybe some of his skills could be transferred to Powerscourt’s hands.

  To arms, citizens!

  Form up your battalions,

  Let us march, let us march!

  That their impure blood

  Should water our fields . . .

  Lady Lucy felt cold when she heard about her husband’s trip to the vineyard. She could sense danger. She thought of the road between the hotel and the vineyard. She remembered the words of the Inspector – ‘We’re only letting the pilgrims out one at a time. No pairs, no groups. If they want to kill themselves instead of one of the others, so much the better.’ The killer might be lying in the wait for her Francis. She remembered all the times in the past when Francis had gone out on potentially dangerous missions accompanied by Johnny Fitzgerald as friend and protector. Now he was on his own. And they were up against one of the most ruthless murderers they had ever encountered. If the murderer began to see Powerscourt as a threat, she felt sure that he too would be killed. She remembered Sherlock Holmes’s advice to Dr Watson when he was telling him how to cross London without falling into the clutches of the evil Professor Moriarty: ‘in the morning you will send for a hansom, desiring your man to take neither the first nor the second that may present itself’. Francis, she thought, had jumped heedlessly into the first one.

  She rushed to find Inspector Léger. Together they ran up the road to Monsieur Leon’s with Lucy praying as she went that her husband would still be alive when she got there.

  The wine was well over his knees now. Powerscourt thought that he had only five or ten minutes left. The music box, obviously a deeply patriotic machine, had worked its way through all seven verses of the Marseillaise. Now it was playing ‘God Save the King’ at a very rapid speed. Powerscourt wondered if he would die happy and glorious. His hands were still hacking feverishly at the wood. His indentation was about an eighth of an inch deep. He didn’t know how thick the planks were but he doubted he had enough time. He realized suddenly how difficult it would be to effect a rescue mission. Anybody walking into the cave would think everything was normal, the bottles parked neatly in their rows, the great vats standing to attention at the end. Nobody would ever know he was inside one of them. He hoped the music box would carry beyond the curved walls of his prison. He thought of Lucy and the years ahead they might never enjoy together. He thought of his children growing up without a father. He thought of his first wife Caroline, drowned with their little son in a shipwreck on the Irish Sea. He thought about t
he murderer in his present case and that drove him to yet more furious efforts with knife and corkscrew. If there was one thing that made him angry, it was the thought of being beaten. This bloody murderer, he said to himself, is not going to kill me. I won’t have it. As the wine rose to his waist and filled his pockets he began shoving the corkscrew into the wood as if it was a cork in a bottle. He thought he could drive it in another eighth of an inch. There was still a long way to go. There was now a musty smell in the vat of death, heady fumes rising from the liquid. Powerscourt realized he might be forced to drink the stuff at the end. An imaginary waiter appeared before him. Would Monsieur like to try the wine?

  Inspector Léger and Lady Lucy were halfway there now. The hill had slowed them to a walking pace. Inspector Léger was mopping his brow with a blue handkerchief, freshly ironed, Lady Lucy observed, wondering about Madame Léger and life in the Léger household. Some of her anxiety had transmitted itself to the policeman. He patted his pocket from time to time, making sure his gun was still there. A small group of clouds passed overhead, obscuring the sun. A cart, laden with manure, passed them going the other way. On either side the vines were ripening slowly.

  The wine was at Powerscourt’s heart now, The musical box had moved back to the American national anthem. He was beginning to feel dizzy. His clothes were sticking tightly to his body. He could feel the energy ebbing away from him as his fingers still hacked at the wood of his prison. He cursed the murderer. He thought he was about to cry.

  Lady Lucy and the Inspector were only a couple of hundred yards away. Lady Lucy was panting, holding on to her side. She knew she couldn’t slow down. A terrible memory came back to her, of her husband lying wounded, shot by a killer in the Wallace Collection in London’s Manchester Square and hovering close to death. He lay in a coma, and she recalled all too vividly the thought that he was going to pass away in front of her and she wouldn’t even know he had gone. Perhaps he’s dead already, Lady Lucy said to herself, for her anxieties had grown on the journey, and I wasn’t there to say goodbye. Very quietly she began to weep.

  Powerscourt thought he was making progress at last: the wood at the end of his corkscrew felt slightly different. It began to yield a little. He though of prisoners in their cells in the Tower of London in Elizabethan times trying to saw away at the bars of their prison. The wine was by his shoulders now. Every time he rammed his corkscrew into the wood there was a swell in the liquid around him. At its height the red tide washed up to his ears. His music box was back on ‘God Save the King’. Powerscourt thought the Dead March from Saul might be more appropriate. Very quietly he began to sing the last verse:

  From every latent foe,

  From the assassin’s blow,

  God save the King!

  O’er him thine arm extend

  For Britain’s sake defend,

  Our father, prince and friend,

  God save the King!

  Inspector Léger and Lady Lucy had reached the winemaker’s house. They took a lightning tour. They peered into the darkness of the cellar and the Inspector went back into the kitchen to search for matches. God only knows, he said to himself, where the bloody light switch is. Lady Lucy stood halfway down the steps straining for a noise or a cry or the sound of some stray dog barking by a human body.

  One more attack with this corkscrew and I might be through, Powerscourt said to himself, bracing himself for a mighty effort. The music box now gave forth a rather high-pitched rendering of the Marseillaise. Maybe the fumes of the wine were affecting its inner workings. In went the corkscrew, Powerscourt turned it as hard as he could. It was getting somewhere. Then it was through. There was a tiny hole in the side of the vat. Powerscourt began to smile. But as he watched the wine trickle out, he knew that it was no good. His trickle was less, far less than the flow coming in from above. He might have postponed his doom but only for a few seconds. And then he saw that something else had gone terribly wrong. In his last round of pushing, turning and twisting he had broken the corkscrew. The vital part of it must be lying on the floor outside. The wine was up to his neck. The fumes were much worse. He thought he would pass out before he died. He would never see Lucy again.

  After what seemed an eternity Inspector Léger found some matches. He left the winemaker’s kitchen looking as if it had been ransacked by a burglar in a hurry, drawers thrown on the floor, cupboards emptied, a whole row of saucepans tossed aside. Lady Lucy clutched his arm as they made their way down the steps, enormous shadows flickering now across the sides of the cave.

  At the bottom the Inspector paused to light another match.

  ‘Listen, Inspector,’ said Lady Lucy suddenly, straining forwards to catch a noise. ‘Listen!’ Together they tiptoed forwards away from the bottles towards the tiers of great vats at the end.

  ‘It’s the Marseillaise, for God’s sake,’ said the Inspector, ‘and its coming from that great vat over there!’

  ‘And look,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘do you see, there’s a trickle of wine coming down the side!’

  The Inspector knew what to do. One of his uncles kept a vineyard in the Loire. He raced over to the vat and pulled back the bolts on the sliding door. A torrent of wine knocked him backwards on to the floor. Lady Lucy dodged to one side. The music box was still playing. And then, very unsteadily, like a man who has been drinking for days, his clothes dripping red on to the floor, his hand still clutching his clasp knife, his face deadly pale, came the staggering figure of Lord Francis Powerscourt.

  ‘Lucy,’ he said, his voice thick from the fumes, ‘I’m so glad to see you.’ And with that he fainted into her arms.

  15

  Shortly after nine o’clock in the morning Brother Healey took Johnny Fitzgerald to meet Sean McGurk, the eighty-year-old veteran of the famine. The Christian Brother stayed for a cup of tea and then left to do his marking. McGurk was a little over five feet tall and his face was lined like a parchment map. His front room had three armchairs, a fire, a couple of bookcases and pyramids of empty bottles of John Jameson. Johnny did a quick count and reckoned that with twelve empties on the first row, ascending to the summit by eleven, ten, nine and so on to the single bottle at the top, there were seventy-eight John Jamesons in each pyramid. He wondered if the number seventy-eight held some symbolic significance for the priests of ancient Egypt or the distillers of Dublin. And there were seven pyramids stretching out from the side of the fire to the opposite wall, a total he thought to be over five hundred.

  ‘How long did it take you to drink that lot, Mr McGurk?’ asked Johnny Fitzgerald. There was another bottle and a jug of water on the rickety table by the old man’s chair. Pyramid builders, Johnny reckoned, must work all day.

  ‘One pyramid every two months or so,’ said Sean McGurk. Christ, said Johnny to himself, that’s over a bottle a day. He was amazed the old man was still alive. The medical fraternity would have said survival was impossible at those rates of consumption.

  ‘You’re looking well on it,’ said Johnny cheerfully. ‘It must help to keep the days at bay.’

  ‘It does that,’ McGurk smiled and the lines on his face grew ever deeper. ‘Now then, Brother Healey said you wanted to know about the famine here in Macroom. Is it any particular district or any particular workhouse or any particular family you’re interested in?’

  Johnny explained about his book, commissioned by a rich Delaney in New York to find out about his ancestors. He almost believed the story by now.

  ‘There’s one thing I must ask you before we start,’ said McGurk, taking an enormous gulp of John Jameson. ‘Please don’t go asking me about my own experiences in those terrible times. I swore to God I would never talk about it again after I had three Americans here two years ago it was this August. Four days they spent here, staying in that hotel where I’m sure you are, and they wouldn’t leave me alone. “Surely there’s something else you can remember, Mr McGurk,” they started saying halfway through the second day and they carried on like that for another f
orty-eight hours. I got through two and a half bottles of medicine the evening they left and that’s a fact.’

  ‘It’s Delaneys I’m interested in, Mr McGurk,’ said Johnny. ‘I’m sure your experiences are fascinating but I’ll settle for Delaneys.’

  The old man hobbled to his bookcase and brought down two blue school exercise books. ‘I’ve written up all my discoveries in these little volumes,’ he said, carrying them back to his chair. He took another draught of medicine. ‘I’ve been talking to survivors of that dreadful famine for over thirty years now. Somebody had to do it, you know, and I’ve always liked history. It was my best subject at school.’

  The old man began looking through his books. ‘Daly, Davies, Davitt, Davy, that’s no good, here we are, Delaney.’ He took another swig to help his reading. For a moment there was silence in the little room. Johnny wondered what was coming.

  ‘I’m not sure your man is going to like this very much,’ said the old man, looking up at Johnny. ‘I don’t think he’ll like it at all.’ He carried on reading.

  ‘Right,’ he said at last. ‘Here goes. Are you sure you won’t be taking a drop?’ He nodded at the bottle. Johnny declined.

  ‘Before the famine,’ McGurk began, peering at his handwriting as if he had never seen it before, ‘there were a lot of Delaneys in these parts, mostly around Clonbeg down the road. Poor they were, terribly poor, living on the potatoes off their tiny holdings in those dreadful cabins we all lived in during those times. There were three Delaney families with over twenty children between them living in poverty and one family who had done rather better for themselves here in Macroom. They had a fair bit of land, the Brian Delaneys. When the potato crop failed the starving ones turned to their cousin for help. Brian Delaney refused. He wouldn’t give them a penny or a potato. Then the time came when they were all going to have to go into the workhouse. By this stage going to the workhouse was virtually a death sentence, the fever and the dysentery were so bad people were dropping down inside the workhouse gates. One of the poor wives managed to reach Brian Delaney in his house. They say he wouldn’t even let her through the door in case she infected his family. He gave her nothing. They all died. Or rather I think they all died.’