Death of a Pilgrim

by David Dickinson

  The pilgrims cheered. ‘Santiago!’ they shouted. ‘August the fifteenth!’ ‘Feast of the Assumption!’ ‘Santiago!’

  Several hours later, as Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were making their way to bed, they were intercepted by an excited Alex Bentley. ‘I thought you’d like this,’ he grinned. ‘Father Kennedy is overjoyed, saying it is one of the greatest days of his life!’

  ‘Why is that?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Simply this. You’re going to enjoy the news. Michael Delaney has agreed to pay for two new foundations to be run by the Church.’

  ‘What’s so special about that?’ said Powerscourt, ‘I thought Michael Delaney sprinkles his money about like holy water all the time.’

  ‘This time it’s for a home for abandoned mothers, deserted by their husbands. And a new orphanage to be run by nuns, large enough to cope with most of the orphans on the eastern seaboard of the United States.’ Alex Bentley paused for effect. ‘And they’re both going to be in Pittsburgh.’

  A month later Powerscourt and Lady Lucy and Johnny Fitzgerald were walking across Santiago towards the cathedral. Lady Lucy was sporting a new hat in pale blue from Bond Street. It was Wednesday, the fifteenth of August, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Santiago was treating itself to a holiday. The service was due to start at eleven o’clock. Lady Lucy was very excited about another guidebook she had brought with her from Hatchard’s in Piccadilly.

  ‘Do you know, Francis, that the whole story of St James may be a myth, fiction even?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the story goes something like this. I don’t think my dates will all be right but never mind. St James comes to Spain and preaches the Gospel some time after the Crucifixion. Then he goes back to Rome and is martyred, poor man, by having his head cut off. This is where it starts to get a bit odd. Somehow or other the body of James and his head are brought back to Spain in a stone boat, to Padron down the road from here. And then nothing is heard of him for about seven hundred and fifty years. Absolutely nothing. No pilgrimage, no statue, no churches, it’s as if he’s never been. Then the Spaniards are having a lot of trouble with the Moors and the Infidel. They need a patron saint of Spain to rid the country of the invaders. So, my author implies, the church authorities remembered the stories of James in his stone boat. Behold! A body is found! It is pronounced, heaven knows how, to be that of St James in person! And he becomes a mighty warrior, able to defeat whole armies of Moors single-handed. His name becomes a great battle cry, Santiago Matamoros, James the Slayer of Moors. The cathedral is built here at Santiago. The whole pilgrim industry starts up and never looks back. It was all very convenient.’

  ‘It’s a good story anyway,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald.

  Powerscourt looked up at the cathedral believed to contain the bones of St James, towering above them. ‘It looks pretty solid to me, Lucy. Who ever says myths have to be true anyway? What about the Son of God who came down to earth to be crucified and to rise again on the third day so that his followers could eat him in church every Sunday?’

  Lady Lucy laughed. They were walking up the nave now, greeting their friends the pilgrims who were already in position, arranging to meet for lunch afterwards. They found outside seats halfway up the transept. There were still ten minutes to go before the service. Powerscourt noted the memorabilia of the saint, the scallop shells, the great statue of St James himself, which had been encrusted with gold until French soldiers stripped it off and carried it away to Paris during the Napoleonic Wars. Looking upwards he saw that each century had left its mark on the original construction, elaborate statues, soaring pillars, delicate carvings.

  The service for the assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Cathedral of St James in Santiago de Compostela began. Sonorous Latin rolled across the transept and down the nave and echoed around the roof spaces far above. Every pew was filled. The congregation knelt and rose and knelt and rose again. Priests and bishop in scarlet and purple moved purposefully around the high altar. There was a handsome young man standing beside Michael Delaney, the son James whose miraculous recovery from illness had led to the pilgrimage. Now he had joined his father and the other survivors at the end, a father’s pride apparent to all every time Michael Delaney looked at his son. Powerscourt found himself thinking of the Last Judgement in the tympanum at Conques, the depiction in stone of the sins which could send a soul to hell, greed, adultery, pride, the glutton about to be roasted in some infernal cooking pot, the kings without their crowns about to suffer the torments of the damned. He thought of the fallen, John Delaney, his body bouncing off the volcanic rocks from the path to the top of the chapel of St Michel in Le Puy. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen. He thought of the trainee priest, Patrick MacLoughlin, his corpse sent down the Lot in the middle of the night to be found by schoolboys in the morning. He thought of the pilgrims he had met again that morning, their eyes bright, their faces tanned by the long march from Pamplona, now at journey’s end here in the Cathedral of St James. He resolved to hold a pilgrims’ dinner every year in London for the survivors. The young men, his young men, as he now thought of them, could relive their days in the vast open spaces of the Aubrac and the roasting plains of Spain. He thought of Stephen Lewis, cut to pieces behind the great Abbey Church of Conques. Hail Mary Mother of God.

  The worshippers were beginning to come forward now to receive the sacrament, Maggie Delaney leaning on the arm of her cousin Michael, still trying to buy his way into heaven. Powerscourt remembered what he had said to Lucy a month earlier, and felt he had been right when he had spoken of the rich buying up all the camels and establishing a monopoly on needles. He thought of Girvan Connolly, feckless, burdened with debt, a man on the run from his creditors, who still did not deserve to meet his doom in the upper chamber at Moissac, his head smashed to pulp against the stone pillars. He thought of Waldo Mulligan. Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.

  His young men were coming forward to the altar now, on this, the culminating moment of their pilgrimage. Wee Jimmy Delaney and Brother White were raising the chalice to their lips. Blood of Christ. Body of Christ. Take this in remembrance of me. Powerscourt touched Lady Lucy’s hand and smiled at her. He wondered how they all felt, now they had finally reached journey’s end. Were their sins forgiven? Would God grant their prayers to heal the sick and make the blind see and the deaf speak?

  Shortly before one o’clock the service was drawing to an end. But the ritual was not. An air of excitement ran around the cathedral. A group of eight men, dressed in dark red robes, assembled at the top of the nave, opposite the altar. They brought a great silver-plated censer over to be filled with a mixture of charcoal and incense. This was the Botafumeiro, literally Smoke Expeller in Galician and Portugese, and it was only brought out on special occasions. No priest or acolytes walked among the congregation waving this thurible about from side to side. It was too big, five feet high and weighing almost two hundred pounds. It was attached to a system of ropes that led down from a pulley in the dome and it would swing across the transept, almost from one door to another, pouring incense over the altar as it went, swooping over the heads of the congregation.

  When the censer was filled it was brought back to the red-robed men, each of whom now had a rope in his hands. These were like bell ringers’ ropes except that, rather than each rope being connected to its own particular bell, they were all connected to the master rope shooting up towards the dome at one end, and to the Botafumeiro, gleaming in the light, at the other. There was a certain amount of shuffling about and then one of the red-robed men took the thurible out into the centre of the transept and gave it a push. It was, Lady Lucy thought, exactly like somebody giving a send-off shove to a model boat at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Then the red men seized their ropes and pulled, bending a long way down as they did so. The censer began to swing in longer and longer arcs, forty feet up, fifty feet up, sixty feet up, higher
and higher towards the ceiling.

  Then disaster struck. The man opposite Powerscourt, who had been swaying about as if he were a human thurible, suddenly tottered out into the gap between the pews, directly in the path of the censer. It was moving away from him as he lurched out. But it looked certain to hit him on the way back. Quite what impact a two-hundred-pound Botafumeiro travelling at over forty miles an hour would have on a human skull Powerscourt did not know. He shot out into the gap to try to bring the man back to safety. Lady Lucy stared at the scene in horror. The censer had turned and was shooting towards Francis at great speed. In a moment he might be dead. Johnny Fitzgerald dived from the edge of his pew and tackled Powerscourt, rugby style, just above the knees. Powerscourt and the reeling man crashed to the ground. The Botafumeiro shot over them on its journey to the other door. Johnny Fitzgerald put his arms across the others. He didn’t want them rising to their feet only for the thurible to smash into their faces on the way back. The men with the ropes appeared to change their routine to bring the thing to a halt sooner that it would under normal running. A priest ran over to make sure nobody was hurt. In a matter of moments all three men were back in their seats.

  ‘My God, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, brushing the dust off his jacket, ‘we come all the way to Spain on a murder investigation. Five dead men, four pilgrims and a murderer later and you’ve solved the mystery only to get yourself nearly killed by a giant block of incense.’

  Johnny Fitzgerald was more philosophical. ‘Bloody country this, Francis, if you ask me, the buggers are obsessed with death,’ he whispered. ‘If you don’t get gored at the running of the bulls, you may catch it in the bullring. And if you’re still alive after that the smelly monster on the ropes will knock the back of your head off. Thank God Waldo Mulligan never got acquainted with this Botafumeiro thing – he’d have killed off half the congregation.’

  The pilgrims were filing out of the cathedral now. Powerscourt thought they had been valiant against all disaster, Jack O’Driscoll and Charlie Flanagan and Christy Delaney and the other survivors. No discouragement had made them once relent their first avowed intent to be a pilgrim. They had struggled on through death and sealed trains and nights on the floors of the police cells of France. They had indeed been beset round with dismal stories of murder in the afternoon and sudden death in the morning. Perhaps, Powerscourt thought, they knew now, all of them, after this long journey towards God, that they, at the end, would life inherit, that they would fear not what men say, that they had laboured night and day, To Be a Pilgrim.

  EPILOGUE

  The Powerscourts received regular reports on the pilgrims’ progress back in the world they had left behind. Only Christy Delaney, now surrounded by the courts and libraries of Cambridge, proved an indifferent correspondent. And then in early December there came two letters from France, one from the Mayor of Le Puy, the other from the Secretary to the Cardinal Archbishop of Toulouse, the worldly cleric through whose archdiocese they had passed earlier that year. Mr Jacquet of Le Puy informed them that the two fountains were in position with the appropriate inscriptions and hoped that the Powerscourts would be able to visit them when they were next in the south of France. Business in the butcher’s shop, he told them as an aside, had never been better. The Archbishop’s interest was more general. He wished to know what had befallen the surviving pilgrims. Powerscourt suspected he wanted material for a sermon on the benefits of pilgrimage and the workings of God’s grace on His faithful servants. But he pulled out a couple of sheets of his finest writing paper and began his story of the outcome of the long journey from Le Puy-en-Velay to Santiago de Compostela.

  He began with Michael Delaney. Delaney had not let himself be affected in any way by the revelations of his past sins in the Pamplona hotel. He had simply ignored them, bulldozed his way past them and carried on with his life and his work. If he felt any remorse he did not show it. If he felt any guilt it was not apparent. His son James was now safely installed at Harvard and enjoying himself. If there was one noticeable change in Delaney’s behaviour it was that he was giving ever more money to charity. The institutions for orphans and single mothers in Pittsburgh were expected to open in the New Year. In his home city of New York he was giving enormous sums to Catholic education. And, in conjunction with the Church, he was establishing a new travel facility called the Catholic Pilgrim, to organize pilgrimages to Santiago where the journey would be planned every step of the way, with different options for walkers and train travellers. Alex Bentley was the managing director and spent much of his time in France and Spain.

  Jack O’Driscoll had indeed written a long account of the pilgrimage for his newspaper, which was successfully syndicated all round the world. Jack turned down job offers in Manchester and London, saying he preferred to stay in the country he knew, where his family and friends were. Charlie Flanagan was being so successful at selling model ships that he thought he would be able to save enough money to go to college and train as an architect. He still had all the drawings he made in Europe, neatly stored in large folders. Sometimes on quiet days like a Sunday afternoon he would open them out and take himself on an improbable journey back to the façade of the cathedral in Le Puy or the cloisters of Moissac, scarcely able to believe that he, a young man from Baltimore, had travelled all that way and seen these glorious buildings.

  Shane Delaney had reported great news, wonderful news, news fit for a miracle if it lasted. Two weeks after he returned home, his wife Sinead, who had been dying slowly from cancer, appeared to recover. Her energy came back. She visited her family. Shane took her for a holiday to Weston-super-Mare. She had never seen a beach or a pier before or stayed in a hotel. Their seven days there in the Strand Hotel, she told her husband, had been among the happiest of her life. Then they returned to Swindon. Two weeks later the disease returned. The end was close. She died, Powerscourt told the Archbishop, in early October. Willie John Delaney, the man dying on pilgrimage from the incurable disease never expected to reach Santiago. But he did. He never expected to last out into the autumn. But he did. Maybe it was the cold that saw him off. Five of his fellow pilgrims attended his funeral in the second week of November.

  Brother White gave up teaching altogether. He retrained as an accountant in a reputable firm in Guildford where the numbers and the ledgers held no temptations for him. Maggie Delaney had abandoned her little apartment in New York with its box files of clippings from the business pages of the New York Times and gone to live with her cousin Michael in his palace in Manhattan. The worldly air of the great town house and the people who passed through it made her a less crabby personality. Father Kennedy had put on weight during the pilgrimage. His Bishop did not think that a portly priest was the right man to tender to the spiritual needs of the rich of Manhattan. He sent him to a poorer parish in New Jersey but replaced him with a former Wall Street banker who had seen the light and joined the priesthood. At least, the Bishop said to himself rather cynically, the rich will now be told how to make their charitable donations as tax efficient as possible.

  Powerscourt kept the most dramatic piece of news till the end. The letter from Pittsburgh had been addressed to Lady Lucy and she had cried when she read it. Marianne Delaney, beloved little sister of Wee Jimmy, appeared to be recovering her sight. She was still dumb, she was still deaf, but she could see. The sight might never be perfect and the doctors did not know how far the recovery would go. Lady Lucy remembered Wee Jimmy saying that the family couldn’t expect everything, but any improvement would be a blessing. Well, improvement there had been and Wee Jimmy reported that the little girl was so excited that she could now see her parents and her brothers and sisters and marvel at the flowers in the park. Every day brought fresh wonder as Marianne saw more people and more places for the first time. Wee Jimmy had brought her back a scallop shell, symbol of the pilgrimage to Santiago, and she could now see it as well as touch it. It was one of her most treasured possessions. The family and the little girl were ove
rjoyed. It was a gift from God. Wee Jimmy’s pilgrimage to Santiago had borne fruit in the sight of his little sister. The Promised Land across three thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean, Powerscourt wrote to the Cardinal Archbishop, had always been represented to the famine refugees from Ireland and the poor of Europe as a place of hope, the country of the American Dream. Now, perhaps, the story of the pilgrimage was ending as it had begun, with an American miracle.