Death of a Pilgrim

12

Lord Francis Powerscourt was staring out of the open window of their bedroom in the house above Espeyrac. Lady Lucy was reading a book about French abbeys and cathedrals. The night air was soft and warm. The moon, three-quarters full, was shining out across the valley. Fields and groups of trees looked ghostly in the white light. Small creatures of the night could be heard rustling about on their nocturnal business in the woods to his left. The spire of Espeyrac church was crisp in the moonlight. A fox could be seen clearly, padding across the track that led back to the main road. All it needed, Powerscourt thought, was an owl. He had always been very fond of owls ever since the time he had made friends with one which lived in a barn behind his house as a small boy. The bird would stare solemnly at him for several minutes at a time before flying disdainfully away.

‘Do you think it’s important, Francis,’ Lady Lucy laid her book aside, ‘what Mr Lewis was saying on the road?’

‘It could be,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It’s a pity they were drunk, though. They might say something completely different in the morning, whoever they were. I think they put the wind up Stephen Lewis, mind you. He seemed very frightened when he looked back to make sure nobody was following us. And I don’t think he’s a man who would scare easily.’

‘Well, you might well be frightened if you were one of these pilgrims. Two of them dead so far. I don’t think I’d go on if I were them. But tell me, Francis, what do you think of this house? Isn’t it just perfect with these marvellous views?’

Suddenly Powerscourt suspected what might be about to come. Lady Lucy was always thinking about buying houses in the way he thought about making centuries at cricket or his children being happy and successful when they grew up. Another onslaught might be imminent. It could start at any moment. He regarded these attacks as a mild form of disease. None of his sisters had ever suffered from them, although one of them had recently acquired a monstrous house near the sea front at Antibes. He would be told how good it would be for the children. They could learn French. They could ride with their father in the hills. Lucy herself would be busy making the necessary improvements to the property, new carpets here, a new kitchen there, different curtains. The air would improve all their health, far from the smoke and grime of London.

‘I think it’s lovely here, so peaceful,’ said Powerscourt, leaning out to inspect a ginger cat that had just captured a small animal with a very long tail and was carrying the trophy away to some secret lair for a late supper. Then Lady Lucy disappointed him. There was no talk of property in the Aveyron. She merely said that she hoped there would be sunshine the next day. They were going to one of the most famous places on the pilgrim route, the medieval abbey at Conques.

Johnny Fitzgerald had only been back to Ireland once in more than twenty years, and that had been on Powerscourt’s business the year before with the ancestor paintings disappearing from the Anglo-Irish houses. He stared out from his boat approaching the Irish coast, trying to forget the time in the 1880s he had looked at that view, the green of the hills to the south, the lighthouses and the Martello towers, the pall of smoke hanging over the slums of Dublin. Ireland had broken his heart all those years ago. Maybe not Ireland, but a certain Mary Rose Lennox, eldest daughter of Mr and Mrs William Lennox of Delgany, County Wicklow. Johnny had first met her at a tennis party in Greystones and had been enchanted from the moment he saw her serve. She was of medium height, with light brown hair and blue eyes that shone with mischief or delight. Mary Rose hit the ball with remarkable force and was also possessed of a formidable backhand, usually, in Johnny’s experience, the weakest point in the female armoury on a tennis court. He played against her in a game of mixed doubles later that afternoon and found he was so bewitched his game went completely to pieces. It was worse than fighting, he said to himself that evening, for Johnny was home on leave from service with the British Army on the North-West Frontier. He saw her twice more that week and from then on they were inseparable. They would ride out into the Wicklow hills and Johnny would tell her wild stories about the Indians and their strange customs, and the way the heat affected the English in such a variety of different ways, some of them becoming parodies of retired colonels in Cheltenham, others learning the native languages and becoming obsessed with the local history and culture. Looking out over the two rivers at the Meeting of the Waters at Avoca on a hot July afternoon, Johnny told her he loved her. The girl was used to the flattery of young men and merely laughed a pretty laugh. He told her again after a trip to the theatre in Dublin where Johnny was so bewitched he scarcely noticed the action on stage. All through those summer days he floated through time in an ecstasy of love, counting the hours until he saw her again. Standing on the beach at Brittas Bay, looking at the waves pounding on to the sand, an unseasonal wind bowling along the beach, whirling clouds of sand as they went, he asked Mary Rose to marry him. He could remember the scene as vividly as if it had been yesterday. Johnny had rehearsed his lines often, especially last thing at night.

‘I love you so much, Mary Rose,’ he said, putting his arm round her waist. ‘Will you marry me?’

The girl laughed as she had laughed before. Then she saw that he was serious. ‘Don’t ask me now, Johnny,’ she said, ‘it’s far too soon. We’ve only known each other a couple of months, if even as long as that. Don’t rush me, please.’

Johnny squeezed her ever tighter and settled in for a long siege. Expensive flowers and exquisite chocolates were his weapons of choice. As summer faded into autumn he grew ever more conscious of the date of his return to his regiment at the end of September. Surely he must make her his own before then.

On the last evening of his leave they went for a walk by the lake in the garden of her parents’ house nestling in the Wicklow mountains. Johnny asked Mary Rose to marry him once more. Once more she laughed. ‘I’ve told you before, Johnny, I think it’s too soon. I’ll wait for you, of course I’ll wait for you. It won’t be long until you’re back again.’

‘You know perfectly well that I have no idea when I’ll be back,’ said Johnny rather sadly. ‘Why can’t you tell me now?’

‘It’s too soon, Johnny.’ That laugh again. ‘Don’t let’s spoil our last evening before you go.’

So they went back to the house. Mary Rose played selections of Irish ballads at the piano. Johnny would always remember her seated there, her back as straight as a guardsman on parade, a slight frown on her face as she made sure she played the right notes, the occasional brilliant smile in his direction, those blue eyes sparkling with pleasure as he sang the songs of old Ireland in his finest tenor voice.

The next day Johnny left early for the English boat. He thought of Mary Rose for thousands of miles, down the spine of England in whose armies he served, past the strange waters of the Suez Canal and the dusty roads of India until he rejoined his regiment. The shock came a couple of months after his return. Johnny had gone for an early evening drink in the Club and noticed that all the others present shuffled quickly out of the room as he came in. It was as if he had some contagious disease. Even the barman and the waiters had disappeared to their private quarters behind the drinks counter. Johnny stared around him. Everything seemed to be normal. A copy of The Times, arrived that afternoon from London, was lying on the table. Later, Johnny thought his colleagues had intended to leave him a clue. He noticed one of the announcements in the Marriages column of the newspaper had been underlined.

OSBORNE:LENNOX. On 3rd October 1886, at Christchurch, Delgany, County Wicklow, by the Reverend John Hancock, Jonathan Henry Osborne of Macroom Castle, County Cork, to Beatrice Mary Rose Lennox of Delgany, County Wicklow.

At first Johnny couldn’t believe it. He picked up the newspaper and carried it back to his quarters. There he lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. After the third reading he found the tears streaming down his cheeks. How could she do this to him? Had she been pretending all those weeks? Had she been seeing this Osborne person all the time she was seeing him? Had she been secretly engaged to the Osborne all the time he had courted her with his love and his generosity and his innocence? What did he feel about Mary Rose now, for he felt sure he still loved her. Even an innocent like Johnny in these matters knew that love could not evaporate in an evening, that four lines in a newspaper column could not rearrange his emotional landscape, but that time and distance and propriety meant there was virtually nothing he could do. He thought about writing an angry letter, pouring out his grief and his distress, then changed his mind. The terrible deed had been done. With just two words in a church, ‘I will,’ Mary Rose Lennox had chosen a different path and a different future from his own. Over the weeks that followed Johnny threw himself into soldiering by day and drinking by night. His commanding officer took care to make sure that he was kept very busy. Twice he almost lost his life in skirmishes with enemy tribesmen. It was as if, he realized later, he had been trying to kill himself. Suicide disguised as death on the battlefield. On the second occasion his life was saved by a fellow Irishman, an officer in his own regiment. Over time the two men became very close. They fought together and spied together after they were both transferred to the Intelligence Services. The fellow officer’s name was Lord Francis Powerscourt.

Memories and regrets for his failed love affair pursued Johnny down to County Cork twenty years later, still carrying out the instructions of the friend who had saved his life and his sanity all those years before. But one thought haunted Johnny Fitzgerald on this return visit to his native land. He could still see in his mind the black letters in the fateful announcement. Jonathan Henry Osborne of Macroom Castle, County Cork. Macroom was his destination on this quest for crimes and possible vendettas in the Delaney past. Would Mary Rose still be there? Would he recognize her? What would he say to her if they met in the street or in society? What would he say to her husband?

The village of Conques lay on a hillside, surrounded by trees. Time had hardly touched it. Modernity with its railways and its factories, its great shopping palaces and its telegraphs and its obsession with time had made very little impact. It was one of the few places on the entire pilgrimage where the pilgrim could imagine himself back in the Middle Ages. The pilgrim party entered by the old road over a tiny Roman bridge across the river Dourdou. The Inspector and his colleagues were offering lessons in the chequered history of the place. Conques, they said to whoever would listen, with Powerscourt and Lady Lucy translating at either end of the pilgrim column, had not always been a major centre on the pilgrim route. Sometime in the eleventh century an ambitious abbot hatched a daring plan to put his church, literally, on the map. He sent one of his younger monks to enrol in the community centred round the martyr’s church at Agen. Here were held the remains and a famous statue of Ste Foy, an early Christian martyr beheaded by the Romans for her beliefs and the most celebrated saint of the time in medieval France. The abbot’s instructions to his man were clear. He was to steal the lot, statue, relics, whatever he could lay his hands on, and bring them back to Conques. The young man waited and waited for his opportunity. Years passed. Daily at first, and then at ever decreasing intervals, the abbot of Conques would stare out at the road that led to Agen, hoping and praying for the arrival of the treasure. After seven years he gave up. But the monk had not. After ten years he saw his chance at last when the community was at dinner and the door to the room where the treasure was kept had, for once, been left unlocked. He stuffed the booty into a sack and fled back to Conques, travelling mainly by night to avoid capture and humiliation. The abbot was overjoyed.

The telling of this tale took them past the slate roofs and into Conques through the western gate, the Porte du Barry with its great red arch, covered with half-timbered houses. Up the steep slope they went, their boots slipping on the cobblestones. The preserved medieval houses looked small compared to the great church in the centre. Here, day and night, the monks had gathered for their seven services a day. Here behind the altar stood the reliquary statue of Ste Foy encrusted with jewels and cameos and intaglios donated by the pilgrims. And here above the doorway was the tympanum, a great semicircular structure depicting the Last Judgement where a majestic Christ ushers the elect into heaven and the damned into hell. Some of the sculptures on the road to Compostela are delicate, almost ethereal in composition, etiolated saints and ethereal evangelists gazing out at the passing pilgrims. The Conques tympanum is not among them. Its message is direct, simple, uncompromising. Follow the scriptures and you’ll be saved. Sin and you’ll go to hell. This was the blunt message of Conques. As the pilgrims stared up at the message, Charlie Flanagan, the young man from Baltimore who carved ships and crucifixes out of wood, took out a small black notebook and began making drawings of the figures. Powerscourt wondered if a tiny Lucifer or an Abraham would emerge in the days ahead.

A great crowd of schoolchildren enveloped them suddenly. They wriggled their way to the front of the crowd, slipping past the pilgrims, pushing them out of their way and scattering them across the square. The children seemed to have emerged from nowhere and began pointing excitedly at the little stone figures above. Heaven didn’t seem to interest them very much. It was hell that appealed.

‘Look at Lucifer with those mad eyes!’

‘They’re hanging one over there upside down!’

‘See that one near the bottom! The devils are putting him into a furnace!’

‘How about that couple below! They must have been very bad. They’re tied together at the neck!’

‘What about this hunchback devil? He’s caught three monks in a sort of fishing net like my father uses!’

As their teachers appeared to restore order the morning air of Conques was split by a scream. It cut through the excited babble of the schoolchildren. Then there was a second. The teachers began to gather their children into a huddle under the main door. The pilgrims looked as if they had been turned into stone. Powerscourt turned and ran as fast as he could towards the noise. It came from the opposite end of the church. The Inspector was close behind him. At the far side of the radiating chapels that led out from the choir were a series of empty stone coffins that looked as if they might once have been inside holding the bodies of dead saints or warriors. They could be seen clearly from the street. One of them was no longer empty. Blood flowed out of it in streams and ran on to the grass and spilled over the flagstones below. It looked fresh, as if it had only started to pump out recently. A lone woman in the street carried on screaming. Powerscourt turned and sprinted back to the tympanum.

‘The children,’ he said to the teachers in a voice he tried to make as normal as he could. ‘Get them out of here as fast as you can. It’s bad back there, very bad. Whatever you do,’ he pointed dramatically behind him, ‘don’t take them that way up the street. You’ll have to find another route.’

He suggested to the policeman that the pilgrims should all be assembled inside the church and not be allowed out until further notice. He found a young priest and asked him to fetch a doctor. Then he took Father Kennedy with him and returned to the scene of carnage. The priest knelt down and began whispering the words of extreme unction as best as he could. Lady Lucy appeared to give moral support to her husband. She looked away quickly when she saw the blood-drenched body, the red flow gushing out over the stone, and stared down at her feet. A thin stream of blood was now nearing her shoes. A scallop shell seemed to be floating in the blood inside the stone coffin. Inspector Leger was making notes in his police book. There was a sweet almost sickly smell in the air. In the distance you could hear the voices of the children, complaining about their shortened visit to the statues and the church, wondering what could have happened at the far end of the abbey. They imagined many things, but not murder.

Powerscourt stared sadly down at the third body dispatched on the route to Compostela. Stephen Lewis the solicitor from Frome would not be going on any more train rides across southern France and taking lunch in agreeable hotels. Powerscourt tried to work out a connection, any connection, between his latest corpse and the two earlier victims but found that he could not. Lewis would write no more wills for the citizens of Frome, their secrets secure in the safe behind his desk. He would supervise no more the affairs and the accounts of the local Dramatic Society who had been urging him for years to take a small part in one of their productions but had always been turned down. Mrs Lewis would sit alone now on her terrace on the summer evenings, with no more gossip and anecdote from the town to entertain her.

An elderly man who looked as though he had seen all the sins of the world approached with a bag. Dr Bisquet, he said to no one in particular, medical practitioner in Conques these past thirty-five years. What have we here? He knelt slowly down to examine the body. Powerscourt thought flippantly that you could almost hear the knees creaking.

‘He’s dead, of course,’ he said in a matter-of-fact voice as if he saw death every day, like the sunset. ‘Instantaneous, mind you. That must have been a blessing. One vicious stroke right across the throat from behind delivered with great force. Monsieur, I show you.’

The doctor seemed to have identified Powerscourt as the principal player in the little group. He stood directly behind Powerscourt, so close that Powerscourt felt the grubby wool of his jacket on his neck. The doctor shot his right hand to the far side of Powerscourt’s neck and slashed it across to the other side.

‘That’s all it would take, monsieur. The knife must have been very sharp. You find the knife, yes? Not yet? Never mind. It is too late for the poor man here.’

The Inspector sent a man to search the surrounding area.

‘Could you say anything about the height of the killer, Doctor?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Would he have been taller than his victim? Could he have done it if he had been a couple of inches shorter?’

Powerscourt was hunting through his memory for the relative height of the pilgrims, the remaining pilgrims, as he reminded himself bitterly.

‘That is an intelligent question, monsieur. I’m afraid I cannot give a definite answer. It would have been easiest if our murderer had been taller. If he had been of the same height it would have been perfectly possible. A little shorter and it would have been difficult but not impossible. For the dwarf, or the little person, they could not have done it.’

‘And the blood, Doctor? Would any of the blood have stuck to the murderer’s clothes?’

‘Ah ha!’ said the doctor, who was a great devotee of detective stories in his leisure hours, although he was careful not to tell his patients. ‘There are a number of ways of stabbing a man to death. If you stab upwards from below the heart, that is a very certain killing stroke. Many would-be murderers don’t understand that it is best to strike from below so the knife goes in under the chest bones. Strike from above in a downwards direction and the blow may not be fatal. Our victim may survive. But with this method here, the rapid slit across the throat,’ the doctor mimed the action once more, ‘the murderer may not have any blood on his clothes at all. He will look like everybody else. There we are.’

Powerscourt looked down at the dead body once more. What had been a human being that morning had turned into a bundle of clothes that might have been left out for the rag and bone man. The blood was still dripping out.

‘Do you know the name of the dead man?’ The doctor looked once more at Powerscourt. ‘You do? Good, perhaps you could come back to my surgery where we can fill in the necessary forms for the authorities with one of these policemen. I will arrange for the removal of the corpse. I will send some kind of shroud so the citizens and pilgrims of Conques do not have to look at something to remind them of their sins and their own futures. We will all end up dead some day.’ The doctor looked as if he told this to his patients on a regular basis. Powerscourt did not think they would find it reassuring. ‘Let us pray that we do not end up like this.’

As they filed past the front of the abbey Powerscourt found himself wondering which side of the great tympanum Stephen Lewis had gone to on his final journey. Was he perhaps in hell, with the devils and the prongs and the halters and the roaring fires? Or was he clothed in white, accompanying the elect into heaven, checking perhaps that they had all left their earthly affairs in order before they set off? On balance, Powerscourt thought, Stephen Lewis, the solicitor from Frome, would be with God’s chosen. Even in heaven, he reminded himself, they must need lawyers.