Death of a Pilgrim

14

Johnny Fitzgerald found it very strange being back in the ordinary Ireland rather than in the great houses of the Protestant gentry where he had stayed the year before. Macroom was still the same small Irish town as all the other small Irish towns he had known when he was growing up. The main square was there with the tall spire of the Protestant church and the grocer and bookmaker with bars attached. The shops were selling the same stuff they had sold when he was growing up all those years before. There was a drunk lolling against the wall of the pub on South Street. There had always been a drunk somewhere about the town. The children still trooped off to the Christian Brothers and the convent for a proper education in the pieties of Irish life. The wall of the demesne ran along one side of the square. Through the ornamental gate with the one-legged lion, wounded by an inebriated young revolutionary in some earlier uprising, the road snaked its way through the woods past the lake to Macroom Castle, home, he presumed, to one Jonathan Henry Osborne. And to his wife, Mary Rose Osborne, nee Lennox. Johnny knew he would have to ask somebody as casually as he could if they still lived there. He hoped he could keep his voice steady when his hour came. He wondered if there were any children. He realized with a start that any sons and daughters might be almost grown up now, conducting their own love affairs, breaking other people’s hearts. And what did Jonathan Henry Osborne do with his time? Was he a conscientious landlord, improving his estates, looking after his tenants? A hunting, shooting and fishing landlord forever out in pursuit of fox or fish? Perhaps he had died in the saddle or been accidentally shot in his coverts. Maybe the widow Osborne would be waiting for him, a relief after years in black.

Johnny had established his headquarters in the O’Connell Arms, a handsome building at the top end of North Street. From his bedroom he could just see into the grounds of Macroom Castle. Nothing moved. Nobody was taking a walk through their property. No children could be heard playing in the grounds. Perhaps they had all gone away. Johnny decided to jump his fences as soon as he could. He bought a drink for the landlord in the lounge bar of the hotel, the walls lined with pictures of horses, rickety tables that had seen better days scattered round the room like patients waiting for the dentist.

‘That’s a grand day we’re having now,’ said the landlord. ‘They say it’s going to rain tomorrow.’

The weather, Johnny remembered, was often the overture to most conversations in Irish bars.

‘Let’s hope it doesn’t last,’ said Johnny, keeping the meteorological ball in play.

‘Have you come far?’ said the landlord.

‘I’ve come from London as a matter of fact,’ said Johnny.

‘That’s the divil of a long way,’ said the landlord. ‘We had a lad from the town here two or three years ago who went to London, so he did.’

‘What happened to him?’ asked Johnny.

‘Didn’t last. He came back a week later, Declan Dempsey. He said he couldn’t stand the noise and the huge numbers of people. He’s a regular in this bar on alternate Wednesdays after the cattle sales. If he has too much porter he’ll tell you all about London. There isn’t a customer here who hasn’t heard the story fifteen or twenty times.’

‘Tell me,’ said Johnny, taking a very large draught of his Guinness, ‘are there people still living in the big house up there?’

‘Up in Macroom Castle? There are indeed. There’s Mister Jonathan and his wife and a herd of children. Why do you ask?’

‘I knew a man in the Army who used to stay there years ago,’ Johnny lied. ‘He said they had very good parties.’

‘We wouldn’t know about that,’ said the landlord. ‘We’re not invited.’

‘Could you tell me this, seeing you’re a knowledgeable sort of man about the locality,’ Johnny plunged on, ‘is there anybody round here who knows about the history of the place, a local historian if you like? A friend and I are writing a book, you see, and we need some information about Macroom’s past.’

‘A book, do you say? Who would want to read a book about Macroom’s past, for God’s sake? Nothing ever happens here. People are born, they get married, they die. That wouldn’t even fill a page.’

‘The book’s mainly about the famine,’ Johnny said. ‘We thought we should write it while there may still be people alive who can remember it.’

The landlord crossed himself. ‘The famine. Mother of God. It was bad in these parts, very bad. But perhaps you knew that. That’d be a fine thing to do, writing a book about the famine. Nobody’d buy it, mind you. Not round here. Not in Ireland. We’re still trying to forget the whole thing. We had a young priest here years ago who formed the theory that the reason the locals drank so much was that they were trying to forget what had happened to their ancestors.’

‘Seems rather a complicated reason for liking a drink,’ said Johnny, finishing his pint and ordering another. ‘He’s not still here, is he, the priest?’

‘No, no. He gave up. He did manage to enrol most of the adult males in that you can’t have a drink thing they have, the Temperance League or whatever it’s called. One day he happened to pop in here for a glass of water or something and found the whole lot of them knocking back the porter in the public bar. He never got over that, Father Bell. The boys told him they’d only joined up to make him happy, they never intended to go dry at all.’

‘Poor man,’ said Johnny, ‘can you imagine what it’d be like never having a drink? You’d never get through the day.’ He took another liberal helping of stout to calm his nerves.

‘You were asking about the local history and stuff,’ said the landlord. ‘I tell you now the fellow you want. Brother Healey, he’s your man. He teaches history up the road at the Christian Brothers and he’s always described as a mighty scholar. They say he once had an article published in the Cork Examiner.’

‘And where would I find him?’

The landlord looked at his watch. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘He’s regular as clockwork. After school he goes back to the house and marks the homework and polishes his strap or whatever they do. Sometime between six and six fifteen he pops in here. Two glasses of John Powers and he’s away again. I’ve never seen him take any more and that’s a fact.’

‘Perhaps he joined the temperance lot too,’ said Johnny. ‘I think I’ll take a walk now. I’ll be back in time to meet the Christian Brother.’

Johnny knew he was torturing himself. He could perfectly easily have stayed in the hotel bar and chatted to the landlord. Instead his legs carried him, almost without his knowledge, to the gates of the big house. He stood there for a moment, staring up the drive. I’m like a love-struck schoolboy, he told himself, lurking outside his girl’s house in the hope of seeing her. He wondered briefly about walking up to the house and knocking on the front door. A butler would open it. Johnny Fitzgerald, the butler would proclaim, and he would be ushered into the presence. What would he say then? What would she say? What would the husband say, if he was there? It was all too embarrassing. Johnny was nearly back at the hotel when he heard a carriage rattling up the street. As he turned to look he caught a glimpse of a hat, only a hat, not the face he had kissed so passionately all those years before.

Brother Healey was a small Brother of about fifty years, plump now and with small eyes, holding tightly on to his whiskey glass as if somebody might come and take it from him. Johnny introduced himself and explained his mission. He gave a more elaborate version of his legend about the reasons for his visit this time. He and a friend, he told the Brother, were writing a book about the famine. They had been commissioned by a very rich American called Delaney who was particularly interested in the Delaney family, many of whom he believed had perished in the years of hunger. Did the Brother know anything about these Delaneys? Would he care for another shot of John Powers to lubricate the brain? Brother Healey did care for a freshening of his glass as he put it.

‘Delaneys,’ he said, savouring the word as if it were another variety of whiskey, ‘there are a whole lot of Delaneys buried there in the field outside the town. It’s not a period I know a great deal about. I’m rather better on Cromwell and the redistribution of land, myself. But I know a man who is an expert on the famine. It’s rather late in the day to call on him now, I’m afraid.’

‘But it’s only a quarter past six,’ said Johnny.

‘I know, I know,’ said Brother Healey. ‘I wouldn’t wish to speak ill of the fellow. But he begins to take a drop of refreshment very early in the day, if you follow me. Before breakfast, I believe. The woman who looks after him says it’s the drink that’s kept him alive. She says he’s so pickled in John Jameson that no disease could get near him. But he’s the man for you. I’ve got the first two lessons off tomorrow. I’ll take you round to him then. You see, he’s well over eighty now. He lived through the bloody famine. He survived.’

Powerscourt thought you could tell which pilgrims had done well at school by the way they filled in his forms. There was a certain amount of pen-sucking in some quarters. Waldo Mulligan polished his off in no time at all and stared out of the window. Christy Delaney, the young man in love, was also well ahead of the pack. He wrote the name Anne Marie on his hand over and over again. Girvan Connolly, the man on the run from his creditors, seemed to be writing an essay in the extra space provided. He was now on the other side of the page.

Powerscourt wondered what you would do if you were the murderer. Would you tell the truth? Would you make up a totally fictitious past? Could one tell if a person was lying from words written on a page? It would be, he realized, much easier to tell if a person was lying in a conversation than it would be reading a sheet of paper. What would I do, if I were the murderer? he asked himself. A clever murderer would know that he, Powerscourt, had no means of checking out the information. He could invent a totally fictitious past and a totally fictitious family. Maybe the whole thing was a waste of time.

The pilgrims began to drift away after they had finished. Inspector Leger’s men watched their every move. One of these men is a murderer, Powerscourt reminded himself, one of the most daring murderers he had ever encountered. He wished there was some test he could give, other than this one, like those chemical experiments he dimly remembered from his school days where things turned blue or green when confronted with another substance.

At last they were all finished. Powerscourt took the papers up to Alex Bentley’s room and together they began turning them into family trees, horizontal and vertical lines joining up the Delaneys spinning their way down the pages. Then he remembered the local vineyard. The owner had been taking his evening meal at the table next to the Powerscourts the evening before and had shouted a very loud invitation to visit him in the morning as he left. Normally Powerscourt would have declined but he had promised to go and his head was weary with family trees. ‘I’ll just pop over for half an hour or so,’ he said to Alex Bentley. ‘Can you tell Lady Lucy where I’ve gone?’

The last of the morning mist was clearing as he set out on the half-mile walk to the vineyard. Thin wisps could be seen disappearing very slowly when you looked at them. A bird of prey, buzzard or kite, was circling high in the sky. It was going to be a beautiful day. Monsieur Leon’s vineyard was on top of a hill. On the right-hand side the vines ran down the slopes in orderly well-tended rows. On the left the hill became almost a precipice, tumbling down towards the Lot, the waters dark in the shadows.

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 Leger. 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 the 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 Leger and Lady Lucy were halfway there now. The hill had slowed them to a walking pace. Inspector Leger was mopping his brow with a blue handkerchief, freshly ironed, Lady Lucy observed, wondering about Madame Leger and life in the Leger 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 Leger 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 Leger 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.