Death of a Pilgrim

2

The library of St Vincent’s was on the top floor of the hospital, looking out over the tall buildings of the city. A storm was brewing outside, angry bursts of rain battering at the windows, gusts of wind blowing the hats off the pedestrians and rattling and shaking the cabs as they made their way around the streets. As Delaney and Father Kennedy filed in for their ten o’clock meeting that Saturday morning, the senior doctor, George Moreland, waved them into a couple of comfortable chairs by a low table in the centre of the room. Dr Moreland was a graduate of La Salle University, summa cum laude, and had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Harvard Medical School. He was six weeks off his fortieth birthday. He was short and his hair, to his great regret, was receding rapidly. His colleague, Dr Stead, was ten years younger with exactly the same medical pedigree as his superior. Together they represented one of the most formidable medical teams in their field in the United States.

‘Thank you so much for coming at such short notice,’ Dr Moreland began, a slight smile moderating his look of extreme gravity. ‘Believe me, I can only imagine how difficult a time this must be for you, Mr Delaney.’

Delaney was trying desperately to stop himself looking at Matron’s eyes. ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘I am so grateful for all you are doing here for my James.’

‘I’m afraid I am going to be frank with you this morning, Mr Delaney,’ said Dr Moreland, who had to steel himself for these difficult encounters with a small shot of brandy before they started. ‘I want to put a proposition before you. You know by now, of course, of the difficulties we have with James’s condition. We believe it to be some form of leukaemia, but we do not what form, what shape it is taking. His illness does not a have a name. If it did,’ he pointed at the lines of books that lined two whole walls of the room from floor to ceiling, ‘there would be articles about it in places like the Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine or the Proceedings of the Harvard Medical School which line the walls here. But there is nothing. We are working in the dark, groping our way to some form of treatment that might effect a cure. So far we do not believe we have found the answer.’

Delaney brightened slightly. ‘If it would help, Dr Moreland, I could endow a Chair for the study of this strange disease at the university here in the city. Or I could establish a Foundation to look into it.’ This world of self-interested philanthropy was one he knew all too well.

‘Please, please!’ Dr Moreland held up his hand. ‘Your offer is most kind and most generous but I do not feel this is the right time or place to raise such questions. We are concerned with one life here, a life that is, as we speak, ebbing slowly away a couple of floors beneath us.’

Michael Delaney winced. Wealth was not going to save him here as it had saved him so often in the past.

‘You see, Mr Delaney,’ the younger doctor cut in, ‘we know so little. If I could draw a very imperfect example from your own world, let us suppose that you are going to build a new railway line across some difficult mountains.’ The young man did not see fit to mention it, but his father was the senior engineer on the Kansas, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. ‘When you come to work up your plans, you have a pool of knowledge to draw upon: surveyors who have mapped similar lines in the past, engineers who can estimate the optimum route to avoid the high places where possible, men who have designed the rolling stock and the engines to carry the trains most efficiently across the difficult terrain. Others have trod the path before you. But with James, we have nothing at all, no maps, no charts, no previous experience. We have been changing James’s treatment all the time. Nothing seems to work. Very slowly, little by little, he is becoming weaker every day.’

There was a distant peal of thunder and a flash of lightning lit up the New York skyline for a brief second. Delaney, Matron thought, sneaking a surreptitious glance at the man in case direct eye contact should set him off again, was looking miserable, more miserable than she had yet seen him.

Silence ruled briefly in the library. It was Dr Moreland who broke it. ‘I hope I have tried to make it clear to you, Mr Delaney, right from the beginning, how little we know. In the medical profession,’ he glanced briefly at his colleague and at Sister Dominic, ‘we wear these white coats to impress the patients and their families. Sometimes we carry medical instruments with us, hanging around our necks. The Sisters and the nurses are dressed in special uniforms to imply they too have special knowledge. At Harvard, my old university, you see the professors wearing their gowns with scarlet hoods lined with fox and ermine and their dark mortarboards to impress on the students that they too have special knowledge. I once saw a formal assembly of lawyers processing through the Royal Courts of Justice in London with wigs and robes and emblems denoting who was Master of the Rolls and so forth. Fancy dress implies fancy knowledge. I cannot speak for the lawyers or the academics, Mr Delaney, but in so many medical cases we have no claim to special knowledge. In the case of your son James we have, in fact, almost no knowledge at all.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true, Dr Moreland.’ said Delaney. ‘You are most distinguished in your field, the pair of you.’

Dr Moreland brushed the interruption aside as if he were swatting a fly from his forehead. ‘Let me cut to the point,’ he said, leaning forward to look Delaney in the eye. ‘There is a choice to be made here. Only you can make it. I am not sure I would have presented you with such a choice were you not such an eminent man.’

‘What is the choice?’ asked Delaney very quietly as another blast of wind rattled the windows.

‘If we carry on with the current treatments, then I think your son will die very soon. I could be wrong. Our knowledge is so limited. We have been making things up as we go along. If we stop the treatment altogether, then again, he might die very soon. But he might recover. Our drugs may be doing him more harm than good. We just don’t know. That is the choice, Mr Delaney. Continue as we are and he may die – if you pushed me hard, I would say it is very likely. Stop them, and there is a chance, only a chance, mind you, that he might recover.’

Father Kennedy spoke for the first time. ‘What a terrible choice. I pray that God will guide you in the right path.’ Matron threw caution to the winds and smiled at Delaney.

The man was silent for a moment. ‘Can I ask you a couple of questions, Doctor?’ he said, sitting forward in his chair and twirling his hat in his hands. ‘Let me thank you for a start for being so honest. In your opinion, is stopping the drugs the only chance of saving James’s life? Is there any other way? And when would you start, or maybe I should say stop?’ He sent an agonized look to Dr Moreland. ‘I mean, if you did it, how soon before you would know if it was working, that James was beginning to recover? Or to put it another way, how long,’ Michael Delaney fought back the tears, ‘how long before he dies?’

Dr Moreland answered immediately. ‘I cannot promise you anything, Mr Delaney. I cannot promise that stopping the drugs is the only way to save James’s life. There might be other ways, but we have tried all we know. As to how soon we should stop the treatment and begin to treat your son with non-treatment, as it were, I think I can give you an answer. We should do it as soon as possible. The young man grows weaker. His ability to fight the disease lessens by the day. The longer we wait, the less likely the non-treatment is to succeed.’

‘Do you mean’, said an aghast Delaney, ‘that you want me to make the choice now? Here, in this room?’

‘I do not wish to rush you in any way,’ said the doctor, leaning back and looking at Father Kennedy, as if appealing for help. ‘It is a most terrible choice. Only you can make it. But I emphasize what I said before: the sooner we start, the better our chances. Which, as I hope I have made clear, are not very good in the first place.’

Michael Delaney rose to his feet. He walked very slowly to the window. He was still fiddling with his hat. He stared out at the rain cascading down the windows, the dark clouds racing across the sky, the busy streets of the city outside in a healthy world.

Sister Dominic found the whole encounter had a terrible fascination. So many times she had watched families and loved ones almost literally torn apart by the doctors’ words in this room. But she had never seen a man of such wealth and power face such a situation before. She wondered what he would do. Silently she began saying Hail Marys. The younger doctor, Dr Stead, was trying, yet again, to work out how long it would take for death to happen or recovery to begin if the treatment were to stop. Father Kennedy was planning to slip away quietly after this meeting and fetch the little box from his house, the little box that would enable him to administer the last rites. He should, he told himself bitterly, have brought it earlier. Dr Moreland was running the discussion back through his mind, hoping that he had made the position clear. Delaney thought of his dead wife and what advice she would give about the life of her only son. He thought of his own parents, now long gone, who had watched young James tottering across the floor on his first faltering steps and had been in the front of St Patrick’s Cathedral as he took his first communion. Delaney’s dead remained silent. No answers came from beyond the grave.

At last Delaney spoke. He turned back from the window and returned to his chair to face the two men who had presented him with what he mentally referred to as the Devil’s Alternative.

‘Very well, gentlemen,’ he said firmly, ‘I do not think I have much choice. I ask you to stop the treatment. I ask you again, how long do you think it will be before you can detect changes for better, or . . . ’ He paused for a moment. ‘Or worse?’

‘The next treatment was due to be administered in just over an hour’s time,’ said Dr Moreland. ‘I do not know how long it will be before we know something. Dr Stead and I will take it in turns to sit by the bedside until we have resolution one way or the other. Matron will see to whatever special nursing needs we may require. I would advise you to take a little rest just now, Mr Delaney. Any changes might start in three or four hours. It might take twenty-four hours or even more. We do not know. But we will prepare as best we can for all eventualities.’

‘Thank you,’ said Delaney.

‘From this moment on,’ said Father Kennedy, ‘we are moving outside the knowledge of these good doctors here. We are all in God’s hands now.’

Michael Delaney returned to the hospital shortly after half past two. He brought with him a small bag containing a change of clothing and a large bottle of Jack Daniels. His coachman watched him turning into the main corridor of St Vincent’s. Then he took from underneath his seat a couple of European motor magazines that had recently arrived in New York. In some respects, he thought, the French and the Germans and the British might be ahead of the Americans in terms of design and engine construction. The coachman found that hard to believe.

The death watch party, as Delaney mentally referred to them, were already in their positions in the little ward. By the left-hand side of the bed, looking at it from the door, was a nurse, one section of her rosary beads hanging out of her pocket. Just behind her sat Dr Moreland, a couple of files on his lap and a pencil in his right hand. Next to the nurse sat Matron, her rosary beads in her lap, her lips moving silently, one tress of blonde hair which had escaped from her cap lying across the top of her forehead. Opposite the nurse sat Delaney, the hat still twisting in his hands. By the window stood Father Kennedy, staring out at the storm outside and the tiny rivers running down the front of the buildings. Above the bed, in a plain frame, was a reproduction of an earlier painting of a saint, dressed in brown with a brown background, his elbows resting on a table, his hands stretched out in prayer, the fingertips touching.

The nurse kept her head very near the bed. If you looked closely, Delaney realized, you could see faint breathing movements, slight swellings in the sheet as the boy’s chest rose and fell. Maybe the nurses had tucked him in extra tight, Delaney thought, so they could watch the movements better. He suddenly remembered telling James about the death of his mother. It had been in the drawing room of his great house, the lights burning brightly, a fire roaring in the grate and the continuous rumble of a great city on the move just audible from the street outside. Delaney had comforted the boy as best he could. Even though they both had known she was dying, it was still a terrible shock. He recalled James telling him, months after the event, how he, James, had felt numb for weeks. Sad, of course, tearful, naturally, but the most memorable feeling was numbness, a cold feeling that ran right through you as if you had swallowed some ice cold mixture. But he wouldn’t be able to tell James about this death, Delaney realized. James wouldn’t be here.

‘It’s all right to talk, as long as we’re quiet, Mr Delaney,’ said Dr Moreland in a voice scarcely above a whisper. ‘Some people think it might even help, that when the patients hear human voices, they know they’re still alive. Or you can take a little break with a walk in the corridor.’

‘How do we . . . ’ Delaney began and then paused, groping for the difficult words. ‘How do we know if James is getting better? Or worse, for that matter?’

‘I cannot give you precise guidance,’ said Dr Moreland. As Delaney looked closely at the doctor, he saw that the top left-hand corner of his folder was covered with tiny drawings of golf clubs. Woods, irons, putters, they were all there. Maybe this was how Dr George Moreland usually spent his Saturday afternoons, out on some green golf course by the sea, sinking his putts with the same authority that he brought to his patients in the hospital. Not, mind you, Delaney thought, looking out of the window, on an afternoon like this.

‘It’s the breathing, Mr Delaney, that’s one thing that can help us. If the breathing becomes shallow, or the gaps between breaths become longer, then I’m afraid that we would regard that as bad news. But often even that simple observation can be wrong.’ He sent Delaney a small, rueful smile.

Delaney found himself hypnotized by the praying figure on the wall, hanging directly over his son’s head, the pale, ascetic face, the fingers joined in prayer. He wondered who he was. He beckoned Father Kennedy into the corridor.

‘That fellow on the wall,’ he said, ‘the one above James. Do you know who he is, by any chance?’

Father Kennedy smiled. ‘That fellow, as you call him, is one of the most important saints in the Catholic firmament. He’s called St James the Greater. He was one of the disciples, one of the fishermen.’

Delaney had investigated fishing once as a possible source of profit, and found it disappointing. There were, in his view, too many variables, bad weather, leaking boats, unreliable fishermen. Now a temporary bout of flippancy overcame him, out here in the corridor of a hospital where his son might be about to die.

‘Why was he called the Greater? Was there a Smaller one? A Thinner? A Fatter perhaps?’

Father Kennedy had seen these temporary flights of fancy all too often in his long vigils by the bedsides of the dying.

‘I think he was called that to distinguish him from another St James, known as St James the Less. But, come, we should return. I shall tell you more about him later, if you wish.’

The afternoon wore on. The nun and the Matron continued their prayers. Dr Moreland moved on to tennis rackets on his folder, his eyes checking on his patient every couple of seconds. Father Kennedy was composing a sermon about the workings of God’s grace in his head. Delaney found a quiet corner of the corridor where he could take occasional consolation from his bottle of Jack Daniels. Every half-hour or so he tiptoed into the chapel and lit more candles. Outside the light faded and the storm raged on. Nurses came and went, bringing hot tea and sandwiches, pausing on their way out to say a prayer for the young man in the bed underneath St James the Greater.

The hours passed impossibly slowly. Delaney could see no change in the condition of his son. The blue eyes he knew so well were still closed. The light brown hair still lay ruffled on the pillow. His colour was still very very pale, a white that was almost the same shade as chalk. But he was still breathing. At seven o’clock Matron took Michael Delaney back to the little chapel. He had lit all the candles by now. The room was full, standing room only at the back. There must have been fifty or sixty people in there, mostly nuns with some auxiliary staff. All of them, Matron whispered, were there to pray for the life of James Delaney. Matron didn’t say that she was using all the weapons she knew of in her fight to keep the boy alive. And that if there were weapons she knew nothing of, she would use those too, if only she could find them. Delaney wondered about the power of prayer. Certainly he had never availed himself of it in his long business career. It had never occurred to him. Great business deals, he felt, depended on more mundane, possibly, in his present surroundings, more sordid factors: profit, or the possibilities of it, the cost of borrowing money, the size and potential for growth of the particular market. But Delaney closed his eyes and prayed along with all the others for the life of his son.

Shortly before nine o’clock the storm grew ever fiercer. Brilliant flashes of lightning shot past the windows. Claps of thunder sounded from the skies. The rain still pounded on the windows. Father Kennedy, the sermon in his head on the workings of God’s grace nearly finished now, wondered if this was an omen. Was his God, Yahweh the ever living, sending a sign that James Delaney was close to death now? Were the young man’s days and nights in his wilderness of pain and suffering coming to an end? Looking out of the window at the raging tempest outside, he thought that the fanciful and the superstitious might think that the end of the world was nigh. Was James’s passing going to be marked by this display of the power of nature, and, for Father Kennedy, of the power of God? He checked that his little box with all the necessaries for performing the last rites was still at his feet.

Dr Moreland had been replaced by the younger man, Dr Stead. He brought with him a medical journal which he read from time to time, making notes or marks in the margin with a silver pen. By eleven o’clock the storm outside showed signs of abating in its fury. James Delaney was still breathing. The doctor beckoned to the elder Delaney and to Father Kennedy and Sister Dominic to follow him to a little room off the main ward that served as a nurse’s office. Timetables, rotas and pictures of the Virgin lined the walls. He motioned them to be seated.

‘I thought I should bring you up to date on our thinking about this case,’ he began. Michael Delaney felt a moment of resentment. His son was more than a case. ‘James’, the doctor carried on, ‘is still with us. We do not know how long it will take for the drugs to pass out of his system. Certainly their power is less, considerably less, than it was twelve hours ago. Our hypothesis, and it is only a hypothesis, has been that if the withdrawal was going to kill him, it would probably have done so by now.’

‘Does that mean, Doctor,’ said Delaney, the hat spinning ever faster in his hands, ‘that he is going to recover, that he’s getting better?’

Dr Stead had heard this note of hope against all the odds many times before. ‘I don’t think we could say that. Not yet. Not now. At this point the absence of bad news is almost good news. That is all I can say, I’m afraid. It’s too soon for hope, for the present.’

Delaney pressed him. ‘I understand your qualifications, of course I do. But would you say that his chances of recovery are better now? Better than they were, I mean?’

The doctor looked down at his journal. ‘I would not wish to give you false hope. But if you pressed me, I should say that the answer is yes. Or probably yes. Our knowledge is so limited. Forgive me, but I have been looking at a recent article in my medical journal here about the process of dying. It is, if you like, a timetable of the way death comes over the body. It is concerned with diseases similar to, but obviously not the same, as James Delaney’s. It suggests to me that if he were going to pass away, he would have done so by now. I emphasize the word “suggests”. We could be wrong.’

Delaney was still looking for comfort. ‘Should we be more hopeful now? Is the worst over?’

The doctor shook his head. ‘I could not agree to that at this moment. The crisis is not over. It may yet be ahead of us, I don’t know. But the breathing has become slightly more regular in the last two or three hours. His colour may be fractionally better. That is good.’

‘And what’, Delaney went on, ‘would you have us do now? Should we stay with him through the night?’

‘That is entirely up to you. I think I would say that you should go home and rest before you come back. Lack of sleep is well known for causing lack of judgement. You have to weigh in the balance the possibility of his leaving us while you are away against the need to remain strong for the days ahead, as you certainly have done up till now, Mr Delaney. Dr Moreland or I will stay on duty by the bedside.’

‘I see,’ said Delaney. ‘Thank you so much for keeping us in the picture.’

Father Kennedy added his weight to the doctor’s opinion. ‘I too think you should go home, Michael. I’m sure we can leave the young man in the hands of the medical staff. And, of course, in the hands of God.’

Delaney made up his mind quickly. In his own kingdom of finance he was famous for it. Father Kennedy accompanied him down the long corridor that led out of the hospital. They would both return in a couple of hours.

‘Father, can you tell me some more about that saint on the wall? I’ve been looking at him all day. St James the Greater, you said he was called?’

‘Fisherman, disciple, martyr,’ Father Kennedy replied. ‘He was beheaded for his beliefs by Herod Agrippa, grandson of the biblical Herod, in about 44 AD. Legend has it that his body was taken to the north-western coast of Spain in a stone boat. His remains were discovered centuries later.’

‘And what was he made a saint for?’ asked Delaney, pausing suddenly.

‘If you were a disciple and a martyr,’ said Father Kennedy, ‘it was virtually certain that you would become a saint some day. In fact, St James the Greater became much more famous after his death than he had been in his life. They made him the patron saint of Spain, for one thing. In the countries where they speak Spanish or Portuguese, the name Santiago is the same as our James. There are cities and churches and statues of him all over the Iberian Peninsula and in South America. During the centuries when the Spanish were trying to expel the Moors from Spain, the story goes that Santiago would appear on the battlefield on a mighty horse, wielding a great sword and urging his troops on to victory. “Santiago Matamoros!” was the battle cry of the Spanish soldiers. “Santiago the Slayer of Moors!”’

‘You implied, Father,’ said Delaney, resuming his walk towards the main doors, ‘that his military powers were one of the reasons for him becoming famous after his death. Are there others?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Father Kennedy. ‘A great city grew up close to the place where the body was found. A great cathedral was built in his honour and in his name. It became a place of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, one of the most important pilgrimages in Christendom. Jerusalem and Rome were the most important sites, but Jerusalem was not a healthy place to go to at the time of the Crusades and Rome was in the hands of the barbarians. Thousands and thousands of pilgrims from all over Europe made the journey.’

Father Kennedy paused and looked Delaney in the eye. ‘I think we may have witnessed a miracle here tonight, my friend. If that is the case, and your son James survives, as I believe and pray he will, we must put it down to the intervention of St James the Greater, praying for your son in his picture on the wall.’

‘And what was the name of the city with the cathedral?’ asked Delaney.

‘The city? I forgot to tell you. The city is still there. It is called Santiago de Compostela, James of the field of stars.’

As the two men passed out into the wet night the bells of New York began to peal the midnight hour. It was Sunday in Manhattan.

3

James Delaney didn’t die on Sunday. He was still alive on Monday.

Always now, Delaney had a special prayer of his own as he roamed the corridors of the hospital and watched over his son. On Tuesday James opened his eyes and smiled weakly at his father. The snows and rain of November turned into the snows and rain of December. Early that month the doctors told Delaney his son was getting better. They were perfectly honest with him, saying that their ignorance of the disease worked both ways. They hadn’t been sure in the past that they knew how to treat his illness. Now they were not sure why he was getting better. All they could say was that doing virtually nothing seemed to work best of all and they proposed to continue with that course of non-treatment. Five days before Christmas they pronounced James Delaney out of danger. It would be a long time yet, they said, before he could come home. Delaney offered the hospital unlimited funds to study the disease that had nearly carried off his boy, saying he didn’t see why anybody else should have to suffer as much as he and his son had done. He presented monies for a five-year supply of candles for the chapel in new designs approved by Matron and Father Kennedy. He wondered then if he had fulfilled his obligations to God and man. All through the month, as the Christmas trees and Christmas decorations filled the shop windows and New York prepared to celebrate the birth of Christ, Michael Delaney was haunted by the image of St James the Greater, the brown saint in his brown background praying with fingertips joined, on the wall above his son’s bed. A strange idea haunted him too, an idea he could not shake off. Two days before Christmas he invited Father Kennedy to join him for a festive drink.

Father Kennedy had been telling all his parishioners about the miraculous recovery of James Delaney. It was, he assured them, a blessing from God and St James the Greater. He had amended his sermon on the workings of God’s grace around the theme of the Miracle in Manhattan, as he referred to it. He was going to preach the sermon after Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

The Father had been thinking a lot about Delaney’s pact with his creator. Such pacts, he knew from personal experience, were sometimes found in families struck with terminal diseases and desperately trying to buy a reprieve for their loved ones with the promise of some unspecified future conduct. He knew, Father Kennedy, that he could ask for a new hospital, new schools, fresh charities to support the starving and destitute of New York. But all Michael Delaney would have to do would be to hand over the money. There would not be any sacrifice, for Father Kennedy had private intelligence of the relative wealth of the New York patrician classes in his parish which told him that Delaney was one of the richest of the rich, a millionaire’s millionaire.

‘Come in, Father,’ said Delaney, ‘come in! Would you care for a glass of John Powers?’ Father Kennedy nodded and settled down in a chair by the fire.

All through his son’s illness Delaney had lost weight. His shirt collars grew loose. His trousers sagged at the waist. He discussed with his valet the possibility of buying a whole new wardrobe to suit his new figure. The man advised him to wait. Now, very slowly, he was beginning to fill out again.

‘I’ve been thinking about my deal with God, Father.’ Delaney plunged straight into business. He made the Delaney Compact sound like a commercial contract, a takeover perhaps, or the sale of some of his blocks of New York real estate. ‘And I’ve been thinking about that St James the Greater man and the pilgrimage to Santiago.’

‘I am glad you have been thinking about such matters, Michael. It may do some good to your immortal soul.’

Delaney resisted the temptation to say ‘To hell with my immortal soul.’ He pressed on.

‘Can you tell me some more about the pilgrimage, Father? Has it died out completely, or do people still go on it?’

Father Kennedy had no idea what was coming next. He wondered if Delaney was going to offer to buy up the city of Santiago, or to turn the memory of the pilgrimage into a subsidiary of one of his great companies.

‘Well,’ he began, ‘it hasn’t died out completely, the pilgrimage. But it’s only a trickle, a tiny trickle of what it used to be. It takes a long time, you see, to walk from one of the starting places in France all the way to the far corner of Spain.’

‘I’ve been thinking, Father, and I want to put a proposition to you. It may sound strange. You may think I’m mad. But what about this? Why don’t I and selected members of my family go on this pilgrimage? I’d pay for them all, of course. It would be a thank-you to God, don’t you see? For my James’s life.’

Father Kennedy thought another miracle had come to Manhattan. Deeds in the service of the Almighty were going to replace the bankers’ drafts to New York’s charities. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. The good of the Delaney soul, for a while at least, was going to replace the good of the Delaney wallet. Maybe Michael Delaney would get to meet St Peter up above after all.

‘What a splendid idea, Michael! I’m sure our Lord would approve. Would you like me to think about some of the details, possible starting points and so on? Do you have any idea of when you would like to set off?’

‘Not in this weather certainly,’ said Delaney. ‘I don’t know if James will be strong enough to do the whole thing – if we go, that is. I’d have to hire somebody to work out the details. Easter perhaps? Early summer? To start, I mean.’ Delaney was not an expert on European weather patterns but he thought it might be easier to make the journey once the rains and storms had gone.

‘Easter might be good, very propitious to start a pilgrimage at one of the greatest festivals of the Christian year.’ Father Kennedy thought of the amount of prayer power, nun power, candle power expended on the salvation of young James Delaney. Surely this would be a fitting recompense.

‘And would you come with us, Father? To be our spiritual guide? I don’t know very much about pilgrimages, you see. I can dimly remember the garish cover of a book in one of my school classrooms called The Pilgrim’s Progress. Will we visit the Slough of Despond? The City of Destruction? Will we see those strange places on the way? Would we dally in Vanity Fair?’

‘I think those places are metaphors, if you like, of the mental state of the particular pilgrim at any particular point along the route,’ said Father Kennedy with a smile. ‘There were many reasons for pilgrimage in those earlier times. Some went to seek forgiveness for their sins. Some went as part of a pact with the Lord. Some went seeking spiritual enrichment in the long journey and the adventures that would surely befall a traveller on such an expedition. Some, no doubt, went partly for fun. It was a holiday, as it were, as well as a quest. Plenty of different food and wine to sample on the way to Santiago, the city of James after whom your own son is named.’

Father Kennedy spent a morning in the New York Public Library in the days after Christmas. On New Year’s Eve he was back in his usual seat in the Delaney drawing room with another glass of John Powers whiskey. He brought various suggestions with him. Their great trek – for Father Kennedy had decided that he would accompany the pilgrims for part of the way at least – could start from the town of Le Puy-en-Velay in the Auvergne in southern France, one of the traditional setting-off places for the pilgrimage, and proceed down through France to Spain and the great cathedral in Compostela. Le Puy and the other starting places like Vezelay, he told Delaney, were like medieval railway stations in the busiest times for pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, a cross-over point for converging pilgrims coming from Germany and the countries of the East who were funnelled down through Le Puy-en-Velay on to the route to Compostela. An earlier version of Grand Central Station in New York perhaps. Father Kennedy didn’t expect them to walk all the way. Sometimes they would be able to take a train or a boat. Horse lovers would be able to ride for part of the journey.

Contemplating the scale of the enterprise, the vast distances, the enormous expense, Father Kennedy wondered, as he had wondered in the hospital, about the scale of Delaney’s response to the salvation of his son. He didn’t think disproportionate was the right word to describe it – it is not every day after all that a man’s only son is rescued from death’s embrace. And yet. And yet. Was Delaney trying to buy a clean slate for all the sins of his previous life? Were there hidden crimes, now buried deep in the Delaney past, that he wished to atone for? Was the pilgrimage a gesture to the past as much as to the present?

Michael Delaney had evolved a number of maxims for the conduct of his affairs, developed over his many years in business. Always pay your men enough to stop them from striking. In his early days he had been involved in a lockout, with blackleg labour and picket lines and hired detectives, and it had nearly finished him off. Always try to buy out your competitors – nothing succeeds like monopoly. Always invest in the latest technology, it will pay for itself in no time. For the management positions at the top of the organization, always look for the very best men in America. Quality managers, Delaney believed, would never let you down. Even he had never drafted a job advertisement quite like the one inserted for the pilgrimage in the New York Times. Organizer Required, it said, for pilgrimage to France and Spain, Europe. Duties to include finding as many members of the Delaney clan as possible in Europe and America, route planning, hotel reservations, liaison with church authorities. Fluent French essential. In return he obtained the services of one Alexander Eliot Bentley, son of a French mother and a doctor father from Rye, New York, graduate of Princeton and Yale Law School, aged twenty-four years.

From the start Alex Bentley regarded the whole thing as an improbable joke. He thought they might get as far as France, but he doubted if this strange collection of Delaneys who passed through his basement office in the Delaney mansion on missions of inspection and research would ever get to the Spanish border, never mind the final promontory beyond Santiago that rejoiced in the name of Finis Terre, the end of the world. But he persisted. He wrote to Irish Delaneys in Donegal and Ballyhaunis, in Macroom and Mullingar, in Westport and Wicklow and Waterford. Across the Irish Sea he wrote to Delaneys in Hammersmith and Kentish Town, in Birmingham and Liverpool. Across the Atlantic he wrote to more of the clan scattered across the eastern seaboard and the Midwest of America. On the wall opposite his desk in the basement Alex Bentley constructed a family tree of Delaneys that grew at the rate of four or five entries a week, each one carefully inscribed in Bentley’s immaculate copperplate. Next to the family tree was his pride and joy. This was a map of the route of the pilgrimage that snaked out from just below the high window, worked its way in a wiggly line down the wall, then turned right once you crossed the Pyrenees by the edge of the carpet and carried on to Santiago. Le Puy-en-Velay, La Roche, Aumont-Aubrac, Espalion. You could, Alex Bentley thought, almost hear the rivers gurgling the sounds of the names, the Lot, the Truyere, the Dourdou, the Cele. Estaing, Espeyrac. Conques, Figeac. Symbols were added to the route as he completed his preparations on every stop of the journey, little signs for hotels, signs for railways, signs for places with acceptable roads. Limogne-en-Quercy, Cajarc, Montcuq, Cahors, Moissac. Names were added to the map as it travelled beneath the window towards the Pyrenees, names of priests and abbots and mayors in all the little towns they would pass through. St-Martin-d’Armagnac, St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, Roncesvalles, Pamplona, Burgos.