Death of a Pilgrim

9

The walking party were still crossing the rocky Margeride Mountains, a damp pastureland speckled with broom and with great granite boulders sticking up out of the ground, stone sentries left on duty from an earlier age. The farmhouses here were squat with small windows and doors and steep roofs to cope with the snows of winter. Saugues itself, their destination for the night, was, Powerscourt noted, a handsome town with many old houses including an English Tower, a great fortress of forbidding grey stone said to be have been the base for bands of marauding English brigands in the twelfth century. Like Le Puy, Saugues had a fraternity and a chapel of White Penitents who paraded round the town on Maundy Thursday in white robes with the hoods pulled over their faces and a couple of other penitents, barefoot, dressed in red, carrying a cross and the instruments of Christ’s passion. The hotel owner serenaded all who would listen with stories of the Beast of Gevaudan, a deadly creature from two centuries before who caused a reign of terror all across the region, killing women and children, decapitating them, sometimes eating them. Was it a wolf? Or some alien creature that had survived unmolested in the forests before coming out to kill?

The pilgrims progressed from Saugues across a mountain landscape dotted with medieval towers and simple stone crosses. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were walking now, trying to draw out from the pilgrims any stories of their past or the history of the Delaney family that might help find the reason for the death of John Delaney.

Lady Lucy was walking with young Christy Delaney who had looked, she noticed, quite disturbed as the hotel owner told them of the marauding Beast of Gevaudan. She asked him what he had thought of the story. Christy Delaney laughed.

‘It reminded me of my grandmother,’ the young man told her.

‘Your grandmother?’ asked Lady Lucy incredulously, unable to discern a connection between man-eating wolves and human grandparents.

‘Sorry, I’m not explaining myself properly,’ said Christy. ‘When I was little we often used to go to my grandparents’ house. They used to leave me and my sister in this unused drawing room on the first floor. It smelt, that room. The whole house smelt, of damp and mothballs and dirty clothes. My grandmother didn’t believe much in washing, you see, never had. Every now and then, either in that drawing room or when we were upstairs in our horrid little bedroom, she would come and tell us stories. She was especially fond of Little Red Riding Hood and she was particularly good at horrible voices for the wolf and those eat you all up bits of the story. She would lean over the bed, smelling, like the house, of damp and dirt and mothballs, and more or less shout at you. I always wanted to hide under the bedclothes but I knew that would be rude.’

‘So you stayed still and got scared?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘I did,’ said Christy Delaney. ‘Very scared.’ He was thinking that Lady Lucy reminded him of his mother. ‘But I don’t think it’s anything relevant to your husband’s investigations, Lady Powerscourt. Mind you, she did tell us all kinds of other stories when we were older, the Big Bad Wolf.’

‘The Big Bad Wolf?’

‘That’s how my sister and I referred to our grandmother. Anyway, I don’t suppose these stories have much truth left in them, they’ve been handed down the family rumour factory for so long.’

Lady Lucy thought young Christy showed a true historian’s scepticism about his sources. It would serve him well, she felt, among the dusty libraries and the eccentric dons of Cambridge.

‘What did the stories say, Christy, even if they were unreliable?’

‘The main incident, around which all the others seemed to revolve, involved a comparatively rich Delaney refusing to help other, poorer Delaneys in the famine years. The poor ones were said to have died in the workhouse, but lots of people were said to have died in the workhouse in those times. Thousands and thousands of people were dying all over Ireland.’

‘God bless my soul,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘is that all that is known? No names?’

‘No names that had reached the Big Bad Wolf,’ said Christy Delaney.

‘Let me ask you another question,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Do you think John Delaney killed himself?’

‘I do not,’ said the young man firmly.

‘Why not?’

‘It’d be a very painful way to kill yourself, Lady Powerscourt. You wouldn’t be dead the first time you hit your head or your leg on a rock on the way down. You probably wouldn’t be dead the second time either. You could bounce all the way down to the ground and still be half alive when you reached the bottom. You’d lie there, maybe, blood pumping out all over you, waiting to pass away from your injuries. Surely that’s not a good way to kill yourself. The Romans used to slit their wrists in a bath of hot water, didn’t they? They thought, those Romans, that that was a painless way to die. They just got weaker and weaker until they went. The bath water must have been a very odd colour by the end, mind you. So that’s why I don’t think he killed himself, Lady Powerscourt.’

‘So what should we be looking for, do you think?’

‘There’s only one thing all these people have in common, Lady Powerscourt. Whether they’re from Ireland or England or America, they’re all Delaneys. There must be some mystery in their past that could explain the murder of John Delaney.’

‘What sort of mystery?’ said Lady Lucy.

‘That’s for your husband to find out,’ said Christy Delaney cheerfully. He had often thought of a career as an author after he left university. ‘Be a good title for a book, don’t you think, Lady Powerscourt, Delaney’s Dark Secret.’

Between St-Alban-sur-Limagnole and Aumont-Aubrac they came down from the mountains and crossed the river Truyere, flowing fast towards the great gorges that bore its name. Now they were in more alien territory, the Aubrac plateau, the most southerly of the volcanic uplands of the Auvergne, grazing country with vast stretches of pasture enclosed by dry stone walls. Higher up the dwarf beeches carried the scars of harsh winters and a long line of conifers along the side of the roads protected them against snowdrifts. There were still fragments of buildings left standing which had provided food and shelter for the pilgrims in the Middle Ages. Ruined donjons and medieval keeps bore witness to more shadowy figures from distant times, the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers of St John. The skies were huge up here on the Aubrac Massif. On a clear day you could see thirty or forty miles. Herds of cattle or sheep were brought up to the plateau to graze in the summer. The shepherds lived in strange dwellings called burons, home to cattle and pigs as well as humans, where the shepherds made Laguiole cheese which they stored in their cellars. But it was, even on a sunny day, a place where the solitude was almost oppressive. Looking out at the great expanse that surrounded them, most of the pilgrims fell silent. For many on the long road to Compostela the passage of the Aubrac, with the heavens stretching away towards infinity and the eternal quiet all around, was the most memorable part of the entire journey. ‘There is the Aubrac,’ a French author wrote, ‘a lofty belvedere both bare and sublime, more lunar, more outstretched, more windswept than the paramos of the Andes.’

Powerscourt was talking with another of the Irish pilgrims as they crossed this extraordinary landscape, Willie John Delaney, in his early forties, the man dying of an incurable disease. Willie John’s illness had left him completely bald. In his past life, he told Powerscourt, he had been a builder in Westport, County Mayo, home to another pilgrimage, to the summit of Ireland’s Holy Mountain, Croagh Patrick on the last Sunday in July every year.

‘And have you left a wife and family behind?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘I have not, thank God,’ said Willie John, ‘there’ll be no wife and children left behind when I go.’

‘Do you know how long you’ve got?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘It could be next week, it could be three months, that’s what Dr McGreevy said to me in his little surgery on The Mall before I left now.’

‘Do you find the pilgrimage helpful?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘I do and I don’t, if that’s not too Irish an answer for you. I’ve been praying a lot, you see. I’m never quite sure about praying, are you, Lord Powerscourt? You know how it is when you’ve got a bad connection on these telephones. Maybe the other end isn’t plugged in right or the girl on the switchboard hasn’t put you through in the proper manner. You can’t hear what the other person is saying, there’s just a fuzzy noise on the line. Sometimes praying is like that for me, Lord Powerscourt, you’ve just got a bad line. God isn’t linked up properly. He can’t hear you. You can’t get through. You know that little Black Madonna back there in Le Puy?’ Powerscourt nodded. ‘I had a terrible thought the second time I was on my knees in front of her. Some little voice in the back of me head was saying, It’s only a doll, Willie John, it’s only a doll like you could buy a child for a birthday or Christmas and the little girl could make different outfits for the doll to wear, just like they have for the Black Madonna with those different sets of clothes for different seasons of the Church’s year. I couldn’t even manage a Hail Mary after that.’

‘But you implied that there were times when prayer was helpful, Willie John,’ said Powerscourt.

Willie John Delaney stopped and leant on his staff for a moment. He pointed his arm in the general direction of the sky. Way over to their right, dots on the landscape, a herd of Aubrac cows were making their way slowly into fresh pasture.

‘I’ve never seen anywhere like this in my entire life,’ said Willie John. ‘I’ve seen most of the great barren spaces, littered with mountains and lakes and sodden peat, in the west of Ireland, but nothing like this here.’

He pointed up at the great canopy of sky, stretching away to impossibly distant horizons. ‘God’s here,’ he said, ‘I’m sure of it. It’s so quiet here He doesn’t need the telephone. I thank Him for allowing me to see Him in this landscape of His majesty, God’s own country.’

Powerscourt asked if there were any details of Delaney family history which might help him in his inquiries.

‘There’s enough stories about the past of the Delaneys to fill an entire library,’ said Willie John. ‘I don’t think it would be helpful to you, Lord Powerscourt, if I regaled you with the family gossip. Most of it is almost certainly wrong.’

They passed La Roche and Chabanes-Planes, la Chapelle de Bastide and les Quatres Chemins, they passed Nasbinals and its eleventh-century church with the basalt walls. Outside Nasbinals they climbed up over five thousand feet on the road to Aubrac itself, a little town almost as high as the high point on the road. This was bandit country, famous in the past for marauding wolves and wild boar and brigands. Over the next four miles the path dropped fifteen hundred feet to St-Chely-d’Aubrac.

Johnny Fitzgerald had been busy on Powerscourt’s behalf in London. He had to find information about Brother White and the dead man John Delaney. Johnny had smiled when he read Powerscourt’s request to find out if the man suffered from vertigo. He had helped his friend down from innumerable high places in his time. Johnny’s only surprise was that Francis was still foolish enough to try once again to reach some lofty and isolated place. Surely, Johnny said to himself, he must know himself better by now than to try again. It was bound to end in failure.

He picked up the trail of Brother White by asking Powerscourt’s brother-in-law William Burke, a mighty power in the City of London, if there were any banking or counting houses likely to employ old boys of the school where Brother White taught. Burke had been astonished when he learnt of Michael Delaney and his pilgrimage, for Delaney’s fame and his fortune had spread to London many years before.

‘If you’d told me that the great Michael Delaney was going on a pilgrimage halfway across France and Spain, Johnny, I’d have said it was about as likely as the Pope coming here and taking a post as a junior clerk in some insurance business. Never mind. I’m sure I can find a couple of Brother White’s old boys for you, that shouldn’t be any problem at all.’

The following evening, shortly after six o’clock, Johnny had bought the first round of drinks in a pub called the City Arms, just off Lombard Street, close to the Bank of England.

‘I gather you’re looking for information about that bastard Brother White,’ said the First Old Boy, whose name was Robert. ‘He’s not dead by any chance, is he?’

‘Not yet,’ said Johnny.

‘Pity, that,’ said the Second Old Boy, whose name was Patrick. ‘He should have been dead years ago.’

‘What was the trouble with the Christian Brother?’ said Johnny.

‘Flogger White?’ said Robert. ‘Just that, he loved beating people, the bastard.’

‘Trousers up, trousers down,’ said Patrick, ‘it made no difference. He once beat an entire class in an afternoon. Think about it. Any normal person would have been exhausted by the end of that. Not Brother White, oh no. He was as fresh at the end as he was at the beginning. He enjoyed it, you see. You could tell by looking at his face afterwards. The bastard was always smiling, as if he’d just scored a goal.’

‘They say he has a special collection of canes, about fifty of the things,’ Robert went on, warming to his theme. ‘He’d ordered up some pretty evil specimens from the Far East where they go in for beatings and that sort of stuff.’

‘He’d have used a cat-o’-nine-tails if the school would have let him, those things they had in the Navy years ago,’ Patrick continued.

‘Bastard,’ said Robert. ‘Somebody should have flogged him good and proper.’

‘He’d probably have enjoyed that,’ said his friend. ‘Some fellow who left last year said he’d seen White coming out of a classy prostitute place where they beat you for as long as you want.’

‘Did nobody ever complain?’ asked Johnny, returning from the bar with fresh drinks.

‘Some American Ambassador complained years ago, a chap told me,’ said Patrick, taking a great draught of his second beer. ‘His son got flogged in the usual White fashion. Next day Ambassador and Mrs Ambassador turn up at the headmaster’s door. Complaint not accepted. Running of the school a matter for the school authorities, not for outsiders, however distinguished.’

After four rounds of drinks Johnny thought he had the general drift of Brother White’s activities, the boys bent over chairs or leant up against the wall or stretched out over some piece of equipment in the gym where the Brother could have a good run up towards his victims. The old boys were astonished to learn that their former teacher had gone on pilgrimage.

‘Maybe he’s gone to ask forgiveness for his sins,’ said Robert.

‘Let’s hope God’s gone deaf,’ said his friend.

Johnny let a couple of days go by before he moved on to the case of the dead John Delaney, one-time resident of Acton in west London. He began his campaign in the Crown and Sceptre at the bottom of Church Street, a short distance from the Delaney residence. They knew him only slightly in there, they said, crossing themselves vigorously at the mention of the dead man, he would drop in occasionally on a Saturday afternoon. The King’s Head in the High Street had heard neither of Delaneys nor of corpses. But the Fox and Hounds, hard by the underground station, was a fountain of information. Here Johnny learnt the name of his wife, the number of his children, the amount he drank on his regular visits, never more than two pints of beer, why, the man was virtually teetotal according to informed opinion in the Fox and Hounds. He was building up a steady business in the little community, Johnny was told, always offering slightly lower rates than his competitors and giving discounts for regular clients. John Delaney and his family were all devout, attending Mass and sending the children to classes for their first communion. There was, the regulars told him, nothing about Delaney which could make anybody want to kill him. Johnny thought it interesting that nobody was surprised John Delaney had gone on pilgrimage. But as to why he might have been killed on his journey they had no idea. It was a mystery to the youngest and the eldest habitues of the Fox and Hounds.

When Johnny had heard what John Delaney’s job was he had to force himself to keep a straight face. And as he hastened towards the City to send a telegram from a Delaney outpost in Gracechurch Street he wondered how his friend would react when he heard of the collapse of one of his theories. Johnny decided to keep the bad news till the end.

‘Don’t worry about the number of words in your message,’ the young telegraph operator in the Delaney offices told him. ‘If Mr Delaney thought it would help, he’d send the whole bloody Bible down the wires.’

‘Brother White known as Flogger White. Likes beating boys. Wide variety of horrible canes. Don’t make any mistakes, Francis, when he’s hearing your amo amas amat. John Delaney v. respectable citizen. Wife, two children. Churchgoer. Suggest you ask Croesus Delaney for contribution for widow and orphans. Not likely to be suffering from vertigo. Man was a window cleaner. Regards Johnny.’

The scenery changed when the pilgrims set out from St-Chely-d’Aubrac. They left behind the vast plateau with the wide open skies and the cattle and entered a softer world of French agriculture, great woods of beech and chestnut beside the road, the occasional vineyard. After four hours or so the advance guard could see the Lot, known here as the Olt, the name for the river in the ancient French language of Occitan, and the little fortified town of St-Come d’Olt. Powerscourt admired the three former gateways in the old wall that led into pretty streets with houses dating back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some of the buildings still had the covered balconies installed centuries before. The sun was sparkling on the river, arrived here from St-Geniez-d’Olt, Ste-Eulalie-d’Olt and St-Laurent-d’Olt and twisting its way through the high cliffs towards Espalion, Estaing and Entraygues-sur-Truyere en route to its marriage with the Garonne many miles away.

There was a bizarre theological argument in St-Come-d’Olt in front of the twisted spire of St Come and St Damien. Jack O’Driscoll, displaying the curiosity for which newspapermen are famous, had bought himself a guidebook. He didn’t understand most of it but odd words made sense.

‘That’s a Flamboyant Spire,’ he said proudly, pointing to the crooked structure on top of the church.

‘No, it’s not,’ said Patrick MacLoughlin, the trainee priest from Boston, who did not have the benefit of a guidebook, ‘it’s crooked.’

‘I think you’ll find it’s called a twisted spire,’ said Father Kennedy, munching on an enormous pastry he had just picked up from the boulangerie.

‘You couldn’t worship God in a church with a twisted spire.’ Patrick MacLoughlin stuck to his guns. ‘It’s like having a crooked nave or a crooked altar. It’s not right. When did you last see one of these things in America?’

‘America doesn’t count in matters like this,’ said Jack O’Driscoll, peering at his Baedeker for guidance, ‘place hasn’t been there five minutes. Not like round here.’

‘Boston’s jolly old, very old indeed. There aren’t any twisted spires there.’

‘See here,’ said Jack, pointing triumphantly to a date in his book, ‘1552, it says here for the construction date of our Flamboyant friend, the only people running round near Boston then were those Red Indian fellows covered in war paint and living in funny wigwams and sending smoke signals to each other.’

‘What do you say, Father? Could you worship God properly in a church with a crooked spire?’

Father Kennedy was reluctant to take on the role of arbiter in the matter. He was staring sadly at his hand. Only a minute ago there had been a pastry there. Now it seemed to have disappeared.

‘I think you will find, young Patrick,’ he replied, licking his fingers for the memory of what had gone, ‘that you can worship wherever you wish. It is the mind of the congregation that is important, not the nature of the surroundings.’

Patrick MacLoughlin snorted and went off to inspect the river. Father Kennedy thought he had just enough time for a return visit to the boulangerie. There might not be another establishment like it for miles.

They marched on, the river dancing and sparkling through the rocks, to another ancient site of pilgrimage, the town of Espalion, graced with an ancient bridge the pilgrims of centuries before had crossed on their long march to Compostela. And here Alex Bentley’s organizational powers came into their own. For he had corresponded with the local boatyard, asking if they could make some rowing boats available to his party, liable to arrive in a given ten-day period. They were to leave the boats at Entraygues further down the river. And so ten pilgrims, the Powerscourts, Alex Bentley and Father Kennedy divided themselves among four boats, three crews of four and two in the last. Maggie Delaney, Stephen Lewis and Delaney himself were travelling by carriage and were due to meet up with them in the hotel at Estaing that evening.

Alex Bentley, his rowing days at Princeton and Yale coming back to him, was in charge of one boat with Lady Lucy sitting opposite him in the front and Christy Delaney and Waldo Mulligan at the stern. Bringing up the rear were Father Kennedy and Patrick MacLoughlin, two in a boat meant for four. At first all went well. They rowed past the tanners’ houses with stones sticking out of them at various levels so that hides could be scrubbed whatever the height of the river. They went by an old palace perched on a rock with a couple of pepper-pot towers. Then trouble came at the rear. Patrick MacLoughlin had protested his complete incompetence at any known form of sporting activity, so Father Kennedy, very reluctantly, took the oars. The only time Father Kennedy used his two hands together was in raising the chalice at Mass. This proved inadequate training for rowing down the Lot. The clerical figure, still dressed in black, was incapable of synchronizing the two oars together. One would drop feebly into the water and the Father sometimes forgot to stroke it through the water. The other oar, nominally under the control of Father Kennedy’s left hand, usually failed to make contact with the Lot altogether. The result was that his rowing boat, far from following the others in a straight line, careered off towards the right and began going round in circles. The river at this point had fields above it rather than the vertiginous rocks that tower over it near Entraygues, but there were still plenty of large rocks lining the banks. Patrick MacLoughlin at least had the presence of mind to call ‘Help’ as loudly as he could.

‘Bloody fool, can’t even row straight,’ said Charlie Flanagan in the third boat.

‘Christ, he’s going to crash into that great boulder in a minute,’ said Wee Jimmy Delaney, resting on his oars.

Alex Bentley felt responsible. Why hadn’t he made sure that a responsible person was in charge of that boat? He aimed his craft at a point where he should intercept the stricken religious and be able to tow them to safety. Father Kennedy’s craft continued its progress, lurching this way and that like a drunk on his way home. He made to dip his left oar in once more and missed completely. The impetus almost carried him out of the boat. Patrick MacLoughlin steadied his superior and settled him back on the thwarts. A couple of locals got off their bicycles on the path and stared at the scene, roaring with laughter.

‘Don’t do anything now! Don’t try to row whatever you do!’ Alex Bentley was drawing close now. ‘I’m going to throw you a rope. Hang on to it, for heaven’s sake. I’ll pull you back to the middle.’

It took four unsuccessful throws before Father Kennedy managed to grasp the rope thrown from Alex Bentley’s boat. At last, the tow line secured, the rowing party were able to proceed. The gaping locals abandoned their mirth and their sightseeing and proceeded on their way. Overhead the birds still whirled, swooping down to perch on the sides of the river. The water, Powerscourt noticed, trailing his hand in the Lot, was very cold. Soon they could see the medieval bridge of Estaing and the mighty castle of the lords of the manor of the same name. On the slopes high above the river the Estaing vines were slowly growing back to full health and maturity after the ravages of phylloxera a generation before. Alex Bentley’s hotel, the Lion d’Or, sat beside the bridge, flanked by two wings that had once been part of a monastery. That night each pilgrim was able to sleep in his own cell.

‘It’s so peaceful here, Francis, don’t you think?’ Lady Lucy was leaning over the ancient bridge and staring into the water. A couple of fish passed slowly by beneath her. ‘You don’t think anything else is going to happen, do you? Any more murders, I mean?’

‘I wish I knew,’ said Powerscourt, staring intently at a heron on the opposite bank. ‘If there is a killer in this party, my love, he won’t care if he’s in the Doubting Castle of Giant Despair or the Delectable Mountains. All the other pilgrims are marching towards their final destination and resolution of their sins in that cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. The killer, if there is one, is marching towards the elimination of his enemies.’

Any pilgrim still awake in the small hours of the morning after an enormous supper of beef stew and almond tart, washed down with carafes of the local red wine, would have seen a strange sight by the side of the hotel. A hooded figure was pushing some package in a wheelbarrow towards the banks of the river. When the figure reached the pontoon where the rowing boats were tied up, he took his parcel out of the wheelbarrow and placed it carefully in the bottom of one of the boats. He borrowed a rough tarpaulin from another vessel and placed it over his package. Then the hooded figure took a knife from his pocket and cut the rope that secured the rowing boat to the bank. He waded out towards the centre of the river, pulling his stolen rowing boat behind him. When he thought he had found the point where the current was strongest, he steadied his craft in the centre of it. He reached into his pocket again and took out two objects. One he placed at the very front of the boat. The other he slipped under the tarpaulin. Then he gave the rowing boat a firm push to send it on its way towards Entraygues, Cajarc and Cahors. The hooded figure watched as the boat twisted its way along the currents of the Lot until it had passed out of sight. Then he waded slowly back to the bank and removed his trousers. He sent these too into the middle of the river with a great heave. Then he walked slowly back towards the hotel. The stars were bright above the water. An owl was hooting from further up the river in the direction of Golinhac on the other bank. There were still three hours before dawn.