David Dickinson - Death of a Pilgrim

The train now seemed to be making heavy weather of the slope. Tall trees lined the route as the engine panted upwards and sent out great bursts of steam. The herons, standing to attention in the river, took no notice. Trains were now as familiar to them as fish.

Opposite Wee Jimmy sat another young man in his mid-twenties with light brown hair and very delicate hands. Girls, he had observed, often looked at his hands as if they would like to take them off him. Charlie Flanagan, a Delaney on his mother’s side, was a carpenter by trade and he had spent the Atlantic crossing making a model of a ship from a piece of wood he had brought with him from his little workshop in Baltimore. He had worked right through the voyage, whittling away in a corner of the sun deck where he wouldn’t create any disturbance. After every session Charlie would tidy up his shavings neatly and place them carefully in the bin. As they travelled further and further east across the Atlantic, word spread among the passengers and crew that a beautiful model ship was being created on the vessel and people came to watch him work, some of them mesmerized by the flashing blade as he shaped his wood. Indeed, by the end, he had a commission from the captain himself, a handsome commission too, for another wooden model, to be delivered shortly after his return from Europe.

Charlie came from a deeply religious family but his main motive for going on pilgrimage was to see some of the cathedrals and castles. Charlie would much rather have been an architect than a carpenter but he was one of ten brothers and sisters so there was little money.

Next to Charlie on the bench was a slightly older man, a handsome man in his early thirties, clean-shaven with curly brown hair and dancing dark eyes that were almost black. Waldo Mulligan, who told Alex Bentley he was a Delaney on his mother’s side, worked for an important senator in Washington. For the last year and a half he had been conducting a passionate love affair with the wife of a colleague. He was trying to break it off. He was, he said ruefully to himself, trying to break his own heart. He had come on pilgrimage to beg forgiveness of his sins and the courage to start a new life without his darling.

Slightly alone, towards the middle of the carriage, was the last member of the American Delaney party, another young man, Patrick MacLoughlin, twenty-two years old with small eyes and a small nose, from Boston. He was studying for the priesthood and had signed up because he was convinced that the faithful of today had much to learn from the faithful of centuries past. Indeed he planned to go on a whole series of pilgrimages before he was thirty to help him in his ministry. He was very excited about kneeling down and praying in front of one of Le Puy’s most famous objects, the Black Madonna in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Patrick MacLoughlin looked forward to visiting religious relics in the same way other people might feel about going to major football matches or the Niagara Falls.

And Michael Delaney himself? He was wearing one of his louder suits today, a bright green check with a cream silk shirt and a bright red cravat. He was still wearing the same broad-rimmed hat he had worn on the liner across the Atlantic that took them back to the Old World. They had stopped for a night and a day in Paris on the journey south and Delaney had been most impressed with the layout of the centre of the place, those great boulevards radiating outwards across the city like spokes in a wheel. Delaney took himself on a short guided tour, astonished when he learnt that the choices for the duration ranged between six and eight hours in a single day. ‘Take me round in three,’ he said to his guide, ‘and there’s a bonus if you can do it in two.’

The Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Elysees impressed him. The Louvre he found disappointing. Too many damned paintings in the place, he said to his guide. Why can’t they put all the finest stuff in a couple of rooms at the front so people can pick up the best bits? No point wandering through all those wretched rooms or saloons as he thought they were called. Americans are busy people. Put the best things at the front and the people would pass through quicker. Quicker visits, in Delaney’s view, could mean more visits. More visits would mean more money. Much better management all round. Notre Dame, he thought, wasn’t a patch on St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Napoleon’s tomb impressed him, however. Anybody who could organize that many military campaigns would be certain to succeed in America. Not necessarily on Wall Street, with all those stocks and complicated bonds he felt the Corsican might not understand, but in any difficult business that needed proper organization, management by vertical integration. Oil, perhaps, coal, coke and steel, that would be thing. In a rare moment of fancy, Delaney could see himself, hand tucked inside his tunic in the best Imperial fashion, tricorne on his head, a faithful marshal or two by his side. Buonaparte Coke Works, he said to himself, Napoleon Steel, that would be a mighty fine name for a business.

The town of Le Puy is one of the most extraordinary sites in France. Located in the bowl of a volcanic cone, three enormous outcrops of rock shoot up hundreds of feet above the ground and give the impression that they might actually lift off into the sky. On the smallest of these giant fingers is the complex of buildings around the cathedral and its cloisters; on another is the huge statue of Notre Dame de France, made from hundreds of cannon captured at Sebastopol in the Crimean War, an enormous reddish pink Virgin clutching an enormous reddish pink child, their colour matching the shade of the slate of the roofs of the town, towering up into the heavens. And the third is the Chapelle of St Michel d’Aiguilhe, an enormous needle of rock with a belfry at the top lifting it even higher towards God and his angels, over two hundred and fifty feet above ground level. Even Michael Delaney was impressed. New York might have its tall buildings and the Statue of Liberty lording it over Ellis Island, but here they had three of the things, all occurring through the forces of nature rather than the energies of man. Alex Bentley thought they looked as if they might hurtle off into the skies, leaving Le Puy, the Auvergne and France far behind. Patrick MacLoughlin, the young man training for the priesthood, marvelled at God’s work, sent to impress the humble sinners here on earth.

Their hotel, the St Jacques, was in the centre of the town. It boasted the heavy decorations of the Second Empire, with dark red paper on its walls and dark wooden banisters. The furniture was dark too, great armoires and secretaires and commodes cluttering up the public rooms. The bedrooms were dark, and the dining room, a vast area that could seat over a hundred and fifty gourmands at a sitting, was gloomy however many lights were turned on. You would never have thought that you were in the country that produced Versailles centuries before, with the light flooding in through those high elegant windows. The Hotel St Jacques was where the respectable citizens of Le Puy would congregate for Sunday lunch, the doctors and the lawyers and the schoolteachers in their Sunday best, the wives showing off the latest fashions to arrive in the Auvergne, the children looking starched and polished in their frocks and sailor suits.

As the pilgrims dispersed to their rooms to unpack, Bentley and Delaney found some more pilgrims who had arrived earlier that day sitting in the bar. These were the Irish pilgrims. Two older men of about forty were sharing a bottle of wine. They had discovered something in common on the boat from England. The balding man was Shane Delaney, a railway worker trained in Dublin but now with a different railway company in Swindon. His wife, Sinead, was suffering from a terminal disease. The doctors said she had less than two years to live. Shane was coming on the pilgrimage at her request. ‘I’m too ill to travel,’ she told her husband. ‘I’ve been to all the holy sites in Ireland and England now, so I have. I’d never get to that Lourdes place the priests all go on about, I’m too ill. I want you to go in my place, Shane. It’s as near as I’m going to get to going myself, don’t you see? Pray for me every step of the way now, pray that I may recover. Those doctors will never make me better, so they won’t. Only God can do that. So you pray for me and my immortal soul and don’t you go drinking too much of that French wine on the way. My sisters will look after me.’