David Dickinson - Death of a Pilgrim

‘How old is your little sister?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘Marianne? She’s eight years old, she’ll be nine on the Fourth of July. She’s well looked after, all her brothers and sisters would do anything for her. She can still taste.’ Lady Lucy saw a gentle smile on the face of the man from Pittsburgh. ‘Every time you give her a piece of chocolate she smiles this lovely smile. And she can smell. She always knows when I’ve come in from the steelworks and haven’t cleaned myself up yet. You see these hands, Lady Powerscourt.’ Wee Jimmy held out his great clubs for inspection. ‘You could tell that I work in something like a steelworks or a coal mine. It’s very hard work. I don’t mind. I do as much overtime as I can. Sometimes I carry on right through the weekends. I do it to take Marianne to the best doctors in Pennsylvania, God, they’re so expensive, these doctors, but I don’t care about the money. We’ve been to two specialists in Philadelphia but they can’t do anything for Marianne. I’m saving up to take her to a man in New York they say is the best man in America.’

Lady Lucy tried to imagine what it must be like to be the mother of a child who could neither see nor speak nor hear. The knowledge that you had brought this person into this world must be with you every minute of every day, as if you had been cursed by God or whatever deities you believed in.

‘Is that why you’re here?’ she asked quietly, looking up into Wee Jimmy’s face. ‘For Marianne?’

‘Well, it is. I’m here, I suppose, as the representative of our family on this pilgrimage to pray that Marianne may get better. We don’t want everything, you see. It would be unrealistic to expect all three faculties to come back, I think. Just something, however small, some improvement to take her a little way out of the eternal darkness and the eternal silence as my father puts it. It’s strange, our family, Lady Powerscourt. All the children born in even years, 1890, 1892, 1894, are believers, like our mother is a true believer. All the ones born in the odd years, 1895, 1897 and so on, are more doubtful, like our father. They all go to church and so on, the odd-year Delaneys, but they don’t believe like the rest of us do.’

‘Was it a family decision, then, that you should come?’ said Lady Lucy trying to hold a picture of Marianne in her mind.

‘It was my father who suggested it, oddly enough. He’d heard about the pilgrimage and Michael Delaney paying for everyone. He said to me that we’d tried all these doctors, we’d probably have to try some more later on. “Science hasn’t worked for us,” he said, he’s a great reader, my father, always getting books out of the library, “so let’s try religion.” Here I am, Lady Powerscourt, praying for Marianne in every church we pass and out in the open too.’

‘Can I ask you a favour, Mr Delaney?’ said Lady Lucy.

‘Of course.’

‘Can I pray for her too?’

The village of Espeyrac boasted yet another river, the Daz, now a thin trickle running down the valley below the hotel, the Auberge des Montagnes. The place did not have enough rooms so Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were to stay in a house owned by the hotelkeeper’s brother a mile or so outside. A long track led up to it past a couple of empty houses and a number of barns. Powerscourt noticed the roofs, all of which, whether designed for man or beast, had a slight outwards curve at the bottom rather than running straight down to the gutters. It gave them a slightly feminine appearance as if the male builders had been thinking of their wives or their lovers or their mistresses as they worked.

‘What a charming little place,’ said Lady Lucy, disturbing a couple of goldfinches minding their own business in the little courtyard outside the house, and opening the front door with the hotel proprietor’s key. The house was on four floors with an attic at the top and a fine sitting room. But it was the view from the terrace at the back that really delighted them, a view that could also be seen, in different sections, from various windows on the other floors. The countryside, a mixture of clumps of trees and rolling pastureland, spread out down towards a valley. Over to the left the spire of the Espeyrac church seemed to hold the picture together like the altarpieces in the paintings of Renaissance Madonnas. On the far side the hills rolled upwards again. Behind them, their own hill climbed to a rocky peak. Later that evening, before they made their way to the hotel for supper, Powerscourt and Lady Lucy walked back up the road towards Entraygues. A smaller road led off to the right at the top of a crest in the hills. The sun was going down fast. They watched, hypnotized, as the colours faded from the bottom of the valleys while the tops were still bathed in sunlight. The lower half of some of the trees was a black and white etching, the rest still coloured by the sun. Soon only the highest parts of the trees and the ground were bright. Shadow and dark grey were covering the rest of the landscape that rolled away in great folds in front of them. The sun eventually sank behind the top of one of the hills, a blazing ball of yellow and gold, gone to light up another part of the world. Powerscourt took Lady Lucy’s hand as they walked down the hill to the Espeyrac hotel. They were both too humbled to speak.

In the Auberge they found themselves translating in an animated discussion between the hotel owner, Michael Delaney and Alex Bentley. The hotel proprietor was expounding on the need for more pilgrims, more visitors, more money to pass through his little village. ‘So many of the towns on the pilgrim route grew rich and ever richer from the proceeds of those pilgrims hundreds of years ago,’ he said, the bright light of profit in his eye. ‘When the wars of religion and that terrible man Napoleon came along it all got too dangerous for the people. But we have peace now. Why can’t we do it again? Why can’t the pilgrims come back?’

‘Why not?’ said Michael Delaney, scenting perhaps or playing with a possible business opportunity. ‘Tell me, Alex, how many Catholics are there in France? How many in Spain? How many in Germany? And how many in America, for God’s sake? Just think of the size of the potential market!’

‘Millions of them,’ said Alex Bentley, ‘probably tens of millions across Europe and the United States. Enormous numbers.’

‘It just needs some proper marketing, that’s all.’ Delaney was warming to his theme now. ‘They say that the art of advertising is to make people buy things they never knew they wanted. Well, imagine what they could do with the pilgrim route to Compostela! Come save your soul in Spain! Forgiveness of Sins! Salvation of Souls! Pilgrim’s Progress! Redemption on Route! French food on the road to God! French wines on the Pilgrim Path! Just think what those early Christians did in terms of marketing when all they had were those four little Gospels and some of them pretty hard to understand. They converted most of the bloody Roman Empire in a couple of hundred years. All done with no proper slogans. No billboards. No newspapers to place advertisements in, for God’s sake. Surely modern American methods can do better than that.’

‘My little hotel here might be full for most of the summer,’ the owner enthused, doing complicated calculations of potential gains in his head. ‘We might never be poor again. My Yvonne could have a carriage of her own!’

‘Hotels?’ said Delaney. ‘A man might do very well with hotels. I could buy or build a whole chain right across the routes from France and Spain. All called the St Jacques with a statue of the saint fellow with his staff and his sandals right above the main entrance. I know a man in stonework up in Westchester County who could knock those off at a reasonable price. Discount for large numbers, of course. Scallop shells in every bedroom. Pilgrim food, maybe not, now I think about it, that was probably inedible and the Americans wouldn’t eat it. We could have shops in all the hotels selling staffs and rosary beads and maps and special prayer books for the pilgrims. I’m sure some medieval professor could dig us out a lot of the old prayers the people said along the way. If not, the Jesuits or some order or another could run off a few for us at a good fee. And once you had the whole system up and running you wouldn’t have to do another thing. The business would look after itself, it’d be like selling water in the desert. It could be tremendous, simply tremendous. Have to get the Church on side, of course. I’m sure Father Kennedy could work out how to buy a couple of bishops, maybe even a cardinal or two. God bless the pilgrims. Confession en route. Absolution in the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. We’d probably have to work out an easier means of transport for the older citizens, mind you. Should appeal to the old, pilgrimage, when they’re so close to the exit themselves. Not long to go now. Pilgrim’s passport to the next world. Maybe we could get some of those liners to make special cruises from New York, dropping the elderly close to the final destination so they didn’t have far to walk.’