David Dickinson: Death of a Pilgrim

A month later Powerscourt and Lady Lucy and Johnny Fitzgerald were walking across Santiago towards the cathedral. Lady Lucy was sporting a new hat in pale blue from Bond Street. It was Wednesday, the fifteenth of August, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Santiago was treating itself to a holiday. The service was due to start at eleven o’clock. Lady Lucy was very excited about another guidebook she had brought with her from Hatchard’s in Piccadilly.

‘Do you know, Francis, that the whole story of St James may be a myth, fiction even?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, the story goes something like this. I don’t think my dates will all be right but never mind. St James comes to Spain and preaches the Gospel some time after the Crucifixion. Then he goes back to Rome and is martyred, poor man, by having his head cut off. This is where it starts to get a bit odd. Somehow or other the body of James and his head are brought back to Spain in a stone boat, to Padron down the road from here. And then nothing is heard of him for about seven hundred and fifty years. Absolutely nothing. No pilgrimage, no statue, no churches, it’s as if he’s never been. Then the Spaniards are having a lot of trouble with the Moors and the Infidel. They need a patron saint of Spain to rid the country of the invaders. So, my author implies, the church authorities remembered the stories of James in his stone boat. Behold! A body is found! It is pronounced, heaven knows how, to be that of St James in person! And he becomes a mighty warrior, able to defeat whole armies of Moors single-handed. His name becomes a great battle cry, Santiago Matamoros, James the Slayer of Moors. The cathedral is built here at Santiago. The whole pilgrim industry starts up and never looks back. It was all very convenient.’

‘It’s a good story anyway,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald.

Powerscourt looked up at the cathedral believed to contain the bones of St James, towering above them. ‘It looks pretty solid to me, Lucy. Who ever says myths have to be true anyway? What about the Son of God who came down to earth to be crucified and to rise again on the third day so that his followers could eat him in church every Sunday?’

Lady Lucy laughed. They were walking up the nave now, greeting their friends the pilgrims who were already in position, arranging to meet for lunch afterwards. They found outside seats halfway up the transept. There were still ten minutes to go before the service. Powerscourt noted the memorabilia of the saint, the scallop shells, the great statue of St James himself, which had been encrusted with gold until French soldiers stripped it off and carried it away to Paris during the Napoleonic Wars. Looking upwards he saw that each century had left its mark on the original construction, elaborate statues, soaring pillars, delicate carvings.

The service for the assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Cathedral of St James in Santiago de Compostela began. Sonorous Latin rolled across the transept and down the nave and echoed around the roof spaces far above. Every pew was filled. The congregation knelt and rose and knelt and rose again. Priests and bishop in scarlet and purple moved purposefully around the high altar. There was a handsome young man standing beside Michael Delaney, the son James whose miraculous recovery from illness had led to the pilgrimage. Now he had joined his father and the other survivors at the end, a father’s pride apparent to all every time Michael Delaney looked at his son. Powerscourt found himself thinking of the Last Judgement in the tympanum at Conques, the depiction in stone of the sins which could send a soul to hell, greed, adultery, pride, the glutton about to be roasted in some infernal cooking pot, the kings without their crowns about to suffer the torments of the damned. He thought of the fallen, John Delaney, his body bouncing off the volcanic rocks from the path to the top of the chapel of St Michel in Le Puy. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen. He thought of the trainee priest, Patrick MacLoughlin, his corpse sent down the Lot in the middle of the night to be found by schoolboys in the morning. He thought of the pilgrims he had met again that morning, their eyes bright, their faces tanned by the long march from Pamplona, now at journey’s end here in the Cathedral of St James. He resolved to hold a pilgrims’ dinner every year in London for the survivors. The young men, his young men, as he now thought of them, could relive their days in the vast open spaces of the Aubrac and the roasting plains of Spain. He thought of Stephen Lewis, cut to pieces behind the great Abbey Church of Conques. Hail Mary Mother of God.

The worshippers were beginning to come forward now to receive the sacrament, Maggie Delaney leaning on the arm of her cousin Michael, still trying to buy his way into heaven. Powerscourt remembered what he had said to Lucy a month earlier, and felt he had been right when he had spoken of the rich buying up all the camels and establishing a monopoly on needles. He thought of Girvan Connolly, feckless, burdened with debt, a man on the run from his creditors, who still did not deserve to meet his doom in the upper chamber at Moissac, his head smashed to pulp against the stone pillars. He thought of Waldo Mulligan. Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.

His young men were coming forward to the altar now, on this, the culminating moment of their pilgrimage. Wee Jimmy Delaney and Brother White were raising the chalice to their lips. Blood of Christ. Body of Christ. Take this in remembrance of me. Powerscourt touched Lady Lucy’s hand and smiled at her. He wondered how they all felt, now they had finally reached journey’s end. Were their sins forgiven? Would God grant their prayers to heal the sick and make the blind see and the deaf speak?

Shortly before one o’clock the service was drawing to an end. But the ritual was not. An air of excitement ran around the cathedral. A group of eight men, dressed in dark red robes, assembled at the top of the nave, opposite the altar. They brought a great silver-plated censer over to be filled with a mixture of charcoal and incense. This was the Botafumeiro, literally Smoke Expeller in Galician and Portugese, and it was only brought out on special occasions. No priest or acolytes walked among the congregation waving this thurible about from side to side. It was too big, five feet high and weighing almost two hundred pounds. It was attached to a system of ropes that led down from a pulley in the dome and it would swing across the transept, almost from one door to another, pouring incense over the altar as it went, swooping over the heads of the congregation.

When the censer was filled it was brought back to the red-robed men, each of whom now had a rope in his hands. These were like bell ringers’ ropes except that, rather than each rope being connected to its own particular bell, they were all connected to the master rope shooting up towards the dome at one end, and to the Botafumeiro, gleaming in the light, at the other. There was a certain amount of shuffling about and then one of the red-robed men took the thurible out into the centre of the transept and gave it a push. It was, Lady Lucy thought, exactly like somebody giving a send-off shove to a model boat at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Then the red men seized their ropes and pulled, bending a long way down as they did so. The censer began to swing in longer and longer arcs, forty feet up, fifty feet up, sixty feet up, higher and higher towards the ceiling.

Then disaster struck. The man opposite Powerscourt, who had been swaying about as if he were a human thurible, suddenly tottered out into the gap between the pews, directly in the path of the censer. It was moving away from him as he lurched out. But it looked certain to hit him on the way back. Quite what impact a two-hundred-pound Botafumeiro travelling at over forty miles an hour would have on a human skull Powerscourt did not know. He shot out into the gap to try to bring the man back to safety. Lady Lucy stared at the scene in horror. The censer had turned and was shooting towards Francis at great speed. In a moment he might be dead. Johnny Fitzgerald dived from the edge of his pew and tackled Powerscourt, rugby style, just above the knees. Powerscourt and the reeling man crashed to the ground. The Botafumeiro shot over them on its journey to the other door. Johnny Fitzgerald put his arms across the others. He didn’t want them rising to their feet only for the thurible to smash into their faces on the way back. The men with the ropes appeared to change their routine to bring the thing to a halt sooner that it would under normal running. A priest ran over to make sure nobody was hurt. In a matter of moments all three men were back in their seats.