David Dickinson: Death of a Pilgrim

‘My God, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, brushing the dust off his jacket, ‘we come all the way to Spain on a murder investigation. Five dead men, four pilgrims and a murderer later and you’ve solved the mystery only to get yourself nearly killed by a giant block of incense.’

Johnny Fitzgerald was more philosophical. ‘Bloody country this, Francis, if you ask me, the buggers are obsessed with death,’ he whispered. ‘If you don’t get gored at the running of the bulls, you may catch it in the bullring. And if you’re still alive after that the smelly monster on the ropes will knock the back of your head off. Thank God Waldo Mulligan never got acquainted with this Botafumeiro thing – he’d have killed off half the congregation.’

The pilgrims were filing out of the cathedral now. Powerscourt thought they had been valiant against all disaster, Jack O’Driscoll and Charlie Flanagan and Christy Delaney and the other survivors. No discouragement had made them once relent their first avowed intent to be a pilgrim. They had struggled on through death and sealed trains and nights on the floors of the police cells of France. They had indeed been beset round with dismal stories of murder in the afternoon and sudden death in the morning. Perhaps, Powerscourt thought, they knew now, all of them, after this long journey towards God, that they, at the end, would life inherit, that they would fear not what men say, that they had laboured night and day, To Be a Pilgrim.

The Powerscourts received regular reports on the pilgrims’ progress back in the world they had left behind. Only Christy Delaney, now surrounded by the courts and libraries of Cambridge, proved an indifferent correspondent. And then in early December there came two letters from France, one from the Mayor of Le Puy, the other from the Secretary to the Cardinal Archbishop of Toulouse, the worldly cleric through whose archdiocese they had passed earlier that year. Mr Jacquet of Le Puy informed them that the two fountains were in position with the appropriate inscriptions and hoped that the Powerscourts would be able to visit them when they were next in the south of France. Business in the butcher’s shop, he told them as an aside, had never been better. The Archbishop’s interest was more general. He wished to know what had befallen the surviving pilgrims. Powerscourt suspected he wanted material for a sermon on the benefits of pilgrimage and the workings of God’s grace on His faithful servants. But he pulled out a couple of sheets of his finest writing paper and began his story of the outcome of the long journey from Le Puy-en-Velay to Santiago de Compostela.

He began with Michael Delaney. Delaney had not let himself be affected in any way by the revelations of his past sins in the Pamplona hotel. He had simply ignored them, bulldozed his way past them and carried on with his life and his work. If he felt any remorse he did not show it. If he felt any guilt it was not apparent. His son James was now safely installed at Harvard and enjoying himself. If there was one noticeable change in Delaney’s behaviour it was that he was giving ever more money to charity. The institutions for orphans and single mothers in Pittsburgh were expected to open in the New Year. In his home city of New York he was giving enormous sums to Catholic education. And, in conjunction with the Church, he was establishing a new travel facility called the Catholic Pilgrim, to organize pilgrimages to Santiago where the journey would be planned every step of the way, with different options for walkers and train travellers. Alex Bentley was the managing director and spent much of his time in France and Spain.

Jack O’Driscoll had indeed written a long account of the pilgrimage for his newspaper, which was successfully syndicated all round the world. Jack turned down job offers in Manchester and London, saying he preferred to stay in the country he knew, where his family and friends were. Charlie Flanagan was being so successful at selling model ships that he thought he would be able to save enough money to go to college and train as an architect. He still had all the drawings he made in Europe, neatly stored in large folders. Sometimes on quiet days like a Sunday afternoon he would open them out and take himself on an improbable journey back to the facade of the cathedral in Le Puy or the cloisters of Moissac, scarcely able to believe that he, a young man from Baltimore, had travelled all that way and seen these glorious buildings.

Shane Delaney had reported great news, wonderful news, news fit for a miracle if it lasted. Two weeks after he returned home, his wife Sinead, who had been dying slowly from cancer, appeared to recover. Her energy came back. She visited her family. Shane took her for a holiday to Weston-super-Mare. She had never seen a beach or a pier before or stayed in a hotel. Their seven days there in the Strand Hotel, she told her husband, had been among the happiest of her life. Then they returned to Swindon. Two weeks later the disease returned. The end was close. She died, Powerscourt told the Archbishop, in early October. Willie John Delaney, the man dying on pilgrimage from the incurable disease never expected to reach Santiago. But he did. He never expected to last out into the autumn. But he did. Maybe it was the cold that saw him off. Five of his fellow pilgrims attended his funeral in the second week of November.

Brother White gave up teaching altogether. He retrained as an accountant in a reputable firm in Guildford where the numbers and the ledgers held no temptations for him. Maggie Delaney had abandoned her little apartment in New York with its box files of clippings from the business pages of the New York Times and gone to live with her cousin Michael in his palace in Manhattan. The worldly air of the great town house and the people who passed through it made her a less crabby personality. Father Kennedy had put on weight during the pilgrimage. His Bishop did not think that a portly priest was the right man to tender to the spiritual needs of the rich of Manhattan. He sent him to a poorer parish in New Jersey but replaced him with a former Wall Street banker who had seen the light and joined the priesthood. At least, the Bishop said to himself rather cynically, the rich will now be told how to make their charitable donations as tax efficient as possible.

Powerscourt kept the most dramatic piece of news till the end. The letter from Pittsburgh had been addressed to Lady Lucy and she had cried when she read it. Marianne Delaney, beloved little sister of Wee Jimmy, appeared to be recovering her sight. She was still dumb, she was still deaf, but she could see. The sight might never be perfect and the doctors did not know how far the recovery would go. Lady Lucy remembered Wee Jimmy saying that the family couldn’t expect everything, but any improvement would be a blessing. Well, improvement there had been and Wee Jimmy reported that the little girl was so excited that she could now see her parents and her brothers and sisters and marvel at the flowers in the park. Every day brought fresh wonder as Marianne saw more people and more places for the first time. Wee Jimmy had brought her back a scallop shell, symbol of the pilgrimage to Santiago, and she could now see it as well as touch it. It was one of her most treasured possessions. The family and the little girl were overjoyed. It was a gift from God. Wee Jimmy’s pilgrimage to Santiago had borne fruit in the sight of his little sister. The Promised Land across three thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean, Powerscourt wrote to the Cardinal Archbishop, had always been represented to the famine refugees from Ireland and the poor of Europe as a place of hope, the country of the American Dream. Now, perhaps, the story of the pilgrimage was ending as it had begun, with an American miracle.