Death of a Pilgrim (16 page)

‘I do not read those pages every now and then, as you put it,’ said Maggie Delaney crossly, ‘I read them every day. I have great files of them at home, sorted year by year,
going back to 1894.’

Lady Lucy would have been the first to admit that she was not a regular reader of this material. She hardly ever looked at them at all, moving on to higher things like the accounts of
forthcoming auctions, or society weddings that might feature members of her family. She dimly remembered row upon row of numbers, of company reports, of the details of the flotation of new
companies on the London or New York Stock Exchanges. For some, perhaps, there was romance in all these dry figures.

‘And what was the first evidence you found about Mr Delaney’s activities?’

‘His crimes, you mean,’ said Maggie Delaney. ‘The first evidence? There was so much of it, so many sins. Did you know that somebody wrote a book about Delaney’s crimes
round about that time?’

‘Really?’ said Lady Lucy, ‘What was it called? Did it do well?’

Maggie Delaney laughed. Or rather she cackled and a look of twisted triumph passed across her face. ‘The book was called
Michael Delaney, Robber Baron
.’

Lady Lucy thought the author hadn’t minced his words. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Was it perhaps not a very flattering portrait? Of Mr Delaney, I mean.’

‘It was not flattering, oh no. The author had got hold of the details of most of Delaney’s crimes over the previous fifteen years. It would have been very powerful. Two hundred pages
of Delaney’s sins, bound for ever in a hardback cover.’

‘But what became of it, Miss Delaney? You make it sound as if something happened to the book. Did you manage to read it?’

‘Nobody, as you put it, managed to read it. When Delaney found out about it – he must have heard people were making inquiries about him – he went straight to the publishers. He
bought every single copy just as they were about to start sending them out to the bookshops. Then he had them all destroyed, pulped is the term, I believe. He paid the author all the royalties he
would have earned if he’d sold every single copy and a bit more to keep his mouth shut. And the author’s mouth has remained shut from that day to this. I tried to find him, of course,
the author, but he’s vanished. That was the end of
Michael Delaney, Robber Baron
.’

Lady Lucy wondered if the author too had been pulped, like his books. Another crime for Maggie Delaney to put on her cousin’s charge sheet.

‘If you will excuse me, Lady Powerscourt,’ Maggie Delaney was gathering up her prayer book and rosary beads, ‘perhaps we could continue our conversation over lunch. I must go
to the cathedral to pray in front of the Black Madonna.’

An improbable image rose to the front of Lady Lucy’s mind. She could see Maggie Delaney sitting at a table in her little apartment in New York, the walls lined, no doubt, with religious
pictures of the Holy Land and the saints, the business pages of the
New York Times
in front of her. She had a pair of scissors in her hand and was cutting out selected paragraphs to be
inserted in a large black file. Chicago meat prices. New York Stock Exchange closing prices. Timber futures. Report from London. Steel stocks firmer.

Powerscourt had ridden over to St-Privat-d’Allier and abandoned his horse at the hotel, hoping to catch up with some of the pilgrims on their march to Saugues. A party
of schoolchildren in crocodile formation passed him in the village square on their way to the church, escorted by a couple of nuns. The locals stared at him with that rude and never-ending stare
reserved for foreigners and people from the next village. The road was climbing now, climbing upwards towards the vast empty plateau of the Aubrac. Small farms were littered across the landscape,
the occasional cart trundling past him. Two birds of prey, buzzards he thought, were performing great acrobatic swoops in the pale blue sky, waiting for a glimpse of lunch before hurtling to the
ground at unimaginable speed. He found Girvan Connolly, the man who described himself as a merchant from Kentish Town, sitting beside a great rock, swearing.

Pilgrimage was not being kind to Girvan. Those two young men, Christy Delaney and Jack O’Driscoll, had stopped their consumption of St Privat’s finest red fairly early the evening
before. It had, Girvan realized now, been a mistake to carry on drinking the stuff with Willie John Delaney, the man dying from an incurable disease. That pilgrim had leaned over to Girvan as he
opened their third bottle and announced thickly, ‘You know the old saying, Girvan, my friend? Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die? In my case that’s almost literally true. This
bloody incurable disease I can’t pronounce could take me away tomorrow, so help me God. So I may as well have a glass while I can. I can’t drink to my health so I’ll drink to
yours instead.’ And with that Willie John Delaney launched a steady campaign down the third bottle.

Not only did Girvan have a hangover. His feet, in the cheap boots he had bought from a man in the market at Kentish Town, were hurting. Charlie Flanagan’s repairs were holding out but only
just. When he had tried to ask by sign language in the village that morning if there might be a cobbler in the place, they had shaken their heads and pointed vaguely in the general direction of
western France. Now here was this detective person arrived from nowhere and looking very cheerful. Nothing, Girvan knew, is more annoying to people with hangovers than their fellow citizens being
cheerful around them.

‘Good morning, Mr Connolly,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Are you having trouble with your boots?’

Girvan pointed sadly to the offending objects. ‘They’re bad now,’ he said morosely, ‘they’re going to get worse.’

‘I’ve got a very thick pair of socks in my pack somewhere,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Would you like to borrow them?’

The socks seemed to improve things. The two men set off along the path.

‘Your business must have been doing well back in London, Mr Connolly, for you to be able to take the time off to come over here.’

Connolly laughed bitterly. ‘I wish it was,’ he said.

Powerscourt said nothing. He wondered if Girvan Connolly might tell him things out here in the wilds of the French countryside that he would never mention in the more crowded quarters of the
hotel. He waited as a party of cows were driven in front of them into a neighbouring field.

‘The thing is . . . ’ Connolly began. He was tired of the lies, the lies he had told his wife, the lies he had told to the various bailiffs who had come to call at his run-down
house, the lies he had told to his fellow pilgrims. He felt a sudden irresistible urge to tell the truth in the same way people sometimes tell their entire life stories, sins and all, to complete
strangers on transatlantic liners or long train journeys.

‘It wasn’t going well at all,’ he said, looking not at Powerscourt but at the woods in front of them.

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Connolly,’ said Powerscourt.

Then his woes poured out of Girvan Connolly. The trouble with the business, the plates and the cups and saucers and the saucepans not selling as well as they should. The little loan taken out to
tide them over. The slightly larger loan at a slightly higher rate of interest taken out to buy the consignment of cheap sheets and blankets that would restore his fortunes when sold off in the
market stalls of Kentish Town. Further trouble when early customers reported angrily that the sheets virtually disintegrated on washing. Yet another loan, larger still, to pay off the first
instalments on the earlier loans while there was still time. And then no moneylenders left to advance him credit to pay off the loan that had accounted for the purchase of the wretched sheets and
blankets. His creditors threatening to come round and sort him out. All of this poured forth like a torrent of disaster.

‘I see,’ said Powerscourt. ‘What a run of bad luck, Mr Connolly.’ He didn’t think any of these troubles would give Girvan Connolly cause to murder one of his fellow
pilgrims. He carried on, ‘So what, pray, is the condition of your creditors now, Mr Connolly? Do they know you are here? Do they know they may have to wait longer yet for the debts to be
repaid?’

Connolly was speaking very softly now. ‘They don’t know I’m here,’ he said. ‘Nobody knows I’m here. At least I hope they don’t.’ He looked behind
him rather desperately but there were no moneylenders on the path behind, lining up for the kill.

‘Tell me this, Mr Connolly, what is the grand total that would be needed to clear your debts today? You’d better add in something for the interest racked up since you’ve been
here.’

‘Fifteen pounds? Twenty pounds?’ said Connolly.

Powerscourt thought that meant twenty-five.

‘Could I make a suggestion?’

‘Please do,’ said Connolly.

‘Why don’t you speak to Michael Delaney about it? He might be able to help. Twenty or twenty-five pounds seems a lot to you, but to him it’s a drop in the ocean. You’re
family, after all. He might be very happy to help.’

‘Thank you, Lord Powerscourt, thank you so much.’ Ahead they could just see a group of pilgrims bathing their feet in a stream. Powerscourt had always thought there would be no
single reason that had brought this disparate group of people to the Auvergne, some of them travelling over four thousand miles to get here. Religion and piety would serve for some. Guilt would
account for others, and love of travel and the excitement of adventure in unknown lands. He thought of the variety of pilgrims in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
, the different stories of
the Miller and the Franklin and the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath. Thinking about Girvan Connolly, he hadn’t expected to find among these pilgrims a man on the run from his creditors.

‘I’ve only just remembered this one, this crime of Delaney’s.’ Maggie Delaney seemed to have gained fresh strength from her visit to the cathedral and
the Black Madonna. She and Lady Lucy were taking lunch in the Hôtel St Jacques, a dish of veal today with sweetbreads in cream accompanied by sauté potatoes and carrots. Lady Lucy
loathed the feel and the taste of sweetbreads and hid hers under a cairn of potatoes. ‘This,’ Maggie Delaney continued, ‘was the crime that set him on the path to riches, may God
have mercy on his soul.’

‘What did he do then?’ asked Lady Lucy, preparing to make another mental note to tell Francis about when she met up with him later that day.

‘He arranged to buy a railroad with another man. I think the man was called Wharton. He, Wharton, I mean, put up most of the money. Delaney swindled him, I don’t know how. Wharton,
poor man, lost the lot!’ With that Maggie Delaney speared three sweetbreads on to her fork and popped them into her mouth.

‘What happened? Surely Mr Delaney must have got caught? Shouldn’t he have been arrested for fraud or something like that?’

‘Every day, Lady Powerscourt, every day the man should be arrested for fraud or something like that. There was a great court case. Delaney hired better lawyers. He’s always hired
better lawyers than his opponents. He got off. Isn’t that terrible? I doubt if God will forgive him.’

‘What happened to the man Wharton?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Did he recover?’

‘As far as I know, he never recovered. Very bitter he was apparently, very bitter.’

Francis will like this story, Lady Lucy said to herself, he’ll like it very much indeed.

Michael Delaney was not aware of the catalogue of his sins being rehearsed in the dining room of the Hôtel St Jacques. He was using his last afternoon in Le Puy to walk
up to the cathedral. The party travelling by carriage was due to set off for Saugues at four o’clock that afternoon to meet up with the pedestrian pilgrims. Michael Delaney was thinking about
his son James. He thought of his boy many times a day. He remembered with a shudder the deathly colour on his face as he fought with death, lying motionless on that hospital bed. He remembered how
pale and wan he had been for weeks afterwards, the tottering steps when he began to move about again, like a toddler learning to walk for the first time. He remembered how healthy James had looked
when they had said farewell with a long embrace on the ship preparing to take Delaney back to the Old World. He wondered what James was doing now. Playing golf, he suspected, with that elegant
swing the older members admired so much. Maybe he was sailing with his friends, the wind in his hair and the spray racing along the sides of the Delaney yacht. He had only bought it for James.

Michael Delaney felt a proprietary pride as he entered the Cathedral of Notre Dame. This, after all, was another of his buildings now, or it would be when twenty thousand of his francs had been
spent. He wondered briefly about hourly rates of pay for French workmen, the cost of building materials, the profit margin the contractors would charge even when working for the Church. He gave up.
There were too many unknowns for him to estimate how much work could be done with his money. But some small part of it would be his. Future visitors would point to some section of nave or chancel
and tell each other, ‘That was repaired thanks to the generosity of an American called Michael Delaney.’

He had not thought much of the Black Madonna the first time he had looked at her on his fleeting visit a few days before. He thought even less of her now. Why was she so small? Why
couldn’t they get themselves a decent-sized statue like the pink Virgin on the Rocher Corneille, fifty-two feet high, not counting the base? A visitor to Notre Dame with bad eyesight sitting
halfway down the nave wouldn’t even know the thing was there. It would be invisible, a black hole rather than a Black Madonna. He wandered over to an enormous painting dating from the year
1630 on the wall. It showed a great procession of town worthies going into the cathedral to commemorate the lifting of a plague that had carried off ten thousand citizens of Le Puy. In the top
right-hand corner a group of hooded White Penitents were entering the cathedral. Behind them a group of monks in brown, then another group of monks in grey. Behind them a great party of religious,
dressed in their more colourful vestments, escorted the Bishop, a bearded prelate with an oriental look about him, carrying his crook. Then, in the centre of the painting, a group of consuls
dressed in red with black underneath and broad white collars were carrying the Black Madonna protected by a canopy above her. Ranged to the right of them were further groups of citizens wearing the
robes of their guilds or their orders. Delaney felt sure that these consuls and the other citizens were the leading men of Le Puy in their time, merchants probably, men of business, come to join
with their colleagues from the church in proper celebration, thanking God for their deliverance. Delaney felt sure that he would have been in this painting had he been alive then. A consul, he
thought, a leading man. He rather liked the look of those red robes.