Death of a Pilgrim (42 page)

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 façade 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.