Death of a Pilgrim (6 page)

Contemplating the scale of the enterprise, the vast distances, the enormous expense, Father Kennedy wondered, as he had wondered in the hospital, about the scale of Delaney’s response to
the salvation of his son. He didn’t think disproportionate was the right word to describe it – it is not every day after all that a man’s only son is rescued from death’s
embrace. And yet. And yet. Was Delaney trying to buy a clean slate for all the sins of his previous life? Were there hidden crimes, now buried deep in the Delaney past, that he wished to atone for?
Was the pilgrimage a gesture to the past as much as to the present?

Michael Delaney had evolved a number of maxims for the conduct of his affairs, developed over his many years in business. Always pay your men enough to stop them from striking. In his early days
he had been involved in a lockout, with blackleg labour and picket lines and hired detectives, and it had nearly finished him off. Always try to buy out your competitors – nothing succeeds
like monopoly. Always invest in the latest technology, it will pay for itself in no time. For the management positions at the top of the organization, always look for the very best men in America.
Quality managers, Delaney believed, would never let you down. Even he had never drafted a job advertisement quite like the one inserted for the pilgrimage in the
New York Times
. Organizer
Required, it said, for pilgrimage to France and Spain, Europe. Duties to include finding as many members of the Delaney clan as possible in Europe and America, route planning, hotel reservations,
liaison with church authorities. Fluent French essential. In return he obtained the services of one Alexander Eliot Bentley, son of a French mother and a doctor father from Rye, New York, graduate
of Princeton and Yale Law School, aged twenty-four years.

From the start Alex Bentley regarded the whole thing as an improbable joke. He thought they might get as far as France, but he doubted if this strange collection of Delaneys who passed through
his basement office in the Delaney mansion on missions of inspection and research would ever get to the Spanish border, never mind the final promontory beyond Santiago that rejoiced in the name of
Finis Terre, the end of the world. But he persisted. He wrote to Irish Delaneys in Donegal and Ballyhaunis, in Macroom and Mullingar, in Westport and Wicklow and Waterford. Across the Irish Sea he
wrote to Delaneys in Hammersmith and Kentish Town, in Birmingham and Liverpool. Across the Atlantic he wrote to more of the clan scattered across the eastern seaboard and the Midwest of America. On
the wall opposite his desk in the basement Alex Bentley constructed a family tree of Delaneys that grew at the rate of four or five entries a week, each one carefully inscribed in Bentley’s
immaculate copperplate. Next to the family tree was his pride and joy. This was a map of the route of the pilgrimage that snaked out from just below the high window, worked its way in a wiggly line
down the wall, then turned right once you crossed the Pyrenees by the edge of the carpet and carried on to Santiago. Le Puy-en-Velay, La Roche, Aumont-Aubrac, Espalion. You could, Alex Bentley
thought, almost hear the rivers gurgling the sounds of the names, the Lot, the Truyère, the Dourdou, the Celé. Estaing, Espeyrac. Conques, Figeac. Symbols were added to the route as
he completed his preparations on every stop of the journey, little signs for hotels, signs for railways, signs for places with acceptable roads. Limogne-en-Quercy, Cajarc, Montcuq, Cahors, Moissac.
Names were added to the map as it travelled beneath the window towards the Pyrenees, names of priests and abbots and mayors in all the little towns they would pass through.
St-Martin-d’Armagnac, St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, Roncesvalles, Pamplona, Burgos.

The little train, its three carriages full of French and Americans, pulled slowly out of the station in the town of St-Etienne in southern France and began the long climb up
into the hills. In the front of the first carriage sat Michael Delaney and his party, on the last leg of their journey towards the starting point of their pilgrimage, Le Puy-en-Velay in the
Auvergne. Alex Bentley was very excited, peering out of the window at the rivers and forests they were travelling past. This, for him, was the culmination of months of planning, finding as many
Delaneys as he could in Ireland, England and the United States, trying to establish that these were genuine Delaneys, not some freebooters come to scrounge a holiday in Europe at his
employer’s expense, inviting them, if suitable, to join the pilgrimage. Now he was coming to see the fruits of his labour.

One grave doubt about his own position was gnawing away all the time in a corner of his mind. He couldn’t understand much of the spoken French. He could read the newspapers. He could
understand the great advertisements plastered along the sides of the boulevards. But when they spoke to him, these living Frenchmen, he grasped very little. If he was honest with himself, he knew
he could latch on to the occasional word or phrase but complete sentences eluded him. They sped past him like an express train, a torrent he could not, for the moment, comprehend. They could have
been speaking Hottentot to him, or Ancient Greek. Alex Bentley’s grandmother, who had taught him French, had died when he was only six years old. His mother had always spoken to him in
English. The knowledge seemed to have vanished from his mind, as if a conjuror had spirited it away. For most of his expensive education in French literature and culture he had been concerned with
the words of dead Frenchmen. Alex Bentley could remember huge chunks of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. He could read Flaubert and Stendhal, Balzac or Zola as easily as he read the baseball scores. He
could have written leaders about the Dreyfus Case for
Le Monde
or elegant diplomatic memoranda for the French Foreign Office in the Quai d’Orsay. But at one of the greatest
universities in America he had spoken no French at all. He had written his essays in English. His lectures were in English. The professors spoke to him about French literature and its glories in
English. But when the taxi drivers or the hotel porters of Paris spoke to him in French, he could only guess at what they were saying. He wondered if he should tell Michael Delaney.

Father Kennedy had endured an unhappy crossing of the Atlantic. Even though the great liner they sailed on from New York to Le Havre did not give them a particularly rough passage, the Father
was seasick all the way. At first he consoled himself with the thought that it would pass, that after a day or so the illness would abate, and that he would be able to walk the decks like the other
passengers and gaze at the vast mystery of the ocean. He dimly remembered reading a book about Nelson which reported that the great Admiral himself suffered from
mal de mer
, as the French
doctor on board called it, for the first few days as he sailed off from Portsmouth or Plymouth to wage war in Egypt or the West Indies. But then, for Nelson, it passed. For Father Kennedy, it did
not pass. He had consulted his small travelling library of religious books but could not find what he sought. There appeared to be no patron saint of seasickness to whom he should address his
prayers. The liner’s library did not help either. It contained no religious volumes at all. So he spent virtually the entire crossing lying on his bunk, trying not to move.

There were five other Americans in the party. One, Michael Delaney’s cousin Maggie, had been a last-minute entry. She was single, in her early sixties, with thinning hair that was nearly
white and a semi-permanent frown on her face. She told everyone who had ever asked that she was married to Mother Church and that being a Bride of Christ was far far better than being joined to
some man who might neglect you most of your life and occasionally perform acts of unmentionable violence upon your person. Michael Delaney couldn’t stand the woman. He had sworn violently
when Alex Bentley told him that she too wished to come under starter’s orders for the pilgrimage. Bentley found it easier to communicate with his employer using sporting analogies. It had
taken all Father Kennedy’s diplomatic skills to persuade Michael Delaney to take her along. And, for once, the Father misjudged his example from the Gospels.

‘Remember our Lord’s words to the woman taken in adultery, Michael,’ he had said. ‘Go thou and sin no more.’

Delaney was on to him in a flash. ‘Woman taken in adultery, Father? That old cow has never been taken in any kind of ultery with or without the add-ons. More’s the pity. Might be
better if she had been. Might have been better if she’d committed a few sins too. Can you imagine? That dried-up old bag coming with us thousands of miles across the world? God save us all.
Sorry, Father.’

At length Delaney was persuaded that he had no right, even as the organizer and paymaster of this pilgrimage, to exclude certain of God’s people merely because he didn’t like them.
So now Maggie Delaney, clad in a dark suit that was far too heavy for the climate of southern France in the middle of June, perched primly on the edge of her seat, and fingered her rosary beads. A
couple of elderly Frenchwomen, who had inspected the Americans with ill-disguised venom and distaste, nodded to each other and smiled frostily as they looked at this transatlantic visitor. They too
had rosary beads in their pockets or their bags. They recognized Maggie Delaney as one of their own.

Sitting on the same bench, but a few feet away, was a much younger Delaney, ‘Wee Jimmy’ Delaney. People often thought Wee Jimmy was an ironic nickname, for the young man stood over
six feet four inches tall, with dark hair and a wavy moustache. He had been given the name because he was very small as a child, only shooting upwards between seventeen and twenty. By then it was
too late to change the name. Wee Jimmy was a skilled steel worker from Pittsburgh, come on the pilgrimage, he told Alex Bentley, because it was free and he had always wanted to travel.

The train now seemed to be making heavy weather of the slope. Tall trees lined the route as the engine panted upwards and sent out great bursts of steam. The herons, standing to attention in the
river, took no notice. Trains were now as familiar to them as fish.

Opposite Wee Jimmy sat another young man in his mid-twenties with light brown hair and very delicate hands. Girls, he had observed, often looked at his hands as if they would like to take them
off him. Charlie Flanagan, a Delaney on his mother’s side, was a carpenter by trade and he had spent the Atlantic crossing making a model of a ship from a piece of wood he had brought with
him from his little workshop in Baltimore. He had worked right through the voyage, whittling away in a corner of the sun deck where he wouldn’t create any disturbance. After every session
Charlie would tidy up his shavings neatly and place them carefully in the bin. As they travelled further and further east across the Atlantic, word spread among the passengers and crew that a
beautiful model ship was being created on the vessel and people came to watch him work, some of them mesmerized by the flashing blade as he shaped his wood. Indeed, by the end, he had a commission
from the captain himself, a handsome commission too, for another wooden model, to be delivered shortly after his return from Europe.

Charlie came from a deeply religious family but his main motive for going on pilgrimage was to see some of the cathedrals and castles. Charlie would much rather have been an architect than a
carpenter but he was one of ten brothers and sisters so there was little money.

Next to Charlie on the bench was a slightly older man, a handsome man in his early thirties, clean-shaven with curly brown hair and dancing dark eyes that were almost black. Waldo Mulligan, who
told Alex Bentley he was a Delaney on his mother’s side, worked for an important senator in Washington. For the last year and a half he had been conducting a passionate love affair with the
wife of a colleague. He was trying to break it off. He was, he said ruefully to himself, trying to break his own heart. He had come on pilgrimage to beg forgiveness of his sins and the courage to
start a new life without his darling.

Slightly alone, towards the middle of the carriage, was the last member of the American Delaney party, another young man, Patrick MacLoughlin, twenty-two years old with small eyes and a small
nose, from Boston. He was studying for the priesthood and had signed up because he was convinced that the faithful of today had much to learn from the faithful of centuries past. Indeed he planned
to go on a whole series of pilgrimages before he was thirty to help him in his ministry. He was very excited about kneeling down and praying in front of one of Le Puy’s most famous objects,
the Black Madonna in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Patrick MacLoughlin looked forward to visiting religious relics in the same way other people might feel about going to major football matches or
the Niagara Falls.

And Michael Delaney himself? He was wearing one of his louder suits today, a bright green check with a cream silk shirt and a bright red cravat. He was still wearing the same broad-rimmed hat he
had worn on the liner across the Atlantic that took them back to the Old World. They had stopped for a night and a day in Paris on the journey south and Delaney had been most impressed with the
layout of the centre of the place, those great boulevards radiating outwards across the city like spokes in a wheel. Delaney took himself on a short guided tour, astonished when he learnt that the
choices for the duration ranged between six and eight hours in a single day. ‘Take me round in three,’ he said to his guide, ‘and there’s a bonus if you can do it in
two.’

The Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées impressed him. The Louvre he found disappointing. Too many damned paintings in the place, he said to his guide. Why can’t they put
all the finest stuff in a couple of rooms at the front so people can pick up the best bits? No point wandering through all those wretched rooms or saloons as he thought they were called. Americans
are busy people. Put the best things at the front and the people would pass through quicker. Quicker visits, in Delaney’s view, could mean more visits. More visits would mean more money. Much
better management all round. Notre Dame, he thought, wasn’t a patch on St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Napoleon’s tomb impressed him, however. Anybody who could organize that
many military campaigns would be certain to succeed in America. Not necessarily on Wall Street, with all those stocks and complicated bonds he felt the Corsican might not understand, but in any
difficult business that needed proper organization, management by vertical integration. Oil, perhaps, coal, coke and steel, that would be thing. In a rare moment of fancy, Delaney could see
himself, hand tucked inside his tunic in the best Imperial fashion, tricorne on his head, a faithful marshal or two by his side. Buonaparte Coke Works, he said to himself, Napoleon Steel, that
would be a mighty fine name for a business.