‘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-Elysees 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.
The town of Le Puy is one of the most extraordinary sites in France. Located in the bowl of a volcanic cone, three enormous outcrops of rock shoot up hundreds of feet above the ground and give the impression that they might actually lift off into the sky. On the smallest of these giant fingers is the complex of buildings around the cathedral and its cloisters; on another is the huge statue of Notre Dame de France, made from hundreds of cannon captured at Sebastopol in the Crimean War, an enormous reddish pink Virgin clutching an enormous reddish pink child, their colour matching the shade of the slate of the roofs of the town, towering up into the heavens. And the third is the Chapelle of St Michel d’Aiguilhe, an enormous needle of rock with a belfry at the top lifting it even higher towards God and his angels, over two hundred and fifty feet above ground level. Even Michael Delaney was impressed. New York might have its tall buildings and the Statue of Liberty lording it over Ellis Island, but here they had three of the things, all occurring through the forces of nature rather than the energies of man. Alex Bentley thought they looked as if they might hurtle off into the skies, leaving Le Puy, the Auvergne and France far behind. Patrick MacLoughlin, the young man training for the priesthood, marvelled at God’s work, sent to impress the humble sinners here on earth.