He had long ago abandoned the rail and was huddling close to the rock on the left-hand side. In the past vertigo attacks crept up on him very slowly. There was always time to turn back and it would pass in a minute or two. The Sergeant did not look round. He could hear the other two coming up behind him. Lady Lucy was talking to her Francis now, very quietly. ‘You’ve done so well, my love. You’re nearly there. Don’t rush it, we’re nearly there.’ We must have done over two hundred steps now, Powerscourt said to himself, and began counting from two hundred. Two hundred and five. Don’t look down. Two hundred and eight. One step at a time. Two hundred and ten. To his right he saw for a fraction of a second the ground below, pygmies and dwarves moving along matchstick roads. He looked away. Two hundred and thirteen. Nearly there. Don’t look back. Two hundred and fifteen. The sweat was pouring down his face now. There was still rock, blessed rock on his left. Two hundred and eighteen. The pinnacle tapered as it rose to the little chapel on the top. These steps are very worn. How did they carry all the building materials to the top a thousand years ago? One step at a time. Two hundred and twenty-one. Only forty-seven to go. One of my laces is broken. Don’t look round. The rock to his right ran out. Don’t look down. A gust of wind and rain hit him full in the face. Good. Don’t look round. Don’t look up. The Sergeant’s trousers are dark blue. The bottom of Lucy’s dress is grey. Two hundred and twenty-five. There is green moss clinging to the rock. Don’t look down. Two hundred and twenty-eight. Keep your head down. Two hundred and thirty-one. Then he ran out of rock. There wasn’t any rock on his left. There wasn’t any rock on his right. Infinity loomed behind the rail. There was no warning. The vertigo hit him like a typhoon. The sky was spinning round above him. The chapel of St Michel was whirling away in the opposite direction. He felt his legs begin to go. The clouds, those dark grey clouds were accelerating above him, shooting into space. His head was going round faster and faster.
‘Sergeant! Quick!’ For a big man the Sergeant moved remarkably fast. Lady Lucy took one side of her husband, the Sergeant the other. Powerscourt was reeling like a drunken man. He knew what he had to do. He had to throw himself over the side. He had to jump. Then this terrible spinning sensation, this total loss of control, might stop. He had to go. He flung himself desperately towards the edge. The Sergeant took him in a bear hug. For a moment Lady Lucy thought the two of them might plunge into the abyss. Then Powerscourt tried the other side. A really determined man, his wits cascading round his head like the colours in a child’s kaleidoscope, could force his way over the left-hand side of the rock. Again the Sergeant just managed to hold him, Lady Lucy pulling desperately from the other side. Still the tempest in Powerscourt’s brain raged on, people, buildings, rock zooming away from him, swirling round and round and round and round and shooting up and down and up and down. There was another struggle. There was a brief pause. Lady Lucy thought incongruously that if her husband’s brain was stable he would be comparing this with the final conflict between Sherlock Holmes and Dr Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Then the Sergeant whipped out his truncheon. He hit Powerscourt a very firm blow on the head. Powerscourt passed out two hundred and thirty feet above ground with his wife and a police sergeant for company. There were only thirty-seven steps to go.
‘Sergeant!’ said Lady Lucy and then she realized he might have saved her husband’s life. ‘Well done! How very clever of you to think of knocking him out!’
‘I wasn’t sure we could hold him,’ said the Sergeant. ‘This seemed the best thing.’
‘What do we do now?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Do we wait for him to come round?’
‘I don’t think so, Lady Powerscourt. I think he might be off again if we leave him up here. I’ll carry him down.’
In ten minutes the Sergeant and Lady Lucy had carried him down. In fifteen the three of them were installed in a little cafe at the bottom, waiting for Powerscourt to come round.
‘I’m still here,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve got a very sore head. I know I had a terrible attack of vertigo up there.’ He shuddered as he looked up at St Michel, dimly visible through the dirty windows of the cafe. ‘I had this irresistible urge to jump off the rock.’
‘The Sergeant knocked you out, Francis. Then he carried you down.’
‘I’m very much obliged to you, Sergeant. I think you may have saved my life.’
As the Sergeant prepared to move off to more normal duties, Powerscourt held him back.
‘I say, Sergeant, I’ve only just thought of this. Do you suppose that poor man John Delaney suffered from vertigo? If he’d gone up there on his own and been sent spinning round, he’d have fallen off or jumped off just like I nearly did.’
‘Don’t suppose we’ll find the answer to that one, Lord Powerscourt. I don’t see how we’ll ever know.’
‘I shall make inquiries in England,’ said Powerscourt, resolving to send a message to Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘If I find the answer, rest assured that you’ll be the first to know.’
Half an hour later Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, staring at the Black Madonna above the high altar. Alex Bentley had given Powerscourt some of the history of this strange artefact over breakfast that morning. The statue itself was small, less than three feet high. A black ebony Virgin with staring eyes was dressed today in a white robe embroidered with fleurs-de-lis and golden roses. Halfway down, a small black Christ, wearing a crown, peeped out from under the robe.
‘Is it very old, Francis?’ whispered Lady Lucy.
‘The original was very old, Lucy. It was brought here by some Louis who was a king and saint in the late 1250s. Le Puy was famous as a Marian shrine long before that but this one up there really put them on the map. They say Louis was given it as a present by some prince in the Middle East. The Black Madonna brought the pilgrims to Le Puy. The Black Madonna was their special attraction. Nobody else had one. The Black Madonna made the town rich.’
‘What happened to the original, Francis?’
‘Ah well,’ said her husband, ‘the original perished in the Revolution. Some say she was burnt at the Feast of Pentecost in 1794, there’s even a story that she was beheaded in the guillotine. You won’t be surprised to hear the church authorities decided to bring her back in the middle of the nineteenth century. Maybe she could make Le Puy rich again. This is a copy of the first one.’
Lady Lucy wandered off to another part of the cathedral. Powerscourt moved forward, as close as he could get to the little ebony statue in her white robes up on the wall above the high altar. It was extraordinary how this tiny figure dominated the entire building, how your eyes were drawn to it from all over the cathedral. Powerscourt wondered what it would have meant to those pilgrims over six hundred years before. A black Madonna and a black Christ. That surely meant a black Joseph, black disciples, a black Peter, a black Mark, a black Matthew and a black Judas. Did it also mean a black God in a black heaven with black angels and black cherubim and black seraphim? And where would thirteenth-century minds have thought this black kingdom was? Did they know where Africa was? Probably not, he thought. No wonder people flocked to Le Puy in their tens of thousands even now to see the Black Madonna carried in glory through the streets of Le Puy on special religious festivals. She came, quite literally, from a different world.