‘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 Hotel St Jacques, a dish of veal today with sweetbreads in cream accompanied by saute 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 Hotel 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.
Maggie Delaney would not have believed it, but Michael Delaney had been thinking about God too. He always thought about God when he thought of his James for the one had saved the other.
Michael Delaney’s God was not a great patriarch like Moses parting the Red Sea, bringing the Ten Commandments down from the mountain top, leading an unruly people towards the Promised Land. He wasn’t the Christ figure who preached the Sermon on the Mount and said blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Michael Delaney didn’t have much time for the meek, life’s losers in his book. Nor was his God an immanent presence in the world like the Holy Ghost, bringing God’s grace to his subjects. Michael Delaney’s God was the Chairman of the Board. He, Delaney, Michael Delaney like to think, was Managing Director of the outfit. Above him, remote, wise, all-seeing and all-knowing, was the Chairman. God.