On his way out Michael Delaney passed a statue. It showed a saint, dressed in brown with a broad-brimmed hat on his head. He carried a satchel or scrip slung round his neck and hanging by his waist. In his right hand was a large staff reaching up to the top of his hat, and in his left, a book of scripture. The bearded face seemed to Michael Delaney to be saying welcome. For this was St James the Great, the saint of the pilgrims who walk to his shrine and his memory in the Cathedral of St James in Santiago de Compostela. It was the same saint who had watched over James Delaney in his hospital bed all those months before.
9
The walking party were still crossing the rocky Margeride Mountains, a damp pastureland speckled with broom and with great granite boulders sticking up out of the ground, stone sentries left on duty from an earlier age. The farmhouses here were squat with small windows and doors and steep roofs to cope with the snows of winter. Saugues itself, their destination for the night, was, Powerscourt noted, a handsome town with many old houses including an English Tower, a great fortress of forbidding grey stone said to be have been the base for bands of marauding English brigands in the twelfth century. Like Le Puy, Saugues had a fraternity and a chapel of White Penitents who paraded round the town on Maundy Thursday in white robes with the hoods pulled over their faces and a couple of other penitents, barefoot, dressed in red, carrying a cross and the instruments of Christ’s passion. The hotel owner serenaded all who would listen with stories of the Beast of Gevaudan, a deadly creature from two centuries before who caused a reign of terror all across the region, killing women and children, decapitating them, sometimes eating them. Was it a wolf? Or some alien creature that had survived unmolested in the forests before coming out to kill?
The pilgrims progressed from Saugues across a mountain landscape dotted with medieval towers and simple stone crosses. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were walking now, trying to draw out from the pilgrims any stories of their past or the history of the Delaney family that might help find the reason for the death of John Delaney.
Lady Lucy was walking with young Christy Delaney who had looked, she noticed, quite disturbed as the hotel owner told them of the marauding Beast of Gevaudan. She asked him what he had thought of the story. Christy Delaney laughed.
‘It reminded me of my grandmother,’ the young man told her.
‘Your grandmother?’ asked Lady Lucy incredulously, unable to discern a connection between man-eating wolves and human grandparents.
‘Sorry, I’m not explaining myself properly,’ said Christy. ‘When I was little we often used to go to my grandparents’ house. They used to leave me and my sister in this unused drawing room on the first floor. It smelt, that room. The whole house smelt, of damp and mothballs and dirty clothes. My grandmother didn’t believe much in washing, you see, never had. Every now and then, either in that drawing room or when we were upstairs in our horrid little bedroom, she would come and tell us stories. She was especially fond of Little Red Riding Hood and she was particularly good at horrible voices for the wolf and those eat you all up bits of the story. She would lean over the bed, smelling, like the house, of damp and dirt and mothballs, and more or less shout at you. I always wanted to hide under the bedclothes but I knew that would be rude.’
‘So you stayed still and got scared?’ asked Lady Lucy.
‘I did,’ said Christy Delaney. ‘Very scared.’ He was thinking that Lady Lucy reminded him of his mother. ‘But I don’t think it’s anything relevant to your husband’s investigations, Lady Powerscourt. Mind you, she did tell us all kinds of other stories when we were older, the Big Bad Wolf.’
‘The Big Bad Wolf?’
‘That’s how my sister and I referred to our grandmother. Anyway, I don’t suppose these stories have much truth left in them, they’ve been handed down the family rumour factory for so long.’
Lady Lucy thought young Christy showed a true historian’s scepticism about his sources. It would serve him well, she felt, among the dusty libraries and the eccentric dons of Cambridge.
‘What did the stories say, Christy, even if they were unreliable?’
‘The main incident, around which all the others seemed to revolve, involved a comparatively rich Delaney refusing to help other, poorer Delaneys in the famine years. The poor ones were said to have died in the workhouse, but lots of people were said to have died in the workhouse in those times. Thousands and thousands of people were dying all over Ireland.’
‘God bless my soul,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘is that all that is known? No names?’
‘No names that had reached the Big Bad Wolf,’ said Christy Delaney.
‘Let me ask you another question,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Do you think John Delaney killed himself?’
‘I do not,’ said the young man firmly.
‘Why not?’
‘It’d be a very painful way to kill yourself, Lady Powerscourt. You wouldn’t be dead the first time you hit your head or your leg on a rock on the way down. You probably wouldn’t be dead the second time either. You could bounce all the way down to the ground and still be half alive when you reached the bottom. You’d lie there, maybe, blood pumping out all over you, waiting to pass away from your injuries. Surely that’s not a good way to kill yourself. The Romans used to slit their wrists in a bath of hot water, didn’t they? They thought, those Romans, that that was a painless way to die. They just got weaker and weaker until they went. The bath water must have been a very odd colour by the end, mind you. So that’s why I don’t think he killed himself, Lady Powerscourt.’
‘So what should we be looking for, do you think?’
‘There’s only one thing all these people have in common, Lady Powerscourt. Whether they’re from Ireland or England or America, they’re all Delaneys. There must be some mystery in their past that could explain the murder of John Delaney.’
‘What sort of mystery?’ said Lady Lucy.
‘That’s for your husband to find out,’ said Christy Delaney cheerfully. He had often thought of a career as an author after he left university. ‘Be a good title for a book, don’t you think, Lady Powerscourt, Delaney’s Dark Secret.’
Between St-Alban-sur-Limagnole and Aumont-Aubrac they came down from the mountains and crossed the river Truyere, flowing fast towards the great gorges that bore its name. Now they were in more alien territory, the Aubrac plateau, the most southerly of the volcanic uplands of the Auvergne, grazing country with vast stretches of pasture enclosed by dry stone walls. Higher up the dwarf beeches carried the scars of harsh winters and a long line of conifers along the side of the roads protected them against snowdrifts. There were still fragments of buildings left standing which had provided food and shelter for the pilgrims in the Middle Ages. Ruined donjons and medieval keeps bore witness to more shadowy figures from distant times, the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers of St John. The skies were huge up here on the Aubrac Massif. On a clear day you could see thirty or forty miles. Herds of cattle or sheep were brought up to the plateau to graze in the summer. The shepherds lived in strange dwellings called burons, home to cattle and pigs as well as humans, where the shepherds made Laguiole cheese which they stored in their cellars. But it was, even on a sunny day, a place where the solitude was almost oppressive. Looking out at the great expanse that surrounded them, most of the pilgrims fell silent. For many on the long road to Compostela the passage of the Aubrac, with the heavens stretching away towards infinity and the eternal quiet all around, was the most memorable part of the entire journey. ‘There is the Aubrac,’ a French author wrote, ‘a lofty belvedere both bare and sublime, more lunar, more outstretched, more windswept than the paramos of the Andes.’