The Inspector whispered something to Powerscourt.
‘The Inspector wishes me to inform you,’ he said mildly, ‘that the authorities in the Revolution did not send people to meet Madame Guillotine in covered carts. The carts were open so the people could see and rejoice at their oppressors’ fate.’
Delaney grunted. Jack O’Driscoll rose to speak. ‘Like Mr Delaney, I do not like your plan, Inspector. But I suspect we may, in the end, have little choice but to accept it. Could you tell us where we are to sleep on our journey? Or are we to be locked up in this special train for days at a time?’
Once more the Inspector spoke rapidly to Powerscourt. ‘You will be locked up all right, my young friend,’ Powerscourt translated, ‘but not in the train. Accommodation has been arranged for you in the police stations and the jails of France along the way. Insalubrious perhaps, but safe. Nobody will be murdered in them. Single cells for all. Accommodation for Miss Delaney in the local hospital.’
There was uproar in the dining room. Even Father Kennedy stopped eating at the thought of being locked up for the night with a bucket for company.
‘I’m not going to put up with this!’
‘I’m going home!’
‘Damn the French!’
‘This is monstrous!’
Once more the Inspector whispered to Powerscourt. He pointed at a large bag at his feet, though the gesture did not reveal what was inside. Towards the end Gallic gestures punctuated his words, a shrug of the shoulders here, a wave to the right with one hand, a wave to the left with the other, regular checkings on the vanished hair. Now Powerscourt understood. He rose to his feet once more.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘the Inspector left out one very important part of his message. You seem to think you have a choice. I’m afraid, after what the Inspector has just said, that you do not. Three people have been murdered so far on this pilgrimage. In his bag the Inspector has warrants from an investigating magistrate to arrest everyone in this room on suspicion of murder. If those warrants are served, it would be up to the magistrate to decide whether or not to grant bail. He could decide against it. In that case, everybody is marooned here, possibly in the county jail, until the case comes to court. That could take months. They still have another option, to put everybody on the special train, but send the train to Bordeaux and put you on the first boat out of France. The French authorities have given you, in effect, three choices. Continue by train to the Spanish border. Continue by train to Bordeaux. Or stay here as murder suspects until the killer is apprehended and the case heard in the French courts. I don’t think it is a very difficult choice, but it is yours. And I feel the Inspector is in earnest with his time limits. If you fail to meet them he will open his bag and bring out the warrants.’
Michael Delaney resumed his unusual role as tribune of the people. ‘Let us put it to the vote, ladies and gentlemen, as we did before. All those in favour of staying here.’
No hands rose.
‘All those in favour of Bordeaux.’
No hands rose.
‘All those in favour of the Spanish border.’
The bull fight and the prospect of Rioja drove them on. All voted for the Spanish option. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy watched them go, the younger ones dispatched to different carriages in case of rebellion on the way.
‘Moissac, Lord Powerscourt, Moissac, the most beautiful cloisters in the world,’ said the Inspector. ‘For the time being the authorities have provided me with an interpreter. I do not know how long he will be able to stay. The Cardinal Archbishop of Toulouse was particularly anxious that the pilgrims should take spiritual refreshment there. We shall see you there at eleven o’clock in the morning in two days’ time. Obviously we shall watch over the pilgrims’ visit to one of the special places on the route to Compostela.’
‘I take my hat off to the French authorities, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt to his wife as they breakfasted in a deserted dining room, ‘they’ve really been very clever.’
‘What makes you say that, my love?’ asked Lady Lucy.
‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘think about it. They’ve virtually deported the pilgrims for a start. You couldn’t get them out of the country quicker from here than by the Spanish border or Bordeaux. And they’ve washed their hands of the murder too. Just think of the headaches if they had served those warrants. Pilgrims to accommodate for a start. How long would it take to find the killer at Conques? Heaven knows. They’ve simply passed the parcel, certainly out of here, probably out of France. And they’re allowing the pilgrims little treats, like a morning out at Moissac. It’s all very smart.’
‘Have you been to Moissac, Francis?’
‘I have not, Lucy. I look forward to it. I’ve always adored cloisters. Such quiet peaceful places.’
PART THREE
ESPEYRAC-FIGEAC-MOISSAC-PAMPLONA-SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA
My Sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my Pilgrimage, and my Courage and Skill, to him that can get it. My Marks and Scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me, that I have fought his Battles, who will now be my Rewarder . . . As he went, he said, Death, where is thy Sting? And as he went down deeper he said, Grave, where is thy Victory? So he passed over and the Trumpets sounded for him on the other side.
17
The city of Bath is graced with some of the most beautiful architecture in Britain. Georgian streets, Georgian squares, Georgian terraces rise in elegant and restrained splendour up the hill above the river Avon and the railway station. There is even an astonishing creation called The Circus, a perfect circle of grand town houses ranged round a garden in the centre. Johnny Fitzgerald tried to remember what he could about the place as he set off from his train up to Mr Daniel’s house. Regency bucks, he thought, dressed in those gorgeous long coats with a stock at the neck. A man called Nash who had been the arbiter of taste in late eighteenth-century Bath, and had lived openly with a woman who was not his wife. Balls. Assignations in the Roman baths or the Assembly Rooms. A marriage market discreetly carried out behind the shuttered windows of Gay Street or Golden Square. Whores by the score drawn to the place by the needs and the purses of the fashionable, the twin magnets of men and money. Johnny thought he would have rather liked it here in Bath in those times.
The door of 4 Royal Crescent, the most elegant street in an elegant city, was opened by a young butler who showed him into an enormous drawing room. Portraits of earlier Daniels lined the walls. Johnny was staring at a spectacular eighteenth-century beauty in a pale blue dress when he heard a door close behind him.
‘That one’s a Gainsborough,’ said the man. ‘Everybody gets transfixed by that painting. Allow me to introduce myself, Ralph Daniel.’
‘Johnny Fitzgerald.’
‘She came to a bad end, I’m afraid,’ Daniel went on.
‘Bad end?’ said Johnny.
‘Sorry, the Gainsborough girl. She married into a very respectable family here in Bath, then she eloped with some American playboy. He abandoned her out in the wilds of Indiana or some other place in favour of a younger woman. Nobody knows what happened to her in the end. Forgive me, I gather you have come to see me about a book. Macdonald didn’t say which one, he’s always very cagey about things like that. How can I help?’
Johnny Fitzgerald handed over his letter of introduction. He had rehearsed various stories in the train on the way down, all of them lies. Ralph Daniel was a slim gentleman of about forty-five years old, clean-shaven and blessed with a winning smile. Various pieces of military memorabilia, a curved dagger on a table, a photograph of a group of officers with Daniel in the centre, told Johnny that he might be in the presence of a military man. Retired colonels, he dimly remembered, had always been fond of Bath. Suddenly Johnny felt tired of his fictions, of wearing other people’s clothes, as he put it to himself.