‘I believe the proper term is the financial and business pages of the New York Times,’ she said primly.
‘You read those pages every now and again, Miss Delaney? That’s very advanced, if I might say so.’
‘I do not read those pages every now and then, as you put it,’ said Maggie Delaney crossly, ‘I read them every day. I have great files of them at home, sorted year by year, going back to 1894.’
Lady Lucy would have been the first to admit that she was not a regular reader of this material. She hardly ever looked at them at all, moving on to higher things like the accounts of forthcoming auctions, or society weddings that might feature members of her family. She dimly remembered row upon row of numbers, of company reports, of the details of the flotation of new companies on the London or New York Stock Exchanges. For some, perhaps, there was romance in all these dry figures.
‘And what was the first evidence you found about Mr Delaney’s activities?’
‘His crimes, you mean,’ said Maggie Delaney. ‘The first evidence? There was so much of it, so many sins. Did you know that somebody wrote a book about Delaney’s crimes round about that time?’
‘Really?’ said Lady Lucy, ‘What was it called? Did it do well?’
Maggie Delaney laughed. Or rather she cackled and a look of twisted triumph passed across her face. ‘The book was called Michael Delaney, Robber Baron.’
Lady Lucy thought the author hadn’t minced his words. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Was it perhaps not a very flattering portrait? Of Mr Delaney, I mean.’
‘It was not flattering, oh no. The author had got hold of the details of most of Delaney’s crimes over the previous fifteen years. It would have been very powerful. Two hundred pages of Delaney’s sins, bound for ever in a hardback cover.’
‘But what became of it, Miss Delaney? You make it sound as if something happened to the book. Did you manage to read it?’
‘Nobody, as you put it, managed to read it. When Delaney found out about it – he must have heard people were making inquiries about him – he went straight to the publishers. He bought every single copy just as they were about to start sending them out to the bookshops. Then he had them all destroyed, pulped is the term, I believe. He paid the author all the royalties he would have earned if he’d sold every single copy and a bit more to keep his mouth shut. And the author’s mouth has remained shut from that day to this. I tried to find him, of course, the author, but he’s vanished. That was the end of Michael Delaney, Robber Baron.’
Lady Lucy wondered if the author too had been pulped, like his books. Another crime for Maggie Delaney to put on her cousin’s charge sheet.
‘If you will excuse me, Lady Powerscourt,’ Maggie Delaney was gathering up her prayer book and rosary beads, ‘perhaps we could continue our conversation over lunch. I must go to the cathedral to pray in front of the Black Madonna.’
An improbable image rose to the front of Lady Lucy’s mind. She could see Maggie Delaney sitting at a table in her little apartment in New York, the walls lined, no doubt, with religious pictures of the Holy Land and the saints, the business pages of the New York Times in front of her. She had a pair of scissors in her hand and was cutting out selected paragraphs to be inserted in a large black file. Chicago meat prices. New York Stock Exchange closing prices. Timber futures. Report from London. Steel stocks firmer.
Powerscourt had ridden over to St-Privat-d’Allier and abandoned his horse at the hotel, hoping to catch up with some of the pilgrims on their march to Saugues. A party of schoolchildren in crocodile formation passed him in the village square on their way to the church, escorted by a couple of nuns. The locals stared at him with that rude and never-ending stare reserved for foreigners and people from the next village. The road was climbing now, climbing upwards towards the vast empty plateau of the Aubrac. Small farms were littered across the landscape, the occasional cart trundling past him. Two birds of prey, buzzards he thought, were performing great acrobatic swoops in the pale blue sky, waiting for a glimpse of lunch before hurtling to the ground at unimaginable speed. He found Girvan Connolly, the man who described himself as a merchant from Kentish Town, sitting beside a great rock, swearing.
Pilgrimage was not being kind to Girvan. Those two young men, Christy Delaney and Jack O’Driscoll, had stopped their consumption of St Privat’s finest red fairly early the evening before. It had, Girvan realized now, been a mistake to carry on drinking the stuff with Willie John Delaney, the man dying from an incurable disease. That pilgrim had leaned over to Girvan as he opened their third bottle and announced thickly, ‘You know the old saying, Girvan, my friend? Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die? In my case that’s almost literally true. This bloody incurable disease I can’t pronounce could take me away tomorrow, so help me God. So I may as well have a glass while I can. I can’t drink to my health so I’ll drink to yours instead.’ And with that Willie John Delaney launched a steady campaign down the third bottle.
Not only did Girvan have a hangover. His feet, in the cheap boots he had bought from a man in the market at Kentish Town, were hurting. Charlie Flanagan’s repairs were holding out but only just. When he had tried to ask by sign language in the village that morning if there might be a cobbler in the place, they had shaken their heads and pointed vaguely in the general direction of western France. Now here was this detective person arrived from nowhere and looking very cheerful. Nothing, Girvan knew, is more annoying to people with hangovers than their fellow citizens being cheerful around them.
‘Good morning, Mr Connolly,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Are you having trouble with your boots?’
Girvan pointed sadly to the offending objects. ‘They’re bad now,’ he said morosely, ‘they’re going to get worse.’
‘I’ve got a very thick pair of socks in my pack somewhere,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Would you like to borrow them?’
The socks seemed to improve things. The two men set off along the path.
‘Your business must have been doing well back in London, Mr Connolly, for you to be able to take the time off to come over here.’
Connolly laughed bitterly. ‘I wish it was,’ he said.
Powerscourt said nothing. He wondered if Girvan Connolly might tell him things out here in the wilds of the French countryside that he would never mention in the more crowded quarters of the hotel. He waited as a party of cows were driven in front of them into a neighbouring field.
‘The thing is . . . ’ Connolly began. He was tired of the lies, the lies he had told his wife, the lies he had told to the various bailiffs who had come to call at his run-down house, the lies he had told to his fellow pilgrims. He felt a sudden irresistible urge to tell the truth in the same way people sometimes tell their entire life stories, sins and all, to complete strangers on transatlantic liners or long train journeys.
‘It wasn’t going well at all,’ he said, looking not at Powerscourt but at the woods in front of them.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Connolly,’ said Powerscourt.
Then his woes poured out of Girvan Connolly. The trouble with the business, the plates and the cups and saucers and the saucepans not selling as well as they should. The little loan taken out to tide them over. The slightly larger loan at a slightly higher rate of interest taken out to buy the consignment of cheap sheets and blankets that would restore his fortunes when sold off in the market stalls of Kentish Town. Further trouble when early customers reported angrily that the sheets virtually disintegrated on washing. Yet another loan, larger still, to pay off the first instalments on the earlier loans while there was still time. And then no moneylenders left to advance him credit to pay off the loan that had accounted for the purchase of the wretched sheets and blankets. His creditors threatening to come round and sort him out. All of this poured forth like a torrent of disaster.