The Crossway Read online

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  PART FIVE

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Prologue

  It was late afternoon when I reached the saint’s house. From a distance the building seemed hidden in mist. Closer I could piece it together: white walls, a low door, a tiled roof and shuttered windows. One of the shutters was loose, its catch bent out of shape. The room through the window was unlit, but I kept looking until the darkness came apart. A wooden chair leant against a wooden desk in the middle of the floor. Two crutches hung over the hearth, a giant rosary tied between them, its cross the colour of bone and each bead a knuckle. Dust on the floor, on the chair, the desk. Dust like vapour on the windowpane glass.

  I tried the door and found it open. Inside the house was still, with a frosted, sour taste. A guestbook lay on the desk, the last entry dated eight months ago – twenty names in children’s handwriting, from a school trip that visited in the spring. Under the book was a homemade board game, the pieces three model pilgrims, the board a winding road. Square number one was a drawing of this house. Fifty-five squares on was a box labelled Rome.

  Signs were fixed to the walls, the printed card grey with damp. Here the saint helped his mother cook bread. There he played with his brothers and sisters. Upstairs was the room where he prayed.

  Dropping my rucksack, I climbed the staircase. An attic ran the length of the house, with a brick chimney in the middle and bare cob at both ends. The roof tiles were bare too, the roof beams exposed. These beams were the same pale shade as the rosary downstairs, turning the attic into a skinned ribcage.

  Past the chimney was a whitewashed alcove containing a cot with a chicken-wire mesh, a waist-high statue of a starved young man, and a stone slate engraved with the words Merci à St Benoît. The crucifix above the cot had Christ lying on his side with face serene, as if the cross were a bed and the body only resting.

  Here the saint slept each night.

  The previous evening, staying at the Abbaye Saint-Paul de Wisques, I had been told about this place – the childhood home of the patron saint of pilgrims. When the brothers learnt I was walking to Jerusalem, they urged me to stop by. Now, standing in the saint’s bedroom, I tried to remember the rest of his story.

  Benoît-Joseph Labre was born midway through the eighteenth century. His father was a tradesman, his uncle a priest. His mother gave birth to fifteen children: five sons, five daughters, and five that never lived. The children were raised in Amettes, a farmers’ village seventy kilometres south of Calais. As a boy Benoît-Joseph was quiet, devout, and at sixteen he decided to enter a monastery. But, when he went to the Carthusians at Longuenesse, they turned him away. The Cistercians at La Trappe did the same. He was too young, they said. Too frail. He did not know plainsong. He had not been taught philosophy. The boy wanted to withdraw from the world, yet every time he tried it ended in failure. Instead, he cast himself out.

  Aged twenty-one, Benoît-Joseph left home, promising to return for Christmas. His mother, his father, his brothers and sisters – none of them saw him again.

  For the next seven years he wandered Western Europe. This was the early 1770s, and the pilgrim tracks that once connected the continent had fallen into disuse. Benoît-Joseph Labre lived nearer to an age of steam than an age of sacred travel, yet he journeyed on foot between Einsiedeln and Rome, Loreto and Santiago de Compostela. The boy too weak for the monastery covered thirty thousand kilometres with no money in his pocket and no cloak for his back.

  His days were endless hardship. He ate dry bread or the herbs that grew wild by the roadside. He slept on the ground or, when offered a roof for the night, refused a bed and slept on the stairs. Imitating the Fools-for-Christ – those medieval mystics who behaved like lunatics and animals – Benoît-Joseph made himself wretched for fear of pride. According to his confessor, Fr Marconi, this humility was born of love. The pilgrim so loved his fellow men that he hoped his austerities might atone for their sins. But was it love that first pushed him away from home? Looking at the cot where he slept, I could think of another reason. Ever since he was a boy, Benoît-Joseph had dreamed of life in a monastery. The adult world rejected him, thus he decided to live always as a child, a pilgrim Peter Pan.

  Well, perhaps. Or perhaps I wanted the saint’s journey to explain my own somehow. For Benoît-Joseph Labre was the patron not only of pilgrims, but also of vagrants, unmarried men and the mentally ill. And, standing in his bedroom that afternoon, I felt his story had something to teach me.

  The alcove was dim now, and there was not one sound in all the house. No creaking doors, no heaving floors, the whole place made mute by dust. Yet I had a vague sense that I was no longer alone here, so I left the attic and ducked down the stairs. Then I slipped out into the mist.

  My first pilgrimage started on a midsummer morning six months earlier. I set off from the flat where I was living in London, followed the Thames east, and joined the medieval route to Canterbury. It was a surprising thing to do, as for much of the year I had been afraid to leave my room.

  When I was twenty-three I had a nervous breakdown. Afterwards I was frightened of the city, of lunchtime crowds and rush-hour trains and the angry, anxious streets. I went to work and sat senseless at my desk. I went to doctors and psychiatrists, counsellors and therapists. Otherwise I lay in bed, turned from the window, my thoughts hurting.

  One year on, the fear was lifting. In early summer I was taken off antidepressants. As the days got warmer, I wanted to go outside, and that June I decided on a walk. Canterbury was a whim – the walk at the beginning of English literature. The forecast was good, meaning I did not think to bring a waterproof jacket. Or buy maps, trusting my phone instead. That Wednesday was the solstice. Perfect.

  Everything went wrong. For two days I marched from dawn until dusk, covering almost a hundred kilometres – a grim total for someone who last hiked at school. On Tuesday I went so far off course that I had to catch a train to my hostel. On Wednesday I was soaked and sunburnt in the space of an hour, and spent the entire afternoon trudging down the A2, eyes harsh from exhaust fumes. When I got to Canterbury my heels were bruised and my socks clotted with blood. Yet I do not remember the pain. I remember lying on the grass beneath the cathedral, watching the daylight last into night, with a sense of relief so complete it was like healing. For a long time my world had been closing in, smaller and smaller, until it was no bigger than a cell. Walking made the world wide again.

  A figure carrying a staff and scrip was etched onto a stone by the cathedral’s southern porch. Around him was written, La Via Francigena / Canterbury – Rome. At that point I knew nothing of the holy road to St Peter’s, but as I lay on the grass an idea took shape in my mind. Why not keep walking? Why not leave England and walk to Italy? And then keep going, to the edge of Europe, on and on to the world’s most sacred city.

  The following day I learnt what I could about the Via Francigena. One website listed the names it had been known by: Lombard Way, Frankish Way, Chemin des Anglois, Via Romea. A second website listed the Anglo-Saxon kings who travelled its length – Caedwalla and Coenred, Offa and Ine – as well as Alfred the Great and King Cnut. A third explained how, in the year 990, the Archbishop of Canterbury also travelled the Via Francigena, to collect his pallium from the pope. On the return journey a scribe noted every town and city where they stopped. An image of that manuscript showed a page of numbered Latin names, some of which I recognized: I Urbs Roma, XXVI Luca, XXXVIII Placentia, and LIV Losanna. Although the Via Francigena was the major pilgrimage in northern Europe, this itinerary was the only one to survive
from the period, and when the pilgrimage was revived a millennium later, it formed the basis of the modern route.

  The Via Francigena also continued south beyond St Peter’s. In Albania it became the Via Egnatia, a Roman road across the Balkans. From Turkey a patchwork of crusader paths led all the way to the Holy Land.

  Rome, Istanbul, Jerusalem. That was it. That was my pilgrimage.

  If people asked about the plan, I told them I wanted to explore the major crises in Christianity: the collapse of belief in Western Europe and the exodus of Christians from the Middle East. It was true, but it was not the truth. It was not reason enough to wander out of my life. There was another reason, though one I kept to myself. That time of unhappy confusion was over, but I was not better. Or rather I was better, yet less, much less, than I had once been. Brittle now, and hollow too, and knocked down by the slightest of blows. I thought the journey might build me up again. I walked to mend myself. But this reason I was ashamed to admit. I do not believe in God, do not believe in miracles, and do not believe that a sacrament can cure a sickness. Therefore, when friends wanted to know about the journey, I said that I needed some exercise, that I could not drive, that I didn’t own a bike and was afraid of flying. They laughed and wondered if I would ever return.

  I said little more to my family, only that I was going on pilgrimage and would be home before the year’s end, as Benoît-Joseph had done.

  Three months after that midsummer hike I handed in my notice. Three months after that I moved out of my flat. New Year’s Eve I spent at my parents’ house, staying up late to repack a rucksack, fitting in a sleeping bag and tent, waterproofs and notebooks, six pairs of socks and a mouth organ for when I was bored. My mother made sandwiches, wrapping them with the last of the Christmas cake, and next morning my father drove me to Canterbury.

  We arrived at the cathedral for matins, the sun rising in the crypt windows and fraying the stone tracery. When the service was done, the dean gave me a blessing in the Trinity Chapel. Then my father said goodbye and I began to walk.

  Off to Jerusalem on the first day of January, a flawless Tuesday morning. I strolled along beneath clear skies and wondered if this was providence. But the boat from Dover crossed into cloud and ever since the mornings had been foggy. In those early weeks dawn was at nine, dusk at five, and my progress slow on muddy footpaths. Heading south-east from Calais, I often had to run to cover the day’s distance before nightfall.

  By Friday I was trekking past fields of blue loam. The air was bitter, like a bonfire after rain, and the fog thick as smoke.

  When I got to Amettes the daylight was ebbing. I ambled around in the half-dark, trying to imagine the village 265 years ago. This was not hard, for its barns and stables were centuries old, its streetlamps smudged and hazy. The Labre house, however, was a disappointment. I expected signs, tour groups, perhaps even a gift shop. Instead I found a sullen set of rooms decorated with a few dusty mementos.

  A church stood on the hill above the house. Inside it smelt of candle wax and wet copper coins – a cold and settled smell. Mist drifted through the doors and hung in the nave like incense.

  The church interior was devoted to Benoît-Joseph. There were banners embroidered with his portrait, the golden brocade turning green with age, and paintings of a hollow-cheeked figure staring at the heavens. His biography was told three times over: on laminated boards, illustrated posters, and in the stained glass of the windows. Circling the aisles, I tried to work out why the story bewitched me so.

  Aged twenty-eight Benoît-Joseph ended his pilgrimage in Rome, living in the Colosseum and spending his days among the destitute. Rome’s citizens were soon telling stories about the young man. How he knelt in church and floated from the ground, or burnt with a faint lustre as he prayed. How, in his hands, a single loaf of bread became two loaves, ten loaves, twenty, and he would give the bread away until there was nothing left for himself. Benoît-Joseph wanted to break free from desire, from need, but it made him frail. His knees swelled from praying the Forty Hours without rest. His stomach distended from constant fasting. On Holy Wednesday, aged thirty-five, he collapsed during mass at Santa Maria ai Monti. He was carried to a nearby house and given the last rites. That evening children ran through the streets shouting, ‘The saint is dead!’

  His body was returned to the church and laid in repose. The crowds that gathered to mourn him were so large, a guard had to be posted at the door. And every day another miracle: those who were sick and dying, who had lost their minds, prayed to the young man and were cured.

  Accounts of these miracles spread round Europe. Within three months the newspapers in Paris and London were reporting on the beggar whom Rome was calling a saint. Finally the Labre family learnt what had happened to their son.

  Early in the nineteenth century the church at Amettes acquired several cast-offs associated with the pilgrim. Some were on display in the north transept, including the font where he was baptized and the straw mattress on which he died. The rest I discovered in glass cabinets near the entrance. A leather shoe in a giltwood box. A plaster mask on a bed of purple silk. A crumbling pair of kneecaps. Taken together, they gave the impression that Benoît-Joseph was not an eccentric child of the Enlightenment, but a great martyr of the Middle Ages.

  In the year 1881 the pilgrim was made a saint. On the date of his canonization, Paul Verlaine, the most popular Decadent poet, wrote a sonnet to celebrate. Looking back at the era of Voltaire, Rousseau and Robespierre, he claimed that Labre was ‘the only light in France from the eighteenth century’. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, the dandy novelist who influenced Proust, called him ‘a sublime vagabond’. André Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement, described him as a ‘glittering beggar’. Germain Nouveau, another poet, who had once shared a flat with Rimbaud, visited Amettes during a fit of madness and vowed to live the rest of his life in poverty. He then walked twice to Santiago in imitation of the saint.

  It’s no surprise that these fin de siècle writers were enchanted. Benoît-Joseph’s humility was in part a performance, his devotion shot through with pride. Perhaps I was captivated by the saint for the same reason, but looking at that shabby collection of relics, I realized there was something pitiful in the slow suicide of his piety.

  A park covered the hill between the church and the house, its grass grey and its flowerbeds black. Fourteen stations ringed the grass, each station shaped like a gravestone, with scenes from the Passion sculpted in bas-relief. They showed Christ dragging his cross, Christ crucified, Christ’s broken body laid upon the tomb. The names of the donors were carved beneath: La Paroisse de Marville, La Comtesse de Bryas, and La Famille de M. Labre Laroche. A few names were blotched with lichen, and one of the shrines, number thirteen, had lost the pinnacle from its cap.

  The stations dropped in the direction of the house and rose on the far side of the hill. Before leaving the site I decided to complete a circuit. As I paced round the park, the same phrase kept playing in my thoughts. Chemin de Croix, Via Crucis. Chemin de Croix, Via Crucis.

  The Way of the Cross is the blueprint for Christian pilgrimage. By walking in Christ’s footsteps, a pilgrim shares in his sacrifice. If any man will come after me, Jesus told the disciples, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. Benoît-Joseph Labre felt called by this command, starving himself that he might be saved, and his story would haunt the rest of my pilgrimage. Not because it was frightening, but because it was familiar. To feel drawn across a continent by a longing that has no name. To feel drawn towards sacrifice. These things I knew.

  At the top of the park, beyond the fourteenth shrine, three crosses were staked into the earth. Each cross held a spotlit body, and beneath the crosses were three women with covered faces, spotlit also. One of the women, Christ’s mother, was bowing at the feet of her child. When I glanced up, a fault trembled the lights, and for a moment the statues were in shadow, as though something moved unseen among the display.

  By now the sk
y was turning over and darkness falling. I kept walking, past the final stations, until the saint’s house was hidden in the mist below. Trees scratched the undersky, their branches sharp like thorns. High above was Calvary, bright against the coming night.

  PART ONE

  École Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-la-Salle was a bungalow. Three bungalows, forming three sides of a courtyard. The yard’s surface was decorated with a circle, a star, a shield and mantling – the school crest, maybe, or a playground game chalked onto the concrete. Beyond was a porch, enclosing a locked set of double doors. Round the back I found more bungalows, as well as a dining room and a chapel. I also found a nativity scene with three wise men the size of schoolboys and a manger trussed in fairy lights, blinking onto the lawn.

  I had been given this address the previous morning. It was a boarding school run by the Society of St Pius X, and the priests were happy to host pilgrims – or so I was told. However, I was given no phone number, meaning I could not ring ahead and ask to stay. Now I worried that nobody was home.

  Eventually a young priest came out to meet me. I tried to explain myself, telling him that I left Canterbury four days ago and was following the Via Francigena across France, Switzerland—

  The priest cut me off: ‘You want somewhere to sleep?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘To stay for how long?’

  ‘One night.’

  ‘Tomorrow our students return.’

  ‘I leave in the morning.’

  ‘We have mass in the morning.’

  ‘After mass.’

  The priest folded, unfolded his arms. He was tall and lanky, breathing loud through his nose. ‘You are alone?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All alone?’

  ‘All alone.’

  His name was Fr Robert. He thought there were some spare beds in the infirmary. There. I could sleep there.

  The double doors opened onto a hall with paper chains tied to the ceiling and a Christmas tree sagging in the corner. The infirmary was on the far side. Fr Robert gave me the key and made me promise to lock up when I left. Otherwise the boys would steal the medical supplies.