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  My own journey had given me some insight into this idea. I hiked eight hours a day, six days a week, sleeping wherever a room was offered and rarely leaving the Via Francigena. The weather was a trial, yes, but that night in the prison guesthouse I felt like my life was somehow lighter. As if I had given up control over the course of my days. As if the pilgrimage was carrying me through the winter.

  Next morning the snow had settled.

  The nuns began the day with a service in a cupboard chapel off the guestroom. While Sr Marie-Bertille and Sr Anne-Christine recited prayers, Eva clattered round the kitchen, swearing and dropping things.

  When we left the chapel, the guestroom was in disarray. There were dirty plates on the table, dirty pans in the sink, and the sideboard was slopped with cereal. A suitcase had been tossed onto the carpet: T-shirts from Miami, branded tracksuit bottoms, and bras and socks in fluorescent shades of pink. Meanwhile Eva sat in the middle of the room, her head thrown back, letting out a noise half scream and half whimper. I could not tell whether her suitcase was broken, or her food was burnt, or her ankle was hurting, or she missed her son. I could not tell who was free, who chained, and who was bound by love. But, as I stood in the doorway, I felt a deep pull of pity, like these three were family now.

  ‘Every week,’ said Sr Marie-Bertille, stepping over the strewn clothes. ‘Every week this is what she does.’

  ‘We agreed today, Eva,’ said Sr Anne-Christine, standing in the doorway with folded arms. ‘You cannot stay past today.’ The whimpering scream became a sob, and Sr Anne-Christine put her hands to her ears. ‘If you need money, we will pay for your ticket.’ The noise stopped. ‘But this is the last time. Please, the last time.’

  I’m not much of a walker. My legs are short, my stride hurried – an anxious, wasteful gait. And I have not spent most holidays since childhood rambling round the Lake District. A few weekend hikes in the months before the pilgrimage were little preparation for twenty-five, thirty-five kilometres a day. By the third week, heading south-east towards Besançon and the Swiss border, my spine was aching and my shoulders welted. Then there was the twinge in my left ankle, the snag in my right calf and the popping in each knee. As the temperature sank deeper, my early exhilaration flagged. The winter had become haunting.

  After Clairvaux I spent the night in a fortified town called Châteauvillain, waking early and leaving through a deer park. The sun did not rise that morning, but bled into the clouds, and the colours in the park were subdued, like light at the bottom of a lake. The air was grey, the fallen leaves were grey, and the mud a pallid grey that was sometimes green. Mist hung in the tree branches, a dirty mist gathered in parcels. Once or twice I saw it twitch, but the deer remained hidden. Walking down avenues of elm, I tried to conjure their shapes from the haze. No animals, alas, but I glimpsed other figures in the veiled air. At times the cast of a costume drama seemed to be wandering the park with me: musketeers in feathered hats, maids in dragging skirts, and altar boys carrying candles and crosses in gloved hands.

  Eventually I spotted a herd of fallow deer in a thicket of hawthorn. Two of the deer, two fawns, watched me with eyes of button black. A third, a buck, strutted by without turning his head. I stood with my arm half-raised, until a doe with a speckled coat crept out from behind the hedge, her lips pouting, head cocked. She moved forwards, one pace, two, but a stray scent must have startled her, because then she ran from me with puppet steps, quickening into the mist.

  There were more ghosts in Langres’s old town.

  The old town was set on a hill above the rest of the city, its narrow streets lined with eighteenth-century mansions. As I wandered those streets the following afternoon, I kept hearing music: strains of violin from a boarded house, folk songs down a deserted alleyway, and choirs practising in the cathedral, even though the stalls were empty.

  My boots were coming unstitched, and I needed to repair the seams. Though I passed workshops selling trays of elegant, impractical cutlery – forks the size of paperclips, or sewing scissors with jewelled handles – it took an hour to locate a cobbler. The shop’s window contained row upon row of antique shoes, as well as riding boots with steel spurs and turned leather tops. It was four o’clock, but the place was still shut for lunch. When I returned thirty minutes later, it had vanished entirely.

  The Langres presbytery was a grand building with an iron gate that locked at nine each night. Next to the presbytery, upstairs from the chapel, I found a flat for pilgrims. Its roof was damaged and its rooms being renovated, but I did not mind, because there were duvets on the beds and radiators on the walls. In addition, previous pilgrims had left packets of pasta and rice in the larder, along with tea, coffee, and energy drinks in disco colours. I took comfort in this hint of community, as if a distant stranger had remembered me.

  All night the wind cheered round the attic. The curtains shivered, letting in tremors of streetlight, and the radiator tick-tocked, tick-tocked, heating the building by some marvel of clockwork. At midnight the ticking ceased. Shortly after, I heard footsteps climbing the stairs to the flat and a hand beating on the door. Thinking it was one of the priests, I called out, but there was no answer. Instead a chair scraped along the landing, stopped, scraped again, and went rattling over. I called out a second time, and a second time there was no answer. Then I heard a sound I could not name: the swishing of Bible pages, or the coughing of a baby. Then: nothing.

  For the rest of the night I lay awake, too frightened to move. I kept telling myself that I was imagining this presence, even though my breath was short, my throat choked. Once I heard voices – In the street? In the chapel? – but otherwise the presbytery was taut with silence.

  At first light I left Langres. It was Saturday 26 January: the coldest day yet. Walking from the old town, my sleeves and collar frayed white with frost, and I could feel the chill in my eyelids, my jaw.

  Footpaths dropped through formal gardens, off the hill and into the woods. Two men were out working that morning, one choosing trees to fell and marking them with a cross, the other cutting the trees down with a chainsaw. When the trunks hit the earth they threw up ice like smashed glass.

  Around midday I came to a medieval refuge with walls of beaten stone and windows bricked shut. Close by was a pond frozen hard in the night. Although I was hungry, it was too cold to sit and eat – my face sore, my lips splitting.

  Later that day I entered the department of Haute-Saône and the grassy flats of the Saône Valley. Rash-red hedges divided the pastures, and the valley was fringed with woodland. A twisted road led between the woods, the roadside littered with rubbish. In a couple of hours I counted seven vintage porn films, twelve packets of cigarettes, four cans of Kronenbourg and a tankard of punched tin.

  Most of the villages on the road to Besançon contained lavoirs – brick or stone structures with public washbasins, where I sheltered from sudden showers of hail. Otherwise I sheltered in churches with domes of enamelled tile, their coloured squares laid out in lattice patterns. A few had posters of a boat pinned up inside, its mast a cross, its sails shaped like the sun, and the words Annus Fidei printed beneath. I would stare at the poster until I was bored with waiting, and then march into the hailstones with eyes to the ground. Twinge and snag. Pop, pop.

  The few people I met in that last week of January wanted to know why I was walking in winter. I told them that I planned to make Rome by Easter. Had I waited until spring to leave, some small excuse would have delayed me – three months, and then another three, and then another. But I worried I had started my journey too soon, without enough training and into the worst of the weather. Though I still asked strangers to house me each night, the assurance of those early weeks was gone. After Besançon the Via Francigena climbed the Jura Mountains on hiking trails, which I realized now would be buried in snow. And, even if I made it to Switzerland, I still had to get over the Alps.

  Madame Lucas was spindle thin, her face made up of angles. I had been given her address
at the parish in Langres and was hoping for a bed that night. ‘Do you have cancer?’ she asked when she answered the door. ‘Most pilgrims have cancer. In hospital they pray: please God make me better and I will go on pilgrimage. Then the tumour gets better and they have to walk.’ She began to take off her cardigan. ‘I don’t have a tumour. But I don’t have a shoulder. Look! It’s made of metal. Of recycling.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t have cancer.’

  ‘You’re too young.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘You have to wait a few years.’

  Madame Lucas’s sitting room smelt of hoovering, and her sofa was cluttered with cleaning products. She removed the carpet shampoo, motioned me to sit and placed a photo album on my lap. The first photograph showed my host standing outside Besançon Cathedral in a small group carrying rucksacks and trekking poles. The words Le pèlerinage de Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle were written above the picture, the dates 11.iv.2010 à 6. vii.2010 below.

  Besançon was a crossing place, a stop on both the Via Francigena and the Camino de Santiago. During the Middle Ages, if the Italian city-states were at war, pilgrims hoping to visit Rome had to travel to Spain instead. But, after the Reformation, the route declined, and by the time of the Peninsular War it had fallen into disuse. When Spain joined the EU in 1986, fewer than ten people a year walked the Way of St James. Since then the pilgrimage has been brought back to life, and in the year of Madame Lucas’s journey a quarter of a million completed the distance.

  ‘Eight pilgrims. That’s how many we were. All from Besançon. All retired. The youngest was sixty-one, the oldest was –’ she scrunched her face as she tried to remember, balling her hands into two tiny fists – ‘very old.’

  Madame Lucas went through each member of the group, listing the medical crises they had recovered from. Breast cancer and lung cancer. Liver failure and heart disease and something wrong with someone’s kidneys. Then she turned the pages of the album, past Chalon-sur-Saône (day six), Saint-Étienne (day fifteen) and Le Puy-en-Velay (day nineteen). More group shots, the eight companions feeding grass to a pair of ponies (Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, day twenty-four), or picnicking in a forest grove (the Dourdou Valley, day thirty-one), or posing next to a roadside shrine (Lauzerte, day forty-two, crossed out, day forty-three), or resting in the shade of a cloister (Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Moissac, undated).

  When the route climbed into northern Spain, other pilgrims appeared in the photographs: a succession of strangers wandering west together.

  ‘I talked to everyone,’ said Madame Lucas. ‘Sick people, old people, young people too! A boy from Greece, he was seventeen, eighteen, said he didn’t believe in God. Said he was a communist. And a couple from Korea, they were on honeymoon, they hitchhiked the whole way to Europe. And a woman from Argentina, she said she was leaving her husband, but I couldn’t understand why, because she cried too much.’

  So why did Madame Lucas walk?

  ‘I’m old. I thought, if I don’t go to Spain, I will stay alone in my flat until I die.’

  And why was the Camino popular again? Was it, as Sr Marie-Bertille claimed, because people wanted to learn what they believed? No, no, said Madame Lucas, it was cheap flights, mobile phones, motorways, fitness fads and the internet. She thought the world was too fast. It’s true. We need to slow down. We do.

  Madame Lucas showed little sign of slowing down. Instead she moved in fits and starts, telling alarming stories that she kept cutting short to leave the room in search of props: a hiking boot with a hole through the sole, or a scallop shell tied to a ribbon. Once or twice she rushed off but returned empty handed, having forgotten what she was looking for. And, if she could not remember the name of a village or church, she would clench her fists and complain about being old. Or she would jump from the sofa and begin cleaning, or swallow a multivitamin tablet with a double espresso. Coffee to wake the dead, she called it.

  Pamplona, Logroño, Burgos and León. Baroque monasteries and medieval hostels and beds laid out in barns. Towns of brown brick and red stone, hanging off the hillsides, and tableland and fallow fields and plains of yellow and dust. And always a line of pilgrims, lagging longer and longer.

  ‘Most of them were tourists. They sent their rucksacks in buses and walked with nothing on their backs. They ate in restaurants and slept in paradores and never came to mass. And complained! All the time complained. It was too hot. It was too hard. I went slowly like –’ she paused again, scrunched her face again – ‘like a snail. And every night I slept in the refuges. Every night sleeping in dormitories! But people leave old women alone in case they are crazy.’

  At last the eight companions reached Santiago. The final photo showed Madame Lucas standing in front of the teeming cathedral, tanned and hunched and squinting in the sun. She looked very small, very happy.

  ‘It’s ugly! The ugliest cathedral in Europe.’

  ‘Weren’t you glad to see it?’

  ‘I never wanted to stop. I wanted to keep going until the Atlantic—’ She interrupted herself: ‘Why don’t you walk to Spain?’

  This was not an easy question to answer, for in truth I was dismayed by the idea of the Camino. It seemed too crowded, too clichéd – filled with hotels, souvenir shops, and hundreds and hundreds of pilgrims. Of course, the medieval pilgrimage would have been just as busy, and I was often bored on the bare stretches of northern France. But, when I explained this to Madame Lucas, she looked bothered. Why didn’t I walk with other pilgrims?

  I told her that nobody else wanted to walk to Jerusalem – the answer I always gave.

  ‘Of course! Nobody walks in winter.’

  ‘And it means I talk to more people.’

  ‘What people? There are no pilgrims on the Via Francigena.’

  ‘Local people. The ones who take me in.’

  ‘What if you are lonely and you want to give up?’

  ‘This week was lonely,’ I said, mentioning disturbed nights in tumbledown refuges and spooked mornings in misty parks. ‘I’m learning to be lonely.’

  Madame Lucas looked even more bothered. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow we will find someone to walk with you.’

  Tomorrow Madame Lucas had decided that she would walk with me. To Rome? Of course! And Jerusalem? Maybe. She would pray more about Jerusalem. As we ate breakfast, I tried to talk her out of it, describing the cold, the snow and the struggle for a bed each night. It was not until I mentioned hiking the Great Saint Bernard Pass on foot that her enthusiasm waned. On second thoughts, perhaps she would ask a priest to accompany me.

  So we marched into Besançon to look for one.

  The city’s old town was wrapped in a dark bow of the River Doubs, its streets made up of grand Renaissance buildings. In the right light, their walls formed a glittering jigsaw of yellow and blue stone.

  Madame Lucas crossed the roads without ever checking the lights – ‘The drivers think I’m blind. They always stop.’ If we passed an open door she took my arm and dashed inside. We saw a marble stairwell in a block of flats, the murals on the walls of a bank and a stucco ceiling in a hotel lobby. Sometimes the doorman or receptionist looked concerned, but nobody told us to leave. Nobody gets angry with an old woman, Madame Lucas claimed.

  Then we visited churches. We visited the Cathédrale Saint-Jean, the Église de la Madeleine, and the Église Saint-Pierre. In each one my companion banged on the vestry door, but there was never any answer, and the secretary in the parish office looked puzzled when she was asked which priests were free for a pilgrimage. Nobody? What about a seminarian? None?

  Next we tried the presbytery. We rang the bell and rapped on the windows, but again there was no answer. By this point I was keen to get away; however, Madame Lucas insisted we wait. A few minutes later the door opened and a priest with a fleshy face peered out. When he saw who was there, he attempted to close the door, but Madame Lucas was too quick. ‘I need a pee-pee,’ she said. ‘I’m an old woman.’

  He s
ighed and let her in. She waved her arms around. ‘To Rome! In the winter!’

  The priest shook his head, puffing his pink cheeks. ‘I cannot help you,’ he said. ‘Nobody can help you.’

  Things got worse after that. Madame Lucas began asking people in the street to walk with me. She asked the till assistant in her favourite patisserie and a tour guide at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. Although I kept repeating that I was happier by myself, she seemed not to hear. Or she heard me, but did not believe me, for her desire to help was born of a biting loneliness that I could not console.

  It was raining now. The jigsaw streets became a single shade of slate. When Madame Lucas suggested we break for coffee, I asked her to go home. She started listing the friends from her Santiago pilgrimage who might accompany me, but I told her no, no more, that was enough. Then I said goodbye and walked away.

  The hills behind Besançon were covered in box. Paths led through the trees, between bungalows and cottages, statues and shrines. Climbing out of the city, my footsteps were urgent, as I tried to make up lost time. But then the sky darkened with storm cloud and the rain came down in sheets. Soon the paths were flooded, the woods becoming a house of horrors: a Virgin weeping raindrops, a lion with a roar like thunder, and a crucifix the size of a man, its body white as lightning. One of the bungalow gardens was hung with prayer flags, streaming purple and red, but when I stopped to look the rain fell so hard that it washed the sight from my eyes.

  Chapelle Notre-Dame des Buis hung over the hillside in the shape of a lantern. Inside, a semicircle of chairs faced a stone altar with a single candle. The candle was lit, the whole room breathing in and out with the flicker of its flame. I sat and listened to the confused noise of the rain, until the storm passed and the chapel was quiet.

  When I went outside again, clouds covered Besançon. I could not see the shining roofs of the old town, nor the hills gripping the city to the north and west – five hills, like the five knuckles of a fist – nor the monumental statue of the Virgin and Child towering to the east. But I could see the black mountains of the Jura rising to the south, and the black course of the River Loue carving a path into the range.