The Judas Cloth (26 page)

The French prelate approached him and nodded to where, in a corner, Rossi recognised the ex-priest who some months before had told him of his unfrocking.

‘A sad case,’ said the prelate. ‘Perhaps you could invoke lenience on his behalf?’

‘You’re asking the wrong man. My argument is that the Pope should leave temporal matters to the laity. How then can I intervene in religious ones?’

‘But if he is sympathetic to reforms, surely he will be sympathetic to priests like Don Mauro? Don’t you agree that we must go forward or back? That there is no half way?’

‘No,’ said Rossi. ‘I don’t. That’s a religious way of thinking. Feminine and visionary. I have a theory as to why most visions are of the Virgin and seen by girls. It’s because men respect hierarchy and are ready to work their way up. Girls hope to rise in one leap. If they are religious, they see the Virgin. If not, they try to marry a powerful man. The Virgin is the prime interceder and bypasses all rules by being conceived immaculate then whisked up to heaven in the teeth of bureaucracies and the laws of gravity. Something similar, to be sure, can happen to popes.’

The French prelate laughed. ‘My mother,’ he said, ‘has two sons. My
brother is an ambassador and able to receive her in some state. She prefers, however, to stay with me. She says I am like the daughter she never had. Other priests’ mothers say the same.’

‘I am not,’ Rossi objected, ‘casting a slur on femininity. Women – but what can be said on the topic is well known.’

Across the room, Madame de Menou was teasing a cardinal.

‘What do you think your mother meant?’

‘Perhaps that clerics make better friends than other people. A priest I know says he is in love with friendship:
amoureux
de
l’
amitié
. That savagery which I notice in heterosexual love – a bit tigerish, don’t you think? – is absent.’

Tigerish, thought the count. Is she? Why am I throwing this youth in her way? A breath of jealousy caught in his throat.

Leaving the drawing room, he retired to a small study to wait for the guests to leave. Half dozing, he sipped Marsala. How old was she now? Twenty-nine. They had known each other for ten years. She – her name was Dominique – played her game with skill. She was childless. That fund of attention which women give their families now held the Curia in its sights, the Republicans, the Prince of Canino’s clique, and the Pope.

On the wall hung a portrait of her painted some years ago. She wore a ball dress, was downier than now and flirted, questingly, with the world: russet hair, feline eyes, sloping shoulders, silky skin. Optimistic, her upper lip rose slightly to reveal small, even teeth. He suspected her of underrating a factor which, talking to her, he called ‘Fortuna’ and talking to Pius, ‘God’. In his mind he thought of it as impish: a disruptive daemon which defies good planning. Despite a lifetime’s rational behaviour, it stimulated him in ways he would not even try to explain to her. Instead, he would follow all her wise advice then, like a Theseus whose Ariadne has furnished him with too short a threat, would proceed fearfully but determinedly alone.

Monsignor Amandi, back from investigating visionaries, found some of their threats realised. The honeymoon between Pope and
popolo
was at an end, though Pius could not see this. Friends grimaced behind their hands. He still walked among the rabble on foot! And was impervious to advice.

Metternich, Pius liked to remind would-be advisers, had had to flee. Months ago now. Off he’d had to lollop with his tail between his legs to London. So had Guizot and Louis Philippe. And here was he whom
they had presumed to advise, four, five and six months later with his good people still cheering him. Ha! No thanks to himself, to be sure! As he said so, he would tilt an ecstatic face heavenward in a way maddening to ministers, since it was how he brushed their opinions aside. How could facts and figures compete with the
doctrina
infusa
floating down to him like gold beams in a sacred painting?

Cardinal Gizzi, his first Secretary of State, had resigned after twelve months. He had been succeeded by Pius’s cousin, Gabriele Ferretti, who later fled in the night. The present Cardinal Secretary, Soglia, couldn’t wait to resign.

‘I’ve been hoping,’ Soglia confided to Amandi, ‘that
you
might relieve me. I could go then with a good conscience.’

Amandi was named Consultor of the Holy Office.

‘It could,’ hoped Soglia, ‘be a precursory token?’

Amandi, though often invited to dine in the Quirinal Gardens, doubted that Mastai would turn to him. Perhaps he was reluctant to trust himself to a man who had influenced him in the past? The great complaint about Pius was his lack of constancy.

‘He doesn’t just lack it,’ Soglia confided, ‘he dislikes it. He feels that, as the spirit bloweth where it listeth, we should all bend like reeds. Just now he wants me to resist Pellegrino Rossi’s attempts to deal with foreign affairs. He hates a layman to have power – but why then ask one to govern? I ask only to go back to my diocese in Osimo,’ said the cardinal on a warm evening in the Quirinal Gardens when the trees were hung with lanterns and the footmen’s livery glowed like fruit. ‘Osimo!’ He sighed and squashed a mosquito on his red silk thigh.

Nobody cared to stay in Rome in October, when infections were rife, though less so on the Quirinal Hill than in the Vatican, where the
mal
aria
was at its worst.

The count, whose inner self ached, received young Stanga with courtesy. The boy was handsome, just as Minghetti had said he would be. The young, he told himself, are another species. Their skin covers them differently.

Prospero, seated on a divan, gave a lively account of events in Bologna, was deferent and drank a jug of barleywater without observing his host’s distress. Meanwhile, to Rossi’s distracted eye, he looked, at moments, like a satyr. Through layers of summer clothing, the host could, or thought he could, see the stirrings of rampant flesh.

Not for a moment, though, did His Excellency’s thoughts betray themselves. Old habits stood to him and he smiled his affable smile. ‘Later on, we’ll pay a visit to a friend of mine,’ he told the boy whose skin, on closer inspection, was not so perfect. ‘Madame de Menou is French but knows this city and can introduce you to its ways. Go with her to the Corso tomorrow and learn the names and political persuasions of the people she will point out. You mustn’t be embarrassed to ask quite simple things. You’ll be of no use to me until you’ve learned your way round.’

‘He was open and easy with me,’ Prospero told Nicola later. ‘He had a reputation for haughtiness, but I never saw that. He was kindness itself and so was Madame de Menou.’

‘He thinks of me as a mother,’ Dominique told the count. ‘I’m not saying it to reassure you. The poor boy’s shocked by the city whose perfidy I at once described. He’s devoted to you already and full of righteous indignation. Your squire! He sees us as a couple and thinks we’re the same age.’

‘Does he attract you?’

‘Now you’re trying to make something happen which would do nobody any good.’

‘It might bring you some enjoyment.’

‘To you, I’m young. To him, old. Which do you suppose I like?’

‘You might enjoy changing his opinion.’

‘I might if I had nothing else on my mind. As it is, I have just learned that plans to murder you are being toasted at the Osteria del Forno in Orvieto wine.’

‘Your footmen may invent such things to earn your gratitude.’

‘Do you think they invented this?’ She handed him a letter in a manifestly disguised hand.

He read:

Rossi folded the paper. That’s how they think, he told himself. That’s the good old Roman gutter. Venomous scorpions are coming out of the woodwork.

‘You’re right,’ he told her. ‘What you must do is engage some
ex-soldiers
as footmen and take them wherever you go. Meanwhile, show yourself in public with the boy. I shall see less of you. Let’s try not to torment each other.’

She embraced him. ‘What about your safety?’

‘I promise to be careful,’ he told her – though how avoid a dagger? The spies’ dossiers he had been reading emphasised the difficulties. Their contributors were all terrified.

To the boy he admitted that the state of the state was worse than he had supposed. ‘I’m going to have no time for private life, yet everything in this city is done by contacts and, though this may surprise you, more influence moves up than down. Small men – clerks, stewards and accountants – think for the rest. They know everyone’s business, while the great landowners don’t even know their own, so what’s said in the counting house and sacristy will be thought tomorrow in the papal court. Frequent them for me, Stanga. Keep your ears open. Drop a wise word when you can.’

The city was lurid with rumour.

In the evenings when Madame de Menou’s guests left, Rossi and the boy lingered over a last glass of port to compare what they had heard. Prospero’s naïvety rid the other two of their fears as it set them laughing at his.

‘Forgive me,’ he said one evening, ‘but I can’t see why you invite men like the Principe di Canino to your house. That fat little beast is scattering money in all directions in the hope of having you killed and himself named leader of a radical Italy. The police and dragoons have pocketed bags of his gold.’

‘Oh,’ said Rossi, ‘it can’t be easy to be a minor Bonaparte. I’m told he’s a good naturalist. That’s probably his true vocation. The rest is theatre. Pretence. The real danger is small men.’

‘Well, he pays
them
,’
said Prospero. ‘There’s a cabinet-makers’ shop in the Monti district where people go to plot after dark. Galletti, the
ex-minister
of Police, drops by, but the moving spirit is the prince. He invites the ringleaders back to his palace. They’re so indiscreet that I could get invited myself.’

‘Theatre!’ Rossi nodded. ‘They need a public’ Sometimes he felt the city shake like canvas as he walked through it.

Madame de Menou had heard of other conspirators meeting in the piazza del Popolo and – but Rossi distrusted spies’ reports. ‘When they
say “conspire”,’ he argued, ‘they may mean “talk”. Remember that there is no tradition of free speech here.’

More dangerous were the veterans from the volunteer corps. These were now half-disbanded, and the men, embittered by defeat, felt betrayed and, speaking in confidence, had been. By Pius.

‘You’ said Dominique, ‘are the target for the resentment he arouses. You,’ she said mischievously, ‘are his
chandelier
!’

Prospero, taking the city’s pulse, found it feverish. October had emptied the great palaces. All that was left were disgruntled civil servants kept to prepare Rossi’s reforms. He was working round the clock himself, but they were used to their October vacation and in their small way added to the disaffection. Things could take on a momentum … Seeing Madame de Menou blench, Rossi made signs to the boy. Hush. Prospero stopped. She turned and caught the count signalling. They laughed. Their sessions, counterparts of those in the palace of the Principe di Canino, had the thrill of a cabal.

Prospero was impressionable and Rossi reflected that young minds did tend to thresh about like Laocoön’s sea serpent. To be accurate, though, the one grappling with ancient coils was himself.

What grew increasingly useful were the boy’s accounts of the city’s byways which, venturing where the other two could not, he diligently explored. Up and down grimy stairways Rossi followed him in his mind, corkscrewing through palaces where dried turds – feline and human – hollow beetle-shells and less diagnosable droppings crackled into dust, and stone steps were so worn as to seem to the deluded eye to undulate like festoons. Here clung ancient odours of the dried cod left to soak for the twenty-four hours preceding every day of abstinence. Laundry dripped in inner courtyards. Women sang. Artisans conspired and Jesuits lurked. Prospero had found one who, loath to leave with his fellows, had locked himself in a room where he was recording the evil being done during the Society’s exile. He had his eye on Rossi. Retribution would catch up with him, he assured, and prayed for this daily when celebrating mass on a chiffonier.

The count’s unpopularity with the Society had started when he helped suppress their schools in France but now a new crime was being laid at his door. This was the Church Property Mortgage, a measure which had been introduced before he came to power and for which he was not in the least responsible. He was blamed for it, though, by priests who saw it as the greatest blow levelled at religion since the fall of Jerusalem. What had happened was that last spring there had been a run on the
Banca Romana which the state – being in debt to it – had allowed to function without a reserve. The bank ran out of money. Foreign loans were unobtainable and the Pope, in desperation, authorised the floating of a loan for two million
scudi
, using Church property as security. The first payment was now due and the mortgaged property in danger of being sold. To prevent this, Mastai begged the clergy for a contribution of 200,000
scudi
and they, reluctantly, agreed to make the treasury a gift of four million, payable over a fifteen-year period, so as to free their assets of all liability: an astute move.

‘If they hadn’t paid off the mortgage now,’ said Rossi, ‘a more radical government could confiscate their property later. I praised their shrewdness in my address of thanks.’

‘It might have been more tactful to praise their generosity.’

‘Oh, they won’t forgive me anyway. Especially since I have set up a commission to reform the tax system and abolish exemptions. You can’t imagine the fury. I’m reforming the law courts too and the Army and police. More fury!’