The Judas Cloth (33 page)

Nicola burned with embarrassment and Aubry said he knew what it was to be Nicola’s age, adding, ‘You mustn’t think she cares for me. I’m a purse and a place to stay. She’ll move on when she finds something better. Meanwhile, I teach her what I can, which isn’t a great deal. She will never be any of the things I imagine you fancy her to be – an imperilled soul, a passionate woman, or a possible friend. She is a little peasant who doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life as a servant. She has had a whiff of the good life, senses the coming of the French Army and hopes to make hay while the sun shines. It won’t shine very long for her because she is not very clever.’

Nicola wanted to hate him. It would have been an outlet for his humiliation. But he knew the Frenchman was only pointing out what he needed to know.

They were sitting in Aubry’s outer room. A little later, the journalist excused himself and went through into what must be his bedroom. Nicola could not resist straining his ears.

‘… doesn’t come for me,’ he heard. ‘Why don’t you come out for a few minutes? The poor fellow would be so pleased.’

Then he heard Maria’s sulky voice and when the door opened caught a breath of body smells mixed with scent. He left as soon as he decently could.

After sustaining a month’s siege, Garibaldi retreated from Rome

The French were entering the city. Wave after wave – there were said to be 20,000 – poured up the Corso on horseback and foot, carrying their arrogant flags. Nicola stood in a sullen crowd. When a horse raised its tail and did what the French call ‘dropping incense’, that too looked arrogant.

A priest pushed to the edge of the footpath and began to applaud. Voices hissed: ‘Don’t clap, traitor!’ But he paid no attention. He was a tubby little priest and beside himself with glee. Defying the warnings, he raised his clapping hands and shouted,
‘Vive
le
Pape
!
Evviva
il
Papa
Re
!’
His face shone. Someone caught his arm; he staggered, slumped against Nicola’s legs, then rolled into the gutter. Blood oozed from the back of the cassock. A man whispered to Nicola. ‘Best remove him fast.’

A third man lent a hand and the three carried the body into the nearest house where it was laid on a bed. The dead man was heavy and there was still a trace of elation on his broad, simple face. A woman said she would inform the parish priest, and sent them quickly away. Better if they weren’t around to be called as witnesses. They separated without telling each other their names.

Cardinal Amandi was expected soon, so Nicola decided to wait, pay his respects, then leave for Bologna. Meanwhile, he went looking for Don Mauro.

A French soldier, on duty at the hospital, refused him entry, so he hung about until a nurse came, then learned that priests, now in charge, were sacking nurses and accusing the Republicans of having stolen things. ‘They’re drawing up inventories of things nobody ever saw,’ whispered the girl. ‘They’re threatening to charge the Principessa and
Father Gavazzi. Don Mauro has been told not to come back. They say he’s not a priest at all. Could that be true?’

Nicola said he didn’t know and went on looking for him.

He found him in the
Circolo,
sitting with a dispirited Martelli, who was insisting that Don Mauro must get out of the state fast and would need false papers. Don Mauro did not protest. Reality had descended on him and with it shock at his own imprudence. He had administered the sacraments while defrocked. ‘My case,’ he tried to justify himself, ‘was going forward and Father Rosmini said I could count on a favourable outcome. At the time he was tipped to be Cardinal Secretary of State. How could I not trust him? Then, later, there was so few priests here and so much need if people were not to turn from religion …’ His voice trailed off. ‘My intentions were pure.’ But the word from men close to the Curia was categoric: Don Mauro had better leave while he could.

‘You should have gone before the French came,’ said Martelli. ‘They’re sour now. Several were murdered on their first night.’

Martial law had been proclaimed, with a curfew at nine o clock.

Outside, the three ran into Gilmore, whom neither Martelli nor Nicola had seen since school. Despite his protests, they took him in near custody to lunch. He was on an errand for his rector and looked dazed, having been immured in the Irish College for months. Under the Republic, this, being under the protection of the British crown, had offered asylum to a number of conservative prelates. Gilmore looked as though he expected to see a citizenry with horns and hooves. He was clutching a small case which caught Martelli’s eye. What was in it, he asked, but Gilmore clutched it more tightly and wouldn’t say. Martelli made his nose quiver, which was an old trick of his and made them laugh. The conversation then turned to the menu, the recent lack of food and how, thanks to the French, supplies were now arriving.

Suddenly, while Gilmore was busy with his soup, Martelli snatched and opened his case. ‘English passports!’ he cried with delight. ‘Your prayers have been answered, Don Mauro. Your name is O’Ferrall and if there’s trouble, just grease the customsman’s palm. As for you,’ he told Gilmore, whose elbows were being held, one by Nicola and one by Don Mauro, ‘you can say you were attacked by wild Republicans who threatened to cut your throat. If you like, I’ll make a little slash in it for plausibility’s sake.’

Nicola asked for whom the passport had been intended and was told it was for a double agent named Don Vigilio who had reasons to avoid
the French. By now Gilmore was almost in tears and Nicola persuaded Martelli to give back the other passports, arguing that the Irish rector, if sufficiently provoked, might give a list of the names on them to the customs. He might do this anyway, so Don Mauro had better leave at once. The priest kept shaking his head. This had all happened to him before. It was destiny. He’d have to head for Marseilles. There would be plenty of others in the same boat, they told him. Hurry. Meanwhile, Gilmore mustn’t be let out of sight until Don Mauro set off. Nicola, unable to dissociate himself from Martelli’s violence, held Gilmore firmly by one elbow until Don Mauro’s possessions were packed and they had seen him onto a diligence. Mustering his spirits, the exile thanked his rescuers and said he’d pray for them – unless they thought his prayers were no good? What an idea! they yelled. Who said God was a reactionary? That’s heresy, Don Mauro! Laughing and waving, the three – even Gilmore joined in – made a great hubbub.

‘I hope you won’t be in too much hot water,’ said Nicola as they returned the Irish boy’s briefcase.

Gilmore said he wouldn’t ever want to refuse help to a man in need. It was a tentative peace-making – like the one the city must soon make with its pope.

Walking off on his own, Nicola marvelled at the silence. After weeks of bombardment, the sound of a cobbler’s hammer or the clatter of a window startled by their ordinariness – though the ordinary was not yet to be trusted. Confident rats quivered grassily among the ruins. You had to be alert for unstable masonry and die ground was strewn with debris. When it rained, pulverized plaster made a great boil of paste and bubbled as though a new, unimaginable creation were about to emerge from the chaos left by the old one. The ‘Rome of the people’ had lasted only a few months.

The banishment of Rosmini, the Liberals’ spokesman in Gaeta, showed the rest of us the uselessness of putting our heads on the same block. While we hoped to prevail, it had been our duty to give our prince candid advice, and I had done this in a series of articles in the Tuscan paper,
La
Patria.
As late as May, I still hoped to wean Mastai from the
cabal which had gained ascendancy over his conscience. Then I stopped signing my articles, but continued to put the case that it would be folly to provoke the people by answering licence with repression and so perpetuating the vicious circle in which we had for so long been caught. ‘If any hand can break this circle,’ I wrote, ‘it is that of Pius IX.’

Rereading this appeal, I see that I had lost faith in him yet longed to recover it. Half Italy was in the same plight for he had extended our moral scope – then reduced it; a grim, Procrustean trick. No need to record what he did do next: restored the Tribunal of the Inquisition, flogging in the prisons, etc., etc. Once it was clear that the French would hand Rome over to him, he lost all interest in reconciliation.

Unlike myself, Rosmini failed to foresee all this and was shocked to be greeted with the words
‘Caro
Abate
, we are no longer constitutional.’ This was on the 9th June and two days later the police ordered him out of Gaeta. Incredulous, he asked to hear his sentence from the Pope’s lips, but could not get an audience. No one knew his face. Doormen were stricken by oblivion and men with whom he had spent convivial evenings stared through him. It was, the poor saintly man said later, a deeply unsettling experience.

At last he shamed Cardinal Antonelli into taking him to Pius who was caught off guard. He said that, yes, Rosmini must leave and that his books were being examined for heresy by the Congregation of the Index. He was hazy about why, but promised to pray that God, who had granted Rosmini so many gifts, would grant him that of seeing how his writings displeased Him. ‘Submit to this Holy See and you will surely be enlightened,’ advised Pius.

Rosmini was bewildered. What enlightenment could God give him which Pius could not? His books had not yet been condemned, so who knew that they displeased Him? Had Mastai implied that Rosmini’s gifts – intelligence, for instance – were a liability?

‘Do not,’ I wrote to Amandi, ‘intercede for him.’ Prudence, I warned, must be our watchword, for our day would come and, when it did, we would need men of integrity who had Mastai’s trust.

During the siege, Miss Maria Foljambe – whose first name rhymed, as she liked to explain, with pariah – had taken to feeding the wild cats which lived in the Forum and around the Pantheon. At first she brought food in bags, then marshalled a servant with a cart. This activity was looked on askance, for since she was only twenty-six, her lapse into
oddity was premature and, to the minds of her compatriots, deplorable since some ridicule devolved on them. She was well connected, which made things worse. The sight of her, her cart, her liveried servant, and the disease-ridden hordes which she had chosen to adopt was unpleasantly suggestive. Protestants were not allowed to have their church within the city walls lest it contaminate those within. Now, as if to prove that such contamination was indeed to be feared, here was this cat lady who was also a genuine English gentlewoman and distantly related to a peer.

Her servant defended the cat food with a cricket bat and had been seen waving it at children.

‘Children are fed by the charities,’ argued Miss Foljambe. ‘Nobody feeds the cats.’

One thought of Egypt. Cat deities. The creatures looked like
emanations
of the stone. Ancient. Savage. Wild. They seized the nasty stuff and leaped to the top of a broken pillar or some equally defensible high ground to tear at the heart or whatever other organs she had brought. There was a latent insult here, for she had found herself a flock or horde and the terms were grown explosive, having been much in official use, as the Pope, Supreme Shepherd, fulminated his anathema on his
flock-turned
-horde.

At mass, when heads were bowed for the consecration, Nicola, feeling a hand in his pocket, thought it had been picked. Instead, a note had been slipped into it. Someone had scribbled: ‘Intercepted by our agents working for mail-coach; pass on to person concerned.’ He opened it and read:

The signature was illegible. Horrified, Nicola rushed to Aubry’s lodging, only to find that he had left. And the girl? She, said the doorman, had taken up with a Garibaldino and retreated with them. She was a camp follower, said the man, looking at Nicola with pity. Returning in gloom to his cell, Nicola found a note from Cardinal Amandi who was in Rome and wanted to see him this evening.

‘It suits the Church’s enemies‚’ said Amandi, ‘for religion to seem incompatible with freedom, and we have fallen into their trap. If those few priests whom the people trust are shot without our lifting a finger to protect them, we shall have fallen into another.’

‘Few?’ The languid syllable came from the lips of a layman who had been reticently introduced as His Excellency. ‘Are
few
priests trusted?’ His Excellency had an Austrian accent and a mocking tone.

They were dining in a room which had been whitewashed to cover slogans with which its recent Republican occupants had defaced its walls. Lettering leaked through the paint and Nicola thought he could make out the words: ‘Down’ – or dawn? – ‘… religion’.

Amandi had come from Gaeta with a party of prelates; a trickling prelude to the return of the exiled court.

‘Trust,’ he said, ‘needs to be restored.’

‘As’ – the Austrian sipped his wine – ‘spilt milk to a jug?’

The cardinal ignored this. Could not Nicola, he urged, take a message to Cardinal Oppizzoni?
Sub
rosa.
Viva
voce.
Fast. Since the roads between here and Bologna were infested by every sort of enemy, he must carry no paper but memorise the following: General Grozkowski, the Austrian governor of occupied Bologna, would be replaced by a more humane officer if Oppizzoni fulfilled a certain requirement. This would save lives. ‘If Your Excellency agrees.’

His Excellency jibbed. Our men, he said, as devoted sons of the Holy Father, were hurt in their filial feelings. Our flag had been insulted. ‘Grozkowski’s a soldier. What can you expect?’

His own affectation of civilian nonchalance was belied by his bearing. Stiffening at the word ‘flag’, his lean frame achieved heraldic abstraction. Excesses, he admitted, were being committed. Shootings. Court
martials
. Lack of court martials. Well; war was war! Still, though the
Imperial High Command was under no obligation to do so, some of us – here His Excellency’s stance softened – felt that to appoint a more lenient governor could heal wounds. We must not, be it understood, seem weak. There must be a quid pro quo. Being the policeman of Catholic Europe was proving thankless and what faith could one have in a population which had resisted our efforts to liberate it? Not to speak of what had gone on under the Republic. ‘I believe that in the hinterland Republicans crowned a man with thorns.’