The Judas Cloth (49 page)

In the end, the moral shadow of the anathema was to touch Sacconi too, and Cardinal Antonelli would attract still bitterer blame. Whose fault was it but theirs if the gallant little international force which had volunteered to fight for the Pope was slaughtered at Castelfidardo? Treachery and misinformation, said the mourners, had delivered it to its enemies. Nobody wanted to blame the dead young men, so live older ones were blamed instead: Sacconi, Antonelli, the French Ambassador and General Goyon of the French garrison, who had led the volunteers to think he would come to their aid.

Louis Napoleon, returning from his cruise, found his victims
quarrelling
among themselves. The French volunteers had been mostly
monarchists
, so their defeat was a bonus. Moving with an idea whose time had come had proven every bit as profitable as he had hoped, and in March 1861 the kingdom of Italy was proclaimed with Victor Emmanuel as king.

‘We must be passive,’ Cardinal Amandi told Nicola. He spoke dully, for his heart was giving him trouble. Waking in the night, he could hear it boom with the rashness of a flimsy gong. ‘We must be seen to be fleeced lambs. Only if shamed will the Catholic Powers intervene to restore what is ours.’

This was now policy. The Powers were to be God’s instrument and Rome must wait for them to hear His call. Meanwhile – this was the
message with which Nicola was being briefed – France must not be alienated, nor her visionaries let say one word which could inflame an already dolorous situation. Traitor or not, the Emperor was needed!

‘I’ve communicated this to the bishops of Grenoble and Tarbes,’ said Amandi. ‘If they won’t listen I can do no more. My recommendation is that they muzzle those young women.’ He spoke gently in his mild, heart-sufferer’s voice.

‘Local piety …’ Nicola did not bother to finish. It was an old difficulty.

The cardinal laid a testing hand on his heart. ‘I’ve lost my taste for irony’, he sighed, ‘but failure to recognise it is a weakness, and
the
irony of our time is that loyalty and piety can be vexatious.’

He was thinking of the ‘Zouaves’, which was the new name for the papal volunteers. These pious adventurers had come to restore the Pope’s ravished lands and Romans marvelled idly at their optimism. But the Zouaves were simple souls from places like Ireland and Poland. Hard-drinking and outlandish, they annoyed citizens by singing loud, tuneless, prayerful songs late into the night. Monseigneur de Mérode loved them. But then, he too was a half mythic creature from another age.

And the dreaming Pope had appointed him Pro-Minister of Arms!

‘He,’ said Amandi, ‘does more damage than Garibaldi. His
Franco-Belgian
contingent is the worst liability of all.’

These – their officers were monarchists to a man – itched to score off the Emperor by undoing the wrong he had done. But there weren’t anything like enough Zouaves and only a mad mystic like Mérode would see them as anything but a disruptive sideshow.

Amandi, having sacrificed his own ambitions to Antonelli and
supported
his polices, was indignant at Mérode’s attempts to foil them.

‘Is there anything,’ Nicola wondered, ‘to the story that Mérode hopes to be Cardinal Secretary himself?’

The cardinal took a pinch of snuff. ‘There is. But I wouldn’t bet on his chances. His Holiness will see sense. Not that Mérode isn’t a good man. On the contrary. I stayed with him once and was never more edified or worse fed. He lives like an anchorite and adores practical jokes – even plays them on officers of the imperial garrison! I’m afraid that what’s left of this realm is in the hands of a saint and an adolescent.’

‘A saint, Eminence? You can’t mean the Pope? After his behaviour to you?’

Amandi’s heart condition had been brought on by a series of painful
scenes with Mastai, whose tantrums had become alarming. Losing his lands had possibly revived his epilepsy. The worst had been when Amandi tried to invervene on behalf of the Mortara boy.

‘Shsh!’ said Amandi.

This evening Nicola was to take a message to Mérode’s friends. It was unofficial but he was to let them know that it came from the Holy Office. The Orleanist faction – Mérode’s – was
not
to exploit this girl, Bernadette – what was her name? asked the cardinal.

‘Soubirous, Eminence.’

‘That’s right. She is not to be turned into a Joan of Arc calling for their pretender to be crowned. Let them know we know that the Legitimists tried that with the La Salette girl, and we’re warning both groups not to start with Soubirous. She’s being carefully watched, you might add. Apart from that, enjoy your evening. You’ll eat well anyway. Foreigners keep better tables than our own thrifty aristocracy which,’ lamented Amandi, ‘imitate the least admirable aspects of the clergy’s conduct. All they learned from us is how to make a show and pass the plate.’

‘Flavio!’

The duke was being escorted to a distant place at table whence, at intervals during the meal, Nicola was able to catch the swivel of his smile.

‘You know him, do you?’ A nearby gentleman was wistful. ‘If we touch him, do you think some of his good luck will rub off? They say he trebled the fortune he was granted by the
Sacra
Rota.
’

‘Later,’ said Flavio’s dumbshow to Nicola. ‘We’ll talk.’

‘Mind you,’ the wistful gentleman lowered his voice, ‘his luck implies that the
Sacra
Rota
erred.
Our
class has used ours up. It’s an argument for bastardy. New blood calls to new money!’ Don Marcellino laughed without resentment and greeted his food festively. ‘Ortolans!’ he exclaimed. ‘The French do one proud.’

The evening was indeed splendid, for the Orleanist Crusaders – that was their other name for themselves – had rented the
piano
nobile
of a palace belonging to one of those Roman princes who had learned their style from the Church. Footmen moved liturgically, and candles blazed like the high altar at Easter.

‘Rome,’ noted Don Marcellino, ‘is already occupied by foreigners.
We
can no longer live like this.’ He waved at the room.

Afloat in glitter, it was porous with false perspectives. Surfaces dissolved. Silks rippled. Solidity invited distrust, and the whole was conducive to a belief in the spirit whose creation it was. To be sure, enemies might read it differently! Nicola imagined them arriving to draw up inventories and attach price-tags. It could happen any day. Aware of a constriction in his chest, he let the lady on his left persuade him that Italy, a cobbled-up absurdity, could not hold together another month.

‘After all,’ she exclaimed, ‘the provinces can’t even understand each other! Did you know that when the Piedmontese landed in Sicily, the Sicilians thought they were French?’

From down the table, a burst of laughter greeted a sally by
Monseigneur
de Mérode who was no doubt peddling a like optimism. In a lull, his voice rose with that messroom joviality which shocked the Curia. An English guest had asked about the castrati he had heard sing in the Sistine Chapel.

‘There are only four left now,’ said Mérode, ‘and my musical friends assure me that only the one called Mustafa is worth hearing. I’m told that, not long since, a compatriot of yours, milord, lured him to his lodgings and bribed him to sing. Poor Mustafa was in hot water. They’re sacred singers and not for hire.’

‘But how exactly – I mean what do you do to … create them?’ The Englishman was a wispy youth.

‘
Mon
cher
!’
Mérode’s laugh was genial. ‘That has nothing to do with the Pope’s administration. It’s a by-product of what your countrymen call private enterprise! Our peasants, you see, raise pigs and also children. Sometimes they leave them together with unfortunate results. Pigs are greedy.
Très
voraces
!
Are you familiar with the animal? When they bite off vital bits of the children, our choirmasters make use of the victims. From,’ Mérode smiled, ‘charity’.

‘Is it true,’ whispered the lady on Nicola’s left, ‘that Antonelli and Mérode are at daggers drawn?’

‘Gossip suggests so.’

‘Come, Monsignore!’ encouraged Don Marcellino. ‘We can be frank among ourselves. The foreigners have ears only for the mitred colonel!’ Nodding at Mérode whose voice thrummed rowdily:

‘We are more humane than your English dean who suggested that the poor eat their children.’

‘But
was
it the cardinal,’ the lady wondered, ‘who enticed
Monseigneur’s
Crusaders into a trap?’

‘That was …’ The young milord’s French was deserting him. ‘A joke!’

‘They say the French Ambassador swore to the cardinal that General Goyon would be bringing 10,000 French troops as reinforcements! So the cardinal passed this on to the Crusaders.’

‘A
joke
?’
Mérode affected an appalled amazement.

Nicola warmed to him, then remembered that he shouldn’t.

‘Irony, you know.’ The Englishman stammered. ‘M-m-meant to be taken the other way round.’

‘You mean,’ Mérode sounded solicitous, ‘that they should
stop
eating their children?’

‘Then no reinforcements came.’

‘If it was a trap, who,’ asked Don Marcellino, ‘set it? Napoleon to discredit the Orleanists? Or Antonelli to discredit Mérode? Do we
know
that the French Ambassador made such a promise?’

‘Mérode thought so.’ The lady’s whisper hissed like silk. ‘I heard that he accused him to his face of being the faithful lackey of a lying master
and
that the Crusaders’ General seized Antonelli by the throat and called
him
a traitor!’

Don Marcellino looked right and left. ‘Also,’ he lowered his voice, ‘that His Holiness’s indignation triggered a,’ he mouthed silently: ‘fit. The battles fought in Rome were as fierce as the one at Castelfidardo!’

‘Where,’ intoned the lady, ‘the flower of Royalist France was cut down! Have you seen the names of the fallen? It’s like a list of those attending a levee of Louis XIV!’ She closed her eyes, perhaps to savour a vision of the Sun King receiving his shirt from some gentleman whose name knelled for the death of a descendant at Castelfidardo. ‘Old France,’ she opened them, ‘has paid its tribute … I think something’s happening.’ Breaking off, her voice grew brisk. ‘A young woman appears to have been taken ill!’

Don Marcellino craned his neck. ‘She’s with
your
friend,’ he told Nicola, who recognised the source of interest as Miss Ella, whose flow of muscle struck him, even at this distance, as scandalous. Rising from the table, she was pulling at her apparently suffocating bodice as though to open it. Remembering what it did and did not contain, he froze. Gentlemen in her vicinity were flapping napkins. She undid a button. Someone called for air.

‘Too tightly laced!’ judged Don Marcellino. ‘Ladies …’

Conjuring away scandal, Nicola prayed. ‘Let her not faint!’ It was mischievous of Flavio to have brought her to a place like this. Brought
him
– as if, wary of mind-readers, he corrected himself:
her
!
‘Oh God! I,’ he admitted to God, ‘should have made them break off the connection long ago. If You spare us a scandal, I’ll do it.’ And apparently his prayer was answered, for the second bodice button remained unopened and Miss Ella accepted a glass of water. Nicola, to discourage his neighbour’s twitter of curiosity, returned to their former topic. ‘The list of
French-men
who died at Castelfidardo,’ he told her brutally, ‘is short. Austria sent ten times more men than France, and even Ireland sent twice as many!’

The diners now left the table. Flavio walked Nicola to a quiet corner. He was so vivid with good fellowship that it was hard to start reproaching him. But Nicola did.

‘How
could
you have brought her here?’

Flavio put a finger to his lips. ‘It’s all right. I’ve introduced her as an heiress from Louisiana. See? She’s collecting admirers.’

And indeed there was a knot of men around her. Foremost in the knot was the wispy milord.

‘I saw your mother. I wrote to you about that. She was afraid you might marry Miss Ella. I suppose that was nonsense.’

Flavio drew him deeper into their alcove. ‘Not quite.’ It was, he said, an obsession with his companion who, indeed, had been threatening him with a scandal because he would not agree to it.

‘What kind of scandal?’

Flavio, looking hangdog, admitted that this varied. Just now, for instance, she might as easily have stripped off her clothes as told her true life story or a false horripilant one. ‘She’s capable of anything,’ he said with admiration. ‘
I
tell her she’s a demigoddess and being a duchess would be a come-down.’

‘Is that what you told her this time?’

‘No. I held my tongue.’ Ruefully: ‘To say anything could touch her off. I have plans which a scandal could spoil.’

Gambling, Nicola saw, was the pulse of life to his friend – friend?

‘Listen. I know I can’t marry Miss Ella if only because you might denounce us …’

‘
Would
denounce you. I’d have no choice.’

Flavio kept his voice soft. Marriage, he supposed Nicola was going to say, was sacred – but what about the marriage of his own legal parents? How many like that were there in this sacred city? Were
they
not travesties? ‘Moreover, Monsignore, you have no right to presume that my relations with Miss Ella are carnal. Supposing I say I want my friend
to have a claim to my name and fortune? That I want a blessing on a business arrangement! What would be so unusual about that? The Pope regularly blesses the city’s nags and waggons!’

But Flavio’s reproaches turned out to be half-hearted – a tribute to a half-shelved indignation. Because the whole thing was probably over anyway. Miss Ella was leaving with her circus on a tour of the Ottoman Empire. ‘It may last a year. She’ll be dazzling pashas and may settle for one. I’m not irreplaceable. Tonight’s little show was – oh, her way of keeping reality mobile and me on the qui vive.’

Nicola was greatly relieved. ‘So will she go?’