The Judas Cloth (55 page)

Nicola put a finger to his lips. For several minutes, they stayed quiet; then they heard the outer door close. Then the drawing-room door opened. It was Viterbo. His sister, he warned, had better wait a while before leaving. The police were still outside, though Miss Foljambe had sent a complaint to her consul. He broke off. Did they not
know
what had happened? Well, the police had appeared, demanded to be let in and gone straight to a bedroom where they found Miss Foljambe’s English maid making love to a man in a cassock whom nobody knew. It was all too pat to be genuine. The girl must have been bribed to let herself be caught. The police story was that neighbours had denounced her for enticing seminarians here. They wanted to discredit Miss Foljambe and perhaps expel her from Rome. Her political friends were in bad odour. However, the thing had backfired.

‘The officers waited outside while subordinates made the arrest. When they came in, they were shocked to find so many people here – including, of course, the cardinal.’

‘His carriage is in the courtyard.’

‘Ah, but they came in the back way and only saw him when they had made their arrest. They were quite put out of countenance and scuttled off without taking people’s names.’

Nicola and Viterbo and his sister drank tea with Miss Foljambe while she awaited word from her consul, to whom she had sent an indignant account of the outrage. She was eager to protest with maximum publicity in the English and Italian press and was with difficulty dissuaded. Mud
sticks, Nicola and Viterbo reminded her. A bargain with the police would be her wisest course. No denunciations on either side.
Pax
!

Meanwhile, Nicola remembered, he still didn’t know how he could be of service to the Signora Mortara.

She said she wanted help from someone who could safely approach Edgardo. A person who would be neither supervised nor spied on but could talk to the boy and learn what was in his heart.

‘Does he miss us still? Or would he rather we didn’t come at all? Does he blame us for not having been able to defend him? He has been five years in Rome!’ On her last visit, she thought she had detected a shrinking when she touched him. ‘Maybe,’ she tightened her lips, ‘we should leave him alone?’

‘But,’ her brother was indignant, ‘the Pope is about to lose his last bit of territory. They’re thrashing around. Even what happened here this evening confirms it! All you need do is wait.’

‘No,’ said the Signora in her painfully controlled voice. ‘He’s twelve now. If they’ve won his heart, we could only break it. They’ve had him for half his rational life. It would be cruel to keep tugging at his loyalties. Remember the baby whom two mothers claimed and brought to King Solomon for a judgment? The king said it was to be cut in half and the false mother agreed, but the true one said she’d rather give it up!’ She began to cry.

Nicola promised to see the boy, then report back to her.

Waiting for him at home was a letter from Flavio, asking for a title for Langrand-Dumonceau. ‘I mentioned this to His Holiness last time I was in Rome,’ wrote Flavio, ‘and
he
said that nobility was a gift from God. Why then, I asked, should it not be one from God’s Vicar? He laughed and seemed well disposed. He likes the nobility and says Jesus Christ did too. “He,” he told me, “chose to be born noble, of the House of David! The gospel gives his genealogical tree.” The nobility, he says, are the best support any throne can have. Thrones supported by the plebs are never stable! Remind him of all this when asking for a title for L-D. Stress that we need it to help us collect pennies for heaven from the faithful. I’m talking about your loan!

‘My
task is to persuade L-D to launch it which is the last thing on his mind. Floating one for the Vatican just now won’t be easy. He’ll need inducements. I suspect the Rothschilds were happy to be dropped! The
official reason – that they were demanding the return of the Mortara boy – doesn’t ring true.’

Edgardo Mortara had been moved to the College of St Peter in Chains where Nicola went to see him.

On his arrival, a priest took him round the church and, in the course of an exploratory chat, intimated that the boy should not be upset. ‘Better not mention the parents. Their visits distress him.’

‘You mean he’s distressed when they leave?’

‘Not at all, it upsets him to meet them. We have to insist.’

They paused before Michelangelo’s Moses – a frowning, muscular old man with horns. The marble, especially in the parts close enough to be touched, was faintly discoloured and as smooth as a sucked sweet. It was to have been part of a funerary monument planned for himself by Pope Julius II.

‘Julius II!’ The young, fresh-faced priest shrugged at the ironies. All the great warrior-pope’s conquests – Bologna, Urbino, Piacenza, Reggio, Parma – had now been ravished from the papacy.

‘Why the horns?’ Nicola wondered what the once-Jewish child made of the old prophet’s being presented with demonic attributes.

‘A mistranslation of Exodus. It seems that what was meant were rays of light.’

Nicola headed for the door and the sunlight. ‘Who shall I say I am?’

‘He wants to take orders. You could have come to ensure that no pressure is brought on him, a routine check of his vocation.’

Above them stretched the Esquiline Hill, planted with fruit trees and vines. Military and bare in their wintery alignment, they recalled the chains of St Peter to which the church was dedicated.

The child, a self-possessed twelve-year-old, was, Nicola reminded himself, having the best education the state could supply and had received several visits from the Pope who made him a personal allowance. He was used to being shown off, had been paraded through the Ghetto, and was reputed to answer questions like a little Solomon. Sitting next to him on a garden bench, Nicola asked why he wanted to be a priest. Had someone suggested it? He was young to decide.

The boy considered. The most striking thing about him was that, as with his mother, his hands and every muscle were perfectly still. His
mother’s and uncle’s eyes looked oddly old in his chubby face. ‘The Holy Father,’ he said, ‘took the tonsure at my age.’

‘Did he tell you that?’

‘No. I found out.’

Nicola decided to dampen this exaltation. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘boys take it so as to qualify for benefices to which their families have a claim. I believe that that was the case with him.’

‘But what I feel is that I must lay claim to a religious heritage which is not mine at all, but was given me as a grace. I can’t take it for granted as others might.’ Having scored this point, he produced a surprisingly boyish grin.

Coached? Genuine? How could one
know
?

‘And family life? You’ll have to renounce it.’

‘I have renounced it.’

‘Why?’

‘We live briefly in this life and in eternity for ever. How choose the first?’

‘But why should loving your parents be a choice against eternity?’

‘Because they want me to apostasise. I am a Catholic now.’

‘Don’t you care for them?’

‘Oh, I pray all the time for their conversion. But if they don’t convert, they will not be sinning against the light which never reached them. It reached me. How could I live with them as a Catholic?’

‘Are you not repeating words which you’ve learned off?’

The boy looked puzzled and Nicola asked, ‘Can you remember ordinariness? Playing with your brothers? Sleeping together at night, while the lonely and unattached wander outside in the dark? There must be things you miss? Secrets? Jokes?’ He himself had often imagined families like this.

The boy’s head was turned away. ‘Why are you saying all this, Monsignore?’ he asked.

Nicola remembered his role as a vocation-tester. ‘I have to make sure,’ he claimed, ‘that you don’t make an intemperate decision. Maybe we should send you back to your family for a while. You may have forgotten about everyday things. Lives are made up of them, especially,’ it struck him forcibly, ‘as you grow older. An impulsive choice can be as disappointing as reaching for the sunlit bits of
a stained-glass window.’

The boy said nothing. Nicola drew breath. ‘Can you remember,’ he
asked – amd immediately felt foolish – ‘the taste of artichokes
alla
giudea
?
Jewish cooking?’

‘What do you want of me, Monsignore?’

‘To be less sure. Humbler perhaps? Doubtful?’ He was, he supposed, describing himself.

‘To lose my faith?’

‘To make surer that you have it.’

The boy raised his chin. ‘It’s not something you can ever be sure of,’ he said slowly. ‘You have to keep earning it.’ He smiled. ‘That’s what I want to do.’ The smile was spreading, luminous, convinced.

Nicola was stricken. ‘Ah,’ he said enviously and with wonder, ‘you do have it!’ Then, on impulse: ‘Pray for me, Edgardo.’

There was both a radiance and a reliable ordinariness to the boy, standing in unruffled certitude among beds of pruned boxwood and dormant, winter plants. Not, the Monsignore reminded himself, that anything at all was reliable! In the long run, ordinariness, like radiance, withered into dust.

As though pondering this very thought, Edgardo-Pio said, ‘I have to have faith, Monsignore. You see, I cost everyone such a lot. The Holy Father says that when he comes. “Oh,” he says, “if you only knew how much you have cost me!” This is because my family turned the French Emperor against him because of me. But my soul is in his keeping and, though the great of the earth try to snatch it, he cannot let them. I told him that if I cost so much, then maybe he
should,
but he said “No,
non
possumus
!”
The choice, you see, isn’t his. It is not permitted to bargain over even one soul. Both of us have to have faith.’ The boy’s finely modelled, fruit-like lips split apart, and he gave the Monsignore his mesmerised and mesmeric smile.

‘Well?’ The priest who had been waiting in the
Collegio
vestibule was ready for a pious chat. ‘What did you think?’

‘I’m impressed,’ Nicola felt it fair to say and did not add that he was horrified as well. The Pope’s spiritual arithmetic appalled him and he kept thinking of the Signora Mortara’s story about King Solomon and the disputed baby. ‘Is it true that he has taken Pio as his middle name?’

‘Edgardo Pio. Yes. He plans to take Pius Mary as his name in religion when he enters the novitiate.’ The priest looked disappointed when Nicola said he had to leave at once. ‘I’ll walk with you as far as
the Campo Vaccino,’ he offered and, swinging along in step with his companion, noted that this case was a perfect example of the naturalist prejudices now dominating popular thought. Even Catholics seemed to care less for Christ in whom we were all members by baptism than for the claims of the natural family. ‘The Holy Father had to make a stand,’ opined the priest, half tripping in his efforts to keep up with Nicola’s stride. ‘Naturalism is as dangerous a heresy as
individualism
.’

At the Campo Vaccino, Nicola managed to hail a hackney carriage and left the gregarious priest looking forlorn. He had an appointment with Viterbo in a quiet alley where the printer was waiting in a second curtained carriage. Nicola had his draw up alongside so that Viterbo could step unseen from one to the other.

‘Don’t bother telling me,’ was his greeting. ‘I’ve guessed your news. He’s happy with his privileges. I’ll tell my sister.’

‘I thought
you
were arguing against resignation.’

‘Yes, but not because I have illusions about Edgardo–Pio. He follows power.
My
hopes were in the Baron de Rothschild. Is there no chance that you could advise the Treasury to deal with him?’

Nicola said that he was less influential than Viterbo seemed to think, but he saw that the printer disbelieved him.

‘Translate it! Translate it!’ The Belgian was laughing at his own excitement. Grey-eyed, with a cocked nose, a solid body and curly mutton-chop whiskers, André Langrand-Dumonceau had the likeable, plebeian good looks which befitted a self-made man. He really was
self-made
, he told Flavio and Nicola, for his grandfather had been a foundling, a
filius
exposititius,
as was noted on his baptismal certificate, the family’s first document in Latin which this one went a long way to avenge. ‘Translate it,’ he repeated.

Nicola obliged. ‘“To our dear son …”’

‘No, the bit about our companies.’

‘“We learn that you and other Catholics of the Kingdom of Belgium have founded loan banks so as to foster agriculture, industry and trade … and to save Catholic families from the rapacious hands of usurers by …” Do you want to hear it all?’

‘The last bit.’

Nicola read him the papal exhortation to despise the lure of riches and persist in his obedience and devotion to the Pope’s Person and the Holy See, in anticipation whereof, Pius, lovingly and wholeheartedly, conferred on Langrand and his associates his Apostolic Benediction.
Datum
Romae
apud
S.
Petrum
die
21
aprilis Anno
1864.
Pius
P.P.
IX.

The document was Nicola’s triumph. Prodded by Flavio, he had worked to obtain it in the teeth of the do-nothing policies of Monsignor Ferrari and the cardinal. It was, Flavio had urged, essential if Langrand was to manage the papal loan – a thankless task since the faithful, who were already contributing to St Peter’s Pence, would jib at an investment promising neither the spiritual return of outright charity nor likelihood of profit.

‘The Vatican,’ he said brutally, ‘does not look like a safe bet. If Langrand’s agents are to sell the bonds, they will need suppport from bishops and priests to persuade the pious to buy.’