The Judas Cloth (60 page)

Prospero resisted an impulse to tear the thing up. Its slyness infuriated him. Also its apparent sincerity. Undoubtedly, it would be read and would do harm! The story was like an opera libretto. Abstracted in his troubled thoughts, the ex-abate now stumbled on the shooting blind where the archbisop and the girl had spent the night. Instinctively, he hid behind a rock – for, said he, a poor preacher does not willingly antagonise an archbishop – and saw first one, then the other, emerge. Later, the women in the wash-house told him that the girl had returned safe and sound. She had been overtaken by darkness and, fearing to lose her footing and fall into a ravine, preferred to wait for daylight before returning. She had, said her friend the nun, spent the night in a shooting blind. A sensible girl, the abate observed. Yes, said the nun, she’s resourceful enough.

Months later, finding himself near the nuns’ convent, he called on the young pretty one and was received in the parlour.

Here Prospero’s pencil wrote in a furious comment: ‘Many? Author tries to portray old Papal States as sink of immorality, whereas they were, notoriously, as chaste and decent as old patriarchal Rome!’

‘
Ha
!’
wrote Prospero’s sceptical pencil.

Abashed, the pencil slipped from his hand.

This time Prospero did not resist his impulse, but burned the pamphlet in his charcoal hand-warmer, scorching his sleeve in the process. It was filth. One did not fulminate anathemas at filth. Pouring water from a ewer, he washed his hands which were black with the pamphlet’s ink and a residue of ash.

Cesco’s birthday dinner was not a success. The count had taken too much laudanum. There were thirteen diners and news of Cesco’s engagement unleashed some unseemly ribaldry. Prospero, distrusting his emotions, sat at the other end of the table from Nicola, the doctor and the
parocco,
and so was unable to monitor their conversation, although the words he did catch revealed its topic to be dogs.

The count’s hand seemed to lose co-ordination and he kept feeding himself with an imaginary spoon. ‘
Qui
n’avait
ja-,
ja-,
ja
…
’ he sang under his breath.

In a freak lull, the doctor’s whisper flew up the table confiding that, while doing his rounds, he often persuaded people to ignore Rome’s orders and come to terms with the new regime. ‘I tell them to vote!’
Had
he said this? Nicola and the
parocco
looked insufficiently shocked and Prospero was prevented from hearing more by Martelli’s chatter.

‘Charity …’ argued Martelli.

Prospero blotted him out. He would not bandy words with a man who sat in a parliament dedicated to the seizure of Rome.

‘…
jamais
navigué
!’

‘What breed?’ the doctor asked the priest.

‘Oh, it had been dead for weeks and was unrecognisable. Big though. It could have been a gundog.’

Prospero strained his ears and, as a moment of silence greeted the dishing up of a mound of rice garnished with truffles, heard Nicola promise the priest to preach in his church next Sunday. About
conciliation
. Peace. The virtue of meekness! The two might have been reciting the Sermon on the Mount.

‘I’ll come,’ said the doctor. ‘I haven’t darkened a church door for years, but I’ll come for that!’

Prospero bit his tongue painfully. Nicola was unreliable, unsafe on the question of the Temporal Power, and likely to confuse the simple.

Martelli wanted to hear about Prospero’s quarrel with Cardinal Amandi. Had it been about the
Syllabus
of
Errors
?
He began to quote from this with angry amusement. Was this why His Eminence wasn’t here?

‘We should love our enemies,’ came from down the table.

‘But not the Pope’s!’ Prospero shouted.

Martelli pointed out that he, though the
parocco
had denounced him, was sitting down to dinner with him because on joyful occasions like this old quarrels should be forgotten. Then he stood up to toast the engaged couple and, swaying on his feet, told a story which stunned his niece and made her mother blush. It was about a quick-witted young mother walking through a market with her small son. ‘Let me kiss that child,’ cries an impudent admirer, ‘in memory of the place out of which it came.’ ‘Why,’ says the mother, ‘don’t you kiss my husband’s cock? It was there more recently!’ Martelli was drunk. Prospero pulled his coat-tails and got him to sit down. Then, to help the company recover, he teased the
parocco
about his offer to let Nicola preach in his church. He himself, said he, had hoped to preach a sermon there. Nicola promptly withdrew and the
parocco
said he would be honoured to have a preacher of Monsignor Stanga’s distinction.

Martelli, however, had begun to brood. Talking of denunciations, he said suddenly, Monsignor Santi had been denounced in the Democrats’ paper,
Roma
O
Morte
,
by someone who signed his letter ‘Indignant from Subiaco’. ‘Am I right, Monsignor Santi,’ he called, ‘in thinking that you never did discover who “indignant” was? Well, I can tell you, and I’ve seen the proof! It was Monsignor Stanga. He had a go-between, of course, a man with one foot in the Democrat camp!’

‘What proof?’ asked Prospero coolly, guessing that there was none.

‘Poor Captain Melzi,’ said the count, ‘was a man with one foot.’

The doctor looked shaken and so did Nicola.

‘
Ohé
,
ohé
,’
sang the count sadly.

‘Is it true or isn’t it?’ challenged Martelli.

It was. Alerted by Mérode to Amandi’s fraternising with the enemy, Prospero had taken the law into his own hands and, to minimise scandal, named Nicola rather than the cardinal. The two had needed a warning. Appeasers were the enemy’s Trojan horse, as he intended saying in the sermon he would preach next Sunday. Our cause was greater than the requirements of our own moral comfort. He was not ashamed. No. But
neither did he relish the damage which could be done by Martelli’s revelation. Many could be troubled in their faith. Candour was a luxury he must forgo. So: ‘No,’ he said to Martelli’s question. ‘It is not.’ As he had guessed, the deputy was unable to prove his allegation and, just then, a diversion providentially dispersed embarrassment, as the count, about whom everyone had forgotten, fell face first into his plate of
riso
ai
tartufi
bianchi.

Flavio slid a marrow-spoon into a bone and greedily swivelled it. Like the glint on old coins, his grin was patinous. ‘This time it will be different. Count Langrand-Dumonceau …’

‘
Count
!’
To Nicola, it was now almost a bad word.

‘
Noblesse
oblige
!
He and I plan to make good the losses which, by the way, were far from being our fault. Factors beyond our …’

‘You’ve told me! The American war! Tight money!’

‘Tight Catholics! But don’t let’s argue.’ A hand landed on Nicola’s sleeve. He was being softened up.

It was 1866 and the Loan, an acknowledged fiasco, had failed to generate half the hoped-for amount. Bonds, moreover, were trading at 75 per cent which meant that the good Catholics who had been badgered into buying them were out of pocket. Meanwhile, Langrand-Dumonceau was the recipient of a papal title. Nicola, who had helped get it, found it galling to have traded sacred things for money – the sin of simony – only to be bilked. What, argued Flavio, was sacred about a papal title? Whoremasters had had it! Murderers! Look, he blandished, we mustn’t quarrel. The count had a new plan. Grander in scope than the Loan – but we’ll talk after dinner. ‘Have a savoury. Meanwhile, did you hear about the young sprigs of good family who were reported to the Pope for misbehaving in this very restaurant? They’d toasted the King of Italy. Well, Pius’s response was, “It’s for their papas to deal with, not for
il
papa
!”
The waiter heard it from Monsignor Talbot, the
cameriere
segreto.
What a cosy town this is! And what a wise pope!’

‘I suppose you’re hoping I’ll sell whatever Langrand’s new idea is to the Treasury?’

Flavio leaned forward. ‘Can you imagine the Treasury resisting fourteen hundred million francs?’ He gleamed. ‘That should balance H.H.’s mind and budget.’ He raised his glass. ‘Peace? It should,’ he added comfortably, ‘stop him firing off anathemas at the king who takes
them to heart, poor man. I’m told he stays scrupulously away from the communion table.’ The duke tittered.

Nicola thought, He’s Hermes: a reincarnation of the old god of gossip – and theft. But Flavio, as though denying this, reminded him that he and Langrand had lost money on the Loan which colleagues had now dubbed ‘the hole’. Promotion costs, agents’ fees and advances had taken a toll. Delicately, he did not say ‘bribes’.

‘We too have losses to recoup, which is why you may rely on our new proposal.’ This, however, seemed hard to describe, for he circled it, lingering on the needs of the papal and Italian treasuries. Desperate remedies were needed.

‘Desperate? Do you mean criminal?’

‘Don’t think of it like that!’

‘Of what?’ asked Nicola. ‘You haven’t said.’

‘The sale of the Church’s real estate in Italy.’ This, like it or not, said Flavio, was about to be enforced by the Italian parliament, so we must try to minimise the loss.
And
we must rid our minds of old comparisons. This was no time for references to the Roman soldiers dicing for Christ’s robe. ‘Don’t look like that, Monsignore. There’s no time! The Italian government may fall, so if we don’t deal while we can with Catholic ministers, we may have to deal with anti-Catholic ones.’

Through Nicola’s mind floated the words ‘… let this chalice pass’. How had he come to be the man in the breach? His superiors would leave the first, tricky assessment to him whom, later, they could, of course, deny. Flavio watched.

‘This is no time for hand-wringing. We must persuade His Holiness to let us save what may be saved. Good can come out of it. You’ll have liquid money! Let’s talk like businessmen.’

‘Don’t you mean thieves?’

The duke recommended realism. As the property was on Italian soil, we could not prevent its being seized. And this time it would not be a few rundown convents. It could be the lot. Yet, a deal could be struck. The Church could exact compensation in return for letting the Italians claim that their action was legal.

‘You want me excommunicated!’

Flavio begged his friend to consider this: the next pope was likely to be a conciliator, but
if
the
property was gone when he came to power, no amount of conciliating could save it!
Now
was the time for that. Think of the future, he urged. It’s only good sense.

Was it? How trust one’s own good sense if that of our leading
theologian had led him astray? Padre Passaglia had now been
excommunicated
. Debates were going on too as to whether Italy’s entire army was under ban of excommunication. A definite anathema hung over its ministers.

‘Describe your scheme.’

The duke did. Put brutally, the Italians wanted the Church’s assets sold at once. This was crucial, for the sale ended their inalienability:
la manomorta
. Langrand’s plan, saving what might be saved, was for two thirds of the proceeds to go to the Church and a third to the state. ‘Count Langrand’s enterprises will get a percentage – the share of a mouse. Remember the mouse which released a lion from a trap? We are your mouse. We’ll buy your property outright, then resell it slowly so as not to depress the market. In the interests of winning the Italians’ consent, we’ll do the same for them. Over ten years you should realise fourteen hundred million. They will get six hundred million.’

‘Two thirds of our own property strikes you as a lion’s share?’

‘We are talking of a trapped lion.’

That night Nicola lay awake and sweated as though already fanned by the winds of hell. It was a strangely warm spring and each time he drifted into sleep
la manomorta
turned up in nightmare disguise. Mingling with it was the image of himself as a stick in an old man’s hand. Dead hand? Live? In one dream the stick twisted from the clenched hand and began to beat it – then the dreaming Nicola tried to fill the hand with coins. I am not, he thought sadly, a spiritual man. I haven’t the passive faith of those who think God will somehow save us at the last. Someone must act. And if the Pope … He did not pursue the discomforting thought. Yet the very stones of the city were resonant with whispers about popes who, being mad or wrongheaded, had had to be quietly disobeyed.

Over the next weeks, a freak heat encroached, siestas lengthened, and Romans in darkened rooms smoked to keep off the mosquitoes whose persistency paralleled that of Flavio, who ambushed prelates in the hot dusk of their offices, catching them in unbuttoned disarray, under peeling stucco in cafés and saloons, or on their slow, contemplative walks. Sometimes their clerical collars lay abandoned on chairs, revealing insides as brown as those of unscrubbed teapots.

‘Lambs do not parley with the wolf,’ was their stock reply to his pleas. Italy was the wolf. To acknowledge her existence was to collaborate in
her crime. Refusal to do so allowed prelates to think themselves resolute. So, no, they told the exasperated Flavio.
Non
possumus
!
Tirelessly, however, he kept working on key men from the Apostolic Chamber and lesser ones from anywhere at all who might, somehow, some day, turn out to be useful.

Regularly, in the evenings, he and Nicola met for a little restorative malice. Perhaps that bitter edge to Roman wit had always been
compensatory
? If so, it had now reached the highest echelons, being latent in the recent promotion of St Catherine to the ranks of the city’s patron saints. Notoriously, she, in her day, had urged the popes to leave Avignon and break their connection with France. The choice was a sly insult to the French garrison, whose withdrawal would soon end another such
connection
. Good riddance, signalled the new patroness.
Bon
débarras
!

As if they’d notice!

Flavio compared the curialists to small boys making rude signs under the lids of their desks.

Nicola suggested that Flavio himself bore Rome a grudge over the matter of Miss Ella. If so, could Rome trust him?

The duke’s face reddened like blown coal, but he said, ‘I’ve only myself to blame. We made jokes,’ he stared into memory, ‘which turned out not to be jokes, about her becoming a woman. How could I have known? Some quack she met on her Ottoman tour persuaded her that it could be done. Arabian Nights fancies! Jiggery-pokery! She was gullible like all gamblers and I’d upset her by proposing that we adopt a child. Anyway, she applied to Sister Paola, who was stunned. Yes, Monsignore. Nobody was quite frank with you. The nun saw her stripped and knew her for a ’twixter. But she kept her mouth shut, even with the abbess. She’s a wise woman and saw that Miss Ella was not one to recognise the limits of possibility. I can imagine appalling scenes before you and I turned up, especially as it’s not clear whether Ella made application to the good sister in her capacity as thaumaturge or amateur surgeon – she does things like lancing boils. Delicacy may be eliminated from
reconstructions
of the occasion. Hysterics undoubtedly included. Suicide threats led to their calling in the chaplain. The rest you know.’

Now that the story had been broached, it came up again. Flavio did not seem to harbour jealousy, but, instead, worried in a brotherly way about Miss Ella. ‘How are they living?’ he wondered. ‘I sent them money, but it came back.’

Nicola, remembering Miss Ella’s accusation, asked: ‘
Did
you bribe people here?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘No,’ he decided, nervously.

One evening he found himself telling of his single afternoon of love with Maria, all those years ago, and of how he had fancied she might have had and left a child on the Foundlings’ wheel. His confession was intended to show himself as human and humane, and, when he saw that this was why he was making it, he grew ashamed.

It fascinated his friend, who marvelled at Nicola’s failure to establish the truth. A child, if there was one, would now be seventeen!

Once again they were enjoying a walk through a night dense with the energy of crickets. A plash of fountains showed that the city still had juice. That scrap of emotional detritus, the false image of the naked Queen of Naples, surfaced in Nicola’s mind and shone like moonlight on mother of pearl. As it happened, the moon
was
shining and so was a bonfire on the steps of San Carlo al Corso.

‘Ah, the book-burning!’ cried the duke, and for moments they watched the oddly festive scene. Children were jumping in the firelight. Priests presided, and stacks of condemned or confiscated books were proving hard to burn. A policeman fluttered pages with a stick and a flame flared. In the gleam, Nicola discerned a known face: Father Grassi’s. He had not seen him since the Jesuit had confided his readiness to back a conciliator for pope. Amandi? D’Andrea? Both men’s stock had now slipped and Nicola doubted if Grassi would wish to be reminded. Keeping to the shadows, he murmured that he was going home.

‘I’ll walk along with you.’ The duke was still thinking of the child. ‘I’ll hire someone to see if it exists,’ he decided. ‘If it does I’ll adopt it. I can feel Fate taking a hand. It will be a seal on our friendship.’

Nicola, unable to admit, or indeed understand, his own revulsion, resolved to give Flavio no more information and, suddenly eager to shed his company, said he must get home. The duke, however, trotted beside him so that at moments Nicola was almost running from him. Somehow, plunging forward without thinking, they had climbed up to the Capitol and were looking down on the Forum. Here too a flicker of bonfires signalled book-burning. Tall, free-standing pillars rose against the reddish glow. Abruptly, he faced his companion.

‘I don’t want you to. I’ll …’

‘You’ll stop me?’ Flavio’s grin caught the gleam of the inquisitors’ fire. ‘How? By denouncing me for sodomy? What proof could you
supply?’ It had been a mistake to cross him. ‘Unless,’ he jeered angrily, ‘you were to say that you and I had carnal relations which, in both our minds, I suspect we did.’

‘Stop it, Flavio.’ Nicola should have said more or less, but couldn’t, because the smouldering in his friend’s eye distressed him. Flavio was more worrying than Liberals who, after all, were predictable, whereas he was anarchic, magnetic and unsafe, so Nicola contented himself with offering his hand.

The duke batted it away. ‘You wouldn’t trust me with a child! You’re as small-minded as the rest of your crew!’ And down he strode, into the Campo Vaccino, past a dying bonfire turned to curling ashes which children had stirred so that they flew, glided, then alighted like malevolent birds. Silhouetted against the sky, the horns of an ox recalled Goya’s painting of the black mass.

Flavio, thought Nicola, was mischief incarnate. And so, for all he knew, was Count Langrand-Dumonceau. Yet, over the next weeks, he patched up the quarrel and continued to work on their behalf since, in the cold light of day, theirs seemed to be the only lifeline anyone was throwing to the Church.

Indeed things had rarely looked worse, for Italy, by allying herself with Prussia in a quick summer war against Austria, now got hold of Venetia. After this, her most pressing concern could only be to annex the last piece of the state she had been assembling, as children assemble a jig-sawed image: Rome. On the day news came of Venetia’s fall into Italian clutches, employees at the Treasury watched Cardinal Antonelli strike his forehead with both palms and cry aloud in shock. Meanwhile, as the French garrison prepared to leave them in the lurch, Roman householders grew sick with apprehension, and the only good outcome was that despair was making the Treasury more receptive to Count Langrand’s agents. They, however, had grown impatient and, to Nicola’s alarm, turned out to have made fraudulent claims in the Belgian press.

Monsignor
Santi
to
Duke
Cesarini: