The Judas Cloth (62 page)

‘You,’ the cardinal told it, ‘chase what has no substance. You try to eat the light, don’t you? Don’t you?’ And indeed the cat was making efforts to bite the sparkle and trap it with its claws. ‘Your name,’ Amandi told it, ‘is Light-eater!
Mangia-luce
!
You’re not the only one in the realm who tries to swallow the light. Who thinks it can be taken inside themselves. And that,’ facing Nicola eye to eye for the first time, ‘is more dangerous than swallowing one’s rage!’ He pointed at the animal which was now sitting back on its haunches. ‘He’s shrewd, a little fat, and apt to chase figments. White-robed too. Of whom does he remind you?’

‘Eminence!’ reproached the Vicar-General.

The cardinal tittered. ‘You’re shocked! That means you understand me! Unlike poor
Mangialuce
!’
The cat had now jumped on his lap and was raising its head for caresses. ‘He lives,’ said the cardinal pleasantly, ‘in a world of reflections. It’s his form of worship.
Lumen
de
lumine.
Yet bring him the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove and what would he do? Take communion. Some of our rituals have so lost meaning that a cat could understand them better than we do! Please take note that I do not fall into the heresy of saying that the mysteries of our religion are mere metaphors.’ His voice had slipped into a singsong, like those of children repeating a lesson learned by rote. ‘All I do say is that repeated prohibitions to think will not defeat modern science nor put out its light. It can neither be eaten nor caught in the claws.’

‘Surely. Eminence …’

‘Surely no one’s trying? Don’t delude yourself, Monsignore! Do you know where the Roman Lighteater is planning to lead us next? He’s summoning a Council to dogmatise the
Syllabus
Errorum
and have himself declared infallible! Don’t ask what little bird told me! It wasn’t the dove of peace!’

The Vicar-General drew Nicola from the room while the cardinal was still laughing. Behind them he began to intone propositions from the
Syllabus.
‘And if anyone shall say,’ he droned, ‘that the Church is not a true, perfect and fully free society …’

‘I’m glad it was you they sent.’

‘… or that it is the prerogative of the Civil Power to define its rights …’

‘A stranger could be scandalised!’

‘Let him be anathema!’ roared the cardinal.

‘You must be tired.’ The Vicar-General tried to ignore the voice which had grown mischeviously loud as they moved off.

‘
Reprobamus,
proscribimus
et
damnamus
!’

The cardinal did not appear at lunch, which was a barometer of his spirits, since he usually plied a good knife and fork and would, in his right mind, have sacked the cook.

Nicola asked about the convent which peasants were trying to keep open. The Vicar-General sighed and rolled his eyes.

‘And the nun?’

‘She’ll have to be dealt with.’

Before dealing, however, with Sister Paola, it was necessary to deal with her protectors who had mounted a picket outside her convent and were refusing to let anyone in or out. They included professional agitators who had been paid to foment trouble during the years when it was Rome’s policy to make its lost provinces ungovernable. This had now lapsed. There was no pay for enforcing it and the disbanded men had nothing better to do than offer their talents to the locals. Thus what might have been a brief brawl had become a three-way deadlock, for the police were outmanned and Garibaldini, infuriated by this, were
threatening
to burn down the convent.

‘It’s just talk for now,’ said Dottor Pasolini who was still hale and hearty, despite or because of the riding he did in all weathers. He had no time for the hotheads, the most excitable of whom was a smith, nicknamed Vulcan because of his trade and his jealousy of his young wife. This was the woman whom Sister Paola was alleged to have aborted. ‘It’s nonsense,’ said the doctor. ‘She developed a false
pregnancy
which disappeared. That’s the long and short of it. Vulcan, however, a mulish fellow in more ways than one, can’t accept this. He wants children, you see, and gets bees in his bonnet. The most recent is about a young red-headed curate whom he thinks was sweet on his wife.’

‘And this, presumably, is why he blames Sister Paola?’

The doctor shrugged. Who could say? ‘There was talk before this of girls coming to her for help of that sort. True? Half true? She has been a magnet for attention ever since it was put about that she changed the course of the wind to save some balloonists. Attention can be dangerous. And a generation has grown up which has never known the arts of peace!’

The doctor himself planned to practise these by going to the capital … no, no, not Rome! Florence! He had friends in the government there. This incident, he would tell them, was a straw in the wind: a burning straw. Their new law on convents was too extreme.

Nicola’s next move was to pay a visit to the red-haired priest who, though on his guard at first, unbent when he saw that the Coadjutor was keeping an open mind. He admitted that he had perhaps been imprudent in his dealings with the blacksmith’s wife, who had come to him because of her barrenness and her fear that this might be a punishment for her husband’s free-thinking. Perhaps, he admitted, he had encouraged this fear. He was a morose, tormented man. How, he asked the Coadjutor abruptly, can we know it isn’t true?

‘Because God doesn’t take sides!’

The priest was shocked. Did Rome not represent God? Yes, said Nicola warily, but perhaps a less fierce God than the one served by the red-headed priest who, for his soul’s peace – here he found the same phrases in his mouth as had been said to him when the Treasury was showing him the door – might be wise to move to another parish. The man looked resentful, seeing this as a judgment against him.

In May came the doctor’s bulletin from Florence. It roused the cardinal from his apathy and revived his Coadjutor’s hopes, for, confounding all likelihood, Langrand-Dumonceau had pulled off a coup! He had persuaded the Italians to strike out the worst part of their own draconian law. A contract, signed by their new Minister for Finance, ignored the clause declaring Church property forfeit, and agreed that, if the count would undertake its liquidation and pay the Italian government six hundred million francs over the next four years, the Church could keep the fourteen hundred million likely to be realised by the sale of the rest.

‘Think,’ Langrand had murmured into the ministerial ear, ‘of the stimulus to the economy! You can develop their lands and they will need to invest their cash!’

Surely, argued the doctor’s letter, this concession made it possible for the Pope to do business?

His next words fairly leaped off the page: a goodwill clause was to be incorporated whereby, in the interests of showing how a free Church
could function in a free state, Sister Paola’s little hospital could stay open as ‘an example of the Church at its best’.

‘That,’ Amandi squinted through the gold wire spectacles which had a tendency to slide down his nose, ‘will stick in the papal gullet! I advise you to see that it is dropped before the contract goes to Rome.’

Nicola did not argue since, as he reminded the cardinal, he was no longer involved in the negotiations and would have no say.

‘The rest of it may get papal approval,’ judged the cardinal. ‘Happily, for His Holiness, nobody at a time like this is likely to tell him that such approval will be at odds with the opinions of his predecessor, Clement V, who pronounced it a heresy to defend the taking of interest! Mastai and all who negotiate on his behalf with your Belgian will be liable to penalties laid down by the papal law against heresy: Clementin i.5, De Usuris, title 5, as I recall. What percentage does our papal count take?’

‘Ten.’

‘Sixty million francs from the Italians! A hundred and forty million from us! Pope Clement must be spinning in his grave! It was simpler when the usurer was Monsieur de Rothschild! One should always do business with infidels, since one is not answerable for their souls.’ The cardinal had a fake mouse made of a bit of ermine trim which he now dangled for his cat. ‘Spinning!’ he repeated and spun his false mouse.

Friends in the Treasury kept Nicola informed. After all, if the count’s scheme triumphed, this, they reminded him, would be partly due to him. He was unsure whether to rejoice or quail. Yet what matter, he told himself, whether or not the financier was on the point of collapse? His ten per cent would save him so that he could save the Church. The miracle was a modern echo of St Peter’s walking on the waves.

Which penalties had Pope Clement had in mind? Burning? Nicola remembered Roman buildings blazing in the siege of ’49 and a recurrence looked likelier now than at any time since. The French had left. Their tricolour no longer flew over Castel Sant’Angelo and it was feared that the volunteers replacing them would be no match for Garibaldi, whose renewed rabble-rousing Nicola had himself glimpsed from a train window on his way here. The general had been wearing his old agitator’s red shirt and, although his harangue was inaudible, one knew the words to which it would boil down:
Roma
o
morte
!

So maybe we’ll all burn, Nicola thought, one way or another.

That June, Mastai invited the bishops of Christendom to join him in celebrating the eighteen-hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of Saints Peter and Paul in the reign of that notorious Rome-burner, Nero. Fireworks and illuminations defied fears of a repeat performance and the King of Italy – ‘of Piedmont Sardinia’ said Pius pointedly – was yet again ritually excommunicated together with his accomplices. Did this include all his soldiers and officials, along with the butchers, barbers and other tradesmen who kept them supplied? Two curial congregations were spinning out their debate on this question and waiting, said cynics, to see how the political cat would jump.

Pius told his assembled bishops that a power emanating from St Peter’s tomb must kindle and fan their ardour until they flamed like the lit tapers which they held in their hands. Had not the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles in the form of tongues of fire?

Nicola, looking around, saw tears in many episcopal eyes. All were foreigners’ eyes, to be sure. Flames were refracted in them so that the bishops’ faces seemed to be combustive.

‘I’ve just heard,’ Amandi whispered in his ear, ‘that he was planning to have his personal infallibility declared by acclamation here and now! It was to have been sprung on us, but Orléans and Mainz got wind of the plan and put a stop to it. The General Council will be his next chance.’

It had been confirmed that this was to be held in two years’ time.

‘If Garibaldi doesn’t get here first.’

‘
He
hopes his ghostly powers will stop Garibaldi! Indeed, Garibaldi is a boon to him: an excuse to increase his own authority. The Jesuits,’ Amandi lowered his voice even further, ‘are encouraging priests to take an oath to fight for the dogma “even unto bloodshed!”
Usque
effusionem
sanguinis.
It seems that two bishops already have. Manning of Westminster is one. Converts – he was a Protestant archdeacon – like that sort of thing. Having turned coat once, they feel a need to put themselves under restraint.’

‘I wonder whose blood Manning plans to shed? Ours or his?’

‘Do you notice who hasn’t come?’

‘Your fellow dauphin, d’Andrea!’

‘Don’t mention us in the same breath. They say he’s to be decardinalised! Mastai’s spleen bloats like a tick! All poor d’Andrea did was to leave Rome without formal permission and meet some leading Italians. Then, when stripped of his powers, he protested, as why shouldn’t he? What grounds are those for depriving him of his powers?’

Nicola whispered warningly, ‘He conspired with Italians who deprived Mastai of his! Tit for tat!’

Nicola left Rome before Amandi did. On his last day, the cardinal introduced him to Archbishop Darboy of Paris, a man whose
independent
spirit had cost him the red hat which usually went with his position.

‘I don’t need a hat!’ Darboy, a lean, fine-featured, chestnut-haired man in his fifties, spoke with robust humour. ‘I don’t suffer from colds. The Emperor was more upset than I because he’d asked that I should have it, thus ensuring that I would not. He is oddly blind to the pleasure Pius takes in biting the hand which protects him.’

On the topic of the Council, the Archbishop said he would welcome the prospect if he thought it would erase the stamp of an intolerant age which the last one – Trent – had impressed on Catholicism.
Unfortunately
, its more likely purpose would be to spread Rome’s power into every see and parish. He himself had clashed with Mastai over his intrusiveness, and the French clergy as a whole was smarting at the revocation of their right to worship according to their own rites. ‘He hates any show of independence.’

‘He was meddlesome even as a bishop,’ said Amandi. ‘Monsignor Ficanaso was his nickname then. Bishop Nosy!’

‘It is more dangerous in France,’ said Darboy. ‘We keep telling our opponents on the Left that if they will grant us the right to teach our children in our own way, we will respect their right to think in theirs. Yet how can they believe us when our leader issues a document like the
Syllabus
of
Errors
?’
Today, he lamented, a Catholic bishop’s dilemma was that he must seem like a yea-sayer to this haughty pope or the enemy of a besieged Church. ‘Yea-sayer, not to say idolator!’ Yesterday, he had heard hymns in which the word
Deus
had been replaced by Pius and, on voicing shock, learned that here in Rome the practice was widespread.

Cheering up, as he took his leave, he remarked that the Council would, after all, provide a forum and, who knew, might favour those who hoped to open the Church to new freedoms. ‘After all, man proposes and God disposes and,’ lowering his voice in a parody of fear, ‘Pio/Dio is still only a man!’