The Judas Cloth (68 page)

The press, said Grassi, was the evil spirit of our time. We tried to fight it – but how triumph over the writer in the German paper who combined a theologian’s erudition with the impudence of the gutter? It seemed that, like Faust, some German theologian must have sold his soul! His Holiness was heartsick. It could provoke another schism in that difficult country. ‘We must,’ Grassi urged, ‘find the perjurer inside the Council!’ Bishop? Theologian? Stenographer? ‘You, Monsignore,’ he insinuated, ‘are well placed to find out!’

Did he think it was Amandi? Surely not!

As though guessing this thought, Grassi said that the cardinal, a noble soul, was naturally above suspicion. ‘Perhaps you hold against me the fact that I once told you I would support His Eminence’s candidature in the event of His Holiness’s demise, then withdrew my support. But my dear Monsignore …’ The priest paced and argued and the gist of what he said was that we served Eternity but lived in Time. A future pope could not receive present allegiance – think of the consequences! ‘Not least,’ he lowered his voice, ‘in the mind of a suspicious pontiff who, from a laudable concern for stability, is at pains to prevent any appeal from this Council to a future one!’ Pius knew – the Italians trumpeted it daily in their press – that half Europe hoped to reverse his policies once he was gone. He was counting on the doctrine of Infallibility to protect his legislation from change.

They had reached the end of the green tunnel. Grassi looked right and left, then, taking Nicola’s elbow, walked him back through it. As far as the future went, he whispered, His Eminence, now that d’Andrea, poor turbulent spirit, had died, must be the first choice. Even his age spoke for him. Nobody wanted another long reign. Flexibility now was an asset and men lost that in office. A pope of one persuasion was best
followed by one of the other. It kept our barque on an even keel. Meanwhile – Father Grassi became next to inaudible – we must bear our cross if the present pontiff was a little
too
concerned for the future. The Bull he had just published was provocative. It forbade the Council to interfere in the election of the next pope if he were to die during its tenure. In that event, it was to be suspended and the election left to the College of Cardinals,
unice
et
exclusive.
The Fathers disliked that. But, well, Rome had never liked foreign fingers in its pies. However, all this was a digression. The question now was, who was the perjurer? Suspicion fell naturally on Germans. Cardinal Hohenlohe and his theologian, Professor Johann Friedrich, were prime suspects but
something
, a sixth sense – perhaps a whisper from the Holy Spirit – told Father Grassi to look elsewhere. Was Monsignor Santi disposed to help at all?

They had again come out of their tunnel. Archbishop Manning and Mr Russell, whose trajectory now came close to theirs, bowed and were bowed to. Then each pair took off on their diverging paths.

‘Acton!’ Grassi hissed. ‘Lord Acton! The other Englishman! You must have met him? He runs the Opposition and I think helps write the letters. He’s ruthless! He stirs up governments. He is trying to poison Mr Gladstone’s mind against the new doctrine!’

‘New, Father Grassi? You concede that it is new?’

‘New dogma! Old doctrine! Acton is a former pupil of Ignaz von Döllinger who is surely the “Janus” whose book is on the Index. The letters are in the same style. Or so German friends tell me.’

‘So then you know?’

‘No, no. Acton is a layman. The questions are, first, who tells him what is said inside the Council, and second, how are the letters sent from Rome? They do not go through the Post Office. Even if you incline towards the Minority, you cannot condone …’

‘But I know nothing.’

‘But may come to know!’ Benevolence sparkled in Grassi’s smile. ‘There are rewards for loyalty. Fifteen red hats are to be bestowed. Who knows on which heads they may land!’

Father Gilmore’s gaze was blocked by clouds as dank and shaggy as the udders of Romulus and Remus’ foster-mother. There was no other view. He had been assigned a cell whose window-screen blotted out the middle ground. This, as it happened, had soft associations, for he had spent his boyhood under the protection of just such a censoring device. Being back was a privilege. Accommodation in Rome was as scarce as hen’s teeth.

‘Accept it,’ was the advice of Cardinal Cullen, who had unflatteringly added, ‘the last shall be first!’

Well, Gus Gilmore knew he was one of the last and least. Shaking ink from his pen, he wrote, ‘Back in old haunts.’ A drop jumped off the nib. Mopping it, he recalled Cullen’s voice at the dinner table lambasting doubters. ‘How but by obedience,’ the cardinal had demanded to know, ‘is the moral order to be protected – or indeed this city?’

Someone mentioned the French garrison.

‘Pff!’

Cullen – sometimes known as ‘the Grey-Green Eminence’ – would give no colour to the jibe that Irish churchmen were ‘politicos in priest’s clothing’. Some blamed him, arguing that the Pope’s recent
condemnation
of the Fenians could have been averted. But Gilmore, a mere dogsbody, had no such thoughts. He had installed a censoring device in his head which he hoped would be as effective as the one at his window. He was here to help our bishops with their Latin, and their lordships were tetchy. Big fish in their diocesan ponds, they didn’t want to feel like minnows and disliked hearing
him
speak of his youth here in Rome. Perhaps they took it for boasting? Reminiscences of those years were now known as
quarantottate
– forty-eighteries – and this, he was mortified to see, caused them marked amusement.

‘Hear that, Father Gilmore?’

Did they think him vain of his
Romanit
à
? Was he? Flicking back through his diary, he read: ‘Old city lovelier than ever. Mons. de Mérode’s improvements said to be every bit as clever as Baron
Haussman’s
in Paris. Rode in an omnibus.’

He had paid three
baiocchi
to go from piazza Venezia to the Vatican, then come back on foot to piazza. Navona which was so deep in rainwater as to recall the old practice of flooding it so that citizens might refresh themselves during the summer’s heat. He imagined cardinals’ coaches splashing through. Wheel spokes whirling. Urchins dodging. Though the ground had been levelled, the freak rainfall had flooded it again.

‘This morning,’ he reread, ‘in a refreshment room off the
aula
conciliaris
,
I stood so close to Mons. Santi that our shoulders touched.’

‘Liberal Catholicism,’ said Father Grassi, ‘is a nonsense!’ How, he asked, have a dogmatic theology in a Liberal Church? His cassock lacked a button. Nicola was ashamed of disliking him. ‘Pope Pius,’ Grassi confided, ‘is stalking God. Don John Bosco saw him three times in February.’ Did Nicola know about Bosco? He received divine messages in his dreams. The most recent was that Pius must steadfastly pursue his course.

Nicola asked whether Father Bosco got any help with his dreams.

The Jesuit smiled. ‘He’s hard to harness.’

Again they were in a garden, this time that of the Villa Ludovisi. Music floated from illuminated windows. Nicola had been inside, partaking of refreshments, when word came that he should join Father Grassi out of doors. It was spring again and magnolia chalices broke apart in pink, fleshy segments.

‘What I want you to do is spy, not for but
on
God.’ By this, said Grassi, he meant that we must wait for a sign from Him and make the Opposition wait too, which might not be easy. They were headstrong men, but we must lead them back to simplicity. The vocabulary of prophecy, we might say, was indeed limited, but so were the trajectories of clocks. Could not God as easily make use of Don Bosco’s tales of the French being reduced to eating rats as of a German intellectual stiff with
Wissenschaft
?

‘Does he say the French will eat rats?’

‘Yes. Louis Napoleon will fall and Paris choke with blood and burn like paper. It’s unlikely – but so was what happened to Sodom and
Gomorrah. You and I,’ said Grassi, ‘must mend rather than make. We are close to power but have none. I am in the confidence of our General who, as you know, is known as the Black Pope.’

This was their second meeting. Suspended above the greenery, the reception indoors grew more visible as dusk gathered. Ladies in draped bustles and
illustrissimi
magnified by capes moved with sinuous ease. Light gleamed on pectoral crosses and on trays loaded with bright goblets. It must be warm, for an opened window, swinging to and fro, caught a blaze of light which at moments obliterated the entire, pretty scene.

Miss Foljambe had opened her apartment to the Opposition. Already, this afternoon, four bona fide members had taken refuge here from the biting
tramontana.
Not small fry either! Every cassock was violet-piped.

‘The Holy Father,’ said an English one, ‘sent our Collegio a present of twenty-four woodcock.’

A lady whose name no one caught offered tea. ‘India or China?’ She might have been tendering slices of the globe.

Their hostess greeted Amandi and Nicola. ‘
Em-m-minenza
!
Monsign
ore
!’
The sounds lolled on her tongue and she smiled at the
papabile
cardinal. They must, she urged, treat this apartment as their own. No need to fear she would disturb them. She had her private quarters down below. ‘I know you’ll need privacy for your discussions.’ She was a woman grown androgynous with age and today, soberly fine in moire and amethysts, could have been an Anglican bishop, though what she actually was, as she was pleased to tell the company, was the only English Council Mother or, as that nasty creature Veuillot liked to put it,
Commère
du
Concile.

‘That means “gossip”, does it not? Well, if I’m to be called that, I may as well earn the insult!’ Lowering her voice, she told Nicola that she had a surprise for the company. Later on.

Her apartment, whose dominant colour was red, was quilted like a doll’s cradle. There were several such welcoming houses now in Rome, for the rule forbidding more than fifteen bishops to foregather meant. that countless coveys of them needed places to settle and consult.

And what was
his
allegiance, Miss Foljambe teased Nicola, who told her he counted himself a sturdy member of the Opposition.

‘Sturdy!’ cried the cardinal, almost spilling his tea. ‘You’ve got him down off the fence!’

Nicola said, no, it had been the offer of a red hat.

Had it really been offered? The Englishman sounded titillated.

‘Not quite offered,’ said Nicola. ‘Dangled.’

‘We’re giving scandal to the laity!’ cried Amandi. ‘Worse, to heretics!’

But Miss Foljambe protested that she was scarcely a heretic now, having become so Romish that her own Church kept expecting her to go the way of former Archdeacon Manning and convert.

A pity Manning had, murmured the English bishop. The Almighty did us a disfavour by calling Mrs Manning to Himself! If He had not, the worthy Archdeacon would, perforce, have stayed in the Church of England to be its scourge instead of ours! ‘Ah well,’ sighed His Lordship, ‘whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth!’ Smiling, he feigned shame at his malice, then spoiled the effect by saying that Westminster would certainly get a red hat for his work here.

Miss Foljambe asked whether it was true that the Council was so secretive that bishops might not see the shorthand reports of their own speeches?

Yes, said her compatriot, but there was hotter gossip still! Four bishops had been released from their oath of secrecy by the Pope himself. ‘They are to keep friendly journalists informed so that they may refute the inaccuracies of
the
Allgemeine
Zeitung.
’

Nicola drew the Englishman aside. How sure was he of this? ‘Very,’ said the prelate. ‘I myself surprised Archbishop Manning handing over notes on Council proceedings and, to prevent a scandal, he had to make a clean breast of it.’

‘Handing them to whom?’

‘To Mr Odo Russell. They meet,’ whispered the Englishman, ‘on the Pincio. Manning admonished me not to tell a soul, but I fail to see why I should accept his admonitions!’

Could
Manning, the advocate of Council secrecy, be himself the source of leakage? He could, for was Russell not Amandi’s friend too and Lord Acton’s? Perfidious Englishman! He had too many friends – and a diplomatic bag to ferry letters past the censor.

Speculation was interrupted by the arrival of Miss Foljambe’s surprise. It was Martelli, with an envelope given him by some Italian customs officers. They were friends, he explained, for he had fought beside them in 1848 and that sort of bond outweighed many differences. They heartily disliked cassocks and often boasted of playing tricks on priests. He had reproved them for this, which was why yesterday he had been treated to salvos of winks, before being handed proof of the ‘cassocks’
duplicity’. The men had confiscated it from a Jesuit for a lark and on general principles, then, on examining it, decided to show it to him who, as a deputy, must know what it was about. To their noses it stank of subversion.

‘But,’ said Martelli, ‘I saw at once, Reverend Friends, that the subversion was aimed not at our parliament but at yours.’

He gave a wad of papers to Nicola, who read: ‘“Insofar as error has no rights …” It’s the Majority Party’s battle strategy!’

Amandi read over his shoulder, ‘“There are turbulent spirits in the Council.”’ Reaching forward, he turned a page. ‘“To defeat proud heads, appeal to hearts. Preachers should dwell on the three weak things which conquered the world: in the manger a child, in the tabernacle a host, in the Vatican an old man.” Mmnn!’ Tightening his lips, he invited, ‘Listen to this: ‘‘(
I
) To bishops whose board is paid by His Holiness, quote his joke: They may not make me infallible, but they will surely make me a
fallito
– bankrupt! Shame them into loyalty. (2) Frighten the vulnerable. (3) Make use of visionaries. Giraud from La Salette must be brought to tell the Council of Our Lady’s wish that the Holy Father be declared infallible. The file in Mons. Stanga’s possession will prove …’’’ Amandi’s hand grasped Nicola’s shoulder, then snapped forward to finger this. ‘So what’s why you gave it to him! I felt there was something!’ His face was in spasm. ‘You connived!’

Suspicion burned the air between them. Also pain. It was as though a window had opened and both had blown in to steam and scorch. Nicola’s breath failed him.

Amandi hissed. ‘I’d heard you had been seeing Father Grassi. I suppose Stanga brought you together? He uses his father’s tactics against his father’s ideals. Intrigue. Secrecy. I preferred the old count.’ His wounded gaze contrasted with his words.

Nicola couldn’t speak. Nothing he said now would seem credible. His throat closed and his brain felt like unmeshed gears. How had things turned so treacherous? Bewilderment worked in him like fever. Was
he
treacherous? Was that so bad? If so, was it because he was tepid or, conversely, because he felt things too much? Where, anyway, was the treachery since God was manifest in His Vicar and His Vicar’s men – and both Nicola’s friends were that! But now his painful, mental whirlwind changed course as he remembered philanderers confiding – it was their defining theme – about contradictory loves. They
were most often shrugged at and seen as self-deceivers.
Was
there an analogy?

There was no time to ponder any of this for Martelli had produced a second document. ‘There’s more,’ he told the company. ‘Father Grassi hopes to found a network of spies within the clergy to report on the orthodoxy of their fellows and defend “integral Catholicism”. He plans to call it the Sodalitium Pianum.’

‘Pious Sods!’ gasped the English bishop with an astounded laugh. He could not have followed the exchange in Italian, but anarchy must have reached him on a visceral level, for he blessed himself as though to ward it off, then, perhaps in the same spirit, blew his nose. Out with evil! Blow it away!

‘So,’ Amandi whispered coldly to Nicola, ‘that’s why they appointed you to be my Coadjutor!’

‘I swear …’

‘Please don’t or I’ll think you too have been absolved from keeping oaths! I am going. Don’t come yet. I could not bear, just now, to hear cajoling lies.’

Miserably, Nicola watched him take leave of Miss Foljambe and her guests. In his black and scarlet, the cardinal looked as frail as a kite in high wind. Nicola felt a surge of rage against Grassi and Prospero, both of whom, if he’d had his hands on their necks, he could have cheerfully strangled. One outcome of all this, he told himself, was that now, at last, he saw the folly of trying to reconcile the unreconcilable.

A rum lot the Zouaves! Their founder had made his name by subduing the Dey of Mascara and, when he put his sword at the Pope’s disposal, he’d remembered the blackies who’d fought for him then. Or other people had. Anyway, his Franco-Belgian riflemen came to be called ‘Zouaves’ and an officer, who must have gone too often to the Opéra Comique, designed their uniforms.

They saw themselves as sons of St Louis, but the life didn’t suit Maximin. Just look at the chore he’d landed now! He was on guard duty at the mouth of a back alley with orders to stop people going in there to shit.
Défense
de
chier
!
There were scarcely any public latrines, so alleys like this were used by those taken short. Up and down walked Maximin in his ballooning trousers, keeping an eye out for anyone whose fingers reached for their own. He glared. ‘Thou shalt not shit,’ said his glare. Anyway, not here.

For minutes he had been watching a lurker – hat down, collar up – whose hands moved under his coat. Maximin was considering asking him if he had no consideration for the dignity of the city in which the cream of the world’s prelates were convened. Did the stranger think they wanted to drag their cassocks through his
merde
, caca, night soil,
stercus
? Maximin should have been told the German and Russian words too. The man’s hand emerged bearing a paper. He was looking for a discreet place to go to confession. Ah, so the relief sought was spiritual! Just as well, then, that Maximin had not insulted him! Especially as, on closer examination, he looked good for a tip. Scrutiny revealed
Dundreary
sidewhiskers and well-cut clothes. A gentleman. What was he doing in a back alley? He was, it seemed, about to say. He had
dismissed
his carriage, wanted a priest but was avoiding fashionable churches.