The Judas Cloth (70 page)

‘It’s not,’ he blurted, ‘that I want to be pope!’ A query bounced off the denial: should he
not
want to be? The two fell silent and the cat turned on them the full, unflinching beam of its amber eyes. Perhaps it sensed their fear of being cast out of the only institution which meant anything to them. Thaumaturges were taking it over. ‘After 1789,’ said the cardinal, ‘it was said that God had sent the Revolution to punish men’s pride of intellect. Has He now sent us a mad pope to punish the opposite sin: failure to think at all?’

‘But thinking,’ Nicola reached for a light tone, ‘in the middle ranks undermines order. Only popes may safely think. If one is wrong his successor can rectify things.’

‘Successors, if he is declared infallible, won’t be able to!’

While waiting for the Zouave to come back, André Langrand-
Dumonceau
strolled around and came on a wine shop. It was a dingy place, smelling of mould, a Roman equivalent of the tavern his father had once owned. Backing away, he slid a hand into his pocket to feel the cap of Brussels lace which his grandfather, the
filius
exposititius
, had been wearing when found. It was of surprisingly fine quality.

Omens mattered for he had not thrown in the sponge. On the contrary, he still hoped to defeat the forces now hounding him through the press and courts of Brussels and Brabant. Jews, Protestants and Liberals had made a set at him. Last year an assault on his empire had been made in the English Courts of Chancery and now press slanders were leading to a case in Belgium too. Mandel – the slanderer – had for some time been trying to provoke him to sue, but Langrand sat tight, knowing that if he sued his account books would be subpoenaed and all his secrets known. Unfortunately, his associates lacked his nous. The Belgian Attorney General and his colleague, the King’s Attorney, having found for him in an earlier case, felt their honour impugned. Both were spoiling for a fight and so were collaborators whose activities up until
now had been limited to lending his companies the lustre of their names. In short, Mandel was to be sued. A disaster!

Langrand had fled to Rome under an assumed name, after destroying what papers he could, but feared that his enemies would turn up something damaging. His wife kept forwarding letters from friends of the feudal sort who urged him to return, face the music and clear his name – meaning, to be sure, theirs! Honour, they repeated, their honour required … He tore their letters up.

When the Zouave brought news that Monsignor Santi was unavailable, the count’s mind flicked to the nub of his concern: the assets which he had put beyond the reach of liquidators. Honour might be put aside but sin worried him. Loath to lose God’s support, he desperately needed an understanding priest.

The Zouave, an elf with a yearner’s grin, led him to the Irish College where, according to Monsignor Santi’s major-domo, there was an excellent confessor. The count dismissed the elf, then waited in a chapel which reminded him of the one in the Jesuit house which was educating his sons. A priest from there had sent a professional opinion on the ethics of bankruptcies via Langrand’s wife, whose letters referred to him by a code-name. Bobo, was it? Bobo or Bibi had said, if she was to be believed, that ‘the conscience is not bound by penal laws, so we may hide all we can from the receivers’. Langrand, distrusting her, wanted a second opinion.

Turning, he found himself facing a gangling cleric who must be the Irish priest.

‘Father Gilmore?’

This was he. Langrand did not give his own name but, to thaw the ice – the cleric looked cranky – mentioned Monsignor Santi and pretended to have just left his company.

‘Monsignor Santi’s?’ The cleric sounded incredulous. ‘You were with him
now
? Here in Rome? This evening?’

‘Yes.’ Langrand believed in using one’s connections and thought nothing of a white lie. The priest’s scowl had become alarming and, to soften him, he added, ‘He says you’re the ideal man to save a
shop-soiled
soul!’ This did not elicit a smile.

‘Ha!’ snapped the priest in a disconcerting way.

He was, Langrand saw, unworldly. Never mind. This man was a mere medium and he, the penitent, must marshal his arguments for God – who, to be sure, knew them already, since they had appeared some years
back in a pamphlet, commissioned and paid for by Langrand, entitled
Taking
Usury
–
Is
It
A
Sin?
The author, an agile cleric, had declared such scruples to be as archaic as those the Apostles had once harboured against baptizing Gentiles.

Priest and penitent now inserted themselves into the confessional and the count found that speaking without having to doctor his effects brought surprising relief. What he had been needing, he saw now, was not to argue his case, as his friends had wished, before the
Cour
d’Assises
of Brabant, but to look coolly at it, as he had not hitherto dared to do. In the enabling presence of the invisible priest, he worked at putting his doubts into words simple enough to get past the brass screen and his listener’s French.

A growl interrupted him: ‘Recite the
Confiteor
.’

A stickler, thought the count. A growler and a stickler! But he was consoled by the ritual words: ‘I confess to Almighty God, to Blessed Mary Ever Virgin, to Blessed Michael …’ Empanelling this jury, which had undoubtedly seen worse, was a way of emancipating himself from the particular and perhaps inadequate presence – he could smell onions – of the growler who had begun to shuffle his feet. It was also a way to leap beyond his own temporal limits, and Langrand might have attempted this – after all he was a vaulter and an experimenter – had it not been for the abrupt and savage assault now made on his person. This did have premonitory signs. It was with a divided mind that he, who was adept through long practice at thinking of more than one thing at a time, cited the opinions on usury of the pamphlet which he had financed and those of Bobo/Bibi on bankruptcy. While so doing, he was mentally querying their value, biting them as he might have bitten coins, while monitoring the groans and growls which greeted his words.

Hearing the hissed imprecation ‘
Homo
mercator
!’, he craned from his own niche to where the red curtains on the front of the priest’s part of the confessional mimicked – for the cloth was shuddering – a matador’s muleta. Hands shot suddenly between them and, hurtling after them, came a cassocked fury with a stole around its neck. So speedy was the eruption that the confessor’s door was still swinging as he reached the financier, hauled him from his niche and propelled him, feet skating beneath him, down the nave.

‘Out!’ howled the scourge and purifier. ‘
Fuori
!
Hors
d’ici
!’ Gilmore was driving the merchant from the temple. Langrand saw this at once. An omen-watcher, he had the answer for which he had come and, though a fit man, did not struggle. God would not help.

‘Father Gilmore! Have you taken leave of your senses?’

A lacily surpliced figure had emerged from the sacristy and stopped the priest long enough for his victim to apply a trick remembered from the days in his father’s tavern. Ducking quickly, Langrand broke his captor’s grip, unbalanced him and fled. The new arrival was someone he had met before. Some English or Irish cardinal. Cullen, was it? He didn’t want to meet him now.

Outside, finding that he had dropped his lacey talisman, his grandfather’s cap, he took this as a conclusive sign: God and Mammon had forsaken him. He had lost his luck.

Cocky Nazareno, the valet who looked after Mr Russell, was himself looked after by certain gentlemen who represented Italian interests. They slipped him a retainer and paid for information supplied. Cocky sold them what came his way – old letters, used blotting paper, etc. without any qualms. Indeed, he suspected Russell of closing an eye and looking, like many another, to the future. Cocky was his stall, the diplomatist’s diplomatist. That, anyway, was Cocky’s guess.

So, when chance – or Mr Russell? – delivered into his hands a run of dispatches to England, plus a letter from Lord Acton which the diplomatic bag was helping on its way to Munich, Cocky copied extracts from the dispatches, noted the addressee’s name on Lord Acton’s sealed letter, and passed everything on to his paymasters.

A ribbon of golden sand marked the route the Pope would take when he came to celebrate mass at the Minerva Church. Sun blazed. Banners floated and bells pealed. Behind Nicola someone murmured: ‘All this to dazzle the riffraff and overawe bishops.’ He thought the voice might belong to a member of the French garrison.

‘The overawing,’ said another voice, ‘has turned to browbeating. Did you hear about the Bishop of Mainz?’

Clergy then! Only they – one must fervently hope – could know about poor Bishop Ketteler. Nicola had been at a meeting of the Minority when the bishop, fresh from a papal audience, had arrived in a state of shock. What had happened was that he, feeling duty-bound to enlighten the Pope, had armed himself with notes and precedents in the hope of persuading him that certain conditions were indispensable if a Council was to be a Council, and not what prominent bishops were now calling the ‘robber synod’ and ‘the Vatican Farce’. It was a crime, thought the conscientious German, to allow a philistine pontiff to discredit the
Church. Accordingly, having rehearsed his arguments, he craved an audience, only to be floored by Mastai’s opening gambit.

Ketteler – powerful chin, fine eyes, and a sweep of forehead from which his pale hair had retreated –
looked
like a pope. Noble but sensitive – there were delicate shadows at the corner of that firm mouth – he must have risen from kissing the pontifical hand so that for a moment the two were face to face: the troubled bishop and Mastai whose features had the contours of a currant bun.

‘Do you love me?’ was Mastai’s greeting.
‘
Amos
me
?’

Mainz said he did.

‘
Amas
me
?’
Subtly, the repetition changed the query’s thrust.

The bishop, submissively, repeated, ‘Yes, Holy Father.’

‘
Amas
me
?’

It had now become a threat. It meant, if it meant anything, as the bishop later told his fellows, ‘forget your precedents, your sheaf of notes, tradition and the law, and give me what I want’. ‘Love,’ here the German was overtaken by scandalised and near-hysterical laughter, ‘is to conquer thought.’

‘
Viva il Papa
!’

This signal that the procession was about to arrive was, as always, given by professional cheerers known locally as ‘the hundred bald men’.

‘Long live the infallible Pope!’

A catcall cut in: ‘May he live somewhere else!’

Amused, the crowd altered ‘
viva
’
to ‘
via
’ (‘away with him’) which was dangerous, but not very, and it was a while before the ‘
Viva
’s won. By then the procession had glittered into view, manifesting the pomp and confidence which, at whatever cost to its Treasury, the Vatican needed desperately to show.

First – craning his neck, Nicola could just see the wagging of their swords – came a platoon of police, then a bedizened
batti-strada
followed by carriages full of officers and men on foot surrounding a cross-bearer on a caparisoned mule.

And now, arresting the cries of fritter-and-lemonade-vendors, came the Pope’s coach. Adazzle with gilt, it was driven by postilions, for the coachman’s box had been replaced by a brace of angels holding up a tiara. Inside it sat Pius facing two cardinals.

A dip rippled the crowd as people knelt, and Nicola sank too, prey to a clash of impulses as painful as if a knot were clamped around his heart. Exalting and at the same time casting him down was a contagion at which non-Romans, like Bishop Ketteler, might not even guess. The
Pope, murmured the tribal pulse in his blood, may be senile and sour, but he is ours and we, in a visceral way, are part of him, since he is our Vicar as well as God’s with Whom we commune in this city where the whole world comes to worship!

‘
Viva
Pio
Nono
!’ The crowd was mesmerised by its own cry.

Rising from his knees, Nicola came face to face with Prospero who said approvingly, ‘He knows how to win love!’

‘He exacts it like a tax!’ Nicola felt as if he had, somehow, let down Amandi and the Bishop of Mainz.

Prospero’s nod ignored churlishness. There was a rumour that he was in line for major office. ‘Love,’ he said, ‘is surely the essence of Christ’s message.’

‘Love of whom?’ The last of the procession was passing, a platoon of sweating dragoons. ‘The poor? The Germans say …’

‘Oh don’t quote them! Abstraction is all they deal in.’

‘No, they can be specific. They say we complicate marriage laws so as to make them send us money for dispensations. When a woman trapped in a brutal marriage has none …’

‘Germans always complain about money. Luther …’

‘… she doesn’t get one, no matter how good her case. Where’s the love there?’

‘Nicola!’ Prospero’s use of the first name had the thrusting intimacy of a kiss, ‘has it ever struck you that civilisations are destroyed not by the foolish but by the clever? Any fabric has flaws and the clever pick at them until there is no fabric left!’

They had reached the door of the Minerva Church. Nicola decided to ask Prospero about the
Sodalitium
Pianum.

But the Pope, who had descended from his coach, was being cheered and again a counter-cheer cut in: ‘The baldies are on duty! Long live the baldies!’ The Pope and his entourage moved quickly into the church. A last half-laughing cheer triggered Prospero’s anger. ‘See the company you’ve joined!’ he was exclaiming when an emollient voice intervened.

‘
Cari
Monsignori
!’ Father Grassi slid between them, congratulating himself on finding such good, old friends together. Friendship was more precious now than ever. Even the Holy Father was showing strain and who could blame him! Had Christ not cursed the barren fig tree? Barren rhetoric was our torment! Poor Mainz, though! Grassi tittered. Germans don’t like to be silenced. ‘Which reminds me, I suppose neither of you have any tidings for me on this Annunciation Day? No? What a pity! If
we only knew which German was divulging our secrets, we could stop suspecting them all. It would be a step towards brotherhood and reconciliation.’

Since the Italians had no official representatives in Rome, Nicola had long guessed Martelli to be one of their unofficial ones, and was not surprised when he arrived with a copy of an English diplomatist’s letter. ‘Read this,’ he invited.