The Judas Cloth (72 page)

It was two days later and here he was again in la Diotallevi’s drawing room. In his hand were the notes taken by a stenographer who had spent several afternoons behind the perforated screen listening to Maximin talk to the unwitting Catherine.

The city had grown maggoty under the unrelenting sun and simmered with wrangles. Amandi was coming back to Rome but must not give any appearance of conspiring. He was to preach, say mass, be active in the Council but avoid private meetings. Nicola should not give any
appearance
of conspiring either.

Archbishop Darboy, whom Nicola had consulted in a cryptic way about his troubled conscience – he didn’t wish to trouble
his
– agreed that preventing an intrigue was a salutary thing though never, he warned, easy. For instance, had Nicola seen what the Majority was up to now? In the
Giornale
di
Roma
?
The paper had named several Opposition bishops as having declared their readiness to submit and vote for the doctrine. This was a lie. Yet, to issue denials and say they would
not
submit to the Pope’s wishes took more courage – as the
Giornale
well knew – than most of them had. And letting the lie stand would dishearten their fellows.

Darboy groaned that our pity for this unfortunate pope was being used against us. He raced off then, leaving Nicola to his doubts and to the sheaf of notes handed him by the stenographer who was even now ruining his eyesight, recording trivia which he lacked the discrimination to leave out.

A note from Martelli warned, ‘Giraud’s Colonel says important men want to see him, men he can’t put off.’ Time was running out and Nicola, struggling through the stenographer’s transcription, saw that Maximin had been wasting it in courting Catherine.

Stocky and bandy with the face of a man who has too often been soused, the Zouave had spent yesterday afternoon in la Diotallevi’s laundry-room, talking of onion bouquets, while two forgotten smoothing irons of the sort tailors call ‘gooses’ glowed red, then white on the stove.

Onion bouquets? Reading more closely, Nicola found that in Giraud’s village these were presented to a jilted girl on the day her suitor married someone else. To avoid such shame, men too, argued the Zouave, needed to be let know whether they had a chance before risking a rebuff. Stuck-up girls had hurt him in the past, starting – ah good!! – with Mélanie whom he had first known as a fourteen-year-old whose every other word was ‘look’! Look what’s in my hand, under my skirt! Look, oh look at the lovely lady!

‘She’s still at it and people listen! Just the other day a friend at the barracks showed me a newspaper with a piece about her. She says now that the Virgin told her there’d be an earthquake in Marseilles and Paris would burn down! Make a lie big enough, as my old Dad used to say, and people will swallow it whole!’

Back to the Dad! Nicola’s eyes slid down the page and found that old Giraud had had ‘ideas’ and because of them never darkened the church door until the day when water from Maximin’s lady’s spring cured his asthma. That staggered his son. Think of it, he invited Catherine. Just imagine
him
admitting such a thing!

Maximin’s mother had died when he was small and life with the widower had been a skulking hell as the child developed a bobbing right arm, ever ready to ward off a box on the ear. Then, one September when he was eleven, he was sent from his own village of Corps – thirteen hundred inhabitants, grim, muddy, poor – to the pasturelands above where he was to mind Monsieur Selme’s four cows. Up there he was free as air and the air was luminous with cataracts and reflections from the Alpine peaks. Berries and mushrooms grew in abundance and you could think of heaven as spilling past the snow-line onto the cropped green slopes. Down in Corps, a huddled world, this heaven was unknown – until the miracle.

Maximin never got over that. Just picture old Giraud begging pardon of him whom he had walloped the day before for conniving with blackbeetles! Begging pardon of the blackbeetles themselves!
Mea
culpa
! His asthma had cleared up and he roared the news so lustily that, blasphemous though it might be to say it, he sounded drunk. His new transports were not so different from the old. He aged after that and, though he let the priests show him off, his eye had the reddish, melancholy cunning of a circus bear’s. Poor old sod! He reminded his son of the Good Thief – or was it the Bad Thief? He had been happier in his Jacobin days.

Mélanie, by contrast, throve on attention. She had been wanting it
since before the nuns taught her French. Nobody in those villages talked it except the curés, which was why when townspeople came puffing up the track, having tired of jolting their bones in the carts hired to convey them, it was to the curés that they turned to translate what the children were saying. Maximin felt that that had been the start of his own troubles. The curés told the bishops who told the Pope and the story changed as it made its way down the slopes to Grenoble and over the Alps to Rome.

He had to keep up with it. Had to be careful. Especially now that there was money riding on the thing. He told Catherine how he had once retracted the whole story and then retracted the retraction. That was when the Curé of Ars got him mixed up.

‘You mean,’ the curé had asked, ‘that it didn’t happen like you said?’

Maximin said people had mixed things up.

‘Was there a lady there at all?’

‘There was a coloured light. In those mountains you see all sorts of things.’

‘But a lady with satin slippers with roses under her feet and on her head a great golden crown. Did you or did you not see that?’

‘Mélanie did.’

‘And the message the lady gave you?’

Maximin said he wasn’t sure. But, later, when the papers said he’d denied seeing the vision, he denied that. Because anything that could tame his father was worth believing in. And what would have become of him if he backed off now? Besides Mélanie
w
as
sure. Not for one solitary second did she doubt or take back a word. And now she was prophesying the end of Paris. The Zouaves said it was a judgment on France for what it had done to its kings.

‘Did she speak French or
patois
?’
asked the government official who, warned Monsieur le Curé, had been sent to trick them.

‘She used,’ said Mélanie sweetly, ‘a language that spoke straight to our hearts.’

There had been no picture of
her
in his friend’s paper, but he remembered how she had looked on the very first day when he was told ‘This is Mélanie Mathieu. She minds Monsieur Pra’s cattle. She’ll help you get the hang of things.’ Thin as string and pale as skim milk!
Tart-mouthed
! At home, she said, she slept with her sisters. Now she must make do with the cows and Maximin. She made him feel he ranked way below the cows.

He’d run off then to play with his dog, Loulou, and pretty soon she
was trying to lure him back. It was then that she told him of the stigmata, what it was and that she had it. ‘Here, under my skirt!’ Catching his hand, she slid it between her thighs, then showed him the blood. Later, she swore him to secrecy. If he breathed a word, she said, her father would skin her alive. That interested him and, comparing fathers, they became quite friendly. Then they watered the cows, ate their rye bread and fell asleep.

Waking, he ran up the slope after the cows and, on reaching the top, found her on the rim of a ravine. A freak mist was drifting in. ‘Look,’ she cried. It was like a screen reflecting the sun’s globe. ‘It’s opening like a tabernacle. Look what’s inside!’

So what
was
the secret message? asked Catherine. Was he going to tell her? No, said Giraud. Not yet. It was worth money, he explained. Enough to start a shop back in his village. ‘I can just see you behind the counter, selling things. Would you like that?’

Monsignor Santi asked if Maximin would mind answering a few more questions and Maximin said right you are. Questions would be part of his mission which, he now knew, was to address the Council.

The trouble was, said His Lordship, that there were sceptics among the bishops, and it would be appalling if one of them were to confront Maximin with his previous retraction or with his sworn declaration, made some years ago, that the Lady’s secret message, far from having to do with Infallibility, as he now claimed, had been that the Orleanist Pretender should rule France. There were contradictions here and a danger that he could be convicted of telling a lie
piis
auribus
offensiva
,
ingiuriosa,
scandalosa
and apt to get him and his sponsors into grave trouble. Did he want to be handed over to the Holy Office, alias the Inquisition? No? Well …

The bishop looked sad. Naturally, he said, we had had to make inquiries before sponsoring your appearance in the Chamber.

While Maximin struggled to find some way out of this – the disappointment was too sudden and crushing to be accepted – the bishop talked of mountains and the odd phenomena to be seen on their upper slopes: circular rainbows, luminous reflections, mirages.
Balloonists
, he said, had told him of seeing things which the uninformed could mistake for a vision. An honest mistake was one thing, but a persistent
attempt to deceive the Church … Here his voice grew coldly menacing. Then he talked of Maximin’s father whose cure need not be of supernatural origin at all, though, to be sure, it must have made a strong impression on the small Maximin.

‘You were, I think, eleven, whereas the girl was …?’

‘Fourteen,’ said Maximin. ‘She’s the one who should have known better. She made it up. She was always making things up.’

‘Well, then it is your clear duty to sign a paper saying that. You see she’s causing scandal with all these interviews and this might stop her. It would also prove to the Holy Office that it was never our intent to perpetrate a deception.’ These, said the bishop, were difficult times. Strife had penetrated even within the
sanctum
sanctorum
,
but better say no more about that.

‘Ah,’ said Maximin, putting two and two together. Strife? Danger? ‘Yes,’ he decided, ‘I’ll sign your paper.’

The bishop had it ready and before Maximin could think twice, the thing was done.

Afterwards, he began to wonder whether he had perhaps dished himself. The more he went over the thing in his mind, the likelier this seemed. He needed advice. He needed the help of a cool, unbiased eye. Whose? Catherine’s? No! She was too ignorant and, besides, might think him a fool. Avoiding her, he went into the empty drawing room and poured himself a stiff brandy. He would have confronted the Signora, but she had gone out. Had she, he wondered, helped trap him? – if he had been trapped. And if he was her bodyguard, why did she go out alone? Worried now, he had another brandy, then set off into the city where, needing a confidant, he headed for a café patronised by Zouaves.

There was a card game in progress in one corner and, at the bar, a discussion of the attempt, some years ago, on the Emperor’s life. The mistake, it was concluded, had been in using bombs. It took more guts to use a knife. True, you had to get close to get it
into
the guts – but then you couldn’t miss!

‘Like this!’ A man held a knife to the barman’s apron, but the barman flicked it away and went on drying glasses.

Maximin had a drink, then, finding nobody he knew well enough to confide in, went back to the Signora’s apartment. Walking in, he paused on the covered walk outside the drawing-room window. The Signora was inside, talking to Monsignor Santi. They were saying that some woman would go to confession to Cardinal Amandi’s titular church tomorrow about four. Monsignor Santi would take His Eminence’s place
hearing confessions. That way, if her protector came to hear of it, he would think the confessor was Amandi who, being in his seventies, could hardly rouse his jealousy.

‘All right?’ asked Donna Costanza and the bishop said yes.

Maximin waited until Monsignor Santi came out, then followed him downstairs. He had changed his mind about the paper he had signed. Could he have it back, he asked.

‘Why Maximin, it’s for your own protection,’ said the bishop. ‘Besides, I haven’t got it any more. I’m sorry.’

Maximin felt like hitting him and, bishop or no bishop, might have done it too if Monsignor Santi’s carriage had not been standing there with two liveried footmen, one of whom had opened the door and lowered the step. After that, there was nothing for Maximin to do but go and get stinking drunk, which is what he did.

He awoke with a headache and an idea. He would go to the lodgings of Monsieur Veuillot whose card he had kept ever since the journalist had given him lunch. Surely, he could smooth things out?

Cardinal Amandi had been disheartened by the Abate Lambruschini’s tactful silence when asked for advice. Tact carried a judgment. This, it said, is all you can accept: not truth, only this. It came close to pity and the cardinal was crushed.

Arriving in Rome, he had gone at once to the Council in whose anterooms were the usual loiterers, quidnuncs, pious sightseers, and touts. Seen afresh after an absence, they distressed him. Money, as all but the invincibly innocent now knew, was paid by surprisingly
respectable
people to equally respectable ones for tidbits of information. Agents were active, stenographers under siege and foreign bishops regularly invited to their embassies to be pumped – hence the frustration of the Italians who lacked such a resource – while the more illustrious were regarded as being ‘booked’ by such families as the Borghese, Doria, Aldobrandini and Caetani, in whose drawing rooms they could be approached with circumspection. Naturally, they did not – one hoped – break their oath of silence, but small indiscretions showed how the wind blew.

Seeing it all with Lambruschini’s borrowed eye, Amandi blamed himself. Years ago, when Amandi first tempted him, Mastai had been an unworldly man. Intrigue and pride had been alien – or, if not alien, behind him. He might have devoted his life to orphans or lived quietly
as a provincial bishop if Mephistophelian friends had not tempted him with a belief in the Church’s need of his gifts.