The Judas Cloth (3 page)

The archbishop looked at the Virgin’s plaster face and thought it mulish: like
hers
when he tried to question her.

‘Can’t you remember?’ he had kept asking.

She had looked at her shoes which were furred with dust from the mountain roads. The cracks in the leather were white.

‘When you met on the mountain, did you know who he was?’

Her foot jigged.

‘Did he tell you his name?’

They were in the Capuchin monastery parlour at Leonessa: a grimy place. Capuchins were the Church’s rabble.

More silence. Out on the mountains the last rebels were burying their weapons. Some, hardly older than this girl, had been seen sitting by the roadside sobbing and wiping their eyes with their sleeves.

The archbishop summoned patience. He needed to know just what accusations might be forthcoming against the Bonapartes whom he had let escape. The horse of history, he reflected, passes this way every fifteen years and men leap on its back. Last time was when Giacomo Murat proclaimed himself King of Italy and nationalists marched with him to Rome. People were always marching on Rome. It had started when Napoleon, avatar of a secular religion, took over the Holy City. Now, again, the Bonaparte seed was active.

The word recalled him to the matter in hand. He tapped the girl’s knee.

‘Look at me.’

She didn’t.

‘You told the nuns you were pregnant. Why?’

Silence.

‘You do know, that … you wouldn’t know yet, even if …’
Foundering
, he changed tactics.

‘What happened?’ he barked.

Abruptly words spurted: ‘He was dying when I got there. He’d had the last sacraments … He was trying to tell me something, only she pulled me away.’

Who? Ah! Her uncle. He hadn’t been asking about
him.

She wailed: ‘Is he dead?’

‘But surely you knew? I was told you’d seen his body.’

The girl reddened. ‘You mean naked?
She
said that, didn’t she?’

The interrogation was booby-trapped.

‘If he’s dead he was killed!’

‘By the Bonapartes?’ What if it were to come out that he had given passports to men guilty of the death of one of his own priests? ‘He died in his bed. The housekeeper …’

‘
She
’s a liar!’

Ah, so that was it. Two years ago, then, it must have been the housekeeper who anonymously denounced the priest for keeping his niece in the house. Whereas the real intrigue … The archbiship marvelled at his own slowness. These mountain presbyteries!

Let sleeping dogs lie had been his predecessor’s maxim. It wasn’t his. ‘She said it was his heart.’

‘Is that what she calls it?’ Her mouth twisted with contempt.

‘So you think it was not the rebels who killed him, but …’

‘It was she! She!!’ Hatred hammered at the word.

The archbishop thought of the housekeeper. A lustreless woman with quick, subservient eyes, she was waiting in the corridor at this moment.

‘He told me,’ the girl insisted, ‘what brought on his attack. She let the rebels fornicate with her.’

‘Rape?’

‘Not rape. They’d had a fight, you see. It was to do with …’ Again that look of contempt. ‘Property. A will he wouldn’t sign. So she started drinking with the men …’

‘The Bonapartes?’

‘No. Hangers-on. Riffraff.’ She was sobbing now and he couldn’t make out her words.

Never mind. He knew all he needed to know. There would be no accusations from this quarter.

‘I’ll give her to you,’ he told the Virgin. She needed containing. Gossip said so, the gossip of those who hoped to deflect attention from their own conduct during the troubles. Opting for neither side, most of his flock had stayed prudently at home, sewing cockades for their hats with papal colours on one side and the tricolour on the other. How blame them?
He
,
after all, had kept dark the business of the Bonaparte passports and only to his friend, Monsignor Amandi, did he ever say how the beleaguered child had flung herself on him with the hungry impulse of misdirected passion. Abashed, he supposed that this was how
she had flung herself on the uncle who had, according to Napoleon Louis, borne a startling resemblance to himself.

In that season of reversible cockades, that hug had been a last flicker of the madness which was unlikely to flare up again in this part of the peninsula for another fifteen years.

‘That,’ he told the Virgin, as he left the cathedral, ‘is why
you’
d
better keep her.’

Outside the leather-lined door, a five-month-old poster was still exultantly announcing in the name of the then newly elected Pope Gregory that all civic militias were to be disbanded, civil servants who had taken office under the rebel government hereinafter suspended from employment, and persons found to possess cockades or other seditious items gaoled as enemies of the state. A corner of the poster had curled to reveal an earlier one signed by the rebels who had held power in February. This threatened anyone who appeared
without
a tricolour cockade with equally summary penalties.

The archbishop reflected that it was a wonder he had not caught the chickenpox. Perhaps he had had it as a child?

In the café, gossips were trying to pump the lawyer about the scandal he claimed to know touching the archbishop, but he would not be drawn.

When the group broke up, Montani linked an arm in his and walked him home. If he had information, said Montani, it was his duty to put it to use. Sooner or later patriots were going to have to overturn the priests’ government. Bernetti, the new Cardinal Secretary, was a savage reactionary, and mild men like Mastai were propping up an intolerable regime.

‘Our cause might be stronger today if there
had
been a massacre,’ he began, but, seeing that he had shocked the lawyer, dropped this line of talk. ‘Seriously though,’ he urged, ‘if you know anything to his discredit …’

When my uncle was ‘Cardinal Nephew’ to Pope Gregory, I, who did not share his opinions, could not honourably play the nephew’s nephew. So
I exiled myself. That was when I first began to devote myself to pedagogy – I have, over the years, educated a number of village boys – agricultural experiments, and my own thoughts. These I scrupled to publish but did discuss in letters, with the result that men who had been formed by their correspondence with me were later able to mediate between the world and my retreat. Among them was the young Monsignor Amandi, then a diplomat for the Holy See, who kept me posted about shifts of policy in France and the German principalities as well as at the papal court. We did not neglect gossip and one of his stories was about how a girl distantly related to himself – small nobles in the Legations are all cousins – had been made pregnant, possibly by a Bonaparte, and how the local bishop was refusing to adopt the usual remedy and marry her to some needy ‘St Joseph’. We joked that if St Joseph was good enough to father the Son of God, a ‘St Joseph’ was surely good enough for a Bonaparte. Later, when I learned who the bishop was, the item went into the file I was keeping on Mastai-Ferretti.

The girl, dressed in a smock provided by the nuns, had a belly like a watermelon but denied she could be pregnant.

‘I’m a virgin,’ she told the Reverend Mother. ‘I’m like a mare that’s eaten wet grass. They swell up.’

‘We’ve had cases like that before,’ the Reverend Mother told the archbishop. ‘They dream away the memory.’

‘Yes, I do know where babies come from,’ the girl had told her. Then she had talked of her uncle’s housekeeper, a real Magdalene, fornicating with him, naked as a potato, under the black cloth of his cassock. She said she had seen this through the crack in a shutter and that the strength of their joining was like potato-tubers bursting through storage sacking. No, no, she had not performed the act herself. Never. She wept indignantly.

‘Maybe she imagined the housekeeper in her place? The uncle,’ said the Reverend Mother, ‘could be the father.’

The archbishop asked if the girl might be weak in the head and was told no. She was clever, devout and happy in the convent but wouldn’t want the baby. ‘We’ll send it to an orphanage right away,’ decided the Reverend Mother. ‘To the Holy Innocents or the Holy Ghost
Orphanage
in Rome.’

But the archbishop, who had had experience of such institutions, said most of those babies caught fever and died on the journey south. There
wasn’t money to feed wet nurses and, lamentable though it was, there was no stopping the bearers using the trip to smuggle contraband goods across the border. They packed these under the infants who were left to lie in their own ordure until a sufficient number had accumulated to make the journey profitable. This girl, said His Grace, was of good family and distantly related to Monsignor Amandi. Something better must be done for the child.

‘Do you want to see her?’

The archbishop did not. Later, he said, when she was delivered, he might accept her as a penitent. He knew her to be an innocent if impetuous creature for she had bared her soul to him in Leonessa. She had bared more than that and the hot throb of her fever haunted him who, unlike her, could not dream away memory.

‘When do you think it was conceived?’ he asked. ‘Her previous trip home would have been Christmas. Could it have been then?’

The abbess was unsure. ‘We think,’ she said, ‘that she’s due in November, so you can count back.’

In October the archbishop arranged to meet Monsignor Amandi at a spa. Although Mastai-Ferretti was older, the two had studied together in Rome where he was said to have proven such a dunderhead that his chief merit, in his teachers’ eyes, had been his lack of all claim to intellectual pride. Since
that
had led to the upheavels of ’89 and brought the brigand Bonaparte to Rome, dunderheads were in better standing there now than men like Amandi, whose cleverness unsettled people.
He
was not thought likely to do well at the papal court.

The two bishops, however, were fond of each other and, as they strolled, ate, worshipped and took the waters, observers noted a distinct liveliness to their colloquies and, in the archbishop’s case, some agitation. As a result, a rumour got about that his epilepsy had again begun to trouble him. It was known, as a doctor at the spa informed the interested, as ‘the sacred disease’ –
morbus
sacer
– and also, according to Pliny, as ‘the spitting disease’ because, if caused by the evil eye, one could rid oneself of it by spitting it back. Due to some garbling of this, the notion now gained currency that Mastai had the evil eye. A spa is a place for gossip, and in no time people were collecting evidence of small mishaps occurring in his vicinity which proved so amusing that his reputation as a
iettatore
was soon unshakeable.

That November, Cardinal Odescalchi, Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, and H. H. Gregory XVI received letters from the Archbishop of Spoleto humbly craving permission to lay down the burden of an office which would tax even an angel’s shoulders –
‘angelicis
etiam
humeris
formidandum’.
The supplicant drew attention to his lack of proficiency in sacred studies and the difficulty of governing a diocese where, in the wake of the recent troubles, he was faced with a choice between scandalising the staunch or embittering the compromised. There was more in the same strain.

‘What is this about?’ Cardinal Odescalchi had summoned Monsignor Amandi for consultation.

‘Why not believe what he says, Eminence?’

‘Scruples? Doubts?’ Odescalchi shrugged them away. He knew
Giovanni
Maria Mastai-Ferretti for a sound element. Two uncles in the prelacy! And in his youth he had paid court to the right sort of woman. Donna Clara Colonna had, after her young admirer donned the cassock, seemed to take more pleasure in promoting his career than she had in whatever mild dalliance had preceded it. It was she, observed his Eminence, whose influence at court had got Mastai his bishop’s mitre and almost certainly she who had provided the cash for his elevation. Given the finances of the Mastai-Ferretti – they were petty and penurious nobility – one could presume as much. Why not? Very commendable. Such women were as rubies – when they didn’t become busybodies. It might indeed be wise to call for her help. It had proven useful before when she put the necessary stiffening into the young Giovanni Maria who, shortly after his ordination, had had tender notions of devoting himself to the poor. Indeed he had done this for a while as director of an orphanage and later of San Michele, that great labyrinth on the Ripa Grande where he first came to notice by making the place pay. It was an epitome of the papal state itself, comprising as it did an asylum, a reform school, an old people’s home and a refuge for fallen women; and he had turned it into a going concern by selling its workshop products at a profit. Well, a man who could do that had an obligation to put his talents to work in a wider arena. As Mastai’s spiritual director was promptly requested to let him know, there were very few men who could stop the state losing money let alone help it make any. Money was a bleeding wound in the Church’s side and it would be sinful
self-indulgence
for a man who could staunch it to waste his time playing at being St Francis of Assisi.

‘What bee has he in his bonnet now?’ Odescalchi inquired.
Laicisa
tion
? Retreat to a monastery? Did he not know – if he did not, would Amandi kindly inform him – that the first was unthinkable and the second justifiable only if he was irredeemably maimed by sin or epilepsy.
Was
he? If he was, should he not atone for this by service? Reluctance could only prove worthiness. Paradox was the Church’s climate. While mediating a higher reality for the world, it was itself stuck in some very particular mud with which its servants must occasionally dirty their hands.