The Judas Cloth (38 page)

‘The new method,’ he told the cardinal, ‘allows us to reject nothing out of hand, neither the possibility of lunar influence on epilepsy, nor a divine one on visionary states.’

The doctor was lively-minded and Amandi, who had been missing the free play of talk – surely it was part of that sweetness of life which Talleyrand located in a lost
ancien
régime
?
– found himself looking with fresh sympathy on the ecstatics on his list. Had he, in assuming they were manipulated, escaped the bias of piety only to succumb to that of common sense? Most visionaries, assured the doctor, were sincere. Cheered, the cardinal sent to his cellar for a Barsac in which to drink to life’s complexities. It was gone, said the major-domo. Drunk by
Republicans
. All they had left was a syrupy Aleatico. Bring it up, sighed the cardinal, hoping good fellowship might work a Cana-miracle.

Dr Moreau’s speciality was epilepsy. Exalted ideas, he said, could be characteristic of sufferers and the malady caused by fright. Seeing Amandi’s interest sharpen, he talked of the
furor
epilepticus
and the belief – deprecated by him, but held by some of his colleagues – that wasting one’s seed could be a prime cause. To be sure, a connection with sexuality had long been suspected. ‘Venus,’ he quoted,
‘in
hoc
morbus
ut
pestis
fugienda.’
But frank debauchery was thought less perilous than solitary excess. He cited Tissot and Schroeder van der Kolk and disclosed that some doctors favoured castration.

‘Men of science, Eminence, can be as dogmatic as inquisitors. I foresee the day when my colleagues’ reign will make people regret the gentler sway of yours.’

Politely, Moreau admired the cardinal’s apartment which was being redecorated to efface Republican devastations. A bust of St Francis – a conciliatory choice – was to replace that of Beccaria. It was not, said the cardinal, that he did not admire the great advocate of legislative reform, but one must neither confuse the loyal nor give one’s fellows a stick with which to beat one.

Talking of which, said the doctor, the
furor
epilepticus
interested lawyers, since men had been known to commit murder under its influence and neither know nor remember what they had done.

‘So they could do anything at all and be oblivious of it?’

‘Yes.’

It was now that a suspicion on the edge of the cardinal’s mind swam into focus: this conversation was leading somewhere. As visionaries see a blaze of light then, at its hub, a face, he too saw the particular emerge from the general. Elusive, then recognisable, like a head on a coin, was not the profile that of someone he knew? Exalted? Suffering
memory-losses
and great rages? Formerly epileptic and now, under the influence of fright, grown strangely unpredictable? Who but the man who sent
troops to war, then said he couldn’t make war; who granted a
constitution
, then told a flabbergasted adviser, ‘We are no longer constitutional’?

Were the particulars known to the French doctor? Or had this diagnosis assembled in Amandi’s mind only?

The cardinal filled his guest’s glass and talked of other things: archeology, the opera, a diligence which had fallen into a ditch killing its two passengers, the new church bells being cast to replace those melted down by the Republic … Underneath, his mind ran like a mill-race. What mattered was not whether this man had or had not deliberately led him to a conclusion, but whether the conclusion was correct. If it was, we had an unbalanced pope.

Nicola Santi had had a letter from Prospero Stanga, who was now in Rome at the Collegio dei Nobili Ecclesiastici, a place where a gentleman could study in decorous surroundings and keep his own servant. Why should access to the priesthood be made uncomfortable for those used to polite living? asked Prospero. Only fanatics or starvelings would then apply, and the Church needed balanced men. Might Nicola join him? If he was planning to enter the prelacy, why not go all the way and become a priest? Remember Pascal’s wager? If you accepted his reasoning as to the wisdom of wagering on the existence of a hereafter, why not wager all you had?

Besides, it would be glorious if they were to study together. Skirting the delicate issue of whether Nicola was well enough born to be accepted – he wasn’t – he hinted that the patronage of two cardinals could surely get around this. Then he described his apartment: walnut bookcase, Turkey rug, and other pleasant appurtenances. Candidly, he had resolved to forswear the extremes of asceticism with their attendant pitfall, pride.

The letter’s recipient – miffed by the reference to his lineage – felt that, as far as pride went, Prospero was like a man who stinks so badly that he can’t smell.

The next argument was more engaging. Now, urged Prospero, when the Church’s prestige was damaged, was the time for the
generous-hearted
to join it. If its truths were truths, should they not be most ardently defended when most challenged? Concessions must not be made, for the faith was an old plant entwined in a complex civilisation – ‘Ours! Nicola, ours!’ – and to straighten or prune or tamper with it to please Liberals and suchlike could destroy it.

‘We need our prejudices,’ argued Prospero. ‘Beware of letting
self-criticism
stifle the exaltation which is our strength. Analysis should be used sparingly. Beware of the lucidity which does not lead to the Light! Join me,’ begged the letter, and Nicola was moved by the appeal.

That same day he had a visit from Father Tasso who was visibly going to the dogs. It was hard not to think this for he was grimy and smelled gamey, and the whites of his eyes looked like tea-stained china. He was still carping about the ‘false Church’ which must be renewed and purified and had brought Nicola a chromotype of Father Bassi got up to look like Christ.

Bassi, said Nicola, had not been selfless enough to be Christlike, for – the letters were in our file – he had written to the Republican Government demanding recognition for his bravery.

He was sorry to see how crestfallen this made Tasso and reflected that he had done just what Prospero deplored – attacked piety with the cold tool of accuracy. But then, Tasso’s was now a counter-religion, so might Prospero approve?

Amandi decided, after some thought, that Dr Moreau’s diagnosis was incomplete, since it failed to consider that epilepsy might be God’s way of tempering a chosen soul.

His Eminence wrote to me about this in terms which made me wonder whether his commerce with mystics might not be affecting him who, as I recall, maundered on about how a grain of folly might be needed to keep a man on the move in convulsive times. He was himself dancing like a cat on a stove. It was a dance of loyalty, a courtier’s dance, and it distressed me, who could not see why he should
want
to be Cardinal Secretary. For, said I to myself, depend upon it, Raffaello, that is what this is about. I knew the moment was gone. But he could not see this, being too strung up after playing Patient Griselda for so long, and biding his time, holding his tongue and letting himself be dispatched regularly into mountain hamlets stinking of cabbage to interview inbred cretins.

Now at last, on the eve of the Pope’s return to Rome, a decision had to be made as to who would be permanent Secretary of State and Amandi nourished hopes, since the Liberal Rosmini had been eliminated
and Antonelli, who had the acting appointment, had edged towards the high ground of conservatism.

Mastai, however, had come to hate statecraft and was loath to burden his friend with it. He saw it as a rather base activity and may even have found it appropriate that his Pro-Secretary of State – like his headsman – was neither a priest nor a gentleman.

Amandi, though, was only too eager to get his hands dirty with what he saw as an urgent challenge, for he ardently believed – I have his letters – that not only did the Church need defending as never before, but that never before had humanity so needed the Church. Only an inner peace could procure peace in the land. Only a heartfelt acceptance of law and order would make freedom possible. Some authority
must
be recognised and whose would even the proud-hearted accept if not God’s?

‘I suppose by now,’ said Pius, ‘you are my oldest friend?’

Marine reflections shimmered on the ceiling: blue, orange and gold. They were in the royal palace to which the King of Naples had brought boxes of plate, linen and other consoling luxuries on that desperate day, sixteen months ago, when Mastai arrived as a fugitive from his own people.

The fright, thought Amandi, had shaken him badly. A man his age – nearly sixty – could have died of it. Think of him slipping through back lanes with his heart in his mouth to an assignation with the Countess Spaur, now the wife of the Bavarian Ambassador but formerly – when married to an English antiquarian called Dodwell – a lady whose name gossip had coupled with his own. His old patroness, Donna Clara Colonna, was said to have resented the countess’s easy access to His Holiness who, having first changed the palace rules for
her
sake, had then extended the new facilities to la Spaur. Anteroom gossip. Yes. But must he not have suffered from the irony as he fled like a malefactor in her unlit carriage? At the border she had passed him off as an upper servant. To a man attuned to signs, this must have read as a divine reprimand. The ‘Servant of the servants of God’ had been plunged into a simulacrum of a bedroom farce!

All Rome, Amandi told him, was praying for his return.

Pius shrugged. ‘He’ – lately an unexplained ‘he’ meant Antonelli – ‘doesn’t want me back yet. Order,’ sadly, ‘has to be restored first. With unimpeded vigour.’

‘Whose order?’

Dispiritedly, Mastai ignored the pun. Optimism, he declared, was dangerous. Presumption and despair were two sides of the same coin. ‘I have come to see that it is cruel to expect too much from people. It exposes them to temptation.
I
did that’ He was thinking of the mob, but of others too. ‘The Jews!’ He shook his head, broodingly, for he had been told a story about a young student who had made friends with one at the University of Florence. The Jew had a pleasing appearance and played the violin and when the Christian invited him home, one of his sisters fell in love with him. It was an indocile passion. Naturally, the Jew was then forbidden the house, but the harm had been done. ‘I was wrong,’ said Mastai, ‘to relax the laws confining them to the ghetto, and Duke Leopold of Tuscany is wrong to allow them into the universities. They are a source of contamination, you see. It is like releasing a cholera virus. I have written to warn the Grand Duke.’

‘What happened to the girl?’

‘They have to keep her locked up. And, as we cannot do that to our whole population, it is clearly better to confine
them
!’

It would have been unwise to argue. Instead Amandi broached a matter which could no longer be put off.

‘Holiness, do you remember my cousin’s boy, Nicola Santi? If he’s to be a prelate, there will have to be a capital sum pledged to guarantee him the mandatory stipend of 1,500
scudi
a year. I,’ said His Eminence, ‘haven’t got it.’

Mastai looked roguish. ‘Ah, a personal request!’ His voice was all relief. ‘You are so modest. Is that all I can do for you?’

Amandi was shocked. ‘This, Holiness, is not for myself!’

‘No, no!’ Mastai’s quick courtesy conveyed a contrary belief. He smiled and his plump face creased like cake dough. Could he have forgotten the boy’s connection to himself? Amandi began resolutely to plumb the depths of the papal amnesia. From loyalty, he had not brought up Nicola’s name in many years but – with Dr Moreau’s words ringing in his head – surely he should now?

‘You remember my cousin, Holiness? Sister Paola of Fognano?’

‘My old penitent! Give her my blessing if you see her.’

This was no help. ‘You remember the talk’ – he was courting a
contradiction – ‘that one of the Bonapartes might have fathered her child whose name,’ he said with emphasis, ‘is Nicola Santi.’

‘People,’ Pius looked at the light playing on the ceiling, ‘are always asking me to recall old connections. One does not wish to appear proud, but it is sometimes best to cut particular ties. The nuns at Fognano have a new confessor.’

‘Her uncle was also suspected.’ Amandi rambled with intent while trying to recall what the doctor had said about such phenomena as
déjà
vu‚ jamais
vu,
old experiences vividly relived and others blotted out. How totally could one lose a memory and was it a weakness or a strength? Taking his courage in both hands, he asked, ‘Do you remember your flight to the mountains in 1831?’

‘Ah!’ Mastai’s eye gleamed like that of a robin which has seen a worm. ‘I see what you are working round to!’

The cardinal felt a chill. Had he gone too far?

‘Yes. You think I am exploiting a connection with the Prince-President, Louis Napoleon. Going back,’ he smiled, ‘to 1831. Old friendships, to be sure, are often too precious to be besmirched with claims. My pride is of small account, but I must free myself from links with individuals. I am the Universal Father.’

Amandi bowed. The Pope was foxy rather than mad. Good.

‘If Louis Napoleon sends us his men to defend us from Garibaldi, should I scruple to accept? My view is that the hand wielding the sword need not be clean. A saviour is a saviour and many crusaders were brutes.’

There was a silence.

‘You may have the capital sum,’ said Mastai kindly. ‘I had feared you were going to ask me for the post of Cardinal Secretary of State and that I would have to refuse. It would be your undoing. We need a man bred to higgling and haggling to handle that! Remember the juggler in the story who juggled for the love of God? Well, men of merchant stock can do die like with statecraft. Not you. You have the wrong instincts. Too gentlemanly. Look how you tried to argue me out of exploiting my credit with Louis Napoleon!’