The Judas Cloth (71 page)

‘You see!’ said Martelli. ‘Her Majesty’s unofficial agent even outfoxes his compatriots! Manning is his source and Acton his channel and, as the
Letters
from
the
Council
appear in Germany, the Germans take the blame. It is the English, not we, who inherited the guile of Machiavelli and of the three, the Protestant is the coolest. Manning and Acton lack detachment and make mistakes, but Russell’s dispatches are often on the edge of laughter. Perhaps his enthusiasm for amateur dramatics keeps him in training.

‘We,’ objected Nicola, ‘put on dozens of plays at the Romano!’

‘But it was all
ad
maiorem
dei
gloriam
!
Our consciences were never off duty! Nonchalance, Monsignore, is what refines intrigue.’

‘It follows, then, that we nonchalantly let Manning go on damaging his own side by supplying information to Russell?’

‘Indeed! But we must stop the plot to force a definition by acclamation which would grant Mastai a dangerously wide range of powers. Given modern means of communication, such a strengthened Rome could interfere in Catholic countries everywhere in ways unimaginable till now. I hope I need waste no time convincing you of the damage which he and his successors would be able to wreak!’

It was late afternoon when the cardinal laid down the copies of the English agent’s dispatches. The sun had gone behind a clock tower and Martelli was keeping off mosquitoes by smoking a cigar.

‘He’s well informed,’ said the cardinal. ‘And his contempt hurts. Do you think …’

‘Oh,’ said Martelli, ‘
we
are not well enough informed to play guessing games. Italian bishops – Your Eminence being one – who are not rabid papalists have tended to boycott the Council and so we have few friends
there to brief us.’ There had, he noted, been only seven signatures on an anti-definitionist
postulatio
drawn up by Italian bishops. ‘Eminence,’ said Martelli, ‘we need you in Rome.’ Religion, he urged, was the woof of our national fabric. If we weren’t to suffer the travails there had been in France, some understanding must be reached. Extremism bred extremism and revenge revenge. But if the bishops saw a likely moderate candidate for the succession, they might be heartened to struggle against the strait waistcoat now being prepared for future popes.

‘You’re asking me to confront intrigue … vilification …’

‘And you’re saying “Let this chalice pass”. But you may be responsible for …’

‘What? A divided country – possibly a divided Church?’

There was a silence. Then Amandi said, ‘Leave me the dispatches.’

Martelli’s departing carriage was a distant dust-puff, as small as blown thistledown, when Amandi gave his major-domo orders. They would leave tomorrow. Seeing the man’s face brighten, he remembered that Gianni, a married man, had a woman in Rome and that this could be used against the cardinal himself. Memories of Amandi’s own
long-conquered
flesh stirrings had no more piquancy than the memory of an old bee sting and, on the whole, this made him inclined to indulgence with others – but none could be afforded now.

‘Tuscany,’ he told his servant, ‘is where we’re going. Not Rome. I plan to visit the Abate Lambruschini.’ The dimmed pleasure in Gianni’s eyes was an offering to luck.

Winnowing through old letters, I am struck by the candour of my Tuscan friends. If a thing strikes one of them as bilge or a
coglioneria
, why that is what they say. Romans, on the other hand – but why marvel? They live at court and only men who have done that can guess what it does to the mind. How many people, I wonder, know that when the Pope sneezes, his attendant prelate must fall to his knees and cry
Eviva
? Well, readers of the
Augsburger
Allgemeine
Zeitung
do now, for their
correspondent reports it in his letter for 18th June. It will shock in a way unimaginable to the Curia.

Amandi who, despite himself, is the Liberal candidate for the succession, came to see me ten days ago in great agitation. Absence from Rome has stripped away his courtliness and he has begun saying things baldly: namely, that he and I should repair the
coglioneria
we perpetrated at the time of the last Conclave when we interfered with the workings of the Holy Spirit and helped Mastai get elected.

‘Do you mean,’ I asked, ‘by interfering a second time?’

He had no answer. Anything he says now must look either like shirking or ambition. Moreover, political motives animate his advisers whom he distrusts. Would I, a proven man of integrity, read some dispatches which had come his way and advise him? Politics, he confesses, disgust him now and seem incompatible with a priest’s vocation. He has neatly exchanged positions with the Mastai of
twenty-five
years ago.

Doubts are contagious.
Am
I a man of integrity? I withdrew. Should Amandi? How? There is no formal candidature for the papal succession, so he has no way of stepping down. Anyway, should he?

I took him on a tour of my small estate and, as he sat next to me in my two-wheel trap, could feel his thoughts seethe and collide like wasps in a jar.

Yet the country was at its most soothing: still as a mosaic and bathed in those blue shadows from the acacia leaves which mimic pools of water on dry days. Relying on the courtesy which would oblige him to listen, I calmed – and bored – him with talk about the relative merits of husbandry and industry in our area, the prosperity – also relative – of my share-croppers and a new sort of coulter which Ridolfi and I devised some years ago.

A neighbour was waiting when we returned from our drive. He had come from Rome full of the latest scandal which he had been told in confidence. We assured him of our discretion and he told his story. It was about the Greek-Melchite patriarch, Gregor Yussef, a man of almost eighty who fears that if the treatment he received at the hands – or, rather, foot – of Pius were to become known in his own country, a schism could ensue. He and his fellow Eastern patriarchs defended their traditional rights on which Rome plans to encroach. Pius, who is minutely informed of what goes on in the
aula
and the committees, summoned him, and when Yussef kissed the papal slipper, pressed his
foot down on his neck, then actually placed it on his head, saying, ‘
Mala
testa
,
Gregor!’

Amandi went pale. Interestingly, neither of us doubted the story – which turns out to be true – since we already knew of Pius’s warning to the Eastern patriarchs against letting themselves be recruited by the Minority. He intervenes openly now in what he has described as a battle against ‘myself and this Holy See’. His claims to neutrality are quite given up.

‘The latest joke,’ said our neighbour, ‘is that the Inquisition has revived, for the heat is unprecedented and the Pope is roasting bishops.’ I think he felt badly about this jibe, for he left soon after and next day sent us a gift of wine.

Since then, I have read the dispatches which Amandi brought but find him hard to advise, since he sees my retreat here as admirable and I cannot burden him with my doubts. We took more drives and my little mare supplied him with a metaphor. Pius and his minion, Manning, hope, he says, to arrest movement and conquer history. He waved at the buzz of light through which we were spinning to a rhythm of soft hooves – I keep the mare unshod.

‘How,’ he asked, ‘arrest all this? It can’t be done!’

Later, he said, ‘At least your uncle, before becoming Cardinal Secretary, had been nuncio in Paris and knew what went on in Europe, Mastai and Antonelli are small-town men who have no idea of the trouble they will stir up in France and Germany. Mastai relies on
doctrina
infusa
,
so why should he bother informing himself?’

Then he told me of Martelli’s plan.

‘But,’ said I, ‘if it becomes known it will be seen to mirror what it aims to stop: intrigue.’

‘Are you telling me to refuse?’

‘How can I? I withdrew. I have no right to speak.’

‘You’re withdrawing
now.
Say something. Be indignant.’

‘I can’t,’ I told him. I felt despair. My lack of faith is not only in this world. It is also in the next. The world as we knew it has ceased to work and the new world is not ours. I read about Acton and Gladstone and Döllinger and marvel at their energy, but lack the will to admire them. For me meaning has leaked from the struggle. As in a chess game, bishops now are not bishops nor knights knights. They are mere tokens whose deployment has no other aim but the play of skill. I cannot care about the skill. My last virtue – if a man with no faith can have any – lies in not disillusioning others. I cannot blame Mastai for his foolish
self-
delusion
. He took on something which could not be achieved and is forced to pretend that he
is
achieving it. Amandi risks falling into the same trap, but I did not trust myself to warn him about this, lest my despair infect him too. So I repeated, ‘I cannot help you.’ I could see that he was disappointed.

In the abate’s kitchen a discussion was going on about the relative merits of the
Lottery
Dream
Book
and the
Renowned
Method
for
Winning.
The
Rinomato
Metodo
said, quoted Gianni, that ‘the country’ meant number nine would come up.

But, said the abate’s cook,
he
was always in the country and it couldn’t always come up.

‘It’s come up in your mind now, though!’

‘I’ll need three numbers for a
terno
. What else shall I put?’

‘And five for a
quinquina
. You win more with that.’

‘I dreamed of a corpse.’ The cook dismembered a hare with swift, expert strokes.

‘Sudden death is fifty-two.’

‘It was just lying there.’ The cook examined his cleaver, ‘Bleeding.’

‘Mortal wounds means forty-nine.’

Darboy’s face had shrivelled. The Council had aged him. Gripping Amandi’s wrist, he said, ‘You should think of yourself. No, not your soul! Your safety.’ The Archbishop frowned.

They were in the Alban Hills in a villa belonging to a hospitable nobleman. It was cool at this altitude and the villa’s owner had thrown it open to bishops who needed a respite from the city’s heat. Greenery feathered slopes on which, said Amandi, snow was harvested in the winter. There were wolves here too.

‘There are wolves everywhere!’

Amandi asked about the likelihood of the Opposition bishops walking out of the Council, but Darboy said it was hard to settle on a tactic. Even he and Dupanloup did not see eye to eye. Himself a senator, he lamented his colleagues’ lack of parliamentary experience – and of nerve. Pius was informed every evening of what had been said and done during the day and cold-shouldered those who were undocile to his will.

‘Neither Dupanloup nor I will be able to vote for you, Eminenza. We shan’t reach the Sacred College while he lives.’

Before leaving for the capital – Amandi was to stay here a little longer – Darboy disclosed a secret. Word had come from Paris that if the Opposition could hold out, help would come from an unexpected quarter. He was unsure what was meant, but his source was a man close to the new Foreign Minister, the Due de Grammont.

His last words were melancholy. ‘It will be hard for us to run dioceses where everyone knows that we are loathed and despised by the Infallible Head of our Church.’

‘So,’ said Amandi, ‘we’ll fight. You, especially, had better. After all, it’s not two months since you submitted plans for the reform of the papacy! You burned your boats!’

‘
La furia francese
!
It’s expected of us!’

Attention was what Maximin Giraud missed from the days when he had stood with Mélanie on altars, rostra and the backs of carts. That hum from the crowd tingled your body and speeded your pulse. It made you more intelligent and was like nothing else – except, perhaps, being God! Indeed it was that touch of divinity which had descended on him after the fact which convinced him that the vision had not been just another of Melanie’s stories. As attention waned so did belief, but he expected both to return here in Rome where he had been told he was to take part in some event which would restore faith in God and himself
and
be one in the eye for Mélanie who took more than her share of the limelight.

Expectancy, having buoyed him up, again began wearing thin. Then, just as he thought he’d been forgotten, the signals started. Anonymous priests visited him; Monsieur Veuillot, a famous big pot, took him to lunch; then a lady came to the barracks to ask for him.

‘Take him,’ said the Colonel. Maximin, outside the door, heard every word. His ears were like bats’. ‘Are you on the side of the good angels this time, Donna Costanza, or of the fallen ones?’

The Mérodiani, she retorted, were the fallen ones. The Colonel was one of those.

‘Lazarus was raised from the dead,’ said the Colonel.

‘Well, if you’re raised, think of me,’ said the lady and, in a low voice, ‘If Antonelli’s people ask, no need to say where he is.’

‘
Entendu
.’ The Colonel opened the door. ‘Here’s Giraud. Giraud, Madame Diotallevi needs a bodyguard and I’m assigning you the task. Make sure you give a good account of yourself.’

So Maximin had come to live at the lady’s apartment which was like falling into God’s pocket. Only now did he let himself know how much he hated the regiment. Until joining it, he had thought his father a violent man. But violence for his father had been explosive and chancy, whereas the Zouaves dreamed of it as relentlessly as some men dreamed
of fornication. They were connoisseurs who would tell with a slow relish the ingenious things which had been done to priest-killers during the White Terror in France. Their dreams were ledgers glinting blackly with debts, and more than one had come here resolved to outdo a grandfather’s role in that great blood-letting or at least bag a
Garibaldino
. They were sportsmen with a taste for human game. Yet, they could be as polite as women, played exuberant, even childish, jokes and went to mass every day.

Donna Costanza told Maximin that the reason she needed a bodyguard was because she had worked for Monsignor de Mérode when he was Minister for Arms.
He
was now so out of favour that, when he broke his leg, the Pope said it was a pity it wasn’t his tongue. The barracks was a gossip-shop which must be why the priests who talked to Maximin had been tight-lipped, revealing only that he should be ready for ‘the crowning moment of his career’. Coming from men with cold, clever eyes, that had a disquieting ring.

‘Are you one of them?’ he asked Donna Costanza, but couldn’t say who he meant, since they hadn’t given names.

Her apartment enthralled him. It was as soft as a tent with glinting brass and feathers and shawls from North Africa. Gifts from French officers? His friends, when he went to pick up his kit, had stories about her morals, but to him she was kind. She had a Savoyard maid, fresh from her mountains, who couldn’t have been more than fifteen. ‘This is Catherine. You can keep each other company,’ said Donna Costanza and left them together.

‘Help me shell peas, then,’ said the girl.

This reminded him of his childhood and soon he had slit open a mound of pods and flicked the bouncing peas into a delft bowl. He asked if he could smoke and she told him to put his head out the window. Papal cigars, he told her, were known as
stincadores
infamos
,
but she was too ignorant to laugh. Then she said that she must take coffee in to the mistress and her guests who were very grand people. One was a bishop, a Monsignor Santi.

When she came back, she showed him the empty coffee cups. The Signora, she said, had offered to read her guests’ fortunes in the grounds and the Monsignore’s cup had a double cross in it. See it! That could be a death!

‘Did she tell him?’

‘He wouldn’t listen. He said fortune-telling was forbidden by the First Commandment.’

Later, Catherine sent him down to the courtyard to the well and, through the window, he heard the voices of Donna Costanza’s guests. ‘A scandal,’ said one, ‘may be the only way!’

Sliding a dipper into glistening water, he drank from it. The voices from the window were now talking secretively in Latin.

Maximin wasn’t surprised when the bishop sent for him and asked the usual questions and offered brandy. From caution Maximin said ‘No’, then grew sorry. Describing the vision had become harder, for he remembered how other listeners, especially the Curé d’Ars, a
sharp-minded
holy man, had picked at details and marvelled suspiciously at the Virgin’s clothes – shoes with rosebuds, golden apron, robe with pearls – being identical to those worn by her statue in the wayside shrine which Maximin and Mélanie used to pass on their way to and from the pasture.

‘Are you sure you won’t have a brandy?’

This time he took it and felt relief as the sparky stuff pirouetted inside his mouth. We’re on the same side, he reminded himself. The priests didn’t want the vision discredited. Not after all these years. At the beginning, they had been leery because state officials were watching
them.
This had been explained to him. The officials were free-thinkers. He drank some more and thought of the first free-thinker to bite the dust: his blasphemous old man.

The bishop said, ‘Tell me about your father. I never knew mine. I envy men who had fathers.’

‘Envy!’ Maximin almost spat out his last precious mouthful. Indeed a fine rainbow spray reached the bishop’s cassock and shone reproachfully. Unnerved, he began to curse his venomous sire.

‘Ah,’ said the bishop. ‘An atheist and a Jacobin? Perhaps it was for him the Virgin came!’

‘What?’

‘Her words were addressed to them. “Don’t blaspheme! Don’t desecrate the Sabbath!” Those were her words, weren’t they?’

Maximin remembered then that he had talked to Catherine about his old man. He’d been stirring egg yolks and sugar. ‘Wrist tired?’ she’d asked, then stuck her finger in the mixture and licked it. ‘Jesus!’ she’d said blasphemously, ‘it’s good!’ and he had recited the Virgin’s words.

The bishop was remembering them too, for he had been watching through a perforated screen in the Diotallevi’s dressing room.

‘This,’ she told him, ‘is where the stenographer will sit.’

Reluctantly, for he found the arrangements distasteful, he put his eye to the screen and heard the girl ask ‘… tired?’

‘Never too tired for action!’

‘Here’s
where that’s needed!’ The girl set the bowl between the soldier’s knees and dodged away, laughing.

The monotony of sexual play was a penance to spies. The bishop sighed. He had voiced scruples about the unseemly endeavour to Martelli and been withered by contempt.

‘Monsignore!’ Impatience whistled in the deputy’s indrawn breath. ‘You, thanks to my unseemly arrangements, can help your friends and mine. War may break out
any
day
now
between France and Prussia! If it does, the French garrison will leave and the Council have to be prorogued and then,’ Martelli bit off each syllable as though it had been made of some brittle substance, ‘bringing on Giraud may be your opponents’ only hope of getting their dogma in time!’ This hope can be nipped in the bud. Now. Here. Surely, in such a cause, a little unseemliness can be stomached?

Goaded by memory, Nicola reapplied his eye to the spy-hole and heard the atheist father described. A wheelwright, he had learned scepticism in Napoleon’s army.

‘My father hated priests.’

‘Did he?’ The girl dropped an unbroken apple peel over her shoulder, then turned to examine it. ‘In my village,’ she told him, ‘this is how girls who know their alphabet learn the name of the man they’ll marry.’ It was a boast.

He ignored it. He was remembering one of his father’s stories. It was about a chair falling from the sky.

That got her attention. ‘A chair?’

Yes. He mimed the fall. Whoosh! It was a true story. A chair had landed in a village and the villagers were sure it must have come from heaven. What puzzled them was that it was badly made. Could heavenly carpenters be botchers? ‘The Curé said one thing and the schoolmaster another. Then – can you guess?’

Catherine was rearranging the apple peel with her toe. Revealing a stretch of sturdy calf, she gave it a quick twitch. Nicola read ‘M’, but her slow swain failed to note it.

‘It turned out that a balloonist had taken a chair up as ballast, then
thrown it out. My father loved that story.’ Maximin laughed. ‘When Mélanie and I saw the Virgin, he said what we saw might have been a hot-air balloon. The Curé said the only hot air around was in him.’

‘And what did you think?’ She was peeling a fresh apple.

‘I think that if my father hadn’t been a bully I might not have seen the vision.’

La Diotallevi’s hand gripped the bishop’s sleeve.
This
was what they were waiting for!

But the girl had cut herself. ‘Oh, ai! Maximin, give me your handkerchief.’

‘Silly little bitch!’ said la Diotallevi. ‘He’ll say no more now!’

Earlier, she had said, ‘No need to worry about impropriety,
Monsignore
. She’s to be the good girl from his own mountains. That way he’ll
talk
, which is, I understand, what’s wanted.’

She herself was quite at ease. Intrigue was her métier and she attended to it without fuss. Martelli who had known her when she was a three-or-four-way spy, ferrying between rival groups in Rome, either had some hold on her or was paying her well. The bishop was glad to be left in ignorance. Amandi, who had consented to Martelli’s plans, could surely not have guessed that they would lead to his Coadjutor spending time in the bedroom of the nearest thing to a madam one could find in a town where amateur courtesans kept professionals out of business.

Back in her drawing room, she explained that she had given her servants a holiday and told friends she had gone to the country. Catherine had been specially engaged.

Lightly touching on their previous acquaintance, she congratulated the bishop on escaping the wrath of Monsignori Pila and Matteucci, two stingless wasps whose venom had been drawn. She had herself feared for her pension when Mérode fell, but the arrangement was being honoured. And, yes, she had Italian connections still.

‘That’s why Signor Martelli engaged me.’ Clasping plump hands with composure, she explained that she was a person who liked to help others, irrespective of party.

He knew he mustn’t show distaste – but perhaps had for she was delivering an apologia, telling how she had started on her trade. First a lover had asked her to spy for the French. Later, she spied
on
them too. Why not? By then, her husband had been cashiered from the Army for debt and needed cash to set up as a photographer. It was shortly afterwards that the bogus photograph of the Queen of Naples was commissioned by the Democrats leading to more hullabaloo than could
have been foreseen. ‘What harm did it do
her
after all, Monsignore? Nobody believed it was she!’ Instead, said the Diotallevi, the one harmed was herself who was given an ultimatum by Monsignor de Mérode: work for him or go to prison. And working for him had made her an object of odium – her, not him! That was how the world was. And now he was rich. ‘
Ricchissimo
,
Monsignore! He bought up great stretches of the city out of his own pocket and had the roads widened and improvements made and when the Italians come here his investments will be worth a pretty penny! And don’t think those who worked for him will benefit! Oh, yes, he granted me my tiny pension. Scarcely enough to keep body and soul together. Yet he’s a great one for charity! Goes out in that hood the confraternities wear, shaking begging boxes under people’s noses. Peering through the slits, recognising some but hiding his own identity, he defies them to refuse alms. But he gives nothing to those who jeopardised their souls in his service. Used spies, Monsignore, are thrown on the midden like dogs.’

The old complaint brought back an old image: a splayed body on the steps of the Collegio Romano. It made it harder for the bishop to dismiss the self-serving farrago being poured over him like slops from a balcony. It was ironic, declared la Diotallevi, that she should pretend to need a bodyguard. Because she had in fact received death threats. Notes had been slipped under her door and there had been whispers from masked faces at carnival. Last spring, an Arlecchino, pretending to kiss her, had made her feel his knife. ‘There was a rent in my dress here!’ She touched her navel. ‘No, don’t talk of an investigation. It could have been the police! Everyone hates me now. Users hate their spies.’

The reproach was to his cloth. He was its representative, facelessly confronting her like Mérode through the slits in his hood. He chid himself for believing that, as an individual, he would have behaved better. How know? Yet the rogue individual inside himself itched to settle an individual debt. Before he knew it, he had said: ‘A penitent of mine – you may remember that he was the reason we first met – wants to make amends to a woman he helped push onto the downward path.’

Donna Costanza’s soft descent of eyelashes opined that there was no such penitent. As one masker to another, he had an impulse to slough off deceptions, but owed it to his cloth not to.

A hand swooped and squeezed his knee. ‘Monsignore, you wouldn’t deceive me, would you? I mean in a way that matters?’

He flinched.

‘Is it amends your penitent is after or revenge?’ She removed the hand. ‘The world isn’t tender to women without protectors and hers is jealous. I tell you what, I’ll send her to confession to you, Monsignore. Can you arrange to hear confessions here in Rome?’