Blood of the Lamb (2 page)

She took his hand. She kissed his palm and a moan escaped him. She moved her lips slowly to his wrist. Another kiss, another moan. Then a fierce sharp pain, a searing that flashed to shoulder and fingertips. It faded as fast as it had come, to nothing, to numbness. Time passed, he didn’t know how much.

And now this. Everywhere, every cell—he swore he could feel them each, individually—in every one, a warmth, a generous, suffusing heat began, intensified, rose. The sense of it made him joyous, wild. As it heightened he was sure he was ablaze, would be consumed by fire from within, and he couldn’t stop himself: he laughed.

Slowly, the burning faded, too. He turned amazed eyes to her. She was smiling. Her breath, her blood, her gardenia scent: he knew them all, his blood knew them all as it knew, as he knew, the cat out on the cobblestones licking its paw, the soft murmur of lovers crossing the piazza, hand in hand. Intoxicating perfume drifted in the open window: the blossoms on the magnolias, too faint for him before. Somewhere, not close, someone played a piano. He heard the instrument. And he heard the distance.

He had Changed.

1

May 27, 1849

Dear Margaret,

I write to you tonight on a matter of utmost consequence. Please, my friend, give your gravest consideration to what I am about to ask of you. I am guilty, I know, of a fondness for the grand gesture, and I imagine you are rolling your eyes at yet more melodrama from your little poet; but I am in earnest when I say that what is contained herein, as fantastic as you may find it, is simply—and momentously—the truth.

With this letter I send you a small sealed box. It holds a copy I made of a document obtained from the Library of the Vatican itself. Obtained! Margaret, I stole it! As you no doubt know by now, Pius the Ninth has fled, taking refuge from our righteous cause in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Here in Rome his craven disappearance had been rumored for months—thus the Pope defends his faith? Hah!—but we were not assured of it until this Easter last. As the news spread our soldiers were hard put to choose between festivity and fury. The coward Pope has summoned the French—the French!—and crawled away.

In the end, being unable to dissuade my men from their consuming rage, I chose to channel it. I led them to the very gates of the Vatican, barely more than a howling mob. (Barely, but yet more: soldiers still, and under my command. Since receiving my commission from General Garibaldi, your fat and laughing poet has become a very good officer, indeed I have!) They would have eagerly stormed the walls at any spot, but I conducted them to the gate nearest the Library, though the purposeful nature of my orders was, perhaps, not apparent.

Wait, I hear your voice, and you are shocked:
Wild soldiers, marauding through that storehouse of wisdom? Papal possessions or not, the glories contained therein are world treasures! You, Mario, deliberately led soldiers thence?
Margaret, your reverence for learning causes horror to ring loud, drowning out the
bravo!
you are no doubt otherwise heaping upon me for my martial prowess.

Withhold your judgment, I beg of you. I was in search of the very document, a copy of which I send you now, and under cover of my soldiers’ rampages, I found it. Immediately, I ordered them out, and they obeyed. Yes, there was damage, and there was pilfering; these were unavoidable, my intent being to create a chaos in which my retrieval of these papers would go unnoticed.

This document, dear friend, will shatter the Church.

I retain the original, and believe me when I tell you I have taken steps to conceal it well, in a place that will resist flames, floods, and the predations of the French. I fully intend and expect to employ it myself, at a moment of my choosing, to maximum effect.

But Louis Napoleon’s army, led by that jellyfish Charles Oudinot, remains camped outside the city. We were told they were impartial, come to mediate between Pius the Ninth and his subjects—his subjects! my God!—but Oudinot has thrown his lot in with the Papacy. I cannot say this surprised me; his master is that Napoleon elected President by free vote of his people, who is rumored on the verge of declaring himself their Emperor. Emperor, Margaret! Does he intend to be Caligula, or perhaps to rule Cathay?

This is why I write to you now. It is likely but a matter of time before Oudinot takes action on behalf of Pius the Ninth and lays siege. If he does he will succeed. It is that simple. Our army will be defeated. But we will not. This document, Margaret, will be the salvation of the Republican cause. Of more than that! It will throw the Papal boot from the neck of the Italian people, of my people, and be the agent of its fall from the necks of those who love freedom in every corner of the world.

But know this: once the inner cabal of the Church understands that it is gone they will stop at nothing to get it back. Thus your friend, full of buoyant confidence though I am, might at some point be no more. Improbable, Margaret, so do not fear—I am a hard man to kill. More credible is the prospect that, despite all my planning, the document itself will be destroyed; or that I will be prevented from recovering it to make the use of it that I so ardently wish and so wholly intend.

Why not, then, just say where the document is, instead of this overwrought business of copies, locked boxes, and other absurdly theatrical goings-on?
you ask, and though I shall not tell you where it is, I will say how very much I am enjoying this imaginary conversation, hearing your voice once again! I shall not tell you, because, although I am consigning this package to a trusted (and well paid!) courier, the possibility exists that it will be intercepted and this letter read by eyes for whom it is not intended. (And if you who are reading this are not Margaret Fuller, I say: shame on you, sir!) No, the hiding place of the original document is my secret alone. But, dear Margaret, as you have been in our mutual explorations of scholarship, of literature, and of statecraft, I am asking you in this, also, to be my invaluable collaborator. I send you this copy of the document sealed and ask you to retain it thus. Margaret, do not read it. I promise you what is found therein will tell a tale you would scarcely credit. You will think your good friend mad, but I assure you, I am not. I beg you, follow these instructions faithfully. Keep this box unopened and always near you; and tell none you have received it.

In the months to come, once the impending battles have been fought and decided, I will send word. But if you have not heard from me in a year’s time, take this box to safety. If he still lives, deliver it into the hands of General Garibaldi. He will read the document and, though at first he will recoil, if he is the man I know him to be he will acknowledge the truth and understand the use of it. If he lives not, Margaret, you must publish the document yourself. Remember, as you know me, and on our friendship, I pledge to you that this document is no fiction and the bargain it makes is irrefutable and real. The other signatory—my people—retain possession of their original manuscript, signed and sealed as is the Vatican’s that I have hidden. Once your copy has seen the light of day, though the world may at first refuse to believe, my people will have no choice but to bring their copy forward. Then will the Papacy and the Church come crashing down, and a new era begin!

Ah, Margaret, how often and how fondly do I think of you, imagining you intensely at your work, quietly at your reading, joyously with your family! How I miss you! The brilliance of your arguments, the passion of your debate. Here in the Army of the Republic, I find much excitement, but little, alas, in the way of conversation.

Spencer, of course, predicted this, arguing against my decision to offer my services to General Garibaldi. He takes, as might be expected, a longer view of the unfolding of history than I myself. I would send you his greetings, but I cannot, because he has, at my insistence, left Rome. My thought was not so much of danger to him, but to the objects in his collection. Planned or unplanned, destruction in war is inevitable; what good, I argued, is a historian without relics of the past, the very objects that prove history? So (upon a laden oxcart, with another following, how you would have laughed!) Spencer has gone to the Piedmont. The result of my silver tongue is that I sit in a leaking tent eating badly boiled polenta, while he sips cognac in a warm villa in the North.

Oh, but how I digress! Your poet is a willing, even an eager, soldier, but a lonely one, and apparently no less garrulous than in civilian life.

Your dashing Giovanni cuts a grand figure in Riete, I am sure; you must send him my compliments. And little Nino is no doubt flourishing. I look forward eagerly to the day when, in a free and united Italy, we are all together once more!

Until that day, Margaret, please: upon our friendship, promise me, though I am not there to hear it, that you will faithfully accomplish what I have asked of you.

Until we meet again, dear friend, I remain

Devotedly yours,

Mario Damiani

2

July 5, 1850

They didn’t roar. Flames. They didn’t roar; and pumping his thick legs as hard as he could, slipping and stumbling on the rough stones of Via della Madonna dell’Orto, plowing through the bedlam of shouts, carts, and the ripe smell of fear, Mario Damiani laughed. The celebrated poet, renowned for his love of the concrete and real, of physical facts and sensory truths, was surprised to find a cliché untrue? Damiani’s experience of fire was, naturally, limited, but not entirely lacking. Caged fires had warmed his homes and cooked his meals, had lit gas lamps and other men’s cigars. Not one of them had roared. The flames he and all around him now raced to escape were of a wildly grander scale, but still distant—though a single errant cannonball from the French position on the Gianicolo and more were sure to bloom. These flames snickered, sizzled, whispered, telling of the mindless destruction of places he had loved. They broke his heart, but they didn’t roar, and he laughed to acknowledge the fool he was.

Not entirely a fool, though. A sharp turn, another minute’s elbowing through frantic, fleeing crowds, and before him, suddenly, the gates leading to the dark, aloof façade of the Basilica of Santa Cecilia. Cecilia, patron saint of poets.
How apt,
Damiani thought,
and how marvelously arbitrary.
His choice of this place, like the others he’d hastily visited tonight, was dictated by happenstance: all were churches on the path from his home to the river, and his little notebook of praise poems already held a page celebrating each. Damiani creaked open the courtyard gate, closed it behind, and stood panting. Perspiration dripped from his brow. He wiped it with his sleeve, grinning to think how horrified Spencer would be by the gesture. Damiani, a year a rough soldier, would have to relearn gentlemanly ways when he reached the North. As his breathing slowed he crept across the courtyard, keeping to the shadows.

This was the last place he’d visit tonight. Six times already, Damiani had torn poems from the notebook and concealed them. Across the bottom of five he’d block-printed five letters with an artist’s lead—inelegant but serviceable, and it was wartime, after all—and he’d hidden each where it would be safe for as long as it would need to be. Here in Santa Cecilia, he’d do something different. The page from his notebook that he’d hide here held no poem. It bore only the last five block letters, the final pieces of the puzzle.