The Judas Cloth (12 page)

Amandi, to establish his independence from the tyrannical
Monseigneur
de Bruillard, claimed to be a preacher answerable only to the provincial of his order. Which? The Barnabites, a liberal body of men. He was, he said, returning from their house in Rome where a new wind was blowing.

Giving that a chance to sink in, he ordered dinner. He would pay for it and for their rooms, being allowed, he explained, to spend a portion of what he earned from preaching on charity. So a table was brought in and laid with the linen and silver which he, as a seasoned traveller, always carried. In that famine year the meal of thin soup and boiled chicken was a banquet to the French priest. In his parish, he began – then remembered that it was no longer his. He had not been a tenured priest, could be removed at will and, when he organised charity for indigent parishioners, was. His bishop, terrified of organising the poor, saw him as a gamekeeper who had sided with the game.

The two men sat late over their wine and Amandi learned about Dubus who had been brought up near here by his widowed mother. His early childhood had been blissful and his memories were all of streams, clear skies and of fresh branches being carried in feast-day processions, so that the woods seemed to come into the church to pay homage. Then, when he was nine, his mother told him that she had lost a law suit and with it their farm and must go into service in Paris.

The shock stunned them and so did Paris, where they slept in an attic with windowpanes so grey that you could never tell whether the grime was on the glass or in the sky. The streets smelled sour. His mother had to wear livery and when they went to a park, the trees were in wire cages and someone stole her purse.

Months passed. Then one day he heard a hymn. It was the Corpus Christi procession. For some reason – perhaps religion didn’t seem part
of their new life – neither he nor his mother had been to church since leaving home. Yet here, down in the street, were banners billowing like sails and gleaming crosses and the hymns he had always known.

‘It was a vision‚’ said Dubus. ‘I closed my eyes and saw the Alps and three months later entered the seminary.’

It was a satisfying tale. Even the bishop would have liked it. After that, to be sure, there had been a long wait, before Dubus could be ordained and take his mother from her dingy surroundings. The seminary was not in Paris and they hardly met from the day he entered it until his ordination at the age of twenty-four.
That
was the climax of their hopes: that and his assignment to a parish, in their native place, where she could be his housekeeper. This was their Eden and behold they had returned to it. Bliss! Dubus had been two years in his parish.

‘You know the rest.’

And had he no prospects? No. His seminary friends were as poor as himself. Did he, Amandi asked casually, know anything of what was happening in the parish of La Salette? Oh, said Dubus, the whole diocese was talking of its miracles and of how the Royal Prosecutor had sent two magistrates incognito to spy. Sighing, he reviled politics, and Monsignor Amandi had to remind him that it was contempt for them which had blinded him to the way men of substance would see his own activities! He should have guessed that they would denounce him to his bishop, an impolitic man himself whose acceptance of the new miracle had led to the Royal Prosecutor’s having similar doubts of
him.
The Minister for Justice and Cults disliked popular movements of any sort.

‘The people,’ Amandi told the young ninny, ‘are, in political terms, a powder keg and regimes which ride in on revolution, as this one did, fear it.
Our
function, in the minds of the ministry, is to check this combustive potential by snuffing out any spark which could set it alight. Even religious enthusiasm frightens them. You may not like this, Father Dubus, but you should know it. Christ said “My kingdom is not of this world.” He sends us into it as missionaries and we owe it to Him to learn its ways – else how shall we preach His message?’

Father Dubus was despondent. It was that hour when a man’s cheeks grow stubbly and his failures loom.

Amandi spoke of a new era and of the Pope who was rousing hopes south of the Alps. He could help men like Dubus. After all, railways and the electric telegraph were here to stay. The world was now smaller and the Pope’s reach longer. ‘He could defend you from your bishop. Make an appeal and I will see that it reaches him. Give up hoping for help
from the state, which has no jurisdiction over your case and sees men like you less as shepherds than as guard dogs.’

Outside the window, a crystalline glitter sugared the Alps. Dawn. Amandi said he would pay the priest a stipend.

‘I shall only rarely ask you for services. For now I want you to go to La Salette, stay there a while, make friends and become acquainted with the nuns in the nearby village of Corps, where the two visionaries are being educated. Find out who has access to them and through whom their public statements are made.’ All this, said Amandi, was to be written and posted to him with maximum discretion. He gave Father Dubus an address in Rome. It would be a good idea if the priest gave it out that his mother had inherited a legacy and they were living on that. The secret messages – there were known to be two – which the Madonna had given the herders were of especial interest. The herders were saying that she had told them not to divulge these.

‘Well,’ said Amandi, ‘so long as they stay secret, well and good. But suppose Monseigneur de Bruillard were to tamper with them? Put his own ideas into the children’s heads and so into others? He could have an incalculably powerful impact. Not just here but in Rome. And we both know what Monseigneur’s ideas are.’

When Monsignor Amandi left in the public diligence which was to take him to where he might hire a private carriage, Father Dubus’ mother seized his hand, wept, kissed and then dried it with her skirt and said that he was her son’s benefactor and she would pray for him as long as she lived.

Amandi retrieved his hand and raised it. The carriage door closed and they were off.

A gentleman in a greatcoat half rose from the seat opposite and introduced himself. Amandi gave his false name: le Père Roux.

‘So you know that priest, Father?’

‘Not really. We met by chance and dined together at the inn.’

‘Dined!’ The other man’s nostrils quivered. ‘On what money? He must be in the pay of the Jacobins! I’m from his old parish. He and his mother are jumped-up peasants of the sort who use the Church to raise themselves from their ordained station in life – ha, ordained is right!’ The man’s laugh was a gulp of surprise at his own pun. Dubus, he told Amandi, had organised food collections and a co-operative shop. ‘Gave the poor ideas. We know the dangers of that! Besides, we guessed from
the first that he was stealing half the proceeds
and
teaching them to do the same. He was quite brazen about it. In the public pulpit he said it was no sin for a starving man to steal food. Just think of it! He was issuing a licence to brigands. Anyway, the outcome was that shortly after that a householder fired a warning shot to scare an intruder who was climbing along his roof, and the thief took fright and fell. He was a child: the sort thieves use to send through narrow apertures. His neck was broken. There was bad feeling in the village – but whose fault was it? You tell me, Father. You’re a priest.’

Amandi shook his head sadly.

‘The evil counsellor’s, that’s whose,’ said the man in the greatcoat venomously.

‘Were you the householder?’ Amandi risked. ‘Did you denounce him to the bishop?’

The man’s face tightened. ‘Ah, so he told you that? I thought he might have seen me.’

‘No, no. I guessed it. I can see how your anger is tormenting you. Underneath it, you must be feeling something quite different.’

‘Feelings,’ said the man, ‘don’t come into this. The Church has too much truck with feelings. It’s a fad and a weakness.’

Nicola Santi had begun to visit the apartment of a priest who needed a clever student to assist his secretary. The visits were forays into a world of singularity and possible loneliness. For Don Eugenio, unlike the Jesuits, had his own household. Nicola observed it with a zoologist’s care.

In its hall were two crackled, smoky portraits of Don Eugenio’s parents wearing black dresses and powdered wigs. They were got up like this because the father had been a papal employee who, though free to marry, was, according to the convention of the day, expected to wear clerical dress. The wife may have thought of herself as belonging to the prelacy in a subsidiary way.

The apartment was almost as dim as the portraits. Its windows were made up of small panes of beer-coloured glass. To Nicola, the tinted air seemed thick with domestic promise for it was the colour of the cake which he was sometimes given on arrival. The walls were hung with yellow damask which yielded pleasantly to the touch. Sometimes, surreptitiously, he tried on Don Eugenio’s three-cornered hat.

It was in the study, under the eye of a grimy bust of Pope Pius VII,
that the secretary, Don Federico, briefed him on what he must know before he could be put to work.

Today Don Federico’s lesson was about sealing wax: mode of application, removal of stains therefrom, and dimension of seals. There were six sizes in use at the Secretariat of State to which Don Eugenio was attached. Of these the largest was for official use, the next for letters to a correspondent of a rank below that of the signatory. The third was for a correspondent of almost equal but still inferior rank, the fourth for equals, the fifth for superiors, while the smallest was for letters to a pope or king.

‘One makes oneself small when dealing with the great‚’ explained Don Federico, who was stirred by the order typified in these distinctions. He left Nicola to memorise them.

Picking up a quill pen, Nicola began instead to sketch a letter to Bishop Amandi.

‘
Illustrissimus
et
Reverendissimus
,’
he wrote. An earlier lesson with Don Federico had turned on the distinctions between men eligible to be so addressed and those who could be called
Excellentia
Reverendissima
or, more grandly, given all three titles at once.

Here his pen made a bashful blot which he at once made into a doodle, thus spoiling the letter which was a doodle too since he would never dare send it. Folding it up, he tore it into bits.

In this bachelor establishment, everyone petted Nicola who was greedy for affection and sought it with shy, thrusting moves. Even small kindnesses encouraged his hopes which throve on very little, just as eggs can be warmed and hatched in an invalid’s bed.

He felt able to talk openly to Don Eugenio.

‘Your father was a married abate then?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know who mine was. I’m sure it wasn’t Santi, the notary. I think he must have been paid to let me have his name. He’s dead now. But he never showed any interest in me. Never visited.’

Don Eugenio did not contradict this.

‘I’ve wondered if my father was a bandit or a headsman: someone
people think I wouldn’t want to know about.’ Nicola waited, then: ‘Or a priest. I’d be an embarrassment then. And I wouldn’t be able to be one myself. They don’t want the illegitimate.’

Don Eugenio didn’t answer and Nicola began to wonder whether he might be thinking that Nicola thought
he
was his father!
Oddio
!
How mortifying! Nicola pretended to examine his shoe. Embarrassment over his error deepened with the thought that it might not be one. After moments of shy, suppressed turmoil, he shot a look at the man’s face and was relieved and disappointed by his smile.

‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said Don Eugenio. ‘Innumerable illegitimate men have become priests and bishops. Besides, you have Santi’s name.’

‘You think I should stop wondering?’

‘Just be ready to accept what comes – or doesn’t. It will matter less soon. You’re at the age when young men leave their families, at least in spirit. They fly with their own wings.’

It was spring. The Feast of the Epiphany had come and gone. Its lights had smudged the sky with a reflected radiance, and a din of tin whistles floated teasingly into the embattled Collegio. Were they omens? Perhaps, for within days a plague of revolutions was sweeping Europe. First Palermo revolted, then Paris, then Vienna, and when Milan followed suit it appealed for help to rid the peninsula of Austrian rule. Inflamed by example, an invigorated
mobile
vulgus
was soon enjoying the mild weather in the Roman streets. Threats to burn the Collegio were again flung in. They were written on scaps of paper wrapped around stones.

‘They’ll do it yet.’

The porter spoke with zest. A martyr’s death offered a man in his nineties the best of both worlds. ‘If Austria sends troops to restore order, that lot out there will make a real revolution!’ With the side of his hand, he guillotined himself in mime. ‘What
we
are is bait.’

‘Hark at them.’ Martelli cocked an ear. ‘They’ve no idea why they’re shouting. The
piazze
,’
he said, ‘are controlled from certain
palazzi
.’
He was disillusioned. It seemed his cousin’s friends might be outflanked. Rival groups were fighting for possession of a revolution which had not yet happened.

A number of pupils had been withdrawn from the school, but this only made the Father Prefect more exalted. He spoke of those left as ‘the faithful’. ‘Blessed are you‚’ he quoted, ‘when men persecute you and, speaking falsely, say all manner of evil against you for my sake.’ It did not occur to him that this blessing might not appeal to the families of young boys. Once, he raised the knot of his hands to intone: ‘Oh God whose only Son annihilated himself to help a world in perdition, should we not accept your will if you decide to annihilate our Society?’