The Judas Cloth (34 page)

The cardinal said, no, those had been papal supporters and the victim a Republican. Yes, he was sure. Smiling: ‘The Republican imagination is less traditional.’

The Austrian produced a copy of an apology sent by Cardinal Oppizzoni to Gaeta and read mockingly: ‘“While upheavals were afflicting this unhappy province, the sharpest thorn in our heart was our inability to deliver the gullible from the snares of those whose impudence was compounded by their being in Holy Orders …”’ Speeding his delivery, he began to skip: ‘“They corrupted consciences … zzzz … brought legitimate authority into disrepute … In the words of St Jude …”’ He flicked the paper with his nail. ‘The cardinal’s excuse for his culpable tolerance is that he was biding his time. He writes: “
Sapiens,
tacebit
usque
ad
tempus
!”
Our belief is that
even
now
the true purpose of this furtive apology is to save the black sheep in his flock. Am I right?’ he asked Nicola who –
sapiens
tacebit
– said he didn’t know. ‘I am,’ said his Excellency. ‘He hopes to save the black sheep and the corrupt shepherds.’

‘Opinion in Gaeta,’ said Amandi, ‘is that the punishment of priests pertains to the spiritual authority. But Grozkowski…’

The Austrian told Nicola, ‘Learn this: the cardinal must make his apology public. He must publish this letter in the
Gazzetta
di
Bologna
and condemn the priests who used the gospel to preach socialism and revolution. Only then will Grozkowski be replaced.’

When the Austrian left, the cardinal gave Nicola passports and a dispatch with a papal seal. These would get him past any French or Austrians troops he might encounter. The roads were filled with them, for the hunt for escaping Garibaldini was widespread. The dispatch merely named Nicola as an accredited envoy. The message would be in his head.

‘The truth is,’ confided the cardinal, ‘that opinion in Gaeta is less sympathetic to this move than I wanted our Austrian friend to guess. My influence is on the wane and I think it fair to tell you that if you are
planning an ecclesiastical career you may find our connection more of a hindrance than a help. If you want to refuse this errand, do.’

Nicola said he wanted to do it. The cardinal looked older, yet the gap between them had diminished. It was as if Nicola’s acceptance had given him something like a battlefield commission.

‘This is the Ark,’ said Amandi. ‘But who knows whether we have weathered our last Flood.’ He had seen His Holiness before leaving Gaeta and predicted: ‘He will put off his return here to avoid the French. They want him to grant reforms or at least to promise not to repeal those he granted last year. He hates saying “No” to people’s faces.’ Amandi, now in his forties, had deep-set eyes and the leashed, stealthy energy of his caste. Nicola, he said, would find a coach and horses ready in the morning. ‘You’ll have to sleep while you travel. I’ve kept you awake.’

The groom, an ex-soldier, would be armed.

Next day Nicola did indeed sleep through much of his journey, only waking when the coach drew up in dim, fly-blown places to change horses. Soon they had left the French troops behind and entered Austrian-controlled territory. Nicola, getting out to spare the horses as they toiled up a slope, was joined by the groom, Enzo, who had heard reports of Austrian atrocities. Villas had been broken into, mirrors shot at and wine cellars looted. Did the villas belong to Liberals? Enzo closed an eye. The white-coats didn’t look too carefully into that.

Meanwhile their coach had been stopped. An officer with an oak-leaf badge leaned so close that Nicola caught the smell of his waxed moustache. On seeing the papal seal, he saluted with what could have been irony for he spat as the coach moved off.

One of Enzo’s stories was about a young girl, a glove-maker who had been denounced to the Austrians for saying she hoped her town would not fall back into the bigots’ claws. Well, what the soldiers had done was strip and whip her. A girl! Just think of it! Eyes fixed on a birch tree which had caught the sun, Enzo wondered what it must have done to her feelings about
men.
Could she ever now make someone a proper wife? They passed trees wreathed lacily in Old Man’s Beard and heard owls hooting and saw a hare. But Enzo’s mind stayed unwaveringly on glove-making and slim fingers easing supple fabrics over their own pallor. After he and Nicola had gone back to their places, he must have nodded off, for Nicola heard him wake up and yell ‘God-damn Croats!’

They were stopped again by Austrians looking for Garibaldini and
advised to take a side route. There was an ambush ahead with orders to shoot anything that moved. The coachman nodded and took off at as fast a pace as was safe on a side road. ‘Poor bleeding misfortunates!’ he said of the Garibaldini, as they drew up in the yard of an inn.

This was the usual mouldering warren but the innkeeper said they couldn’t stay. It had been requisitioned by a joint unit of pontifical and Austrian troops. Enzo threatened him with trouble. The young
gentleman
, he said, indicating Nicola, was journeying on the Pope’s business. He had urgent dispatches. See. And was in the service of Cardinal Oppizzoni. Know who he was? Well then. The innkeeper swore and gave in and Enzo went into the kitchen to order dinner. Nicola was stung by the way he had taken charge. Had Amandi told him to? Was he a sort of nurse? These doubts were only increased by Enzo’s return with an inn servant and their dinner.

‘Best grab what we can,’ he advised Nicola and the coachman. ‘When the soldiers come they’ll eat like locusts.’

And indeed the three had hardly finished their boiled fowl when hooves clattered outside. A detachment of papal troops were yelling for the landlord. They had a prisoner who needed locking up. Was there a room with a key?

‘Who’s the prisoner?’ Enzo asked a soldier.

‘A girl. A Garibaldino camp follower. They shot the men with her. They were … trying to escape.’ The soldier’s cockiness faltered and it was clear the Garibaldini had been gunned down in cold blood. As for the girl, he said, the Austrian officer seemed to have his own plans for her. ‘He’s gone after some fugitives, but he’ll be back.’ The man added, as though arguing with himself, ‘Well, anyway, she’s a whore.’

Nicola didn’t have to see her. The rush of his pulse told him: it was Maria. When she was bundled through the room it was no surprise. She was dishevelled, but it was her limpness which struck him, in the presence of those stiff, armed men. She drooped, boneless as a shot bird or an empty glove. She was prey: wide-eyed, confused and horrifyingly vulnerable.
Miserere
!
he prayed and, after she had been locked up, wondered briefly if he had imagined her. She hadn’t noticed him.

Then a fear-numbing urgency boiled in him and his brain felt clear as glass. Desperation? Never mind. Take advantage of it, he told himself. Act! He ordered grappa, to the surprise of the other two, then asked Enzo: ‘Do you think we could rescue her?’

‘Us, Excellency?’ The tide showed Enzo’s shock.

Nicola told the papal soldier to take him to his senior officer and,
picking up the bottle, followed him to where the officer was eating boiled capon. He was chubby-faced and perhaps twenty-four: young, if you weren’t yourself seventeen with peach fuzz on your cheek. Was there a humorous twitch to his lip? He accepted a glass of grappa.

‘Captain,’ sitting opposite him, Nicola spread his knees in an attempt to enlarge his presence, ‘may I speak candidly?’

There
was
a twitch. Nicola ignored it. Gravely, he knitted up a story backed by a display of his passports and dispatches. The captain, a man used to responsibility, must understand his reticence about the true identity of the girl he had come to arrest. Yes, the one here in this inn. Seeing the other man sharpen, Nicola said, ‘You sprung our trap,’ explaining that the girl was to have been arrested further along the route ‘by our agents’. The Church wanted her in its own custody and not the Army’s – much less that of the Austrians.

‘You won’t be surprised to know that the interests of the Austrian High Command and our own’ – with a bow to the officer’s papal uniform – ‘are not always the same and that there are matters which we keep from them.’ The girl, he improvised, was an associate of the Principessa di Belgioioso and of Father Gavazzi, ‘whose ordinary, Cardinal Oppizzoni, is my superior’.

The captain said his sergeant came from Bologna.

‘Then,’ said Nicola coolly, ‘he may know me by sight. To return to the girl, the interest of the Holy Office,’ he slid a glance at the officer to see if this absurdity was being accepted, ‘is in tracing responsibilities which,’ he smiled blandly, ‘I may not discuss. Our allies are inclined to be precipitous …’ Like a novice player of a new game, he was trying out turns of thought which he had encountered recently – some as recently as last night. But he was aware that his rigmarole contained contradictions. Would the other man notice?

Apparently not. The young captain – their ages were beginning to feel closer – downed another grappa and said the trouble was that the Austrian officer outranked him. To overrule him, he would need authorisation. Besides …

Nicola, fearing lest the man’s wits might be stirred by speech, interrupted with indignation on behalf of Our Holy Father on whom two overbearing allies were attempting to impose their will. A hotchpotch of feeling steamed as he refilled the captain’s glass.

‘What do you want of me?’

‘Let me take her in my coach. Now, before your Austrian colleague returns.’

‘I’ll need something in writing.’

The balloon of Nicola’s imagination began to dip. ‘Brigands,’ he pleaded, ‘stole my writing case.’

The captain, however, had caught fire. ‘You may use mine. Have you a seal?’

A seal? Nicola’s hand clapped to his chest and felt the small bump of the one which Flavio had given him. It had the wrong pope’s arms on it, was indeed a seal from before not one but two Roman Republics, but, if he smudged the wax, would anyone notice this?

The officer meanwhile confided his dislike of the Austrians. His had been a disappointing war and having to work with the Croats was the last straw. Butchers was what they were. Here, abate, can you use this?

It was a leather writing case with silver ink bottles, paper and wax. ‘Order me to hand the prisoner over to you,’ said the captain, ‘and I’ll handle the Croat. But hurry. If they come back before you get her away, they’ll enjoy refusing you.’

Nicola wrote the letter, signed it in Cardinal Oppizzoni’s name, sealed it with Flavio’s seal and within half an hour was in the coach with Maria, bowling out of the yard, while Enzo, on the coachman’s box, kept his gun at the ready.

Maria sat stunned and listless.

At first Nicola was pleased that she had not spoiled his story by greeting him too familiarly. Then, as the coach jingled over dusky roads and she still sat as unmoving as Niobe, elation fell away. As it did, he began to wonder whether his cleverness was not beside the point. Almost angrily, he tried to rally her, but persuasion had never worked with Maria. She had, he knew, seen her lover killed. Yet – jealousy nipped at his sympathy – for how long could she have known this lover? A week? Less? Until two weeks ago she had been with the Frenchman and the memory of what
he
had said of her buzzed like some foul fry at the edge of Nicola’s mind. He refused to acknowledge it. Death had consecrated her most recent lubricity.

‘Do you want to tell me how it was?’

Numb headshake.

‘I’m taking you to the border with Tuscany. There’s a priest there who’ll smuggle you across. A friend of Garibaldi’s.’ Nicola remembered this from the dossier on suspect clerics which he had kept for Cardinal Oppizzoni. ‘Are you,’ he asked the numb silence, ‘hungry?’

More silence. She drooped and it was an anguished rapture to have
her here safe from everyone except his own soured desire. His was a bruised love and he tried to make it generous, telling himself that he wanted nothing from her – only to make her happy. But that hope, in the immediate circumstances, was childish. She made him seem
perennially
backward in experience, feeling the wrong things and unable to catch up.

Modigliana was a small town heaped in a valley like eggs in a basket. It was also off his route which meant that he was not proceeding to Bologna as fast as promised. One mission of mercy was interfering with another.

Don Giovanni Verità, a convivial countryman who, like Father Bassi, committed the solecism of wearing trousers instead of a cassock and a round, instead of a three-cornered, hat, groaned at news of the Austrian ambush, rallied, gabbled a prayer, then told them that Garibaldi had been here and was almost certainly now in safety. Rumours were coming thick and fast and the latest was that Garibaldi’s wife, Anna, was wounded or ill and that Father Ugo Bassi, who had been with the couple, had left them, set off alone with one companion and been taken prisoner. This news revived Nicola’s sense of urgency and he asked whether they could get a change of horses and press on for Bologna tonight. But the priest, the coachman and even Enzo opposed the idea. Driving after dark was illegal and, besides, the roads were infested by dangerous men. They must spend the night where they were.

‘But you go out at night?’ Nicola reminded the priest.

Ah, said the reverend smuggler, that was different. He knew the country around here as well as any goat. Even so, he would not brave the dark tonight. Tomorrow, he would take the girl over the border and see her into safe hands.

He spent the rest of the evening telling smuggling stories.

Early next morning, Nicola and his two companions drove off into a lemon-bright dawn. An image of Don Giovanni Verità, waving his round hat, danced behind them at the door of the presbytery which, when the cloths came off the cages in its small corridor, vibrated with a private dawn chorus. The priest had explained that though, as a smuggler, hunting was his great cover, he loved birds and spent winter evenings making these light, roomy cages from reeds and willow twigs.