Authors: Julia O'Faolain
The thought made him laugh. After all, this was a good moment; the one when the intrusive dog, with a last yawn of regret, bounds forth to freedom – and useful activity. The laugh became a shout. His sense of purpose was honed. Rejecting his father’s way of life, he would be true to his father’s more worthy ideals. The old
Carbonari
had struggled gallantly for an embattled cause, but the flame animating them had been
stolen fire. They, like all heretics, were impatient. They wanted heaven
here.
Striding through fireflies, he resolved to attend at once to tidying things up. Anna must be told about the villa’s secrets, whatever they now were. Absorbed in this thought, he almost tripped over something which smelled gamily of mortality: a sack of dead rabbits. Pushing it away, he cleaned his hands in grass then, looking up, saw a man standing on a low wall. It was Storto, the fellow who had forced him to watch the beating of the
Centurioni.
The poacher’s pose was one of cartoonish attentiveness, and the only movement about him came from a small bag. Apparently forgotten in his clenched hand, this heaved and jiggled. A ferret?
‘Storto!’ Prospero pulled his coat and the man looked blindly around, then wheeled his gaze back to whatever he was watching. ‘Are those your rabbits?’
‘Signor Prospero! It’s the Madonna.’ His voice was aghast.
Prospero climbed up beside him. Ahead, clearly visible against a background of outbuildings, sailed a luminous figure. Larger than life, it had a white garment with bits of red and blue, black hair, touches of gold at the throat and shoulders and some sort of dark shape above its pale face.
‘Holy Mary …’ gabbled Storto, spiritually turning his coat – for had he not been a free-thinking conspirator? ‘Pray for us sinners,’ he begged, and tightened his clasped fingers so that his stifling ferret went mad inside its sack.
‘It’s not the Madonna,’ judged Prospero. ‘Not in a black hat!’
‘Halo.’
‘Not black.’
‘… hour of our death, Amen. Who then? The devil?’
Prospero screwed up his eyes. The image was too soft-edged for a transparency and anyway there were no windows facing this way. ‘It’s rum,’ he admitted, then: ‘It’s Napoleon.’
‘Napoleon, Signor Prospero?’
‘From a magic lantern,’ Prospero realised. ‘Poor Captain Melzi’s lantern! Someone’s throwing images on the barn wall!’
The captain had died, possibly of a broken heart, but more likely of a ruined liver, for he had taken increasingly to drink when the war, the world and his friend and rival Guidotti disappointed him. One of his hobbies had been making slides of the heroes of his youth and prime.
Storto, however, had never heard of a magic lantern. ‘
Viva
Napoleone
!’ he cried, to conciliate the old invader. ‘Why’s he haunting us then?’
‘Listen, Storto, you keep your mouth shut about this. The Austrians were here earlier and they wouldn’t like it.’
‘He gave them many a licking!’
‘Exactly. Listen now. Remember that
Centurione
you thrashed?’
‘He’s gone. The whole family is. There’ll be no trouble from them, Signor Prospero.’
‘Maybe not from
him,
but his friends are back in power. And if you say one word to a living soul about what we’ve just seen, I’ll tell what you did to him. Not to mention the rabbits.’
‘What rabbits?’
Prospero indicated the sack. Storto said he hadn’t seen it until this minute. And the ferret? Where? In the bag in his hand.
Storto gave in. ‘All right.’ He climbed down from the wall.
But Prospero hadn’t finished. Grasping him by his distorted shoulder, he said, ‘What’s more, I want you to tell me everything my father’s been up to in the last year.’ He shook him gently. ‘I’m
much
more dangerous than that image up there.’
*
The count relished the story of Storto’s seeing the Madonna in poor Melzi’s last remaining slide with which Daniele had been amusing little Cesco. ‘Ha!’ he roared, ‘that restores me!’ And he raised his glass. His veneration for the Pope had turned to vinegar. ‘Our lantern doth magnify Old Boney whom the zealots see as Antichrist I. Antichrist II is Garibaldi! I drink to them both,’ said he, although he had been told by Dottor Pasolini not to drink at all. Wayward and unbiddable, he insisted while his wife remonstrated and she, when he wasn’t looking, emptied his glass into a potted plant.
Storto, said the count, wasn’t all that far out in confusing the Madonna with Napoleon. Both had brought down Republics, if one was to believe Papa Mastai, who was ascribing his restoration to her rather than to his allies. The count stared in puzzlement at his empty glass, then signalled to the footman: more wine. He banged the table so that wax flew from the candelabra.
‘I remember him when he was bishop here. Good-hearted but emotional. You can’t rely on emotion. It’s womanish!’ He slapped his wife’s marauding wrist. She had been after his glass.
She smiled. ‘Women …’ He launched into a disquisition and she let the smile fade, placidly, not minding in the least.
Prospero noticed the wobble in his father’s wrist and the shine of his scalp through the chicken fluff of his hair. Hers, he thought, is an impossible situation: responsibility without power, the very one in which
he
would like to put the Church!
The count was persuaded to go to bed early and his wife led him off, smiling a promise over her shoulder. She would be back to talk to Prospero who had told her that he had something to discuss. Storto had informed him that his father had been spending time in his old secret hiding place and might have something there. Guns? He wasn’t sure. The count didn’t trust him now.
Left alone, Prospero paged through an old book of fairy tales. Once his, it had been taken over by Cesco and the black and white illustrations had been vividly coloured in.
‘Look at the
Orco
,’ Cesco had invited earlier, showing a purple ogre with teeth like scythes. ‘It gives me dreams that make me get up and look for Mamma and disturb everyone.’
‘Do they get angry?’
‘Yes, but in my dream I can’t help it. I think it’s real.’
Prospero thought the whole villa might be mired in the same dilemma.
‘I’m not asking you to be disloyal,’ he told his stepmother when she came back. ‘It’s just that he’s getting …’ He stopped, since harping on his father’s age must offend her. ‘He’s always been,’ he corrected this, ‘rash. I used,’ he heard himself blurt, ‘to blame him for my mother’s death!’
He had shocked them both.
‘I’m sorry.’ His mouth felt stale from eating ancient wedding cake. They had saved a dusty piece for him which he had pretended to enjoy.
Into his bruised mind came echoes of the doctor’s words and his revised version of Prospero’s childhood myth. Prospero’s own memories were of his mother as smilingly cool and of his father as besotted with her. How fit this into the new frame? Meanwhile, whatever his
stepmother’s
emotion, he was drowning in his. Pique? Jealousy? As the magic-lantern image had done at first, it evaded defining. Perhaps it was suspicion? The canon cited by Don Vigilio, which forbade those who took a lover during a spouse’s lifetime to marry them if the spouse died, cast its shadow into the mix. A lawyer’s ruse to prevent uxoricide, it had no relevance here. His father, a gentle, irresolute man, must
have married Prospero’s mother on some absurd understanding that theirs was to be a purely political partnership, then fallen in love with her
after
becoming entangled with Anna who, even now, seemed to know little of his political interests. She must be told of them, decided Prospero, and soon had her so alarmed that he began to feel remorse.
‘You see why I had to speak out?’ He wanted an admission of his own rightness. ‘His laughing at the magic-lantern story,’ he scolded, ‘is worrying.’ And he told how the Austrian officer had mentioned people reporting strange goings-on at the villa.
‘I see.’ Her soft frilly face puckered anxiously.
‘I’m sorry.’ He had an urge to take her protectively in his arms.
‘No. You were right to tell me. Well, if there’s something in that secret apartment, we’d better see what it is.’ She stood up.
This startled him. ‘Now?’
‘I couldn’t sleep without knowing.’
So he had to accompany her. The apartment, he explained, as they made their way there, had two entrances – one through the chimney in his father’s bedroom, the other from behind a piece of statuary in the front of the house. Somehow, he had now plunged them into the very sort of situation which he most abhorred: histrionic, furtive and probably unnecessary.
Moonlight was milky on the gravel and, further off, on potted lemon trees. By contrast the old hideaway smelled of enclosure and rancid hopes.
‘Mildew!’ diagnosed Anna with housewifely distaste.
‘Muffa
!’
‘There’s a lamp!’ Guiding himself by a shaft of moonlight, he got it alight.
‘This place is horrible.’
He had always thought it silly. Now, however, taking its danger seriously, he tapped walls, searched cupboards and even prised up floorboards to find nothing more sinister than bales of pamphlets tied with string and copies of the now banned portrait of Pio Nono blessing the troops.
‘Viva
l’Italia
’
ran the legend, with the memorial date, 10 February 1848. Just nineteen months ago. Shiny with varnish, the prints gleamed, as Prospero’s light-bearing hand shifted, and the Pope blessed them both.
‘It’s like keeping old love letters!’ whispered Anna. As though reprimanding her frivolity, a sound came from her husband’s room and the two froze. A draught rippled a curtain, bringing home to them the dangers of what they were doing. There were no guns. What there was
was the danger of a confrontation which could engender
misunderstandings
and sour the marriage for which she had waited so patiently and long.
‘Come
on
!’
She drew him outside, then ran with him across the front lawn and into the safety of the hall where, relieved and laughing, they hugged so spontaneously that Prospero was afflicted by a sensation which he recognised as pure carnality; cocksure and misplaced, like a bit of monstrous marine life taken by error in a trawl.
Seeing him shy from her, she tried to soothe him, saying, ‘Prospero, don’t worry! It’s perfectly normal and understandable.’ For she guessed his trouble and saw no reason to pretend otherwise. Then, to calm the poor muddled chap, she said something about Madame de Menou, the lady to whom he had made skittish references earlier because, as he had explained, half- but only half-jokingly, he wanted his stepmother’s advice, having no other female relative to whom he could turn. This, however, only compounded his disarray, making him shy even more and stiffen alarmingly as though with an onset of rigor. Poor, motherless, difficult boy, thought Anna and to show that he was truly part of his father’s new family and not an outcast, threw her arms around him and gave him a friendly kiss.
*
At breakfast, Cesco announced that he had had a dream last night, but that though he had called, nobody had come. ‘The
Orco
was in my room, so I got up to look for my Mamma but she wasn’t in her room so I went downstairs.’
‘You dreamed that part,’ said his mother comfortably. ‘We’d have seen you if you’d come.’
‘No,’ argued the child. ‘You didn’t see me, but I saw you. I was on the landing looking down and you were kissing Prospero. Are you his Mamma too then? He said my Papa was his but you weren’t. But you were kissing him. Does that mean you are? Is she?’ he asked his father. ‘Is my Mamma his Mamma too?’ He kept asking his question and, as he got no response to it – a rare event – became obstreperous, banged his spoon, and had to be sent away from the table, leaving the three adults to avoid each other’s eye.
*
‘I’m the wrong sort of Frenchman,’ was Aubry’s answer when asked to intervene with the Occupying Authority.
After the siege, Maria had disappeared, then reappeared as the mistress of a French officer and he, not wishing to spoil her chances, did not make himself known. Bowing to her once at the theatre, he was impressed by the social grace with which she acknowledged him. Perhaps, after all, the little peasant might become a
grande
horizontale?
French solidarity with Roman Republicans had evaporated and would, anyway, have had little effect, since efforts to persuade the Curia to preserve a semblance of civic freedoms came up against a phrase to make diplomatists grind their teeth. ‘
Non
possumus’
smiled the clerics. ‘We can’t do it. The Temporal Power cannot be diminished. This is a sacred principle and numbers voting for or against it are immaterial.’
In Paris, though, the Church used votes and numbers for all they were worth. French peasants, shepherded to the polls by their priests, produced a parliamentary majority which pressed the Prince-President to yield on all points to the Pope. In Rome, the Church had sacred principles, in Paris none. Aubry was disgusted. So: ‘I’m the wrong sort of Frenchman,’ was his reply to all requests for introductions or the exercise of occult influence.
‘I think you’re the right sort for me,’ retorted Dr Moreau, an army doctor who wanted to do some research. He had worked at La Salpêtrière and was interested in cerebral diseases and in the recent rash of visionaries claiming to have experienced ecstatic states. How closely did the Church look into these? Could he meet the cardinal in charge of investigations? The doctor had heard that Aubry had an entrée? And indeed, an evening was arranged, for prelates, eager to temper the harshness of their
non
possumus,
were glad to do favours for French archeologists, academicians and – why not? – scientists. Besides, Aubry let Amandi know that he was a friend of Santi’s. So the doctor was invited to dine.
Amandi asked about experiments in the hospitals of La Salpêtrière and Bicêtre, and learned that clinicians now submitted to statistical evidence what had previously been decided by ‘common sense’, a criterion, said Moreau, more rigid than you might think.