The Judas Cloth (47 page)

‘And promised you a little present.’

‘
Bien
sûr
!’

‘I see! Well … will you sing me one of your songs?’ He was wondering whether a little sin might not keep off worse. Clearly, Jeanne, a plucked rose, would suffer little in the process.

‘What would Monsieur like?’

But she didn’t know the songs he named. Meanwhile, his hand was somehow lured inside her bodice, to feel the caky resilience of
gooseflesh
, and he grew a little sad to find how simple things could be and what an infinity of tender consolation lay in cuddling this adaptable creature who could be a gipsy – she was dressed as one – or nymph or peasant as the evening’s bill required.

He was, it seemed though, too slow in his dalliance.

‘Better look slippy,’ she warned, ‘if you want to take your seat by the time the curtain goes up.’

Then she drew the pins from her topknot and shook out her hair, releasing a smell which he found moving and reminiscent, somehow, of childhood kitchens. It was a little fatty, a bit like the coat of a dog, and the mood was comfortably domestic as she suddenly swept it up again and twisted it in a knot. This was a teasing move. Hurry, it implied, or I’ll shut up shop. Next she asked him to help her stick back her hairpins. There was no mirror.

‘There!’ she directed. ‘No. More to the left – Jesus! What was that?’

He had imagined it might be to do with the opera – a thunder sheet perhaps? But: no, she told him.
No
!

There was another explosion. Then another and another and sounds of shattering glass.

‘Let’s go!’

This, he saw, was the real Jeanne who had shed her stagy manner and bundled him out the door in seconds. Down the wooden stairs they raced, but were stopped at the corner leading to the rue le Pelletier. Mounted soldiers had closed off the entrance. Horses reared. Carriages were backed up. Someone shouted that the lights in front of the Opera
House had been shattered. People hung out of carriage windows arguing.

‘They’ve killed the Emperor!’

‘Who?’

‘English bombers!’

A
sergeant
de
ville
shouted, ‘Everyone off the streets!’ The wounded were to be taken to an apothecary’s shop. ‘Clear the way,’ he yelled.

‘Come on!’ Jeanne drew her customer into a café just as the shutters came down.

Here too the news was garbled. Customers drank spirits to restore themselves and someone came in with a report that the latest detonation had been nothing but a pistol shot, as a horse was put out of pain. So how many injuries were there? Nobody knew. There was so much fraternising of every sort that Prospero was unworried about being seen with Jeanne.

Now the shutters were opened again and a man came in who claimed he had seen everything. An eyewitness! So,
was
the Emperor hurt? No, said the man, he had escaped miraculously. A bit of debris had made a hole in his hat. The Empress had a scratch in her face. That was all. The bombs, thrown under the carriage, had exploded sideways so it was the escort which took the brunt.

Jeanne wanted to see if she could get in the stage door. Prospero followed her doubtfully and again they were stopped. Two policemen were on duty and with them was Monsieur Angelo who drew Prospero aside. ‘It was Italians,’ he whispered. ‘Not English. I just heard from the police. A man’s been arrested. He’s been babbling, giving names and they’re all Italians. About a dozen people were killed.’ Monsieur Angelo shook his head. He was white as paper. There would be trouble now for the rest of us – not for gentlemen like your Excellency, but for ordinary Italians. ‘How,’ he remembered his professional duties, ‘did your Excellency like Jeanne? You should come back when things are quieter. She’s a nice girl. Ah, and here she is. Everything all right, Jeanne?’

‘Yes.’ Pertly, ‘All present and accounted for!’

She was her old self, Prospero saw. Her professional self. And with the perception came a nausea which he recognised as guilt, though about what or whom he no longer knew. It was a private, personal, secular guilt and possessed him like a fever – he was shivering – and, to propitiate it, he slipped money to Jeanne and some to Angelo who took it without protest. The performance would go on, he told his client. The imperial couple had to show they weren’t intimidated. But His
Excellency must go round to the front. No need to hurry. The curtain would be late rising.

Back in the street, opera-goers’ carriages now edged forward in response to a signal from the
sergeant
de
ville.
Pale faces gleamed behind glass. Here, boxed in a convoy, was
le
tout
Paris
,
the fine flower of the Second Empire which, for all it knew, was being borne to its own funeral. The last revolution in these streets had been exactly ten years ago. While thinking this, Prospero felt two arms flung about his neck. It was Jeanne who, finding he had given more than she expected, had run out to thank him. ‘You’re a generous little padre,’ she cried, excited into indiscretion. ‘Come and see me again!’ And exuberantly kissed him on the mouth.

Over her shoulder, while still imprisoned by her hug, he found himself within inches of a carriage windowpane through which the alarmed, beautiful, astounded eyes of Dominique de Menou stared at him in shock.

DESPERADOES STRIKE AT CROWNED HEADS. After an early appearance among the telegraphic dispatches, this item was to move to the front page of the
Giornale
di
Roma
,
where it soon squeezed out THE RELIEF OF LUCKNOW, a topic which had enjoyed pride of place for weeks because, being of no interest to anyone, it gave no trouble to the censors. By contrast, the new story’s implications were entirely favourable to the Pope’s regime and the
Giornale
,
making the most of this rare circumstance, was soon able to announce that the miscreants had brought their murderous hand grenades to Paris from London, and a little later, that the would-be regicides were in custody thanks to the panic of an accomplice, Davide Viterbo, who, losing his head at the scene of the crime, had blurted out the ringleaders’ names. These were Pieri and Orsini.

Triumphing,
Il
Giornale
printed exerpts from the French and English press.

‘Some of the refugees,’ marvelled the naïve
Times
of London, ‘were of the better sort with plenty of money in their pockets.’ And indeed 9,000 francs in English gold and banknotes had been found at their lodgings along with a stock of weapons.

In Paris,
Le
Constitutionnel
concluded that the crime was the work of a subtle brotherhood of fanatics which had its headquarters in London. There followed a war of words between the two papers – gleefully
reprinted by
Il
Giornale
– about England’s refusal to abridge the liberty of those seeking asylum on her shores.

It was delicious for the Roman press to see the Pope’s enemies fall out and Piedmontese conspirators alienate at one swoop the French Emperor and English opinion.

‘Can they be so stupid?’ Nicola Santi asked Cardinal Amandi. ‘Might they have been manipulated by the other side?’

‘What side?’

‘Ours.’

‘Beware,
figlio
mio
,’
said Amandi, ‘of growing too cycnical.’

‘In that case, could we not,’ asked Nicola, ‘try to do something for the unfortunate Mortara family?’ Then he described how Viterbo, in a desperate attempt to help his nephew, had been almost certainly persuaded to infiltrate and betray the bombers. But Amandi reasoned that if he was an infiltrator his masters would look after him.

‘And the little boy?’

‘I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done about him. The decision, from what I hear, has been taken by the Holy Father personally. He has made an offer of the child to God: a soul for religion. How ask him to take him back?’

‘It’s giving rise to gossip, though. Quite unedifying.’

Amandi shrugged. Everything did that.

Had he heard the story, asked Nicola, of how when His Holiness was a young layman he had a Jewish mistress and got her pregnant? Then she married a Jew who brought up the child as his so that it was left without baptism. Gossips said the Mortara child was payment: a soul for a soul.

Amandi wondered whether Nicola had heard stories about himself. Brusquely, changing the topic, he said:

‘I’ve mislaid my spectacles. What else is in the paper?’

Nicola turned from the front page – showily adorned with the
Mastai-Ferretti
coat of arms – to the second where the cardinal watched him skip an advertisement for a cure for chilblains and the schedule of foreign-language sermons at San Andrea della Valle: Polish, French … ‘Does Your Eminence want to hear about the glorious French campaign in Algeria? No? What about the list of foreign visitors to the city?’

Amandi chose that, which was how they learned that Duke Cesarini, Flavio, had at last returned to Rome.

Prospero was staying with the nuncio whose balconies overlooked a garden where branches were as black as iron and tree roots arched with a knuckled clench. Lingering here, he thought several times of visiting Madame de Menou, but did not. Neither did he go back to the Opera, for what had happened with Jeanne had revealed a way of being which he was convinced could only be open to men who lived on the surface of themselves. Passion bore witness to human scope but tepid comfort with the likes of Jeanne denied the spirit.

He turned his back on it.

Once he had, however, the tabooed memory acquired dignity. Jeanne renounced grew more worthy and it was in a mood of stimulated gloom that he at last made his way to the rue le Pelletier – only to find that she had left for the country, ‘To see her mother,’ said Angelo with an air of improvisation. He, though, had other resources. If His Excellency would leave it to him, he … No?
Bene
!
Bene
!
Angelo did not insist. In a week or so then. If His Excellency had taken a fancy to little Jeanne,
pazienza
! Never deny the heart was Angelo’s motto.

When Prospero returned to the house, the nuncio, Monsignor Filippo Sacconi, was talking to an unwholesome and worried-looking fellow whom he addressed as Viterbo.

‘You remember the Orsini case,’ said Monsignor Sacconi to his guest. ‘Listen to this.’

Viterbo produced some crumpled papers which he smoothed out on the nuncio’s desk. They were rough drafts, he explained, of a letter to the Emperor which purported to come from the condemned cell of the would-be-assassin, Felice Orsini, but had, in fact, been written by journalists. Penny-a-liners. Men he knew.

‘It’s an appeal,’ explained Monsignor Sacconi, ‘to be magnanimous and help Italy gain its independence. Apparently it’s to appear in the press on the day of Orsini’s execution: a voice from the grave. The trick is likely to strike people’s imaginations. It’s a bold, not to say impudent, stroke which could do us damage. Viterbo here got wind of it some time back, since when I have been trying to have the thing censored but keep coming up against resistance. Someone highly placed seems to want it to go through. This is why I have asked Signor Viterbo to come round here again. ‘Do you know who commissioned it?’ he asked Viterbo.

The man shrugged and the shrug turned into a shudder. He could have had palsy. ‘Excellency,’ he pleaded, ‘I can’t concentrate on anything until I get news of my nephew. I’ve been going from one Church authority to another looking for help.’ His voice shook. ‘May I sit down? I’m all in. I don’t sleep. Not a wink. You understand I’ve come to you and am selling out my principles in the hope of a trade, some assurance. But I’ve been disappointed. People have begun to suspect me. I – it was I, you know, who gave the alarm at the rue le Pelletier. That was at Father Grassi’s instigation. It was a risk. I pretended to lose my head, but not everyone believes it. Especially as the police released me too soon. There are spies among your servants. I don’t want to be seen coming here, especially if it’s all for nothing. I’ve been threatened. See.’ He handed the nuncio a letter. It reminded Prospero of the ones Pellegrino Rossi used to receive. This time though, instead of individual letters or words, a whole chunk of print had been cut out and mounted. He read it with a vague sense of recognition. But of course. It was the
Carbonaros
’
oath. ‘And if I betray this,’ he read, ‘may I be cut open from neck to toe and all my blood …’

‘Were you a
Carbonaro
?’ he asked the man.

‘No. But they’re trying to frighten me. At first it was to stop me testifying, but my testimony wasn’t needed. They found enough to convict Orsini at his lodgings. Maybe they even know I’ve been seeing you. I don’t know …’ He stood up, then sat down again. His mind seemed to whirr like an unhinged mechanism. He was half stunned by panic. ‘Meanwhile, Excellencies, my nephew …’

‘It’s the Mortara case,’ explained the nuncio to Prospero. Then to Viterbo: ‘I can’t promise anything. I haven’t the power.’

‘If we even knew where he was. His mother is half demented. Can you imagine? Seven years old …’

‘He’s well cared for,’ said the nuncio. ‘What difference could it make where he is unless you’re thinking of kidnapping him back!’

Viterbo did not deny that he had thought of this. ‘We may make representations to the Emperor.’

‘It would only anger the Pope.’

‘What have I to lose? Or gain by helping you?’

‘You’re an exile. You could be granted an amnesty. A passport. You’d be safer back in Bologna than here. All the dangerous men are in exile. Things are quiet in Bologna. They’re preparing for carnival and, to show how tranquil the Government is, masks are to be allowed this year.’ Talking of masks, said Monsignor Sacconi, he was counting on
Viterbo’s unmasking the false Orsini and finding out who was behind the appeal to the Emperor. He knew too much not to know that. Why was he holding out?

The Jew stared at his hands. ‘I don’t know where treachery is any more.’

It was a bit late to worry about that, said Monsignor Sacconi crisply. ‘You need our protection. You’ve already betrayed Orsini. So.’ He tilted his chin encouragingly.