The Judas Cloth (5 page)

‘In the café yesterday,’ said Nardoni, ‘the topic was Your Lordship’s tiff with Monsignor Folicardi.’

Mastai’s ringed hand flashed a benediction and he leaned towards the door. A flunkey opened it and Nardoni found himself outside.

Since then he had been reviewing the conversation. ‘He says you’re one,’ could have been a chance bull’s-eye. Had he flinched? The crux of the matter was that Nardoni was on the payroll of Vienna as well as Rome and Rome mustn’t know it. If Gambara too was working for Austria …

Now, standing outside the bishop’s palace he pulled the bell-pull and realised too late that he had prepared nothing to say. Never mind. He’d feel his way. Discover just what Gambara had said about him – if he’d said anything. The bishop might have been chancing his arm.

Frighten him, he thought. ‘We’re worried, Monsignore,’ he might warn. ‘Conspirators are in touch with Vienna. There’s a move to detach this part of the state from the Holy Father’s dominions and attach it to the Empire. Has nobody mentioned Austria lately in your lordship’s hearing? Her enlightened policies? How much better off her subjects are? No? Not even Signor Gambara? I ask because we have reason to believe …’ That would do. Again and with greater assurance the lieutenant pulled the bell.

The footman who finally came to the door said that Monsignore was in Fognano conducting a retreat for the nuns. He wouldn’t be back for three days.

Three days! The lieutenant walked back across the square. Three nights! Pausing at the apothecary’s shop, he decided to buy a bottle of laudanum.

They were hot days and the bishop returned from his journey in a paste of dust and sweat. His clothes clung to him and his mind was dizzy with the scruples of women. Yet he was good with nuns, being much in demand as a confessor, and had improved the health in the convents of his old diocese by insisting on better food and hygiene. Medical certificates must, he had ruled, be supplied by all new novices. Too many families used the religious orders to rid themselves of sickly daughters. Consumption was rife. Deaths upset survivors and in the
midst of all this, the foolish quarrel over jurisdiction with Monsignor Folicardi was the last straw.

On reaching his palace, he told his vicar-general who had come to meet him to go back in and wait. ‘I want to say a prayer in the cathedral,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long.’

It was cool by the main altar and he was enjoying the shade and occasionally shaking the neck of his cassock to get air on his skin, when a man sprinted up the nave followed by two others. The first one vaulted over the altar-rails and shouted ‘sanctuary!’ Then he turned and shouted it again. There was a panicked tremor in his voice until, seeing the bishop, fear visibly fell from him. ‘Ah, Monsignore!’ he cried. ‘Thank God!’ It was Gambara.

His pursuers were now on him but he didn’t try to resist. ‘Sanctuary,’ he reminded them more steadily and, as they started to pinion his arms, his protest had an almost pedantic assurance. ‘This is the high altar …’ he was arguing when his voice expired in a strangulated gulp. The man holding his arms had jerked his head upwards while the other one slit his throat.

Mastai felt these images explode into flying shards and for seconds could not put them together: blood, Gambara, violated sanctuary … They wouldn’t coalesce. And then he thought: murder, while something prickled on his skin and his vision blurred as though gnats had got in his eye.

He started to scream but couldn’t, and when he took his hand from his locked throat it came away bloody. Then he was breathing again and lurched beseechingly towards the altar, howling ‘Oh God, my God!’ It was at once prayer, query and reproach.

The men were now gone and Gambara’s body had slithered down the steps. Clutching his own chest, the bishop found it soggy with the dead man’s blood. No question but that Gambara was dead. Blood was spreading from the crooked heap which lay before the altar like some savage offering.

A few old women and a priest who had been hearing confessions in a side chapel gathered round. A boy was sent for the police. The priest whispered in Mastai’s ear. ‘Come, Monsignore.’

‘No, no. I knew the victim. I must testify.’

The old women buzzed and whispered and the priest – a small man in a stained cassock – hovered a while longer then plucked at his superior’s sleeve.

‘Monsignore, with respect, it would be better if Your Lordship weren’t
here. The killers were
Centurioni,
you see, and the police can’t arrest
them.
Well, strictly speaking, they can, but it could cause trouble and if your lordship denounces them, the police won’t know what to do.’

Mastai turned on him. ‘What do you mean? What do you know about this?’

‘Nothing, Monsignore.’ The small priest backed fearfully away.

Later, people would agree that the priest had given wise advice, for the two
Centurioni
disappeared, spirited off, no doubt, to a part of the state where the corps was clandestine, whereas here it was expected to take responsibility for its acts. A representative of the
Commissario
Straordinario
– a State of Emergency was still in force – told His Lordship that, regrettably, nothing could be done. Better not give scandal. The
Commissario,
you see … The dead man was thought to have been a – well, there had been denunciations. The Cardinal Secretary of State himself … But this was guesswork, for the gossips relied on footmen for their information and the crucial conversation took place out of doors, where there was nowhere for a footman to hide, and only gestures could be vouched for: evasive on the part of the
Commis
sario
’s
envoy, incredulous on that of Monsignor Mastai. Lip-readers – at a distance – recognised a recurring word which might be ‘Rome’ or ‘no’ or
‘morte’
.
The bishop looked stunned. As for Padre Cassio – the wise little priest – nobody thought he had played much of a role, although it was of interest that he was the confessor of Lieutenant Nardoni’s wife who had recently grown thin and agitated and was going to confession as often as others to the café.

Monsignor – later Cardinal – Amandi is my source for the story of Gambara’s murder by
Centurioni
and, while I do not doubt his veracity, I note that he was abroad at the time and that an equally good source has it that it was Gambara who killed a
Centurione,
then fled the country and ended up in California where he grew rich in the Gold Rush. According to this version, Monsignor Mastai-Ferretti helped him escape and, decades later, when the Church was in dire need, a providentially large and anonymous donation arrived from Sacramento. A parable? Perhaps. Pious parables are much alike and it is worth noting
that Mastai’s having helped Louis Napoleon escape the Austrians in 1831 is sometimes linked to the help the future emperor was to give the future pope. Men who inspire gratitude do better in life than those who don’t.

Common to both versions of the murder-story is the account of the bishop being splashed with a dying man’s blood: a baptism which leads to his looking differently thereafter on the world around him. What is unquestioned is that for years after this he shunned politics and that, although, in 1840, he duly received a cardinal’s hat, he continued to live as quietly as a
porporato
could.

Naturally, he continued to receive news from the capital where, apart from spies and manufacturers of lace-trimmings, the most active citizens were those who hoped to topple the regime and men like my uncle who were labouring to prop it up. The latter were regularly lampooned in squibs stuck on the broken marble torso known as ‘Pasquino’, the ‘protester’s patron’, which stood outside Palazzo Braschi.

The pasquinade, never a subtle genre, grew crude towards the end and I am bound to say that the fault lay with the regime which by now suffered from a touch of rigor mortis. Panic stiffened it. Respect was on the ebb and on the via Pia, at the hour of the promenade, irreverence could be detected in many of the looks cast at the eminent
porporati
who descended from gilt-trimmed carriages to read their breviaries and stretch their red-stockinged legs.

‘What’s needed,’ murmured the disaffected, ‘is a dose of a different sort of red.’

Outside ecclesiastical hatters, swinging replicas of behatted heads, stirred bloody associations and so did the trunkless wooden forms inside the shops on which red skull caps were displayed.

Few, to be sure, gave thought to such signals, and hatters went on doing a thriving trade with men whose enthusiasm for violet and red
zucchetti,
birettas, damask mitres and hats trimmed with cords
appropriate
to rank was as lively as any lady’s in the latest plates from Paris.

The loftiest headgear was naturally that of the popes whose
triple-tiered
tiaras manifested claims over heaven, hell and here, realms which some of them seemed unable to distinguish, such as Pope Leo XII, who, hoping to force his subjects to live like angels, closed the Roman wine
shops. Naturally, when he died, they danced like demons and drank his successor’s health so copiously that the Almighty must have been displeased for He took him to Himself the following year. The next pope was Gregory who, being elected during the disturbances of 1831, ruled harshly and fearfully – or so everyone said, including the poet Belli, who later worked as a censor preventing others doing the same. Oh, life fizzed with irony in those years! Citizens joked and preachers preached and when agents began coming from the north to stir up rebellion, the jokes worried them more than the sermons, for they saw them as proof of a Roman incapacity for belief. ‘Cynical,’ they called our citizens. ‘Servile!’ And it was true that most of the lay population were servants and maybe they
were
cynical. ‘See Rome and lose your faith!’ The old tag worried the Jacobins for a new faith can founder as fast as an old one.
Roma
veduta,
fede
perduta
!
It worried them. At least, they thought, the priests believed in
something
and for a while they tried working with priests against priests and tried to enlist me. But I said that I would not work against the Church but only, if it could be done, help reform it from within. So off they went, leaving me to wonder if posterity would ever be able to imagine how
la
Dominante
was in those years. Rome. The
caput
mundi.
It was strangling in bureaucracy and privilege. Impoverished. Undeveloped. Idle. Its aristocracy had been ruined when the French forced them to divide their fortunes by abolishing entails. Nobody knew what to do and under my uncle’s rule it was difficult to find out since it was illegal to travel abroad to attend a scientific congress – too many free-thinkers there, you see – and illegal to discuss the reforms which we all knew were needed. Even goodwill tended to get bogged down. As the future censor put it in one of his secret jingles:

Contemptus
mundi
was the great temptation, but Mastai-Ferretti did not succumb to it. Instead, he stuck to his last and ruled his diocese with an iron rod, ferreting out laxness until his priests dubbed him Bishop
Nosy and prayed for his transfer. Their prayers were half-answered when a disaster at the Villa Stanga diverted his attention from their peccadilloes.

Count Stanga’s wife had been murdered in their own garden when a patrol of
Centurioni
mistook her for one of her husband’s
Carbonaro
confederates. An appalling thing. It seems that she had been wearing a long winter cloak and playing with their small son. It was dusk. Visibility was poor and when she darted, in what the intruders later described as ‘a suspicious manner’, behind some trees, they shot her.

It was an accident. This was established. But the similarity with Gambara’s death drew the survivors into a combustive alliance.

It is not hard to imagine their colloquies or how those counter-elixirs, Liberalism and piety, must sometimes have curdled as the pair took sips at each other’s sustaining faith. I picture them fevering over winter fires and over the mazy flicker of fireflies on summer nights. Friends from both factions disapproved of their friendship and Mastai, shaken by this, begged the nuns at Fognano to pray for him. He was still an assiduous visitor there, for one or two of his penitents had mystic tendencies with which a less sensitive confessor might have found it hard to deal. Indeed, evidence that he found them hard to deal with himself turns up in his letters to Monsignor Amandi.

One of these penitents was the girl from Leonessa, now a novice, whose name in religion was to be Sister Paola.

Amandi wrote a rallying letter ending:

Cardinal
Mastai
to
Sister
Paola
: