The Judas Cloth (50 page)

‘Unless I give in.’ Flavio drooped. ‘How could I give in? Marry her?
Could
I, Monsignore?’

‘No.’

‘Well, there you are then. She won’t stay on any other terms. She and I are both stubborn as mules – and as deprived of posterity. My sister’s brood will recover the fortune I took from her. I suppose you’ll feel I deserve this?’

Nicola was spared having to reply, by the arrival of their host with a loquacious lady in tow. She, a marquise and a cousin of Monseigneur de Mérode, began to blast the Bonapartes and, more particularly,
Plon-Plon,
the Emperor’s dissolute cousin, whose marriage to poor little Princess Clothilde of Piedmont had sealed last year’s thieves’ bargain with France.

‘King Victor Emmanuel has let everyone down! The Bonapartes have always aimed to marry blue blood and the House of Savoy is one of the oldest in Europe! How
could
he consent to the alliance?’

Old herself, she was a fossil layered in deposits of amber, jet and jade. Her hair, on its scaffolding of combs, could have come from some reliquary and, like relics, her purpose was to put backbone into the faithful.

‘Poor little princess. Fifteen years old and offered up like Iphigenia.’

‘For wind, marquise?’

‘Hot air! Cynics say her father accepted the
mésalliance
for the alliance. A calumny! It was his ministers who made him do it.
Minestrone-makers
, I call them. That’s what ministers are; half-cooks, half-liars! Clerical ones are no better.’ Her words rang fearlessly. ‘Can you credit this? A priest told His Majesty to his face that it might be a good thing if he were to lose his throne, since a Republic would be so repugnant to the Catholic Powers that they might then intervene!’

The old lady looked as though she had cocked a snook at Nicola and,
for a moment, there was a glimpse of a flirtatious girl. A spurt of coyness. It was as though, roused by the turn of events, she had been summoning old strategies. In the alliance between throne and altar, the latter was not pulling its weight and this aged tease was here to ginger up the men of God. Some, ‘offspring of factors and stewards’ – a clear reference to Antonelli – were not to be trusted. ‘Blood tells!’ She looked at Nicola as though wondering about his. ‘Such people have their fortunes to make, whereas we can give our energies to serving our God and our king.’

It was the aristocratic argument in its mouldy nutshell.

‘Take Antonelli’s brother, the banker,’ she invited. ‘There’s a corrupt …’

Nicola moved off. The Cardinal Secretary might have observers here. Seeing his host momentarily alone, he crossed the room and delivered his message. The host nodded and, for a few minutes, they spoke of neutral matters. Looking back, Nicola saw with surprise that Flavio had managed to reduce the old marquise to attentive silence. When he was next alone, Nicola rejoined him.

‘Were you intriguing?’

‘Promising to sell her shares.’ Flavio grinned. ‘Money interests everyone, Monsignore!
She
was ready to think of it as an outward sign of inward grace – as, indeed, people have since they first minted coins with crosses. Do you know that a good fifth of public money here goes into private pockets? That shows that there’s no contempt for it at the papal court – only failure to understand how it works!’ Flavio’s eyes were shining.

‘You turn it,’ Nicola saw, ‘into a sport.’

‘Oh, once you risk anything, it becomes a sport. My boyhood was all risk and I miss that – as I’ll miss Miss Ella who is risk incarnate. Can you blame me, Monsignore?’

‘Yes!’ Because you worship the creature rather than the Creator and because it’s our mortality which you love. Our flaw, our chancy uncertainties. You revel in our fallen state!’

‘How well you understand!’ Laughing. Stepping behind Nicola, Flavio whispered warmly in his ear,
‘
Retro
Satana
!’
Then: ‘Remember that story you told me once about the white stones? When you were a boy? You were investing promises. Competing with reality. You were already a financier, Monsignore!’

Nicola pivoted. ‘Are you here to tempt us into dangerous venturings?’
He
was
tempted. Flavio hadn’t even said what he was offering, but Nicola could sense the lure of it.

‘Money isn’t like St Peter’s rock, Monsignore. It has to move.’ Flavio began to talk of a man who was sweeping old Europe off its feet by teaching aristocrats to raise mortgages on their land and invest the proceeds. So far, the profits were dazzling and this new Midas was the darling of the most impenetrable drawing rooms in Brussels and Paris. More remarkably, he was a Catholic and eager to put his genius at the disposal of the Holy Father.

‘You’re an emissary from the Golden Calf?’

‘In this season of
vaches
maigres
,
shouldn’t you burn a little incense to it?’

The financial wizard’s name was Langrand-Dumonceau and he liked horses with stars on their foreheads and collaborators with titles. ‘He, like your Crusaders, wants to serve the Curia, but offers money rather than blood?’

‘A gambler?’

‘The Icarus of gamblers. Gambling is
the
greatest adventure as we saw when one of the leading financiers in France came a cropper. Jules Mirès, the railway king, was decorated by the Emperor last September and arrested in February. That quickened our pulses. The sight of worldly glory in quick transit shakes people up. It was Rome’s delays, as it happens, which brought him down. He speculated on your railways which then did not get built.’

‘Those railways may ruin more than Mirès. Our Treasury is still paying the bills for their construction, though the lands they run through have been lost.’

But Flavio knew this. He knew too that the Pope was floating a loan which was to be managed by the Rothschilds. A pity! Langrand should have been the one. Why must finance always be in the hands of Protestants and Jews? Flavio knew. It was because Catholics kept their money in tobacco jars, or locked in land. But Langrand was at last getting them to invest. ‘You should cut your ties with the feudal mummies.’ Flavio nodded at the Orleanist guests. ‘And then you’ll need new allies. Listen.’ Nicola did, doubtfully, half resisting, half enjoying this new circus act of Flavio’s, who teased and gleamed and dangled silver dreams of railway tracks flung across Ottoman lands and Mexico and, indeed, here. ‘We …’ said Flavio, and the mercurial pronoun expanded to embrace the Church Militant.

Prudent, but disliking his own prudence, Nicola wondered whether
he was not keeping his imagination in the equivalent of a tobacco jar. Had his work with the visionaries – whom he had
had
to doubt – made him old before his time? Or should Flavio, a more dangerous visionary, be doubted too?

He
was talking about how people must be given confidence to lend and how a papal blessing could help mobilise the savings of Catholic shopkeepers, priests and peasants all over Europe. If these were put to work, think of the good it could do. Think of the employment it could give. This had already begun to happen, but if the Church joined forces with the financier the mutual benefit would be enormous. No, no, don’t talk of usury or gambling! Or, rather, do! For religion was itself a gamble! Remember Pascal’s wager! Well, capitalism too relied on faith.

‘And,’ Flavio’s eyes danced, ‘Langrand will give you terms you would get from no infidel banker!’ Squeezing Nicola’s arm, he said, ‘We must arrange how to have you moved to a useful position in the Treasury. The Church has invisible assets – no, I mean the sort negotiable in this world! For instance, this idea of a blessing for Langrand could earn you solid returns. A title or even a medal would cost nothing and secure his devotion.’

As the two went in search of Miss Ella, Nicola felt so atingle that the sight of velvety ladies bent over cards or lazily swaying fans brought him into a new harmony with the agreeably orchestrated scene. Before, he had been watching from outside. Now, he was drawn in.

The harmony was shattered when they found the Englishman with Miss Ella. It was easy to guess what had happened, for Miss Ella’s amused smile told them that the boy knew who she was. How much could he know? That she was a circus-rider? This, though it had been indiscreet of Flavio to have passed such a person off as a lady, was no crime. At any moment, to be sure, she might, wilfully, reveal more.

Whinnying with pleasure, the English youth threw back his long equine head. ‘
Magnifique
Miss Ella!’ he cried in school-room French and added that he had gone on three separate nights to watch her perform in Marseilles. Then he invited her to supper and she, asparkle with malice, said, ‘Yes’.

Flavio grabbed his friend’s arm. ‘Wait,’ he whispered, ‘in the small library.’

So off went Nicola to a room which was clearly not much in use for there were jackdaw feathers in the grate. Here, he began to wonder whether this new turn meant that Flavio would not, now, be able to restore the solvency which the state had achieved on the eve of the
Italian invasion – and then, of course, lost. Measuring his
disappointment
, he saw that he had begun counting on it. Fool, he chided himself. How count on Flavio who was so unreliable? Or was faith called for? God often did use odd instruments to effect His Will – and manifest His glory. This train of thought was bolstered by what happened when Flavio came in with the now half-cowed English youth, bowed Nicola into an imposing, throne-like chair, and started addressing him as ‘Excellency’ – a title to which he had no right – with a deference which turned his purple sash and stockings into deceptive props.

Clearly this was aimed at intimidating the young milord who kept nuzzling the air and protesting incomprehensibly about his leg.

‘You’re pulling it, aren’t you?’ he pleaded. ‘There must be a mistake.
Une
erreur
!’
The nuzzling, it grew clear, was a wobble and the milord possibly about to weep.

But Flavio assured him that there was no error. The milord had been under observation since leaving England. ‘You look surprised? Did your tutors not warn you of the likelihood? Ah well, perhaps they’re agents themselves. Your coachman certainly is. Oh indeed. Servants are skilled at collecting evidence of the debauchery of well-born Protestants. We store it, you see. Market forces, my lord. We buy it cheap when young men like you first travel. Later, if you become a public figure – why not, a man of your birth! – why then it could be too expensive to collect. For now, to be sure, we have no desire to create trouble. But sodomy is not a sin His Holiness’s government can condone. If it were to become known, we would have to prosecute.’

And so on. The boy went white, bristled, stormed, denied and asked to speak to his host, but, on being told that, if he did so, Mérode, as Minister for Arms, would feel obliged to make the charge official, the young milord gave up the idea. He was very young.

‘You’re blackmailing me!’ he protested.

‘Exactly!’ said Flavio. ‘Did your mother never warn you about papist plots? Always believe your mother, milord.’

Nicola, feeling he had been used enough, moved towards the door.

‘His Excellency,’ he heard Flavio explain, ‘prefers not to take official cognizance of this …’

Back in the mirrored hall, churchmen were moving like dark planets around important suns: Mérode, General de la Moricière, ladies in pale spreading dresses and one or two cardinals who were about to leave now that dancing was to begin. Miss Ella too was holding court.

‘It’s done,’ said Flavio, reappearing. ‘He’s gone to his lodgings under
escort and will leave the state tomorrow. He’s too frightened to talk to his consul.’

‘How did you know he was a sodomite?’

Flavio turned up his palms in the card-sharpers’ gesture. ‘I gambled.’

‘And his coachman? You’ve lost him his job.’

‘I’ll take him on. I’m sorry about the deception. I know you didn’t like it.’

Walking home, Nicola felt the dim, fungusy streets mime the spiral of his feelings as he circled walled gardens redolent of stagnant water and throbbing with a stridor of crickets. These recalled the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. Rome was full of the one and needed the other – but which was Flavio?

There was a moon, and by its glimmer Nicola saw a startled Martelli wake up on a divan. He had had to wait, he explained, because he was leaving in the morning for Turin. Had Nicola got the letter?

‘Your man let me in. I sent him to bed.’

Nicola gave him an envelope and his friend slid it into the lining of his boot, then, with the aid of a glue bottle, stuck a leather flap over the insertion. Nicola watched the deft movements with pleasure. ‘I’m keeping this as well hidden from my friends as yours,’ said Martelli. ‘Our National Committee would be gobbling with rage if they knew Turin was in touch with priests. Half of them are mad Masons!’ He laughed. ‘I sound like
La
Civiltà
Cattolica
!
I fell asleep over its account of factious men, which means you and me, Monsignore. Spleen animates our old teachers. They’re beside themselves at the divisions in their ranks.’

Initiatives were indeed erupting in odd places, and men pledged to be staffs in the hand of the ageing Pope had, instead, begun to twitch like broomsticks. Foremost among these was Padre Passaglia. Once
Professor
of Dogmatics at the Romano and Rome’s leading theologian, he had, last year, approached the Pope with a bold proposal. This was that Mastai resign himself to his losses and come to an understanding with the Italian state. There was no theological barrier to such a pact, assured Passaglia, provided it guaranteed the Holy See spiritual independence. For the sake of Catholics whose consciences were on the rack, why not start secret talks, using Passaglia himself as go-between? Turn the other cheek, Holiness, he urged. And Mastai, hearing it put like that, agreed to give the idea a chance.

Unfortunately, the theologian muffed his mission. To the scandal of the Curia, he was seen in Cavour’s palace in Turin, and, on being taken for a renegade, for practical purposes, became one. Useless now as an envoy, he could not return to Rome where his presence would embarrass
the Pope. At best, as Martelli pointed out, he could become a decoy and distract attention from ourselves who, unknown to him, were taking over his plan. ‘Misled by pride, he’s still buzzing about.’

Nicola did not like the dig at Passaglia’s pride, since for priests to renounce that
now
must look like a betrayal of their kind. He was about to protest but found it hard to stand on dignity with Martelli of whom he was immensely fond.

Raising his boot, Martelli asked, ‘What do you suppose is in this? I know it’s confidential, but we may surely speculate. I say it’s about scudi and that Antonelli wants compensation for the annexed lands. The trouble is that Italian coffers are empty too. The war cleaned us out. So with what are we to pay?’

‘Could a great international Catholic financier help?’

‘Does such an animal exist?’

‘I’m told he does. Why don’t your people look into it?’

Martelli nodded. ‘He could raise cash for both our masters.
Compensation
could be paid and the seizure of papal lands condoned.’

‘It could lead to peace.’

‘And our keeping the dialogue open will have been worthwhile.’

‘A lot of people would be against such a peace.’ Nicola was restraining his own optimism: ‘Garibaldini, the Jesuits, Mérode … Why are you for it, Martelli?’

‘Logic. Italy is Catholic, so a
modus
vivendi
has to be found. Why are you?’

Nicola wondered whether to say that he, like the ex-Professor of Dogmatics, hoped the papacy would grow more spiritual once it no longer needed such worldly pomps as land and possessions. This did seem in keeping with the gospel’s message – unless he had got hold of the wrong end of the stick? Padre Passaglia’s thought processes were notoriously elusive and, exalting though it might be to think of the Pope renouncing riches, if he needed cash to bring this about, might he not have to welcome in by one door the vain pomps ushered out by the other? Even at the height of his prestige, Passaglia had been thought fond of unsound German ideas which could lead him too far – and perhaps had? They had certainly led him away from Rome.

So Nicola’s answer was evasive. ‘I’d like all my friends to be able to sit down at one table.’

Martelli clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Put down some young wine and let’s hope it’s drinkable when the day comes. I won’t have breakfast with you. I have to find a barber before I leave.’

Nicola walked out with him, then stood a while in the courtyard which gleamed in the moonlight and smelled, since it was Thursday, of the dried cod which had been left there to soak. ‘A fish out of water!’ he heard himself say and realised that he had been thinking of Passaglia. For where could the eminent theologian now go but out of the Church?

Upstairs, feeling too stirred-up to sleep, he opened Martelli’s copy of the
Civiltà
Cattolica
and read the piece on Liberal sympathisers. The noblemen among them, said the Jesuit writer, could only be
nincompoops
. As for Liberals of the middling sort, these were either ‘men of letters whose smattering of knowledge has addled their wits, doctors mad to exchange the task of prescribing enemas for the nobler one of running a province or estate managers who fancy that dealing with herders and horse-manure has fitted them for government, plus a mob of idlers who, lacking the means to feed either themselves or their vices, welcome change of any sort. To these join a throng of unruly schoolboys and you’ll have the roll call of factious Rome.’

Nicola wondered how then to account for himself.

A peace formula had been worked out. Still secret, it was the fruit of the patient ingenuity of Cardinal Antonelli and Prime Minister Cavour, and its terms were as follows: the Pope would regain sovereignty over his old territories but delegate civil powers to the king who thus became the Vicar’s vicar. Anti-Church laws were to be repealed and indemnities paid. The genial simplicity of this and the speed with which it had been agreed surely proved that heaven was helping men of good will to help themselves. Gold had been sent by Cavour to ease the way with minor officials, and agreements reached about compensation to Cardinal Antonelli’s family for the losses it must incur, once such monopolies as the bank and railways passed from its control.

Meanwhile, the war party, knowing nothing of all this, was putting its trust in the Zouaves and had kitted them out with with new uniforms consisting of baggy trousers, red cummerbunds and braid frogs, which gave them the look of fanciful figures devised to give interest to paintings of the Colosseum or to advertisements by traders in Turkey rugs.

Those who knew that they need not, after all, depend on these swashbucklers, were able now to see them with a less exasperated eye. It was as though the city were playing charades, for the new plans had emptied the present of reality. Foreign voices, floating from the barracks on warm evenings, added to the feeling of carnival. Songs invoking a
sanguinary, but now – God grant! – obsolete, future filled the initiate with a relieved and tremulous joy:

Luckily, ordinary Romans, many of whom had an intense admiration for Garibaldi, knew no English and listened as they might have done to zoo creatures when the foreign riffraff took to roaring in Polish or Breton or other barbaric tongues. The French volunteers were better born and their refrain had a ring of the nursery:

Some were as young as sixteen and Pius adored their company. Last spring, his health had been bad and bets laid that he wouldn’t last the summer. Cavour was thought to be counting on the Church electing a more accommodating pontiff next time. It stood to reason. If the new peace plan was to work.

Instead, in June, confounding all expectancy, he died himself: a bolt from the blue, for he was only fifty-two.

The hand of God? Or the devil?

‘Is there a chance,’ Nicola asked Cardinal Amandi, ‘that His Holiness will carry on with the peace plan anyway?’

But Amandi had already pleaded for this and got short shrift. ‘I kept saying, “
Santità
,
can we not repropose the formula? Simply submit it to the new ministry in Turin?” But no. Cavour made a bad death. Ergo everything to do with him is contaminated. He who touches pitch, etc.’

Already the network of communications had been dismantled. Mastai was uncompromising. Contacts must cease. Amandi had been retired from his curial functions; Nicola was to be moved to the Ministry of Finance – Flavio’s hand was possibly to be seen here –, and Martelli forbidden to put foot in the shrunken papal state.

Cavour, on his deathbed, had tricked the Church, so neither he nor his works could be trusted. Not even Talleyrand had done anything like this. On the contrary. On
his
deathbed, twenty-three years before, the great tergiversator had made his peace, as always, with the incoming regime which this time was God’s. He was, after all, a man of the old
stamp. Cavour’s free-thinking was more modern and disconcerted Mastai. There was something underhand about his death.

News of it had reached Rome in a telegram from the nuncio, Don Gaetano Tortone, to the effect that the deceased had duly received the last sacraments. This was edifying and the Pope thanked God. Cardinal Antonelli then urged Don Gaetano to make sure that Count Cavour had repented of his crimes against the Holy See. The nuncio discovered that he had not. How, asked the cardinal, could a man under ban of excommunication, have received the sacraments? Back came the reply: Padre Giacomo, a friend of the count’s, had taken it upon himself to administer them and was now nowhere to be found.

The scandal was soon plastered across the pages of the Liberal press while, throughout the Catholic world, bishops wondered whether to sanction requiems for the dead prime minister and nuncios’ telegrams sought advice from Rome. At last Padre Giacomo reappeared and was summoned to an audience with the Pope, who had persuaded himself that the priest must have been hiding, not from him but from the Liberals, and that it was from fear of their reprisals that he was denying the only possible truth, namely that the dying man had indeed disavowed his godless policies.

But the priest dispelled this illusion. Cavour, fearing to be refused burial in sacred ground, as had happened to a colleague some years before, had laid his plans in advance. Padre Giacomo had promised to shrive him when the time came and had kept his word. That was the long and short of it.

A sacrilegious deathbed confession! Pius couldn’t get over it. Had the count no fear of God? Had the priest no fear of
him
?
No. Both, it appeared, were at ease with their consciences. Padre Giacomo claimed not to have known that he should ask for a retraction – and, to be sure, many priests were imperfectly acquainted with canon law. But Pius guessed that this ignorance was wilful and, behind the blank face, divined a political thought, namely, that the count had been
excommunicated
for reasons which were no concern of religion. Temporal reasons! Politics.

Pius was outraged to find the logic of the peace-talks intruding into a spiritual matter. Clearly, the count’s motives had not been religious at all. At the very moment when he was about to meet his Maker, Camillo Cavour had been less concerned with God’s kingdom than with the one he had made himself. His confession had been designed to validate in the minds of his people his objective of ‘a free Church in a free State’.
Coolly and with malice aforethought, he had secularised the sacrament for his own ends.

The old pontiff was stunned.

When Amandi came to plead in favour of continuing the peace-talks, he found him suffering something close to a seizure. The Pope’s plump face could, in a swell of indignation, seem as fragile as a paper bag caught up by alien winds. Such winds, Pius now saw, were blowing within the Church itself. For minutes he could hardly speak and his speech, when he did recover it, mumbled in shock at Padre Giacomo’s insolence.

Retailing the thing to Amandi, Pius held himself in like a coiled spring, fearfully, husbanding his forces as he now must. For here was how Jansenism trickled into the Church. Protestantism. Indifferentism … All heresies were linked and he, he whispered, must, somehow, smite them all. Scales had fallen from his eyes. He had been too tolerant before.

Amandi sighed. ‘There’s no talking to him,’ he told Nicola. This being so, he was not sorry to be going to the provinces. He had been given Imola, a diocese in the Kingdom of Italy, and was to live among the Pope’s enemies. Well, at least, he was unlikely to be debarred from taking up his duties, as more conservative bishops had been, now that their flocks, as some bitter wit had put it, ‘were no longer sheep’.

‘What will happen to Padre Giacomo?’

‘Suspended. He’s a casualty of war. We can’t help him. What we can do is take up negotiations again, this time unknown either to Mastai or Antonelli. We can prepare the way for an understanding as soon as the opportunity arises. I can’t do it alone.’

Nicola reminded him that
he
was to join the Treasury.

‘An excellent place,’ said the cardinal delightedly. ‘The duke and his emissaries will be coming and going. He’s eager to raise a loan for us, isn’t he? Well …’ Amandi smiled. ‘What better cover could you have?’ Then, checking himself: ‘Say straight out if you’d rather not help. I shall understand.’

Nicola did not believe he would. People had grown passionate about their strategies and he, who had joined the Church in search of certainty and fellowship, felt continually and painfully torn.

‘You should know,’ said Amandi, ‘that Pius dislikes me now. His last words were: “No doubt you’ll do things differently, Eminence, if ever
you’re in my shoes. For now, though, they’re to be done my way!” So if you help me you may be risking your career.’

‘I’ll help,’ said Nicola.