The Judas Cloth (77 page)

Nicola saw that the moment was unpropitious. Time, however, was
short and he was unlikely to have another chance to make his request that the cardinal’s murder should be investiga …

‘Monsignore!’ A gesture cut off the topic at such speed that His Holiness could hardly have been taken by suprise. Indeed, it now turned out that Monsiegneur Randi had told him of Nicola’s delusions. ‘Not another word! Have you got Giraud’s paper?’

The bishop said he did not. The Pope said he should get it. The bishop said it had left the city because it would be needed to establish the truth. If Monseigneur Randi would only open an inquiry …

‘Monsignore! Monsignore!’ Mastai’s headshake was ponderous but had an edge of humour to it, and Nicola saw quite suddenly that he was watching a performance so practised as to be second nature – but not nature itself. No, the play of whimsical mouth, compelling gaze, stern then complicitous grimace, was too well orchestrated to be spontaneous. Pius, Nicola saw, was an artist who evoked feeling but delivered none – which, after all, was his role. He was a Vicar. His dimension was mythic not domestic. He was nobody’s father and his warmth of manner was a mere portent. All this was orthodox and if Nicola felt a sudden chill, well, he had malaria and could blame neither it nor his sense of desolation on Mastai. From a depth of himself opened by stress and fever, there welled up an intuition. Pius, after twenty-four years as pontiff, was a performer only. There was no humanity left in him.

If this was fever, Nicola prayed for more of it. Closing his eyes, he reflected that if he had managed to contact the departing Darboy – probably now at the station – he would have taken back the retraction from him and might now surrender it to Pius. As it was, he was being backed into rebellion.

‘Monsignore!’ The silvery voice had steel in it. ‘Let me remind you that four days ago you and your brother bishops unanimously accepted the canon on the Papal Primacy decreeing that the Roman Pontiff has supreme jurisdiction not only in things pertaining to faith and morals but also in those pertaining to discipline and the government of the Church. How then can you refuse to give me the retraction?’

The bishop’s head swam. He tightened his fists to keep from swooning. He was still on his knees, since the pontiff had not given him permission to get off them and, despite the risk of swooning, Nicola was determined not to ask for it. Yet his fever was gaining on him. Even the angle at which he had to keep his head was painful. And now, as he stared up at the fat, white shape above him he saw it levitate.

‘Well,’ asked the unsteady figure. ‘Well, Monsignore?’

Later, it would seem to the bishop that he at this point uttered a somnambulist’s warning to the fracturing whiteness. It was against deceptions like those now infesting his own head. Moths! Snow flurries! Paracletes!

‘They’re dangerous,’ he told the skirted knees which were opening like those of a woman giving birth. Everyone, he thought, sees a different Pius – the saint, the martyr, the
perturbator
ecclesiae
. But the knees menaced him like the white, age-smoothed heads of marble lions which flank church doors in towns like Imola. Changing back into knees, they were those of a woman in labour under a stretched sheet, flanking the cavity where doctors grope to deliver a child. Lion-kneed, the woman groaned about the ills of Mother Church and menaced Nicola with arrest if he did not hand over the paper.

Cunning in his delirium, the bishop said that in that case the paper would be printed in the French, English and Italian press.

‘Ah, so the deputy has it! Martelli! You’re a traitor, then, Monsignore! A traitor and a turncoat! A Judas!’

‘I’ve been told that I’m the son of one!’ was what he seemed to say next, before succumbing to a fit of malarial shaking. ‘T-t-t-turncoat!’ he remembered crying through teeth which chattered like castanets before being seized by a palsy so disabling that the audience had to be terminated.

On 18 July, the Council proclaimed the infallibility of the Pope. On 19 July, France declared war on Prussia and, on 19 August, withdrew her garrison from Rome.

‘You were raving!’ Prospero told Nicola when he came to visit him in the country, where he was convalescing. ‘Delirious! Thank God this became obvious at the end! You’re lucky!’

‘What?’

Yes, said Prospero, because this furnished grounds for forgiveness. ‘After all, you were sick, full of some drug and melancholy-mad over poor Amandi’s demise. If you make your act of submission, declare your adhesion to the Constitution
Pastor
Aeternus,
obtain and give up Maximin Giraud’s paper and …’

‘And what?’

‘Apologise. It seems you were rather offensive in a mad way.’

‘Unfilial?’

‘Nicola, I want you to forget our conversation about … you know what I mean.’ Prospero wiped sweat from his neck and forehead. He had driven a long way in unpleasant heat to make this visit.

‘Tell me about the Solemn Session.’

Prospero was only too pleased to do so. None of the Minority had attended except for two rather obscure men, a Sicilian and an American, who, being unaware of the agreed strategy, had turned up and said
non
placet.

‘Brave men!’

‘No. Strays! They seem to have done it by mistake, or so they say now. Anyway, they submitted on the spot, crying
Modo
credo.
They’ve shown the way all must go.’

‘Hush. Don’t gloat! Just describe what happened.’

The event had taken on the colours of legend. There had been a storm, a bizarre, blazing electric one which each side had interpreted as the voice of heaven signalling its anathema or – according to preference – sanction.

Prospero admitted that there was a divergence over detail. Reports differed as to whether a ray of light had pierced the darkness and lit the Pope’s forehead just as he pronounced the definition. Prospero had not himself seen this. Conversely, had a windowpane shattered and fallen ominously near Mastai’s head? In all the noise, it would have been easy to miss. All agreed that it had been hard to hear the
placets
over the pealing thunder and that the crowd – smaller far than at the opening ceremony – had been distracted by the lightning darting about the
baldacchino
and flashing in at every window, down through the dome and around every cupola. ‘In a way it added to the solemnity.’

‘Lucifer’s last signal?’

‘Who can say? The storm was at its height when the result of the voting was brought to His Holiness, and it was so dark that a taper had to be placed beside him as he read and pronounced the definition: a light shining in the darkness that the darkness did not comprehend! Thunder and lightning were still raging. Then the Te Deum was sung, the congregation fell to their knees and he blessed them in that thrilling voice of his. It was deeply moving.’

‘So his labour bore fruit. A new infallible self!’

Prospero ignored this. ‘Meanwhile,’ he said, ‘a skeleton Council goes on. We’ve held two meetings. Both very sober. There are 120 of us left. We’ve gone back to the agenda which was put aside to make way for …’

‘
The
question.’

‘Yes.’

‘Darboy reminded me that one of that word’s meanings is “torture”.’

Prospero did not demur. He was weary after his journey to this remote house where Nicola was keeping out of the way. Their host – Flavio – was doing much the same, for the collapse of Langrand-Dumonceau’s empire was sending tremors through the world of the fashionable and the well-born. Pillars of old Europe had been shaken, as case after case dragged through the Belgian courts, revealing that the fallen Midas’s collaborators – like the horses in his stables, most were thoroughbreds – must either have been cretinously ignorant of his fraudulent practices or have culpably connived. Indeed, said those who chose to think them cretins, he could as well have harnessed the blue bloods to his carriages and seated the horses in his boardrooms.

Slanderous charges in
La
Cote
Libre
de
la
Bourse
de
Bruxelles
had turned out not to be slanderous at all, and Belgium’s Royal Attorney and Attorney General had been dismissed for failure to recognise this, while its Prime Minister, a Langrand associate, was being challenged to resign.

Rome was a Limbo.

The French troops would not be back, for Prussia, contrary to predictions, was winning its war against France. Certitudes were
collapsing
. Yet here was Prospero demanding Nicola’s submission to the doctrine of papal infallibility! Should he give it as a kindness to a crazed old man? He had neither the charity nor the cynicism.

Flavio admitted that the Belgian Courts were likely to charge him with embezzling sums which Langrand’s books showed as having been paid to him. The truth was that they had been spent here in Rome. On bribes to churchmen – but how prove this?

‘They don’t give receipts.’

He also revealed that Victor Emmanuel had been ready to dismiss his ministers and govern by decree. If he had gone through with this – a royal
coup
d’état
–
his Finance Minister designate was to have accepted Langrand’s plan to buy the Church property in Italy. The bribed churchmen would have secured Roman agreement and everyone would have been rich. The money Langrand and Flavio were being acused of taking would have multiplied, the ruined investors would be counting their dividends, and the Church would have its fourteen hundred million francs! ‘It was all a matter of faith. I told you at the time. It was like St Peter walking on water! But Peter lost his nerve. And so, therefore, did
the king!’ Flavio kept repeating this in differing moods – drunk, sober, despairing, marvelling. Faith! Why had nobody had it?

‘And what about truth?’ asked Nicola on hearing this speech for perhaps the twentieth time.

‘There’s no such thing!’ roared the duke. ‘It’s a discredited Voltairean notion! Reality is shifting, multiple and not to be relied on, yet Langrand and I are being crucified in its name. By Liberals. Liberals make a fetish of it because they don’t understand the world. You’ll see and so will they. Give them power for a bit and they’ll begin to understand.’

Prospero said much the same thing. Now, he argued, was not the time for points of doctrine but for loyalty to the faith which could move mountains and stop armies! His Holiness was threatened by the Garibaldini who, now that the French were gone, could be expected at any moment. He needed the comfort of our support. Was Nicola going to give it? If he was, he should write his act of submission and let Prospero take it back to Rome.

Nicola temporised. He had promised fellow members of the Minority to hold firm until their return. But, said Prospero, the Garibaldini might be here by then. ‘Ah,’ asked the cruel Nicola, ‘have you so little faith?’

A thought had struck him. If they did get here soon, then the judiciary would be in their hands and might seek Amandi’s killer. But there was no time to ponder this, for he had to deal with Prospero who was grown emotional and hard to put off. Now, he insisted, when there was nothing to be gained from supporting the Church, was surely the time to support it.

‘Give your
placet.
It’s an act of loyalty. All the bishops are making it. Mérode has already given in and so have several of the fifty-five signatories who said they would hold out. Oh, don’t be surprised! There are no secrets.’

‘Were you sent or did you come?’

‘Both. His Holiness says that all who oppose him will be struck down. So why wait for this to happen? Look, I know hateful things were said and done. But the Garibaldini will be more hateful. Radicals always are. Remember 1792! Remember Napoleon’s treatment of Pius VII!’

‘I won’t. Pius IX has made too much capital out of it – yet his own worst experience was to be the house guest of the King of Naples. Why can’t he forgive? The Church needs calling to acount, not loyalty.’

This, he now saw, was why he was eager to bring the wretched Maximin to book. He wanted clarity, a trial and a summing-up. A sad
ruthlessness stiffened him – he felt it in his body – as he groped towards a way to cut himself off from his own tradition. The confessional, an instrument for controlling consciences and inner motivations, was dark, curtained and forgiving. But the courtroom threw light on what people actually did.

Flavio was encouraging his guests to drink up his best wines lest Italian looters soon be drinking them instead. Let this be a libation to a dying Rome.

This flippancy upset Prospero, who countered it with accounts of Mastai’s prayerful serenity and the stir at Antonelli’s office, which he described as awash in intercepted telegrams from foreign embassies. The same office was leaking false information – which came back to it in the telegrams! He laughed robustly. Human failure was grist to his milling faith.

Before leaving, he promised to obtain permission for Nicola to remain a while longer. ‘For reasons of health. This will give you time to make your act of submission. Don’t delay too long. Remember: the See of Imola won’t be vacant long and won’t go to a rebel!’

So Nicola stayed on with Flavio to whom, one polleny evening, bright with fireflies, he talked of Maria Gatti’s son and the experience of coming face to face with an image of his youthful self. He did this to distract his host from the bulletins about the Langrand court cases which kept humming over the wires. The latest was that five directors had been declared personally bankrupt. Langrand himself was thought to be in hiding in London.

‘He was here for a while,’ said Flavio. ‘In this house.’

It was a time of confidences.
Villeggiatura
: visits to neighbouring villas, drives, walks and mutual commiseration. They talked of Langrand and, one by one, Nicola learned the names of the Roman officials who had pocketed bribes. One was the man who had received him in Monsignor Randi’s stead and eluded his questions.

‘Oh yes, he’s bribable!
You
should have bribed him, Nicola! Not that he’d necessarily have produced the goods. He didn’t for me.’

They were at a neighbour’s, watching tennis balls skew off a bumpy court, when news came that the French Emperor had been defeated at a place called Sedan. He had been ill, suffering from a stone in the bladder, and was said to have rouged his cheeks lest his pallor depress his men. Yet, after the surrender, they turned their backs on him, and the Pope – the news came through Rome – greeted his protector’s Calvary with a nursery pun. ‘He’s lost what? Sedan?
Ses
dents
?
Aha, he’s lost his teeth!’

The chubby old man had the impulses of a spoilt child.

‘Well, he’ll soon lose his!’ said Flavio.

‘He doesn’t think so,’ said their informant. ‘His new visionary tells him Rome will not fall, so he’s serene!’

Thanks to the electric telegraph, news now came thick and fast. A republic had been declared in France and agreements made with the defunct Empire rendered void – which worried the Italian regime as much as it did the Pope’s. For what if the French were to revive the old idea of setting up a sister republic in Rome? This could take over the peninsula! Alarmed, the Italian monarch sent an ambassador to Pius.

‘The Jesuits at the Romano are burning papers,’ said Flavio. ‘The people say so. They always know. No doubt the police at Montecitorio are having a little bonfire too.’

He and Nicola were back in Rome.

‘I’m going there!’ said Nicola. ‘Before they burn Amandi’s file. Was what you told me about bribing that policeman true? I don’t want to draw a blank at this late stage of things.’ It was indeed late. Days ago, a notice in the
Gazzetta
Ufficiale
di
Firenze
had announced that the King of Italy had ordered his troops into Roman territory and declared a state of siege.

At Montecitorio, Nicola learned that the man he was seeking had resigned from the police and been appointed chaplain to a convent. A clerk winked. ‘He’ll be safer there when the Italians come!’

Nicola took the address of the convent and set off again. All along the way French, Prussian and English flags flew on private
palazzi
whose owners had obtained the protection of foreign powers. Some doors were locked and barricaded but, by contrast and despite assemblies being forbidden, sightseers drifted about and a woman described a visit to the
city walls, where an officer had allowed her up to view the defences. She sounded amused and so did youths who had climbed some scaffolding to take a look at the enemy camp.

The nuns were expecting the worst. A frightened doorkeeper
interviewed
Nicola through a fist-sized shutter and said she had orders to let no one in. However, when he claimed to come from Montecitorio, the door was opened.

‘The Turks aren’t coming!’ he teased the two lay sisters who had opened it, but failed to raise a smile.

The chaplain, having shriven all the nuns, was restoring himself with hot chocolate. He was unshaven and his cup rattled as he replaced it in its saucer. The spoon fell. Nicola refused his offer of hospitality and told him that his friend, Duke Cesarini, was in a dilemma. He must account to the Belgian courts for monies spent here in Rome to promote his scheme to save our Treasury.

Dunking a piece of
pan
di
Spagna
in his chocolate, the chaplain avoided Nicola’s eye and waited to hear more.

The trouble was, said Nicola, that the duke’s notebooks listed the names of those who had received emoluments; but if these were turned over to courts which, alas, were in a priest-baiting mood, the emoluments would be described in the press as bribes. Scandal must ensue and careers suffer. ‘I have been wondering how to advise the duke as to where his duty lies.’

The chaplain, grasping the nettle, asked what the bishop wanted and Nicola asked for the police file on the cardinal’s death. ‘We spoke about it once in your office.’

‘Yes,’ said the ex-policeman, ‘but I can only repeat what I told you then. There is nothing at police headquarters. Nobody wants to keep compromising papers about and no file was opened.’ He added, in a little rush, that as a proof of good will, he could offer the bishop a related item of information: ‘Monsignor Randi knows that before Monseigneur Darboy left for Paris you gave him a certain secret paper. Now, as Randi has two audiences a week with His Holiness, he will certainly have told him this and Monseigneur Darboy will equally certainly be ordered to hand it over. That’s all the help I can give you, Monsignore. Are you sure I can’t offer you a cup of chocolate?’

Nicola accepted and the man rang for a second cup. Waiting for it, he fidgeted and, as Nicola drank the sweet, foaming draught, kept stealing glances at him. Close by nuns’ voices were reciting a prayer.

‘You want something else from me, don’t you, Monsignore?’

Nicola observed that the Italians would soon be here. Some, having suffered at the hands of the papal police, might be vindictive with an
ex-policeman
who lacked protection. He had friends – he named Martelli – able to provide it.

The chaplain asked with some spirit if the Monsignore was leaving the ship even before it sank.

‘I,’ said Nicola, ‘am not leaving. But I saw the result of a lynching back in 1848. A man called Nardoni. I saw his mangled body and hope you will help me avoid another such memory.’ He laid out his demands. The ex-policeman was to go back to his office and manufacture a letter acknowledging payment by Duke Cesarini of an unspecified sum to the Governor of Rome for distribution to such charities as the said governor thought fit. The governor’s seal should be appended and the date be three years old.

‘But Monsignore … a forgery …’

‘It is a short cut rather than a forgery. The duke
did
distribute large sums, as I think you know, but there is no time to solicit receipts from those who got them. As it is, this will have to be done today. The Italians …’

The chaplain gave in.

Two days later Rome was awoken by cannon booming from three different points. This then was it! It was 5.15 in the morning by the new way of reckoning and Nicola and the duke had, like many others, been up half the night. A rumour had got about that the invasion was for today and, sure enough, here it was. Would the people rise and give the Italians a pretext for coming in? No. The people, like themselves, were sitting tight behind closed doors, eating their stored provisions and perhaps killing time with card games and other indoor pastimes.

News of blood-letting in France was said to have upset the Pope and dissuaded him from authorising a last-ditch fight. It would have been a carnage. His men were outnumbered ten to one!

‘The Zouaves will be furious! Maybe they’ll persuade him to change his mind.’

‘No chance. He’ll let it go on just long enough to show that force was used and that he didn’t give away God’s patrimony!’

‘A last pageant!’

At ten came news that white flags had been raised on the Vatican and the Quirinal – bed sheets in both cases. The duke insisted on going out. ‘You stay here,’ he warned Nicola. ‘Priests will be in danger. I’ll bring back news.’

But it was days before news could be sifted from rumour.

For a while, it was believed that Monseigneur Randi had been lynched in his office by the vindictive riffraff which had arrived with the Italian Army. Then it turned out that he had been lent a carriage in the nick of time and driven hell for leather to the Città Leonina, that small area bounded by the Santo Spirito Bastions, the Castel Sant Angelo and the Vatican Hill into which the Pope and his aides were now crammed like so many sardines in a barrel. Yes, that was all the armistice was leaving His Holiness! And yes, it had been signed. Needs must. Randi was safe but not everyone had been so lucky. Reports were murky but there had been savage scenes, and one who had had to be rescued from a
lynch-mob
was la Diotallevi. Martelli and some Italian friends had intervened at the last minute and spirited her away.

Nicola learned from the Zouaves’ chaplain, Monseigneur Daniel, how, after the ceasefire, Zouaves had been insulted, spat on, and even killed by what the chaplain refused to believe were Romans.

‘Look at the faces in the streets,’ invited Daniel, whose own face was that of a man who had drunk vinegar. ‘They’re scum, Monsignore! Vermin! Trainloads of them are being imported gratis to vote in the
so-called
plebiscite! A sinister
canaille
!’

Enfevered by loathing, the chaplain described girls dancing with the invaders, and his horror on visiting General Kanzler in the single room which the Minister for Arms was obliged to share with his wife and small son! ‘They put a screen around the bed!’ he explained in shock. But no wonder God’s servants had no place to lay their heads! The Italians were seizing Church property throughout the city. Even the Quirinal Palace had been seized in a scene – though the chaplain did not know this – orchestrated by Cardinal Antonelli. It had been agreed during the preliminary negotiations that it should be handed over. But when the moment came, the cardinal packed the place with the families of papal dependants and refused to give up the keys. The ensuing
lock-picking
and forced evictions provided a tale calculated to distress the faithful in distant countries and kindle energies in the papal cause. Christ had given Peter the keys of the kingdom – but then the
lock-pickers
came! A powerful parable!

Daniel’s was a high-coloured face which one could imagine being painted by some unknown Maestro on a pocked wooden panel. Nicola had sought him out in the hope of learning something about the whereabouts of Maximin Giraud. But it proved impossible to wrench the conversation round to this. The chaplain was full of his last hours with Mastai. ‘Daniel,’ His Holiness had said to him, ‘we are in the lion’s cage!’ And it was a double pun, for His Holiness was indeed caged up in the Leonine City. The chaplain’s eyes were fierce but wet. How, he asked, had Nicola held on to
his
apartment?

It was private property, Nicola told him. It did not belong to the Church. Daniel looked as though the distinction astonished him. He brooded a while then burst out with the remark that disloyalty would surely draw down heaven’s wrath. ‘And sooner rather than later. God has already punished the absconding French. Has it escaped your notice, Monsignore, that Paris fell to the Prussians on the selfsame day as Rome did to Victor Emmanuel?’ The chaplain’s face, which was as raw as flayed meat, thrust itself close. His breath was sulphurous. ‘Even if the Empire had not fallen, it might not have helped us, for Monseigneur Darboy is not loyal. There are Judases in the episcopacy, Monsignore! They too should be punished! We,’ said Monseigneur Daniel, ‘will have a tale to tell in France!’

Nicola, ill at ease, but unable to escape, had to hear of the Pope’s last review of the Zouaves, when, preparing to deliver his blessing from a Vatican window, Pius found his voice failing and fell sobbing into his chamberlain’s arms.

Monseigneur Daniel’s voice shook as he described the shout from the piazza. ‘
Viva
Pio
IX
! Long live our king!’ cried the chaplain, in imitation of the Zouaves’ farewell. Then his control cracked and he wept into his handkerchief.

It was over. Rome was part of Italy and the new order settling in. Pope and Curia had shut themselves up in the Vatican.

Riffraff disported themselves in clerical cafés and priests who had been in hiding were starting to emerge. Some looked dazed. Others scoured the papers for signs of hope., One market day a peasant, indignant at the new taxes, had yelled a defiant ‘
Viva
Pio
Nono
!’

Flavio had gone to Belgium, taking his receipt from the Governor of Rome. This would save him from the embezzlement charge, but others, he now admitted, were pending. A legacy from Amandi had left Nicola financially indpendent, which was lucky, for the See of Imola had gone to someone else and he was in an administrative Limbo. This and the dwindled reach of the papal censorship left him free to join in the dispirited exchanges going on among the Minority bishops, many of whom now faced troubles at home.

French friends sent gloomy letters from their fallen country, often relegating to postcripts the question which had kept them so painfully on tenterhooks for eighteen months.