Three-Cornered Halo (6 page)

It is the tradition of the Hereditary Grand Dukes of San Juan el Pirata, to be enormous. The Grand Duke Juan Lorenzo was no exception to the rule—six foot six, deep-chested, broad-shouldered and magnificently handsome, as also the custom is. Educated in England, he had travelled extensively and had, a year earlier, brought home a French-woman for his wife: to choose from the narrow, already much intermarried aristocracy of the island, would be to court disaster in that matter of obligatory health, strength, size and good looks.

He rose as Mr Cecil entered the patio, a vast, darkly splendid young man, and held out a glittering hand. “Mr Cecil—a pleasure to see you. Ma Belle—je te presente Monsieur Cecil: je t'ai parlé de lui.”

Great, luminous blue eyes looked out from a pale, a disenchanted face, crowned with a wealth of smooth, corn-coloured hair. She held out a hand as cool and flawless, and as impersonal, as ivory. “Enchautée, Monsieur.” Her figure was narrow, but within its strait confines, softly curved; and Mr Cecil, earnestly practising, even in his thoughts, his latest idiom, found himself reflecting that odds fish, upon his soul and various other exclamations à la Congreve, 'twould be prodigiously entertaining, he warranted himself, to design her clothes for her. An attendant brought glasses and a bottle of pink champagne. With an affectation of almost Eastern modesty, she waited on her guest, handing him the wide glass with a grave inclination of her golden head; and then, bowing slightly also to her husband, was gone—slipping away from them through the dreaming cloisters almost before they knew she had left them. From a neighbouring patio came a sudden chitter-chatter of French, a burst of laughter, a sudden hush, a scutter of scampering high heels. “The Grand Duchess alleviates her exile with a succession of visitors from home,” said El Exaltida. “She appears to order them in batches, as she does her French gloves—but with rather less discrimination: she is fond of gloves.” Still, they were charming little creatures, he conceded; like a flock of humming-birds, flitting, so pretty and brightly coloured, through the palace gardens; and only rather tediously gay. “And all so much the same: this time next week, another selection arrives, and I do assure you they will be indistinguishable from these.” He sighed. “But you, Mr Cecil—tell me about yourself. How fares the Hipline?”

Not
vastly well, acknowledged Mr Cecil. And it was worrying. In fact, that was one of the reasons he was here. “One must get some new ideas. For your sake and mine, I'd like them to be Juanese—something to follow on the Hipline. But stap me, if I can think just
what!
” He eyed the Grand Duke hopefully, but ‘stap me' appeared to have made no great impression. “And they've got used to San Juan now. We need something new, some sort of a fillip to get them all talking about the island again.”

The Grand Duke leaned back indolently on the cool marble seat, his arms outstretched along the back of it, the rings a sparkle of ice and fire on his enormous hands. “What sort of a fillip?”

“Well … I'd thought of going to El Margherita, she wore a head veil, didn't she? and a sort of loose gown …? Or yashmaks, even.” But he dismissed yashmaks, so messy in restaurants; and anyway, Juanita had not affected the yashmak, though, privately, Mr Cecil thought it might have been an advantage if she had. And that brought him to moustaches. Could one possibly bring the moustache back into fashion? In Victorian days, it had been much admired, a little fine down on the feminine upper lip.… But these things were tricks of the mode, gimmicks for the boutiques and the cosmeticists, what one wanted was something revolutionary, another
line.
Juanita's long, loose dress, for example, caught round the waist by a girdle?—and then, perhaps, by head-dress or hair-do, some suggestion of a halo.…? “But, Exaltida, you'd have to get Juanita canonised first.”

The indolence was the indolence of the great cats that lie softly relaxed in the green jungle sunshine, every muscle and nerve controlled in readiness to spring. El Exaltida shot forward his great head and looked at Mr Cecil from under suddenly threatening black brows. “Why do you say that?”

Mr Cecil was all of a Restoration twitter. “La, my dear, I protest, how
fierce!
” Scratch the Grand Duke Lorenzo, he thought, and how quick old Juan the Pirate showed through!

“Why should you wish Juanita canonised?”

“
I
wish?” As if Mr Cecil of Christophe et Cie could care two fitting-room pins about some old frump on a kitchen table! “I couldn't care less, dear, I think she's quite dreadful; really too repellent, I always did.” In his agitation, Congreve had deserted him. He said with simple dignity: “I just thought it would pay.”

“Everyone in San Juan thinks it would pay,” said the Grand Duke. “Some think it would pay spiritually, some—the vast majority—in cash. There are in this island only three people who don't think it would pay at all. One of them is the Grand Duchess: she is unpopular already because she surrounds herself with Frenchwomen, won't bother to learn the language and produces no heir; and she rightly wants no competition from an upstart Beatitude. The second is the mother of the Beatitude concerned: she is ninety, stone deaf and extremely disagreeable and she says and always has said that her daughter was a tiresome, hysterical extrovert and remained one till the end. The third is me. The opposing party is led by a young firebrand in the town—for pelf: and on the spiritual side by this damned old fool whom you see approaching us now.”

And sure enough, the Arcivescovo was coming towards them—toiling in the sunshine up the dazzling white marble steps, his soutane hitched up in one trembling old hand, a black blot against the shimmering white and blue. He was very old and very ugly: and he was dying—slowly and agonisingly dying of a great rodent ulcer that, outwardly healed and leaving only a tapeworm of white scarring on his mottled old forehead, beneath the scarring ate its way into the brain. El Arcivescovo, His Serenity the Archbishop of San Juan, nicknamed El Pato because he resembled that most hideous of all feathered creatures, the Muscovy duck. His left hand grasped the skirt of the black soutane, the right dangled, by habit, unconsciously held out a little so that the faithful might catch at it as he passed by and, with hasty genuflexion, kiss the great, glowing jewel of the episcopal ring.…

The Grand Duke and Mr Cecil sketched by a semblance of this ceremony, neither of them caring to risk inhalation of lingering Barrequitas germs; and the old man subsided painfully on to a seat. He looked, as he always looked, as though it were doubtful he would ever rise again. Mr Cecil, not wishing to have his holiday clouded by a death-bed scene, especially one taking place on a garden bench, quickly made his adieux.

The Hierarchy of San Juan el Pirata consists of three; all cadets of the tiny seminary in Barrequitas from which the island priests are drawn. Old Juan, finding his fortress grown to the proportions of a townlet and women and children on his hands, decided that the time had come to turn to God; and, looking round for a likely candidate for episcopal honours, lit upon an old pirate chum, ripe for retirement from the sea, spruced him up, stuck a looted mitre on his head, and instructed him to found a church; having, with memories of Lisbon and Venice where most of his business was conducted, created him Patriarch. The Patriarch, his duties growing arduous, created an Archbishop to assist him, who in turn created a Bishop: all three gentlemen, however, jumping to it with alacrity when their patron snapped finger and thumb. This position continues relatively unchanged up to the present day. Cut off from the mainland by language difficulties—and its confusion of Spanish and Italian makes Juanese especially difficult to anyone speaking either—San Juan is forced by necessity as well as by strong inclination, to be self-supporting; and in the matter of the Church, especially so. Its leaders are selected arbitrarily by the Grand Duke and since their election is for life, the only way to get rid of them is to end that condition. More than one Grand Duke has availed himself of this privilege and in not very ancient times. High positions are coveted in San Juan by none but the most ambitious; and kept only by the extraordinarily discreet.

The Arcivescovo, with nothing very much to lose but his life and that uncomfortable and anyway already forfeit, was growing in his old age, alarmingly indiscreet. He was a good, holy old man: it had stood between him and the Patriarchy, his former Obispo having been promoted over his head. Now he had two remaining wishes only: to see before he died—and he knew that death was very near—El Margherita canonised; and to see the Grand Duke Lorenzo with a son and heir. It was to discuss these two matters that he had craved audience today.

El Exaltida sat impatiently through the slow unfolding of the rose of the old man's mind. “As to a child, Arcivescovo, what would you have me do? Do you wish to come with me and supervise the affairs of my marriage bed?”

“I should like to be assured, Exaltida, that it is to your marriage bed that you go.”

The Grand Duke raised his right hand with a swift movement as though he would strike out at the thin, old, ravaged face. But he controlled himself and lowered it again. “I go to my wife's bed, Arcivescovo, and to nobody else's—at present.” Anger smouldered in him, flamed up suddenly, died down again. He knew of a punishment far more telling than a physical blow. “If there is a fault it lies with the Grand Duchess. Perhaps you would suggest—divorce?”

“A divorce? Per Dios, Exaltida …!”

“La Bellissima is not Catholic—or only by adoption since she came to this country; it means very little to her. She is young and she is beautiful: for fear of her beauty, she takes secret means so that she shall have no child. Her mother is a clever woman; it is she, I suppose, who instructs her in this matter. I have protested but I am met with bland protestations. I can do nothing more about it. So what do you propose?”

“But divorce!” The old man choked and stammered, a purple flush mounted upwards across the gnarled old face, leaving the grooved scar livid and hideous against the receded hairline. “Exaltida, this is not for a moment to be thought of. The Church does not permit divorce. Think of the scandal to your people, Exaltida; think of the effect on the life of this island, think of your own immortal soul.” And he drew himself up in quavering dignity and repeated, heartsick and afraid: “It is unthinkable. I speak to you with the voice of our Holy Mother Church: it is impossible that you should resort to divorce.”

“That is what the Grand Duchess is relying on,” said El Exaltida; and his hands relaxed like the paws of a cat releasing a claw-marked mouse and letting it go. “Very well, Archbishop. A child will come when God—and La Bellissima's mama—see fit. So that is the end of that. What else was there?”

What else but the matter of El Margherita? “The question of applying to the Pope is in the hands of the Patriarch.”

“When I speak to El Patriarca, he says it is for you, Exaltida, to decide.”

“Very well, then, you may safely leave it between the two of us.”

“But you do nothing. Sometimes I almost think,” said the old man, fretfully, “that I should write to Rome myself.”

“You would be exceedingly ill-advised to do so,” said the Grand Duke; and his voice was warm black treacle with vitriol in it.

The Arcivescovo shrugged his gaunt shoulders under the black soutane. “He who has nothing left, need not fear to lose it. If I thought I could do good, I would try. But I know nothing of these things, not even whom to address. You and El Beatitud hug it all to yourselves.…”

“It is the province of the Patriarchs of San Juan to conduct our affairs with Rome. Attend to your own business, which is the care of the Cathedral and the cure of souls: and leave the rest alone—or you will find yourself not here to do either.”

“As to that, Exaltida, threats cannot frighten me.” He touched the terrible scar with fingers thin and noded as bamboo sticks. “I am soon to die.”

“And no doubt would rather do so in your bed than on the floor of a dungeon in the bowels of the prison. You would not be the first, my Lord—and no questions asked. I will not have interference in these matters. Do not speak of them again.” He snapped his fingers with a sound like a pistol shot and a guard sprang forward from an inner archway and stood at attention. “Very well, Arcivescovo: the audience is ended.”

But long, long after the tragic figure had groped its slow way down the marble steps, he sat on, silently, gazing with unseeing eyes at the stretched blue satin of the water-lilly pool. Beside him in its shallow glass, the hissing sparkle of the pink champagne died to an almost imperceptible seething: and, before the Grand Duke stirred again, was still.

CHAPTER FIVE

A
NEW
crowd of people had arrived at the hotel that evening a ‘grouppa' under the aegis of Odyssey Tours; a little late in the season, but specially arranged to include the Domenica di Boia and the Fiesta di San Juan. These are high days and holidays on the island and their customs, of great age and enormous interest to students, especially those of barbarity and pornography, naturally attract a large number of tourists. Miss Cockrill watched their arrival from her balcony. Tight-packed into carriages, they were drawn up from Barrequitas by horses not quite so enthusiastic as Mr Cecil's had been earlier that afternoon and, now that the sun had gone down, no longer wearing hats, and descended with cries of rapture if only at the easing of their discomforts: amazed and enchanted, or condescendingly at home, according to whether or not they had ever before made so much as a day trip to the island. Winsome Foley came out of her room and joined Cousin Hat at the balcony rail.