The Judas Cloth Page 10

  He denied this. ‘Don’t you see that to prevent the really wild men from taking over, we must anticipate them. Bring in reforms, take the wind out of their sails!’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’

  ‘Santi, we’re nearly sixteen! If it wasn’t for my shitpot of a father, I’d be active already!’

  Nicola was shocked.

  ‘He doesn’t want me to see my cousin because he was in gaol. In Bologna, anyone who’s been in gaol is a hero. Don’t look like that, Nicola. Are you going to be a Jesuit? Even if you are, you’ll have to pick sides.’

  Would he? The Jesuits themselves denied this. It consoled them to know that, even now, aloft in their Observatory, Father Vico, famous for having tracked Halley’s comet, was oblivious of things terrestrial, as he got on with describing the entire visible sky. The Father Prefect had made much of this in his last talk.

  The Prefect, said Martelli, had his head in a bag.

  *

  The text at dinner was by a man who had opposed the Jesuits until he saw how the Church’s enemies united against them. Then: ‘A conviction took root in me that there must be some mysterious explanation for the amazing unity among those odd bedfellows, their enemies. Hidden in that intuitive hatred is a conviction that by striking at them one strikes the Church at its heart.’

  That, said the reader, was from a speech made in the French Upper House three years ago, when our schools in France were being forced to close. The reader then sat down to his cooled meal.

  Martelli at once began a voluble conversation and Nicola, who was too far away to hear, was exhilarated by the flash of his eye. Yet the reading too had appealed. Like moths to light, their teachers seemed drawn to fatality. It was an abyss into which they felt enticed to plunge. Sometimes, just before falling asleep, Nicola imagined sliding into it with them and the thrill of surrender crossed over into his dreams.

  In more energetic moments, these fancies gave way to ones in which he rushed out into the mob and laid about him with a stick.

  Martelli was idly rearranging meat-scraps on his plate. He’s reading the entrails, thought Nicola, and felt relieved to find his friend’s challenge reducible to a joke.

  *

  ‘Souls for God …’

  ‘Holiness, you win them!’ Amandi meant this. ‘Something extraordinary happens between your flock and you.’

  Mastai sighed. ‘They ask for material things. I fear they’ll soon start to see me as the representative for Railways and Lower Customs Tariffs!’ His smile was cheerless. ‘You and I were accustomed to follow orders.’

  ‘Now you give them.’

  ‘And the advice I get is contradictory. Grassi’s, Gizzi’s …’

  Cardinal Gizzi, the Cardinal Secretary, had resigned on the grounds that Mastai lacked fixity of purpose and was impossible to work with. The gossip was that Chancellor Metternich had used Austria’s secret veto to stop Gizzi himself becoming pope and was now sorry. Warnings about the Chancellor’s state of mind came thick and fast from the nuncio in Vienna, but Mastai disregarded them.

  ‘Why,’ he had greeted Amandi today, ‘has the Austrian eagle two heads? To gobble its prey faster.’ Jokes restored him. ‘The dove,’ he quipped, ‘won’t speak through eagles’ beaks.’ But did the dove speak at all? Advice blasted Mastai’s ears. He needed a new St Joan. ‘Maybe we should pray for one?’

  This was seriously meant. Like a fairytale king, he had asked for news of the visionaries of his realm and was now hoping to learn what was on God’s mind – which mattered more than Chancellor Metternich’s – from the testimony of two children to whom the Virgin was said to have appeared shortly after his own election.

  It seemed that God, like the Chancellor, was angry. Recent crop-failures were a warning and worse would follow unless people renounced blasphemy. ‘She said,’ Mastai told Amandi, ‘that her Son’s hand is raised to smite the world and she has been holding it back, but her arm is tired.’ The vision had occurred near a small Alpine village and this in itself was a message. God had chosen to speak to the simple. A rebuff for our intellectualists. Mastai relished it. ‘We must believe,’ he said, ‘as little children do.’ ‘Blasphemy’ meant the whole baggage of modern presumption. He agreed with this. His Liberal mentors were insatiable and he would have liked nothing better than to turn his back on them and drive to where the Madonna had appeared to two French cowherds aged eleven and fourteen. She had been floating over a ravine, by a stream whose waters were now healing the sick.

  ‘I said we needed a St Joan. Well …’ Mastai smiled. What a trial, thought Amandi, if he turned out to be a saint. The thought shocked him. I’m forgetting his shrewdness, he decided. This is a way of extricating himself from the Liberal grip. For a moment, he closed his eyes. Opening them, he found Pius watching him.

  ‘I know what’s on your mind. Politics. But I won’t use you there.’ Mastai’s grin split his aimiable currant-bun face. ‘I have enough men of reason there. I want you to go to France.’

  *

  Two weeks later, having journeyed up the leg of Italy and over the Alps, Amandi reached the parish of La Salette in the diocese of Grenoble. He was dazed by a repetitious effulgence of pale precipices and cataracts as white as horses’ tails. Snow, crisp as salt, stung the air, and at one point the travellers had had to leave their carriage, as its horses were harnessed to a sled.

  He had removed his violet insignia and dressed like an ordinary priest, even adding the neck bands peculiar to French ones. The local bishop favoured the local miracle and Amandi did not want reports reaching him that Rome had sent an observer. Bishop Philibert de Bruillard, ordained in 1789 – a year to mark a man – had gone into hiding during the Terror, then been spiritual director to Madeleine Sophie Barat, foundress of the Sacred Heart nuns who were widely known as ‘Jesuitesses’. Their proclaimed aim was to teach the future mothers of well-to-do France how to keep revolutionary notions from entering their sons’ heads, and it looked as though the new miracle’s aim was to prevent them burgeoning in those of the starving.

  There were plenty of these. The potato crop had failed again and so had cereals. All along the way, Amandi saw fields of rotting stalks and, when his carriage sank in mud and broke its rear axle, he was himself mistaken for a victim of the times.

  He had managed to hire a cart to convey his baggage to the nearest inn and, as he walked ahead of it, was surprised by the approach of what looked like a mirror-image of himself. Another priest, wearing a tattered soutane, walked beside a cart piled high with furniture. The winter sun dazzled, and for moments Amandi wondered whether he, like the cowherds, was seeing a mirage.

  The other priest raised a hand in salutation. ‘Are you another of us, Father?’

  The man’s face looked tear-stained and now, as though triggered by the thought, wails burst from behind his cart where a woman was hobbling along. She had furrowed skin and darned clothes: a priest’s housekeeper or mother? He was young enough for that.

  Amandi, sensing a misunderstanding, said he’d had an accident.

  He wasn’t the only one, said the Frenchman. Thirty-five accidents had happened today. Thirty-five letters had been sent from the episcopal palace, throwing priests from their parishes with scarcely more ceremony than if they’d been thieving footmen. ‘We’re lucky to be spared the kick in the bum! We’ll end sweeping the streets. In the old days we’d have had redress. But since the church courts are gone, bishops are all-powerful. Oh, mother, stop! You’ll have me crying too.’

  The young man’s voice had an edge of hysteria. While he tried to comfort the old woman, Amandi observed their possessions. A bucket hung from the cart’s tail. There were bedding rolls, pots and a painting of St Aloysius Liquori. All had the humiliated look of objects which need to be arranged just so to hide their blemishes. There was one padded chair. Who got that? The mother? Yes, for her son was fond of her. He was rubbing her hands now and gently shaking her as though in the despairing hope of infusing a little spir
it into her.

  ‘I’m making a list.’ He turned back to Amandi. ‘Will you let me put your name on it, Father? Since the Church denies us recourse, we can try the state. Go to law. After all, we’re on its payroll. This is no time for turning the other cheek. The poor depend on us. You are one of us?’ The youth was seized by doubt.

  His mother knew better. Alert as a dog, she had been plucking at his arm to warn that there was something not right about Amandi.

  The young man’s muscles froze. Then the blood rose in his face. ‘I’m a fool,’ he acknowledged as he took in the good cloth and cut of Amandi’s dusty clothes. ‘You,’ he supposed dully, ‘must be an observer for Monseigneur de Bruillard? His …’ the word slipped out, ‘spy?’

  ‘No.’ Amandi felt awkward. He was, after all, a sort of spy.

  Suddenly, the young priest began banging his forehead with his fist, to the scandal of the two carters who stared reprovingly at this unpriestly behaviour. ‘Fool!’ The boy banged his forehead.

  ‘Stop!’ Amandi caught his arm. ‘It’s not what you think. On the contrary, we may be able to help each other.’

  *

  Later, in a private room in the nearest inn, he and le Père Dubus – the young priest’s name – became allies. Dubus had to be wooed from his suspicions; but Amandi, after all, was a diplomat, knew France, knew men, and disposed of the excellent argument that the other had nothing to lose. Neither had the French Church which, for reasons to do with chance and history, needed outside help.

  ‘Outside?’ Dubus’ mind was slow. He had been up early, packing his depressing possessions, and had just put his mother to bed after feeding her bread soaked in broth.

  Now he and Amandi, alias le Père Roux, which was the name on his papers, sat burning their shins at a fire whose heat was mostly escaping up the chimney – like the Church’s energies, said Dubus, who believed in applying these to the needs of this world and had on this account fallen foul of his bishop.

  Amandi, to establish his independence from the tyrannical Monseigneur de Bruillard, claimed to be a preacher answerable only to the provincial of his order. Which? The Barnabites, a liberal body of men. He was, he said, returning from their house in Rome where a new wind was blowing.

  Giving that a chance to sink in, he ordered dinner. He would pay for it and for their rooms, being allowed, he explained, to spend a portion of what he earned from preaching on charity. So a table was brought in and laid with the linen and silver which he, as a seasoned traveller, always carried. In that famine year the meal of thin soup and boiled chicken was a banquet to the French priest. In his parish, he began – then remembered that it was no longer his. He had not been a tenured priest, could be removed at will and, when he organised charity for indigent parishioners, was. His bishop, terrified of organising the poor, saw him as a gamekeeper who had sided with the game.

  The two men sat late over their wine and Amandi learned about Dubus who had been brought up near here by his widowed mother. His early childhood had been blissful and his memories were all of streams, clear skies and of fresh branches being carried in feast-day processions, so that the woods seemed to come into the church to pay homage. Then, when he was nine, his mother told him that she had lost a law suit and with it their farm and must go into service in Paris.

  The shock stunned them and so did Paris, where they slept in an attic with windowpanes so grey that you could never tell whether the grime was on the glass or in the sky. The streets smelled sour. His mother had to wear livery and when they went to a park, the trees were in wire cages and someone stole her purse.

  Months passed. Then one day he heard a hymn. It was the Corpus Christi procession. For some reason – perhaps religion didn’t seem part of their new life – neither he nor his mother had been to church since leaving home. Yet here, down in the street, were banners billowing like sails and gleaming crosses and the hymns he had always known.

  ‘It was a vision‚’ said Dubus. ‘I closed my eyes and saw the Alps and three months later entered the seminary.’

  It was a satisfying tale. Even the bishop would have liked it. After that, to be sure, there had been a long wait, before Dubus could be ordained and take his mother from her dingy surroundings. The seminary was not in Paris and they hardly met from the day he entered it until his ordination at the age of twenty-four. That was the climax of their hopes: that and his assignment to a parish, in their native place, where she could be his housekeeper. This was their Eden and behold they had returned to it. Bliss! Dubus had been two years in his parish.

  ‘You know the rest.’

  And had he no prospects? No. His seminary friends were as poor as himself. Did he, Amandi asked casually, know anything of what was happening in the parish of La Salette? Oh, said Dubus, the whole diocese was talking of its miracles and of how the Royal Prosecutor had sent two magistrates incognito to spy. Sighing, he reviled politics, and Monsignor Amandi had to remind him that it was contempt for them which had blinded him to the way men of substance would see his own activities! He should have guessed that they would denounce him to his bishop, an impolitic man himself whose acceptance of the new miracle had led to the Royal Prosecutor’s having similar doubts of him. The Minister for Justice and Cults disliked popular movements of any sort.

  ‘The people,’ Amandi told the young ninny, ‘are, in political terms, a powder keg and regimes which ride in on revolution, as this one did, fear it. Our function, in the minds of the ministry, is to check this combustive potential by snuffing out any spark which could set it alight. Even religious enthusiasm frightens them. You may not like this, Father Dubus, but you should know it. Christ said “My kingdom is not of this world.” He sends us into it as missionaries and we owe it to Him to learn its ways – else how shall we preach His message?’

  Father Dubus was despondent. It was that hour when a man’s cheeks grow stubbly and his failures loom.

  Amandi spoke of a new era and of the Pope who was rousing hopes south of the Alps. He could help men like Dubus. After all, railways and the electric telegraph were here to stay. The world was now smaller and the Pope’s reach longer. ‘He could defend you from your bishop. Make an appeal and I will see that it reaches him. Give up hoping for help from the state, which has no jurisdiction over your case and sees men like you less as shepherds than as guard dogs.’

  Outside the window, a crystalline glitter sugared the Alps. Dawn. Amandi said he would pay the priest a stipend.

  ‘I shall only rarely ask you for services. For now I want you to go to La Salette, stay there a while, make friends and become acquainted with the nuns in the nearby village of Corps, where the two visionaries are being educated. Find out who has access to them and through whom their public statements are made.’ All this, said Amandi, was to be written and posted to him with maximum discretion. He gave Father Dubus an address in Rome. It would be a good idea if the priest gave it out that his mother had inherited a legacy and they were living on that. The secret messages – there were known to be two – which the Madonna had given the herders were of especial interest. The herders were saying that she had told them not to divulge these.

  ‘Well,’ said Amandi, ‘so long as they stay secret, well and good. But suppose Monseigneur de Bruillard were to tamper with them? Put his own ideas into the children’s heads and so into others? He could have an incalculably powerful impact. Not just here but in Rome. And we both know what Monseigneur’s ideas are.’

  *

  When Monsignor Amandi left in the public diligence which was to take him to where he might hire a private carriage, Father Dubus’ mother seized his hand, wept, kissed and then dried it with her skirt and said that he was her son’s benefactor and she would pray for him as long as she lived.

  Amandi retrieved his hand and raised it. The carriage door closed and they were off.

  A gentleman in a greatcoat half rose from the seat opposite and introduced himself. Amandi gave his false name: le Père Roux.

 
‘So you know that priest, Father?’

  ‘Not really. We met by chance and dined together at the inn.’

  ‘Dined!’ The other man’s nostrils quivered. ‘On what money? He must be in the pay of the Jacobins! I’m from his old parish. He and his mother are jumped-up peasants of the sort who use the Church to raise themselves from their ordained station in life – ha, ordained is right!’ The man’s laugh was a gulp of surprise at his own pun. Dubus, he told Amandi, had organised food collections and a co-operative shop. ‘Gave the poor ideas. We know the dangers of that! Besides, we guessed from the first that he was stealing half the proceeds and teaching them to do the same. He was quite brazen about it. In the public pulpit he said it was no sin for a starving man to steal food. Just think of it! He was issuing a licence to brigands. Anyway, the outcome was that shortly after that a householder fired a warning shot to scare an intruder who was climbing along his roof, and the thief took fright and fell. He was a child: the sort thieves use to send through narrow apertures. His neck was broken. There was bad feeling in the village – but whose fault was it? You tell me, Father. You’re a priest.’

  Amandi shook his head sadly.

  ‘The evil counsellor’s, that’s whose,’ said the man in the greatcoat venomously.

  ‘Were you the householder?’ Amandi risked. ‘Did you denounce him to the bishop?’

  The man’s face tightened. ‘Ah, so he told you that? I thought he might have seen me.’

  ‘No, no. I guessed it. I can see how your anger is tormenting you. Underneath it, you must be feeling something quite different.’