The Judas Cloth Read online

  *

  ‘Well!’ Prospero had driven silently for some minutes. The gig the count had provided was making slower progress than the horses they had left behind. It was poorly sprung too. ‘I suppose we draw our own conclusions.’ His face was sombre and his mouth a knot. ‘My father’s free to do what he likes. As secretively as he likes.’

  The count had explained that their cousin was busy with a sick child and they should leave without bothering her. The groom would bring the horses home when the lamed one was better. Meanwhile borrow the gig. He gave orders with aplomb and the groom took them without surprise.

  ‘That’s my father’s love-nest. What else? The child must be his.’

  Nicola could think of nothing to say.

  ‘Odd that he hasn’t married her yet. How could he though,’ Prospero gave a barking laugh, ‘while the shrine of my mother’s bedroom continues to be garnished with fresh flowers? It would be a sort of ghostly bigamy. I’m sure he’s mortified to be caught out.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s relieved?’ Prospero, it struck Nicola, must have been an unforgiving little boy and his father’s efforts to propitiate him – the ‘shrine’ – had turned into a trap.

  ‘It seems I’ve a brother born on the wrong side of the blanket – oh forgive me, Nicola, I didn’t … I don’t think that way. Truly!’

  ‘Then you won’t discourage your father from marrying?’ It was no business of Nicola’s, but he was refusing to let the slight pass. Also: the woman in the window had moved him. He had a soft spot for mothers.

  *

  At dinner, trouble boiled up again and, this time, was harder to track. The captain was taken by surprise, but Nicola, being privy to the afternoon’s doings, saw how a disagreement over the merits of a dish of artichokes could lead to rages and pacings which quite eclipsed those of the previous night. The words ‘bigot’, ‘tight-rump’ and ‘hypocrite’ were flung about and, at last, after Captain Melzi had cajoled the pair into returning to their seats, a stiff-jawed silence led to Prospero’s flinging down an orange he had been dissecting and the words: ‘I’m off.’

  ‘Why,’ asked his father, ‘don’t you bugger off altogether?’

  ‘You mean leave the villa? Very well! I shall!’

  ‘Good!’

  It was like the ritual of the flower-filled shrine. How change course now? Nicola saw that, without help, neither man could. ‘No,’ he cried, trying to supply some. ‘Listen! Please!’ And urged that nothing real divided them at all. But they paid no mind and his words sounded so inconsistent that he wondered if they had emerged from his lips. ‘Captain, you tell them!’ he begged.

  But Melzi had given up.

  Nicola caught Prospero’s elbow and was shaken off. Unused to families, he was appalled by what was happening. His tears made a blur in whose rainbow hub gleamed a fruit-knife. ‘Listen! Well, if you won’t …’ And he plunged the blade through his hand into the table underneath. ‘Now,’ he yelled as they stared at the impaled hand in a harmony of shock, ‘will you listen?’

  *

  ‘My poor son,’ said the confessor whom Nicola had been advised to tell about his wound, lest dangerous rumours get about. ‘Libertine lures have found you insufficiently wary! Did you truly do this to yourself? Debauchery, young man, destroys feeling. I have known many young men and none, I promise you, gave himself up to unsanctified passion without losing the ability to love. Vice dries the heart! Sinners cut themselves off from love! Even in this life, my son, they are cut off. I sit here, day after day, breathing in the contagion of sad and terrible lives.’

  Nicola wept. It seemed to him that the contagion was reaching him, through the brass grating, on the priest’s metallic breath.

  ‘Those are good tears,’ approved the confessor. ‘Beware of those who tell you nature is good or human affections reliable! See where that sophism leads. It has led to the abuse of your body. It leads to the abuse of the body politic.’

  *

  Only now, as luck would have it, did news reach the villa of a papal allocution published on 29th April. In it Pope Pius disclaimed all intention of making war on Austria. He could not, he declared, prevent his subjects volunteering to fight but he, as Christ’s Vicar, must embrace ‘all … nations and peoples with an equal … paternal love’. This bid to conciliate both sides had instead enraged them. His ministers resigned and the Civic Guard were hard put to prevent a revolution. Count Stanga, who had invested so much hope in his old friend, heard the news in silence, then shut himself in his room.

  *

  Nicola hoped to see the girl again. At first he expected to run into her by chance then, learning that her father had been smuggled to some place unknown, he proposed to Prospero that they return to the Villa Tartaruga to fetch home the horses. But it appeared that the lamed one was still lame and, after that, he did not dare bring the matter up.

  *

  Monsignor Amandi, courteous but decisive, arrived with a secretary and a valet but stayed only two nights, for he was en route to Rome where he had to report to the Holy Father on a confidential mission. Finding Nicola with his arm in a sling and the villa simmering, he promptly recommended that Prospero and Nicola should leave as soon as could be arranged, one for Rome, the other for Bologna, where he was to have a place in the Curia.

  Amandi spoke with authority and his host deferred to him. Churchmen in a church-run state must, for the time being anyway, know best. Come the revolution, joked the count, and we’ll see who’ll be protecting whom! He was in better spirits and had been heard cajoling Prospero in the small hours of the night when Nicola punctured his hand. It was Melzi who, on getting up to see if the patient had a fever, passed outside the count’s door and heard whispers seeping from under it.

  ‘Prosperino mio,’ he heard him coax, ‘how could I ever want to replace …’ Who? What? Prospero’s voice didn’t carry and Melzi could only say that a reconciliation had been effected.

  *

  Melzi had heard a story from soldiers in Bologna on one of his news-gathering trips. He believed it to be the truth behind the Jesuits’ departure from Rome.

  A mild man when sober, he had drunk more than usual and was visibly incensed by the sight of a cassock. Amandi affected not to notice this.

  The story was that the Jesuits, knowing that they might be expelled, conceived the notion of digging up the remains of the man who had fought to save them, seventy-five years ago, at the time of their last banishment. Their hope was that these had been miraculously preserved. Opinion, said the captain, was divided as to whether they truly hoped for a miracle or planned to fake one. Either way, the enterprise was delicate since it could damage their cause if it were seen to fail and the remains – like their reputation! – prove rotten. Yet they feared to proceed with stealth lest they be taken for grave-robbers and arrested by the anti-Jesuit Civic Guard. Accordingly, they begged Mastai to send witnesses which he did. He sent them, said the captain, because he was as anxious as they to know the message from the grave. So, accompanied by the Pope’s own envoys, a party set forth by dead of night but had no sooner opened the tomb than they were interrupted by revellers returning from one of the patriotic banquets which had become so popular in recent months. Drunk on wine and rhetoric, these fellows paused to sing songs in the vicinity of the working party which, fearing to be discovered at a task whose symbolism was as unfavourable to it as were the odds if it came to a fight, closed the tomb, blew out their candles, hid their tools and dispersed, the papal witnesses returning to the Quirinal, the Jesuits to the Collegio Romano. Here, another surprise awaited them, for Nardoni’s lynched corpse had just been flung on the steps. He was dressed as a Jesuit and it seemed likely that it had been left there with the intention of stirring up a scandal in the morning when it came to be discovered. Why, people would want to know, had this police spy – notorious and hated – been hidden in the Collegio? Why was he dressed as a Jesuit? What had he gone out to do? The grave-diggers did not know, but, fearing the
worst and, in the interests of peace, the good of the Society and ad maiorem dei gloriam, they wrapped the corpse in a blanket, put it in a carriage and took it back to the unsealed tomb where, since there was now nobody about, they were able to conceal it. This was intended as a provisional measure. Where else could they hide it? The open tomb offered providential concealment. Again they went home.

  Meanwhile, at the Quirinal, Mastai, who had been eager for news, was disappointed when his emissaries returned without any.

  ‘You mean,’ he marvelled, ‘that you opened the grave then failed to even look? You ran off just because a few harmless popolani came by! You must not be so suspicious of our good people,’ he scolded. ‘How can they love and trust you if you don’t do the same for them? Go back at once,’ he ordered, ‘and examine the dead Jesuit’s remains. If necessary, ask one or two of our good popolani for help.’

  He had no sympathy with his emissaries’ alarm or fatigue. A little suffering could only benefit their immortal souls. He was teaching them charity and faith. So back they went in the dim light of dawn, skulking through back streets – for by now rumours were about: deformed, magnified and frightening, of the mob’s activities earlier that night. Once again they pried open the tomb, sweating and breaking their finger nails as they did so, for they had seen no willing popolani and wouldn’t have dared ask for help if they had. Then – but, said Melzi, there’s no need to say what they saw: a dead man dressed as a Jesuit and smelling – for the Jesuits had, for their own comfort, scattered this earlier – of attar of roses! Unfamiliar with the spy and by now too tired to think straight, they believed that this must be the miraculously preserved seventy-five-year-old body of the Jesuit saint. Back they raced to Mastai who, beside himself with joy – since any sign from heaven was a sign to him! – sent a detachment of papal guards to bring back the sacred remains. Then, in the Quirinal, by the light of the dawn and in the presence of several senior prelates who had been roused from their beds, he recognised Nardoni.

  Here, said Captain Melzi, seemliness must draw a veil. We may imagine the fury and loss of face. But better not describe it. ‘Naturally,’ he added, ‘the episode has been suppressed. It is a non-event. The Jesuits were promptly banished and the papal guards sworn to secrecy. Perhaps not even Monsignor Amandi will hear echoes of it? After all, it reflects well on nobody.’

  ‘But it’s not true!’ Nicola was upset by the cartoonish evoking of his worst nightmare. He still dreamed of Nardoni. ‘It can’t be! I saw Nardoni’s corpse myself in the Collegio the morning after he was killed. Civic Guards were watching over it.’

  ‘It’s not meant to be true,’ intervened Monsignor Amandi equably. ‘It is an emblematic tale! We shall hear more before things settle.’ He smiled at the captain.

  Later, looking at Nicola’s bandaged hand, he remarked that his young protégé might not have the character for a clerical career. Why had he been so distressed by Melzi’s story? Was there a reason? Amandi listened while Nicola spoke of Nardoni, then asked whether he had ever heard of the bee which chanced to sting a bull just as the butcher was delivering the death blow? ‘What a dangerous sting I have!’ thought the bee and flew off full of pride and misapprehension. A number of people, said Amandi, had known of Nardoni’s presence in the Collegio. And the spy had become imprudent. It was likely that some of those whom he had been trying to blackmail had enticed him out and let his death look like a lynching. ‘You,’ he told Nicola, ‘are like the bee who stung the bull. You say you informed the police? But the police knew about Nardoni all along. He was a policeman.’

  Amandi wore his violet stockings with dash and had the assurance of one who not only knew the world, but saw through it. Rashness, he told Nicola and Prospero, was worse than sin for it robbed virtue of its wisdom and could precipitate the unforeseen. Each of them needed a mentor. Prospero, happily, had found one for himself. ‘You too,’ Amandi told Nicola, ‘need a period of apprenticeship. I shall ask a very astute prelate to take you under his wing. Cardinal Count Carlo Oppizzoni is eighty years old and needs someone to do just about everything for him: cut up his meat, be his memory and write his letters. You must be a staff in his hand.’

  ‘Perinde ac cadaver.’

  ‘Yes. Don’t be offended if your functions are servile. Think of this as an honour. Oppizzoni, who has both pluck and wit, has held high office and seen the inside of gaol. In his youth, he was appointed to the diocese of Bologna by Napoleon to spite the then pope; yet he was true to his cloth rather than to his patron, and when the Emperor divorced Josephine to marry a Habsburg princess, denounced the bigamy. For that he lost his diocese and the right to wear red. He became one of the “black cardinals” who suffered exile and, later, gaol. He has seen a lot of history and is as wary as a fox. Watch how he handles things. You can be a son to him.’

  ‘I was told,’ Nicola hoped to take the bishop by surprise, ‘that my true father could be Father Gavazzi.’

  Amandi raised an eyebrow. ‘By him? I thought not. You heard Captain Melzi’s legend. You will hear more and may figure in some. Learn not to care. I am offering you a spiritual father in Oppizzoni. Gavazzi would be a less useful choice.’ Amandi smiled. ‘Neither am I proposing myself. Cousinship will suit us better.’

  *

  Before leaving, Nicola received a letter from the front. It was from Martelli, who was disillusioned by the treatment which the Roman volunteers were getting from their Peidmontese allies. ‘They despise us,’ he complained, and wrote rancorously of old flintlock muskets which jammed and of being issued with the wrong ammunition.

  ‘What could they expect?’ lamented Melzi when Nicola told him this. ‘Disowned by their own prince, the Pope, they’re orphans. Naturally, Piedmont doesn’t want them to do well on the battlefield. It’s looking to its own ambitions, which are to eat this peninsula as one eats an artichoke: slowly and relentlessly, leaf by leaf.’

  Not wanting Melzi to think he was retaliating for his slander of the Jesuits, Nicola did not pass on Martelli’s account of seeing civilian prisoners hacked to pieces by rioting volunteers. ‘The prisoners,’ wrote Martelli, ‘were said to be spies and the men were maddened by the conditions in which we’ve been living, but, all the same, the officers’ incompetence is frightening. Only Father Bassi, the chaplain, was able to calm the rioters. He snatched a bayonet from a man who had impaled one of the prisoners’ fingers on it and looked angry enough to hit him. In the end he restrained himself, and, by simply speaking to the fellow, reduced him to tears. This made the officers’ failure look worse.’

  Bologna, 1848

  Cardinal Oppizzoni’s face had the fine fragility of age and he disliked wasting time. His first act, after welcoming Nicola, was to send him to be rigged out in a costume which must be neither secular nor downright priestly. He was to be lodged at the archiepiscopal palace and to receive a small salary. For the first time in his life he would have money in his pocket.

  ‘Your cousin,’ said the cardinal, ‘recommends that you and I try and trust each other more than is usual for men in our circumstances.’ His Eminence turned his bony head sideways and scrutinised Nicola with what must have been his better eye. It was yellowish but piercingly alert. ‘Temporale,’ he went on, ‘used to mean two distinct things: a storm and the temporal power of the Pope. Of late, the distinction has been lost, and, just now, one is breaking over my head. This is why I want you to take over a file which we have opened on the military chaplains, Bassi and Gavazzi, whose activities in this diocese have created havoc. I am being pressed for a decision which would oblige me either to condemn His Holiness’s policies of last month or the quite different ones which he has seen fit to embrace since the Allocution of 29 April. I am temporising but time will catch up with me and, when it does, I shall expect you to provide me with a clear and up-to-date account of current opinion in the diocese. My clergy is too divided for me to give this task to any of them. Who is your confessor?’

  Nicola told him. The cardin
al looked sad. ‘I see that in him your cousin has provided you with a guide to the spiritual sphere and in me one to things temporal. I wish I could suppose it to be the other way around. Keep the file locked up. My priests keep appealing over my head to Rome, so mum’s the word when you go to confession. I place myself in your filial hands.’

  Nicola withdrew.

  The file contained:

  Newspaper accounts of the military chaplains’ recruiting and fund-raising activities since their arrival here on Easter Sunday, 23rd April.

  Letters from admirers contrasting their energy with the indolence of the diocesan clergy.

  Letters from the clergy protesting about the two firebrands. Copies of these had, said their writers, been forwarded to Rome. Just what, they demanded, did the cardinal plan to do?

  Queries as to how to deal with the pair. Should they or should they not be allowed to preach in local churches? Given lodging?

  Accounts of the festive popular welcome extended to the preachers. Flags, garlands, poems, parades, recruitment ceremonies, etc., etc., were described with exuberant enthusiasm in the patriotic newspapers.

  Nicola divided the file into piles marked ‘Pro’ and ‘Con’.

  Cuttings from the Gazzetta di Bologna claimed that Gavazzi’s sermons had a conceptual energy unknown since Savonarola, and that his patriotism was a challenge to other priests to say where they stood with regard to the sacred cause which the Pope himself had blessed. To oppose it, opined the Gazzetta, was to oppose him. Four days later, noted a marginal comment, Pius said he could not fight Austria. So was the clipping now ‘pro’ or ‘con’?

  Nicola started a third pile which he labelled, after some thought, ‘Dubious’.

  Several vehement notes to the cardinal deplored Gavazzi’s harping on cases of clerical corruption and his unseemly appeal to Bolognese women to give to his fund as a penance for having bastardised Italian blood by taking Austrian lovers. Surely, more decorum could have been looked for in a priest?