The Judas Cloth Page 3

  ‘It was she! She!!’ Hatred hammered at the word.

  The archbishop thought of the housekeeper. A lustreless woman with quick, subservient eyes, she was waiting in the corridor at this moment.

  ‘He told me,’ the girl insisted, ‘what brought on his attack. She let the rebels fornicate with her.’

  ‘Rape?’

  ‘Not rape. They’d had a fight, you see. It was to do with …’ Again that look of contempt. ‘Property. A will he wouldn’t sign. So she started drinking with the men …’

  ‘The Bonapartes?’

  ‘No. Hangers-on. Riffraff.’ She was sobbing now and he couldn’t make out her words.

  Never mind. He knew all he needed to know. There would be no accusations from this quarter.

  ‘I’ll give her to you,’ he told the Virgin. She needed containing. Gossip said so, the gossip of those who hoped to deflect attention from their own conduct during the troubles. Opting for neither side, most of his flock had stayed prudently at home, sewing cockades for their hats with papal colours on one side and the tricolour on the other. How blame them? He, after all, had kept dark the business of the Bonaparte passports and only to his friend, Monsignor Amandi, did he ever say how the beleaguered child had flung herself on him with the hungry impulse of misdirected passion. Abashed, he supposed that this was how she had flung herself on the uncle who had, according to Napoleon Louis, borne a startling resemblance to himself.

  In that season of reversible cockades, that hug had been a last flicker of the madness which was unlikely to flare up again in this part of the peninsula for another fifteen years.

  ‘That,’ he told the Virgin, as he left the cathedral, ‘is why you’d better keep her.’

  Outside the leather-lined door, a five-month-old poster was still exultantly announcing in the name of the then newly elected Pope Gregory that all civic militias were to be disbanded, civil servants who had taken office under the rebel government hereinafter suspended from employment, and persons found to possess cockades or other seditious items gaoled as enemies of the state. A corner of the poster had curled to reveal an earlier one signed by the rebels who had held power in February. This threatened anyone who appeared without a tricolour cockade with equally summary penalties.

  The archbishop reflected that it was a wonder he had not caught the chickenpox. Perhaps he had had it as a child?

  *

  In the café, gossips were trying to pump the lawyer about the scandal he claimed to know touching the archbishop, but he would not be drawn.

  When the group broke up, Montani linked an arm in his and walked him home. If he had information, said Montani, it was his duty to put it to use. Sooner or later patriots were going to have to overturn the priests’ government. Bernetti, the new Cardinal Secretary, was a savage reactionary, and mild men like Mastai were propping up an intolerable regime.

  ‘Our cause might be stronger today if there had been a massacre,’ he began, but, seeing that he had shocked the lawyer, dropped this line of talk. ‘Seriously though,’ he urged, ‘if you know anything to his discredit …’

  From the notebook of the noble abbot

  Raffaello Lambruschini:

  When my uncle was ‘Cardinal Nephew’ to Pope Gregory, I, who did not share his opinions, could not honourably play the nephew’s nephew. So I exiled myself. That was when I first began to devote myself to pedagogy – I have, over the years, educated a number of village boys – agricultural experiments, and my own thoughts. These I scrupled to publish but did discuss in letters, with the result that men who had been formed by their correspondence with me were later able to mediate between the world and my retreat. Among them was the young Monsignor Amandi, then a diplomat for the Holy See, who kept me posted about shifts of policy in France and the German principalities as well as at the papal court. We did not neglect gossip and one of his stories was about how a girl distantly related to himself – small nobles in the Legations are all cousins – had been made pregnant, possibly by a Bonaparte, and how the local bishop was refusing to adopt the usual remedy and marry her to some needy ‘St Joseph’. We joked that if St Joseph was good enough to father the Son of God, a ‘St Joseph’ was surely good enough for a Bonaparte. Later, when I learned who the bishop was, the item went into the file I was keeping on Mastai-Ferretti.

  *

  The girl, dressed in a smock provided by the nuns, had a belly like a watermelon but denied she could be pregnant.

  ‘I’m a virgin,’ she told the Reverend Mother. ‘I’m like a mare that’s eaten wet grass. They swell up.’

  ‘We’ve had cases like that before,’ the Reverend Mother told the archbishop. ‘They dream away the memory.’

  ‘Yes, I do know where babies come from,’ the girl had told her. Then she had talked of her uncle’s housekeeper, a real Magdalene, fornicating with him, naked as a potato, under the black cloth of his cassock. She said she had seen this through the crack in a shutter and that the strength of their joining was like potato-tubers bursting through storage sacking. No, no, she had not performed the act herself. Never. She wept indignantly.

  ‘Maybe she imagined the housekeeper in her place? The uncle,’ said the Reverend Mother, ‘could be the father.’

  The archbishop asked if the girl might be weak in the head and was told no. She was clever, devout and happy in the convent but wouldn’t want the baby. ‘We’ll send it to an orphanage right away,’ decided the Reverend Mother. ‘To the Holy Innocents or the Holy Ghost Orphanage in Rome.’

  But the archbishop, who had had experience of such institutions, said most of those babies caught fever and died on the journey south. There wasn’t money to feed wet nurses and, lamentable though it was, there was no stopping the bearers using the trip to smuggle contraband goods across the border. They packed these under the infants who were left to lie in their own ordure until a sufficient number had accumulated to make the journey profitable. This girl, said His Grace, was of good family and distantly related to Monsignor Amandi. Something better must be done for the child.

  ‘Do you want to see her?’

  The archbishop did not. Later, he said, when she was delivered, he might accept her as a penitent. He knew her to be an innocent if impetuous creature for she had bared her soul to him in Leonessa. She had bared more than that and the hot throb of her fever haunted him who, unlike her, could not dream away memory.

  ‘When do you think it was conceived?’ he asked. ‘Her previous trip home would have been Christmas. Could it have been then?’

  The abbess was unsure. ‘We think,’ she said, ‘that she’s due in November, so you can count back.’

  *

  In October the archbishop arranged to meet Monsignor Amandi at a spa. Although Mastai-Ferretti was older, the two had studied together in Rome where he was said to have proven such a dunderhead that his chief merit, in his teachers’ eyes, had been his lack of all claim to intellectual pride. Since that had led to the upheavels of ’89 and brought the brigand Bonaparte to Rome, dunderheads were in better standing there now than men like Amandi, whose cleverness unsettled people. He was not thought likely to do well at the papal court.

  The two bishops, however, were fond of each other and, as they strolled, ate, worshipped and took the waters, observers noted a distinct liveliness to their colloquies and, in the archbishop’s case, some agitation. As a result, a rumour got about that his epilepsy had again begun to trouble him. It was known, as a doctor at the spa informed the interested, as ‘the sacred disease’ – morbus sacer – and also, according to Pliny, as ‘the spitting disease’ because, if caused by the evil eye, one could rid oneself of it by spitting it back. Due to some garbling of this, the notion now gained currency that Mastai had the evil eye. A spa is a place for gossip, and in no time people were collecting evidence of small mishaps occurring in his vicinity which proved so amusing that his reputation as a iettatore was soon unshakeable.

  *

  That November, Cardinal Odescalchi
, Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, and H. H. Gregory XVI received letters from the Archbishop of Spoleto humbly craving permission to lay down the burden of an office which would tax even an angel’s shoulders – ‘angelicis etiam humeris formidandum’. The supplicant drew attention to his lack of proficiency in sacred studies and the difficulty of governing a diocese where, in the wake of the recent troubles, he was faced with a choice between scandalising the staunch or embittering the compromised. There was more in the same strain.

  ‘What is this about?’ Cardinal Odescalchi had summoned Monsignor Amandi for consultation.

  ‘Why not believe what he says, Eminence?’

  ‘Scruples? Doubts?’ Odescalchi shrugged them away. He knew Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti for a sound element. Two uncles in the prelacy! And in his youth he had paid court to the right sort of woman. Donna Clara Colonna had, after her young admirer donned the cassock, seemed to take more pleasure in promoting his career than she had in whatever mild dalliance had preceded it. It was she, observed his Eminence, whose influence at court had got Mastai his bishop’s mitre and almost certainly she who had provided the cash for his elevation. Given the finances of the Mastai-Ferretti – they were petty and penurious nobility – one could presume as much. Why not? Very commendable. Such women were as rubies – when they didn’t become busybodies. It might indeed be wise to call for her help. It had proven useful before when she put the necessary stiffening into the young Giovanni Maria who, shortly after his ordination, had had tender notions of devoting himself to the poor. Indeed he had done this for a while as director of an orphanage and later of San Michele, that great labyrinth on the Ripa Grande where he first came to notice by making the place pay. It was an epitome of the papal state itself, comprising as it did an asylum, a reform school, an old people’s home and a refuge for fallen women; and he had turned it into a going concern by selling its workshop products at a profit. Well, a man who could do that had an obligation to put his talents to work in a wider arena. As Mastai’s spiritual director was promptly requested to let him know, there were very few men who could stop the state losing money let alone help it make any. Money was a bleeding wound in the Church’s side and it would be sinful self-indulgence for a man who could staunch it to waste his time playing at being St Francis of Assisi.

  ‘What bee has he in his bonnet now?’ Odescalchi inquired. Laicisation? Retreat to a monastery? Did he not know – if he did not, would Amandi kindly inform him – that the first was unthinkable and the second justifiable only if he was irredeemably maimed by sin or epilepsy. Was he? If he was, should he not atone for this by service? Reluctance could only prove worthiness. Paradox was the Church’s climate. While mediating a higher reality for the world, it was itself stuck in some very particular mud with which its servants must occasionally dirty their hands.

  ‘Does he imagine he’s the only one tempted to devote himself to his own salvation? asked Odescalchi. ‘You may tell him from me that I wrestle with the urge on an average of once a fortnight. Tell him too that we’re praying for him.’ Then he advised Amandi to stress spiritual fellowship when talking to the archbishop. In time of need your fellows could provide support, and he and Amandi now held Mastai up, or anyway back.

  They presumed him to be a prey to scruples more precise than those mentioned in his letters. A temptation of the mind or, less importantly, of the flesh? Patriotism? Heresy? The excessive charity which leads to heresy? The cardinal knew that only a deep disarray could have made Mastai grind out the letter to His Eminent self and the one to Pope Gregory which ended: ‘Permission to withdraw would, Oh Most Holy Father, be the greatest expression of your love and I would be grateful to you always …’ Permission was not forthcoming, but Mastai was to receive more tangible grounds for gratitude when the following year – Donna Clara again! said the monotonous gossips – he was promoted to the Diocese of Imola. This was a major see, though not an archbishopric, so it was with a purely apparent loss of rank that he became for a while plain Bishop Mastai. He was forty now, and though he would not recover from the emotional disorders left by the epilepsy of his adolescence, had for years been judged sufficiently free of it to say mass unaided. Was he still beset by scruples? Perhaps, for he was unusually susceptible to signs and wonders and sent assiduously to solicit the prayers of the visionaries who, being numerous at this time, were thought to have been sent by God to comfort His people after the ravages of revolution. They must have comforted Monsignor Mastai, for the following year he received letters from Odescalchi and Amandi congratulating him on his new serenity. Amandi, who had been on missions to Paris and Brussels where he sharpened an already keen political sense, was particularly pleased at his friend’s elevation to a key diocese.

  Two

  From Monsignor Mastai to Monsignor

  Amandi, Imola:

  August 1833

  Now that you are back I warn that you may get more letters than you might like. While you’ve been away, I have been struggling to come to terms with my translation to this great see with its stipend of nine instead of three thousand scudi, and do not doubt that, after my protests, I must look in some quarters like a shrewd contriver.

  The same divisions prevail here as in Spoleto. Did I tell you that my first invitation was from a gentleman whose wife is a connection of yours, Count Stanga? This happy discovery was a trifle marred by a subsequent one that the count is held to be unsound. But then I am sometimes considered so myself by, among others, His Holiness who likes to quip that in my family’s household even the cat is a Liberal! I take this to mean that I am on the Church’s reserve, to be used only if it should one day need to show a Liberal face. Having, thus, little to lose, I dine fearlessly with the unsound Stangas. At first we were always en famille. Then I met their friends. I fancy the aim had been to sound me out because no sooner was the ice well broken than a young guest began to praise my mildness during the Spoleto troubles. I told him that this had been due rather to charity than to partisan feeling, whereupon he remarked that charity was precisely what was bringing some priests to make their peace with Liberalism. He was unabashed by my saying that, being unacquainted with the ideas current in fashionable drawing rooms, I could not discuss them. His name is Gambara. He is greatly exercised by His Holiness’s condemnation of freedoms of thought and the press and by the new encyclical which, he fears, must drive Liberals from the Church. Did I know, he asked, that there is a secret movement for reform within the Church itself? I said I did not and marvelled at his knowledge. He claims he has it from his spiritual director, whose name he will not divulge, since the secret of the confessional should cut both ways. I took this to mean that I too might speak my mind without fear.

  This was impertinent but I own to some curiosity about his clerical friends – Tuscans, would you not guess? – who espouse unorthodoxies, some of which go back at least fifty years to the Synod of Pisa which, as we know, was declared a non-event. This shadow-Church is, I suppose, the equivalent of the Carbonari, who equally secretly elaborate plans for an alternative form of civil government. The count is thought to be one of them and his young friend, a layman with a curiously clerical cast of mind, must, I suppose, aim to recruit me. To be prudent, I should delate him but am reluctant to do so – except now to you. In our conversations I am the soul of discretion and beg you to be the same by destroying this, which I shall not send by the public post.

  From the same to the

  same:

  April 1835

  Gambara continues to tease me. I ask the count about him and am imperfectly reassured by his replies. I fear that he too is rash and that his wife worries about this. She is a quiet, pretty woman and devoted to their small son who is about four. I suspect her health prevented her having another.

  Gambara’s spiritual directors talk, it seems, of abolishing mass stipends, confessions, benefices and, to be sure, ecclesiastical courts. Priests and laymen should be equal before the law! Parish priests should be elected by the
laity and the clergy be of and with the people. It is a farrago of generous contradictions, not the least being Gambara’s status as a layman. On my saying so, I was surprised to see him redden like a girl.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he begged. ‘I don’t want to insult you – but neither do I want the privilege of being a priest. In this state, you see,’ he explained gravely, ‘the privilege is a worldly one, since only the clergy enjoy high stipends or qualify for high office.’

  I have decided not to visit the Stanga villa for a while.

  Amandi saved these letters. Later ones were peppered with sideswipes at the chronic absurdity of those around Mastai who was as easily roused to humour as to indignation. Both bristled in the margins of a pamphlet which he sent on with a complaint that someone was circulating it among his diocesan priests.

  It praised the Centurioni, a militia founded to ‘defend the godly against French doctrines’, and urged priests to keep an eye on free-thinking landlords and forbid labourers to work for them. ‘That,’ triumphed the pamphlet-writer, who signed himself ‘the water-sprinkler of truth’, ‘will teach these proud gentlemen that they need the people more than the people need them!’

  ‘Who writes such things?’ marvelled Mastai. ‘They undermine people’s respect for their betters. Our zealots don’t need a guillotine. They’ll cut off their own heads!’

  He had failed to hit it off with local conservatives who were alarmed by his hobnobbing with the Stangas. The count, they warned, was a Carbonaro and the Devil knew what heathen mumbo-jumbo went on in his villa after dark. Had Monsignore himself seen none of this?

  *

  Lieutenant Nardoni laughed. ‘Well, no, I suppose Your Lordship wouldn’t!’ A squat man, dense with muscle, Nardoni kept his fists in a half clench and his knees bent as though ready to spring. ‘They have tunnels and secret entrances,’ he explained.