The Judas Cloth (21 page)

‘Maybe she’s a friend of one of the grooms?’ suggested Melzi.

Just then the count rode out of the stables and into the woods. He had not returned when Prospero and Nicola went for their usual ride.

‘My uncle’s expected in the next day or so,’ said Prospero. ‘Monsignor Amandi. Race you!’

The two took off at a gallop. Nicola’s horsemanship had improved, for they rode out almost daily to explore the countryside which was in full metamorphosis. Vines, which had been as bare as basketwork, now had a dancing softness, and the fish-bone poplar trees were feathered with green. Today they were fairly far afield when one of the horses caught its foot in a rabbit hole and lamed itself. Prospero, anxious to spare it the walk home, began casting around for somewhere to leave it.
This was how he came to remember a villa belonging to a distant cousin which should be somewhere near here. A man, who came by driving two oxen, confirmed this. The Villa Tartaruga? Just pass that hill. So off they went and had soon turned in a driveway leading to a flight of granite steps. Nicola, leaving Prospero to hold the horses, ran up these and pulled the bell. Yesterday’s girl opened the door and behind her was the count. He and Nicola stared at each other. Nicola said, ‘We had an accident.’

‘Prospero?’

‘Yes, but he’s all right. He’s here.’

The count mumbled something and descended the steps to look at the lamed horse. Then he and Prospero took it round to the back.

Nicola turned to the girl. For moments his voice failed him, then it volleyed out questions. Who was she? Did she live here? She worked here, she told him. Her name was Maria. And the letter? Who had …? She shrank. Please, she begged, he mustn’t mention it. Not here. It was nothing to do with here. She seemed frightened and he saw that, in his excitement, he had been hectoring her.

‘Maria,’ called a woman’s voice, and a manservant appeared to say that the
padrona
wanted her.

He asked if he could do anything for Nicola, who said he’d join his friends at the stables. Glancing back as he descended the steps, he felt himself observed from a window and recognised the lady whose carriage had splashed him outside the
osteria.
She had a child in her arms.

‘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.
Churc
hmen
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.’