Three-Cornered Halo

by Christianna Brand

  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

  ANEW 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.

  Winsome had had a Simply Wonderful day. She had been up to the Colombaia and had a long talk with Innocenta; and Innocenta was delighted with the work she had done on the translations. Innocenta herself had contributed several exercise books filled with her sharp, slanting script in purple ink and, said Winsome, too deliciously Quaint. She would have proceeded to quotation of some of the quaintnesses, but Cousin Hat said for goodness sake no, my dear, whimsey made her feel sick. So she turned away her head and counted up to ten and in a voice of gentle patience began again on a new tack. The house was enchanting inside (she had never before penetrated so far, having met Innocenta for the first time on almost the last day of her previous visit), and that too was deliciously Quaint. “You go in through a patio all covered with vines: and actually grapes, Cousin Hat, hanging down from the vines, so that you can just put up your hand and pick them. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “It might be if they were anything but vines,” said Cousin Hat.

  And then on into a great cool room, went on Winsome doggedly, having counted another ten; all whitewashed and with frescoes on the walls.… (The frescoes had been rather curious, they would certainly have to be painted over if ever the place became a convenuto again. One of the daughters, she supposed, a talent that way; and one knew that to the artistic eye the Female Form Divine meant nothing at all, just nothing at all.…) “And there they all were, such charming creatures, though none of them takes after Innocenta one bit!—running in and out as she and I sat talking, begging—so prettily!—for a length of coloured thread, the loan of a needle, help with ironing a difficult frill.… Preparing for a party, I imagine, they all seemed to be freshening up their best dresses and there was a delicious smell from the kitchen; cheesecakes, Innocenta told me, ‘specialité de la maison’ at the moment, it appears! I didn’t enquire too closely in case they should think I was hinting for an invitation. But it was a charming scene!”

  “It sounds delightful,” said Cousin Hat, bored to tears with it.

  “So I tactfully stole away when I thought they would be wanting to get the room ready for the dancing; and went up to the Duomo and put up my little candle in Juanita’s chapel; and said my little prayer.…”

  “How is Juanita looking? Has she got any blacker?”

  “The continental habit of embalming the bodies of their saints——” began Winsome, having counted yet another ten.

  “—and dressing them up in mauve satin, is quite revolting. And what I want to know is—how do they know which ones to set about embalming? Or do they just do eve
ryone on spec., in the hopes that some will strike lucky and go on and get canonised? They take long enough about it in all conscience. Look at Juanita: twenty years!”

  “It is their lives that are saintly, Cousin Hat. You don’t,” said Winsome, really quite tartly for her, “just collect up the dead and say eeny, meeny, miney, mo. Of course you know if a person’s a saint, when he dies.”

  “Everyone is a saint when he dies,” said Cousin Hat; adding with a sniff, “for a very short time.”

  Winsome said, tolerantly laughing that now, now, Cousin Hat mustn’t be cynical! Besides, there was the matter of miracles. As far as she understood it, it was required by Rome that there should be—as well as evidence of exemplary conduct and an influence for good in the lifetime—proof of four miracles, two during life and two after death. So far—and it might well be this was holding up matters with El Exaltida and the Patriarch—Juanita could really be credited with not more than three. Her own mother had been brought to her (furiously struggling, but Winsome was not to know that), with ears so distended and painful as to make it seem almost certain that she must die. And Juanita had just laid her hand on her mother’s head and her mother had given one convulsive shudder—Innocenta had seen it, she had been there!—and the distension had suddenly disappeared, just like that, and all the pain with it; and the mother was still living, at a very great age.…

  “And stone deaf,” said Cousin Hat.

  And there had been some business of a false accusation of robbery with violence, as to whose details Winsome was admittedly not very clear. But certainly the true villain had been miraculously brought by Juanita to confess his crime. They had given him, on his death-bed, some garment of hers.…

  “Like a bloodhound, you mean?”

  … and the man, a hardened criminal, had burst into tears and suddenly Told All. The miracle, had Winsome known it, lay not so much in anyone in San Juan confessing to anything, though that was rare enough, as in anyone having taken the slightest notice of a robbery, with violence or without. Still, the felon—at point of death and no longer within reach of Juanese law—had indubitably confessed; and it was not Juanita’s fault if, through his delay in applying for her remote-control ministrations, he had allowed the falsely accused to moulder long since ‘into merciful death.’ And finally there was the Arcivescovo who, patient and trustful, had from the first onset of the lupus, now many years ago, prostrated himself daily before the glass coffin; and to this attributed his present (not exactly enviable) condition—but who, at least, was alive: if he was alive. Variously interpreted, these demonstrations constituted Juanita’s claim to thauma-turgical powers: and it seemed to Miss Cockrill that only the eye of faith could review it as anything but a slender stock-in-trade. Her observations to this effect, however, were not well received. Winsome counted ten, counted twenty, opened her mouth to speak, ran up another ten: and suddenly found it a teeny bit chilly and thought she would go back to her room. Miss Cockrill continued to stand complacently at the balcony rail.

  It was not chilly at all: a lovely evening, balmy and clear and with, even at this hour, a little warm, scented breeze blowing in across the pines. Below her, the hotel guests strolled up and down the terrace awaiting the dinner hour, which in San Juan el Pirata as in Spain, is not earlier than nine. Snatches of their conversation drifted up to her. Someone had bought something ‘terribly cheap—smuggled my dear, of course,’ someone was rhapsodising over the olla del hongi, a stew of Juanese toadstools much delighted in by tourists though formerly, and rightly, considered only fit for feeding pigs; a gentleman had had an experience some evenings before which he was confiding to a fellow guest—the words, ‘charming creature,’ ‘nothing but cry,’ ‘cruel stepfather,’ ‘promised not to tell the Patranne’ floated up to Miss Cockrill in a pot pourri of, to her, meaningless sound. The drivers of the long line of carriages were paid off, the horses clip-clopped merrily away, a figure detached itself from the shadows where the paying and tipping had gone on and walked with short, purposeful strides to the big front door. She was about to turn and go into her room when something about that stubby figure in its stout grey flannels and dark-blue, brass-buttoned blazer, caught her attention. She turned back to the rail; and she must have exclaimed for a red face and large white moustache were suddenly raised and a voice said, “God bless my soul! It’s Hat!”

  In unalloyed pleasure? Or had there been an almost imperceptible note of despondency and alarm?

  It was twenty-five years since first Major Bull—he was Captain Bull then—had met Miss Cockrill and, puffing and blowing a little for he was even then of a full habit, had offered her his heart. Why she had refused him, she would probably, for she was not given to self-examination, never know. The plain woman’s defence, perhaps, against the jealous mockery of her narrow little world: ‘Good heavens—Harriet Cockrill got off, and at her age! Then there’s hope for us all.…’ And the corollary, ‘But she’s got a bit of money, of course.’ Dick Bull had had no money, only his army pay; and he had taken that and offered it to the first pretty woman he met on leaving Hat; as the next best, he had later assured her, to going off and shooting big game. It had come to rather the same thing in the end, as matters turned out for, out with the guns in Bangalore one day, the Major’s lady, as she had then become, had been shot by her husband in mistake for a bird—and not a bad shot either, in any respect. Stricken with remorse—for he was too honest to pretend a grief he could not possibly feel and which, moreover, must be shared with his Colonel, two subalterns and several woman-starved members of the I.C.S., the widower had come home to England and, eventually, to Hat. Miss Cockrill, in uneasy double harness with her ward, Winsome Foley, had received with gratitude and regrets a subdued renewal of his suit: once more the defence mechanism went into action and—she could not leave poor Winsome, she had promised her dead sister, she did not feel it right to saddle him with two women, etcetera, etcetera. The gallant major withdrew to the heights a little above Heronsford, in Kent, where his lady resided, and from thence, his face growing larger and redder, his moustache larger and whiter as the years went by, made dabbing little sorties as occasion offered or thwarted devotion ordained. And Miss Cockrill henceforward met the scorn which, nowadays at any rate, existed only in her own mind, by hugging to herself the secret knowledge that an she would she could; and allowed herself more and more to resent poor Winsome for ‘standing in her way.’

  She went in through her room and down the wide central staircase to the hall. “My dear Dick—what on earth are you doing here?”

  The Major puffed and blew. “My dear Hat—I might ask you the same thing!” But his face was wreathed in smiles, the moment of doubt—if moment there had been—was past. “Came out with a ‘party.’ Funniest joke in the world. Courier. Me!”

  “A courier?”

  “Hush, not so loud, old girl, all these people respect me, think I’m the cat’s whiskers. Conducted tour, you know, conducted ’em all the way from England—France, Italy, bit of Switzerland, no it was Austria, somewhere like that, all mountains anyway—and here we are! Can’t speak a word of the lingo but I couldn’t in France and Italy either and we did all right there. Old campaigner, you know: just raise your voice a bit and wave your arms and if you happen to have a dirty dollar bill between your fingers, it works every time. Keep a dollar bill for nothing else but waving: pay out, of course, as per promise, but not with my dollar.” He fished it out of his pocket and showed it to her. In point of dirtiness at least, it was unexceptionable.

  “But my dear Dick, I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about. I haven’t seen you.…”

  “Not for ages, old girl. Just the point. You gadding round up in Town on these blesséd translations, dashing in and out of the liberries with Winnie; me stuck down there in Heronsford and beginning to feel off me oats. A change, old boy, I said to myself, that’s what you want, a change. Drifted into this agency and bless me soul, if I didn’t come out with a job! Always on t
he look-out for couriers, you know, reliable chaps who can keep their heads and speak a bit of the lingo.…”

  “But you can’t speak a word of any ‘lingo’; except Hindustani, and that’s no use to you here. You’ve just said so, this minute.”

  “But only to you, Hat,” said the Major, nervously. He looked round at his flock. “They none of them know; and neither do the fellers up at that head office of theirs.” The Major, it seemed, was an Old Campaigner in more ways than one.

  Winsome came down to dinner a little pink round the eyelids and inordinately pleased to see Major Bull, who dined at their table. She had had a little weep in the privacy of her room and had been unwilling to meet the bright eyes of Cousin Hat—which now, by God’s grace would be directed to the Major’s, which were prominent and blue. It had been, for all her brave description, a disappointing day. That Innocenta, her friend and colleague, should have been so ready to let her go off alone from the Colombaia that evening, when a party was planned, had seemed—well, not very kind. Young people were expected, no doubt; the girls would have jolly young friends, there would be noisy laughter and foolish fun, a little silly horseplay, perhaps—but one was Broadminded, Innocenta should surely have known that one would be happy to sit by with the mothers and the aunts and watch the young folk enjoy themselves: gliding round just once or twice, perhaps, with one of the gay gallants, for she had been an excellent waltzer in her girlhood days and could soon have mastered the simple Juanese steps.… But no. She had been allowed to drift away with only a couple of cheesecakes by way of consolation; had felt that behind her departing back, Innocenta and her daughters had exchanged glances of something like relief; had been even rather surprised at her staying so long. And up at the Duomo, the mood of disillusion had persisted. Juanita had looked, as Cousin Hat in her crude way had suggested, disagreeably black; with her garish mauve gown and her tawdry gold lace and the terrible pink and white mask that she wore over her doubtless far more terrible face. All delightfully quaint, of course: all wonderfully right for these simple hearts, for these happy children with their unschooled æsthetic tastes; but—not worthy of those wonderful words that, over the long, happy days of her work on the translations, had burned their pious messages into her soul. And then …