Scarpia

by Piers Paul Read

  Acton was then forty-three years old and unmarried. He was the cousin of an English baronet, Sir Richard Acton, of Aldenham Hall in Shropshire. Several members of the Acton family, among them the fifth baronet, had converted to Catholicism and, because it was hard for a Catholic to rise in the professions in Protestant England, had sought employment abroad. Edward Acton, John Acton’s father, had studied medicine in Paris, worked as a doctor in Besançon, and in 1735 married the daughter of the president of the Parlement of the Franche-Comté, Anne Cathérine Loys. In 1750, at the age of fourteen, their son John had been sent to serve with his uncle and namesake, Commodore John Acton, commander of the fleet of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. On the death of this uncle, the nephew took over his command until he was poached by the King and Queen of Naples.

  Acton was described by his descendant, the historian Harold Acton, as a man with ‘a fine presence, magnetic, penetrating eyes and a slim, agile figure’. He was not handsome, but was ‘dignified and self-assured’. He immediately impressed the king and the queen with his decisiveness, sound judgement and ability to see things through. Queen Maria Carolina gave him her wholehearted support. Both the king and the queen came to trust Acton and rely upon him rather than their home-grown advisers. His duties were extended from the navy to the exchequer and eventually to the entire governance of the kingdom.

  Acton was also liked and admired by the British ambassador in Naples, Sir William Hamilton: the two Englishmen felt an affinity and favoured an alliance between Naples and Great Britain. They encouraged King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina to see the British Mediterranean fleet as a useful instrument in the pursuit of their vendetta against the Jacobins.

  Sir William Hamilton was a connoisseur of precious and beautiful antiquities, and had in 1783 been given for safekeeping a living embodiment of classical beauty in the form of a young Englishwoman, Emma Lyon, the daughter of a blacksmith in Ness in Cheshire. Emma Lyon, also known as Emma Hart, had worked as a housemaid for a doctor, then for an actress in London who had taught her to act and dance. At the age of fifteen Emma became the mistress of an English rake, Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, who passed her on to a friend, Charles Greville, the second son of the Earl of Warwick. When Greville ran out of money and sought to marry an heiress, Emma became an embarrassment, and so he sent her to stay with his widowed uncle, Sir William Hamilton, in Naples. There she became first Sir William’s mistress and, in 1791, his wife – enchanting the visitors to the ambassador’s residence by enacting tableaux vivants of figures from antiquity – poses she had learned in London.

  There was one man, however, who exercised a greater influence over the Neapolitans than Hamilton, Acton or even King Ferdinand and Queen Carolina: this was the Roman martyr, St Gennaro (Januarius), executed during the persecution of Christians by the Emperor Diocletian fifteen hundred years before. He had been bishop of Naples and was now its patron saint – the reality of his martyrdom visible in an ampoule containing his blood. Three times a year, the ampoule at the centre of a gold monstrance was displayed to the crowd assembled in the city’s cathedral where, on occasions, the dry russet powder liquefied before the eyes of the devout. This miracle was for the Neapolitans a portent of the utmost importance; and when it failed – when the powder remained powder – it was taken as an omen of disasters to come – wars, storms, the plague or the eruption of Vesuvius, the volcano that loomed over the city.

  No monarch had ever questioned the power of St Gennaro to intervene in favour of the people of Naples. Quite to the contrary: the rich and mighty sought to ingratiate themselves with the saint by donating stupendous treasures to his shrine. His skull was contained in a silver reliquary, and around its neck hung a necklace with emeralds, sapphires and diamonds. The golden mitre worn by the archbishops of Naples when displaying the blood of St Gennaro was studded with over three thousand diamonds, 164 rubies, two hundred emeralds and fifty garnets. No conqueror had ever dared seize these precious relics from the shrine of St Gennaro, but rather had added to its treasures to secure his favour and, more practically for the sceptics, the support of the superstitious lazzaroni whose first loyalty was to their patron saint.

  2

  When Vitellio Scarpia fled from Rome to Naples in February of 1798, he stayed with his brother Domenico and visited almost daily his sister Angelina and her husband Leonardo Partinico. The family were in mourning because their father, the cavaliere Luigi Scarpia, had died the month before; Domenico and Angelina had recently returned from his funeral in Sicily with their mother, Marcella, who was now living on Domenico’s estate at Barca, her childhood home.

  All were now older; Vitellio’s nephews and nieces were on the verge of maturity; but none had changed so much as Vitellio himself. Ten years had passed since he had visited the city as the newly ennobled Baron di Rubaso with his bride, Paola di Marcisano – elated with his good fortune and a little disdainful of his provincial siblings. Now, he was all but destitute, his salary as a soldier stopped, his estates at Rubaso expropriated by the French – a refugee without a home, a wife, a family or even a servant, because he had sent Spoletta on to Palermo.

  Scarpia’s appearance reflected his change in fortune: he retained his slim figure and still had a good head of hair, but there were lines in his face, shadows under his eyes – eyes that would sometimes as before light up with amusement, but more often expressed bitterness and dejection. His brother and sister had heard the gossip about Paola and the painter Ringel, but pretended to accept Vitellio’s assurance that in due course his family would join him.

  Scarpia presented himself at court, and put his sword at the service of his sovereigns, King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina; but Naples was at peace. Despite their loathing of the French, Bonaparte was thought invincible; Austria was reluctant to take him on, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was in no position to do so on its own. Their Majesties might hope and pray for the defeat of their enemies, but even Acton advised caution. To commission Scarpia, an officer who had been proscribed by the French, would be noted by the French ambassador, Citizen Trouvé, and be taken as a sign of the government’s unfriendly intentions.

  Moreover, Scarpia was a Sicilian, and King Ferdinand and Queen Carolina held the martial skills of their own subjects in low regard. Only foreigners from north of the Alps were considered capable of command. A Swiss, Baron Rudoph de Salis, employed as inspector general of the Neapolitan army in 1787, had been replaced by a Hungarian, Joseph von Zehenter, in 1790. Certainly, Scarpia had established a reputation, but it was more for personal courage than military skills. A minor command in the papal army at the disastrous battle of Faenza was not enough to secure a commission in the Neapolitan army without influence at court. Scarpia had no powerful patron to back him. His brother was a loyal but docile member of the minor nobility; his brother-in-law was suspected of republican sympathies and was fortunate not to have been implicated in Blasi’s plot to kill the king.

  There remained Cardinal Ruffo, now enjoying a sinecure as comptroller of the royal palace at Caserta and superintendent of King Ferdinand’s colony at Leucio. Scarpia called upon him at Caserta and was received with unfeigned affection. ‘My dear Baron,’ said the cardinal. ‘I feared for you when I heard that the French had taken Rome. You came here. Quite right. Discretion is the better part of valour and the Lord helps those who help themselves. The princess remained in Rome? That is understandable. Even the French would not dare touch a Marcisano. And your father. I am sorry to hear of his death. Punished for the sins of Tanucci, I fear, but from everything I hear, he was an admirable man.’

  The cardinal was now fifty-five years old, but to Scarpia he seemed little changed. Resignation to the will of God, and the sense that he had served Him as best he could, clearly removed many of the sources of anxiety that would have taken their toll on a layman. His concern now was for his protégé, Scarpia, for whom he still felt the same paternal affection that the young Sicilian had aroused in him when he had first appeared
as a destitute young adventurer in the Quirinale Palace thirteen years before. However, it is always easier to do something for a youth than for a middle-aged man. Ruffo had posts within his gifts, both in the running of the immense palace at Caserta or the king’s colony of silk weavers at Leucio, but none were suitable for a man of Scarpia’s rank and standing.

  ‘Alas, I have no influence at court when it comes to commissions in the army,’ he said to Scarpia. ‘The only man that matters there is Acton. He is a Catholic, of course, and his mother was French, but in essence he is an Englishman – cold, calculating, and concerned first with the interests of his sovereigns, then those of Great Britain, which he regards as synonymous as those of his sovereigns, and only lastly, if at all, the interests of the Catholic Church. And if he was to listen to anyone, it would not be to me but our Archbishop, Cardinal Zurlo, who regards me as an interloper and an embarrassment, and would as soon thwart my wishes as seek to fulfil them.’

  ‘Would you advise, then,’ asked Scarpia, ‘that I seek service with the Russians, perhaps, or the Turks?’

  ‘The Turks? God forbid. I know they are now our allies, but they remain infidels. No, you should wait. Are you in need of money? I could appoint you as an honorary gentleman in my household, which would bring a modest stipend.’

  ‘Thank you, Your Eminence, but following my father’s death I now have the income from our estates in Sicily.’

  ‘Then go to Sicily and bide your time. The present peace cannot last indefinitely. The French are infected with a malign virus – there is no inoculation against Jacobinism as there is now against smallpox: it is in its nature to spread. And now added to the virulence of the Jacobins’ satanic ideas is the ambition of Bonaparte, who will not rest until he is master of the world. There will be war and when there is war you must be here, not in St Petersburg or the Porte.’

  3

  Scarpia travelled south to his brother’s estate at Barca to visit his mother. He found her well cared for by the family’s retainers, many of them the sons and daughters of those she had known as a child. Domenico was a benign landlord and the family was regarded with affection, while Vitellio was a hero who had won glory in the service of the Pope.

  His mother’s mind was half gone. She knew that there were sources of unhappiness and disappointment in her own life and that of her son, but could not remember what they were. At times she mistook him for her husband, Scarpia’s father, and adopted the old tone of irritation. And yet senility had to some extent softened her, and now that she was helpless she became almost affectionate, as if understanding that one must curry benevolence when one lost the power to command. Her decrepitude enhanced the melancholy felt by Scarpia since he had left Rome. O quam cito transit Gloria mundi!

  *

  Scarpia travelled on along the dusty roads of Calabria. He stayed for three days with Cardinal Ruffo’s brother, the Duke of Baranello – telling him of what had passed in Rome as they sat on the terrace of the duke’s castello at Bagnara with its view of Sicily over the narrow strait of Messina. The duke provided a boat to take him to Messina, where he was met by Spoletta and taken to the villa in Bagheria. The dust sheets had been removed from the furniture; servants had been employed; and on that evening, after a good dinner, sitting alone on the terrace in the late-summer sun, looking out to sea and smoking a cigar, Vitellio Scarpia, despite his melancholy, felt almost content.

  In the weeks which followed, Scarpia paid a courtesy visit to the viceroy in Palermo, and went to Castelfranco, to pray at the tomb of his father, and take possession of the estate that was now his. He looked over Ottavio Spoletta’s accounts, joking with Guido, the son, about the discrepancies, saying that they were too obvious – that the old factor was losing his touch. But Scarpia had now no wish to grow rich at the expense of tenants. In the villa at Bagheria, he needed little: his establishment was modest and his descents into Palermo rare. He received invitations from cousins, neighbours and friends from his youth, but in those first weeks he declined them, giving as an excuse that he was unwell.

  Scarpia’s indisposition was not wholly feigned. Physically he was well enough to hunt boar with Spoletta at Castelfranco, and ride out every day from the villa at Bagheria, but when this was reported to the disappointed salonnières of Palermo, the old Principessa Calamatina, who had known Scarpia as a child, would say, ‘He is licking his wounds,’ tapping her head to indicate where the wounds were to be found. Scarpia was suffering from an odd mixture of contentment and dejection – contentment because he was out of the fray, his ambition in abeyance, secure in his childhood home; dejection because as he sat in his father’s study he remembered the day when the cavaliere had given him his sword, his blessing and those ducats and sequins and florins as seed corn for his future good fortune.

  Now, fifteen years later, he was back in the same room, sitting on the same chair, surrounded by the same books, with no position, no fortune, a wife who had been happy to be rid of him and children she had infected with her disdain. Scarpia felt the presence of his father and wished that he was present to answer his son’s questions. He was overwhelmed with regret that he had seen almost nothing of his parents in recent years. He looked around at the spines of books on the shelves as if his eye might alight on the work of a sage who would bring him peace of mind. There were the Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle; the Roman authors, Cicero and Pliny the Elder; the great historians, Suetonius and Herodotus; the great theologians, Augustine and Aquinas; the free-thinkers who had removed the certainties – Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau; and the Catholic apologists who had tried to sustain them – Bossuet, Pascal. Which should he read? Philosophy was said to be a consolation for life’s vicissitudes, but none, so far as he could remember, gave a consistent explanation of the purpose of a man’s life. To do the will of God? To pursue fame and fortune? Could one do both? Soldiering was a noble profession, but only if the cause was right. Scarpia had killed others in the service of the Pope, and what can better define righteousness than the cause of Christ’s vicar on earth? But what of the Bourbons? Were righteousness and legitimacy one and the same? Or was legitimacy merely a tag, like liberty, to promote the interests of one set of men and women over others? ‘Since justice cannot be enforced,’ Pascal had written, ‘we justify force so that justice and force go together and we have peace, which is the sovereign good.’ What was the source of their legitimacy other than descent from conquerors who had imposed their rule by force?

  And what if a new conqueror appears? Scarpia thought back to the moment when all Europe was astonished by the military triumphs of Bonaparte and Paola’s affections had strayed. He looked again at the spines of the books that surrounded him, rebuking their authors for failing to warn him about women as the arbiters of men’s reputations. Of course the authors were mostly celibate; or they lived in less refined epochs when women were chattels rather than the custodians of men’s self-esteem. Beyond the humiliation of being cuckolded by the libertine Ringel, Scarpia felt a retrospective resentment against all the women he had thought he had loved. It is men’s fatuous vanity, he now realised, that persuades them that they are the predators, when it is in fact the woman who seduces the man.

  Yet even as Scarpia inveighed against women, he longed for one to be there with him – not simply to satisfy his desires, but as a companion in mind as well as the flesh. When he thought back to the first years of his marriage to Paola, what he now realised he had most valued was not the pleasure of making love to a beautiful woman but the exchange of smiles, the shared laughter, small physical intimacies – a caress, or the holding of hands. He thought of them both standing arm in arm looking down at Pietro lying in his cradle; the gentle halo of love that seemed to hover over this new family. Could he have done anything to preserve that precious affinity? Or had he always been no more than a means to an end – Paola’s smiles and embraces the ties to secure a man from outside her circle whose seed would invigorate the etiolated genes of the inbred Marcisa
nos?

  What had been his mistake? What had lost him her affection? Was it simply that by fathering two children he had served his purpose? Or was it that historical events had changed her feminine perception of his strength? The dashing young officer in the papal army with a record of heroic escapades had seemed superior to the foppish young Romans who were put forward by their parents for her to marry. But then the French had appeared in Lombardy; the extraordinary young Corsican had routed the armies of the Austrian emperor; and at Faenza the papal army was shown to be not just feeble but absurd.

  Looking out through the window of the study in the villa in Bagheria, Scarpia thought back to those early years of his marriage, blushing to remember his conceit at being the husband of the Principessa di Marcisano, achieving at one stroke fame and fortune, not realising that it rested on the whim of a woman. And how foolish he had been to treat her so well – to be courteous, affectionate, tolerant, forgiving – when the affection had been taken for weakness, his love his Achilles heel. Ringel was callous with women; she had surrendered to Ringel. Perhaps Spoletta was right. Women purport to admire courtliness; in reality, they succumb to brutes.

  4

  Every morning Guido Spoletta would go down to Palermo and return with the gazettes that carried news from Naples, but also from Rome. From these reports, Scarpia learned that the holy city and former Papal States now had a republican government, and a constitution based on the model of antiquity with a Senate, a Tribunal and five Consuls – one of them Cesare Angelotti. The bronze angel on top of the Castel Sant’Angelo had been renamed ‘The Liberating Genius of France’, painted the red, white and blue of the French tricolour flag, and a Liberty bonnet put on its head. Crucifixes had been replaced by Liberty trees, statues of the saints by busts of Cato and Brutus. Patriots rather than penitents now processed through the streets of the holy city, acclaiming the Nation rather than God. A grandiose memorial service was held for the republican martyr, General Duphot, in St Peter’s Square – men in togas extolling his heroic virtue while young women in diaphanous costumes danced around a papier mâché altar. At the Piazza di Spagna there had been a ritual burning of the archives of the Roman Inquisition, where half-naked youths with wings attached to their shoulder blades lit the bonfire and, at the summation of the ceremony, a naked woman symbolising Truth was seen rising from the Ashes of Superstition. The Roman hoi polloi, watching from the Spanish Steps, had booed and jeered, and pelted the performers with rotten vegetables.