Only when he had did he remember that if Donna Geltrude had not poisoned her brother, a more unmanageable situation would have developed. By then, however, he was too tired to tackle the moral tangle. Authority, he thought sleepily, should have been invoked. Who had said that mankind was too wicked to live in freedom? Christ, was it? He fell asleep.
*
‘To be sure,’ said Miss Foljambe, the next time Nicola came to tea, ‘everyone should have some religion. But I can’t see that it matters which.’ Over the years she had grown so English that now she could have been acting the part – which perhaps she was? Amateur theatricals were a favourite pastime with foreign residents, who had perhaps forgotten other ways of being themselves. ‘It’s like praying in different languages,’ she elaborated, ‘which is why I can’t see why the dear pope minds people bringing in bibles. It is so tedious when they’re seized, and makes a poor impression on first-time travellers.’
Her nose had acquired an increasingly rosy flush and he would not have been surprised to find she rouged it. Looking comic set her apart which was, he sensed, where she wished to be. Miss Foljambe, for whatever reason, did not like to quite belong and, after years spent here, was in danger of doing so. Nicola, who relished belonging, recognised the opposite quirk. At first, therefore, he took her reference to Bible-smuggling – a favourite sport with English ladies – as a random part of her ‘act’. But it turned out that smuggling was what she wanted to discuss.
Confiding in him – she had once admitted – was her way of trying out the confessional: an institution which repelled and fascinated her. Admiring church art was no longer enough, and she made sly excursions into other aspects of Catholic life against which her own pastor, a perspicacious gentleman, had warned her. Being High Church himself, he saw the lure. But Miss Foljambe reassured him. Her principles would never allow her to come to terms with the Catholic Church. The priests she knew were all dissidents of one sort or another. ‘I told him,’ she told Nicola, ‘that I am more of a threat to your faith than you to mine! So you stand warned!’
Nicola said he didn’t think of himself as a dissident.
‘But you’re tolerant, which is why I trust you. Perhaps you know that I am acquainted with some of the leading Democrats here?’
‘Please don’t tell me anything I should feel bound to report to the authorities.’
But what she had to tell was that she had already been caught by the authorities who had then, astoundingly, looked the other way. More tea? A scone? Did he, she asked, know a priest called Grassi? Well, said Miss Foljambe, she had recently made his acquaintance at the frontier where a number of carriages were held up and passengers cooling their heels. She, who had been on her way to England, was carrying a parcel for Democratic friends. They had asked her to do this because it was easier for foreigners to take things out. It was money and when the customs impounded it she had been terribly upset. Frankly, the officials looked villainous and she had feared lest her friends not see their money again.
‘Well, there were some Jesuit priests in the carriage behind mine, so I threw myself on their mercy. One was this Father Grassi who could not have been more gracious. He intervened, got my money back for me and kindly advised me against carrying specie on trips like this. There were brigands on these roads. He had a distinctly ironic look to his eye as he suggested that we travel on in convoy as far as Leghorn where I was to take the steam packet.
‘But do you know the odd and embarrassing thing? It was that, later, when I looked at the package, its outer covering had been ripped off revealing the name of the addressee in England. My friends had been deplorably imprudent and there for all to see was the Holborn address of the Democrat and refugee Colonel Pieri who, as you know, was an associate of Signor Mazzini’s at the time of the Roman Republic. The customsmen must have seen it and so must Father Grassi. So why did they return it to me?’
Nicola could only speculate. ‘Perhaps they already have him under surveillance in England?’ he wondered. But it was an unsatisfactory explanation.
Eighteen
Paris, 1857
Nicola was back in France, that forcing house for visions where, though the glimpsed Virgin was, reportedly, still as pretty as stained glass, her messages were fierce. Odium between cleric and anti-cleric had been smouldering for some years and in May the Pope, travelling to the shrine at Loreto, had brought along his own altar wine and hosts for fear of poison.
It was no time for priests to fall out, so when Nicola and Father Grassi came face to face outside the Church of St Medard, their skirmish was almost cordial and Nicola accepted the offer of a coffee at the nearby Jesuit house in the rue des Postes. ‘Though how appropriate,’ Grassi sniped, ‘to find you where a notice once hung, saying, “By the king’s orders let God perform no miracles in this place!” You were contemplating the acts of your predecessor!’
Nicola – he had just read this in a leaflet issued by the parish – retorted that the miracles at St Medard had been performed by Jansenists and that they had been no friends of the Society of Jesus.
Grassi was prepared to take the long view. ‘They reproached us with laxity, but now, we are the ones fighting that. Which is why I do not,’ he reassured Nicola, ‘hold the Caterina da Sezze business against you! Let’s go and have that coffee. Did you know that coffee-drinking was once thought to be the height of laxity?’
Outside the Jesuit house, a man stepped forward and Nicola recognised the printer, whom he had seen at the Abbé de Lammenais’ funeral four years before. Viterbo. He whispered to Father Grassi: ‘Can I have a word?’
‘Later,’ said Grassi.
Viterbo went rigid. This was not the cheery man whom Nicola remembered. ‘I can’t …’ he stuttered. ‘Not …’
‘Oh, very well, come and have a coffee with myself and Father Santi.’ Grassi sounded amused, as though he were indulging a whim.
The three moved down a corridor, their heels clicking on a hard floor, then came to rest in a parlour where Grassi tugged at a bell rope. ‘Coffee,’ he ordered the lay brother who appeared almost at once. ‘For three.’
But the man had a message which he murmured into Grassi’s ear.
Grassi told his guests to drink their coffee when it came. He’d be back when he could.
Left alone, Viterbo began to laugh. ‘Jesuit obedience! He’ll be eating his liver out at leaving us together. I’ve been reading about them. I’m like a naturalist confronted with a new species.’ He waited, then asked, ‘Forgive me, but you are the man I met at Lammenais’ funeral? Were you a priest then?’
‘I was.’
Viterbo spread his hands and looked at them. They were trembling slightly.
‘We’re wondering about each other,’ said Nicola.
‘Oh I,’ Viterbo waved his hand in an indeterminate way, ‘am adrift in wonder these days. May I ask why you were there?’
‘For Don Mauro’s sake.’
Viterbo nodded. ‘Poor Mauro!’
‘He’s not dead, is he?’
‘No, no! Just unhappy – like others.’ Another leery pause. ‘I’m a Jew.’ Viterbo spoke as though some inner resistance had given away. Not a religious one! But I support those who promise equal rights to people of all faiths. Any Jew must. Even a rationalist.’
‘I understand.’
‘Well, can you understand this? What if I told you that I had agreed to spy on my comrades? For Father Grassi?’
‘Why …’ marvelled Nicola. ‘Ah,’ he saw with sorrow, ‘you think we’re birds of a feather?’
The printer’s cheek twitched.
‘Are you,’ it occurred to Nicola to ask, ‘hoping to drive some sort of bargain with me?’ He was sorry to bully the man, but Grassi would be back at any moment and he couldn’t have him hearing of his having gone to Lammenais’ funeral in lay dress.
‘Please,’ the printer’s hands captured and held each other, ‘don’t take offence. I think of you as a man who sees the cruelty of thes
e mangling divisions. Have you heard of the Mortara case? Well, my sister is the Signora Mortara.’
Nicola was shaken. ‘The mother? So your nephew …?’
The story had been all over the papers for weeks. Catholics were appalled, Jews furious, and anti-clericals having a field day.
‘I’m sorry.’ Nicola did not dare say more.
The Mortara child had been kidnapped. By the Church. Secretly baptized, six years earlier, by a Catholic nursemaid – no doubt a common enough occurrence – he was, when this became known, taken into protective custody, lest his Jewish parents prevent him practising the religion which must now be his. God’s gift could not be repudiated. The abduction took place in Bologna whose Cardinal Archbishop, Monsignor Viale Prelà, chose to abide by the letter of an antiquated canon law. This was the man who, as nuncio to Vienna, in 1848, had sent dispatch after urgent dispatch warning Papa Mastai not to support Italian nationalism. Mastai had ignored them, and shame over that error may have prevented his tempering the cardinal’s zealotry.
‘He’s seven years old!’
What could Nicola say?
‘Disappeared without trace!’ mourned the printer. ‘There have been protests in the London and Paris papers – but what good do they do? I’m dealing now with Father Grassi, and that’s like digging a hole in water. He got in touch with me, but behaves as though it were the other way round. I don’t understand. Do you?’
Nicola didn’t. The case was odd. Put at its lowest, the thing was impolitic. It was discrediting the Church with moderate opinion and driving it into the embrace of extremists. Could that have been someone’s intention?
Coffee was brought in and Viterbo, downing it, stared morosely at his cup, as though reading the future in its dregs.
A memory nagged at Nicola. It went back to last Easter when he had helped out with confessions to get experience of pastoral work – but it evaded him.
Vivid and assymetrical, the printer’s profile sawed the air and Nicola imagined the child whose equally vivid features must have won the nursemaid’s heart. Strictly speaking, she had been breaking the law by working for Jews. No doubt she grew fond of the child, worried lest, being unbaptized, he be ineligible for heaven, and, when he caught some childhood malady, took the law into her own hands. Baptizing him, she became a secret godmother and, six years later, foolishly boasted about this.
Now the scene from last Easter swam into Nicola’s memory. It had been the end of Lent and confessionals were assailed by penitents come to get their certificates of compliance. In corners and side chapels, whispers moved stale air, candles flickered and a sepia light held everything in condensed solution. Statues, cowled in purple cloth, signified that Christ was crucified but not yet risen. It was a time of heightened feelings when Nicola heard weeping on the other side of the grille. A maid servant whose husband had died some years before was reliving her woes in the only place she could. She worked for Jews, she told him.
‘She did it when Edgar was one,’ Viterbo told him, ‘but only told about it last month. Six years later. Why?’
‘Had she had a row with your sister?’
The printer didn’t know.
Nicola was trying to conjure up that wraith in the darkness. But all he could recall was a congested eagerness to break out of isolation. It was as if the woman had lost the knack. Where the girl in the Mortara case spoke too much, this one gagged. Did anyone maltreat her, he had asked. No. She foundered. Shy. Breathy. Unable to find words – but what was troubling her was perhaps less a matter of words than a need to linger here in the small, secret box. Equally needy, the Mortara maid might have blabbed her story simply to have her own people acknowledge her.
Little Edgardo, he told Viterbo, might have turned on his nursemaid. One could imagine that. A seven-year-old parrots what adults say and could, unknowingly, have hurt her.
His penitent had finally got out a question. Her employers, she said, made her light all their lamps on certain days, holy days, she thought. ‘Not ours, though. Theirs.’ They said that on these days it was a sin for them to touch a lamp or do any sort of work. ‘They call me their lamplighter.’ Then: ‘Is it a sin for me?’ she asked. Invisible in her dark compartment, she breathed heavily and he guessed that her concern for lamps was a code. It meant, ‘I am one of you, still, am I not?’
He told her she might light the lamps, but knew that this did not address her real trouble since, in her employers’ house, this freedom marked her isolation. The Jews were clannish, gathering snugly because of their exclusion from the larger clan outside. A Christian servant did not quite fit in either.
‘The authorities won’t even say where he is.’ Viterbo’s train of thought was stalled. ‘What can I do?’ What he had done so far was to mobilise the French press. As a printer he had contacts and journalists had seized on the story. Why, they demanded, should France, Motherland of the Rights of Man, keep a garrison in Rome to preserve a regime which trampled on the most basic human right of all: that of families to stay together? The case was wrecking the French Catholic party and radicals hoped that the Emperor would now seize his chance to abandon Pius.
Too late, Viterbo realised that in the process his nephew’s interests could suffer. Father Grassi had remarked that if the family was counting on bringing down the papal regime so as to get back little Edgar, theirs might be a long wait. Would it not be wiser to come to an understanding? Viterbo’s smile was wry. ‘His words were: “You don’t catch flies with vinegar!”’
‘What does he want of you?’
‘I’m to stand by. Wait.’
‘Does he promise to get the child back?’
‘Nothing so clear. He hints and jokes – if they are jokes! The claim “Give me a child at the age of seven and he’s mine for life” does not strike our family as funny. Edgardo is seven. Then he seems to back off, saying that it’s not the Jesuits who have him at all but the Holy Office. Do you think,’ asked Viterbo, ‘he can help us? We don’t even know that.’
‘Oh, I think he is quite powerful.’ Nicola spoke reluctantly, not wanting to help Grassi make use of Viterbo.
Bologna, 1857
It was December. In chestnut-vendors’ braziers, the charcoal glow was like a vestige of sunset. Optimistic and diminuendo, the hawkers’ cry faded behind Nicola and Prospero as they drove to a rural osteria.
‘Castagni! Bell’e caldi!’
Martelli, arriving from abroad, had arranged this dinner, catching the two friends on the wing. We’ll go somewhere quiet, he had urged. But the evening started badly. It was Advent, a season full of days when there were penalties for eating meat. Oddly, nobody seemed to have warned Martelli about this yesterday when he ordered a donkey stew, a dish about which he claimed to have dreamed in England where he had had a surfeit of bland food.
The host was visibly shaken to see two priests arrive in a house bubbling with forbidden smells and, unmoved by Martelli’s blandishments, did not crack a smile. ‘You’ll no doubt,’ he hoped, ‘have dispensations!’ As far as he was concerned, he told them, roll on the day when gentlemen could eat as they chose but, for now, he must ask them to do so in an inner room. With or without a dispensation, public consumption of grasso on days of magro was against the law. So the three let themselves be boxed into a space the size of a hen coop and Martelli started firing off jokes, as though offering his guests encapsulated bits of a life which they, as clerics, must surely miss. Nicola supposed he felt a need to bridge the abyss – judging by his frantic geniality, it must seem great – separating ordinary folk from those who served the regime.
Prospero said, ‘Our host fears a trap. He could deal with you and your meat or with us and our Roman collars. The combination perplexes him.’ Prospero, now an apostolic delegate, was travelling and could have claimed licence to eat donkey stew. Instead, he chose fish. Nicola, mindful of the abyss and the need to bridge it, agreed to sample the reddish, fibrous stuff which the waiter brought in to help his customers make up th
eir minds.
‘It’s a communion and reunion!’ Martelli chewed with pleasure. ‘Christ rode into Jerusalem on a donkey – so why not make a communion out of eating donkey! Sorry, gentlemen, sorry. I didn’t mean that you eat Christ – though, to be sure, you do! Oh, dear, I’m a little light-headed. I’d better order wine so you can catch up. Red makes blood, they say. Would you like red? Or champagne? I brought some. Let’s have some fizz!’
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