The Thorn Birds

by Colleen McCullough

  “You’re a prawn,” she said in disgust.

  “It’s what I want.”

  “Idiot.”

  “Calling me names won’t change a thing, Jus.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that? It affords me a little much-needed emotional release, that’s all.”

  “I should think you’d get enough on the stage, playing Electra. You’re really good, Jus.”

  “After this news I’ll be better,” she said grimly. “Are you going to Saint Pat’s?”

  “No. I’m going to Rome, to Cardinal de Bricassart. Mum arranged it.”

  “Dane, no! It’s so far away!”

  “Well, why don’t you come, too, at least to England? With your background and ability you ought to be able to get a place somewhere without too much trouble.”

  She was sitting at a mirror wiping off Electra’s paint, still in Electra’s robes; ringed with heavy black arabesques, her strange eyes seemed even stranger. She nodded slowly. “Yes, I could, couldn’t I?” she asked thoughtfully. “It’s more than time I did…. Australia’s getting a bit too small…. Right, mate! You’re on! England it is!”

  “Super! Just think! I get holidays, you know, one always does in the seminary, as if it was a university. We can plan to take them together, trip around Europe a bit, come home to Drogheda. Oh, Jus, I’ve thought it all out! Having you not far away makes it perfect.”

  She beamed. “It does, doesn’t it? Life wouldn’t be the same if I couldn’t talk to you.”

  “That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.” He grinned. “But seriously, Jus, you worry me. I’d rather have you where I can see you from time to time. Otherwise who’s going to be the voice of your conscience?”

  He slid down between a hoplite’s helmet and an awesome mask of the Pythoness to a position on the floor where he could see her, coiling himself into an economical ball, out of the way of all the feet. There were only two stars’ dressing rooms at the Culloden and Justine didn’t rate either of them yet. She was in the general dressing room, among the ceaseless traffic.

  “Bloody old Cardinal de Bricassart!” she spat. “I hated him the moment I laid eyes on him!”

  Dane chuckled. “You didn’t, you know.”

  “I did! I did!”

  “No, you didn’t. Aunt Anne told me one Christmas hol, and I’ll bet you don’t know.”

  “What don’t I know?” she asked warily.

  “That when you were a baby he fed you a bottle and burped you, rocked you to sleep. Aunt Anne said you were a horrible cranky baby and hated being held, but when he held you, you really liked it.”

  “It’s a flaming lie!”

  “No, it’s not.” He grinned. “Anyway, why do you hate him so much now?”

  “I just do. He’s like a skinny old vulture, and he gives me the dry heaves.”

  “I like him. I always did. The perfect priest, that’s what Father Watty calls him. I think he is, too.”

  “Well, fuck him, I say!”

  “Justine!”

  “Shocked you that time, didn’t I? I’ll bet you never even thought I knew that word.”

  His eyes danced. “Do you know what it means? Tell me, Jussy, go on, I dare you!”

  She could never resist him when he teased; her own eyes began to twinkle. “You might be going to be a Father Rhubarb, you prawn, but if you don’t already know what it means, you’d better not investigate.”

  He grew serious. “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

  A very shapely pair of female legs stopped beside Dane, pivoted. He looked up, went red, looked away, and said, “Oh, hello, Martha,” in a casual voice.

  “Hello yourself.”

  She was an extremely beautiful girl, a little short on acting ability but so decorative she was an asset to any production; she also happened to be exactly Dane’s cup of tea, and Justine had listened to his admiring comments about her more than once. Tall, what the movie magazines always called sexsational, very dark of hair and eye, fair of skin, with magnificent breasts.

  Perching herself on the corner of Justine’s table, she swung one leg provocatively under Dane’s nose and watched him with an undisguised appreciation he clearly found disconcerting. Lord, he was really something! How had plain old cart-horse Jus collected herself a brother who looked like this? He might be only eighteen and it might be cradle-snatching, but who cared?

  “How about coming over to my place for coffee and whatever?” she asked, looking down at Dane. “The two of you?” she added reluctantly.

  Justine shook her head positively, her eyes lighting up at a sudden thought. “No, thanks, I can’t. You’ll have to be content with Dane.”

  He shook his head just as positively, but rather regretfully, as if he was truly tempted. “Thanks anyway, Martha, but I can’t.” He glanced at his watch as at a savior. “Lord, I’ve only got a minute left on my meter! How much longer are you going to be, Jus?”

  “About ten minutes.”

  “I’ll wait for you outside, all right?”

  “Chicken!” she mocked.

  Martha’s dusky eyes followed him. “He is absolutely gorgeous. Why won’t he look at me?”

  Justine grinned sourly, scrubbed her face clean at last. The freckles were coming back. Maybe London would help; no sun. “Oh, don’t worry, he looks. He’d like, too. But will he? Not Dane.”

  “Why? What’s the matter with him? Never tell me he’s a poof! Shit, why is it every gorgeous man I meet is a poof? I never thought Dane was, though; he doesn’t strike me that way at all.”

  “Watch your language, you dumb wart! He most certainly isn’t a poof. In fact, the day he looks at Sweet William, our screaming juvenile, I’ll cut his throat and Sweet William’s, too.”

  “Well, if he isn’t a pansy and he likes, why doesn’t he take? Doesn’t he get my message? Does he think I’m too old for him?”

  “Sweetie, at a hundred you won’t be too old for the average man, don’t worry about it. No, Dane’s sworn off sex for life, the fool. He’s going to be a priest.”

  Martha’s lush mouth dropped open, she swung back her mane of inky hair. “Go on!”

  “True, true.”

  “You mean to say all that’s going to be wasted?”

  “Afraid so. He’s offering it to God.”

  “Then God’s a bigger poofter than Sweet Willie.”

  “You might be right,” said Justine. “He certainly isn’t too fond of women, anyway. Second-class, that’s us, way back in the Upper Circle. Front Stalls and the Mezzanine, strictly male.”

  “Oh.”

  Justine wriggled out of Electra’s robe, flung a thin cotton dress over her head, remembered it was chilly outside, added a cardigan, and patted Martha kindly on the head. “Don’t worry about it, sweetie. God was very good to you; he didn’t give you any brains. Believe me, it’s far more comfortable that way. You’ll never offer the Lords of Creation any competition.”

  “I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind competing with God for your brother.”

  “Forget it. You’re fighting the Establishment, and it just can’t be done. You’d seduce Sweet Willie far quicker, take my word for it.”

  A Vatican car met Dane at the airport, whisked him through sunny faded streets full of handsome, smiling people; he glued his nose to the window and drank it all in, unbearably excited at seeing for himself the things he had seen only in pictures—the Roman columns, the rococo palaces, the Renaissance glory of Saint Peter’s.

  And waiting for him, clad this time in scarlet from head to foot, was Ralph Raoul, Cardinal de Bricassart. The hand was outstretched, its ring glowing; Dane sank on both knees to kiss it.

  “Stand up, Dane, let me look at you.”

  He stood, smiling at the tall man who was almost exactly his own height; they could look each other in the eye. To Dane the Cardinal had an immense aura of spiritual power which made him think of a pope rather than a saint, yet those intensely sad eyes were not the eyes of a pope. How much
he must have suffered to appear so, but how nobly he must have risen above his suffering to become this most perfect of priests.

  And Cardinal Ralph gazed at the son he did not know was his son, loving him, he thought, because he was dear Meggie’s boy. Just so would he have wanted to see a son of his own body; as tall, as strikingly good-looking, as graceful. In all his life he had never seen a man move so well. But far more satisfying than any physical beauty was the simple beauty of his soul. He had the strength of the angels, and something of their unearthliness. Had he been so himself, at eighteen? He tried to remember, span the crowded events of three-fifths of a lifetime; no, he had never been so. Was it because this one came truly of his own choice? For he himself had not, though he had had the vocation, of that much he still was sure.

  “Sit down, Dane. Did you do as I asked, start to learn Italian?”

  “At this stage I speak it fluently but without idiom, and I read it very well. Probably the fact that it’s my fourth language makes it easier. I seem to have a talent for languages. A couple of weeks here and I ought to pick up the vernacular.”

  “Yes, you will. I, too, have a talent for languages.”

  “Well, they’re handy,” said Dane lamely. The awesome scarlet figure was a little daunting; it was suddenly hard to remember the man on the chestnut gelding at Drogheda.

  Cardinal Ralph leaned forward, watching him.

  “I pass the responsibility for him to you, Ralph,” Meggie’s letter had said. “I charge you with his well-being, his happiness. What I stole, I give back. It is demanded of me. Only promise me two things, and I’ll rest in the knowledge you’ve acted in his best interests. First, promise me you’ll make sure before you accept him that this is what he truly, absolutely wants. Secondly, that if this is what he wants, you’ll keep your eye on him, make sure it remains what he wants. If he should lose heart for it, I want him back. For he belonged to me first. It is I who gives him to you.”

  “Dane, are you sure?” asked the Cardinal.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Why?”

  His eyes were curiously aloof, uncomfortably familiar, but familiar in a way which was of the past.

  “Because of the love I bear Our Lord. I want to serve Him as His priest all of my days.”

  “Do you understand what His service entails, Dane?”

  “Yes.”

  “That no other love must ever come between you and Him? That you are His exclusively, forsaking all others?”

  “Yes”.

  “That His Will be done in all things, that in His service you must bury your personality, your individuality, your concept of yourself as uniquely important?”

  “Yes.”

  “That if necessary you must face death, imprisonment, starvation in His Name? That you must own nothing, value nothing which might tend to lessen your love for Him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you strong, Dane?”

  “I am a man, Your Eminence. I am first a man. It will be hard, I know. But I pray that with His help I shall find the strength.”

  “Must it be this, Dane? Will nothing less than this content you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “And if later on you should change your mind, what would you do?”

  “Why, I should ask to leave,” said Dane, surprised. “If I changed my mind it would be because I had genuinely mistaken my vocation, for no other reason. Therefore I should ask to leave. I wouldn’t be loving Him any less, but I’d know this isn’t the way He means me to serve Him.”

  “But once your final vows are taken and you are ordained, you realize there can be no going back, no dispensation, absolutely no release?”

  “I understand that,” said Dane patiently. “But if there is a decision to be made, I will have come to it before then.”

  Cardinal Ralph leaned back in his chair, sighed. Had he ever been that sure? Had he ever been that strong? “Why to me, Dane? Why did you want to come to Rome? Why not have remained in Australia?”

  “Mum suggested Rome, but it had been in my mind as a dream for a long time. I never thought there was enough money.”

  “Your mother is very wise. Didn’t she tell you?”

  “Tell me what, Your Eminence?”

  “That you have an income of five thousand pounds a year and many thousands of pounds already in the bank in your own name?”

  Dane stiffened. “No. She never told me.”

  “Very wise. But it’s there, and Rome is yours if you want. Do you want Rome?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you want me, Dane?”

  “Because you’re my conception of the perfect priest, Your Eminence.”

  Cardinal Ralph’s face twisted. “No, Dane, you can’t look up to me as that. I’m far from a perfect priest. I have broken all my vows, do you understand? I had to learn what you already seem to know in the most painful way a priest can, through the breaking of my vows. For I refused to admit that I was first a mortal man, and only after that a priest.”

  “Your Eminence, it doesn’t matter,” said Dane softly. “What you say doesn’t make you any less my conception of the perfect priest. I think you don’t understand what I mean, that’s all. I don’t mean an inhuman automaton, above the weaknesses of the flesh. I mean that you’ve suffered, and grown. Do I sound presumptuous? I don’t intend to, truly. If I’ve offended you, I beg your pardon. It’s just that it’s so hard to express my thoughts! What I mean is that becoming a perfect priest must take years, terrible pain, and all the time keeping before you an ideal, and Our Lord.”

  The telephone rang; Cardinal Ralph picked it up in a slightly unsteady hand, spoke in Italian.

  “Yes, thank you, we’ll come at once.” He got to his feet. “It’s time for afternoon tea, and we’re to have it with an old, old friend of mine. Next to the Holy Father he’s probably the most important priest in the Church. I told him you were coming, and he expressed a wish to meet you.”

  “Thank you, Your Eminence.”

  They walked through corridors, then through pleasant gardens quite unlike Drogheda’s, with tall cypresses and poplars, neat rectangles of grass surrounded by pillared walkways, mossy flagstones; past Gothic arches, under Renaissance bridges. Dane drank it in, loving it. Such a different world from Australia, so old, perpetual.

  It took them fifteen minutes at a brisk pace to reach the palace; they entered, and passed up a great marble staircase hung with priceless tapestries.

  Vittorio Scarbanza, Cardinal di Contini-Verchese was sixty-six now, his body partially crippled by a rheumatic complaint, but his mind as intelligent and alert as it had always been. His present cat, a Russian blue named Natasha, was curled purring in his lap. Since he couldn’t rise to greet his visitors he contented himself with a wide smile, and beckoned them. His eyes passed from Ralph’s beloved face to Dane O’Neill and widened, narrowed, fixed on him stilly. Within his chest he felt his heart falter, put the welcoming hand to it in an instinctive gesture of protection, and sat staring stupidly up at the younger edition of Ralph de Bricassart.

  “Vittorio, are you all right?” Cardinal Ralph asked anxiously, taking the frail wrist between his fingers, feeling for a pulse.

  “Of course. A little passing pain, no more. Sit down, sit down!”

  “First, I’d like you to meet Dane O’Neill, who is as I told you the son of a very dear friend of mine. Dane, this is His Eminence Cardinal di Contini-Verchese.”

  Dane knelt, pressed his lips to the ring; over his bent tawny head Cardinal Vittorio’s gaze sought Ralph’s face, scanned it more closely than in many years. Very slightly he relaxed; she had never told him, then. And he wouldn’t suspect, of course, what everyone who saw them together would instantly surmise. Not father-son, of course, but a close relationship of the blood. Poor Ralph! He had never seen himself walk, never watched the expressions on his own face, never caught the upward flight of his own left eyebrow. Truly God was good, to make men so blind.

  “Sit
down. The tea is coming. So, young man! You wish to be a priest, and have sought the assistance of Cardinal de Bricassart?”

  “Yes, Your Eminence.”

  “You have chosen wisely. Under his care you will come to no harm. But you look a little nervous, my son. Is it the strangeness?”

  Dane smiled Ralph’s smile, perhaps minus conscious charm, but so much Ralph’s smile it caught at an old, tired heart like a passing flick from barbed wire. “I’m overwhelmed, Your Eminence. I hadn’t realized quite how important cardinals are. I never dreamed I’d be met at the airport, or be having tea with you.”

  “Yes, it is unusual…. Perhaps a source of trouble, I see that. Ah, here is our tea!” Pleased, he watched it laid out, lifted an admonishing finger. “Ah, no! I shall be ‘mother.’ How do you take your tea, Dane?”

  “The same as Ralph,” he answered, blushed deeply. “I’m sorry, Your Eminence, I didn’t mean to say that!”

  “It’s all right, Dane, Cardinal di Contini-Verchese understands. We met first as Dane and Ralph, and we knew each other far better that way, didn’t we? Formality is new to our relationship. I’d prefer it remain Dane and Ralph in private. His Eminence won’t mind, will you, Vittorio?”

  “No. I am fond of Christian names. But returning to what I was saying about having friends in high places, my son. It could be a trifle uncomfortable for you when you enter whichever seminary is decided upon, this long friendship with our Ralph. To have to keep going into involved explanations every time the connection between you is remarked upon would be very tedious. Sometimes Our Lord permits of a little white lie”—he smiled, the gold in his teeth flashing—“and for everyone’s comfort I would prefer that we resort to one such tiny fib. For it is difficult to explain satisfactorily the tenuous connections of friendship, but very easy to explain the crimson cord of blood. So we will say to all and sundry that Cardinal de Bricassart is your uncle, my Dane, and leave it at that,” ended Cardinal Vittorio suavely.

  Dane looked shocked, Cardinal Ralph resigned.