Sidney Chambers and The Forgiveness of Sins

by James Runcie

  Once they were back in the nave, they sat down to rest. Sidney looked at Domenico di Michelino’s painting of Dante with the Divina Commedia and lit a candle for his family and his parishioners, thinking particularly of all those who had died that year. Hildegard and Anna took out their colouring pencils and began to copy a fresco of the English condottiere Sir John Hawkwood on horseback. As they did so, a couple stopped and smiled to observe the blonde hair and pale skin of both mother and daughter, quoting Pope Gregory: non angli sed angeli.

  They were sheltered and at ease. One day they would look back on this moment as the happiest time of their holiday.

  The flood arrived at three thirty on the Saturday morning when most people were asleep. By seven o’clock the situation was critical. The rising water had submerged the supporting arches of the Ponte Vecchio, spurting through leaks and crevices in the parapets flanking the river. Now at the full, the Arno carried a deluge of water, mud, rubbish and uprooted trees, pouring into the quarters of Bellariva and Gavinana, San Niccolò and Santa Croce: every part of the city that was not on a hill.

  Electricity, gas, water and telephone supplies broke off in turn. The river poured into basements and swept into heating plants, releasing tanks of fuel oil that merged with the water to leave greasy black lines on the walls of buildings. By eight thirty the flood had reached the historical centre, overturning parked cars, ripping through the canvas-covered stalls in the flea market, and tore into the basement and conservation areas of the Uffizi Gallery.

  Sidney, Hildegard and Anna awoke to find that the flood had carried away rubbish bins, empty crates and sections of doorways. Cars that had been parked in the streets below turned three hundred and sixty degrees and swirled off downstream, pulling down traffic signs in their wake. Couples kept to the sides of the road, holding on to walls for support against the torrent as they made their way towards higher ground.

  On the south side, in the Oltrarno, water rushed past San Jacopo sopr’Arno, Palazzo Guicciardini, the Palazzo Pitti, Santo Spirito and Borgo San Frediano. The city had become an immense lake. The bridges connecting the two sides were impassable. Police in hooded raincoats directed people away from the danger areas without being able to predict when the waters would abate. A twelve-year-old boy gave his grandmother a piggyback. A No Through Road sign (Permanente) was torn from its holdings. Thousands of people were stranded on rooftops, waiting, often in vain, for rescue from helicopters. One elderly woman lost her grip and fell to her death.

  In time, the floodwaters reached up to fifteen feet, into the arches of the cloisters in Santa Croce. The statue of Dante was still visible, the poet looking like he might be contemplating a swim on a chilly day. Sidney remembered the lines from Inferno:

  Dost thou not hear the pity of his plaint?

  Dost thou not see the death that combats him

  Beside that flood, where ocean has no vaunt?

  He went to help Timothy Jeffers protect the English Church, working with a queue of elderly volunteers, pumping out water, putting up new flood boards, and moving valuables into the organ loft.

  Amanda had made her way to the Uffizi.

  Hildegard and Anna spent the day in the top of the vicarage, unable to go out, hardly daring to look out of the window and down to the flooded streets below. They played Topfschlagen to pass the time, in which Anna was blindfolded and given a wooden spoon in order to find a cooking pot hidden in the room. Then they sang German folk songs and nursery rhymes:

  Hoppe hoppe Reiter

  wenn er fällt, dann schreit er,

  fällt er in den Teich,

  find’t ihn keiner gleich.

  It only stopped raining towards evening, the flood abating in the night. Rescue and repair would have to wait until the following day when there was a chance to assess the wreckage, the first grey light revealing upturned cars, shattered buildings, breached bridges and roads blocked by uprooted trees. Buses and cars had been abandoned. The streets alongside the river were as muddy as a wartime battlefield.

  Hundreds of artworks were damaged or destroyed: Paolo Uccello’s Creation and Fall at Santa Maria Novella, Sandro Botticelli’s Saint Augustine and Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Saint Jerome at the Church of Ognissanti. The greatest loss was the Crucifixion by Giovanni Cimabue in the Santa Croce Museum.

  Once Sidney had helped with the clean-up of St Mark’s he made his way to the Uffizi to join Amanda, ferrying paintings to the Limonaia in the Boboli Gardens where they could dry out. The Piero double portrait they had seen only a few days before was mercifully intact. Sidney was instructed to put the paintings to one side ready for the conservator’s inspection.

  Sir William and Lady Victoria Etherington were doing their bit too, with Lydia Huxley from the British Institute and a number of ex-patriates Sidney remembered from the church service he had taken the previous Sunday. The operation was methodical and surprisingly well organised given the scale of the calamity. It was similar to the preparations for a funeral, Sidney thought. As long as people were given something specific to do they were calm.

  By the end of the day Sidney was exhausted. When he finally arrived home for supper he noticed Francesca helping Tim remove his wellington boots. They were laughing at how stuck they were, and if they would ever come off.

  He could hear Hildegard singing once more to their daughter upstairs:

  ‘Hoppe hoppe, Reiter,

  wenn er fällt, dann schreit er;

  fällt er in den Sumpf,

  dann macht der Reiter . . . Plumps!’

  He had never paid much attention to this bedtime ritual but now he tried to follow the words, translating them as his wife sang.

  Bumpety bump, rider,

  If he falls, then he cries out;

  If he falls in a swamp

  The rider goes plop!

  Sidney was silently grateful that none of them had fallen in the swamp. How fragile everything was.

  After an early-morning inspection of his church, and satisfied that there was no further damage, the Reverend Tim Jeffers settled down to breakfast with his guests. It consisted of cornflakes (which his sister brought over in batches twice a year; the English vicar could no more do without them than he could live without Marmite), toast with apricot jam, and coffee with hot milk.

  He read his newspaper, II Giorno, and observed how one writer, Carlo Coccioli, had lost his faith as a result of the flood.

  ‘Amazing how such a comparatively minor thing can set a man off course.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s not so minor for those who experience it.’

  Francesca interrupted their breakfast. She knew it was a bad time but her father was at the door with some of his colleagues. Nico Tardelli was shown into the room with Inspector Luigi del Pirlo and two carabinieri. They were dressed in their traditional dark-blue uniforms with a red stripe down the side of the trousers and white shoulder belts. Signor Tardelli looked at Hildegard and Anna before asking the vicar if there was somewhere private the men could talk.

  Sidney had seen that type of look before and was sure that something was afoot; he only hoped that it wasn’t anything drastic. He presumed that his presence would not be required but was surprised to find the exact opposite. Indeed, he was the very purpose of the visit.

  Nico Tardelli explained in halting English that Piero della Francesca’s painting of Battista Sforza, one half of a pair with the portrait of her husband, Duke Federico da Montefeltro, had gone missing. They had checked the conservation workshop in the Uffizi, and the temporary holding room in the Limonaia, and it was nowhere to be found. Could Sidney remember where he had put the painting when he was helping with the clear-up operation?

  The request was oratorically complex and Sidney spent some time wondering if he had assessed the situation correctly. At first he had thought Francesca’s father was talking about somebody else. The conversation had such a deferential tone, repeating what an honour it was that such a distinguished English clergyman had come all this way to
their city, so that the final implied accusation that Sidney had stolen a painting was buried in a flurry of flattery.

  Once he had understood what had been said, Sidney felt that he had to adopt the same flowery rhetoric in his response. He was sorry that there appeared to have been a misunderstanding. He had last seen the painting the previous day and had placed it on one of the trestle tables, well away from the windows and in the driest part of the room, against the wall by the wooden door leading back up to the gallery. The painting of the duke was already there. He had then handled a series of different paintings for the next hour. When he had left he had taken only his cloak. Yes, he was sure. No, he could not be mistaken. Yes, he had put it beside the portrait of Federico da Montefeltro so that the pair remained together. No, he couldn’t explain why he remembered these paintings and not the ones that came before or after, apart from the fact that Amanda had pointed them out to him as being particularly impressive works of art. No, not so impressive that he wanted to take them back to England or look at them in his own home.

  The inspector asked if Sidney had ever been absent-minded; if he was, perhaps, sometimes distracted by ‘higher things’. He knew that priests found it difficult to concentrate on the routine of everyday life when they spent so much time pondering the mysteries of eternity. Perhaps if he looked around the vicarage, even in his room, then the painting might turn up (possibly inside his cloak?) and they could be on their way and no one need say anything more about it.

  Sidney explained that he was happy to show them his cloak and for them to look at his room but he was sure that they would not find the painting because he had never removed it in the first place. He was sorry for their wasted journey. While he did not have the painting himself he would be pleased to assist in any way he could in securing its safe return.

  The inspector was grateful and asked Sidney if he was sure of his story. He would not want there to be any confusion.

  No, there could be no misunderstanding. Sidney could remember precisely what he had been doing.

  Perhaps not precisely? The inspector announced that it was with the greatest regret his men would indeed have to search the vicarage. While they did so, he would appreciate it very much if Sidney accompanied him to the station.

  Would that really be necessary?

  The inspector was full of a thousand apologies and stated that yes, it was necessary.

  For one wild moment Sidney thought of asking Hildegard to watch the men search the house. He did not want the carabinieri planting evidence and framing him for a crime he had not committed, but he acknowledged that this was, perhaps (but only perhaps), taking suspicion too far. At least Amanda was in town. Would she know what was going on? Almost certainly not.

  The inspector took Sidney into a car where two more police were waiting. He remembered a joke that Tim had told him. Why do the carabinieri go round in pairs? So that one could read and the other could write. It hadn’t been amusing in the first place, and it certainly didn’t seem funny now.

  The clean-up operation after the flood continued as the streets were cleared of overturned and mud-spattered cars, wardrobes, mattresses, bicycles, cash boxes, tables and chairs, books, diaries, manuscripts and photograph albums. Through the window of the police car Sidney saw a shopkeeper putting back his wooden flood boards just in case the waters came again. Paintings, stepladders and picture frames were stacked against walls; a television crew was interviewing a woman who appeared to have packed her most precious family possessions in a cardboard box. Perhaps she had the Piero della Francesca painting inside it? Sidney thought. It could be anywhere.

  Once they were at the police station he was taken to an interview room and asked if he wanted a cup of coffee or a glass of water. He was then told to wait while a translator was summoned.

  Back at the vicarage, Timothy explained to Hildegard that there were three different police forces at any one time in Florence: the carabinieri, who were a special branch of the army, the state police and the local police. It was all to do with safeguarding liberty. They counterbalanced each other and it was, he smiled sadly, the Italian way to live with contradiction. ‘In the grand scheme of things it is nothing to worry about. The police need to be seen to be doing something to satisfy any protest from the Uffizi about incompetence and inefficiency.’

  ‘Even if they demonstrate both.’

  ‘I am sure they will release Sidney later today or tomorrow.’

  ‘They might keep him overnight? He is innocent. They can’t believe that a clergyman would steal a painting.’

  ‘I’m afraid that they no longer have the respect they once had for the Church. Some people think it is because the services are no longer in Latin. Everyone can now see how far priests fall short. But Francesca tells me that all will be well.’

  ‘Her father did not seem so helpful.’

  ‘He is different. He is in a position of authority.’

  ‘I will ask Miss Kendall to talk to the director of the Uffizi. This has to stop.’

  ‘I am not sure she will be of much help. You need to have a local on your side. That is why Francesca is such an advantage.’

  Throughout the interchange Anna was confused, asking her mother, ‘Where’s Daddy? I want my daddy.’ She went to look for his cloak in the bedroom wardrobe and followed the carabinieri round the house as they searched. One of them was kind enough to turn it into a game.

  While she was preoccupied, Hildegard sought out Francesca in the kitchen, and asked if she could talk to her father.

  ‘It is complicated. So many police.’

  ‘But your brother is a policeman.’

  ‘With the local force. They are different.’

  ‘There are too many people; too many different organisations.’

  ‘And none of them are good. People say it is because we have so much crime.’

  ‘They are busy?’

  ‘Perhaps if you make everyone a policeman then life is more peaceful. But somehow we made a mistake. And now many of the policemen are criminals.’

  ‘But not your family.’

  ‘In my family we do nothing wrong. Your husband is a good man?’

  ‘The best.’

  ‘Then I will help him. I like Mr Chambers. He makes me smile.’

  ‘I think you also have a boyfriend in the police force?’

  ‘He is not so much. He takes me places. It is not serious.’

  ‘And Padre Tim?’ Hildegard asked, but before the housekeeper could divulge any further information about her employer they were interrupted by Anna running into the room in tears.

  ‘Men won’t let me play with Daddy’s cloak. Where’s Daddy?’

  Once she had heard the news from Hildegard, Amanda telephoned the director of the Uffizi, convinced that Timothy Jeffers was hopeless, his housekeeper was corrupt, and that the situation was a fix. She would come over to see Alfredo Verga within an hour, and she didn’t care if he had meetings, or that it was in the middle of a flood, or that he had a lot to do. The situation had to be resolved. There would be no deal on the exchange of paintings with the National Gallery and, indeed, no further relationship with them at all if necessary and she wasn’t prepared to put up with her best friend’s incarceration.

  ‘Signora,’ the director protested. ‘I did not arrest him personally.’

  ‘But you must have agreed to it.’

  ‘It is not my business to agree or disagree. The carabinieri told me that your friend was acting suspiciously. He had a large cloak.’

  ‘They have large cloaks too. And those stupid feathered hats.’

  ‘You should not worry, Miss Kendall. No charges have been made. They only want to question your friend.’

  ‘I don’t trust them. They weren’t even in the room at the time! You must have told them something.’

  ‘It is not my job to go into details. Mr Tardelli assures me . . .’

  ‘Mr Tardelli! Is there no escaping that family? I will be with you imminently
and I will want answers.’

  ‘I cannot promise to be available.’

  ‘Don’t you dare even presume that you can avoid me!’ Amanda shouted, her voice breaking with anger. ‘I will find you wherever you are.’

  She picked up her handbag and was just about to leave her hotel when she was delayed by the Etheringtons. They wanted to know if there was anything they could do to help in this very unfortunate situation but asked in a tone that, although just the right side of sympathetic, suggested they would rather not be involved. Instead they seemed keen to extract any gossip and leave as soon as it could be considered polite.

  ‘What evidence do they have against Sidney?’ Sir William asked.

  ‘None as far as I can see.’ Amanda controlled her temper, but only just.

  His wife wanted the details. ‘He was in the room while we were conveying paintings to the Limonaia. Do you know if they said anything about his cloak?’

  ‘Yes. They seem to have fixed on that very object. I’ve always hated it. It is the worst of Sidney’s affectations. Sometimes I think he wears it just to annoy me.’

  ‘I imagine they think that’s where he hid the painting.’

  ‘But he didn’t.’

  ‘Not even by mistake? He seems very absent-minded.’

  Amanda adjusted her headscarf in the mirror and began to put on her gloves. ‘He isn’t at all. That too is one of his stupid mannerisms. At least this might all be a lesson to him.’

  ‘He didn’t strike us as an art-lover,’ Lady Victoria continued before her husband added: ‘One couldn’t call him a connoisseur.’

  ‘He isn’t,’ Amanda answered testily. ‘That’s the point. What would he do with the painting anyway? He wouldn’t have a clue how to sell it.’