In a bafflement of remorse – must he now engage in further remedial politicking? – he was gazing out to where the scarf was still streaming eastwards when he saw something amazing. The balloon was coming back! Rosy in the sunset’s glow, and travelling westward like a second sun, it reached the pitch of its trajectory just as the first, more constant orb sank. Just then, like an eyelid raised for a celestial wink, a cloudlet lifted off it. The Monsignore, feeling absolved and reprimanded – a familiar blend – told himself that visions came from yearning and certitude: two forces which could in incandescent moments unite to constrain the universe. They could also, apparently, accommodate deception.
What surprised him was that his own diffident nature should witness the nun’s miracle. His mind refused it, finding it unjust and keenly troublesome, yet here it was! The balloon was sailing into the very teeth of the wind which was still blowing Flavio’s scarf the other way!
‘God!’ he cried. ‘It is a reproof to reason!’ And indeed logic must have lulled, for he felt a leap and lightening of the heart.
Later, he would be shocked at his egotism in supposing God’s signal to be directed particularly at himself. Later still, he saw that it had brought distinct messages to those who beheld it. God was thrifty in His ways.
*
The French balloonist slapped himself, then opened and closed his fists and, flexing a leg, indulged in a little gymnastique. He had gone through this routine several times since landing. One must, he explained, keep the blood circulating. It was remarkable how little most people knew about the body, not to speak of the world. They lacked instruction! Especially here.
‘Not that I’m being critical, Monsignore! Our own rural population is no better. Some Breton peasants burned a balloon on me once when I landed in their field of artichokes. I was lucky not to be burned myself as some sort of devil. I suppose I looked like one, slithering from the basket on my belly! I’d twisted my ankle, you see. You’d be surprised at the lack of progress in our hinterland. So you lived in Paris for a while, Monsignore? Ah now, that’s a different kettle of fish! Another universe, you might say! There were balloons there in the days of Louis XV! You wouldn’t find Parisians imagining that rising up to catch a contrary wind was a miracle!’
‘Did you expect all along to do that?’ asked Nicola.
‘Of course! We watched the clouds! Science is a matter of observation, Monsignore. We knew that when we wanted to we could throw out ballast, rise, catch the east wind and turn around. No need of divine intervention! No need of saintly nuns!’
Nicola invited the two balloonists to join him in a hot drink. Punch? Cinnamon wine? They were just driving into Cesena.
They accepted. They were Monsieur et Madame Poitevin, internationally known balloonists, at your service, Monsignore. Mind, the flight had not been without its hazards. They were suffering from exposure on account of the height to which they had been obliged to rise and, due to navigational difficulties, things had taken longer than foreseen. But they were in high spirits. Laughing with ebullience and relief.
It was no surprise, they noted, that Miss Ella should be wedded to the idea of a miracle. Circus folk were superstitious – unlike balloonists, who were scientific. That was why ballooning was largely a French pursuit! It was a logical business. Take today’s adventure with the wind. Of course the horse had suffered, poor beast! The Poitevins hadn’t wanted to take him and hadn’t predicted the long flight when they did. But Miss Ella had held out. Hippophiles could be temperamental. Monsieur Poitevin had noticed this. Horses themselves were stubborn and impulsive and, over time, an exchange of character could occur between rider and mount. Not that she had used her own mount on the flight. No, no. This was some poor nag who would, doubtless, now end as dog-meat. And it went without saying that she had not spent the flight on the wretched creature’s back. As soon as we were well out of sight of the crowd, she had skipped up the ladder and into the basket. A true professional. One did not perform for seals and sea gulls!
‘Very good of you, Monsignore, to take us back in your carriage! Being stranded is one of the hazards of our sport.’
Spending time in the convent, though they didn’t say so, would clearly not have been congenial. Hot punch in the best Cesena could supply in the way of lodgings was more like it. And a fire and a rest. Then back they would go to Bologna. They had a show to prepare. Come and see it, Monsignore. Better, let us take you up and show you what it’s like. Unfortunately, one cannot steer a balloon, or we would take you to Bologna in ours!
‘But you did steer it!’
‘Ah, but that was approximate. As you saw, we landed in a field. Very good of you to come and get us.’
‘How is Miss Ella?’ Nicola had hardly seen her before she was taken off in Flavio’s carriage.
They told him that she was suffering from cold. She had insisted on wearing her circus rig! Wanted to do acrobatics in the air! Well, I ask you! Madame Poitevin cranked her forehead. Luckily we had some blankets. ‘Oh dear! I was about to say she was a bit montata! Exaltée! Well, she does have her head in the clouds! She may be ill for a while.’
*
So it was not a miracle! Nicola’s relief gave way to a mild disappointment which reproached him, for he must – he saw – have inflicted worse when exposing the thaumaturges who had transfigured the reality of small stinking villages.
Miracles brought scope and significance to trapped lives. Did it matter whether they were true? The question frightened him. Shelving it as tricky – for what was true? – he prevailed on Flavio to keep quiet about a story which did not reflect well on their personae as solid businessmen and pillars of the Papal Loan. There was an instability about the episode which would not reassure possible purchasers of bonds. And Miss Ella must now be got rid of.
‘So,’ said Flavio, ‘we’re back where we started!’
‘Where else would we be?’
Perhaps Flavio was more worried than he let on about business confidence – an equivalent, as Nicola now knew, of the Faith. At any rate, he gave in and some days later Miss Ella came to see Nicola in his hotel in Cesena. Her carriage was outside, loaded with trunks. A second one, drawn up behind it, was heavily curtained, but he saw the curtains twitch as though someone were nervously pulling them to.
She was leaving, she told him, thanks to him, who had ruined what had been a pure friendship. As it happened, she was not sorry to go and it was in no spirit of disappointment that she was confronting him. No, merely of justice. He deserved punishment, and so she had written a letter to Monsignor Pila, the Justice Minister – she smirked – denouncing Flavio and himself for taking bribes from Langrand-Dumonceau.
‘Naturally, I would not be telling you this if I were not leaving straight away for Louisiana with a friend.’ She curtsied, pirouetted, then ran down to her two carriages which, moments later, rattled impudently down the street and out of Cesena.
Nicola wondered whether it was by chance or design that she had hit on the most dangerous person to whom to denounce him? He had thought her childish, but children can manipulate malice with a cool finesse. Though unable to gauge the randomness of her bull’s-eye, he was sufficiently dismayed by it – since Monsignor Pila would surely seize any pretext to ruin him – to head for Bologna whither Flavio had fled from Miss Ella. He had hoped to consult him but found that there could be no question of that, for Flavio was mournful and furioso in the way Orlando must have been when his brain joined those of other lunatics in the valleys of the moon. He had been drinking absinthe for days and, startled by his friend’s arrival, fell and hit his head on a brazier, so that Nicola, to prevent any further éclat, had to nurse him with the help of a valet, but without that of a doctor, after Flavio tried to assault one they did bring in. He charged the bewildered man with conniving with lecherous priests. After that, it was several days before Nicola dared leave him alone.
When it finally seemed safe to do so, he went out for air and, feeling in need of a chan
ge of scene, called on Monsieur and Madame Poitevin and reminded them of the offer to take him up in a balloon. The couple were delighted. Tomorrow then.
Oh, by the way, said they, they had seen Miss Ella. Yes, she was bound for Livorno where she planned to take ship for North America. The Poitevins nodded pinkly and their cheeks bobbed like apples in water. She had introduced them to her new friend, the convent chaplain who, in the course of trying to convert her, had himself been converted. Padre Gamba planned to join some Protestant sect in North America which, he hoped, would have him as a priest. Madame Poitevin presumed the two would marry – what other advantage had the Protestant priesthood over our own, she asked teasingly, but the Monsignore was not up to engaging in the sort of banter which such queries aim to elicit from a prelate. He was thinking that Flavio’s remarks about lecherous priests now made sense! Poor gull, he thought of Padre Gamba! He was crossing an ocean in pursuit of a false religion and an impossible love!
*
It was a week for confrontations.
La Diotallevi was in the hall when he returned to his hotel. Hiding her light – she had a scandalous visibility to her – under a shawl, she was lurking with her back to the door. Sotto voce, she murmured that they must talk. She had come from Rome to do so.
They agreed to make their separate ways to the cathedral which was one of the few places where they could be seen together without scandal, and there, standing in the middle of the nave, so as to give no cover to eavesdroppers, he learned what had happened with Monsignor de Mérode, to whom she had not, she swore, denounced him. Instead, her efforts to have a confidential conversation with the Arms Minister had attracted the attention of his henchmen, Pila and Matteucci, who insisted on knowing why she wanted it. She, since she had to tell them something, said she had scruples over what they had made her do. The pair promptly took fright and locked her up for a few nights to teach her to keep her mouth shut. This, however, proved their undoing, for Mérode heard about it and summoned her, whereupon she told him that she had committed perjury in his interests and that her testimony against, for instance, Signor Fausti, had been entirely false.
‘You were quite right, Monsignore,’ she told Nicola. ‘He was stunned. Disbelieving at first, then indignant. His first impulse was rage. He’s a choleric man and I thought he might hit me. He who touches pitch, said he, meaning that I was pitch, must expect to be defiled. Then he said pitch couldn’t help being what it was and that I was less to blame than he. “Well, you came here to confess my sins to me,” said he sarcastically. “Not your own! So I’m the one in need of absolution!” Then out he stormed, ranting something about the waters of tribulation.’
She was now terrified lest he wreak his fury on Pila and Matteucci who had endangered his soul – Monsignor de Mérode was genuinely devout – and tarnished his honour. Because, if he didn’t utterly destroy them, they would then wreak theirs on her.
‘I’ve come to you, Monsignore, for my sake, but also for yours.’ The word scruples had, she explained, alerted the two as to the likelihood that she had been to confession to some enemy of theirs. They had made inquiries. Her maid, a simple creature, had been interrogated by the morals police and had told them that a Monsignor Santi had come to the house one day in a wet cassock and had had to remove it and … La Diotallevi stopped. ‘Need I say more, Monsignore? Forewarned is forearmed. I came to tip you off. I’m doing my best for you.’
And he, ran the implication, should do the same for her. For now she intended lying low here in Bologna, where, as it happened, she had friends. He too, she warned, should take measures to protect himself. To be sure, Monsignor de Mérode might effectively clip the wings of his underlings. But best be on the qui vive.
*
That night Nicola did not sleep at all. Flavio was now better, but news like this might send him back to the absinthe bottle. So, left to wrestle with his demons alone, Nicola read his breviary and tossed and turned and lit a candle and read some more and blew it out again maybe six or seven times over. What had he done wrong? He had associated with people – Flavio and Cardinal Amandi – who had enemies and so drawn these on himself. But that answer didn’t reach his deeper anxiety. The question gnawing at him was why such naked evil should be rampant among us and ready to pounce on our smallest mistake. Surely, it hadn’t always been like this?
The Pope had addressed himself to this very matter last December in an encyclical to which he had appended a list of the errors of our time. The Syllabus Errorum censured pantheism, naturalism, nationalism, indifferentism, socialism, communism, freemasonry and a host of other contemporary views, including the proposition that ‘the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism and contemporary civilisation’. The conservative clergy hoped this censure would save us from the flood of errors. They saw the Church as a house whose foundations could be sapped unless dykes were built around it. Others, like Amandi, thought of it as a barque which could ride the flood. They believed that changing thought reflected a changing world and that if we engaged in a dialogue with it we could pick out the good and reject the bad. Quarrels between partisans of these differing strategies were by now sourer than the one with the Italians.
*
Perhaps it was partly due to light-headedness after his sleepless night, but Nicola’s jaunt in the Poitevins’ balloon brought a joy such as he remembered only from dreams, and he felt his anxieties melt as the couple took him soaring through sunshot clouds and circular rainbows and over a Bologna which looked as one might imagine it being seen by God. Neat within its pretty walls, it gleamed, after a baptism of rain, like an illuminated miniature of one of the towns of old Christendom, garlanded in Faith’s dicta and vivid with gold leaf. A God looking down at this might suppose it to be easier than it was for His servants to take the long view. Faith, He would imagine, could sustain them.
*
And in this instance, He would, as it turned out, be right, for there was no move from the Mérodiani, who had other fish to fry. In less than a twinkling – as seen from Eternity – an amazing thing was to happen. On an October day in 1865, Monsignor de Mérode would be sacked quite suddenly and obliged to remove himself bag and baggage from the Arms Ministry on the piazza della Pilotta. He had, said the usual gossips, been caught stealing funds. No. His subordinates had! Well, anyway, they must have done something reprehensible. No smoke without fire and the Mérodiani, a Curia-within-the-Curia, had been insufferably overweening. Having the Police and the Justice Ministry within their ranks, they had thought themselves untouchable. Well, they’d learned otherwise. Gaining in colour, the news spread through Rome.
Nicola heard it with a grateful relief. In its way, it was a miracle as unlooked for as the balloon’s return, but his notion of the miraculous was increasingly leery. He was not willing to waste faith on untenable outposts of his creed. Perhaps he had simply grown up? He preferred to think of the once conniving sky as empty. No God looked down with a balloonist’s eye or replaced whatever kind, tutelary face had bent over us in the cradle. Faith was vulnerable and Nicola’s instinctive way of protecting it was to refine it to something interior and abstract which offered less of a target to disillusion.
To his surprise, the abbess agreed. He went to see her in trepidation, fearing that she would want to publicise Sister Paola’s miracle by printing up cards and calendars and maybe even finding some spring whose waters could be bottled. But no. None of that was on her mind. Sister Paola, she said, would not want it either. Though she knew nothing about winds blowing differently on different levels, the abbess had, it appeared, enough experience of truth’s shifts to choose caution over enthusiasm. And sure enough, when news came of the wretched chaplain’s having absconded with the miraculée, this caution proved wise. Perhaps she had intuited something? The convent was, it seemed, a web of intuition and Sister Paola, though still in retreat, sent Nicola a message.
‘To me? What had you told her of me?’
>
‘Nothing,’ said the abbess, ‘though Miss Ella will have described you to her as the devil’s advocate, if not the devil himself. Sister Paola, however, is not easily taken in and has startling perceptions, so listen. She says you need not worry about Miss Ella’s venom but must forgive her because she is unhappy and her revenge will fail. Don’t ask me what she means. It may become clear to yourself. We find that detachment from personal appetites hones the perceptions. Sister Paola, for instance, is an excellent dowser. She found a well here with a hazel rod. We’re not calling that a miracle, as you may imagine. We’d be laughed out of the province, where quite a few people can dowse and tell cards and set bones and prophesy with or without almanacs. That’s why we don’t believe in making claims. After all, as you, his advocate, must know, Monsignore, more magic comes from the devil than from God. God is remote but the devil is close and uses cures and tricks to make people trust him. Her other message to you is that you and she will meet soon.’
And, sure enough, the revenge failed, for Monsignori Pila and Matteucci soon lost their places, being cast down from their seats by Cardinal Antonelli who, while refraining from gloating or triumphing over Monsignor de Mérode, of whom he spoke everywhere with generous courtesy, ruthlessly crushed former minions of his own who had gone to work for the former Arms Minister and made sure that they would never again get their treacherous hands on the levers of power. Pila and Matteucci, who had cooked up false charges against his friend, Fausti, could, like the fraudulent in Dante’s hell, expect the worst penalties.
In time, details came out about Mérode’s fall. He had not, as vulgar gossips claimed, misappropriated funds. However, he had been highhanded and drawn out monies for his men without bothering to discover whether the Treasury could afford them. Then he had turned the Council of Ministers into a bear-garden, insulted people and even been disrespectful to the Pope. This misconduct had, Nicola noticed with interest, increased markedly after the Diotallevi told Mérode of his responsibility for injustices and fraud. Perhaps, in an expiatory spirit, he had drawn punishment down on his own head?
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