*
The bishop was remembering them too, for he had been watching through a perforated screen in the Diotallevi’s dressing room.
‘This,’ she told him, ‘is where the stenographer will sit.’
Reluctantly, for he found the arrangements distasteful, he put his eye to the screen and heard the girl ask ‘… tired?’
‘Never too tired for action!’
‘Here’s where that’s needed!’ The girl set the bowl between the soldier’s knees and dodged away, laughing.
The monotony of sexual play was a penance to spies. The bishop sighed. He had voiced scruples about the unseemly endeavour to Martelli and been withered by contempt.
‘Monsignore!’ Impatience whistled in the deputy’s indrawn breath. ‘You, thanks to my unseemly arrangements, can help your friends and mine. War may break out any day now between France and Prussia! If it does, the French garrison will leave and the Council have to be prorogued and then,’ Martelli bit off each syllable as though it had been made of some brittle substance, ‘bringing on Giraud may be your opponents’ only hope of getting their dogma in time!’ This hope can be nipped in the bud. Now. Here. Surely, in such a cause, a little unseemliness can be stomached?
Goaded by memory, Nicola reapplied his eye to the spy-hole and heard the atheist father described. A wheelwright, he had learned scepticism in Napoleon’s army.
‘My father hated priests.’
‘Did he?’ The girl dropped an unbroken apple peel over her shoulder, then turned to examine it. ‘In my village,’ she told him, ‘this is how girls who know their alphabet learn the name of the man they’ll marry.’ It was a boast.
He ignored it. He was remembering one of his father’s stories. It was about a chair falling from the sky.
That got her attention. ‘A chair?’
Yes. He mimed the fall. Whoosh! It was a true story. A chair had landed in a village and the villagers were sure it must have come from heaven. What puzzled them was that it was badly made. Could heavenly carpenters be botchers? ‘The Curé said one thing and the schoolmaster another. Then – can you guess?’
Catherine was rearranging the apple peel with her toe. Revealing a stretch of sturdy calf, she gave it a quick twitch. Nicola read ‘M’, but her slow swain failed to note it.
‘It turned out that a balloonist had taken a chair up as ballast, then thrown it out. My father loved that story.’ Maximin laughed. ‘When Mélanie and I saw the Virgin, he said what we saw might have been a hot-air balloon. The Curé said the only hot air around was in him.’
‘And what did you think?’ She was peeling a fresh apple.
‘I think that if my father hadn’t been a bully I might not have seen the vision.’
La Diotallevi’s hand gripped the bishop’s sleeve. This was what they were waiting for!
But the girl had cut herself. ‘Oh, ai! Maximin, give me your handkerchief.’
‘Silly little bitch!’ said la Diotallevi. ‘He’ll say no more now!’
Earlier, she had said, ‘No need to worry about impropriety, Monsignore. She’s to be the good girl from his own mountains. That way he’ll talk, which is, I understand, what’s wanted.’
She herself was quite at ease. Intrigue was her métier and she attended to it without fuss. Martelli who had known her when she was a three-or-four-way spy, ferrying between rival groups in Rome, either had some hold on her or was paying her well. The bishop was glad to be left in ignorance. Amandi, who had consented to Martelli’s plans, could surely not have guessed that they would lead to his Coadjutor spending time in the bedroom of the nearest thing to a madam one could find in a town where amateur courtesans kept professionals out of business.
Back in her drawing room, she explained that she had given her servants a holiday and told friends she had gone to the country. Catherine had been specially engaged.
Lightly touching on their previous acquaintance, she congratulated the bishop on escaping the wrath of Monsignori Pila and Matteucci, two stingless wasps whose venom had been drawn. She had herself feared for her pension when Mérode fell, but the arrangement was being honoured. And, yes, she had Italian connections still.
‘That’s why Signor Martelli engaged me.’ Clasping plump hands with composure, she explained that she was a person who liked to help others, irrespective of party.
He knew he mustn’t show distaste – but perhaps had for she was delivering an apologia, telling how she had started on her trade. First a lover had asked her to spy for the French. Later, she spied on them too. Why not? By then, her husband had been cashiered from the Army for debt and needed cash to set up as a photographer. It was shortly afterwards that the bogus photograph of the Queen of Naples was commissioned by the Democrats leading to more hullabaloo than could have been foreseen. ‘What harm did it do her after all, Monsignore? Nobody believed it was she!’ Instead, said the Diotallevi, the one harmed was herself who was given an ultimatum by Monsignor de Mérode: work for him or go to prison. And working for him had made her an object of odium – her, not him! That was how the world was. And now he was rich. ‘Ricchissimo, Monsignore! He bought up great stretches of the city out of his own pocket and had the roads widened and improvements made and when the Italians come here his investments will be worth a pretty penny! And don’t think those who worked for him will benefit! Oh, yes, he granted me my tiny pension. Scarcely enough to keep body and soul together. Yet he’s a great one for charity! Goes out in that hood the confraternities wear, shaking begging boxes under people’s noses. Peering through the slits, recognising some but hiding his own identity, he defies them to refuse alms. But he gives nothing to those who jeopardised their souls in his service. Used spies, Monsignore, are thrown on the midden like dogs.’
The old complaint brought back an old image: a splayed body on the steps of the Collegio Romano. It made it harder for the bishop to dismiss the self-serving farrago being poured over him like slops from a balcony. It was ironic, declared la Diotallevi, that she should pretend to need a bodyguard. Because she had in fact received death threats. Notes had been slipped under her door and there had been whispers from masked faces at carnival. Last spring, an Arlecchino, pretending to kiss her, had made her feel his knife. ‘There was a rent in my dress here!’ She touched her navel. ‘No, don’t talk of an investigation. It could have been the police! Everyone hates me now. Users hate their spies.’
The reproach was to his cloth. He was its representative, facelessly confronting her like Mérode through the slits in his hood. He chid himself for believing that, as an individual, he would have behaved better. How know? Yet the rogue individual inside himself itched to settle an individual debt. Before he knew it, he had said: ‘A penitent of mine – you may remember that he was the reason we first met – wants to make amends to a woman he helped push onto the downward path.’
Donna Costanza’s soft descent of eyelashes opined that there was no such penitent. As one masker to another, he had an impulse to slough off deceptions, but owed it to his cloth not to.
A hand swooped and squeezed his knee. ‘Monsignore, you wouldn’t deceive me, would you? I mean in a way that matters?’
He flinched.
‘Is it amends your penitent is after or revenge?’ She removed the hand. ‘The world isn’t tender to women without protectors and hers is jealous. I tell you what, I’ll send her to confession to you, Monsignore. Can you arrange to hear confessions here in Rome?’
*
It was two days later and here he was again in la Diotallevi’s drawing room. In his hand were the notes taken by a stenographer who had spent several afternoons behind the perforated screen listening to Maximin talk to the unwitting Catherine.
The city had grown maggoty under the unrelenting sun and simmered with wrangles. Amandi was coming back to Rome but must not give any appearance of conspiring. He was to preach, say mass, be active in the Council but avoid private meetings. Nicola should not give any appearance of conspiring either.
*
Archbishop Darboy, whom Nicola had consulted in a cryptic way about his troubled conscience – he didn’t wish to trouble his – agreed that preventing an intrigue was a salutary thing though never, he warned, easy. For instance, had Nicola seen what the Majority was up to now? In the Giornale di Roma? The paper had named several Opposition bishops as having declared their readiness to submit and vote for the doctrine. This was a lie. Yet, to issue denials and say they would not submit to the Pope’s wishes took more courage – as the Giornale well knew – than most of them had. And letting the lie stand would dishearten their fellows.
Darboy groaned that our pity for this unfortunate pope was being used against us. He raced off then, leaving Nicola to his doubts and to the sheaf of notes handed him by the stenographer who was even now ruining his eyesight, recording trivia which he lacked the discrimination to leave out.
A note from Martelli warned, ‘Giraud’s Colonel says important men want to see him, men he can’t put off.’ Time was running out and Nicola, struggling through the stenographer’s transcription, saw that Maximin had been wasting it in courting Catherine.
Stocky and bandy with the face of a man who has too often been soused, the Zouave had spent yesterday afternoon in la Diotallevi’s laundry-room, talking of onion bouquets, while two forgotten smoothing irons of the sort tailors call ‘gooses’ glowed red, then white on the stove.
Onion bouquets? Reading more closely, Nicola found that in Giraud’s village these were presented to a jilted girl on the day her suitor married someone else. To avoid such shame, men too, argued the Zouave, needed to be let know whether they had a chance before risking a rebuff. Stuck-up girls had hurt him in the past, starting – ah good!! – with Mélanie whom he had first known as a fourteen-year-old whose every other word was ‘look’! Look what’s in my hand, under my skirt! Look, oh look at the lovely lady!
‘She’s still at it and people listen! Just the other day a friend at the barracks showed me a newspaper with a piece about her. She says now that the Virgin told her there’d be an earthquake in Marseilles and Paris would burn down! Make a lie big enough, as my old Dad used to say, and people will swallow it whole!’
Back to the Dad! Nicola’s eyes slid down the page and found that old Giraud had had ‘ideas’ and because of them never darkened the church door until the day when water from Maximin’s lady’s spring cured his asthma. That staggered his son. Think of it, he invited Catherine. Just imagine him admitting such a thing!
Maximin’s mother had died when he was small and life with the widower had been a skulking hell as the child developed a bobbing right arm, ever ready to ward off a box on the ear. Then, one September when he was eleven, he was sent from his own village of Corps – thirteen hundred inhabitants, grim, muddy, poor – to the pasturelands above where he was to mind Monsieur Selme’s four cows. Up there he was free as air and the air was luminous with cataracts and reflections from the Alpine peaks. Berries and mushrooms grew in abundance and you could think of heaven as spilling past the snow-line onto the cropped green slopes. Down in Corps, a huddled world, this heaven was unknown – until the miracle.
Maximin never got over that. Just picture old Giraud begging pardon of him whom he had walloped the day before for conniving with blackbeetles! Begging pardon of the blackbeetles themselves! Mea culpa! His asthma had cleared up and he roared the news so lustily that, blasphemous though it might be to say it, he sounded drunk. His new transports were not so different from the old. He aged after that and, though he let the priests show him off, his eye had the reddish, melancholy cunning of a circus bear’s. Poor old sod! He reminded his son of the Good Thief – or was it the Bad Thief? He had been happier in his Jacobin days.
Mélanie, by contrast, throve on attention. She had been wanting it since before the nuns taught her French. Nobody in those villages talked it except the curés, which was why when townspeople came puffing up the track, having tired of jolting their bones in the carts hired to convey them, it was to the curés that they turned to translate what the children were saying. Maximin felt that that had been the start of his own troubles. The curés told the bishops who told the Pope and the story changed as it made its way down the slopes to Grenoble and over the Alps to Rome.
He had to keep up with it. Had to be careful. Especially now that there was money riding on the thing. He told Catherine how he had once retracted the whole story and then retracted the retraction. That was when the Curé of Ars got him mixed up.
‘You mean,’ the curé had asked, ‘that it didn’t happen like you said?’
Maximin said people had mixed things up.
‘Was there a lady there at all?’
‘There was a coloured light. In those mountains you see all sorts of things.’
‘But a lady with satin slippers with roses under her feet and on her head a great golden crown. Did you or did you not see that?’
‘Mélanie did.’
‘And the message the lady gave you?’
Maximin said he wasn’t sure. But, later, when the papers said he’d denied seeing the vision, he denied that. Because anything that could tame his father was worth believing in. And what would have become of him if he backed off now? Besides Mélanie was sure. Not for one solitary second did she doubt or take back a word. And now she was prophesying the end of Paris. The Zouaves said it was a judgment on France for what it had done to its kings.
‘Did she speak French or patois?’ asked the government official who, warned Monsieur le Curé, had been sent to trick them.
‘She used,’ said Mélanie sweetly, ‘a language that spoke straight to our hearts.’
There had been no picture of her in his friend’s paper, but he remembered how she had looked on the very first day when he was told ‘This is Mélanie Mathieu. She minds Monsieur Pra’s cattle. She’ll help you get the hang of things.’ Thin as string and pale as skim milk! Tart-mouthed! At home, she said, she slept with her sisters. Now she must make do with the cows and Maximin. She made him feel he ranked way below the cows.
He’d run off then to play with his dog, Loulou, and pretty soon she was trying to lure him back. It was then that she told him of the stigmata, what it was and that she had it. ‘Here, under my skirt!’ Catching his hand, she slid it between her thighs, then showed him the blood. Later, she swore him to secrecy. If he breathed a word, she said, her father would skin her alive. That interested him and, comparing fathers, they became quite friendly. Then they watered the cows, ate their rye bread and fell asleep.
Waking, he ran up the slope after the cows and, on reaching the top, found her on the rim of a ravine. A freak mist was drifting in. ‘Look,’ she cried. It was like a screen reflecting the sun’s globe. ‘It’s opening like a tabernacle. Look what’s inside!’
*
So what was the secret message? asked Catherine. Was he going to tell her? No, said Giraud. Not yet. It was worth money, he explained. Enough to start a shop back in his village. ‘I can just see you behind the counter, selling things. Would you like that?’
*
Monsignor Santi asked if Maximin would mind answering a few more questions and Maximin said right you are. Questions would be part of his mission which, he now knew, was to address the Council.
The trouble was, said His Lordship, that there were sceptics among the bishops, and it would be appalling if one of them were to confront Maximin with his previous retraction or with his sworn declaration, made some years ago, that the Lady’s secret message, far from having to do with Infallibility, as he now claimed, had been that the Orleanist Pretender should rule France. There were contradictions here and a danger that he could be convicted of telling a lie piis auribus offensiva, ingiuriosa, scandalosa and apt to get him and his sponsors into grave trouble. Did he want to be handed over to the Holy Office, alias the Inquisition? No? Well …
The bishop looked sad. Naturally, he said, we had had to make inquiries before sponsoring your appearance in the Chamber
.
While Maximin struggled to find some way out of this – the disappointment was too sudden and crushing to be accepted – the bishop talked of mountains and the odd phenomena to be seen on their upper slopes: circular rainbows, luminous reflections, mirages. Balloonists, he said, had told him of seeing things which the uninformed could mistake for a vision. An honest mistake was one thing, but a persistent attempt to deceive the Church … Here his voice grew coldly menacing. Then he talked of Maximin’s father whose cure need not be of supernatural origin at all, though, to be sure, it must have made a strong impression on the small Maximin.
‘You were, I think, eleven, whereas the girl was …?’
‘Fourteen,’ said Maximin. ‘She’s the one who should have known better. She made it up. She was always making things up.’
‘Well, then it is your clear duty to sign a paper saying that. You see she’s causing scandal with all these interviews and this might stop her. It would also prove to the Holy Office that it was never our intent to perpetrate a deception.’ These, said the bishop, were difficult times. Strife had penetrated even within the sanctum sanctorum, but better say no more about that.
‘Ah,’ said Maximin, putting two and two together. Strife? Danger? ‘Yes,’ he decided, ‘I’ll sign your paper.’
The bishop had it ready and before Maximin could think twice, the thing was done.
Afterwards, he began to wonder whether he had perhaps dished himself. The more he went over the thing in his mind, the likelier this seemed. He needed advice. He needed the help of a cool, unbiased eye. Whose? Catherine’s? No! She was too ignorant and, besides, might think him a fool. Avoiding her, he went into the empty drawing room and poured himself a stiff brandy. He would have confronted the Signora, but she had gone out. Had she, he wondered, helped trap him? – if he had been trapped. And if he was her bodyguard, why did she go out alone? Worried now, he had another brandy, then set off into the city where, needing a confidant, he headed for a café patronised by Zouaves.
The Judas Cloth Page 65