Conspiracies of Rome (22 page)

    The dispensator raised a hand for silence. ‘Questions, questions, young man – so many questions. Please be aware that I ask the questions in this city. I do not make it my habit to give answers.’

    He closed a file that had lain open on his desk. Its pages had been covered with tiny writing that I hadn’t been able to read from where I sat.

    ‘However, so far as I can tell, Father Maximin took the letters out with him last night. They were not found this morning with his body.’

    ‘But surely you had them from him yesterday,’ I broke in. ‘You called him here in the morning.’

    ‘I sent for him,’ the dispensator said. ‘He didn’t come. I sent for him again. My private secretary did not return. I sent out a search party for him. He was found this morning, dying from a stab wound. I never saw Father Maximin. I saw him last in your company in this office.’

    I fell silent. What was going on in this city? ‘There are evils,’ Maximin had told me, ‘that will swallow you whole.’ They’d swallowed him instead. What had been in those letters?

    I tried again. ‘Maximin was my friend and my confessor. I have a duty to find his killers. I need all the information I can get.’

    ‘Duty?’ The dispensator’s face took on a thin, contemptuous smile. ‘You have a duty? Was it not your duty in Canterbury to keep your breeches around your waist? As it is, you caused a potentially serious dispute between the Church and a local ruler who had previously been wholly favourable to our mission.’ He tapped Maximin’s long report. Then he reached for a sheet of unrolled papyrus. ‘If that weren’t enough, you hadn’t been in Rome two days before you were seen attending a nocturnal sacrifice.’

    I slumped back in my chair. I’d come here to find answers. All I was getting was further questions. Yes, I was tired and drunk and drugged, and fighting back a despair that was threatening to reach out and floor me. But the dispensator would have been a match for me even otherwise. I’d burst into his office with some wild idea of getting a full explanation or a promise of justice. Instead, I’d smashed my face into a brick wall. I’d been landed with an accusation that would in all other circumstances have terrified me. Even now, I was baffled.

    The dispensator continued: ‘You will have noticed that the prefect has much else to do beside the performance of his official duties. But I doubt if even he would take no action were I to send him a formal complaint. The old worship is strictly forbidden. I will not warn you again.’

    He looked steadily into my face. I looked uncertainly back, fear at last clawing its way from the back of my mind.

    ‘I am sorry that Father Maximin is dead,’ the dispensator added, now in a softer tone. ‘He was a good and faithful servant of the Church. But you and he blundered outside Populonium into something beyond your comprehension. He did so from pardonable but unwise zeal, you from simple greed. Little people should keep away from such things.’

    He closed the file. He made a mark in black on its papyrus cover and dropped it into an open box. ‘His was not the only death in the past day,’ he added. ‘I have lost a highly valuable assistant, and must now transact a mass of confidential but routine business alone. Brother Ambrose will not be easily replaced. My first priority is to see to the solving of his murder. Perhaps that will lead us to whoever killed Father Maximin. In the meantime –’ the dispensator rose, indicating the meeting was at an end – ‘you must perform alone the duties that brought the pair of you to Rome. I have excellent reports of the work you did yesterday in two libraries. You have a natural aptitude that you will do well to develop. And that must be your whole duty in this city. You have already intervened in matters that were none of your business. Two men are dead because of that. I will have no further trouble.’

    As I was leaving, he called me back. ‘There is the matter of the funeral,’ he said.

    ‘Yes. I believe you are taking that from me as well.’ I was bitter.

    ‘Not at all, young man,’ he said smoothly. ‘You will have first place among the mourners. So far as I can tell, Father Maximin had no living kin. You are all he had. Nevertheless, he was of the Church, and he must be buried by the Church.’ He paused, gathering his words with more than usual care. ‘Someone has started a rumour that Father Maximin died in a peculiarly holy state. If this turns out to be the case, it will be fitting to inter him in the new Church of the Virgin and All the Martyrs. The English Church has saints, but has had no martyrs so far. To have the first one buried here in Rome would be useful.’

    I opened my mouth to make some protest. I still had some reason and common sense. The dispensator stopped me. ‘You will neither confirm nor deny any rumours that you hear. You will remember that you came last upon the body, and are in no position to say what signs attended its first discovery. Pending the conclusion of my enquiry, and my report to His Holiness, the body will be brought here to the Lateran, where it must be embalmed. Do you understand that I require your complete silence?’

    I nodded. Did any of this matter?

    The meeting was still not ended. The dispensator spoke again. ‘How is Martin doing?’

    ‘Very well,’ said I. ‘Because of him, the mission so far as it regards the books has gone very smoothly. I am grateful to him.’

    ‘I am glad of that. However, I now find myself in need of Martin’s services. There is work for him here that would otherwise have been assigned elsewhere. I needed him yesterday even before I lost Brother Ambrose. But tomorrow will not be too late. Please ask him to attend on me here at first light tomorrow. In the meantime, he will remain your guide and general assistant.

    ‘Now, you saw yourself in. I am sure you can see yourself out.’

22

As I walked back into the bright sunshine in the square outside the Lateran, I tried to draw my thoughts together. But it wasn’t to much effect. Whatever Marcella had dosed me with was wearing off. I felt I should go back and get some sleep. I hadn’t slept at all in a day, and then it had been little more than a nap. I was tired. But I didn’t want to go back to my rooms. Everything there reminded me of Maximin. And there would be men taking the body away from me.

    And there would – I now realised – be interminable questions about the life and conduct of this latest martyr in the history of Holy Mother Church.

    I went to a letter-writer’s stall in the square and bought a slip of papyrus and borrowed pen and ink. I wrote a brief note to Martin, passing on the dispensator’s message and saying I’d be back later in the day. For a few additional coppers, the stallkeeper undertook to have it delivered.

    I crossed the square, avoiding the crowds of priests, beggars and pilgrims who swarmed around the palace. Already, though the consecration was still some while ahead, there were perceptibly more of these than on my first visit.

    Choosing at random, I took one of the exit streets, and walked briskly past arcades of bright, cheerful shops. I’d normally have stopped and looked in these. Rome, you see, wasn’t just a depopulated slum. If much fallen away from its old magnificence, it was still, here and there, by any other standard, a great and wealthy city. There was a continuing demand for goods and services that had to be satisfied somewhere. And I’d wandered by accident into one of the few districts where life went on much as it always had. But I was in no mood for shopping.

    I walked, it seemed forever, through the sometimes crowded, sometimes dead, streets of Rome. I stopped at last by one of the crumbling embankments of the Tiber. I sat down on a stone bench and looked across to the far side.

    You could see that there had once been elegant gardens there – trees and shrubs brought in from the limits of the known world, carefully arranged paths, little grottoes, and so on. But nature had long since reclaimed the site, and I looked over at a jumble of local and exotic foliage that seemed to owe nothing to human action. The vividness of the flowers aside – and that glorious Italian light that even I, in my present frame of mind, couldn’t wholly ignore – it reminded me a little of the forests back home in Kent.

    Down by the river, slave women and the poor did their washing. Some children ran in and out of the water. Their faint cries of joy floated up to me on the still, warm air. These joined the louder chattering of the birds across the river. Closer by, the respectable classes of Rome went about their business – exchanging gossip, doing business, getting up an appetite for lunch. I sat watching in the bright, hot sunshine of a late Roman spring day. Everything was surprisingly normal.

    I tried again to gather my thoughts. The dispensator was right. We had blundered outside Populonium into something bigger than we could understand. There was something going on there that had involved using the mercenaries for an exchange of letters and precious things. What was being given in return? I couldn’t imagine. The mercenaries had been finished off by the prefect’s men. But the matter had followed us to Rome. We had been followed. Our rooms had been searched. Whoever was after us had been willing to take any risk to get those letters back. Finally, Maximin had remembered and read them. But he hadn’t told me their contents. Instead, he’d been somehow lured out at night and murdered.

    Why had he delayed so long after the summons to the dispensator? I didn’t know. I did know he’d been kept from obeying the second summons by the murder of the monkish clerk. It was reasonable to suppose the letters had then been taken from him when he was killed.

    What did the prefect know about this? Probably nothing more than he’d revealed that morning. What did the dispensator know? Certainly much more than he was inclined to tell me. Were they working together to get the letters back? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

    Where did One-Eye fit into all this? What had he been looking for in Populonium? He must have known about the two men I’d killed – after all, he’d alluded to them. Or did he know I’d killed them, or even that they were dead? Where had he been when he came galloping back along the road towards us? What connection had he with the mercenaries? I didn’t see how he could have passed us on the road and then had time to alert them before they came after us. But he’d been the one who had searched our rooms.

    The little scraps of information were jumbled together in my head, and I couldn’t see my way to fitting them into any satisfactory order. We had blundered into something odd. We had now been ejected from it. I was reminded of a summer storm that bursts into a clear sky, leaves a trail of sudden devastation, and then disappears, leaving the sky clear again. Only this storm had killed Maximin.

    Do you think I should have been racing about Rome, looking for his killers? Had I known where to begin, I’d have been racing there even now. But I had nowhere to begin. It’s one thing to swear vengeance in a city like Rome. It’s another thing to know how and where to exact it.

    So I sat on that bench, watching the bright normality of a spring day in Rome and feeling so empty of emotion that I could hardly recognise my own mind. I hadn’t until then realised what a large part of my life Maximin had come to fill. Every few moments I had to check myself from thinking I should tell Maximin about the shops, or Maximin about the happy children, or Maximin about the strange colours in the old garden across the river. He was gone, I thought yet again, and I was left in this huge, evil city, alone and poised between savage despair and a vast emptiness of misery that I hadn’t felt even after my mother died.

    Until the day before, I’d blessed that evening when Maximin had refused my suggestion to sleep over in the ruined monastery. From that decision, everything flowed as logically as the plot of one of those Greek tragedies I’d read in translation. Because of that, we met the two bandits. Because of that, we learnt about the relic and the gold. Because of that, we arrived in Rome not one up from the beggars in the street, but men of means and reputation.

    Now, I cursed that decision. If only I’d insisted on staying put, Maximin would still be alive. And I could have insisted. Maximin had come to take my firm advice in such things. Oh, it was his idea to get the relic back. But without the gold as well, I’d soon have talked him out of that. Without the relic, I knew I’d still have talked him into getting the gold. There was no symmetry in the mutual encouragement. And if only I’d paid more attention to his troubled state of mind the previous morning  . . .

    If only, if only. And now he was stiff and cold and surrounded by onions and cured hams. Worse, he was about to be taken away from me and pickled for use by the Church even after his death. However I looked at the matter, it all seemed to be my fault – my irresolution, my greed, my vanity. And now Maximin was dead, and I was all alone in the world.

    My thoughts went in circles. At last, I closed my eyes. I only meant to do so to rest them from the brightness of the sun. But it was as if I’d thrown myself backwards into a dark ravine. I sank into the blackness.