The Judas Cloth (17 page)

‘Don’t you like me at all?’ asked the possible father.

‘Not enough to show you off.’

‘You’re quite horrid. Go and sleep somewhere else.’

‘Where? With Milady?’

‘I doubt if she’d welcome you. But please don’t feel challenged.’

‘So I shall go next door.’

Overwhelmed by shyness, Nicola wished there were somewhere to hide. But already the door of his cupboard was rattling. ‘It’s Flavio,’ said Flavio’s voice.

‘It doesn’t lock.’ Nicola decided to be impassive. Flavio had a knack of making him uneasy.

Flavio stood in the crack of the door with a lighted candle. ‘Hullo, Nicola.’

Nicola moved over. Flavio sat down beside him. ‘You heard all that, I suppose?’

‘I didn’t understand much.’

‘It’s simple really. He who plays the piper likes me to dance to his tune. But I’ll only do it for so long.’

‘Do you work for him then?’

‘Yes.’ Flavio explained that he was like a sweet-seller at the Carnival,
one of the ‘ambulant’ ones whose licence required them to keep on the move. ‘I have to be spry.’

‘I heard you’d come into a fortune?’

No, said Flavio. There would have to be a court case and this was no time for it since his backers, the Jesuits, were in exile. His mother had been found but refused to acknowledge him.

‘She says I’m a bastard and have no claims. She says she’ll say so in court.’

Nicola was so stunned by this story that when Flavio’s fingers ran up his spine, he didn’t try to remove them. Then he began to enjoy the sensation, as Flavio whispered that he had learned the art of massage from one of His Lordship’s Turkish grooms. He pressed his knuckles into Nicola’s neck muscles which, after several days on the road, were knotted and sore. ‘It’s a good feeling, isn’t it? Mmm? Isn’t it? Ah you’re so hard here!’ He had raised his voice as though talking for the benefit of the man next door. ‘Jesuit boy!’ Flavio pinched Nicola’s neck muscles so that he groaned despite himself. Was Flavio a friend? Nicola, who had been feeling lonely, was comforted at being with someone he knew and whose fate was parallel to his own. Both had unnatural mothers. Flavio was straddling him now and saying things which did not quite make sense. ‘You’ve never done this to yourself, have you,’ he said in that voice which was undoubtedly addressed to the foreign listener.

‘Don’t ask why I didn’t want you to meet him. He’s dry-hearted!’ His knuckles kept time to the words.

Abruptly, the door opened and a censorious whisper hissed:
‘Vos
excammunico‚
turpes
!’ A light swung, and a hand made a thumbs-down sign. ‘Into the pit of hell!’ went the theatrical hiss. ‘Into the third mouth of triple-jawed Satan.’ As the light rose, the hiss was revealed to be coming from one of the slit-eyed, mitre-shaped hoods commonly worn by fraternities for the dead. To Nicola, the word
‘turpes’,
though issued in mockery, carried a real charge. He was attempting to wriggle free of Flavio’s weight when the hooded figure leaped on top of them both.

Quick as a fish, Flavio slid away and pulled Nicola after him.

‘Sorry, Milord, working hours are over.’

‘I thought you’d be amused!’

Hood and cloak were now off and the man sitting in the midst of their shed billows was laughing. He looked not much older than they were.

‘You think only you have rights to privacy.’

‘My dear Flavio, half the inn must have heard your charade. Introduce me.’ The Englishman extended a hand to Nicola.

Flavio, half sulkily, said that Nicola was Nicola and this was Lord Blessington. The Milord had small clever eyes, a horse-shaped head and a cloud of beery hair. A closer look showed that what Nicola had taken for youth was a replica of it. The Englishman’s skin was pomaded. ‘You’re angry with me,’ he said, smiling and clasping his hands. ‘It’s a bad beginning. But it was a joke. Do you know about jokes?’ he asked Nicola. ‘They’re more necessary as one grows older. How can I make amends? Come and have a glass of cognac with me and we’ll drown our differences.’

‘He spies a bit,’ said Flavio later. ‘The English worry about France interfering on the side of the Piedmontese.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I spy too. I spy with my little eye, which is how I know that you have a letter for Father Gavazzi. Do you know what’s in it? No? Shall we have a look?’

‘Did you go through my things while I was at dinner?’

‘Yes.’

‘I should hit you,’ said Nicola. ‘I don’t know why I don’t. That was a despicable thing to do.’

Flavio took Nicola’s hands in his. ‘You don’t because you fear we may be alike. Or else opposites? A couple, of sorts! And because you’ve left your tidy Collegio and don’t know the wild world outside and I do. I can guide you a bit, Nicola, but not much, because we’re not really alike.’ He kissed Nicola on the cheek. ‘I like you, but I’m not like you. And, anyway, I may be coming into your world where
you
can guide me. Friends?’

For a shy, half-angry moment, Nicola turned his back. Then he swung round and said, ‘Oh, there’s no point fighting with you, Flavio, so: all right. Friends.’

It was now 4 a.m. and Flavio’s Milord had fallen asleep. He had a wife, Nicola gathered, a Milady, now asleep too out in the yard in her double-springed barouche, which was more comfortable than anything the inn could provide. Their arrangements seemed odd but Nicola was more interested in hearing Flavio’s story and in how the Father Prefect had taken him to see the priest’s own sister who, it now appeared, was Flavio’s mother. The Jesuit, who had been deeply agitated, had warned Flavio that the meeting might not go off smoothly. He had then taken him to various outfitters and had him dressed like a gentleman, lest he
disgust her on sight. The naive man had imagined that, given help, a maternal instinct would suddenly assert itself, and Flavio too seemed to have entertained some hope. But no such thing had happened.

‘Her legitimate son is dead and she must be enraged to see that I, the unwanted one, survived him. Anyway she was as cold as stone. The Father Prefect was dumbfounded. No wonder he “left the world”, as he calls it. He’s not fit to cope with it.’

Flavio laughed. His small teeth were like a cat’s. His lips were charmingly modelled, his nose straight, his hair feathery. He had a quick, cool eye and Nicola imagined the reluctant mother being frightened by its intelligence. She would surely have hoped to be confronted by someone less likely to judge her.

‘The Father Prefect is
soft
and the shameful thing is that so was I. He made me
pray
. I’m sure God thinks the less of me!’ He had been introduced to the duchess – yes, she was a duchess – by her own name which must, her brother had decided, now be his.

‘Oh,’ she’d said, ‘so you’ve got the same name as we have? I believe there is a family somewhere in the south which has it too. No relation of course. Perhaps you’re one of them.’

‘I stood gaping,’ said Flavio. ‘She’s a plump little woman with a mouth like mine. My mouth on a bad day! And it was closed against me. Tight and rancorous while mine was catching flies!’

Her brother had tried to talk, but she interrupted him. ‘I’m sorry, Bandino,’ she said, ‘but you’ll have to excuse me.’ Then off she went and didn’t come back. Later she told her brother that she would not let her husband’s inheritance go to a bastard. She owed it to the dead man not to. And to his live daughter.

‘Yes,’ said Flavio, ‘of course I want it. Can you imagine being denied by your mother? To your face? I even look like her, for God’s sake. Yes, I want the inheritance because it means acknowledgment. That’s not the Father Prefect’s reason. He wants to keep it from her daughter, who has married a Liberal. Money is something the Jays pretend to despise. But don’t be deceived. The parade of poverty, mended cassocks, etcetera, means something else. They give it up
because
they prize it. And remember that though the individual gives it up the Society keeps it. It’s a small shift really to change from “me” and “mine” to “us” and “our”.’ He nodded at the sleeping Englishman. ‘He’s amiable because he’s rich. If I get this money I’ll be amiable myself. Just think, Nicola, you can’t even take vows of poverty unless you have money to give up! It buys fine feelings. Oh yes. I want it.’

‘Who does she say your father is, if not her husband?’

‘A Russian lover of hers who went back to his country years ago. That’s how the old Russian Jesuit guessed who I was. Her brother argues that she must have been sleeping with her husband too and so my paternity is to be presumed legitimate. She says her husband never came near her. Here.’ Flavio handed Nicola the letter to Gavazzi. It was unsealed. ‘I haven’t read it. I’m not mercenary all the time. I’m practising to be a gentleman.’

They had breakfast with the Milord: beer, cheese, sweet bread and hot chocolate. The beer was for the Milord’s apparently exploding head which he kept touching as though it were an imperfectly mended vase. Milady was not awake. The Englishman drank to peace. England wanted it. Palmerston did. Sensible man. Prime Minister Russell was sensible too. Queen and Prince Consort a bit Austrophile. Less said the better. Lord Minto the other way. Balanced out. Peace! Let’s drink to it.
Pax.

In the post coach Nicola read the letter to Father Gavazzi, who was said to be weaving back and forth across the country, recruiting and raising funds for the troops. He might run into him at any moment. Flavio, before bidding him goodbye, had provided an old seal with which to reclose the letter. It was obsolete and had the wrong pope’s coat of arms on it but if Nicola applied it clumsily and blurrily, nobody was likely to notice this.

Foligno, Gualdo, Sigillo, Cantiano, Cagli, Acqualagna, Fossombrone … They were crossing the Apennines, past chestnut scrub and
monotonous
villages whose wind-shy roofs were steadied by roped stones. Conversation languished then revived to wonder if they had crossed the Rubicon which the coachman thought might be today’s Uso or
Fiumicino
– each had claims – or a stream called the Pisciatella or ‘Little Pisser’. The lawyer, briefly roused, talked of Roman history in a way which would have startled the Father Prefect.

At night, fireflies were so thick that the air seemed to condense in drops of gold. Fano, Rimini, Cesena, Faenza. Riveted walls bulged haphazardly. Bricked-up windows had been repierced and rebricked. Sometimes, in a blind arch, you could discern a stony eye, or a broken pilaster mimicked a nose or mouth.

Nicola left the coach in Bologna where he was to wait to be fetched from the Albergo San Marco. The lawyer joined him for a meal nearby: boiled pigs’ trotters, capon and tongue.

The waiter had a copy of
Il
Pavero
and read aloud an attack on rich citizens who gave stingily to the national cause. ‘That’s Gavazzi’s paper,’ he said. ‘It sows hatred.’

The lawyer demurred half-heartedly. He was dealing with a drumstick.

A customer said that one of the city’s most illustrious citizens, Gioacchino Rossini, the composer, had been insulted by the mob which considered his contribution miserly. King Mob! Yet he had given two horses and 500 scudi.

‘The horses were on their last legs. One died.’

There was an argument. Some said Rossini was as tight as the skin on your elbow and wouldn’t give you the sweat from his balls, speaking with respect. Shuttup. There’s a young boy listening and, anyway, here’s Father Bassi.

A lean young priest came in. No: on second glance he might be forty. Long-haired, dressed as a Barnabite with an alert eye and a quick smile, he came up to the lawyer and grasped his hand.

‘May I sit with you a moment? I’m off then. Just time for a coffee. You’ll have been hearing ill of me?’ The priest nodded at the copy of
Il
Pavero.
‘The Rossini story? He left town in dudgeon, but I’m hoping to achieve a happy ending. The ultras are quick to blame the people and say they’re disorderly. And it’s not true. The people are wonderful. In Senigallia, the Pope’s home town, the offerings were beyond anything you could imagine. Women gave their ear-rings – I’ve started a fashion!
The “Bassi fashion” they’re calling it. Wear one and give one to the cause. Women are among the most generous. One young girl gave her trousseau. And an old labourer took the shirt off his back. You could see him pondering what to give and feeling wretched because he had nothing. Then he thought of his shirt, which was new, and pulled it off and flung it on the pile of gifts. There was a moment of silence and for a while nobody came up with anything else.’

The lawyer ordered coffee. ‘That’s a happier story than the other‚’ he acknowledged.

‘Oh there are many like it. A girl offered her long hair. Beggars gave their takings. The Cardinal Legate gave 500
scudi.
Melted down, the gold and silver we collected over Easter brought six million. I sound dazzled by wealth, don’t I?’

‘You’re a generous man, Ugo,’ said the lawyer, ‘but you’re misleading a generous people. That labourer’s shirt has gone to a cause which will do him no good.’

The priest shook his head, smiling. The lawyer said, ‘This goggle-eyed youth whom you’re magnetising with your dangerous charm is Nicola Santi. I’d warn him to beware of you, but what good would it do? This, Nicola, is Father Ugo Bassi, a military chaplain like the abate Gavazzi, who is only slightly less deluded.’