The Judas Cloth Read Free

since Easter.
    Trying not to speed his step, he remembered, with residual pique, how a mutiny at the Rocca had been used by local notables to worm permission from him to recruit a Civic Guard. The marchesa’s son had led the delegation. After all, said Don Gabriele, His Eminence the Legate was known to favour mobilising the citizens.
    ‘Arm the people against the people?’ The archbishop could not openly criticise the legate’s judgment.
    It was Ash Wednesday and there was a smudge of penitential ash on the delegates’ foreheads.
    ‘General Sercognani’s force is approaching,’ Don Gabriele argued.
    ‘ General Sercognani?’
    ‘He’s been promoted.’
    ‘By?’
    Don Gabriele had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘The people,’ he said. ‘The Provisional Government in Bologna.’
    In recent weeks town after town had been appointing such governments and the one in Bologna had declared the popes’ temporal dominion to have ceased ‘de facto et de jure’. Posters, blossoming in the night, announced plans to march on the capital and ‘separate the sceptre from the tiara’. More worryingly, the rebels were opening prisons to recruit the riffraff inside.
    ‘There are six hundred prisoners at the Rocca .’ On Don Gabriele’s forehead, sweat made runnels in the Ash-Wednesday smudge. ‘If they’re let out, who’s to guard the citizens’ property?’
    ‘And who’s to know,’ mused the archbishop, ‘that a Civic Guard, if I let you raise one, will not turn its arms against the Church?’
    ‘Are we to take it,’ challenged Don Gabriele, ‘that His Holiness’s government is unwilling to permit its subjects to defend their homes?’
    Cornered, the archbishop had given in. ‘Form your Civic Guard,’ he yielded. It was putting foxes in charge of the hen run – but what choice had he? ‘I’ll review them,’ he decided shrewdly. ‘I’ll be their chaplain and say a few words.’
    Don Gabriele could not object. However, when the archbishop came to review the recruits, he could feel their hostility. Allegiances had grown volatile and indeed it was later to turn out that, elsewhere in the province, relatives of his own had been compromised. Later still – now – this made it difficult to be hard on men like Don Gabriele. Yet, if thearchbishop let bygones by bygones, loyal citizens would take it amiss. His social life was in ruins.
    Plucking a verbena leaf from a garden, he inhaled its fragrance and set off on a detour so as to avoid returning by Don Gabriele’s palace.
    ‘Monsignore!’
    Two peasants had moved their cart aside to let him pass. Whittled faces. Deferent eyes. Few of their sort had joined the rebels and the few who had, had been armed with halbards stolen from museums. Friends in Rome, tittering over this, failed to appreciate the danger which had been averted.
    ‘Beloved sons!’
    Those were his words to the guards when exhorting them to take an oath of loyalty to the freshly elected pope.
    ‘Will you do this, diletti figliuoli ?’
    The silence was sullen. Suddenly – if there was a signal he missed it – they whipped tricolour cockades from inside their coats and shouted as one man, ‘Viva l’Italia !’ Viva – this was rebellion, a repudiation of papal rule. Italy though! Italia mia …
    The archbishop kicked a stone. He disliked remembering what he had done next which was to burst into tears. The stone hit a dog which limped reproachfully away. To his surprise, the tears had been triggered less by the guardsmen’s treachery than by an urge to shout ‘ Viva l’Italia !’ himself. Treachery had got inside his head, which went to show how hard this new nationalism would be to check. It was, as he had since argued with Monsignor Amandi, quite unlike the godless anticlericalism of the last century. Sercognani’s manifestos declared that he respected the pope as pope, but not as king: papa si, re no !
    Back in his palace, the archbishop had summoned the captain of the papal