The Judas Cloth Read Free Page B

Can you believe that I received a reproof within days? His lordship is to be congratulated on his spies! Blessed are those tormented by trivia. Clearly our fright of last spring is quite forgotten. I have two items to impart: (1) your conduct then has at last been recognised as judicious, and (2) there has been gossip about the three days you spent in the mountains. Odd things are being said. Fiat lux ?
    What was being said? Oh God! thought the archbishop and rushed into the dusk of the cathedral where a sacristan was removing wilted flowers from the altar. Kneeling down, he began to bargain with God.
    *
    Back in the café, Count Montani and his friends were discussing the archbishop. A level-headed prelate like that, said a lawyer, was a boon.
    ‘If he hadn’t conciliated the retreating rebels, they’d have sacked the town, and if he hadn’t made himself scarce earlier by running off to Leonessa, they might have taken him hostage. Then, when the Austrians got here, they’ dhave wreaked havoc.’
    ‘So you think he was trying to preserve the peace?’
    ‘What else?’
    ‘His own skin.’
    The lawyer grinned. ‘There are other versions of the thing.’
    *
    The sacristan had left vases of stale water in the track of a draught and the smell reminded the archbishop of hung meat. Looking at a statue of the Virgin, he said: ‘It’s a message, isn’t it? All flesh is meat and prone to rot? Well,’ he harried, ‘is that it?’
    The statue looked like the girl they had brought to Leonessa. Plaster-pale at first, the visible bits of her skin had later broken out in a raw rash.
    The archbishop had known her name from the diocesan records. There had been some awkwardness there a year or so earlier.
    Orphaned by cholera, she had been adopted by an uncle, a parish priest who unwisely kept her by him until she was thirteen and nubile. The case came to notice during one of Mastai-Ferretti’s campaigns to moralise his mountain parishes. What he had been after were priests who were cohabiting with their housekeepers, but, once the girl’s uncle had been denounced by some tattletale, she had had to be put in the care of a community of nuns living at a prudent distance.
    Monsignor Amandi’s letter nudged back into the archbishop’s train of thought. ‘Your policies have at last been recognised as judicious.’
    Christ’s kingdom might not be of this world, but the pope-king’s was, and archbishops could find themselves dealing with things temporal. Last February, when the apostolic delegate, who should have seen to these, have fled from Spoleto, Mastai-Ferretti had been confronted by some thorny choices. The Bonaparte brothers, for instance, neither of whom was much more than a schoolboy, had fallen into his grasp like a pair of snared ferrets. What was he to do with them? They had well-connected relatives all over Europe but had fought with the rebels. Arrest them? How? The Civic Guard was not reliable and the Austrian Army not yet here. Meanwhile, here were these two who had possibly raped the girl.
    Again her face slid into the archbishop’s memory. Root-pale and taut as a muscle, it was not the sort of face which had appealed to him in his secular years. Gracious, no! Impossible to imagine her in Donna Clara’s salon.
    She was a wincing little thing: touching in an odd way and had, in her innocence, stumbled into the very thick of trouble.
    On hearing of the disturbances, she had slipped from her convent and arrived at her uncle’s to find him dying of a heart attack and Bonaparte bravos living in his presbytery. They were a scratch collection who, having billeted themselves here, were nervous about being blamed if he died.
    Ironically, she arrived on a mule supplied by Napoleon Louis, the elder brother, who, on finding her limping along a mountain trail,offered help. He had been foraging. Two hams swelled the mule’s panniers and he promptly cut her a piece. It was that sweet ham which peasants hang from their