The Judas Cloth Read Online Free PDF Page A

bared more than that and the hot throb of her fever haunted him who, unlike her, could not dream away memory.
    ‘When do you think it was conceived?’ he asked. ‘Her previous trip home would have been Christmas. Could it have been then?’
    The abbess was unsure. ‘We think,’ she said, ‘that she’s due in November, so you can count back.’
    *
    In October the archbishop arranged to meet Monsignor Amandi at a spa. Although Mastai-Ferretti was older, the two had studied together in Rome where he was said to have proven such a dunderhead that his chief merit, in his teachers’ eyes, had been his lack of all claim to intellectual pride. Since that had led to the upheavels of ’89 and brought the brigand Bonaparte to Rome, dunderheads were in better standing there now than men like Amandi, whose cleverness unsettled people. He was not thought likely to do well at the papal court.
    The two bishops, however, were fond of each other and, as they strolled, ate, worshipped and took the waters, observers noted a distinct liveliness to their colloquies and, in the archbishop’s case, some agitation. As a result, a rumour got about that his epilepsy had again begun to trouble him. It was known, as a doctor at the spa informed the interested, as ‘the sacred disease’ – morbus sacer – and also, according to Pliny, as ‘the spitting disease’ because, if caused by the evil eye, one could rid oneself of it by spitting it back. Due to some garbling of this, the notion now gained currency that Mastai had the evil eye. A spa is a place for gossip, and in no time people were collecting evidence of small mishaps occurring in his vicinity which proved so amusing that his reputation as a iettatore was soon unshakeable.
    *
    That November, Cardinal Odescalchi, Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, and H. H. Gregory XVI received letters from the Archbishop of Spoleto humbly craving permission to lay down the burden of an office which would tax even an angel’s shoulders – ‘angelicis etiam humeris formidandum’. The supplicant drew attention to his lack of proficiency in sacred studies and the difficulty of governing a diocese where, in the wake of the recent troubles, he was faced with a choice between scandalising the staunch or embittering the compromised. There was more in the same strain.
    ‘What is this about?’ Cardinal Odescalchi had summoned Monsignor Amandi for consultation.
    ‘Why not believe what he says, Eminence?’
    ‘Scruples? Doubts?’ Odescalchi shrugged them away. He knew Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti for a sound element. Two uncles in the prelacy! And in his youth he had paid court to the right sort of woman. Donna Clara Colonna had, after her young admirer donned the cassock, seemed to take more pleasure in promoting his career than she had in whatever mild dalliance had preceded it. It was she, observed his Eminence, whose influence at court had got Mastai his bishop’s mitre and almost certainly she who had provided the cash for his elevation. Given the finances of the Mastai-Ferretti – they were petty and penurious nobility – one could presume as much. Why not? Very commendable. Such women were as rubies – when they didn’t become busybodies. It might indeed be wise to call for her help. It had proven useful before when she put the necessary stiffening into the young Giovanni Maria who, shortly after his ordination, had had tender notions of devoting himself to the poor. Indeed he had done this for a while as director of an orphanage and later of San Michele, that great labyrinth on the Ripa Grande where he first came to notice by making the place pay. It was an epitome of the papal state itself, comprising as it did an asylum, a reform school, an old people’s home and a refuge for fallen women; and he had turned it into a going concern by selling its workshop products at a profit. Well, a man who could do that had an obligation to put his talents to work in a wider arena. As