Page 72 of The Devils

Saint Tabitha’s Day

It was the fourth of Generosity, and Mother Beckert was early for her audience with Her Holiness the Pope.

‘May God have mercy on their souls,’ she murmured, making the sign of the circle as the carriage was buffeted by a procession of wailing flagellants, their backs streaked with blood and their faces with tears of rapture, whipping themselves along beneath a banner that read simply, ‘Repent.’ There was no need to say what one was called on to repent of.

For are we not all sinners?

The carriage door banged open and the din – of prayers, trade, and appeals for charity – and the stench – of incense, overworked sewers, and a nearby fish market – were both instantly tripled as a young man climbed in. He was tall, slender, flamboyantly dressed and, as he glanced surprised towards her, very handsome.

Mother Beckert did not trust handsome people. They were too used to getting away with things.

‘Ever so sorry.’ He spoke with a rich man’s accent. But in a way that made her guess it was not the one he grew up with. ‘Hadn’t realised I’d be sharing the carriage.’

‘You know the Church,’ said Mother Beckert. ‘Always after savings.’

He sat opposite her, wiping sweat from his brow, and the carriage lurched on, at the snail’s pace that was the top speed of the Holy City’s traffic. ‘You’re heading to the Celestial Palace, too?’

‘They say everyone is,’ said Mother Beckert, ‘whether they know it or not.’

‘Hope we’re not late. Streets are swarming!’

‘A crowd out for Saint Tabitha’s Day. A list of her registered miracles is being given a formal reading from every pulpit.’ Mother Beckert shrugged. ‘But it’s the Holy City. Every day is at least one saint’s day, and everyone is always late. They shift all the appointments to allow for it.’

‘You’re familiar with the place, then?’

‘I was.’ She winced, as if she could smell something bad. This was the Holy City, after all. One could always smell something bad, especially at the height of summer. ‘I lost my taste for it.’

‘But now it’s returned?’

‘It absolutely has not.’ She frowned out of the window at the sweltering crowds. ‘The cardinals,’ she murmured. ‘The so-called Saved. They have made of it the most unholy place on God’s earth.’

The bells for midday prayers were starting to echo over the city, beginning with a desultory dingle or two from the roadside shrines, mounting to a discordant clangour as each chapel, church, and cathedral added its own frantic peals, competing viciously to hook the pilgrims through their doors, onto their pews, and up to their collection plates. If one had built a giant machine for the fleecing of the faithful, it would have looked no different.

The handsome young man cleared his throat, flapping the collar of his loose shirt. ‘It’s hot even for the season,’ he observed, with that nervous need some people have to fill the silence.

Mother Beckert had spent much of her life in silence, and even more at one extreme of temperature or another. Carrying the word of the Saviour to the benighted corners of the world beyond the edges of the maps. To the steaming jungles of Afrique and the mountains of Norway where the snows never melted, aye, even to Novgorod, where she had bathed in the freezing waters of the river to the astonishment of the locals, and asked them in their own tongue to bring more ice. Heat purged the body, cold sharpened the mind. The greater the bodily discomforts, the purer became her faith.

‘I’m used to harsh weather,’ she said.

‘Oh? Where have you travelled from?’

‘From England.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t blame them, they know no better. And you?’

‘From Alexandria.’

‘You don’t look Alexandrian.’

He smiled, showing a silver tooth. ‘I am a mongrel. No two of my great-grandparents were from the same country. I am from everywhere and nowhere.’

‘And what do you do when you are everywhere and nowhere?’

‘A little of this. A little of that.’ He offered his hand, the nails of which appeared to have been shaped with a file. ‘My name’s Caruso.’

She considered his hand, then his smile. No doubt he thought himself quite the special case. Most people do. But she saw to the heart of him. Most people are the same, once you peel the outer layers away. ‘But I expect you have others,’ she said.

He smiled a little wider. ‘When I must.’

She gripped his hand firmly. ‘I am always Mother Beckert.’

‘A German?’

‘If you unwound my guts, you would find them stamped Cast in Swabia .’

‘Like the best armour.’

‘But made of stiffer stuff.’

‘I hope your innards won’t be put on display!’

Mother Beckert gave a snort and looked back to the window. ‘We shall see.’

The carriage crawled through a narrow square, hot as an oven, busy as a slaughterhouse, and squalid as a shithouse. On one side there was a painted enclosure crammed with licensed beggars and a linden-wood platform for public punishments, on which a set of children were burning elves in straw-stuffed effigy while onlookers bellowed encouragement. On the other side the prostitutes were out in numbers, pouting painted lips and displaying sunburned extremities to the midday glare.

‘I would not have thought it possible,’ she murmured, ‘but there may be more prostitutes here than ever.’

‘You disapprove of prostitutes?’ he asked, with a hint of a smile.

It was possible he had merely mistaken her. But it was also possible he was making fun of her. For herself, Mother Beckert had long ago surrendered any vanity, but to mock a priest was to mock the Faith, and to mock the Faith was to mock God, and that was a thing to be nipped in the bud. She fixed his eye, and looked directly into it, without blinking or deviation.

The way she once looked into the eye of the accused, as if she already saw the truth within, and only wished it confirmed.

‘My mother was a prostitute,’ she said. ‘A very good one, by all accounts. Also a very good mother. One would be a fool to judge a person by their profession alone. Like pox on a plague victim, the prostitutes are the symptom, not the sickness. They merely answer a desire. It is the scale of that desire, of that sickness, that concerns me. Especially here, in the Holy City, among the ruins of the ancient Carthage, in the shadow of the thousand churches, within the echo of their blessed bells, where all eyes should be turned to heaven.’ She leaned towards him, still with her eye on his, without blinking or deviation. ‘Tell me, Master Caruso – what is the one sin the Saviour cannot forgive?’

He was starting to look a little uncomfortable, which spoke well of his grit. Most would have mumbled their apologies much sooner, and buttoned their lips for the rest of the trip. ‘Well, I confess I’m no theologist—’

‘A man who’s a little of everything should be a little theologist, too, don’t you think? The Saviour can forgive any trespass honestly confessed and atoned for. Which makes dishonesty the only crime that cannot be forgiven.’ She bared her teeth as she spat the word. ‘ Hypocrisy , Master Caruso. The pretence that you are something better, nobler, holier than you are … is surely the worst dishonesty of all. It is that of which I disapprove.’

A silence then. She let it stretch, until she judged that there would be no more mockery. ‘So tell me. What brings a man from everywhere and nowhere to the Holy City?’ Though she already had her suspicions.

‘Oh, well …’ He slid out a letter and held it up. Fine paper, and a great seal of scarlet wax, stamped with the crossed keys of the Papacy. ‘I was sent for. By Her Holiness.’

‘Your appointment may be with Her Holiness,’ said Mother Beckert, ‘but your meeting will be with Cardinal Zizka.’

‘The Head of the Earthly Curia?’ He blinked. Afraid and excited at once. More afraid and more excited than if the meeting had been with the Pope herself, which said a great deal, and none of it good. ‘The letter mentions replacing someone, but … it doesn’t say who.’

‘Zizka always loved her mysteries.’

‘You know Her Eminence?’

‘Since we were girls. We shared a cell at seminary.’

‘Old friends, then?’

Mother Beckert chuckled. She did not laugh often, but that was too rich. ‘We have despised each other from the moment we met. And admired each other. Because we are each everything the other is not. But we know that what the other is, the Church must have. Zizka is like the sea. Ever hungry, never sated. Always flowing, yielding, adapting, treacherous as the tide. If her principles get in the way, she will make new ones.’

Caruso swallowed. Perhaps it shocked him, to hear the most powerful woman in Europe so carelessly slighted. ‘She’s a politician, I suppose …’

‘Her blessing and her curse.’

‘But you’re otherwise?’

She fixed him with her eye again. The way she had once fixed the convicted, when she spoke the sentence. ‘I am the rock on which the water breaks. That is my blessing.’ She took a long breath. ‘And my curse.’

‘Over years … the sea will wear the rock away.’

‘Oh, I am well aware. Zizka sent for me, too.’ And she drew out her letter between two fingers, and held it up. ‘As a replacement.’

‘Who for?’ Caruso’s accent had slipped slightly in his eagerness. Did she detect a hint of something earthy and German underneath?

‘She did not say. But I can guess. She wants me to take back my old benefice. A chapel. Within the Celestial Palace.’

Caruso frowned. ‘I doubt a chapel would have use for my talents.’

‘You might be surprised.’ Mother Beckert took a long breath. She had surrendered her fear along with her vanity, but she still hesitated to name it. As if, until the word was spoken, it could be avoided, but once named, was made inevitable. ‘It is the Thirteenth Chapel,’ she said, softly, already knowing how he would reply.

‘Aren’t there twelve chapels in the Celestial Palace? Twelve chapels, for Twelve Virtues.’

Mother Beckert smiled to have been proved so exactly right, and she sat back, and let herself be jolted by the movement of the carriage. ‘You might know a little of this, Master Caruso, and a little of that. But about virtue …’ She looked back to the crowds outside the window. The pilgrims. And the prostitutes. ‘You have a lot to learn.’