Читать книгу Inquisitor Dreams - Phyllis Ann Karr - Страница 11

Chapter 5

The Italian Procurer

The step was taken. At the age of twenty-one, Felipe de Alhama de Karnattah—or Granada, as more northerly tongues pronounced the name—now bore within himself a soul wearing the indelible mark of a priest of God and Holy Mother Church. The young man had set his hand to the plow, and there was no longer time to turn back had he wanted to.

After the momentous events of the days just past, he sat down to refresh himself a little in the wineshop of Giuliano Abruzzi. Had not our Lord Himself often eaten and drunk with sinners? Moreover, Giuliano’s was a quiet place, in which a man might eat and drink alone, resting and meditating on the peaks he had scaled and the path he found suddenly before him.

His father, no doubt, would have preferred him to follow in the cloth trade that had proven so lucrative over the years. Still, the epistle over which Felipe had labored for weeks, and which he had not dispatched until almost too late for any messenger to return to him with a reply before the day of his ordination, had brought only parental congratulations and hopes that, when these troubled times for the kingdom of Karnattah were over, Don Felipe might revisit his family. His mother had even added the wish, in her own gentle hand, that her priestly son might in the due course of time officiate at the marriages of his dear sister and his younger brother.

He guessed, now, that his father had already laid the money aside for his university education, that his love for Morayma had merely precipitated the moment of leavetaking. No doubt his parents had hoped for him not only to broaden his view both of letters and of the world, but to make influential connections in Italy. He wondered…if he had come home boasting of personal acquaintance with the greatest Italian merchants and bankers, prepared to follow his father in business, would he have found his way cleared to a mature courtship of his friend’s sister?

Ah, but no! They had not even thought of waiting. They had married her only two years after his departure to one of her own religion. The young priest could never have been other to her than her loyal knight, worshiping her honor from afar.

And yet, if he had been less violent in his protests seven years ago, if he had merely signified to his father a readiness to bow beneath the parental will in humble hopes for a future chance at the lady’s hand…

Well, influential connections he had made, though perhaps not in the spheres his father had hoped. He remembered his last interview with Cardinal Borja, the pope’s vice chancellor, whom many called the most powerful man in the Curia.

“His Holiness has heard good reports of you,” the cardinal had confided, “from certain of his own onetime fellow instructors at the university.”

In trained humility, the young priest might have dismissed these words as kind flattery, had not his patron gone on to name two of his theology instructors. Both were conventual Franciscans, as was Pope Sixtus himself.

They had tried to make a Franciscan out of young Felipe de Karnattah, even before they knew his intent to turn priest. Certain Dominicans as well, and at least one Augustinian, had tried to bag him for their respective Orders, so that he had already begun to glimpse the rivalries between and among all these venerable brotherhoods, with their endless squabbles as to processional precedence.

“The benefice of Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida, in Aragon, is open just at present,” Cardinal Borja had continued, running his long if chubby forefinger down a sheet of notes.

“Your Eminence is very kind, but I had thought to stay here in Italy. Perhaps in some small parish near Assisi.”

“A man of your talents?”

“Well, then, if I were to seek a university post?”

The vice chancellor had leaned forward, slowly shaking his handsome head with its prominent nose and delicately arched brows. “Listen to me, Don Felipe. The Church can show a proud and unruly face in Spain. I know. By birth, I am a Spaniard myself. We need men there whom we can trust. It is best when they, too, are Spanish, for our fellow Spaniards—yours and mine—all too often balk at having foreign clergy sent to shepherd them. My instinct tells me that God Himself has provided you to help us in the good work of solidifying our ties with Spain. Now: in addition to the benefice of Nuestra Señora, I believe that we can find you a good secretarial post with his Reverence the bishop of Daroca.”

“I am of Karnattah,” Felipe pointed out. “In the kingdom of Aragon, I would be as foreign as any Italian priest.”

Cardinal Borja sat back, folding his large white hands over his comfortable middle, and spoke with a companionable twinkle in his eye. “I came here to Italy a foreigner, and now I flatter myself that there are those who consider me an Italian among Italians. You have this advantage: you speak the same language they do in Aragon. Yours is a more southern form, true, but it is my observation that mere accents can be lost or, at least, overlaid.”

The vice chancellor was a man of great personal charm and persuasive power. It had taken no more than that one interview, and the young priest found his entire life changed for him yet again.

So now he sat in Giuliano Abruzzi’s wineshop, gazing into the goblet he turned between his hands while wondering whether, and how far, he was being used as a mere tool.

Nevertheless, as long as the work was worthy, what business had the tool to complain of being a tool? Did a true loom turn upon the weaver, or a needle shed tears over its lot in life? Did the good hammer rebel against the carpenter, or the plow against the plowman? Did not a loyal knight in arms owe unquestioning loyalty to his liege lord here on this sinful earth? And should not the priest outshine the secular knight in obedience to the voice of God as it spoke to him through his spiritual lords? Was not the length of the Spanish peninsula distance enough to worship his lost Morayma from afar, without the additional safety of the sea between? True, the work of a bishop’s secretary might prove much different from that of a village pastor or a university instructor, but he would have the task of finding and approving a vicar for Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida…

“Hey, my lad!” a jovial voice cut into his meditations. “Do you read the future in that cup, like a witch telling fortunes in a bowl of water?”

Felipe looked up. A tall and skinny Italian stood before him, perhaps a year or three older than himself, his once brightly-colored cap set to one side of a lean but lively face with thin lips and dark eyes.

“I am an ordained priest,” Felipe answered stiffly, annoyed at this stranger’s having addressed him as “lad.”

“Ah! But belonging to none of the holy brotherhoods, as your fine clothes tell me. Well, your priestliness might render you all the more eager to hear what I have to say.” Without waiting to be invited, the newcomer swung his frame into the empty chair at Don Felipe’s small table.

Suddenly amused, the new priest told him, “Young man, you interest me strangely.”

“Host me to a good cup of wine, and I promise to interest you still more.”

Felipe counted out the coins, added something to the amount in honor of the generosity it behooved priests to show, and pushed the money across the table, more or less expecting the stranger to take it and never return.

Instead, the Italian got his wine and settled himself more comfortably than before.

“I am listening,” said Felipe.

“Well, friend priest…” The Italian took a long drink, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and casually pointed at a table near the window. “Do you see that man with the pair of ladies?”

“Yes.”

“Do you recognize them?”

After a moment of study, Felipe shook his head. “No.”

“Not even when I tell you that the man is a fruiterer of some prominence?”

“I do not question your word,” Don Felipe replied with growing curiosity. “But I fail to perceive how any of them may concern me.”

“The man, no, except in so far as he is one of my own satisfied customers. Nor, I fear, should the blonde lady, with whom he is so obviously smitten, concern you. But she who dares to flaunt her tresses in their natural raven black—ah! Is she not a morsel for the very gods?”

Felipe considered her again. She was indeed a beauty. His gaze traveled over her as appreciatively and calmly as if she had been a fine marble sculpture surviving from classical times. “She is everything you say. What of it?”

“What of it?” The Italian looked slightly taken aback for a moment. Recovering, he went on, “But perhaps you think she is unavailable. I tell you, no. That lovely lady, that tempting delight, is one of my own sweet nymphs and, at the moment, our fruiterer having opted for her fellow nymph, she is free.”

“By the way you call her ‘one of your own,’ implying slavery, I take it you are not approaching me to save her soul.”

A laugh and a wink. “‘Saving her soul’! As good a way as any to speak of it. And popular, I have heard, with the old hermit monks of the desert.”

The young priest replied quietly, “I will not hear you slander those holy saints.”

“Saints, do you call those desert fathers? Well, perhaps, in their dotage, when they had no better use for their feeble strength.” Another wink. “Come, come, friend priest! Look around you. Your brothers of the cloth—both in Orders and merely ordained—your bishops, your cardinals, the Curia, the very popes themselves, one after the other…all of them understand that God has given our flesh certain needs, and that the best way to satisfy those same needs is not in a brothel. Now, look again at my lovely Isabella, there. No slave, she! Bred up gently as a lady, ready to be good as any wedded wife—better, indeed, than most wedded wives, for she will never turn shrew, nor give herself airs, nor beggar you with demands for scarves and jeweled trinkets. Priests’ women know their places! ‘A fruitful vine in the recesses of your home,’ as King David tells us. For three ducats only—no more than that—you will enjoy her company all the rest of this day and the whole long, joyous night until tomorrow morning. After that, if you and she should come to a more permanent understanding—as I am sure is more than likely—I ask a mere five ducats a month for myself. Or, if you should prefer a nice, quiet marriage—as I know many of your fellow priests do—deal with me in the place of her parents.”

Felipe looked again at the lady, then back to her procurer. “Other men, alas! would no doubt find your offer a sore temptation. But my love and loyalty have been pledged already, to a lady as good and beautiful as she is unattainable. For her sake, I have made myself a spiritual Abelard.”

The Italian stared at him. “What tale is this? If you wish to haggle over the trifling little price I ask—”

“No tale, my friend.”

“Then… Then why in God’s name did you not say so at once? You have made me waste my time!”

“Let me speak for a moment as a priest,” Don Felipe replied, allowing a bit of unction to flow into his voice. “Your time was much better wasted in talking with me, than spent in successful pandering. God made both your soul and the lady’s for better things.”

Still gaping at him, the Italian sat back, took another swallow of wine, and then started laughing, so suddenly that he snorted up a noseful and so violently that even the need to spew it out hardly interrupted his mirth. “So now, I suppose,” he said at last, still choking a little, “you will want us both to sit down and hear you preach at us concerning our sins?”

“That sounds a profitable way of spending our evening.”

“Profitable in heavenly coin only.” Chuckling again, the Italian pulled out a tattered handkerchief and began to wipe the wine as best he could from his face, hands, garments, and the table. “Well, it is my bad luck. Or the malice of the gods. Friend priest, that man is indeed a wealthy fruiterer of the city, but the blonde lady is his wife and the dark one, I believe, either his sister or hers. I know them only by having seen them and asked folk about them. They know me not in the slightest. You were the first on whom I tried this pleasant little scheme, and see what it has earned me!”

“You would have taken my three ducats,” Don Felipe mused, “and then slipped away at once. You would have had to enjoy the ensuing jest in your imagination only. You could hardly have risked staying to watch it.”

“I would have taken your money, pretended to arrange an assignation for the pair of you, then gone to their table, paid her some such little compliment as any lady may accept even from a complete stranger, nodded in your direction, and so out the door, leaving her none the wiser and you to cool your heels at your choice of Rome’s lovely fountains, or whatever trysting place you had named, from Vespers until…dawn, if your patience lasted so long.”

“And suppose that I had insisted on meeting her here, at once?”

“Why, in that case I would have taken your money, played out my little dumbshow, and slipped away as above stated, to enjoy the ensuing jest in my imagination only. And now, by your kind leave…” The Italian started to stand.

The priest darted one arm forth to catch him by the sleeve. The state of this fellow’s handkerchief had not escaped his eye, nor the frayed and threadbare areas that pocked his faded garments, nor the fact that the fabric had never been of the best. “Stay a moment. Dine with me, at my expense. I may try to save your soul, but I will not report you, either to the secular authorities or the spiritual.”

The fellow hesitated no more than a heartbeat or two before laughing again and reseating himself. “I see I did not choose my mark too badly, after all. Enough such failures, and I could become a fat man.”

Not until near the end of their meal, when the Italian seemed sufficiently mellowed with food and wine that the priest judged him reasonably likely to speak truth in the matter, did Felipe ask his name and personal history.

“Francesco di Gubbio. A scamp in my native town, a sometimes successful—and sometimes not—rogue here in Rome.”

“By your leave, I shall call you Gubbio. Another San Francesco you are not. But have you considered, friend Gubbio, that your efforts might more often meet with success if they were directed in honest pursuits?”

“For another bottle of wine and a plateful of fruit and cheese, I will consider whatever you like.”

It was the only meal they were ever to eat as equals. Another bottle of wine and two plates of fruit later, Felipe had not only a benefice and a secretarial post with the bishop of Daroca awaiting him in Aragon, but his own personal manservant to accompany him there.