`You go beyond jocosity,' he said to D'Ailly, trying to control his outrage.

`His Holiness himself must prescribe for all the world to know,' Spina said gravely, `the certain hours for the recitation of his office, for saying and hearing of mass – indeed, my Lord, – for being shriven -for attending the sick and the dying; and he must allow, of no emergency to break in upon these hours. The people worship what you stand for. They have come hundreds of miles to see you and to be put at peace by you.'

`What do I have cardinals for? You are the so-called churchmen! You do some of the work for a change! I am a lawyer, not a priest, and you knew that when you elected me your pope. I am a soldier, not a chanter of rituals.'

D'Ailly ground on. `A Roman pontiff is expected to hold secret consistories. It is the customary thing for a pope to maintain the pagnotta, the public alms collection of everything taken from his table when he has finished eating.'

`The pope is required to appoint three or four referendaries to inspect all petitions. It is only right,' Cossa's nephew, Brancacci,

'If I had turned to the referendaries before appointing you as a cardinal because my father requested it, little nephew,' Cossa spat at him, 'you would still be playing among the catamites of Naples and ignoring that there was a church in the city.'

`You Cossa!' Spina snarled. 'We are talking about you who should be holding a public audience after every mass and at vespers three times a week – if only to show that you occasionally go to mass and vespers. These are northern people who surround us; they are not complaisant Italians. They send in the greatest bulk of the income of the Church. They have paid over and over again whenever they were assessed and re-assessed, and they deserve to get from their pope what they have paid for.'

`Where lords are slack, the steward cannot be expected to be particular,' D'Ailly said smoothly. `A lord should rise before his servants and be the last to bed. Above all, his responses to any event should be couched in kindly terms lest he make enemies.

`But you do not heed your own counsel, my lords!' Cossa exclaimed, extending his hands to them palms upward, then clenching these into fists.

`Counsel – Holy Father?'

`Your ancient wisdom about making enemies. You have made a hungry enemy today.' He turned to Spina. `You must take care, Spina, lest your reputation among popes becomes as smashed as your nose.' He smiled slyly. `We really must have a long talk about that nose of yours some day. I never could believe that story of how it happened to you.' He turned to the two other cardinals. `Did you know that thirty-one men once took their consecutive pleasure upon our lord Spina's body, Eminences? Now you would not have thought he would have been such a morsel, would you? But that is the typical Sicilian every time, isn't it?'

Spina tottered forward, grabbing at a table in front of him, then standing, leaning it upon it with both arms, drawing air into his body in great sucking gasps. His face was blank white with two vivid scarlet spots high on the cheekbones. Intensely white sputum discharged from the corners of his mouth. He tried to speak but he could make no sound. It was an insane tableau: the Holy Father in his whitest of albs and snowy zucchetto standing amiably before a man suffocating with humiliation, beside two gorgeously robed princes of the Church. At last, Spina was able to lift a hand from the table top, keeping the other there to support himself. He lifted the arm and extended a long, brown, palsied finger at his pontiff, eyes wide with horror. `You knew Minerbetti!' he croaked. `Where is she?'

`Get him out of here,' the pope said, for the moment recreating the enormous amiability of Boniface IX. `All of you, carrion, fallen upon the purse of the Church – get out of my sight!'

That evening, when he had almost finished the delight of re-telling the story to me, a letter bearing Cardinal Spina's seal arrived. Cossa told me to read it to him. 'It is a cheery message, I am sure,' he said, `with which Spina will hang himself'

`Cossa,' I read from the letter; `we can come to an arrangement. You tell me where I may find Minerbetti and I will become your agent inside the D'Ailly faction which intends to bring you down. Iput this in writing. I place my future in your hands, so that you will know that I must find Bernaba Minerbetti.''

`Jesus Christ!' I exploded. `Spina must have lost his mind.'

49

Sigismund and Barbara kissed the skull of Charlemagne at Aix minster, and while the Te Deum was sung, Sigismund lay prostrate on the floor with outstretched arms, his queen kneeling at his side. Since daylight, processions had filled the streets of the town and, at eleven minutes after nine on the morning of 8 November 1414, Sigismund was crowned King of the Romans by the new Archbishop of Cologne. Sigismund himself, wearing an alb and dalmatic, read the gospel and with visible awe held the great relics in his hands – an undergarment of the Blessed Virgin and St Joseph's stockings, which he had taken off to swaddle the Holy Infant at the moment of its miraculous birth 1414 years earlier.

Maria Louise Sterz had kept close by Sigismund through his travels and ceremonies. She greatly attracted Sigismund's wife by her distant gelidness, but it was of no avail to the queen. Maria Louise listened and watched everything with seeming indifference and reported to her mother by courier each week. A fortnight after the coronation; she wrote: The king and queen made joyous, entry into Frankfurt today en route to Konstanz. Then the news arrived that John Hus had ignored the king's cone and that he attend the council only in the king's train. Sigismund is enraged by this. He had given Hus a safe conduct from Prague to Konstanz and then he was told the impossible news that Hus had been arrested in Konstanz by the Bishops of Augsberg and Trent, in league with the Burgomaster of Konstanz, and taken to prison.

`Sigismund regards this as a flagrant outrage against his honour. He cannot believe that the bishops surrounded the house where Hus was staying. Sigismund keeps saying that Hus knew that his safety depended on his joining the king's entourage at Spier so that he could journey to Konstanz under the king's protection. The second horrendous mistake was to ignore the king's instructions that he was not to say anything except in the royal presence. I tell you, Sigismund is in a hurricane of fury about this, although much of it is play-acting. He fears, deeply that any business against Hus may grow into a serious political matter in Bohemia and he recognizes that the cardinals have shown their stark intention to keep the power in the council.

`Sigismund swears to every newcomer who enters the room that he will have Hus out of jail if he has to break down the prison doors himself He is certain that Cossa is behind the Hus arrest in order to embarrass and humiliate him and to place his own possible future accession to the throne of Bohemia in jeopardy in Prague. His people answer him only with their conviction that Hus's arrest is the cardinal's signal that they, not the princes, must dominate the Council of Konstanz.'

The sworn escort of John Hus, the Bohemian knight John of Chlum, demanded an audience with His Holiness to protest at the Hus arrest. Cossa received him with me as witness. `Holy Father,' Chlum said after the blessing was done, `your cardinals have cast John Hus into prison and this is not what your paternity promised'

`I call upon Cardinal Ellera to bear witness,' Cossa said. `I have never ordered the cardinals nor anyone to take John Hus prisoner'

`It was an act hostile to His Holiness,' I said, causing my voice to emerge as from the bowels of the planet. `They try to force disgrace upon the Holy Father by keeping Hus in captivity.'