I sat on that plastic-coated seat, in the bright efficiency of the thoroughly modern hospital, gazing through the big windows at the gardens with their cypress trees. “ Evolution. They are evolving differently. Is that what you’re saying?”
Peter said, “If the story of Regina is true, the Order have cut themselves off, more or less, from the rest of humanity for sixteen centuries. That’s, say, sixty, seventy, eighty generations … I’m no biologist. I don’t know if that’s enough time. But it sounds like it to me.” He shook his head. “You know, twenty- four hours ago I’d never have believed we’d be having this conversation. But here we are.
“… I still don’t see the big picture, though. Evolutionary changes happen for a reason.” Peter leaned close. “You’ll have to go back, George. Back into the Crypt. Call your sister again.”
“Why?”
“We need more information. We still have more questions than answers, nothing but a lot of guesswork. If we could get Pina or one of the other neuters into the hands of the doctors—”
“Daniel.”
He looked around. “What?”
“Where’s Daniel?” While we’d been talking, the boy had disappeared from his seat.
We ran down the corridor, the way he must have gone. We heard the receptionist call us back, a sharper yell from the security guy.
We hadn’t gone fifty yards before we met a party coming the other way. Daniel’s arms were pinned by his escorts, a burly male nurse on one side, a security guy on the other. The nice young lady doctor was talking to him, steadily, calmly, about how they had been unsure about our credentials, and it was only proper that they should ask the girl herself about her family …
When he saw us Daniel struggled harder. “They took her back,” he said, despairing. “The Order. They came, and they took her back !”
Chapter 44
It was in the year 1778 that Edmund found Minerva, and lost her.
He was twenty-three years old. He had come to Rome as part of his “Grand Tour,” in the traditional style, funded by his father’s money and his own youth and energy. He stayed in an apartment in the Piazza di Spagna, which had become known as the English Ghetto. The apartment, a decent first floor and two bedchambers on the second, was small but well furnished, and cost no more than a scudo per day.
Edmund fell into the company of one James Macpherson, a forty-year-old Jacobite refugee and hardened rake, who proved a willing guide to the various delights of Rome — as long, of course, as Edmund continued to be a source of cash. Edmund understood this relationship very well, and was careful not to let James take advantage. But Edmund was catholic in his tastes, and soon learned to relish the vitella mongana, which he thought the most delicate veal he had ever tasted, and drank great quantities of Orvieto, a decent white wine.
Rome proved to be great fun. Night and day the piazzas were crowded with acrobats and astrologers, jugglers and tooth drawers. In the cramped, garlic-stinking alleys where grand mansions loomed over tiny houses, shop signs hung everywhere, of barbers, tailors, surgeons, and tobacconists. But the alleys were always clogged with noise and filth, since the Romans had the rude habit of relieving themselves against any convenient doorway or wall, and left their garbage heaped in every corner, waiting for the irregular call of the waste collectors.
But amid the noise, filth, and debauchery, there were true wonders.
Edmund found Saint Peter’s and its piazza quite stunning — he had James bring him back to it day after day, for there always seemed something new to see in it — and he was enchanted by the area around the great cathedral, where elegant domes and cupolas rose from the morning mist. And then there were the older monuments, sticking out of the past. Edmund often had James escort him to the top of the Palatine, where mature cypress trees waved gently among the ruined palaces.
Edmund found the Romans themselves pleasant and civil — as well they might be, he thought, for they were surely the most indolent people in Europe. There was no industry here, no commerce, no manufacturing. The people relied for their income on the steady flow of money from all over Christian Europe, which continued as it had for centuries.
And religion dominated everything about the city. At any one time there were as many pilgrims and other visitors, it was said, as residents. There were three thousand priests and five thousand monks and nuns serving three hundred monasteries and convents and four hundred churches. It was fashionable to dress like a cleric even if you had not taken holy orders. A greater contrast to the dynamic industrial bustle of England could scarcely be imagined; sometimes the cleric-choked city struck Edmund as being in the grip of a great madness.
Edmund was not struck by the women of Rome, whose beauty, he thought, did not match their city’s. He remembered a remark of Boswell’s that only a few Roman women were pretty, and most of the pretty ones were nuns. But he was not above letting James introduce him to courtesans, of whom he seemed to know a great number. Edmund had not come here for debauchery, but he was no monk, and he had to admit it was a peculiar thrill to indulge his carnal appetites here in the home of the mother church — where, he learned, some of the prostitutes actually carried licences issued by the pope himself!
But all that changed when he met Minerva.
One night he took in an operette at the Capranica. It was hard to make out the performance for the drinking and gambling going on in the private box James had hired. James introduced him to the raucous company of the singers and actors, and in the course of a very long evening Edmund was astonished to learn that some of the beautiful “girls” who mingled with the company were in fact castrati. Happily he avoided making a fool of himself.
The next morning, his head more than usually cloudy, Edmund walked alone to the Forum.
He found a fallen column to sit on. The Forum was a meadow littered with ruins. He watched the hay carts lumbering across the open space, and animals grazing among the lichen-coated ruins. As the rising sun banished the last of the morning mist, despite his mildly aching head, he felt tranquility settle on him. It was a scene of ruin, yes, and there was poignancy in seeing the shabby huts of carpenters erected on the rostrum where once Cicero had stood. But there was great peace here, as if the present had somehow made a settlement with the past.
In one corner of the ancient space a bank of charcoal stoves had been set up, and he could smell the sour stink of cabbage and tripe. Idly he stood, brushed lichen from his trousers, and wandered that way. There were many places in Rome where you could find food being cooked in the open. Some of these open-air establishments were grand, and Edmund had enjoyed adequate lunches of salad, poached fish, cheese and fruits, rounded off with the ice cream with which the Romans seemed obsessed. But he could see that these cabbage cookers had humbler culinary ambitions than that, and that the wretched folk who clustered around the stoves were the poorest of the poor.
At first he thought the women working at the stoves must be nuns, for they wore simple white robes laced with purple thread. But they wore no wimples or hoods, and he saw that they were all young, all rather similar, almost like sisters — and all pale, as if they wore cosmetics of theatrical thickness.
That was when he saw Minerva.
She was one of the serving women. She had a beauty that made him gasp, as simple as that. Her face, small and lozenge-shaped, was symmetrical, her nose straight and neat, her mouth full and as red as cherries, and her eyes were gray, like windows on a cloudy sky. She was like her companions, but in her the combination of features had worked to stunning effect, like a perfect deal in a card game, he thought.