"Wells? Wells behind what?" Severn choked on crust and coughed. John looked at him with calm eyes.

"Your cough is good and dry, Severn. It is not the fanfare heralding the princess in purple. I dreamed just now of that water outside, and there was a grinning man poisoning it. Wells poisoning wells. Did I not say I would poison him? He knew, you see, and now it is he does the poisoning. He is clever. All the way from London he sends his poison."

"John, you must not talk so. You know this is not possible."

"He was and is pure malignity. Why else should he hoax poor Tom with the dream of a foreign lady in love with him and drive poor Tom to desperation and death? I saw the letters he wrote about this lady. Tom dead of the phthisis, they said, but you and I know it was of a broken heart. But Wells will not let me too die of a broken heart. He began his poisoning before we left England. He contrives now to have the poisoning go on here in Rome. How is it done, all the way over the land and sea? He has his engines, Severn."

"You and I eat the same food. I am not poisoned."

"Ah no, he is above mere Renaissance subtleties. He is the Napoleonic poisoner and makes use of the telegraphic semaphore. You must exorcise with your Christian mumbo jumbo. But no, you have thrown out the devil, since gentle Jesus has not the Michelangelo muscles to fight him. He must not exist, the devil, and all must be pink froth of sweet goodness. Well, there are burly priests enow here and eke Latin. Stabat mater dolorosa. Their Christ here is the stiff standing prick, Signor Cristo Cazzuto. Dum pendebat filius."

Severn was distressed. "John, we cannot have this. It is very unreasonable. Your mind is too busy. Let me read to you."

"What will you read – the Holy Bible? I approve the style but condemn the content. God's name, making man sinful so he could play with his hopes and terrors, has God nothing better to do? I figuratively cack on your Holy Bible, Severn." A bell started outside. "All gone already, the morning? Is that the Angelus?"

"It's too early for the Angelus. They toll the single bell."

"Well, not for me, not for the dirty Protestant. The filthy atheistical English poet. You know, Severn, when the time comes I must be buried at night? Belli told me that. Only the sons of the True Church may be earth-committed in daylight."

"You must not speak so, John. You must rest and be calm and get well again."

"Get Wells again. Isaac Marmaduke said he would kill Wells for me, but I think it will have been put out of his mind by other things. An unfairness about somewhere. Elton was to have done my dying for me." Then: "Severn, buy me laudanum."

"I said no, John, and must say it again. Please let us have no no no. More of this." Severn, to his own surprise, was weeping. John was sardonic-fatherly.

"Aye, aye, weep, dost thou, little one. Like Niobe. Well then, thou shalt be made laugh. Diddle diddle dumpling my son John beshat himself with's breeches on. It shan't happen, don't you see, Severn, it must not happen to this one. Can I not be preserved from that indignity?"

"You make me. I do not know what to. I wish I."

"Go paint the death of Socrates or some other bearded ancient, Severn. Be about your business, what you call your art. Or shall we have a symposium about my bed? Call them all in, Belli and hewing Ewing and Gulielmi, no he is with Shelley and his lordship in in where the tower leans, and our anglophilic Spaniard. But keep Clark in the dark, for he will be full of Calvinistic engines whose creaking jars. The Pope we could have if he would come, to see how a vile atheist dies."

"I will not have this," Severn, on his feet, his fists clenched with thumbs inside, cried, control lost. "I will not have this, do you hear?"

"Marry, because thou art atheistical dost thou think there shall be no more crusts and vinegar? You are right, Severn. I must look after you, I must not let you have hysterica passio."

"I will not have it, do you hear?"

"And I agree, do I not? Well, I will be calm." And then: "Wells, poisoning wicked Wells, the foul swine, you shall not prevail, there are engines to crush you and strong thumbs for the strangling."

Severn sobbed.

SEVEN

"For us," Cardinal Fabiani said, "the future exists."

"Yes, your eminence," said Belli. They had finished dinner – pasta with a rich meat sugo, Bracciano lake fish stuffed with sage and rosemary and roasted, roasted fowls, a winter salad, Sardinian cheese, eggs whipped with sugar and sherry, white and red wine, grappa and coffee – and sat before a log fire as wide as a stage in a chamber theatre. The salone of the villa on the Via Aurelia was full of holy and comfortably Italian art, but there were one or two pictures by the Spaniard who was really a Greek, containing placid whales into which crowds of people placidly proceeded. There were some Etruscan cups and vases filched from the tombs of Cerveteri, and there was some frank neopagan statuary by Canova. Cardinal Fabiani should have been fat but was thin, as if gnawed by an undying worm. He had vigorous ringed hands that flashed in the firelight. He poured more grappa for Belli. "Thank you, your eminence."

"We must not confuse the future with eternity. Eternity is not an endlessly prolonged future, it is a timeless state that wraps itself about time and, in odd places perceived chiefly by the holy, nibbles at it. Do you follow me?"

"Yes, your eminence. Very poetically put."

"However, to return to the future. In a few weeks 1821 commences. It will be a strange year. You know in what way or ways?"

"The death of Bonaparte, to begin with."

"Well, yes, the reports I have received, stemming ultimately from the Corsican physician Antommarchi, point to the completion of the task by early summer."

"The task? The completion?"

"The English are killing him under the guise of giving him the best medical treatment. Slow poisons, one presumes. However, however. He is to die, and he has time to die holily. He has murdered many by one means or another, and his purgatorial sojourn can hardly be brief. He has changed Europe," the Cardinal said sharply, as though making an epigram.

"One cannot doubt that, your eminence."

"And now Europe changes again. The Napoleonic flame flares, as if sugar had been thrown on it, for one last time, and the big grandiloquent odes will be written."

"Not by me, your eminence."

"Not by you, my son. What is this I hear about your losing your taste for grandiloquence? There is a sonnet of yours going about, one written in the Roman dialect. It condemns or scorns or something some holy poem written on the Blessed Virgin."

"I do not condemn the substance but the form. There are some self-styled poets in the Academy of the Tiber who launch words like balloons. I prefer my words to be small but full of gravity. Mass, not size. Napleon's death will launch plenty of balloons, your eminence. They will all come down. Now a word of metal makes no pretension to flying."

"You are not here, my son, to deliver a theory of literature."

"No, your eminence. You started it, with respect, your eminence."

"You are here," kindly smiling, up on his feet, ringed fist banging Belli's shoulder, "to discuss the future of Rome and your future in the Rome of the future."

"How far into the future, your eminence?"

The cardinal prepared to kick back a log dislodging, saw that he had a silk slipper on, desisted. Belli thrust out his booted foot without otherwise stirring from his chair and smartly sent the log back in a grumble of sparks to nest again with its fellows.

"Well, now, we gained our independence from the French Empire six years back. His Holiness resumed rule of a city that had tasted the rank meat of Jacobin republicanism -"