whereabouts of Christ’s tomb. They have had many names, gone under many disguises, but the Brotherhood itself has always been one and indivisible. In almost two thousand years, until I came back from the dead and poured my heart out in this room to Dermot and Roberto, no one has ever betrayed them.’ She hesitated. ‘No, that’s not quite true. They
have been betrayed many times. But no one before this has ever betrayed them and lived this long.’
She looked up and caught Patrick’s eye.
‘Yes, Patrick, I know,’ she said. ‘Long before I betrayed them, I betrayed you. You want me to explain it all, and I don’t know how to. Not without telling you more than it may be fair for you to know.’
‘Let me be the judge of what’s fair, Francesca. What happened to you happened to me as well. I have a right.’
She did not reply at once. Her hair fell across her eyes, as it had fallen years ago; but now it was streaked with grey, and the eyes beneath it harboured memories unthought-of then.
‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I shall try to explain. But first ... Dermot - please help me. Father Makonnen ...’
O’Malley nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand.’ He turned to Assefa. ‘Father Makonnen,’ he said, ‘I know you have been sorely tested in the past few days. I feel I should warn you that, if you stay, you may hear things you might prefer not to have heard. Things that will test, not only your vocation, but your faith. I do not say this lightly. Whatever else, I am a priest like yourself. I know that, if you hear what Francesca is about to tell us, you will not know a full night’s sleep for a very long time to come. Perhaps never again. If you prefer to leave, none of us will think the less of you, least of all myself. But it must be your decision.’
Assefa got up and went to the window. He looked down into the street, at the coming and going of people and cars, at the world of his vocation. He was thinking of the Virgin he had prayed to that morning, of her blackness and her virginity, like two sides of a coin, knowledge and ignorance, wisdom and unwisdom. To be black was to know things other men could never know. To have suffered always, to have been poor always, to have known no hope of change in your own lifetime. Suffering was a kind of knowledge, pain was a kind of wisdom. Ignorance, like virginity, gave no trouble to the heart. But his own virginity, the denial he had chosen for himself, was a virginity of suffering. He could not turn his back on it as Patrick had turned his back on the Virgin that morning. ‘I would prefer to stay,’ he said.
FORTY-SIX
‘They called us the Dead.’
Francesca held herself tensely in the chair, as though braced against a storm at sea.
We were chosen. Chosen out of all the world, they said. A new nobility, a priesthood consecrated by God. So they told us. Our families chose us and the Seven approved their choice. Or disapproved it if they had doubts. Once chosen, there was no going back. It was as if someone had taken a sponge and wiped our names from a slate. From that moment, we were treated as though we were truly dead.’
She glanced at Patrick.
‘You know that: you rode to my funeral, you watched them bury me, heard them pray for my soul’s rest. You think now it was a mere pretence, an elaborate game they played. Perhaps. But their grief was no more simulated than yours. For them, it was as though I had really died. My parents knew they would never set eyes on me again. My brothers, Giulietta my sister, they all knew. So you see, they suffered almost as much as you, dear Patrick. Almost as much as you.’
She halted, her eyes nervously seeking his, as though to reassure him, to tell him his grief had not been wasted. But her own eyes held a sadness that frightened him more than simple grief.
‘The Dead are a brotherhood within a brotherhood,’ she continued. ‘Strictly speaking, they are divided into a brotherhood for men and a sisterhood for women. Like the first Christian monks, like the first Brothers of the Tomb themselves, they live in Egypt, in two order houses close together in the western desert
beyond the Dakhla oasis. Whenever their services are needed in Europe or America, they are sent for. For centuries, they have been the heart of the Brotherhood. Its eyes, its ears ... its hands.’
She shivered slightly, as though a thin draught had passed unseen through the room. They were close, she thought, closer than they had ever been. Events during the past few months had forced her to show her hand more than had, perhaps, been wise. They were still hunting, still waiting for her to make the one mistake that would put her in their hands. And when they found her, they would have no mercy. None at all.
‘Having died once,’ she said, ‘they are willing to die again. Or to kill. They are, in a sense, beyond morality. Of course, they have a morality of their own; but they bend it to their own ends, like fashioners of glass who pull and twist and draw it so fine that, in the end, it has no other purpose than to break.’
Patrick watched her thin fingers move as though spinning glass filaments. He remembered going with her once to see a craftsman on Murano work with the thinnest of glass, fashioning the legs of tiny insects. He had bought her a glass spider, but by the time she brought it home, two of its eight legs had broken.
‘The Dead,’ she was saying, ‘are substitutes. By accepting death while still alive, they renew Christ’s sacrifice.’ She hesitated. ‘How can I explain this? Patrick, when you were in the palazzo with my father, did you see a painting on the wall, a fresco?’
‘Yes, it showed ...’
‘The figure of Christ bound hand and foot, dragged to the tomb.’ She paused. ‘That isn’t how the Bible tells us he died, is it? But it’s not a painter’s fantasy either, nor some ghastly attempt at blasphemy. For
the Brotherhood, it is the literal truth. It is the centre of their faith.’
Patrick remembered Alessandro Contarini as he had last seen him, angry, his long white hair falling loose across his face, his finger raised, pointing again and again at the fresco on the wall and crying: ‘For that, you fool! For that!’
Francesca hesitated and turned to O’Malley.
‘Dermot, I...’
‘It’s all right, my dear. You’re doing well. Keep going.’
She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again, as though, in a moment’s darkness, she had found strength.
‘The Old Testament,’ she said, ‘is built around the notion of sacrifice. Bullocks, rams and sheep, goats, turtle-doves, pigeons: an endless flow of sacrificial blood.
‘But there is human blood as well. Abraham goes to a mountain with his son and prepares to slit his throat as an offering to his God. Moses is sent by the same God to redeem His people from Pharaoh: the price is the blood of Egypt’s first-born. God gives them their Promised Land, and the price is yet more blood - whole cities put to the sword, men, women and children without distinction. Jephtha returns from his victory over the children of Ammon and the price is his only daughter, to fulfil a vow to God. Hiel the Bethelite rebuilds Jericho and pays with the blood of his sons, Abiram and Segub, cast beneath the foundations and the gate. In time, the Temple reeks of blood.’
The unseen storm that raged round her was reaching its height. She fought against it, denying its force in her.
‘Christ was born into a world obsessed with sacrifice. The daily burnt offering, the weekly sacrifice
on the Sabbath, the monthly offering, Passover; burnt offerings, drink offerings, sin offerings. Within days of his birth the streets were awash with the blood of little children. That was God’s price, the ransom that allowed him safe passage to Egypt. In Jerusalem, in the Temple, the altar was red.
‘He wanted to change that world, to invest the throats of doves and the necks of rams with a different sanctity. His own life for the world, his own body as a final sacrifice, his own blood as the price of everything, the coin that would buy God’s pardon. That is what the Church teaches, what the Church believes. The Mass repeats his sacrifice endlessly, flesh and blood on God’s new altar.’
She looked at Patrick, then at Assefa. Her eyes had a faraway look now.
‘That is what you believe, isn’t it? That in one man the Temple sacrifice became universal. But the Brotherhood thinks otherwise. The Brotherhood knows the truth.’
From the table next to her, she lifted a small book bound in black.
‘This is a copy of the Aramaic Gospel of James,’ she said. ‘It has been in the possession of the Brotherhood since its inception. Any other manuscripts that may have existed have long ago been lost or destroyed. The
