'But maybe you love cities more than farms.' She looked at him, frowning, then said, businesslike as before, 'Would you come to our farm?'
'Yes, but-'
'The sun shines all day long and we swim in the lake. We bring fruit and cookies to eat there, and we light a fire and make hot chocolate, because the water's all melted ice and snow from the mountain. I give you this.'
With hasty movements, she took from the pocket of her coat and passed to him a plain cross enamelled blue, not the same blue as her eyes, but blue.
'Oh, Hilda, how pretty. You must have paid shillings for it.'
'No, nothing. It was mine.'
'Thank you,' said Hubert, closing his hand round the object. 'I wish I had something to give you in return.' (He could not give her, or anyone, the cross Mark had given him.)
She smiled and shook her head, looking at him very directly. 'No need, no need. So...'
'What was that word you said in the garden that afternoon? It began with a C or a K. You said it was an Indian word.'
'Kisahkihitin?'
'Yes. What does it mean?'
'Oh, now... Well: it means 'I love thee.' It's Indian. It's truly what they say to each other, the Indians. But other folk say it too. Sometimes. Good-bye till we meet.'
She pointed towards the window, but it must be New England she was pointing at. Before he could speak or make any movement, she had kissed her hand to him, turning away as she did so, and was running off down the aisle of the division.
Hubert realised at once that he had failed to wish Hilda, and her parents too, any kind of divine blessing on departure, and, more slowly and dimly, that that failure had not sprung from any fear of offending Schismatic susceptibilities as he had Domingo's. He would pray to God that the omission might be remedied, but he would not do that for the moment. He could not: he could think only of how it was impossible that he should go to New England before he was twenty-one years old, because his father must by law either go too or send an accredited proxy, and his father would do neither. And after he was twenty-one, indeed much sooner, the design was even more impossible, because he could never be with Hilda after it was obvious that he had been altered. What had Master van den Haag meant by his talk of a concert-hall and singing?
Here, the reasoning part of Hubert's mind shut down. He turned on to his side and pulled the covers up almost over his head, so that only a little light came through. With the blue cross still in his fist, he pretended that he and Hilda were riding horses, side by side. Then he found he could pretend that her horse was running faster and faster, but that his horse did the same, and, even when the ground began to slope upwards and the track became rough, they stayed near each other.
Pope John XXIV was nearly at the end of his day's business in the cabinet of his summer quarter: the documents on the porphyry work-table had been reduced to three, and only three persons remained in attendance. These were Count Paolo Maserati, Inventor-General to the Papacy, Father Gregory Satterthwaite, SJ, the privy secretary who had served His Holiness since eight years before his coronation, and Cardinal Berlinguer. Curtains of Swedish ermine kept out the late-afternoon sun and moved now and then in the slight breeze. At this hour, the plain, the City still scorched in the heat, but it was no more than pleasantly warm two and a half thousand feet up among the Alban hills, and, thanks to clever siting and careful building, the air seemed always fresh in the spacious apartments of the Castel Alto.
The one who evidently found it not quite fresh enough at the moment was Count Maserati. Despite the thinness of his biscotto-coloured woodman style suit, he was sweating a little. He said now in careful English, the mode and language in which the present Pope greatly preferred to be addressed, 'The size of the assay was determined by the Chamber after due process, Your Holiness.'
'On your advice, Count.' The Pope stared heavily through his eyeglasses. 'And, as we and you have just been let know, it was too small.'
'But no assay can ever be large enough to guarantee—'
'We're struck dumb by you. We don't know what to say, we're sure. There's no lack of subjects, after all. Over a hundred and fifty thousand without having to look outside Italy. And what are they? Heretics, apostates, runaways, New Englander spies, Turkish spies—grievous sinners every mother's soil. They mean to defy our authority, Count. Do you understand? They're-they're bad folk.'
'Yes, Your Holiness,' said Maserati with conviction.
'And what do you do? You take two hundred of them, a measly two hundred, and have them fornicate their heads off in between doses of Crick's Conductor. Ee, what a shocking fate! What do they care if they do lose their fertility?—they're inside again at the year's end, and they'll never need it there. Why did you not take two thousand? Four thousand? Then the deformities must have appeared, would have been ten or twenty times more likely to appear. Eh?'
'Our facilities would not have allowed so many, Your Holiness.' Maserati spoke with less conviction than before.
'Fuck your facilities! If they lack anything it's your blame and you know it. You are the Inventor-General, we believe.'
There was silence but for the faint sound of cicadas. Frowning, the Pope stared at the nearest wall. It was fifty feet away and, like those adjacent to it, was hung from top to bottom with olive-green velvet. The purpose of this was to rest the eye and to conceal from it the beautiful travertine stone of which the room was built. The ceiling, painted with an awe-inspiring Creation by Tiepolo, was likewise hidden by an immense sheet of white linen. No object was visible, not even a clock or a candlestick, that might show signs of more than the absolute minimum in the way of craftsmanship: not an inch of floor showed between the plain rugs, the table bore a thin but opaque cloth and the chairs were of some black-painted wood with tie'd-on cushions covered in white silk. It was not (so he often said) that John XXIV disliked art, simply that he saw enough of it at other times to make its absence refreshing when he was at work. Throughout the rest of the building, as throughout the Vatican palaces except for the various cabinets there, art flourished unchecked, indeed perceptibly added to in one room and another by the reigning Pope himself, who knew that this was one ready method of furthering his very settled ambition to be
