Edmund couldn't simply stand there. Besides, some of the hapless poor were beginning to notice him, and were sn.i.g.g.e.ring. He walked away, to find a place where he could sit and watch the women at work.

Perhaps later he could engineer some opportunity to talk to the girl.

But to his shock, when he turned back, he saw they had gone, stoves and all, as if they had never existed.

The poor, some still devouring their plates of cabbage and tripe, were dispersing.

He ran back and grabbed the shoulder of one man, though he quickly let go when he felt greasy filth under his palm. "Sir, please-the women here-"

The man could have been any age, so crusted was his face with dirt. Bits of cabbage clung to his ragged beard. He would say nothing until Edmund produced a few coins.

"The Virgins, yes."

"Where do they come from? Where did they go? How can I find them?"

"Who cares? I'm here for cabbage, not questions." But he said: "Tomorrow. They'll come to the Colosseum. That's what they told us."

That evening Edmund felt restless in James's company. Their usual circuit of the piazzas and taverns did not distract him. It did not help when he heard one rotund innkeeper mutter that English gentlemen on the Grand Tour were famously"milordi pelabili clienti" -a soft touch as customers.

For Edmund, the night was only an interval until he could find Minerva again among her stoves and cabbages.

A part of him warned him of his foolishness. But, though he had been in love before, he had never felt anything like the drowning desire he had experienced when he had gazed on Minerva's perfect face, and the pale shadow of her slim body.

The next day he hurried to the Colosseum long before midday.

Edmund had to pa.s.s through a hermitage as he entered the great crater of marble and stone, with its mute circles of seats. Squalid huts of mud and scavenged brick sheltered in the great archways where senators had once pa.s.sed; on the arena floor trees had grown tall and animals grazed.

There was no little row of charcoal stoves, no women in their white robes, no moist smell of cooked cabbage rising to compete with the stink of dung. There were beggars, though, milling about listlessly.

They looked as disappointed as he felt, though it was hard to tell through their masks of grimy misery.

None of them could answer his questions about Minerva or the Virgins.

He spent a week combing the city. But he found no sign of the Virgins, nor anybody who knew anything about them. It was as if they had just disappeared, as evanescent as the mist off the Tiber.

Chapter 45.

Trying to track down what had become of Lucia at the hospital, Peter and I got nowhere fast.

We established that a woman called Pina Natalini had come in a small private ambulance to sign her out and take her away, showing valid signed certificates from a family doctor. Lucia herself, it seemed, had wanted to check out, claiming Pina as a cousin. It was all aboveboard, and I had no reason to believe the staff of the American Hospital were telling any lies about what had happened.

Surely it wasn't the whole truth. I had no idea how much control this Pina and whoever else had come along-perhaps even Rosa-might have had over Lucia's vulnerable mental state.

But what could we do? To the hospital staff-and indeed in my eyes-Peter, Daniel, and I had no claim over the girl. We barely knew her.

Daniel found all this hard to accept. He hung around, agitating for us todo something . Maybe you have to be that way when you're young-you have to believe you can change the s.h.i.tty state of the world, or else we'd all slit our wrists before reaching majority. But he became a pain in the a.r.s.e. In the end I winkled his father's number out of him and had him picked up and sent back to school. It was a lousy trick, but I believed it was for the best for him.

That just left Peter, who likewise, in fact, wouldn't accept that we could go no farther. But his motives- and I still wasn't sure what they were-were, unlike Daniel's, murky, complexifying, entangling. I even had the feeling he was beginning to fit the mysteries of the Order into his wider worldview. I actually resented that. This wasmy issue-my sister-and I didn't want to become just another sideshow in his paranoia.

Still, I thought he was right that I should go back into the Crypt again. I had unfinished business with Rosa, after all, regardless of Lucia.

But I felt frightened. Not of the Crypt, or Rosa, or even of the business surrounding Lucia. I was frightened of myself. I found the memory of how I had responded to the Crypt more disturbing the more I thought about it. So I put off the visit, hoping to gather a little mental strength.

While I was stalling, Peter initiated a new inquiry of his own. He tried to get access to the Vatican Secret Archives, to try to trace some of the Order's complicated history between the days of Regina and the present.

At first he drew blanks. When he applied for a pa.s.s to the archives, the Vatican clerks trawled through his and my recent contacts concerning the Order, including the head of Rosa's old school, and even my sister in the States. The testimonials were hardly ringing, and no pa.s.ses were forthcoming.

"It's a f.u.c.kingconspiracy ," Peter groused. "I'm not exaggerating-Iwouldn't use that word lightly. And it's all connected to the Order. These b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are working together to keep us out. We've hit an outer ring of defense, and we've barely started . . ."

After a few days of that he leaned on me to go see my "tame Jesuit" again. A couple of days afterthat , Claudio called me up and offered me a tourist trip around the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, the secret archives themselves.

"I hate to disappoint you," Claudio said, grinning. "But in this contextsecret just means 'private' . . ." He met me at the Vatican's Porta Sant' Anna entrance. We had to pick up visitor pa.s.ses at the Vigilanza office; there was an awful lot of form filling.

The entrance to the archives themselves was off a courtyard called the Cortile del Belvedere, within the Vatican complex.

Claudio, it turned out, regularly researched here, and he briskly showed me the areas to which visiting scholars were allowed access: a ground-floor room called thesala di studio , and the Index Room, which actually contained athousand indices, many themselves very old.

Claudio walked me across to a rattling elevator, which took us down to what he called the bunker. This was the Ma.n.u.script Depository, built in the seventies to cope with the great inward flood of material that the Archives had had to cope with in the postwar period. It was an underground library, a basic, unadorned, ugly place, with shelving spread over two stories, and mesh flooring and steel stairs connecting everything. Some of the shelves were locked, holding sensitive material, and others were empty, waiting for more material yet to come.

We went through into the Parchment Room, where some of the more famous doc.u.ments were stored for display. They were held in chests of drawers, each waist-high, with ten gla.s.s-topped drawers in each.

These pieces could be stunning-often in Latin, some illuminated, others covered by wax seals.

Claudio kept up an engaging and practiced patter. From its very earliest days, even in the days of persecution, the church in Rome had adopted the imperial habit of record keeping. The first archives had been called thescrinium sanctum , a bit of language that startled me with recognition. But the archives were far from complete. The first collections had been burned aroundA .D. 300 by the Emperor Diocletian. When Christianity had become the religion of the Empire, the accretion of records had begun again. Little had survived, however, from the b.l.o.o.d.y turbulence of the first millennium.

In the fourteenth century the popes had, for a time, been exiled to France, and in the fifteenth a period of infighting had peaked withthree rival popes rampaging around Europe-"A bibliographer's nightmare,"

said Claudio laconically. The later popes had started trying to unify the archives in the sixteenth century.

But when Napoleon had taken Italy, he hauled the whole lot away to France for a few years, doing still more damage in the process . . .

"But all we have is here," Claudio said. "There are letters from popes as far back as Leo the First, from the fifth century, who faced down Attila the Hun. We have diplomas from Byzantine emperors. The correspondence of Joan of Arc. Reports of papal enclaves, accusations of witchcraft and other skulduggery in high places, s.e.xual secrets of kings, queens, bishops,and a few popes. The records of the Spanish Inquisition, details of the trial of Galileo . . . Even the letter from England asking for the dissolution of the first marriage of Henry the Eighth."

"And somewhere in all this," I said, "is the true story of the Order. Or at least as the Vatican saw it."

He waved a hand. "What I'm trying to tell you is that the archives are overwhelming. There are scholars who have spent most of their lives in here. It isn't even all cataloged, and our only search engine is shoe leather. The idea that someone like your friend can just come in here-"

"Peter said you would be like this," I said bluntly.

He looked aristocratically bemused. "I'm sorry?Like what?"

"Obstructive. It's true, isn't it? It's just as when you stalled over giving me a contact with the Order in the first place. You don't want to come right out and refuse to help. Instead you're trying to put me off."

He pursed his lips, his eyes cloudy. I felt a stab of guilt; perhaps he hadn't even been aware of what he was doing. "Perhaps I'm not sure if Ishould help you."

Something in the way he said that triggered an idea in my head. I said at random, "But you could help us, if you wanted to.Because you've done searches here on the Order yourself. "

He wouldn't concede that, but his aristocratic nostrils flared. "You are making big inductive leaps."

"If you have, you could help Peter find what he wants very quickly."

"You haven't told me why I should."

"Because of Lucia." I knew Peter had told him about the girl. "Here's the bottom line. Peter and I think she is coming to harm, because of the Order. I certainly don't know for sure that she isn't. You're a priest; you wear the collar. Can you really turn away from a child in trouble? . . . You can't, can you?" I said slowly, thinking as I spoke. "And that's why you've done your own researches. You've had your own suspicions about the Order-"

He said nothing. He was right that I was making big inductive leaps in the dark, but sometimes my nose is good. Still, I could see he was in conflict, pulled by two opposing loyalties.

"Look," I said, "help us. I give you my word that we will do you no harm."

"Idon't matter," he said, with a priest's steely moral authority.

"Very well-no harm to anything you hold dear. My word, Claudio. And perhaps we will do a lot of good."

He said little more that day. He showed me out, his remaining conversation brief and stiff. I suspected I had compromised whatever friendship I had with him.

But a day later, perhaps after sleeping on it, he got in touch.

Under Claudio's guidance, Peter immersed himself in the archives for days on end. And he surfaced with a string of tales: the diaries of pilgrims and n.o.bles, records of wars and sackings, the account of a thwarted love affair-and even a mention of one of my own ancestors, a different George Poole . . .

George Poole had first come to Rome in 1863, in the company of the British government's chief commissioner of works, Lord John Manners. Poole was a surveyor. It had been a time when the Modern Age, in the form of hydraulics, telegraphs, steam power, and railways, was just beginning to touch the old city, and British engineers, the best in the world, were at the forefront.

Poole had even been in the presence of the pope himself, for a time. He had seen the papal train, with its white-and-gold-painted coaches, and even a chapel on bogie wheels. The pope had come to the opening of a steel drawbridge, built by the British, across the Tiber at Porta Portese. The pontiff took a great interest in the new developments, and had asked to meet Manners and have the bridge mechanism explained to him-much to his lordship's embarra.s.sment, for in the middle of his working day he was carrying an umbrella and wearing an old straw hat.

When Poole came back to Rome twelve years later, it was in his own capacity as a consulting engineer.

He returned at the invitation of a rather shadowy business concern fronted by one Luigi Frangipani, a member of what was said to be one of Rome's great ancient families.

Poole expected that much would have changed. During his first visit it had been just three years since the great triumph of the Risorgimento had seen Italy unified under Victor Emanuele II. Now Rome was the capital of the new Italy. Among Poole's circle of old friends, there had been great excitement at these developments, and much envy over his visit, for he was coming to a Rome free of the dominance of the popes for the first time in fourteen centuries.

But Poole was disappointed with what he found.

Even now the great political and technological changes seemed to have left no mark on Rome itself.

Within its ancient walls, the city was still like a vast walled farm. He was startled to see cattle and goats being driven through the city streets, and pigs snuffling for acorns near the Flaminian Gate. The source of wealth was still agriculture and visitors, pilgrims and tourists; there was still no industry, no stock exchange.

But there were changes. He saw a regiment ofbersaglieri , trotting through the streets in their elaborate operetta-extras' uniforms. The clerics were much less in evidence, though you would see the cardinals'

coaches, painted black as if in mourning. He even glimpsed the king, a spectacularly ugly man, pa.s.sing in his own carriage. He gathered that the king was a far more popular figure than the pope had ever been, if only for his family; after all, no pope since the Middle Ages had been in a position to display a grandson!

After a day of wandering, Poole met Luigi Frangipani. They went for a walk through the cork woods on Monte Mario.

Frangipani sketched in something of the background to his approach to Poole. "There is much tension in Rome," Frangipani said, in lightly accented English. "It is a question of time, you see, of history. Rome is a place of great families."

"Like your own," Poole said politely.

"Some are prepared to accept the king as their sovereign. Others are prevented from doing so by loyalty to the pope. You must understand that some of the families are descended from popes themselves! Still others have made their fortunes more recently, such as from banking, and have yet a different outlook on developments . . ."

Poole thought all this talk of families and tradition sounded medieval-very un-British-and he felt oddly claustrophobic. "And what is it you want of me?"

They stopped at a wooden bench, and Frangipani produced a small map of Rome.

"We Frangipani, lacking the great wealth of some other families, are not so conservative; we must look to the future. Rome has been invaded many times. But now that it is the capital, a new invasion is under way, an invasion by an army of bureaucrats. The munic.i.p.ality was first asked for forty thousand rooms for all those teeming officials, but could provide only five hundred. To house its ministries the government has already requisitioned several convents and palaces. But much more housing is needed.

"So there is an opportunity. There is sure to be a building boom-and there is plenty of room for it in Rome. We believe the earliest developments are likely to behere -" He pointed at his map. "-between the Termini station and the Quirinal, and perhaps laterhere , beyond the Colosseum."

Poole nodded. "You are buying the land in antic.i.p.ation. And you want me to work on its development."

Frangipani shrugged. "You are a surveyor. You know what is required." He said that Poole would be asked to survey the prospective purchases, and then lead any construction projects to follow. "There is much to be done. During their thousand years of control, the popes, while they ensured their own personal comfort, did little to maintain the fabric of the city concerning such mundane matters as drainage. Every time the Tiber floods the old city is immersed, and the fields beyond the walls are a malarial wasteland-why, the Etruscans managed such affairs better. We know your reputation and your experience," Frangipani concluded smoothly. "We have every faith that you will be able to deliver what we require."

Poole asked for time to think the proposal over. He went back to his hotel room, his mind racing. He was sure from his own reading that Frangipani's a.n.a.lysis of the housing shortage was correct-and that this was a great opportunity for Poole personally. He could look ahead to an attachment here for years, he thought; he would have to bring the family out.

But he was a cautious man-he wouldn't have become a surveyor otherwise-and he asked for rea.s.surances about Frangipani's funding before committing himself further.

Two days later he met Frangipani again, in a cafe near the Castel Sant'Angelo.

Frangipani brought a colleague this time, a silent slate-eyed woman of about forty. She introduced herself simply as Julia. She wore a plain white robe of a vaguely clerical aspect. Frangipani said she was an elder of a religious group called the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins-"Very ancient, very wealthy," Frangipani said with disarming frankness. The Order was the source of much of Frangipani's funding.

Julia said, "The Order has a mutually beneficial relationship with the Frangipani reaching back many centuries, Mr. Poole."

Poole nodded ruefully. "Everything in Rome has roots centuries deep, it seems."

"But we must grasp the opportunities offered by the times."

They talked for a while about the dynamic of the age. Julia seemed to Poole to have an extraordinarily deep perspective. "The harnessing of oil and coal is propelling a surge in the growth of cities not paralleled since the great agricultural developments of the early medieval days," she would say.

Clearly the Order was not run by fools; they intended to profit from the latest developments, just as, no doubt, they had profited in one way or another from previous changes throughout their long history.

Poole had more immediate concerns, however. He began to talk of his tentative plans to bring his family to Rome, and asked about schooling. Julia smiled and said that the Order provided education of a very high standard, including cla.s.ses in English for the children of expatriates. It would not be difficult to find places for Poole's children, if he so desired.

After some days of further negotiation, the decision was made, the deal done.

George Poole would stay in Rome for twenty years, in which time he played his part in the advance of a great tide of brick, stone, and mortar over the ancient gardens and parks. His two daughters completed their education with the Order. But Poole found himself spending a good proportion of his income on relieving the conditions of his laborers and their families, part of a great throng of three hundred thousand in the growing city by the end of the century, who found themselves sleeping under ancient arches or on the steps of churches, or in the shantytowns that sprouted in many open s.p.a.ces.

Even so he went back to England wealthy enough to retire. But one of his daughters, somewhat to her parents' disquiet, elected to join the Order herself when her tuition was complete.

"And that's how a Poole came to Rome," Peter said. "George, you have roots in the Order onboth your mother's side and your father's . . .

"This stuff is incredible. And I believe I still haven't seen the half of it. I think there has been a relationship between the Vatican and the Order that goes back to the founding of them both. Surely the Order has provided funds to the popes over the centuries. Surely it has provided refuge or support in turbulent times-perhaps it has sponsored one candidate for holy offices over another.

"And in that greatscrinium you describe, which unlike the Vatican Archivehasn't been burned by emperors or chewed by rats or plundered by Napoleon, there are secrets that no pope could bear to have revealed, even in these enlightened times. George, no wonder your tame Jesuit hovered over me all day.

This stuff is explosive-your Order has got the pope by the b.a.l.l.s! . . . George, you have to go back down there."