Everyone agreed: it had grown colder in Rome in these latter days.
The damp chill of winter lasted longer, the great stone houses and palaces of the noble rioni remained cold when spring came. The churches were colder still. The warm blue Italian skies of former times blazed as ever in innumerable paintings, but were less true now. In truth the whole world had grown colder, from China to Brazil, but Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, didn’t know that; his own land—which he had not seen in a decade—was still green, still warm, in his mind. England, yes, had been cold: when as a boy he had dwelt there, he had gone with his fosterers the Sidneys and walked out on the frozen Thames river, hard as granite, where buildings and arcades of ice had been put up, lit at night by candles and cressets that seemed to shiver in the cold; sleighs flitted past as on a broad highway, drawn by horses with studded shoes, casting off a glitter of ice with every step.
How long ago that was.
The apartments in the Palazzo Salviati that the Pope had provided to the Earl were furnished with charcoal braziers, but the tall windows weren’t glazed, and the Earl refused to batten the shutters at nightfall. He slept through the night wrapped in the rugs of his couch, sitting up, his head propped on pillows like a sick man. A naked sword within hand’s reach. He thought that on any night he might be murdered by agents of one or another of the powers he had striven with, or betrayed, or failed. The King of Spain’s son. The English Crown. His own clan and liegemen. Sanctissimus himself, or his cardinals for the matter of that: they might soon tire of the Earl’s endless pleas for money and arms whereby he might return to Ireland, of his plotting when in vino plenus with his fellow exiles—this one brooding on vengeance, that one mad for justice—who might themselves hate him secretly. A pillow over his face as he slept. But the great and beautiful ones, the legions of earth and air, whom most of all he had failed and who had failed him in turn—they could not reach him here to punish or to harm: could no more leave that island than he could return to it.
But it was summer now, a blessing; on waking he felt it, this long day breaking, somehow suddenly. His bedchamber door was rapped on lightly and opened; his attendants brought a basin of water for him to wash in, white towels for his hands and face. He rose, pushing aside the bedclothes and standing up with an old man’s groan, naked. Would his lordship break his fast, he was asked, or attend Mass first? The Earl looked down on himself, the red curls of his breast gone gray, the scars and welts where no hair grew. The land that was himself, in all its history. Was he well or ill? He could not say. He would hear Mass, he said. He was helped into the long wadded coat that the Romans wear at morning, vestaglia, robe de chambre, and took the hands of the men on either side of him while he put his feet, twisted and knuckly and seeming not his own, into velvet slippers. He drank the posset given him. He thought of turning back to bed. He belted the robe, thanked his attendants, who stepped away backward from him bowing and out the door, a thing which always charmed him. With a great yawn, a gulp of morning, he awoke entirely at last.
The Salviati palace contained a small chapel where each morning the Archbishop said Mass, as he was required by canon law to do, and wished to do. His daily congregation was small: the palace’s serving nuns, a superannuated monsignor, the Archbishop’s secretary. And the Earl of Tyrone, taking a gilded chair at a prie-dieu between the two rows of benches. When the Archbishop entered, followed by his server, he touched O’Neill on his shoulder as he passed, smiling, looking toward the Mass vessels and the Gospel open on the altar.
Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Armagh in Ulster, had never entered his See. He had been a bright Munster boy, sent off to Oxford and then the Continent to study; earned a doctorate at the Catholic college of Louvain in Belgium. When he came to Rome he so impressed Pope Clement VII that he ascended quickly through several appointments and soon was made Archbishop. He was the obvious choice for Armagh, but though he was anointed and given the ring and crozier he could never reach his seat in Ulster; couldn’t be shepherd to his flock, couldn’t marry or bury, couldn’t say a High Mass for them on holy-days. Catholic clergy in Ireland were being imprisoned, exiled, hanged, and butchered. He would have gone to Ireland anyway but the Holy Father forbade it, and instead made Peter his Domestic Prelate, with a good income attached. The Irish exiles in Rome were made his concern. Like his friend Hugh O’Neill, he would never leave Rome, nor ever stand again on Irish soil.
I will go unto the altar of God, he said, hands lifted to the standing crucifix on the altar. And in the soft Latin of the Italian church the server answered: To God who gave joy to my youth. The Earl whispered in concert with the priest, he in Irish, the priest in Latin: Why do you turn me away, why am I made to go on in sorrow, while my enemy afflicts me? How many times in how many ages had that question been asked, the Earl wondered, and how often gone unanswered. He felt his tears arise, as they did often now, at small things, at nothing.
Midway in the Mass the Archbishop raised the circle of bread that had become transformed, bread into body; then wine into blood. The nuns rose and in a line, gray ghosts, approached the rail to partake. Panis angelicus. On this day the Earl would not. He could not; he had not confessed, had not done his penance, his sins had not been forgiven.
Hugh O’Neill attended divine service most mornings; in the evenings, if he did not engage in visionary plots and plans with other old Irishmen like himself, he sat with the Archbishop in his chambers, for the Archbishop, author of the huge De regno Hiberniæ sanctorum insula commentarius, his account of the saints and defenders of the Irish realm, wished to compile the intimate knowledge that Hugh O’Neill had of the events of the last Irish defense against the heretic. He was the Earl’s historian; he put questions and wrote down what Hugh answered, when he could answer: the names and clans of old companions, the course of battles lost or won, the years and months and days of them; the letters of supplication or refusal, the oaths sworn and broken. The voice of the old Queen: Hugh would not tell the Archbishop how it was that he had come to hear that voice, and spoke instead of a sort of sense he had had, or a sensitivity to the procession of events: that he could know them at a distance, or in a time yet to come.
On Fridays he was a penitent: the Archbishop was his confessor, sat alone knee to knee with the Earl, his face turned away and his hand at times hiding his eyes, listening without speaking, unless what he heard needed explication or inquiry. In their tall cages the Archbishop’s turtle-doves moaned, flitting pointlessly, gifts of the new Pope, Paul V. Here too Hugh was allowed a chair, was not made to lower himself to his knees, from which posture (he had said to the Archbishop) he might never rise again. And with head lowered, he confessed. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, in thought, word, and deed.
A week’s sins could be told in the tenth part of an hour; the old Earl had few of what the priest called Occasions of Sin now. Hugh O’Neill’s confessions were not of present peccata but of the sins of his whole lived life, not so different from the history the Archbishop was writing, except that in the written history the crimes that the Earl acknowledged were excluded, whereas in confession they were probed and totted up with care. The nightly history-telling began at the beginning of Hugh’s coming of age and went toward the end, to these rooms in Rome; the Friday confessions, however, had started at the end—the end of all the wars and all the battles in the wars and the things done in the battles and after them—and went backward, toward the beginning. Each week the Earl and his confessor turned back a little further, seeking what must be honestly spoken of now, all that he should have done and did not do, what he did and should not have done. Hugh O’Neill had never been an observant son of the Church; when it was advantageous he would enter a church, or kneel with his captains before a hunted priest in the wilderness for a blessing, but what things he had done as a warrior, as a leader, as the O’Neill and the champion of Ireland’s and his own clan’s rights and freedoms—those he would not have called sins; and even now in the face of the Archbishop’s gentle questioning he sometimes resisted. When he could say no more, baffled by himself, and they had reached a place to stop, they arose together and exchanged a kiss of peace.
In the course of the years of exile, the Earl’s and the Archbishop’s, these two histories of Hugh O’Neill—of his acts and of his soul—reached the moment in his life where they crossed, like two riders each headed for the other’s starting point: as one went toward the end, to matters hardest to speak of, so full of failures and defeats, the other reached the years of youth and childhood, when he went unschooled in grace and sin, and mostly learned to do things, to ride and run and throw the javelin, wrestle and brag, wake and sleep in the green world.