“You know the church, I believe?”
Malory turned. A man, in that confident age between thirty-five and forty-five, before the thinning above and the thickening below signal beginnings of endings.
“I used to tune the organ. Years ago. Many.”
“Ah.” The man squinted up at the steeple, but not even in the vague direction of the organ. “Ten days and she’ll be down.”
“She?” Malory looked at the man.
“The church. Parish raised the funds to knock her down to the ground and build me a new one. Splendid, don’t you think?”
“Knock the church down?” It was late enough in the day that Malory doubted most of what passed through his ears. “And you are?”
“The vicar,” the vicar said, squinting up at the vault again.
“And you intend to knock down St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey?”
“Knock, knock, knock,” the vicar smiled. “What the church eats up in heating bills alone.”
“You can’t be serious?”
The vicar turned and focused on Malory for the first time. “You’re not one of those university preservationists, are you?”
Malory wasn’t certain what he was. He never had been. But he thought back to MacPhearson, to all the red-haired, red-bearded questers devoid of doubt.
“It’s a Norman church,” Malory said. “I’ve seen the entry in Holinshed, it’s been around for …”
“Eight bloody hundred years. Don’t quote the vicar, chapter and verse,” the vicar quoted at Malory. “Eight bloody hundred years old. And the electric is eighty, and the plumbing over a hundred, and the drafts have been around since Noah built his bloody ark. ‘It’s a Norman church,’ he says.” The vicar simpered. “Well so are fourteen hundred other Norman churches in East Anglia alone. I believe we might spare this one and build ourselves a church where elderly gentlemen won’t catch their deaths of colds in the bloody springtime!”
Malory put the box back in the Kit Bag, the Kit Bag back in the basket of the bicycle, and pedaled back to Cambridge. He booked a train ticket the same afternoon — he was too fixed in his ways to approach the city otherwise — a train ticket to Rome for a final visit with Antonella. The transparency of his sight allowed him a view into the depths of his regret — late once again — that only now was he bringing Antonella back to the city she ached to visit on Malory’s arm while she was alive. Still, she was there with him, in a box, as safe as any cat, snug within the sturdy canvas of Malory’s ancient Kit Bag.
Malory walked from the Palazzo Caetani through the Ghetto to the Tevere, the same path he had run with another woman in his arms long before.
“Biscuit?” Louiza had asked then.
Biscuit.
Had she thought of that jog, that walk since then? Had she remembered through the pain of delivery and loss and all those years, how Malory had followed Tibor down to the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, carrying her in his arms? Malory looked over the parapet to where the Tevere spilled over the smallest of waterfalls as it passed the prow of the island, and the plastic bottles and cartons and floating debris of decades was caught in the bubbling eddies at the downriver end, floating in an endless balance between water and gravity.
He left the Isola Tiberina, left the square hulk of the synagogue behind him and walked, slower now, past the Temple of Hercules, the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, survivors of that religious fervor to knock, knock, knock to the ground. Crossing the empty slip road off the Lungotevere, Malory found the shaded entrance to the Clivo di Rocca Savella. The sanpietrini looked no more moss-covered, the pines, the bougainvillea no older or less colorful. The Clivo was empty, the medieval brick walls bare of even a midsummer gecko. No cancello, no entrance, not even a fig leaf or a turban to disguise the identity, no omega of a bricked-up arch to suggest that once, long ago, there might have been a hidden door and a villa and a kingdom.
At the top of the Clivo, Malory turned towards the rising bulk of Santa Sabina and in through the iron gate of the entrance to the Giardino degli Aranci. The sun was fully risen, and the odor of the bitter oranges gripped his nostrils. It had been a full day since he had eaten. He set his Kit Bag down upon a concrete bench and picked a piece of fruit from one of the lower branches. The peel came away slowly — he was hot, he was tired, and the skin beneath his nails stung from the juice. He sat on the bench and ate the orange, section by bitter section. The juice ran down his lip and hung suspended from his unshaven chin. He was alone in the garden.
Beneath him lay what remained of Septimania: the bedroom of the portraits of his ancestors; the scarlet cap and cape of the secret cardinal hanging in the wardrobe; the majlis of Haroun, all cedar and cushions; the marble Bernini of Isaac Newton and the Queen of Septimania eternally without the apple; the Sanctum Sanctorum, where Newton and the Queen had made their discoveries, where the Queen had written her lonely letter to the lonely Newton — all of them, Antonella, Malory himself alone in these words; and beneath the words, the kilometers upon miles upon light years of tunnels holding books and wires and information that was declining into antique and ruin with every passing moment. Twenty-three years of his own life passed down there below, eating scones, wandering in the garden, and searching for an answer to a question he may never have understood. Searching for what it meant to be King of Septimania, Holy Roman, Jewish, Muslim, heir to the throne of Science, as if the sum of those titles would add up to One.
What he was, what Malory was, was something else. He was the Hercule of his mother, dreaming of a father and a giant buried beneath the hills of the Pyrenees. He was the organ player of Narbonne, long before he had any notion that the Old Lady up the hill was Mrs. Emery, that Mrs. Emery was his grandmother. He was a seventy-year-old man with a corduroy suit too warm for midsummer Rome and a Kit Bag containing … He opened the flap and set the entire inventory on the bench beside him. A bag of toiletries, including a razor and soap, a toothbrush, and toothpaste with perhaps one good squeeze left. The Book of Organs and the Newton Chapbook — the meager remains of his once infinite library. The Universal Organ Tuner, with its memory of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of pipes, but at base only a piece of bent and rusting metal. And finally, the blue marbled box holding what once was a young Italian girl with a biscuit tin, a few kilos of dust.
Malory sat on the concrete bench with his belongings beside him, as lost as the old men he used to see camped out beneath the bridges by the Tevere with their possessions spread out on a muddy piece of tarpaulin, knowing less — if that were possible — than when he’d first come to Rome. He sat, and the day turned into evening and the evening turned into night. Malory sat all night in the Giardino degli Aranci. Beneath him and his concrete bench and the contents of his Kit Bag, there was only dust. And beneath that, the center of an Earth that was same size as the point at the center of the Sun, ninety-three million miles away. In all the years since he had been crowned on the circle of porphyry in St. Peter’s, the Earth had traveled thirty billion miles around the Sun. And yet the Sun’s two-hundred-fifty million-year journey around the center of the Milky Way during that time barely registered on any calendars, Julian, Roman, Arabic, Biblical, or otherwise, even less the motion of the Milky Way around the center of the universe, and the universe around whatever collection of other universes unimaginable to a species that had been around for only a few hundred thousand years. What would it mean to discover Newton’s One True Rule that guided everything? Would it explain all that? It was all that Malory could do to imagine scattering Antonella’s ashes here in the Giardino degli Aranci, behind the Basilica of Santa Sabina where she had spent her girlhood, where Ottavia had spent her early years. Scatter Antonella, turn her into an orange tree the way Ottavia had been the product of a pip. Dust to dust, ashes to oranges.