The Alteration

       'But, sir, it's only a minute since you arrived, and to have come so far for so little...'

       'We have another reason. We'd still have come without it, but we have an aircraft to take. To New England.'

       'How long will you stay, sir?'

       'For a long time, I think. I'll be back here next month for a few days, but my office is ended. Our First Citizen has displaced me.'

       'Not for what you did on my behalf?' asked Hubert in two sorts of distress.

       'No, no. Well, only partly. I'd offended the English authorities a couple of times before. This was just the finale. They knew of your visit to me in Coverley, you were discovered in the aircraft apartment of a New Englander just come from my Embassy, and, although it seems they've learned nothing of the process that took you from one place to the other, that was enough. Yes, the suspect and the guilty are the same to a Romanist-my excuses, Hubert.'

       'I should never have asked you... I should never have allowed you...'

       Dame van den Haag laid her hand on Hubert's head. 'Peace, Hubert. We're honoured that you trusted us and asked our help. It was only an evil dispensation that exposed us. And—in private—my husband was never a happy ambassador. For that, a man has to love ceremony, and he doesn't.'

       'But to be displaced...'

       'He's talked already of resigning-no, Cornelius? And we miss our country.'

       'But isn't your First Citizen angry?'

       'Maybe, maybe,' said van den Haag, smiling. 'He may swell up with rage till he bursts, for me. Oh, it's quite true, I'm altogether too much a Schismatic for this function. So are most of my countrymen. It amounts to a national weakness.'

       Half Hubert's distress had been half relieved. 'What function will you take to, sir?'

       'I'll build a concert-hall and you shall come and sing in it. We must go, Anna. Yes, Hubert, I will and you shall. I'll write to you at St Cecilia's. Well, I reckon even in England a father can kiss his son, so...'

       He bent and kissed Hubert and his wife did the same.

       'Good-bye, my dear. The Lord protect you.' He turned to Hilda and said severely, 'Two minutes, maid.'

       'Ya ya, paps.'

       When they were alone, Hubert said awkwardly, 'Your father and mother are very gracious folk.'

       Hilda came a little nearer and leaned her hip against the side of the bed. She spoke not fast but with great determination, as if she had taken a wager to finish what she had to say however it was received. 'We have a farm in Latimeria with two hundred Indians on it. Sometimes in the evening we go to their huts and see them dance and play. There are cows and pigs and hens—paps has me help in the dairy. And horses—I have one to myself, named Springer. I mean when I'm there he's mine. He's all black but for a white stocking on his far hind. Some of the tracks in the hills are rough, but he never stumbles, not Springer. It's good that we're done with England and Naples: we can be at the farm much more. Do you love horses?'

       'Yes.'

       '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... Welclass="underline" 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.'