The Enemies of Nicolo Basti

By Lance Haward

In a near future where the Catholic Church has declared that choral music is inappropriate for the Eucharistic liturgy, the Patriarchy of Venice remains the only diocese that has not yet conformed. The Cardinal patriarch must navigate a series of complicated challenges, including the involvement of his niece with the city’s police commissioner and the interests of powerful individuals in government and international trade. As dissent grows and escalates into social, political, and criminal consequences, the independent state of Venice is also dealing with the approaching Historical Regatta. In the midst of it all, a conspiracy erupts on the Lagoon during the climax of the gondoliers’ race. Follow the twists and turns of this gripping tale in The Enemies of Nicolo Basti.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781528902717

Lance Haward

Lance Haward is a retired solicitor. Formerly the country’s leading specialist and lecturer on the Law of Education, with numerous technical publications to his name. Also articles and short stories, including prize winners. Sometime member of the London Diocesan Board of Education, and the London Diocesan Council and Synod. Appearances on many television quiz/chat shows – the only person to have won the Brain of Mensa (three times) as well as BBC’s University Challenge. Currently editing two journals under the auspices of British Mensa. Rather addicted to the alternative splendours of chess, madrigals, skiing and thoroughbred racehorses.

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About the Author

Lance Haward is a retired solicitor. Formerly the country’s leading specialist and lecturer on the Law of Education, with numerous technical publications to his name. Also articles and short stories, including prize winners. Sometime member of the London Diocesan Board of Education, and the London Diocesan Council and Synod. Appearances on many television quiz/chat shows – the only person to have won the Brain of Mensa (three times) as well as BBC’s University Challenge. Currently editing two journals under the auspices of British Mensa. Rather addicted to the alternative splendours of chess, madrigals, skiing and thoroughbred racehorses.

Dedication

To Sweet Sherry, first of a beautiful brood.

Copyright Information ©

Lance Haward 2023

The right of Lance Haward to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781788788168 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528902717 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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Acknowledgement

To all those enlightened clergy of my acquaintance who have remained steadfast to the Church’s heritage in the face of much misconceived and destructive aggiornamento, to whom, for the survival of so much endangered beauty, the Church and the world are indebted.

Chapter 1

First, the smoke, its source unseen.

Next, rearing above the heads of the crowd, visible to all who can as yet see nothing else, like a Mongol standard the shining processional crucifix.

At last, the censer comes in sight of those nearest the nave. Clashing like the bridle of a war-horse. The brief coughs of silver pause before floating into a sun-shaft; entering the same spear of light, the censer dazzles like a leaping salmon. Solid gold. The man flying this bright falcon on its jesses is a Marchese.

Lesser brilliants of that light, the dozen tapers that precede the crucifix. Reflected embers of them spark fitfully in the eight-hundred-year-old mosaics.

Then the second rank prelates, sub-bishops and canons of the Basilica, glittering in brocade and silk. Less than personalities—furnishings of the ancient rite, expressionless.

And last, the Cardinal Archbishop, the Patriarch.

An incoming tide in all its power. A surge of genuflection runs alongside his passage through the crowd. The pastoral staff paces his steps; the right hand is lifted mitre-high, visible transmission of grace.

Grace delivered with the faintest of smiles.

Of approval? Of gratitude? Of affection?

Of despair—panic—uncertainty?

Remarkable that humanity can express all these equally with a smile; and all and any of them may well be this man’s burden on this particular morning of Eastertide.

This man. A prince of Christendom in state. Mirror of God, given to the faithful for reassurance and direction.

The chanting that now begins—the deep wave that takes his wave and carries it forward and upward into the sanctuary, where it will crash in a foam of ritual splendour, God dissolving headlong into man, on the rock of the encrusted altar—the chanting is the ‘Vidi Aquam’, Easter hymn from centuries out of mind.

The ones in the front seats who, nevertheless, yawned through all this splendour were the reporters. There were always representatives of the press in attendance these days, although the chance of anything dramatic happening before the end of the Transitional Year was remote.

They knew the feeling in Venice, of course. All Italy knew it. The world at large, perhaps not just yet.

But then that feeling was not unique to this unique city, and people elsewhere had no reason to suppose it would find any more particular expression here than in New York or London. So, the reporters were all from the Italian press; and yawned. The exalted, soaring cadences of the ‘Vidi Aquam’, almost frantic to lift them to the same heights, rapturised in vain and, at last, fell silent.

London had looked like the front runner for a time. Immediately after Vatican III, almost a third of Westminster’s senior clergy had subscribed to a letter to The Catholic Herald, protesting against the decree, and the Cardinal had maintained a discreet silence for three full months before, at last, coming out with a lukewarm and ambivalent admonition to obedience, empty of all rebuke against the protesters. None of them, apparently, had suffered any official interruption of his duties. At the same time, as that had been promulgated, the Cathedral had equivocally thrown in a sequence of its most magnificent orchestral liturgies.

But a month after that, the choir had been disbanded. There was hardly any public comment other than in the musical journals. The protesters had made their point (and got away with it uncensured)—the primacy of conscience. Let off futile steam in conscious hopelessness of achieving anything and stayed silent, as the dyke collapsed and the tide welled in. In England, with a month of the Transitional Year still to run, ‘Omnium Credentum’ was already in force.

In the States and Germany likewise, the churches had not insisted on running out their year’s indulgence. Holland, that bulwark of individualism and invention for centuries, was one of the first to conform. The Dutch as laid-back about the things of the soul as always. In Japan – Chile – the Philippines – Norway – South Africa, the sheet music was boxed in the crypts, gathering over itself the first of its centuries of dust. In Paris, Notre Dame had ended its millennium of tradition with a flourish—two full orchestras, a clerestory—full of massed choirs and the bugles of the Garde Républicaine hurling their unruly clamour into the space beneath. A requiem in horsehair plumes. Paris, city of the tricoteuses, knew how to kill tradition in the style spectacular. Apart from the ‘Polish Problem’, already more politics than religion, only the problem of Venice by this time remained to be decently and quietly solved.

What makes all ordered schemes of government finally impossible, and leads sooner or later, relentlessly, to collapse and chaos, is that people are to themselves unpredictable. By one of those subsequently inexplicable accidents of mood well-known to history, a thousand small resentments had coalesced in Venice which had harmlessly dissipated themselves everywhere else. From no special pre-eminence, no unique vocation to the art of music, where other equally famous exponents of that art had finally shambled off at the drover’s impatient command, unlikely Venice stood, and kicked. Unlikely except in one fact: Venice for a thousand years had been habitually—religiously, one might say—at odds with the Papacy.

So, beyond all probability, the stage is set in this incomparable theatre for the last act of Vatican III.

Chapter III.

"The Priesthood of All Believers. (That wonderfully Protestant platform! )

"…23. The priesthood of all believers is a principle which, while consistently maintained by the church in conjunction with that of the unique priestly office of Christ Himself, and consequently the special office of that particular ministry ordained by Him, has not always been conspicuously exemplified in the liturgical role taken by the laity. It has too often been obscured by a false emphasis or primacy accorded to particular vocations exercised in the sacred liturgy. Rites and devotions otherwise unobjectionable are repugnant to the doctrine of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ where they are allowed to detract from the manifest unity of the congregation of the faithful assembled for this purpose. Accordingly, this most sacred Council, following in the footsteps of the Council of Second Vatican, decrees the following norm.

Norm relating to Participation of the Laity.

24. No liturgical form in which all the faithful may not freely and equally join is appropriate to express in its fullest measure the true nature of the Eucharistic offering…"

28. And in accordance with Article 24 of this Constitution, any rite which is in the nature of a concert or performance by individuals or by one section only of the congregation to another, is no longer to be regarded as a proper expression . . . . . .

There had been a full morning’s debate on that word ‘equally’. In the end, only six votes had carried it.

Six votes out of a hundred. On their nod, lives end. The lives of the great composers, for a second time—Palestrina, Bach, Howell, Byrd, Viadana, Tallis, Mozart, Gibbon, Vittoria, Wilcox, Britten, Fauré… Every work that every voice could not encompass was pronounced against nature, the nature of the Christian at worship. The Missa Communis with its recommended simple choruses must become the regular diet during this Transitional Period, and on Pentecost, Article 28 would become a universal law.

The press had had a field day. A score of ‘last grand concerts’, as each diocese in turn fell into line, was given detailed coverage with inside spreads of weeping women (usually professional models). And they lined up the cameras to wait for the most splendid curtain of all, the swansong of Monteverdi himself.

The first development was some unexpected by-play. The Church had, from the most ancient times, provided a home for decorous, and sometimes less decorous, theatre. And a rational distinction between theatre and concert would be difficult to draw. And there was nothing in the Constitution to prohibit the use of a church building for a purely non-liturgical performance of religious music outside liturgical hours. Was there? Even if that building was the great basilica of San Marco itself.

It began with an ‘extra-statutory’ performance of Tallis’ ‘Lamentations’ during Holy Week though not at any service officially styled ‘Tenebrae’. What significance could possibly attach to music by an alien—a Protestant—composer? There had been one or two such performances already during this permissive period, running more or less side by side with the liturgy proper but readily distinguishable from the regular Missa Communis which the Constitution prescribed. But for the first time, the ‘concert’ slotted easily into a liturgical context and also provided a useful framework for private devotion at this special season. The impromptu genuflections of an old woman, hardly the standard practice of any concert audience, sparked off a wave of emulation. The faces of that first congregation, one journalist noted, were ‘as stubborn as martyrs’, the sign of the Cross made aggressively under the nose of the Vatican dignitary who happened to be present. By the second performance, the ‘concert’ had become a devotional focus of the week, and the Missa Communis of Wednesday was celebrated by half a dozen priests and a couple of dozen laity.

And no public admonition. (What was there, and who was there, to admonish?) In private, the Archbishop told his niece: There’s nothing unlawful in what anyone’s doing, as far as I can see. And this is still the Transitional Year.

After Easter, the prescribed new order continued to run parallel with—and overshadowed by—the old. Old-style ‘concerts of liturgical music’, increasingly more liturgy than concert, with vested clergy moving more or less ceremonially around the altar. Eventually and unequivocally, daily Masses unamended in any musical particular. A process gathering momentum as the year turned to run downhill.

Headlong toward Pentecost, and clean out of the bottom end of the Transitional Year.

This morning, it was Palestrina’s ‘Aeterna Christi Munera’, the superb fugal opening of the ‘Agnus’ gathering weight and pace, like a small river heading for the open sea.

The Osservatore correspondent yawned, his eyes wandering. Not until—if—discontent became specific, legal rebellion would his columns carry any further report. Not for his editor the interesting drama under the surface. There was nothing in this situation that anyone could properly enjoy. His nearby colleague from La Stampa had no such pieties to inhibit him. He could smell time running out. The nasal tenors, full-throated, bursting their collars, were on a blind collision-course. This machine should have been switched off months before, if it were to have any chance of pulling up in time. The keyboard in his head chattered.

But his eyes too were roving. Dress up the drama—give it a human face. He studied the girl in the aisle seat, patrician nose, sculpted cheekbones, Hermes silk scarf tossed over one shoulder of a beautiful bleached-linen suit. She was watching the liturgy as though it were the photo finish of the Gran Premio di Milano.

Attractive blonde Stella X, 22 (?), is one of many who will surely miss the traditional splendours come Pentecost. An art student at Bologna? Stella says, "To me, worship is music. I shall probably turn Protestant."

If he could persuade this one to weep on camera, it would be much better than any of those shots of posing professionals.

The man holding the patten at the Archbishop’s side, as he came down to give Communion, had been the organiser of that first run-away ‘concert’. He was also founder-member and chairman of Eredità, the movement whose stated aims were to preserve the Church’s heritage as ‘cultural tradition’. On those terms, it was not in open breach of ‘Omnium Credentum’. But how to keep ritual music going in any real sense except in a marriage dance with ritual action, reflected La Stampa. And then thought? We can weave the punch line around that. This particular drama ends on a question mark.

The jewelled procession reformed and came down again, the Archbishop walking like an old sailor on the undulating floor. La Stampa watched the ballpoint he had placed on the ground beside him roll gently off its notebook and follow a valley across the nave, under the lace hem of the Cardinal’s alb. These carpet-crumpled stones were a terrifying symbol of the magnificent insanity of Venice, permanently in collusion with the unsettled tides.

In his rapture of composition, he had allowed the congregation to block the aisles before he moved. Catching a glimpse of the silk scarf disappearing down the nave, he tried to eel his way through the press.

Christina Ciachetti walked across the Piazzetta without haste. Once she got back to her flat, with its Navajo blanket on the living room wall and its side-on glimpse of the Grand Canal, the splendid echoes of Palestrina would quickly evaporate. It was her first Sunday since Carlo had walked out. In the end, as suddenly as he had walked in. This Sunday, for the first time in nineteen months, an empty flat and lunch for one. She loitered along the Sansovino colonnade. She had lingered with the crowds from the Cathedral as long as she could, knowing no one. The liturgy had been a solace; it concluded in a tide that washed her up on a bleak coast, alone till Monday. She had forgotten that a Sunday afternoon could be so purposeless.

She had spent most of yesterday tormenting herself with the thought that things might have been different if she’d committed herself; a baby might have kept him? Over these last three dreadful months, she had thought about it daily. But today recognised that that too was a delusion. It would have made no difference at all, except to complicate life unduly—he was a travelling man, and in Venice, no traveller has to wait long for his boat to come in.

Thankfully, she had been spared the folly of chancing it. She had stayed on the pill. Her uncle couldn’t approve of that either, of course. It compounded the offence. But his disapproval was purely technical, a professional stance, that had no impact on his personal relationship with her.

Her uncle was His Eminence Gianbattista Ziani, Cardinal Archbishop and Patriarch of Venice.

She thought of him as a wise old bloodhound. (Not so old, in fact; not so sleepy.) He knew perfectly well that in its moral standards, the Church was on the losing side. He didn’t, unlike silver-haired, silver-faced Father Alfonso, pretend that practices he disapproved of didn’t go on. He suffered his niece’s truancies patiently. The one which pained him most was apparently her lack of creed rather than her nomadic sex life. (Perhaps he imagined that acquisition of the one would automatically terminate the other?)

She didn’t need to be alone for twelve hours, in the circumstances. The Patriarchate doorbell was only two minutes from San Marco. It wasn’t that his company would be unwanted after Carlo’s, or his morality unhelpful; rather that she respected his need for a few moments of privacy when they could be snatched, on Sunday after the High Mass, and in the present climate.

She slowed to a halt at the corner by Saint Theodore’s Column. The crouching dwarfs at its base didn’t reproach her either. They were too preoccupied, huddled there, watching always for the last flood to rise and engulf them, and wipe this magical city off the face of the earth.

Signorina. May I ask if you’re a regular worshipper at Saint Mark’s?

She didn’t register the purpose of his question, thought it an attempt at a pick-up, encouraged by the supposed hint in her stopping.

(It was only a score of yards along the Molo that Carlo had first accosted her as she watched a gondolier with a cargo of Americans gesticulating at a bargee with a cargo of loaves, who had taken his water. She could hear it now, and she smiled again as she had then:

Back in Nebraska, that fracas is going to be the highlight of their tour.)

She wasn’t in the mood for another encounter now. Not yet. Her uncle’s company would have been preferable. Give it time to fade, for God’s sake. She shook her head, shielded him off with the back of her hand.

She saw it too clearly now to deceive herself; yet still, the doubt nagged her in spite of reason, that a word, a gesture, a decision might have made all the difference. At last, common sense asserted itself. And appetite.

Oh, balls!

The hovering journalist turned back.

I’m sorry?

She walked away, only as she reached the Giardinetta steps recognising the ballpoint and notepad. The sense of imminent drama was the one thing apart from music that was bearable in life at the moment. Drama was strong, clean and uncomplex. A bloodless battle was shaping, with just as much pain to be spread around, even if not physical.

She had already fired her own first shot the day before, when having coffee at the Patriarchate in the course of her Saturday morning shopping.

Bringing influence to bear, she had laughed to her colleagues beforehand.

(She was not a student: she taught violin at Padua University.)

‘Influence’ meant reason and passion. She had gulped her coffee, waved the taste away like smoke, set her cup clashing down, all in one movement, launched into the subject without preamble.

(Who in Venice any longer needed preamble?)

"Uncle, surely you’re not going to let it happen? Saint Mark’s? It’s unthinkable."

The smile he put up was a defensive one.

"Now, now. The Church has announced its wishes. You can read the Council documents if you care to take the trouble. I don’t know why you should concern yourself over a purely internal matter."

"The Church has said a lot of silly things in its time and done a lot more. And don’t tell me Galileo has nothing to do with the case. It’s vandalised as much art as it’s sponsored, and that’s not just a private matter."

I didn’t say private; I—

Your Church is a trustee for people like me. Surely, to goodness God is beauty rather than desiccated conformity?

"You are not a believer, Christina, and you cannot teach me theology. Have some more coffee."

But look—

No, I will not look in some irrelevant direction of your fantasy. I’ve told you. In fact, I’ve told everyone—

Yes, I’ve heard. Then why is everyone still asking the same question?

No, no, no. The matter is decided—finished, don’t you understand? There is nothing—to—debate.

"Oh, bosh. It’s you, Uncle Zizi! In Venice, it’s you that make the decisions, not some remote abstraction down south. You are the Church, for all practical purposes."

He had raised a wall of protective hands.

"You,