The Perils of Command by David Donachie Read Free Book Online Page A

of twenty-five thousand pounds a year, his inferior bishops just as well housed and just as suffused with personal greed, while minor clerics were often close to starvation and their parishioners rarely dined on meat?
    He recalled telling Michael tales of the Catholic Church of France, stories he had heard in the salons of Paris after he and Adam had been forced to flee there and his father was still a feted visitor for his radical views.
    Prior to the rise of the Jacobins, the city had been a delightful place in which to reside, free from the stench of monarchy and with a religious bloodsucker equally tamed. The Church in France had been broken. It no longer held vast swathes of property or was corrupt to an almost unimaginable degree.
    Prior to the change, cardinals lived like princes, with retinues numbered in the hundreds, many armed, and incomes reckoned by the millions of livres. They and their bishops lived in sumptuous splendour, consorting openly with mistresses who made no attempt to hide their presence or the production of their illegitimate offspring. Adam had no great love for the notion of celibacy and neither did his son but both abhorred the blatant hypocrisy of a religion founded on the principles of poverty and simplicity.
    ‘Never pay heed to that, John-boy,’ had been Michael’s response, and it was one that survived the sight of the numerous papal palaces and overdecorated churches of Benevento, a cool mountain retreat to divines in the summermonths. ‘The creatures who occupy these will have to answer for their sins on the Day of Judgement.’
    ‘Then let us hope money plays no part in that assessment of worth,’ had been John Pearce’s jaundiced reply.
    Soon they passed back into the Kingdom of Naples, making rapid progress downhill and on the flat, slowed every time they came to one of the hills between them and their destination, until atop one peak they finally spotted Vesuvius, or at least the column of sulphurous smoke that rose from its cone.
    Nothing, not even a doubt about the strength of friendship that had troubled John Pearce, could dim the excitement he felt at being so close to his lover.
     
    Emily Barclay had ceased to use the style of the husband she had come to despise, reverting to her maiden name of Raynesford, this being how she was known in Naples. She had sought to keep her residence discreet, a convenient cover as, even in such a lax environment, a married woman openly consorting with her lover was a cause of comment, but such sentiments were brushed aside by her hostess.
    As Lady Hamilton had pointed out many times, marital fidelity in Naples was the exception not the norm, and too often for her own liking Emily found herself in an open coach with the wife of the British Ambassador, both hailed for their beauty by the populace as they passed through the crowded streets.
    If Lady Hamilton was untroubled by such a liaison her guest was not. Emily had been brought up to respect her religion and the tenets by which women of her social class lived their lives and that did not encompass an acceptance ofadultery. It was all very well for John Pearce to ridicule such sentiments, with his constant references to how life was lived in Paris and better for it, but Emily could not fully accept existing in such a state.
    His presence alleviated that, obviously: she was in love with him and when he was by her side or shared her bed it was hard to feel guilty. His absences, however, brought back her feelings of doing wrong and the thought that the God in whom she firmly believed must be frowning at her behaviour, never mind her friends and family, if they knew, for she could not communicate with them to offer any explanation. This allowed guilt to triumph over any memory of pleasure.
    She had tried to break their connection and return to England without him once already but that had been thwarted by circumstance. Yet the idea had not died; it was very much in her mind. As a guest of Sir