Pope Joan_ A Novel - Donna Woolfolk Cross [127]
It was an active, busy life, one that suited Joan perfectly. It offered all the opportunities of monastic life with none of the disadvantages. She could exercise the full measure of her intelligence without check or censure. She had access to the schola library, a small but fine collection of more than fifty volumes, and no one stood over her shoulder to question her if she chose to read Cicero or Suetonius rather than Augustine. She was free to come and go as she pleased, to think as she liked, to express her thoughts without fear of flogging and exposure. The time passed quickly, measured out contentedly in the fulfillment of each day’s work.
So things might have continued indefinitely had the newly elected Pope Sergius not fallen ill.
SINCE Septuagesima Sunday, the Pope had been beset by an assortment of vague but troubling symptoms: bad digestion, insomnia, heaviness and swelling of the limbs; shortly before Easter, he was stricken with a pain so intense as to be almost unendurable. Night after night, the entire palace was kept awake by his screaming.
The society of physicians sent a dozen of its best men to attend the stricken Pope. They tried a multitude of devices to effect a cure: they brought a fragment of the skull of St. Polycarp for Sergius to touch; they massaged his afflicted limbs with oil taken from a lamp that had burned all night on the tomb of St. Peter, a measure known to cure even the most desperate of afflictions; they bled him repeatedly and purged him with emetics so strong his whole body was racked with violent spasms. When even these powerful curatives failed, they tried to dispel the pain through counter-irritation, laying strips of burning flax across the veins of the legs.
Nothing availed. As the Pope’s condition worsened, the Roman people were gripped with alarm: if Sergius should die so soon after his predecessor, leaving the Throne of St. Peter vacant again, the Frankish Emperor, Lothar, might seize the opportunity to descend on the city and assert his imperial authority over them.
Sergius’s brother Benedict was also beset by worry—not out of any fraternal sentiment but because his brother’s demise represented a threat to his own interests. Having persuaded Sergius to appoint him papal missus, Benedict had skillfully used that position to accrue the authority of the papal office for himself. The result was that, only five months into his papacy, Sergius ruled in name only; all real power in Rome was wielded by Benedict—to the considerable aggrandizement of his personal fortune.
Benedict would have preferred to have the title and honor of the papal office as well, but he had always known this to be beyond his reach. He had neither the education nor the polish for so great an office. He was a second son, and in Rome it was not the custom to divide property and title among heirs as in Frankland. As the firstborn, Sergius had been lavished with all the privileges the family could provide—the expensive clothes, the private tutors. It was terribly unfair, but there was nothing to be done about it, and after a while Benedict had left off sulking and sought consolation in worldlier pleasures, of which, he quickly discovered, Rome had no shortage. His mother had grumbled about his dissolute habits but made no serious attempt to curtail them; her interest and hopes had always been centered on Sergius.
Now, at last, the long years of being overlooked were at an end. It had not been difficult to get Sergius