Sinceri's bow and kiss to Borja's ring were fussy and precise. "Your Eminence," he said. "How may I serve you?"
Borja took a deep breath. Let it out, in a long sigh. "Father Sinceri," he said, "we are, are we not, faced with a problem?"
"Your Eminence?" Sinceri looked genuinely puzzled. "I understand Your Eminence to be concerned at the import of the dispensations concerning consanguineous marriage that the Holy Father recently granted, and I have taken the liberty of preparing a legal opinion—"
He reached into the leather folder he had been carrying for a document.
Borja waved it aside. "I thank you most sincerely for your efforts, and indeed for your consideration in attempting to anticipate my concerns, but it is in regard to another matter I wished to speak with you."
Sinceri's frown of puzzlement grew deeper. "I should be most grateful to be enlightened by Your Eminence."
Borja began to pace. The afternoon's business before the curia still had him simmering. Walking back and forward helped to calm him. "Father Sinceri, I feel it will be helpful if I rehearse a little of the mutual history we have with the current Holy Father."
"The Galileo affair?" Sinceri cocked his head to one side. His professional attention engaged, Borja fancied he looked more than a little like a portly, yet sleek old carrion crow. One with a smattering of gray feathers amid the black, but all the more distinguished looking for them.
Borja nodded. "You are most perceptive, Father Sinceri. The Galileo Affair is indeed that part of our mutual history to which I refer. You will recall, if you please, that the matter was decided wholly without regard to proper inquisitorial procedure, and indeed wholly without regard to the proper rule of canon law."
Sinceri gave a small sniff. "Most—"
His had been a career spent enforcing obedience to the church, and in particular obedience to its hierarchy, and Borja could see that the idea was giving him more than a little trouble. "Most irregular," Sinceri finished after a short, but nevertheless embarrassed pause.
"Irregular?" Borja let a little incredulity come in to his tone. In truth, the sarcasm and bilious humor was not in the least feigned. The conclusion to that sorry business still rankled. The near-picaresque farce of the denouement at Galileo's final hearing had been a mockery of the dignity of the cardinals and of the church that not even the most ribald of the romantic writers of the day would have stooped to.
If nothing else, they would have been jeered in the streets for the shameless slapstick implausibility of the whole business. And he, Cardinal Gaspar Borja y Velasco, had been forced, in what with hindsight could only have been a deliberate and calculated insult, to take part in the whole degrading machination. Borja felt himself flush a little redder in his just and proper indignation at the mere memory.
"It was more than irregular," he went on. "It was a deliberate abuse of the dignity of Holy Mother Church by one whose charge it is, a charge laid on him by the Holy Spirit no less, to preserve the Church in all her glory. It was a deliberate abuse by one whose holy duty it is to preserve the Church against her enemies, within and without, whose solemn oath of office it is—" Borja stopped himself.
"Your Eminence is clearly exercised by this matter."
"Exercised, yes," Borja said, trying to collect himself. That Barberini was plainly unfit to hold that most holy of offices was plain for all to see, yet how many dared to speak of it? Borja could see that behind the professional mask, Sinceri was profoundly embarrassed by how this conversation was going. Still, let him be embarrassed.
"It is my belief that His Holiness has overstepped the bounds of what is acceptable in the behavior of a pontiff." There. Approach the matter carefully.
Sinceri thought that one over. He cocked his head upward, regarding the ceiling with its plaster cherubs and giltwork carefully as he turned the idea over. At length he said: "With the greatest of respect to Your Eminence, and to the matters of policy on which Your Eminence has sought to persuade His Holiness, I am not at all certain that that is a matter on which I entirely follow Your Eminence, in particular having regard to precedent—"
"Horseflies, Father Sinceri, horseflies!" Borja had been dealing with lawyers of one sort or another since he had been old enough to have charge of affairs, and knew the signs. It was best to stop them before they started on the hedging and obfuscation that their training made as natural to them as breathing. And canon lawyers, those who specialized in the laws of the church's governance, were the worst. All the obfuscation of lawyers with the pomposity of theologians on top.