Sylvia

by Bryce Courtenay

  But I had scarce time to see them rise and, gasping at the sight of their own nudity, hurriedly reach for their habits when my feet seemed turned of their own accord. I started to walk down the long flagstone aisle towards the two great doors at its end as if I possessed no will of my own. At that very moment Nicholas entered the church through the small side door we had used when, as the Petticoat Angel, I had first come to sing to a crowd gathered in the square. He took one look at me in my dishevelled state and gasped at my shaven head, then turning, quickly darted back through the side door. Moments later, the two templars swung open the great doors to the church and I walked through to stand beside Nicholas on the top step looking down into the square at what seemed to be utter confusion.

  Below me street children darted in among the chanting women chased by angry husbands who did not seem to be getting the better of the feral urchins. Some of the older men lay sprawled and beaten on the ground, others were bent over panting and clutching their knees while the children danced gleefully about them, snatching at the garments they held. All the while the naked women, pushed and jolted by pursuing urchins and roughly shaken by castigating husbands, seemed heedless of the mayhem that surrounded them and continued to chant words that I could now clearly hear, the same as those I’d spoken in the church: ‘Our children in Jerusalem!’

  I continued to sing and Nicholas beside me held up his hand. It seemed impossible that I could be heard, but surprisingly the chanting started to abate. Several older children ran up the steps to Nicholas who gave them orders to stop the harassment by the children and to return the clothes they’d stolen. Then I started to sing the Gloria in Excelsis Deo with the words:

  Glory to God in the highest,

  and on earth peace to men of good will.

  We praise Thee.

  We bless Thee.

  We adore Thee.

  We glorify Thee.

  O God, heavenly King,

  God the Father almighty!

  As I completed it, the chanting stopped dead.

  A low moan rose from the square and then followed a thousand cries of despair. The street urchins threw the garments they had stolen to the ground and started to run away. Women snatched up what apparel lay nearest to them to cover their shame.

  The square became filled with the sound of sobbing women, some of whom had found husbands who still carried their clothes and began to dress hastily. Then the battered and angry men began to beat their wives as if to alleviate their own frustration. Some women remained unclothed, walking in circles, wailing in confusion, their hands covering their most private part.

  I turned to Nicholas and was astonished at what I now saw. He trembled as though in a trance and his eyes possessed a glow I had not seen in a human face before. I knew at once that it was he who was now possessed. It was as if all the power that had driven the women into the square had now entered him. He began to shout, his voice astonishingly loud, as if that of a large man, a giant, someone who might be accustomed to shouting at a host of soldiers in the course of battle.

  ‘SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME AND I WILL SHOW THEM THE GLORY OF JERUSALEM!’ he shouted.

  From every corner of the square the street children turned and started to run towards him. Then he collapsed upon the steps beside me and fell into a trance so that none could contain his jerking.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Cross and the Fish

  THE DEATH OF THE archbishop caused a great deal of ecclesiastical fuss and it was scarce two weeks after the funeral that the four of us from the convent were quietly excommunicated by the bishop. The Church, initially calling what happened in the square the work of Satan, tried to cover up the incident at the altar. It used the one event (the archbishop’s death) to eliminate the other (the nude nuns in the church), hoping that the pomp and circumstance of the burial ceremony and our quiet excommunication would settle the affair once and for all. The public, the Church reasoned, given a good burial and the appointment of a new archbishop, would soon forget the little problem of the three nuns and lay sister disrobing at the high altar in front of the image of Christ.

  But it had misjudged the tittle-tattling tongues of the old women in the congregation. The dead archbishop’s injunction to them that they had not witnessed the event in the square was no longer valid. If God had erased their earlier memories of the outside event, then He had not done so for the incident within the church. They now had no need to talk of what they’d been forbidden to say. They’d been amply rewarded with all the juicy details while within the church itself.

  These interior events soon gained credence among the population and served to convince the folk of Cologne that, rather than Satan’s dark work, the event in the square was the hand of God. How else, they asked, if not His glorious work, would the nudity have simultaneously occurred within the church to four women, four servants of God, among them the Petticoat Angel? If the bishop was right and it was the work of Satan, then surely on that Sunday the church of St Martin’s must have been host to the devil?

  While this ‘people’s logic’ could not be easily refuted, the bishop, never popular with the people of Cologne and well-known to be a philanderer, stubbornly resisted these arguments and persisted with the idea that Satan had conspired to create the incident in the square. He could no longer keep our excommunication quiet and issued a missive to say that the nuns had brought the evil with them into St Martin’s from the square and that their blasphemy was the power of Satan that lurked within their hearts.

  However, the old women present at the mass that morning would have none of this Church dogmatism and readily took the side of the nuns and the lay sister. Satan, they insisted, had not entered the four women, but possessed the archbishop, who, cursing the congregation, had chased them from the church with eyes bulging while visibly frothing from the mouth – this bulging and frothing being a detail added afterwards as the telling grew.

  There were rumours that the Pope had asked the bishop to remove his ring until he adequately explained the striking down of the archbishop. Of course, such an assertion was preposterous, the Pope being too far away for the news to have reached Rome and for a reply to come back.

  Having, for once in their uneventful lives, captured the attention of everyone the old fraus now lavished the incident with detail. Inventions and exaggerations seemed added every day. While keeping more or less to the facts they were now given metaphysical meanings. The archbishop, upon seeing the nuns disrobe, bellowed with rage and brought his holy bishop’s crook down to strike the Petticoat Angel twice across the back. At the first blow the crook broke but the archbishop persisted, so that at the second blow another piece of the holy stave broke off, whereupon the archbishop discarded the piece he held and it clattered to the floor to join the others at the foot of the high altar. It was only moments later that the women saw the shape of a perfect cross on my back and at its centre sat a fish, the holy symbol of Jesus the Saviour and Fisher of Men. They pointed to the significance of the shepherd’s crook breaking into three pieces that lay at the feet of the crucified Christ, each piece, they suggested, represented a part of the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost.

  The old women then insisted that the sudden appearance of the cross and the fish upon my back was the precise moment the devil was seen to enter the archbishop. They told how he turned to face them, his eyes demonic and likened to red-hot coals. Then, with a stygian roar, he’d sent them screaming from the church.

  The people of Cologne now talked openly of the Miracle at St Martin’s and railed against the bishop, demanding that the Petticoat Angel be restored to her former sanctity and that my excommunication along with the other three be rescinded.

  The funeral procession of the archbishop and his internment in a vault at St Mary’s would normally have attracted several thousand people and would have filled the church and the square beyond it. But apart from the usual town dignitaries, nobles and church officia
ls, the great church of St Mary’s on the Kapitol resembled a morgue. The pews set aside for the poor were empty and the square held no more than a couple of dozen people, mostly out-of-town pilgrims. Earlier, as the procession moved through the almost deserted streets, the few people present registered their disapproval by turning their backs on the funeral cortege.

  The month following the incident of the chanting women and the death of the archbishop was a difficult one for me as the people of Cologne insisted that it was me who had been blessed and cast the devil from the Church. When I protested they pointed out that it was I who had come out of the trance after receiving the anointment of the cross; that with the archbishop possessed by the devil I had been guided by God to restore the sanctity of the Church and to still the chanting and chase the thieving street children from the square. The other nuns had meanwhile remained in a trance and had not witnessed any of the events directly after the archbishop expunged the congregation’s collective memory and driven the congregation from the Church. This, they maintained, was evidence that I had been chosen by God.

  I had unfortunately brought much of this upon myself by telling Father Hermann and Nicholas what had happened in the Church after the archbishop had driven out the congregation. I should have known that neither would be able to contain themselves and they spread the story freely, with Nicholas including the entire incident in a subsequent sermon to many hundreds of children.

  The only true witnesses, apart from myself, were the two clerics who, throughout the inquiry by the bishop and despite his efforts to get them to modify their viewpoint, had unfortunately remained obdurate. The archbishop, they maintained, had seemed truly possessed, if not by the devil, then certainly by an evil spirit. They described how he had taken to beating them severely with a section of his broken shepherd’s crook. How in the process of this uncalled-for beating, one of them had seen me stoop to regain my habit and had seen the cross and fish symbol suddenly materialise on my back. He’d pointed and shouted out the single urgent word, ‘Look!’

  Whereupon, he claimed, the archbishop ceased beating them and turned to see the crucified fish and the cross on the back of the nun they named the Petticoat Angel. They then both witnessed that his eyes filled with fear and, dropping the broken crook, he’d clutched at his heart with both hands. Moments later he crashed with a groan to the flagstones. The two clerics, rather vaingloriously, told how they’d immediately administered the last rites but feared the archbishop was already struck dead. Asked if they believed the archbishop had been struck by the Almighty or by Satan, they wisely agreed they could not say. They proved to be loose-tongued and instead of keeping what they’d seen to themselves they’d told the two templars, Father Paulus and, it seemed, the three old women who cleaned the church. So that what had occurred when I’d come out of my trance was soon the subject of general gossip. It further confirmed my status as the one chosen to chase the devil from the church and to reduce the mayhem in the square.

  Of course, I had not been present when the two clerics appeared at the bishop’s inquiry. The bishop, aware that I had become a central figure in the incident and, also through Fathers Hermann and Paulus, knowing of the matters of the birds and the blood on the rose, called them as witnesses to my character. It was Fathers Hermann and Paulus who later told me of the evidence given by the two clerics, and unfortunately Father Hermann had once again told others of the inquiry, so that the evidence of the two clerics served only to confirm the earlier version of what had happened in the Church.

  This, as might be expected, fired the brouhaha anew and there seemed some evidence that someone somewhere in the Church was taking note since the bishop, who might normally have been consecrated as the new archbishop, was passed over by Rome. A new archbishop who was unknown to the local population was duly appointed. Anxious to settle the matter of the death of his predecessor and to calm the people of Cologne, he called for a second inquiry to examine what he described as ‘new evidence’.

  It was to this inquiry that I was summoned and fetched by a standard-bearing troop of six of the archbishop’s splendidly uniformed soldiers on horseback and with a pretty mare bearing a side-saddle brought for me. On the route to the archbishop’s palace we travelled along the banks of the Rhine and through the busy markets. By honouring a peasant in such a grand manner the archbishop was desirous of letting the people of Cologne know that he was attending to their urgent concerns.

  It must be said that the new Prince of the Church faced a difficult task. The pious people of Cologne were already predisposed to think me sanctified. In their minds they believed they possessed four previous reasons for this without adding the recent incident in the church and the square. They talked of my miraculous appearance in the bathhouse in front of the three whores that had caused them to flee nude and to forsake their wicked past; the symbol of the fish, the mark of Christ, the three women swore they’d seen upon my back and its further existence also confirmed by the bathhouse attendant; my calling of the birds in St Martin’s square; and, on that same occasion, the blood on the Virgin’s pure white rose was now well-known and accepted. All four incidents had combined to convince them of my spiritual significance. And now, not only the fish symbol previously upon my back, but added to it the miraculous sign of the cross.

  The bishop, by excommunicating me, had, they asserted, denied the Petticoat Angel the comfort and sanctuary of the Church. They claimed that I was being sacrificed in order to exonerate the devil-incarnate archbishop. The appearance of the cross embracing the fish taking place in front of the high altar clearly indicated that God had chosen me and not the dead archbishop as the one who was innocent and His beloved servant. Moreover, further proof of this blessed approval was my singing the Gloria in Excelsis Deo on the steps of St Martin’s that caused the chanting in the square to finally cease.

  Added to all this, another complication had arisen for the new archbishop. With the blessing and encouragement of Father Hermann, known as a greatly respected and visionary priest at St Mary’s on the Kapitol, a youth from the streets who called himself Nicholas of Cologne, also well-known by the city’s population, was preaching daily to a thousand or more children. He had also been present with the Petticoat Angel at the chanting in the square, where it was said the Holy Spirit had descended upon him and witnessed through him that he should lead a Children’s Crusade to Jerusalem.

  To even further complicate the situation, the Pope was at that very moment calling for pilgrims and recruiting soldiers to embark on a new crusade against the infidel in Egypt. Now the people of Cologne were saying it was clear that God had ordained that this crusade should be composed entirely of children; that not Egypt but Jerusalem should be its destination, with the purpose of regaining the Holy Sepulchre.This notion gained even further credence when news arrived that a boy preacher known as Stephen of Cloyes had presented a letter, said to be from Christ, to the king of France. He too preached about a crusade to Jerusalem led by children and, like Nicholas of Cologne, it was claimed that tens of thousands of French children were being swept up in the movement. The assertion was that the advent of the two movements started simultaneously and at too great a distance apart to be a coordinated effort and, too strange an occurrence to be a mere coincidence, was clearly the work of God.

  Upon my grand arrival at the archbishop’s palace the four of us who had been excommunicated met again. Sister Angelica, now Lady Angelica von Essen, appeared gorgeously attired in the very latest and most expensive gown and high, feathered hat accompanied by her personal maid. Lady Freda, less ostentatious, but well attired as a minor noblewoman, stood with her, while Rosa, in the brown linen shift and heavy boots of a peasant, stood apart and was ignored until I joined her.

  I was dressed by Frau Sarah who had insisted that I should be able to hold my own with anyone and be seen as the proper lady I had become. In deference to the Petticoat Angel my gown was of a simple design and made of purest linen dyed as blue as a cloudless
summer sky and I wore white, calfskin pointed slippers slightly splayed at the ankles. It was the cut of the gown that made the whole difference and it showed off my slim figure to the utmost. ‘Even an archbishop must admire a beautiful young woman,’ Frau Sarah had said, well pleased with the result. As always I wore no wimple and my hair had grown a little. She’d tut-tutted about the crude act of shaving it, despite her own religion requiring that her head be shaved in marriage. She’d cut and snipped and shaped my hair so that it sat in a soft bowl about my head and then she’d brushed it until it shone like the morning sun.

  We were ushered into an anteroom leading from the great hall and asked to wait. Upon first seeing me a smug-looking Lady Angelica turned to Lady Freda and sniffed, ‘You may dress a peasant in finery but she remains yet a peasant underneath.’

  No longer subject to the restrictions imposed on me by my inferior position at the convent I was free to answer back. ‘Ah, Lady Angelica, you may well speak of underneath. For try as you might to cover up with silks and bows, I have seen your own underneath and thy tits, poor empty sacks, do sag halfway to thy waist, while thy bum is much too large and wobbles deeply dimpled!’ In truth, I had barely noticed their nudity in the church, being much too upset and preoccupied with regaining my habit and boots. My wimple I never found.

  Lady Freda and Lady Angelica’s personal maid gasped at my temerity while Rosa, wide-eyed, brought her hand up to her mouth to conceal her delight. ‘You’ll pay for this, you bitch! I shall speak to my brother,’ the former tormentor hissed.

  I shrugged. ‘What else can he do? We are already by his hand disowned by the Church and all of us condemned to hell.’

  ‘You’ll soon see!’ she spat.

  The hearing took place in the great hall of the archbishop’s castle, and despite the early summer sunshine it was a cold and draughty place of flagstones, flags and stone-carved saints. Lady Angelica’s brother, the bishop who had expelled us from the Church, Fathers Hermann and Paulus and at least twenty other ecclesiastics were present. The archbishop, in a high-backed chair that carried his noble crest, sat at the centre of a long banquet table while the priests, clerks and scribes were seated at either side of him. We stood at its centre on the opposite side facing the Lord Archbishop.