Sylvia (43 page)

The four of us from the convent who had remained within the church had no notion of the goings-on outside. I grew wretched for a lack of knowing and my curiosity could scarcely be contained. The archbishop's sermon, so clearly directed at what was going on in the square, remained a complete mystery. We did not know that a thousand women stood naked outside, as he did not say as much, but simply preached of the perfidious Eve and her wickedness and referred to an uncleanliness and abomination that the congregation recently thought they'd witnessed but hadn't, since their memories had been purged. Even the chanting was distorted and it was impossible to interpret the words, so that there were no clues to help me comprehend.

It was all very confusing and I confess that when he proceeded to read the prayer of the day, my mind was not possessed of piety but otherwise engaged in the thought of Brother Dominic's expulsion from Rome for his writings on the subject of reason and truth. I clearly understood that I had just witnessed the monumental hubris of the archbishop when he had simply expunged what the congregation had just witnessed, denying them the divine unction and the bread and wine of forgiveness if they should persist with what they knew to be the truth. Thus I had not heard a single word of the archbishop's prayers when quite suddenly I felt myself possessed of an urgent need to remove my habit. I did not for one moment think that my naked form would be unseemly in the church, or even bring me or others shame. Within me I had a sense of absolution and purity, as if at that moment I was purged of all wickedness. I could feel the burning light of the Holy Spirit descended upon me. From my lips, without reason or forethought, came the shouted chant, ‘Our children in Jerusalem!'

It evidently took some time to bring me out of the trance I had fallen into. I hadn't felt the urgent and persistent shaking of the two clerics, both mortified and weeping at the sight of my nudity, nor had I felt the archbishop's blows as he used his shepherd's crook to beat furiously upon my shoulders and my naked back, so that now his stave lay broken in three pieces at the foot of the altar. As my eyes cleared, I saw that I was not alone in my trance: Sisters Angelica and Freda as well as Rosa knelt naked before the altar with their eyes closed and their sensibilities not yet returned. They too chanted the words, ‘Our children in Jerusalem.'

The two clerics, whimpering and fearful, held our habits as the archbishop, his eyes near popping from his head, shouted at them to cover our nudity. They had no idea how this might be done. As they tried to gather up a habit and place it over the head of one of the three naked forms still in a trance, the nuns grabbed at it and impetuously thrust it away, their eyes yet closed and their chanting continuing. The archbishop became so angry that he picked up the longest part of his broken crook and now commenced to beat the clerics. They cowered at his feet and, first casting aside the habits, brought their arms up to protect their heads against his furious blows. ‘Dress them, you fools!' he shouted, his mouth spit-flecked and his face grown purple.

I hastily moved to the garments, anxious to find my own. As I crouched to where the clerics cowered with the archbishop standing over them, one of them suddenly shouted, ‘Look! Look at her back, your Grace!'

The archbishop paused and turned to look where I crouched, the broken stave still raised. I glanced back, fearful that he might strike me, only to see that he seemed struck by some invisible force. He stood a moment perfectly still, his mouth half opened as if about to speak. The broken stick dropped from his grasp and clattered to the flagstones. I watched, fearful, as he clutched at his heart, then his great bulk descended slowly to his knees as he collapsed, his head crashing to the flagstone floor, his eyes turned back into his head, his mouth gone slack. He gave a small convulsive jerk and then lay still.

I found my habit and my boots and dressed as quickly as I might with the two clerics kneeling in prayer over the dead archbishop, hysterically reciting the last rites. I looked about and saw that the church was empty, although in my trance I had not heard the congregation depart. Beset by a terrible fear, I had no idea what to do next. Then, as I had done in the marketplace in Uedem when Frau Anna had spat upon me, I began to sing. Almost immediately the two nuns and Rosa emerged from their trance.

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 officials, 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.