SYLVIA

Bryce Courtenay is the bestselling author of The Power of One, Tandia, April Fool’s Day, The Potato Factory, Tommo & Hawk, Jessica, Solomon’s Song, A Recipe for Dreaming, The Family Frying Pan, The Night Country, Smoky Joe’s Cafe, Four Fires, Matthew Flinders’ Cat, Brother Fish, Whitethorn, Sylvia and The Persimmon Tree.

The Power of One is also available in an edition for younger readers, and Jessica has been made into an award-winning television miniseries.

BOOKS BY BRYCE COURTENAY

The Power of One

Tandia

April Fool’s Day

A Recipe for Dreaming

The Family Frying Pan

The Night Country

Jessica

Smoky Joe’s Cafe

Four Fires

Matthew Flinders’ Cat

Brother Fish

Whitethorn

Sylvia

The Persimmon Tree

THE AUSTRALIAN TRILOGY

The Potato Factory

Tommo & Hawk

Solomon’s Song

Also available in one volume, as The Australian Trilogy

Bryce Courtenay

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PREFACE

The Jerusalem Fever

THIS WAS A STRANGE period, even for a time of civil war, when horrible surprise and uncertainty, sickness and blight upon the land seemed as commonplace as dogs barking in the night. People, sensible and devout, not given to open display and well knowing their lack of noteworthy lives, took to strange acts of sudden wilfulness. A vainglorious, corrupt and complacent Church, the only arbiter of right from wrong and well accustomed to owning all judgements, felt certain these signs and portents were visitations from the devil, while the ordinary folk clearly saw God’s mysterious hand at work in their lives.

Though how God, one crisp March morning in the year of our Lord 1212, could cause two chaste women of Cologne to strip to public nakedness in the grey dawn light was a complex mystery even for those epochal times. That two fat women with no cause to want for anything, and at a time when to be rotund was a sign of contentment and privilege, took to behaving like drunken hussies seemed near impossible to explain as a divine manifestation.

These, you must understand, were enormous women, their pendulous breasts lifting and slapping against great wobbling stomachs, each milk-white thigh shifting its weight first to the left and then to the right as they trundled barefoot across the wet, cold earth.

The fact of the two fat women running was a near miracle in itself. But further to this, neither was known to the other – they came down different streets and it was well-known in their respective neighbourhoods that they would customarily walk only short distances before having to stop to recover their breath. But now they ran, if less the gazelle and more the hippopotamus, still it was running by any known description. They wept as they ran, constantly calling out the name of the most holy place in Christendom.

If this was a Satan-inspired early-morning madness, then it was also an infection that seemed to be carried within the stinking city not yet cleansed of winter ordure by the spring rains. At about the time the Angelus bell rang and even before the sun was to rise fully that morning, as if to some unspoken command, hundreds of pious women rose from their beds. The fortunate and the desperate poor, all keepers of the faith, sat bolt upright, then, as if possessed, stepped urgently from their beds and hastily drew their woollen nightgowns or the rags they slept in over their heads, casting them to the floor, and stood naked before their Creator.

To some further inward command, the women crept silently past sleeping husbands and children to emerge from the doorways of homes and hovels in every neighbourhood. That they regarded themselves as spiritually guided there is no doubt – foolishness and wanton display played no part in their chaste and pious thoughts. With their arms and faces raised to heaven, eyes tightly shut to the rising sun, they ran from every direction towards the square in front of the church of St Martin where from their collective lips issued the single chant, ‘Our children in Jerusalem!’

The archbishop and his two attendant clerics, together with the small number of old women and a smattering of pilgrims seeking indulgences before the spring ploughing who were attending the early-morning mass, hearing the chanting that came from outside the church, hurried to the great doors. Some would later claim that at least a thousand women stood naked chanting in the church square. Later that day town officials would announce the figure at less than a hundred and then, as time wore on and at the insistence of the archbishop, it was further revised to a handful. Finally, when it came time to add the event to the pages of Church history, it was reduced to the original two fat women running, who, the Latin scribe was careful to add, were found dead, struck down by the hand of the Almighty.

History, when it is recorded from only one determining source, is usually as unreliable as it is self-serving. It consists, in the main, of what the Holy Father in Rome or the Princes of the Church, archbishops and proctors cared to acknowledge, and is usually rearranged to suit the political or doctrinal agenda of the day. The truth in those medieval times, as often as not, was placed in the custody of the eyewitness, where it too became degraded when carried forward in song and legend. This communal voice, if not entirely reliable, at least has the distinction of being neither politically inspired nor self-serving and therefore has no reason to conceal the facts.

Accepting that two people who witness the same event may see it quite differently and allowing for exaggeration and the usual alehouse talk, the layman’s truth may yet be the more reliable of the two versions. The Church historian says two fat women possessed of a satanic frenzy entered the square where they were struck down for their sin of nakedness. The secular voice claims more, many more, naked women swept up in a common religious zeal inspired by the Holy Ghost gathered in the church square that early March day in the year 1212. We may choose to believe one or the other account, but the common voice possibly explains what the Church was never able to: how the Children’s Crusade was initially inspired.

To continue the popular account, the congregation, watching from within the church, had barely sufficient time to gain a glimpse of the naked chanting women before the archbishop ordered them to return at once to kneel before the high altar. Whereupon the church doors were closed with a great banging and echoing and shooting of bolts into place by the two templars, who traditionally stood as the night watch for the few coins it earned. Alarmed by the echo of the doors, a blur of pigeons rose into the sky from the hundreds of carved and crenulated tucks, nesting nooks and crannies and from the snarling jaws of the granite gargoyles.

Inside the church the two ineffectual and near-hysterical clerics, shouting and wringing their hands, implored the morning congregation to stop their excited chattering and to kneel alongside four nuns at prayer in front of the great altar. These four devout figures, three nuns and a lay sister, oblivious of the events taking place outside the church, had remained steadfastly at prayer throughout.

With his flock finally gathered and silent at his feet, the archbishop reminded them that at the very moment Adam, tempted by a recalcitrant Eve, had taken a bite from the forbidden fruit, innocence in the world had ceased to exist. From that time, with the eviction from the Garden of Eden, public nakedness had become a mortal sin.

He informed them that, because they had been witnesses to this flagrant act of sinning, they too were no longer pure in spirit and therefore the wine of Christ’s blood and bread of His flesh was withdrawn until they’d received confession. They would, the archbishop hastened to declare, be allowed to receive mass only if they confessed the sin of Eve and, as penance, purged their memories of the event they henceforth imagined their eyes had recently witnessed. This they all readily agreed to do; better to accept a Church-sanctioned lie than be forever damned by a satanic truth. The archbishop accepted their collective confession and pronounced them cleansed in sight, memory and mind.

In the re-telling of any event, a brief glimpse is far more dangerous to the truth than a good hard look, so that not everything ‘apparently not seen’ in the church square by the women attending mass that morning can be absolutely relied upon. What is certain – for it took place in front of their very eyes and after their minds had been cleansed, their memories expunged and their tongues hopefully silenced – was the subsequent behaviour of the three nuns and the lay sister kneeling in prayer.

Just as the archbishop pronounced the penance of compulsory memory loss and began the final benediction, the four kneeling forms rose simultaneously to their feet and commenced to disrobe. In a matter of moments they stood naked with their eyes tightly closed, arms raised towards the statue of the crucified Christ and in clear voice simultaneously pronounced, ‘Our children in Jerusalem!’

Outside the bolted church door the two old templars, setting aside their pikes, seated themselves on the topmost step. Slapping their knees in delight they cackled gleefully as they watched the curious proceedings in the square. They, who while twice serving as crusaders in the Holy Land believed they had witnessed every manifestation of the Christ passion, now found themselves confounded. They had seen pilgrims who had marched on their knees until the cobblestones ran red with blood; they had witnessed rape and pillage, mass hysteria, the eating of human flesh, ecstatic rending of garments, legions dressed in sackcloth and ashes, male nudity and self-mutilation, all in the name of the Christ figure. But now they merrily agreed that nothing they had hitherto seen compared to the situation evolving in front of their eyes on this early-spring morning. They proceeded to scan the chanting women for every lurid detail, knowing that for years to come no alehouse in the land would refuse to fill their tankards in return for their personal account of the onset of Jerusalem fever.

The two old soldiers watched as panting husbands, carrying garments of every description, some in possession of whips and stout sticks, began to arrive. Gesticulating wildly the husbands shouted out the names of their wives, while for the benefit of each other, they cursed the gullibility and hysteria of the weaker sex. But their presence did not diminish the spiritual exhilaration. Meek and untroublesome women, caught up in this moment of ecstasy, brushed their husbands aside as if they were beggar children tugging at their skirts.

Soon the homeless, mostly street urchins and cretinous youth, rapscallions all, sleeping under dirty rags in the dark, stinking narrow alleys that surrounded the church, wakened to the strange, high-pitched chant and descended upon the naked women like a pack of hungry wolves. Whooping and caterwauling they barged and darted among the frenzied gathering, groping unfamiliar parts, grinning lewdly for the joy of pawing and fondling female flesh while stealing bangles and beads from pliant wrists and necks. Husbands ceased from beating wives and fell instead upon the invaders from the alleyways. This seemed only to increase the fun for the errant halfwits and snot-nosed urchins who easily dodged their blows and were seen to lead the older men a merry dance. It was not long before their attackers grew short of breath and stood panting, stooped, with their hands upon their knees, whereupon the garments they clutched were ripped from their grasp as they now became the object of attack and robbery.

Yet the women remained oblivious to the mayhem surrounding them. No amount of promiscuous patting or licentious groping was to any avail; ignoring the errant hands, the thieving fingers, and the cajoling, cursing, bloody blows and cries from their anxious and angry menfolk, they chanted on and on, ‘Our children in Jerusalem!’

CHAPTER ONE

Sylvia Honeyeater

I AM SYLVIA HONEYEATER. I came originally from Uedem, a village some distance from Cologne. This is the story of my life. I will relate it as honestly as I may, for they say confession is good for the soul and my soul, poor dead thing, is much in need of some good. If I should attempt to justify my deeds with the adage that the alley cat cannot choose the bowl from which it laps, you must accept that the truth is often painful.

To begin, I think myself born in 1196, whether at the beginning or the end I cannot say. It was an unpropitious year of great starvation when sickness and blight visited the land and half the village perished from the terrible epidemic that scourged Germany and all the lands surrounding. For the four years before, it had rained and flooded so much that the crops could not be harvested until late August when the seed had mostly rotted. Many folk, in an attempt to stay alive, ate the grass along the streams and the rotting flesh of dead animals, and if there were woods nearby they gathered acorns to grind into bread. It was also the year of recruitment for the German Crusade that failed in its attempt to get to Jerusalem.

I was the seed my father deposited in my poor mother’s womb prior to his departure as a foot soldier and crusader for the Holy Land. He became a crusader not from any sense of piety, but to escape the sickness and in return for the promise by his Holiness the Pope that if he served in the attempt to regain the Holy Sepulchre from the vile hands of the infidels he would be forgiven his sins. It was a deal in which the Almighty most definitely got the worst of the bargain. My father was a drunk, a huge, bellicose brute, by trade a carpenter but one seldom seen to do an honest day’s work. But then again, he was not alone. In order to escape from justice, many a layabout, drunkard and thief wore the Cross emblazoned upon his soldier’s tunic. While playing the pious pilgrim my father was interested only in profit, in looting, the maddening frenzy of killing for Christ, rapine or some other nefarious mischief, with the forgiveness of his sins past being the glorious prize to be awarded at the conclusion of his pilgrimage.

True to my nation I was blonde and blue-eyed and later, as I grew into a woman and lost the starved look that comes with poverty, I was known to be of comely appearance and, more importantly, I knew from their constant flattery and attentions that men found me desirable. For all the advantage this was. to give me I would have been better served with squint eyes and a harelip for I always find myself attracted to a rogue’s bed. They say the nature of all humans is born within them, that what we are we cannot change. I am cursed as an optimist and a dreamer, a dangerous combination, for I seldom see the traps that men set for me and see only the excitement in the brute and the tedium in the good man.

If, as they say, I am as I was born, my social nature immutable, then my attraction to bastards is not something I may change, although my father, the first of many in my life, was one of the few not chosen by myself and also the first to cause me to commit the sin of hatred. As a child I grew to regard him with a great malevolence and in my thoughts he remains so to this day. May he rot in hell!

Let me begin with him then. A year after his departure my father returned from the siege of Toron in Galilee, which the crusader army abandoned in panic at the first news that the Muslim army of al-Aziz approached from Egypt. Despite this fiasco the Pope’s promise of redemption carried a ‘no cowards’ clause and my father returned cleansed of all his past sins. With a clean slate and a missing right leg he claimed to have lost in the siege while demonstrating great valour, he took up the life of a wastrel. A carved wooden peg with a brass tip replaced his former leg and was further fitted with an embossed camel leather cup and straps decorated with small metal studs that bound it to a purple stump of scar tissue. Henceforth he was known as Brass Leg Peter the Forgiven Coward, a name he never saw for the cruel joke it was intended to be. He argued, too vehemently for credence, that due to his war wound and the courage he claimed had earned it, he was the exception, one of the few German crusaders to be forgiven of cowardice. I would later learn that he had lost his leg acting in a foolhardy manner while drunk when working on the construction of a siege engine.

Back home with the seasons back to normal he worked sufficiently at his carpenter’s trade only so that he might drink and fornicate and be seen a generous fellow among the village men. He gave my mother none of his earnings but expected food on the table, a fire in the hearth and to receive all the attendant duties of an obedient and submissive wife. He was also a consummate liar and his outrageous tales of derring-do, if not for one minute true, were well told and worth the listening for the laughter and entertainment they brought. Is it not so that a coward’s stories of heroism are always more valiant than those modestly related by a true hero?

Whereas the ale contained in my father’s krug foamed with merriment among his drunken fellow villagers, the very same substance turned to bile in his stomach by the time he arrived home from the inn. My mother and I would hear him cursing and shouting abuse, sometimes crying out in pain as his peg leg jarred against a rut or entered into a hole in the uneven surface of the dark road. In the summer we would escape to the woods where we would pass the time singing.

We would return when the moon was halfway high in the summer sky, knowing that he would have collapsed into a drunken stupor, and we always drew comfort from the sound of snoring as we approached from the pigsty beside the cottage. But in the bitter winter snow there was no place to hide lest we freeze to death. While I cowered under the bed, my mother accepted an inevitable beating, dodging most of the clumsy blows my father, far from nimble on a wooden leg, aimed at her.

I was eight years old or thereabouts, in the winter of 1204, when at the age of twenty-eight my mother died of pleurisy. She was a woman of great character and resilience who took much pride in the fact that she came from free peasant stock and was not subject to tenure to the count who, together with the monastery, owned most of the land hereabouts. She was an only child and her parents, mindful of their precious daughter, had unknowingly caused her to be betrothed to a young carpenter, Peter of Pulheim, who was said to have excellent prospects. Thinking that his trade and diligence would allow their only child to prosper in her married life they were beguiled by his greedy parents and her father forewent the munt, the compensation due to him from the groom’s parents, thinking that to have his daughter well matched and safe was sufficient reward. It was soon apparent that my father was indolent, a ne’er-do-well and a drunkard who spent his days fighting and carousing and who used what little money he earned to support a life of profligacy.

Those were, as they still are, hard times, but my mother was a woman proficient in most things concerning the peasant way of life. With the death of both her mother and father scarce three years after her marriage she inherited a small cottage and half an acre of land. The land she worked assiduously, growing corn and cabbages, onions and turnips for sale at the village market and a few vegetables for our own use. She also kept six hens and a rooster and three pigs of a good breed, a boar and two sows that grew fat on the spoilt cabbage leaves and turnip tops.

The black boar was a splendid animal and my mother took great pride in him as his seed was plentiful; both sows were good mothers and every teat was occupied with robust piglets that she would fatten and sell for a good price. She would always donate one piglet to the Church, which put her greatly into favour with the priest, Father Pietrus. If all she touched in husbandry was blessed with fecundity this was not true of herself, and like her own mother she too seemed barren in the first years of her marriage. This gave my father the right in the eyes of the Church to divorce her. But if he was a wastrel he was by no means stupid. She gave him a fire in the hearth, his food and a warm bed and even money for drink, and kept her thoughts to herself while demanding nothing in return. She was barren and therefore in the eyes of men, the law and the Church she was useless, an empty vessel. The shame of being known as a ‘cast off’ was a greater humiliation than the beatings and the scorn she received from him. But then, on the eve of my father’s departure for Jerusalem came a late sowing of his seed that received God’s blessing and I was born while he was away in the Holy Land.

As my father’s drinking and bellicose behaviour grew he added infidelity to his list of public misdemeanours, taking up with wanton women and whores. He showed no improvement upon his return and would curse my mother for her girl child and her inability to give him a son and heir. Although she was often beaten, the shame his womanising brought her in the eyes of other married women was by far the worse punishment and increasingly she sought the solace of the Church. She possessed a natural and pleasant voice and took some pride in being allowed to sing a part of the Gregorian chant on her own when the convent choir was invited to perform before visiting ecclesiastics, a privilege usually only accorded a nun who possessed a sweet voice.

Eventually my father’s dissolute life was beginning to attract the attention of the burgomaster. I well recall my mother’s shame and relief when he would spend the night in the lockup. We would have the bed to ourselves and I loved these times when, snuggled into her arms, she would tell me stories and teach me the words and tunes of the many folksongs she knew.

But my mother was more, much more to me than these lovely nights spent together in bed. She would keep me constantly at her side while she worked, teaching me the ways of the seasons, of seeds, caring and harvesting of plants and the duties of animal husbandry. I’d accompany her to the markets where I soon learned how to sell and how to bargain. We would spend hours together in the nearby woods where we would take her precious pigs to forage, until I knew all the wild herbs to be gathered for seasoning, the mushrooms that were good to eat and those to be left well alone. In the high summer we’d pick blackberries and wild strawberries and we’d laugh and sing until we’d quite forgotten the burdensome male in our lives.

She would often grow serious in the middle of laughter. It was as if she had suddenly experienced a strange prescience. Then she would bid me come to her and clutch me, as though desperate, to her bosom. ‘My precious, I have long since forgiven every blow and bruise I have received from the drunken brute simply because his nascent seed finally brought my womb to life and God saw fit to give you to me.’ Then kissing my golden curls she would add as if she knew that she would not be at my side much longer, ‘Remember, Sylvia, you were late in coming into my life and so you have all the wisdom I have gained as I grew older. Whatever I know, you will know more abundantly and already your voice is sweeter and truer than my own. You are blessed with intelligence, a sweet nature and a lively character that will serve you well in life if you do not allow yourself to become too impetuous of spirit or let vanity at your coming beauty drain the charity from your soul. Hold your head high, my lovely child, let no one bring you down. A strong woman must be like the willow tree – while she bends to the wild and wicked winds of life she will endure.’

At the time I was too young to fully understand her words, nor did I think of myself as either pretty or tempestuous, though in the latter characteristic she has been proved to be right. In my younger years God blessed me with a certain beauty that proved as troublesome as it was an advantage. I loved and revered my mother with all my heart and while every child must try to honour and respect their father, he took such scant notice of me that I scarcely knew him when he was sober and feared and avoided him when he was drunk. Should he as much as touch me when he was in a drunken state my mother, who was otherwise compliant to all his wishes, would fly at him with a knife in her hand, eyes blazing. ‘Touch my child, you bastard, and I will wait until you sleep and kill you!’ she’d snarl.

Alas, with her death, I was now alone with my father who, no longer able to vent his anger on my mother and now free to do as he wished with me, would rape me when drunk. In one fell swoop I had gone from a loved, cherished and innocent child to becoming the victim of a wantonly cruel father who regularly slaked his lust on me. He would never rape me in the cottage, but instead drag me into the pigsty where he’d point to the black boar and in a slurred voice, he’d whine, ‘Your mother loved that brute more than me!’ Then he’d push me face down over a broken wine barrel. ‘Let the bitch look now! See who has the last laugh!’ He’d lift my shift and with his peg leg stuck out at an angle, its brass point buried in pig shit, he would take me, meanwhile grunting and snorting like the three pigs jostling alongside.

When it was over he’d grab me by the hair and jerk me to my feet, turning my head so that I looked directly into his broken face. A sour smell issued from a mouth possessed of yellow rotting teeth and blackened stumps. ‘Sing! Sing for your papa,’ he’d growl, releasing his hand. Fighting back my tears, I would sing a folksong my mother had taught me. When it was over he’d place his huge hand upon my head. ‘Remember, it is I who have been forgiven past sins and will go on another crusade before I die to redeem myself for those I have since committed. It is you who are now the sinner condemned to hellfire.’ Then tucking away his vileness, he’d add in what he thought an amusing tone, ‘Never you mind, when you are older you too can be a pilgrim to the Holy Land, just like your brave papa who suffered so terribly in the name of the true Cross.’ Pausing to cackle at such an amusing notion, he’d exclaim, ‘Then, abracadabra, all your sins will be forgiven!’ With his tunic and pouch adjusted and his peg leg upright he’d reach into his pocket to produce a lump of honeycomb wrapped in a twist of cloth. ‘To sweeten you for the next time, liebling.’

There are few secrets in a small village and those who knew themselves my betters soon gave me the disparaging name Sylvia Honeyeater. Why I have to this day retained it I simply cannot say. I have no cause to remember those days with fondness and have been given many more flattering names in life. Perhaps we come to think of ourselves in a certain way and by removing a childhood name, no matter how disparaging, we lose some small part of ourselves. Today most folk think ‘Honeyeater’ such a pleasantly amusing appendage that it must have come about because of my sunny disposition. I have long since learned that the hurt that we acquire in life can be disguised behind a smiling face.

I missed and mourned for my sainted mother with a terrible ache, and prayed every night to God that while I knew myself to be a sinner condemned to roast in hell, He would protect her in heaven from knowing what was happening to me. Knowing myself condemned, I grew silent and withdrawn and showed my face in the village as little as possible, only attending religious feast days or venturing in when I had something I might sell in the market. As my mother had taught me I attended Church on Sunday. I would hide in the graveyard until the last of the worshippers had entered the building before creeping silently into a back pew, seating myself convenient to the door so that the moment the service was completed I might escape the curious and accusing eyes of the pious parishioners. While in Church I remained mute, concentrating on the sounds of the Gloria, refining in my head the purity of the notes flattened and corrupted by the tuneless voices of many of the nuns. Later in the woods I would spend hours alone practising and bringing to life the various hymns.

Because of my silence and unobtrusive manner I became an acute observer of people and I also began to understand the lives of the birds and the small forest creatures. I would spend as much of my summer days as I could in the woods that covered the slopes of the surrounding hills. As I had done with my mother, I gathered herbs, wild strawberries, blackberries and field mushrooms and dug for roots and lily bulbs to feed the pigs. Here I would sing all day while fossicking, and spend hours alone practising the hymns I had memorised while in Church. I could recite the mass word for word, even though it was in Latin and beyond my comprehension, and would often remember an entire sermon.

Singing brought me closer to the memory of my mother, who had so often praised my voice. ‘God,’ she would also say, ‘has lifted it from the soul of an angel who no longer sings in the heavenly choir and placed it as a precious instrument into your infant throat.’ After her death I sang at first only to myself and later sometimes to the village children who would venture into the woods to play, and so I gave it no worth other than that it comforted me and brought me within her imagined presence. Despite the vicissitudes seemingly overwhelming me, my sainted mother had left me with a strong sense of my own worth. My father’s vile and frightening actions condemning me to hellfire I locked away in a chamber within my heart. If I was denied the power to prevent him from harming me, then I told myself that within me remained someone uncorrupted and worthy of my mother’s precious memory.

I was seldom miserable for the company of friends my own age. With my mother as my sole company I had not previously cultivated any friendships with other children and so knew nothing of child’s play. To amuse myself I would have imaginary conversations out loud with various people I had observed or overheard in the village market. I would sit on the low wall of the pigsty and pretend the black boar was the village priest or the mayor or one or another of the more self-important town dignitaries, mimicking their voices as I conducted a conversation with them. I would use the sows to talk with the village women who loved to gossip and to condemn everyone or everything that didn’t fit in with their own narrow views on piety and life. I loved especially to imitate one fat, large-breasted woman, Frau Anna, known in the village as the Gossip Queen. She was self-important, pompous and possessed a loud and vociferous voice that offered an opinion on everything, but seldom had a kind word to say about anyone. Generally speaking, if I may say so, she was a thoroughly nasty piece of work. In the process of this lonely children’s game and unbeknownst to myself, I was becoming a very good mimic.

As a special treat to myself and after admonishing the black boar to be on his best behaviour I would turn him into the abbot at the nearby Monastery of St Thomas. The abbot, preaching as he sometimes did in the village church, would always delight me. While the village priest, Father Pietrus, intoned his message in a dogged and sonorous litany as if disinterested in the hallowed words of our Saviour and seeming anxious for his sermon to be over and done with, the abbot’s were filled with the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament. At its crescendo he’d often draw a deep breath until he’d become scarlet-faced, when he’d commence to hiss as if adding vehemence to a word yet to be formed and which finally emerged in an expostulation of spittle and sound. These truncated and strangled words that hissed like a goose and fought for release before exploding from his mouth I would greatly enjoy imitating, holding my breath, then making them stop dead with a hiss, then leaping them forth at the command of my nimble tongue.

This gift for mimicry, though of course at the time I wasn’t conscious that it was any more than the pastime of a lonely child, began at the age of seven or thereabouts when I began to imitate the calls and the songs of all the birds in the woods. The persistent call of the male cuckoo, the woodlark, redpoll, robin, hawfinch, flycatcher, the shy wood nuthatch, thrush and wren, the harsh caw of the crow, the chattering of a magpie and the assiduous cookerooing of the wood pigeon and the turtle-dove, even the woodpecker and many more were all grist for my mellifluous tongue. I was careful with the call of a raven or a jackdaw as they brought on evil omens. I learned to distinguish the mating calls of all the cock birds and soon enough I could draw them as well as the hens to my presence at will, until the trees above me trilled with the birdsong of courtship.

Then one indifferent autumn day when the sun seemed to be spending most of its time behind threatening storm clouds all this changed for me. I stood in my usual place in the market, my eyes downcast, hands folded at my waist, silently taking in the chatter around me when the Gossip Queen, Frau Anna, waddled up to me. She was one of three market women who seemed always to be together: the other two I had nicknamed Frau Frogface and Frau Gooseneck. The first because her head seemed broader than it was high as if it had been placed in a clamp top and chin and squeezed causing her eyes to bulge and lips to protrude. The second for her small rounded head, sharp nose, beady eyes and long neck that constantly moved from side to side as if she was trying to locate a bad smell. Frau Anna was too well-known as the Gossip Queen to be renamed. Now she stood in front of me, her breasts heaving, her heavy leather-booted legs apart. She looked down at my naked feet in apparent distaste, then her eyes travelled across my ragged gown and still further up, lingering purse-lipped on my dirty face, runny nose and matted blonde hair. Whereupon she sniffed, jerked her chin in disapproval and pointed a fat finger at a small heap of field mushrooms, dropping a coin into the dirt at my feet. I bent down and silently scooped up the mushrooms and placed them carefully into her basket, then reached to retrieve the coin. ‘Whore! Satan’s child!’ she hissed, whereupon I heard a sharp ‘phfft’ as she spat, a glob of spittle landing on the back of my neck.

I shall never know what possessed me; her insult was no worse than many others I had received at the hands of the self-righteous villagers. I would carry their cruel words home in silence where I’d crawl into a dark corner and weep for their reminder of the miserable sinner my wanton father had caused me to become. Barely conscious of my own voice or that the sun at that very moment had come out, bathing the corner in which I stood in bright sunlight, I commenced to sing the Gloria Patri, my voice rising above the noise of the marketplace. It is a short hymn, but well before I had come to the end a silence fell upon the market crowd who quickly gathered around me. Not knowing how to extract myself from the predicament in which I had so stupidly placed myself I followed this first hymn with a second longer one, the Gloria in Excelsis. Almost at the precise moment I’d completed the hymn, as suddenly as it had arrived the sun disappeared, followed shortly by a soft rumble of far-off thunder. To my consternation I saw that several of the more humble village folk had come to kneel at my dirty feet.

And so a different stage in my childhood had arrived. The incident at the market became known as the ‘Miracle of the Gloria’. Those who boasted that they had been present that morning told how the general hubbub of the market stalls had suddenly ceased as a blindingly bright light appeared to surround me. They watched and saw my eyes take on a fiery red glow as the demon within me looked outwards and an expression of abject terror appeared on my face, contorting it horribly, so that they knew I was possessed by Beelzebub. As they drew back in fear, the glorious light began to enter my mouth and the demon’s transmuted eyes immediately began to fade and mine return to a deep sublime blue. Whereupon my face softened to a beatific smile, as if I had just received a divine kiss from the Virgin Mary. At that precise moment my mouth opened and I commenced to sing the Gloria Patri in the voice of an angel, followed by the Gloria in Excelsis, causing many of those present to fall to their knees in prayer. As I came to the end of this second hymn of praise a great clap of thunder caused the earth to tremble around me.

From such small and unpropitious beginnings miracles are made. From that day on folk stopped disparaging me and bought my produce with a smile, placing their payment politely within my palm. The name Sylvia Honeyeater was no longer used and I was now known as Sylvia of the Gloria. The village folk would beg me to sing to them and I would do so, but only when all my produce had been sold. Nor would I again sing a hymn in a public place but only folksongs. In my usual pew at the back of the church on Sunday I reverted to my accustomed silence. I was now eleven years old or thereabouts and knew my mind, and while the village women begged me to sing in the church grounds after mass so that the priest, Father Pietrus, might hear my voice, I steadfastly refused. Despite my redemption in the inflamed imagination of the Christ-zealot villagers, I still knew myself to be a sinner unworthy of singing in or even near God’s house.

My newfound public voice brought a reflected glory to Brass Leg Peter the Forgiven Coward, who now acted as if I was the result of his careful nurture, happily accepting the credit for my transformation into a songbird. He commanded me to appear at the inn to sing to his circle of drunken comrades. He would bask in their congratulations and when my singing brought tears to their eyes he would boast that my voice came from him. That he had once sung like a lark until the infidels had captured him. They’d poured lye down his throat when they’d caught him on his knees in his evil-smelling, rat-infested prison cell praising the Almighty in glorious song. This brought the usual derisive laughter from those who had known him as a young man. They claimed he had only ever been part of a drunken singsong and had never been heard to sing in praise to the Almighty. But others who knew him less well were quick to pat him on the back and refill his tankard. Nor was the innkeeper lacking in generosity; my singing attracted new customers and so he too saw to it that my father’s tankard was always brimming with good cheer.

But idle tongues cannot easily be silenced and the news of the divine occurrence did not take long to reach Father Pietrus. The Miracle of the Gloria by this stage had increased even further in its lurid and improbable detail and it was now maintained that prior to the ‘miracle’ I had been a mute.

I have subsequently spent most of my life in the observation of people and know how they hunger for sacred manifestations, holy signs and wonders that they could perceive to be miraculous. Nor, at the time, was I willing to deny them. My newfound status was a great deal better than the one I had previously possessed and while I sometimes longed for my former privacy I confess I enjoyed the attention. Never having known anything but disparagement, the respect people now afforded me gave me my first small taste of power. My voice was the only thing I had ever possessed that was mine alone to control and I would often quietly refuse a request to sing. Refusal was a new experience for me. I had never possessed anything to withhold from anyone – even my body, that most sacred of female rights to refuse, had been taken without my consent. Curiously, refusal seemed only to enhance my status in the village and I soon learned that to give sparingly of my voice made it more valuable to those who hungered to hear me sing.

As I grew older it was a lesson I was to employ in other aspects of my life. As a woman I was to learn that the promise of something to come that must by degrees be earned is far more valuable to a man than a hasty, generous and wanton fulfilment. Despite this small sense of independence, I had some doubt that I possessed the courage to refuse the command of the village priest to sing, even though I thought myself a blasphemer should I be made to sing anywhere near the house of God.

I was to be escorted into the presence of Father Pietrus by Frau Anna and her two companions. The Gossip Queen had very conveniently forgotten the spittle and abuse she’d hurled at me. Now she boasted that she’d been the main presence at the moment Christ’s spiritual light in the form of the Holy Ghost had entered to wrestle with and cast out the evil demon that had taken possession of me.

Ever since the ‘miracle’ she’d claimed certain privileges at my expense, the major one seeming to be the right to attach her presence to me whenever it was to her advantage. I have no doubt it was she who led the prattling contingent of old wives to the village priest to inform him of the miraculous event that had turned me from a deaf mute into a celestial singer.

I had been cleaning the pigsty, singing to myself, so that by the time I heard the three village women approaching it was too late to hide. Frau Anna was at the forefront followed by Frogface and Gooseneck, both carrying baskets. She came to a halt beside the pigsty. The priest wishes to see you, Sylvia,’ she announced in a peremptory manner, then including the other women with a sideways nod of her head, added, ‘but we have agreed thou art not in a fit state to see him.’ I immediately thought she meant that as a sinner I was not fit to be in his holy presence. ‘You will wash in the stream and then put on fresh linen,’ she commanded.

I glanced shamefaced at my ragged gown. ‘Frau Anna, I have only what I am wearing.’

‘I know, child,’ she said impatiently. ‘We have brought a gown for you and shoes and a cap. They are not new but clean and well patched and the shoes are stout enough. Now hurry, we cannot keep the good father waiting.’

The stream, when I had earlier that morning gone to fetch water, had been covered in a thin layer of late-autumn ice. Though it was by now well past noon and the ice would have melted in the pale sunlight I knew it yet to be freezing. ‘We will wash and prepare you,’ Frau Anna announced firmly, then pointed to a basket one of the women carried. ‘We have brought soap and a scrubber and some old linen to dry you.’

I was told to disrobe beside the stream where they sniffed in disgust at the ragged garment that fell to my feet to leave me standing naked, hugging myself and shivering in their presence. ‘Look, she is still a child,’ Frogface pronounced, pointing at my hairless crotch.

‘Only in appearance,’ Gooseneck said sardonically. This set both of them cackling.

‘Shame on you!’ Frau Anna chided. ‘God has returned the child’s virginity.’ She turned to me. ‘Has your bleeding come yet?’

‘There, you see! She has been restored to a blameless innocent. Oh my God!’ she suddenly exclaimed, visibly trembling, then grabbing me by my right shoulder and spinning me around so the other two might look at my back. ‘See the fish!’ she shouted out excitedly. ‘It is the sign of Jesus the Saviour! The Son of God! The Fisher of Men!’ Then in a tone of awe she suddenly whispered, ‘Oh my God! He has marked her for Himself!’

I had never seen the small birthmark situated between my shoulderblades and so had forgotten about it. I now remembered my mother saying it was in the perfect shape of a fish. She had joked that it was God’s way of seeing to it that I would never drown. Now Frau Anna saw it for a part of the Miracle of the Gloria. I remained silent, too preoccupied with the cold, and besides, I saw no reason to tell her that I had been born with the mark upon my skin.

‘There! I told you so!’ Frau Anna, somewhat recovered from her initial shock, declared triumphantly. ‘This is yet another confirmation that the Lord Jesus has personally blessed the child.’ Not wishing to miss an opportunity to scold them she turned scornfully to her two companions. ‘And you two see fit to mock God’s special child! Shame on you both. I hope you will declare this sinful behaviour before next you accept the bread and the wine of redemption?’

Frau Anna’s admonishment silenced them and somewhat resentfully they set about me with soap and wet rags, splashing me with jugs of freezing water until I gasped and turned blue from the cold, my teeth chattered furiously and I was unable to cease from trembling. They soaped my hair and then made me immerse my head in the freezing stream, Frau Anna’s huge hand at the back of my neck forced my head below the water while one of the women rinsed my hair. At last, fussing and clucking, they dried me in the pale sunlight and dressed me in a woollen gown that fitted well enough and was clean and carefully patched. The wimple was almost new and wrapped snugly about my head, and though the shoes were too big and the wooden soles well worn they remained on my feet with only a little difficulty and were tolerably comfortable. One of the women produced a cloak to wrap around my shoulders.

And so we set off for the meeting with Father Pietrus, the three women excited by the further addition of a sacred fish, which added to my growing mystique. As we approached the village church Frau Anna turned to me. ‘I will do the talking, Sylvia. You will be silent until the priest asks you to sing the Gloria. Say nothing, you hear? Nothing! Do you understand, child?’

I nodded, happy to comply with her request. I was anxious and frightened for I had never spoken to a priest and couldn’t imagine ever doing so. Father Pietrus was busy and caused us to wait for some time before we were ushered into a draughty vestry by the old hausfrau who swept the church interior and cooked and cleaned for him. She bade us all to be seated in a pew too small to contain three fat women and myself, so I found myself squashed between the enormous buttocks of Frogface and Gooseneck.