Bryce Courtenay - Sylvia

P ENGUIN B OOKS

SYLVIA

Bryce Courtenay is the bestselling author of The Power of One, Tandia, April Fools Day, The Potato Factory, Tommo & Hawk, Jessica, Solomons Song, A Recipe for Dreaming, The Family Frying Pan, The Night Country, Smoky Joes 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.

Bryce Courtenay lives in the Southern Highlands, New South Wales.

Further information about the

author can be found at

brycecourtenay.com and

penguin.com.au/brycecourtenay

B OOKS BY B RYCE C OURTENAY

The Power of One

Tandia

April Fools Day

A Recipe for Dreaming

The Family Frying Pan

The Night Country

Jessica

Smoky Joes Cafe

Four Fires

Matthew Flinders Cat

Brother Fish

Whitethorn

Sylvia

The Persimmon Tree

T HE A USTRALIAN T RILOGY

The Potato Factory

Tommo & Hawk

Solomons Song

Also available in one volume, as The Australian Trilogy

Bryce Courtenay

SYLVIA

P ENGUIN B OOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2006

This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2008

Copyright Bryce Courtenay 2006

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

ISBN: 978-0-14-194219-3

Contents

For Christine Gee,

my beloved partner

For Fiona McIntosh,

who gave me the concept for this book

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 Gods 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 laymans 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 Childrens Crusade was initially inspired.