Count Belisarius (17 page)

Soon a full company of Guards came to escort my mistress back in safety to the Palace, where she told Theodora something of what had happened, but not all: she discreetly made no mention of the question as to the illegitimate son. Nevertheless, Theodora looked grave. She asked for a description of the man, but his burliness and a black beard and a slight provincial accent were his only distinguishable features.

‘He is none of the Emperor's usual agents,' she said. ‘Either he is someone with a secret commission, unknown to me, or else he is an impostor. I will find out soon enough.'

But she could not trace him, though she examined the monks and obtained from them a description of him. One monk suggested that his accent was Cilician, but my mistress did not agree with him on this point.

My mistress had no further encounter with this supposed superintendent of police, but became aware that her movements were constantly watched. Her house in Blachernae, before she gave it up, was broken into and her box of private papers rifled; fortunately none of these was in the least compromising, either morally or politically. My mistress had not, I admit, been living a particularly chaste life of late; and having been in conflict with the law in the matter of some property of her husband's, she had been obliged to buy justice in a lower court from an official of the Green faction who controlled it. Otherwise, her conscience was clear, and no record of any of her lapses existed in writing. She was a woman who never wrote or preserved love-letters, never asked or gave receipts for money where the transaction was questionable. But she soon realized that she must behave
with even greater circumspection than usual if she would avoid being harmed by secret enemies who were apparently trying to strike through her at Theodora.

My mistress felt the full force of their assault one Holy Day. After attending Theodora's morning audience she followed close behind her in the usual Royal procession to the Cathedral Church of St Sophia. (This was the old church, which was a splendid building, though not to be compared with the present church on the same site, which is acknowledged to be the finest sacred edifice in the whole world.) She was dressed in her best flowered silks, with all the scarlet and purple additions to which her rank as the Illustrious Antonina now entitled her, and wore her heaviest and most exquisite jewellery – part of it a present from Theodora, who was, in a literal sense, ‘as generous as her mouth was wide'. Naturally she also wore an exquisitely curled and coiled auburn wig, with a number of ringlets bobbing pleasantly on her neck, to supplement her own good but not profuse auburn hair. My mistress always enjoyed these processions – unless of course it was raining; even those to distant churches on the name-days of the saint to which they are dedicated. For on such occasions the Superintendent of City Streets has the roadways and pavements swept; and the whole population wears festival clothes and appears with clean faces and hands and feet and casts itself down in adoration as the Emperor and Empress pass; and embroidered cloths hang from the windows, and there are ingenious decorations everywhere of myrtle, ivy, rosemary, box, and meadow-flowers, forming letters that couple the Imperial honour with that of the Saint. Gay marching hymns are chanted by the monks in the procession, and throughout the City is heard a rhythmic drum of mallets on sounding-boards, summoning the faithful to prayer; each church has its different characteristic rhythm.

On this occasion my mistress was in her customary good humour as she reached St Sophia's. Passing through the line of penitents in the vestibule, who are cut off from the Eucharist and may approach no nearer, she climbed the stairs and sat down next to the Lady Chrysomallo, in the front row of the gallery-seats, which were reserved for women. She leaned over the carved sill and began signalling merrily to her male friends in the nave below; for a great deal of intimate information can be exchanged thus with the aid of hand and kerchief. At St Sophia's, as at most fashionable churches, the sacred nature of
the service is not taken over-seriously: clothes and gossip provide the greatest interest in the gallery, and a buzz of political or religious argument from the nave invariably drowns the reading of the Scriptures. However, the singing of the eunuch choirmen is usually listened to with some respect, and nearly everyone joins in the chanting of the General Confession and other prayers; and if the sermon is being preached by an energetic preacher it is often greeted with appreciative clapping and laughter or with earnest hissing. The Eucharist is dispensed at the conclusion, and then the blessing spoken, and out we go again. ‘Against such civilized and sociable Christian functions it would be foolish to bear any grudge,' my mistress used to say – ‘they are merely a quiet variety of the Theatre performances.'

The preacher on that day was a bishop whom we had not heard before, but who was known to be greatly admired as a theologian by Justinian. He held some Italian see or other, and was good-looking in rather a foppish way. He took for his text the verses in the first epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, which lay down that men should wear their hair short and not pray with their heads covered; but that women should wear their hair long and not pray with their heads uncovered. He dwelt most gravely on the verse: ‘For if a woman be not covered, let her also be shorn'; which was to say that if a woman attended service in a church without a head-covering she should be punished by having her hair clipped close to her head. The audience settled down to an entertaining homily, though not without nervous looks on many faces, male and female. For there was many a woman there whose head-covering consisted of no more than a spray of jewels, and many a man whose hair was cut in the Hunnish mode then fashionable – clipping the front part off as far back as the temples and leaving the back hair to grow down the shoulders. What if the Emperor or Empress should be persuaded by this bishop to take severe steps against the law-breakers? Nevertheless, it was not these people whom the Bishop intended to denounce: for the sermon, most illogically, was directed against women who wore wigs. As though a wig were not a head-covering of the most complicated and effective sort!

He started gently in a musical voice with general thoughts on the subject of women's hair, appreciatively quoting the pagan poets of both languages – to make it quite clear to us that he was a man of polite education, not an ignorant, narrow-minded, monastery-bred
preacher. He cited Ovid as having said this, and Meleager that, in praise of a fine head of hair. Nor were these praises anti-scriptural, he pointed out: for the Apostle Paul himself, in the very passage from which the text was derived, had written: ‘If a woman have long hair it is a glory to her.' And in praising length the Apostle no doubt meant to praise strength and glossiness, for no hair that is not strong or glossy can grow to commendable length.
‘But
,' he said, putting tremendous emphasis on the word,
‘But
, during any religious ceremony and on any but the most intimate private occasions, this long, strong glossy, beautiful hair must be decently covered,
out of respect for the angels
.'

For the Christian angels – he proceeded to explain, as if he had had a long and troublesome acquaintance with them – are all eunuchs; they look down from Heaven on human worshippers, and from that vertical angle see little but heads and shoulders. ‘Any honest person who has had any experience of eunuchs,' he went on – with a sly glance at the choir and at the long aisle reserved for eunuchs of the Civil Service and for personal eunuchs attached to prominent courtiers, such as myself – ‘Any such honest person will support me when I assert that the lack of the customary male organs of generation does not, as might be supposed, free the heart from carnal affections. Not by any means! I have indeed seldom known a eunuch who could confess truly to having no tender feelings for women's hands and eyes and feet and hair – oh, but especially for their hair! I know many a rich and learned eunuch who spends his leisure time, wantonly and shamefully, in the slow combing of the hair of some frivolous woman of his household! You may laugh, my sisters, but you know it is so, and it is a great sin that you are committing if you pander thus to the ineffectual lusts of the castrated. Angels are no less subject to temptation than eunuchs: the Arch-Fiend himself was an angel who fell from Grace – was it perhaps partly from delight in the hair of some daughter of Earth? Out of respect therefore for these blessed but beauty-loving angels, who must not be distracted from their religious duty of perpetual hosannas and hallelujahs, it is the first duty of all Christian women with fine hair to keep it securely covered. It is surely evil enough to wean human worshippers from their devotions by an ill-timed display of the crowning glory of women, without seeking to drag angels down to earth and thus add to the race of demons – already numerous enough, God knows!'

But the pagan poets, even – he quoted Martial, Propertius, and Juvenal – had written with the utmost horror of women who wore hair that was not their own. Wigs were thus proved to be an offence not only against the Laws of the Church, but against secular canons of beauty and good taste. ‘As for the Orthodox view of the Holy Fathers, it could not be clearer, and may be summarized as follows. Male wigs are in general designed to cover baldness: they are therefore in the nature of a skull-cap and constitute a covering, and are therefore anathema. Women's wigs, however (for a bald woman is a rarity), are designed to add to the hair already in existence on their heads, to heighten and improve its effect: they therefore do not constitute a covering, and are anathema. The righteous thunders of the Church, Council after Council, have always been directed at wigs of both sexes: both the cowardly male wig and the immodest female wig. Tertullian has said – but what has Tertullian not said against these stitched and coiled monstrosities of wigs? He has said, amongst other things, that all personal disguise is adultery before God. All wigs, paint, powder, masks, false bosoms are disguises and inventions of the devil.

‘Moreover, my erring sisters,' the Bishop proceeded, suddenly pointing very rudely at Chrysomallo and my mistress, whose wigs, after Theodora's, were the two most elegant monstrosities in all St Sophia's that day, ‘Tertullian makes a powerful appeal to your common sense as well as to your religious scruples. He writes: “If you will not fling away your impious false hair, as hateful to Heaven, cannot I make it hateful to yourselves as women of worldly discernment, by reminding you that those lascivious, bought ringlets of yours may have had a detestable origin? They may well have been cut from the corpse of some woman dead of the plague, and still retain the seeds of plague alive in them; or, worse, they may have adorned the head of a blasphemer irretrievably damned by Heaven and carry in them God's heavy curse, ineluctable.”

‘What does wise St Ambrose say of wigs? “Do not talk to me of curled wigs: they are the pimps of passion, not the instructors of virtue.” What does downright St Cyprian say? “Give heed to me, O ye women. Adultery is a grievous sin; but she who wears false hair is guilty of a greater.” What does the famous St Jerome say? He tells an instructive story, on the truth of which he stakes his reputation as a Christian teacher – yes, if this story is a fabrication, the great name of
Jerome must be erased from the diptychs as though he were a heretic or forger! He tells of a respectable matron of his acquaintance, by name Praetexta, who had the misfortune to be married to a pagan. Now it is well known that a wife should obey her husband in all things, and indeed this very text in Corinthians makes it plain, when it says “the head of every man is the Son, but the head of the woman is the man”. But there is a reservation implicit in this first phrase, namely that if the husband be no Christian, the Son, not he, becomes her Head in spiritual matters; as, with widows, the Son becomes their sole Head, unless they marry again in discourtesy to the Son.

‘This husband, therefore, whose name was Hymetius, said one day to Praetexta: “Our orphan niece, Eustochia, whom we have tenderly nurtured in our home, is not an uncomely girl. She might easily find a rich husband, and thus relieve us of the expense of a dowry, but for one fault in her looks – her thin and ragged hair. Do you therefore, my good wife, repair this defect of nature, by going secretly to the hairdresser's and ordering a fine curly toupee for her.” This Praetexta did, hoping the expenditure of five gold pieces to save a thousand or more, and forgot entirely both her duty to God and her respect for the angels. That very night, as she lay beside her husband, dwelling with satisfaction upon Eustochia's remarkable transformation, to that sinful bedside descended a tall angel, piping in wrathful falsetto. “Praetexta,” cried this angel, “you have obeyed your husband, an unbeliever, rather than your crucified Lord. You have decked the hair of a virgin with superfluous ringlets and given her the appearance of a harlot. For this do I now wither up your hands, and command them to recognize the enormity of your crime by the measure of their suffering. Only five months more shall you live, and then Hell shall be your portion; and if you are bold enough to touch the head of Eustochia again, your husband and children shall die even before you do.” O my erring sisters, what a sin that was, and how fully deserved that anguish of corporal punishment!'

It was only natural that my mistress Antonina should giggle a little at this story. It was no great interest of hers that the name of this St Jerome should remain on the diptychs; and he certainly deserved to have it removed, she considered, for so outrageous a story. If Prae – texta's hands had really been withered, how was there any possibility of her using them again on her niece's head? She remarked on this to the Lady Chrysomallo, who giggled too and, signalling to her
husband in the nave below, flapped her hands about dramatically, as if they, too, were withered. Such levity angered the Bishop. He began to rail at my mistress and the Lady Chrysomallo, mentioning them by name, though he was a stranger in the City: which made it clear enough to us that the instigation to preach against them had come from some enemy of theirs at Court. He threatened them with exclusion from the Eucharist, and branded my mistress as a shameless, ill-living widow who painted her face and lived as merrily as the Great Whore of Babylon instead of wearing sad raiment and weeping for her sins and ministering to the poor, as widows should. He said that my mistress brought dishonour upon the Pious and Superbly Beautiful Sovereign who employed her, and upon the whole city of Constantinople; and that if a sudden pestilence broke out, spreading from my mistress's abominable wig and from the filthy red ringlets pendant therefrom, the faithful in the City would know whom to thank.