She was sitting outside on the steps of the church, considering the fickleness of fortune and longing for some ripe, juicy grapes, when a gilded carriage, drawn by a single white mule caparisoned in crimson, stopped at the bottom of the steps. The door was opened by one of the six statuesque, fashionably Nubian slaves who accompanied the carriage on foot, dressed in immaculate white tunics, and a great lady of the city stepped out. The kind of lady who keeps numberless ‘whisperers’ in her grand townhouse, which is to say those little naked slaveboys kept by rich ladies for amusement, to bring them almonds and candied fruits and whisper compliments and sweet nothings in their pearl-ringed ears.
This lady wore a magnificent cloak of midnight-blue silk, stiffly brocaded with pearls and golden thread, illustrating the miraculous life and martyr’s death of one of her favourite saints, Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna. He was shown in three separate embroidered panels, bound to a stake, slain with a sword, and then finally burned. It was a remarkable piece of work. Furthermore this great lady had at home many more such embroidered cloaks, each one carrying illustrations of a different favourite saint and, ideally, martyr. On the whole she preferred her saints to be martyrs as well, because the embroidered illustrations of their deaths in pearls and gold were so much more elaborate and striking. Her favourite of all, perhaps, was her cloak in bright spring green, showing the dramatic martyrdom of dear St Ignatius of Antioch, thrown to the lions in the Colosseum in the reign of Emperor Trajan. She always looked forward to his feast-day, 17 October, when the cloak could correctly be worn without spiritual pride or impropriety. Furthermore, on her fingers she wore an assortment of massive gold rings, set with precious stones or decorated with cloisonne enamel. Within one of them, inside a tiny locket, was curled a single lock of John the Baptist’s flaxen hair.
She was a very great and holy lady indeed.
No sooner had she begun to ascend the steps of the church which she herself had so generously endowed, the hem of her cloak raised up from the dusty ground by two of her slaves, when a street-girl stepped in front of her, as bold as you please.
The great lady arched her delicate pencilled eyebrows.
Athenais held her hand out, and drew breath to speak, but got no further.
The great lady looked her up and down in one swift movement, and then turned haughtily away.
Athenais stepped in front of her again and looked her straight in the eye.
The great lady was outraged. ‘Out of my way, you hussy! And how you dare you look at me so!’
Athenais smiled softly. ‘The day will come soon when you will not dare to look at me.’
The great lady turned to one of her attendants, astonished. ‘Why, the girl’s mad! Or drunk, more probably. Move her out of my way.’
‘Remember me,’ said Athenais, speaking softly still, even as one of the handsome attendants took her firmly by her arm and pulled her aside. ‘Look me in the face, and remember me.’
The great lady, despite herself, looked at the impertinent jade, who was pretty in a sluttish, plebeian sort of way, and found to her intense irritation that, even during the most moving and rapturous moments of the ensuing high mass in the Church of St Stephanos, she was still able to picture the girl’s face quite clearly.
It was growing dark when Athenais came back to the great square of the Imperial Palace, and saw the lamps burning in the tall windows, and felt the air growing cool. She wrapped her arms round herself, sat in the corner of an alley and brooded. She could not go begging at that grandiose door. Not yet. Not yet, though this city was a wood full of wolves.
It was after the great cathedral bells had tolled midnight, and few were left in the streets but whores and thieves and vigiles, the watchmen of the city, who crouched round their braziers, wrapped in their cloaks, with their long, sharpened staves, themselves as wretched and often as drunk as the scoundrels in the streets they were policing. It was not a good place for a solitary girl.
Finally she asked one of the watchmen about a house called the Metanoia. After an obscene invitation to her, to which she did not deign to reply, he grudgingly pointed the way. She walked for a few minutes and came to the door of a low building beside a chapel in a side street. She knocked timidly on the wooden door. After some time a panel was drawn back and a woman’s face appeared.
She didn’t need to say a word.
Almost immediately the door was opened and she stepped inside.
She spent seven days there. Among the prostitutes of the House of Metanoia, which is to say Repentance, cared for wordlessly and with infinite kindness by the nuns of that place, themselves often high-born daughters of noblemen who would not spare the dowry to find their daughters a husband.
She ate and slept and chattered among those prostitutes, young and old, haggard, withdrawn or laughing still, despite the foulness and the outrageous injustice of their short lives hitherto. Pocked with sores, scarred with drunken knife-cuts, some still bruised from the last client they had had before they finally revolted and fled to this place for sanctuary. She told a simple story of herself. The other women also told their stories soon enough, unburdening themselves in stumbling sentences, and her eyes grew round with horror.
She learned a lot in those seven days.
It was in the twilight of the following Sunday when she presented herself at the great doors of the Imperial Palace again. A beautiful, unknown girl in a plain white stola.
How many ranks of household servants, eunuchs and chamberlains she had to pass through, saying to each one, ‘The emperor himself is expecting me’; how much scorn, incredulous laughter, impatience, indifference. It was many hours before she was admitted into a vestibule and told to wait.
Very soon, a man stepped into the room, closed the door behind him and looked across at her. A young man, eager, kindly, with much to learn still.
He was tongue-tied, so she went to him.
‘You knew I would return,’ she said with mock resentfulness. ‘What choice did I have?’
‘I,’ he said, ‘I…’ Hesitantly he took her hand in his. ‘No, but I hoped you would.’
The elderly, arthritic but still zealous Bishop Atticus was instructed to teach the young pagan girl the rudiments of Christianity in time for her baptism and subsequent marriage. The bishop was shocked to find that the girl – clever, articulate, and as pretty as one of those she-demons who so tormented St Anthony in the Theban desert – already knew the rudiments of Christianity, and a lot more besides. He was shocked because it was evident that the girl, having previously heard and understood the Gospel preached with perfect clarity and doctrinal orthodoxy, had nevertheless, on consideration, rejected it as untrue. As if still blissfully unaware of her own wretched sinfulness, and her urgent need to be washed clean in the blood of the Lamb who was slain!
Atticus had been commanded not to pry too closely. So he ran through the essential doctrines of the True Church once more, with brief but ferocious digressions on the ghastly and damnable creeds of the Arians, the Monophysites, the Hieroconodulians and other hell-destined heretics, until he was satisfied that the girl, expressionless and without any obvious spiritual ardour, was able to recount them herself with reasonable fluency.
She was baptised in the private chapel of the palace, where she was given the new name of Eudoxia: rather more Christian a name than the distinctly pagan Athenais. One of the ladies-in-waiting was overheard to say after the baptism that it seemed a shame, as Athenais had been such a pretty name. At which the emperor’s grim-faced sister Pulcheria shot the foolish woman such a look as might wither a cedar of Lebanon.