BEFORE THE SCREAMING starts, the night silence of the convent is already alive with its own particular sounds.
In a downstairs cell, Suora Ysbeta’s lapdog, swaddled like a baby in satin cloth, is hunting in its dreams, muzzled grunts and growls marking the pleasure of each rabbit cornered. Ysbeta herself is also busy with the chase, her silver tray doubling as a mirror, her right hand poised as she closes a pair of tweezers over a stubborn white hair on her chin. She pulls sharply, the sting and the satisfaction of the release in the same short aah of breath.
Across the courtyard two young women, plump and soft-cheeked as children, lie together on a single pallet, entwined like kindling twigs, their faces so close they seem almost to be exchanging breaths, the one inhaling as the other lets go: in, out, in, out. There is a slight sweetness to the air—angelica, perhaps, or sweet mint—as if they have both eaten the same sugared cake or drunk from the same spiced wine cup. Whatever they have imbibed, it has left them both sleeping soundly, their contentment a low hum of pleasure in the room.
Suora Benedicta, meanwhile, can barely contain herself, there is so much music inside her head. Tonight it is a setting of the Gradual for the Feast of the Epiphany, the different voices like colored tapestry threads weaving in and over one another. Sometimes they move so fast she can barely chalk them down, this stream of white notes on her slate blackboard. There are nights when she doesn’t seem to sleep at all, or when the voices are so insistent she is sure she must be singing out loud with them. Still, no one admonishes her the next day, or wakes her if she slips into a sudden nap in the refectory. Her compositions bring honor and benefactors to the convent, and so her eccentricities are overlooked.
In contrast, young Suora Perseveranza is in thrall to the music of suffering. A single tallow candle spits shadows across her cell. Her shift is so thin she can feel the winter damp as she leans back against the stone wall. She pulls the cloth up over her calves and thighs, then more carefully across her stomach, letting out a series of fluttering moans as the material sticks and catches on the open wounds underneath. She stops, breathing fast once or twice to still herself, then tugs harder where she meets resistance, until the half-formed skin tears and lifts off with the cloth. The candlelight reveals a leather belt nipped around her waist, a series of short nails on the inside, a few so deeply embedded in the flesh beneath that all that can be seen are the crusted swollen wounds where leather and skin have fused together. Slowly, deliberately, she presses on one of the studs. Her hand jumps back involuntarily, a cry bursting out of her, but there is an exhilaration to the sound, a challenge to herself as her fingers go back again.
She keeps her gaze fixed on the wall ahead, where the guttering light picks out a carved wooden crucifix: Christ, young, alive, His muscles running through the grain as His body strains forward against the nails, His face etched with sorrow. She stares at Him, her own body trembling, tears wet on her cheeks, her eyes bright. Wood, iron, leather, flesh. Her world is contained in this moment. She is within His suffering; He is within hers. She is not alone. Pain has become pleasure. She presses the stud again and her breath comes out in a long satisfying growl, almost an animal sound, consumed and consuming.
In the next-door cell, Suora Umiliana’s fingers pause briefly over her chattering rosary beads. The sound of the young sister’s devotion is like the taste of honey in her mouth. When she was younger she too had sought God through open wounds, but now as novice mistress it is her duty to put the spiritual well-being of others before her own. She bows her head and returns to her beads.
IN HER CELL above the infirmary, Suora Zuana, Santa Caterina’s dispensary mistress, is busy with her own kind of prayer. She sits bent over Brunfels’s great book of herbs, her forehead creased in concentration. Next to her is a recently finished sketch of a geranium plant, the leaves of which have proved effective at stanching cuts and flesh wounds—one of the younger nuns has started passing clots of blood, and she is searching for a compound to stop a wound she cannot see.
Perseveranza’s moans echo along the upper cloister corridor. Last summer, when the heat brought the beginnings of infection to the wounds and those who sat next to the young nun in chapel complained about the smell, the abbess had sent her to the dispensary for treatment. Zuana had washed and dressed the angry lesions as best she could and given her ointment to reduce the swelling. There is nothing more she can do. While it is possible that Perseveranza might eventually poison herself with some deeper infection, she is healthy enough otherwise, and from what Zuana knows of the way the body works she doesn’t think this will happen. The world is full of stories of men and women who live with such mutilations for years, and while Perseveranza might talk fondly enough of death, it is clear that she gains too much joy from her suffering to want to end it prematurely.
Zuana herself doesn’t share this passion for self-mortification. Before she came to the convent she had lived for many years as the only child of a professor of medicine. His very reason for being alive had been to explore the power of nature to heal the body, and she cannot remember a moment in her life when she didn’t share his fervor. She would have made a fine doctor or teacher like him, had such a thing been possible. As it is, she was fortunate that after his death his name and his estate were good enough to buy her a cell in the convent of Santa Caterina, where so many noblewomen of Ferrara find space to pursue their own ways to live inside God’s protection.
Still, any convent, however well adjusted, trembles a little when it takes in one who really does not want to be there.
ZUANA LOOKS UP from her table. The sobbing coming from the recently arrived novice’s cell is now too loud to be ignored. What started as ordinary tears has grown into angry howls. It is Zuana’s job as dispensary mistress, should things become difficult, to settle any newcomer by means of a sleeping potion. She turns over the hourglass. The draft is already mixed and ready in the dispensary. The only question is how long she should wait.
It is a delicate business, judging the depth of a novice’s distress. A certain level of upset is only natural: once the feasting is over and the family has left, the great doors bolted behind them, even the most devout of young women can suffer a rush of panic when faced with the solitude and silence of the closed cell.
Those with relatives inside are the easiest to settle. Most of them have cut their teeth on convent cakes and biscuits, so pampered and fussed over through years of visiting that the cloister is already a second home. If—as it might—the day itself unleashes a flurry of exhausted tears, there is always an aunt, sister, or cousin on hand to cajole or comfort them.
For others, who might have harbored dreams of a more flesh-and-blood bridegroom or left a favorite brother or doting mother, the tears are as much a mourning for the past as fear of the future. The sisters in charge treat them gently as they clamber out of dresses and petticoats, shivering from nerves rather than cold, their naked arms raised high in the air in readiness for the shift. But all the care in the world cannot disguise the loss of freedom, and though some might later substitute silk for serge (such fashionable transgressions are ignored rather than allowed), that first night, girls with soft skin and no proclivity for penance can be driven mad by the itch and the scratch. These tears have an edge of self-pity to them, and it is better to cry them now, for they can become a slow poison if left to fester.
Eventually the storm will blow itself out and the convent return to sleep. The watch sister will patrol the corridors, keeping tally of the time until Matins, some two hours after midnight, at which point she will pass through the great cloister in the dark, knocking on each door in turn but missing that of the latest arrival. It is a custom in Santa Caterina to allow the newcomer to spend her first night undisturbed, so the next day will find her refreshed and better prepared to enter her new life.
Tonight, however, no one will do much sleeping.
In the bottom of the hourglass the hill of sand is almost complete, and the wailing has grown so violent that Zuana feels it in her stomach as well as her head—as if a wayward troop of devils has forced its way inside the girl’s cell and is even now winding her intestines on a spit. In their dormitory, the young boarders will be waking in terror. The hours between Compline and Matins mark the longest sleep of the night, and any disturbance now will make the convent bleary-eyed and foul-tempered tomorrow. In between the screams, Zuana registers a cracked voice rising up in tuneless song from the infirmary. Night fevers conjure up all manner of visions among the ill, not all of them holy, and it will not help to have the crazed and the sickly joining in the chorus.
Zuana leaves her cell swiftly, her feet knowing the way better than her eyes. As she moves down the stairs into the main cloister and enters the great courtyard, she is held for a second, as she often is, by its sheer beauty. From the moment she first stood here, sixteen years ago, the walls around threatening to crush her, it has offered a space for peace and dreams. By day the air is so still it seems as if time itself has stopped, while in the dark you can almost hear the rush of angels’ wings behind you. Not tonight, though. Tonight the stone well in the middle looms up like a gray ship in a sea of black, the sound of the girl’s sobbing a wild wind echoing around it. It reminds her of the story her father used to tell of the time he sailed to the East Indies to collect plant specimens and how they found a merchant boat abandoned in steamy waters, the only sign of life the screeching of a starving parrot left on board. Just imagine, carissima. If only we could have understood that bird’s language, what secrets might it have revealed?
Unlike him, Zuana has never seen the ocean, and the only siren voices she knows are those of soaring sopranos in chapel or wailing women in the night. Or the yelping of noisy dogs—like the one now yapping in Suora Ysbeta’s cell, a small matted ball of hair and bad smells with teeth sharp enough to bite through its night muzzle and join in the drama. Yes, it is time for the sleeping draft.
The air in the infirmary is thick with tallow-candle smoke and the rosemary fumigant that she keeps burning constantly to counteract the stench of illness. She passes the young choir sister crippled by her bleeding insides, her body curled in over itself, eyes tight shut in a way that speaks of prayer rather than sleep. In the remaining beds the other sisters are as old as they are ill, their lungs filled with winter damp, so they bubble and rasp as they breathe. Most of them are deaf to anything but the voices of angels, though not above competing as to whose choir is the sweetest.
“Oh, sweet Jesus! It is coming. Save us all.”
While Suora Clementia’s ears are still sharp enough to make out the pad of a cat’s paw, her mind is so clouded that she might read it as the footfall of the devil’s messenger or the first sign of the Second Coming.
“Hush.”
“Hear the screaming! Hear the screaming!” The old woman is bolt upright in the last bed, her arms flapping as if to beat off some invisible attack. “The graves are opening. We will all be consumed.”
Zuana catches her hands and pulls them down onto the sheets, holding them still while she waits for the nun to register her presence. In the Great Silence that runs from Compline until daybreak, the ill and the mad will be forgiven for breaking the rule but others risk grave penance for any squandered speech.
“Shhh.”
Across the courtyard another howl rises up, followed by a crash and a splintering of wood. Zuana pushes the old nun gently back down toward the bed, settling her as best she can. The tang of fresh urine lifts off the sheet. It can wait until morning. The servant sisters will be gentler if they have had some sleep.
Taking the night-light, she moves swiftly into the dispensary, which lies behind a door at the far end of the infirmary. On the wall in front of her, pots, vials, and bottles dance in rhythm to the flickering flame. She knows each and every one of them; this room is her home, more familiar to her even than her cell. She takes a glass vial from a drawer and, after a second’s hesitation, reaches for a bottle from the second shelf, uncorks it, and adds some further drops of syrup. Any novice who breaks furniture as well as silence will need a strong soporific.
Back in the main cloisters, Zuana notes a ribbon of light under the door of the abbess’s outer chamber. Madonna Chiara will be up and dressed, sitting at her carved walnut table, head erect, prayer book open under the silver crucifix, a cloak around her shoulders, no doubt, to keep out the night chill. She will not interfere—unless for some reason Zuana’s intervention fails. They have an understanding on such matters.
Zuana moves quickly down the corridor, stopping briefly outside Suora Magdalena’s door. She is the oldest nun in the convent, so old that there is no one left alive who knows her age. Her decrepitude should have had her in the infirmary long ago, but her will and her piety are so fused that she will accept no comfort but prayer. She talks to no one and never leaves her cell. Of all the souls inside Santa Caterina, God must surely be most eager for hers. Yet still He keeps her at arm’s length. There are times when Zuana passes her cell at night when she might swear she can hear Suora Magdalena’s lips moving through the wood, each word inching her closer to paradise.
But God is good and His mercy endureth for ever. Be thankful to Him and bless His name. The words of the psalm flow into Zuana’s head without her bidding as she moves along the corridor.
The new girl is in the double cell in the corner. Some might argue that it was an unfortunate choice. Less than a month before, the sweet-voiced Suora Tommasa had been singing the latest madrigals in here, verses slipped in by a sister who had learned them at court, until some malignant growth had erupted in her brain and she had keeled over into a fit from which she never woke. They had barely cleaned the vomit off the walls by the time the new entrant had been approved. Zuana wonders now if perhaps they didn’t clean hard enough. Over the years she has come to suspect that convent cells hold on to their past longer than other places. Certainly she wouldn’t be the first young novice to feel ecstasy or malignancy pulsing off the walls around her.
The sobs grow louder as she trips the outer latch and pushes open the door. She imagines a child caught in an endless tantrum, flailing across the bed or crouched, cornered like an animal. Instead her candle throws up a figure standing flat against the wall, shift sweat-sucked to her skin, hair plastered around her face. When glimpsed through the grille in church the girl had seemed too delicate for such a voice, but she is more substantial in the flesh, every sob fueled by a great lungful of air. The one she is reaching for now stops in her throat. What does she see in front of her, a jailer or a savior? Zuana can still feel the terror of those first days; the way each and every nun looked the same. When had she started to spot the differences under the cloth? How strange that she can no longer remember something she thought she would never forget.
“Benedicta,” she says quietly, the word denoting her intention to break the Great Silence.
In her head she hears the abbess’s voice adding the absolution Deo gratias. Within her penance it will be recognized that she is about convent duty.
“God be with you, Serafina.” She lifts the candle higher so the girl can see there is no malice in her eyes.
“Aaah!” The held breath explodes in a wind of fury. “I am not Serafina. That’s not my name.”
The words reach Zuana as flecks of saliva on her face.
“You will feel better when you have rested.”
“Ha! I will feel better when I am dead.”
How old is this one, fifteen? Maybe sixteen? Young enough to have a life to look forward to. Old enough to know that it is being cut short. What had the abbess told them when they voted her in? That hers was a noble family from Milan with important business connections to Ferrara, eager to show loyalty to the city by giving their daughter to one of its greatest convents: a pure child bred on God’s love, with a voice like that of a nightingale. Sadly, no one had seen fit to mention the howling of a werewolf.
“Maybe I am dead already. Buried in this …this stinking tomb.” She kicks furiously at the ground, sending a ball of horsehair spinning along the floor.
Zuana lifts the candle higher and registers the debris in the room: the bed tipped over on its side, the mattress and bolster ripped open, stuffing strewn everywhere. The chaos is impressive in its way.
The girl rubs the back of her hand roughly across her nose to stop the stream of tears and mucus. “You don’t understand.” And now there is a furious pleading in the voice. “I should not be here. I am put in against my will.”
Zuana sees her, kneeling in a whirlpool of velvet before the altar, head bowed while the priest guides her through the litany of assent.
“What about the vows you spoke in chapel?” she says gently.
“Words. I said words, that’s all. They came from my mouth, not my heart.”
Ah. Now it is clearer. The phrase is as well known as any litany. Words from the mouth, not from the heart: the official language of coercion. In the right court, before a sympathetic judge, this is the defense a wife might use to try to get a desperate marriage annulled, or a novice before her bishop to have her vows dissolved. But they are a long way from any court here, and it will help neither the girl nor the convent to be awake all night debating the problem.
“Then you must tell the abbess. She is a wise woman and will guide you.”
“So where is she now?”
Zuana smiles. “Like the rest of us, she is trying to sleep.”
“You think I am stupid?” The voice rises again. “She does not care about me. I’m only another dowry to her. Oh, I have no doubt my father paid very generously to keep me hidden.”
“Even the greatest dowries come with souls,” Zuana says gently. Each word that breaks the Great Silence is as painful to the Lord as it should be to the nun who utters it, but kindness and charity are also virtues within these walls; anyway, she is committed now. “You will come to understand that soon enough.”
“No! Agh!” And the girl flings her head against the wall, hard enough for them both to hear the thud. “No, no, no!”
Only now when the tears come they are of despair as much as fury or pain, as if she knows the battle is already half lost and all she can do is mourn it. There are some sisters in Santa Caterina, women of great faith and compassion, who believe that this is the moment when Christ first truly enters into a young woman’s soul, His great love sowing seeds of hope and obedience in the soil of desperation. Zuana’s own harvest had taken longer, and over the years she has come to understand that the only true comfort one can offer another is the one you yourself feel. While it is not something she is proud of, at moments such as this it is impossible to pretend otherwise.
“Listen to me,” she says quietly, moving closer. “I cannot open the gates for you. But I can, if you let me, make tonight easier. Which in its way will help you with tomorrow, I promise you.”
The girl is listening now. She can feel it. Her body has started to tremble and her eyes dart everywhere. What is going through her head, escape? The cell is not locked and there is no one to stop her flight. If she wanted she could easily push past, out the door, across the cloisters, and down the corridor toward the gatehouse—only to find when she got there that it is not the gatekeeper who holds the night keys to the main door but the abbess herself. Or out into the gardens, then, through the orchards, eventually reaching the outer walls—except that they are so smooth and high that scaling them would be like trying to climb a sheet of ice. All this, of course, is common knowledge to those living within. Indeed, for some the real terror only starts to bite when they imagine themselves standing in the world outside.
“No, no …” But it is more a moan than a protest. The girl covers her face with her hands and slides slowly down the wall, her back scraping against the stone, until she is crouching, curled over, crushed with sorrow.
Zuana kneels on the floor beside her.
The girl jerks away. “Get away from me. I don’t want your prayers.”
“That’s just as well,” Zuana says lightly, sweeping away the horsehair to find a safe spot to rest the candle, “since Our Lord is surely temporarily deaf by now.” She smiles so the girl will know the words are meant kindly. Close to, in the candlelight, she sees a lovely enough face, though a little swollen and pockmarked now with rage. Zuana can think of half a dozen giggling young novices who would happily help nurse her back to beauty again.
She takes the vial out from under her robe and uncorks it.
“Stop crying.” Her voice is firm now. “This panic that you feel will pass. And it will do nothing for you or your cause if you keep the convent awake all night. Do you understand me?”
Their eyes connect over the vial.
“Here.”
“What is it?”
“Something to make you rest.”
“What?” She doesn’t touch it. “I still won’t sleep.”
“If you drink this you will, I promise. The ingredients are those they give to criminals on the cart to the gallows so their drowsiness will blunt the torment long enough for the worst to be carried out. For those suffering less it brings a faster and sweeter relief.”
“The gallows.” She laughs bitterly. “Then you must be my executioner.”
I am the jailer, Zuana thinks. So be it. How much energy it takes to fuel rebellion. And how hard it is when you are the only one. She holds the vial out farther, as one might offer a tidbit to a wild animal that could bolt at any moment.
Slowly, slowly, the girl’s fingers reach out to take it. “It will not make me give in.”
Now Zuana cannot help but smile. If she knew how to make a draft that could do that, every convent in the country would want her for their infirmary. “You don’t need to worry. My job is to tend your body not your soul.”
The girl’s eyes lock on Zuana’s as she swallows. The taste is strong and makes her choke, her throat raw already from the yelling. If that talk of a nightingale was not another lie, she will need a soothing syrup to coax her singing voice back out.
She finishes the draft and puts her head back against the wall. The tears keep flowing, but with less noise. Zuana watches carefully, the healer in her now alert to the progress of the drug.
Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my crying come unto Thee.
When was the last time she had to use this level of dosage? Two—no, three—years ago, on a girl with an equally fat dowry but a hidden history of fits. Her first-night panic had unleashed a seizure so violent it had taken three sisters to hold her down. Had the family been more powerful the convent might have been forced to keep her, for though epilepsy is one of the few recognized causes for the annulment of vows, that, like many things, depends on levels of influence. As it was, Madonna Chiara had successfully negotiated her return, along with a portion of her dowry somewhat reduced for their trouble. Such was the diplomatic acumen of Santa Caterina’s current abbess— though what she might do with this recalcitrant young spirit was yet to be seen.
Hide not Thy face from me in the day of my distress.
The voice inside Zuana’s head grows into a whisper.
“Through the noise of my groaning my bones cleave to my flesh”
When she thinks back on it later, she cannot remember what makes her say this particular psalm, though, once started, the words are apposite enough.
“I am like a pelican in the wilderness. Like an owl of the desert. I watch and am as a sparrow that sitteth alone on the house top. ”
“It’s not working.” The girl shakes herself upright, flailing, angry again.
“Yes, yes, it is. Stop fighting and just breathe.”
“I have eaten ashes as if it were bread and mingled drink with weeping.”
The novice gives a little cry, then slumps back down again.
“For Thou hast set me up and cast me down. My days fade away like shadows, and I am withered like grass. ”
She groans and closes her eyes.
It won’t be long now. Zuana moves closer, to provide support when she starts to slide. The girl pulls her arms tight around her knees, then after a while drops her head down on them. It is a gesture of tiredness as much as defeat.
“But Thou, O God, endurest for ever: and Thy remembrance throughout all generations.”
Outside, the night silence renews itself, moving out through the cloisters, across the courtyard, nosing its way under the doorframes. The convent lets out the breath it has been holding and slides toward sleep. The girl’s body starts to lean toward Zuana’s.
“So will He regard the prayers of the destitute, and He will not despise their call.”
It is over; the rebellion has ended. Zuana registers a certain sadness mixed with relief, as if the words of the psalm might not after all be enough to guarantee comfort. She chides herself for the unworthiness of the thought. Her job is not to question but to settle.
And it is happening. The girl will be unconscious soon enough. Zuana glances around the cell.
At the entrance to the second chamber is a heavy chest. With cunning packing a nun might carry half a world within it. Certainly she would have her own linen; those whose dowries buy double cells sleep on satin sheets and goose-feather pillows. The bed frame can be turned upright without help, but even with the remains of the mattress in place she will need thicker covers. Her body, no longer heated by the force of her distress, will grow clammy, and what started as outrage might turn into fever.
“For He maketh the storm to cease, so that the waters thereof are still.”
She moves the girl gently back against the wall and goes over to the chest. The lid releases a wave of beeswax and camphor. A set of silver candlesticks lies across a bed of fabrics, a velvet cloak and linen shifts next to a wooden Christ child doll. Farther down there is a rug, thick Persian weave, and next to it a handsome Book of Hours, the cover elaborately embossed, newly commissioned no doubt for her entrance. She can think of a few sisters who will find themselves wrestling with the sin of envy when they see this in chapel. As she picks it up, it falls open to a lavishly illustrated text of the Magnificat: intricate figures and animals entwined in swirling tendrils of gold leaf, shimmering in the candlelight. And tucked inside, like a page marker, some sheets of paper covered in handwriting. Had they been read and passed as acceptable? Or did the inspecting gate sister perhaps miss them in among such riches? It would not be the first time.
“What are you doing?” She is alert again now, head jerking up despite the pull of the drug. “Those are mine.”
Mine. It is a word she will have to learn to use less in the coming months. The girl’s panic answers Zuana’s question. Not prayers, evidently. Poems, perhaps? Even letters from a loved one, as precious as any prayer …The light is too dim to make out any words. It is better that way. What she cannot read she cannot be expected to condemn.
She thinks of her own chest and how the books inside it saved her life all those years ago. What if someone had seen fit to confiscate them? She would have needed more than a sleeping draft to dull the pain.
“You have a rich life in here.” She shuts the book and slips it back into the chest. “And you are lucky to have these rooms,” she says, pulling out a piece of heavy velvet cloth. “The sister who lived here before you kept court some evenings between dinner and Compline. Served wine and biscuits and played music, sang court madrigals even.”
She moves the bed upright and hauls the remains of the mattress back onto the frame.
“From the outside the walls are forbidding, I know. But once you get used to it, life in here need not be the desert you fear it to be.”
“Iss your job to tend ma body, no ma soul.” Though she is still propped against the wall, her eyes are half closed now and the words fall away into one another. While the spirit may be unwilling, the flesh at least is now weak.
“And they are glad because they are at rest and He bringeth them to a haven wherein they would be. ”
Zuana lays the coverlet carefully over the open mattress so she will not have the worst of the horsehair sticking into her skin. When she is finished the girl’s eyes are closed again.
She pulls her up by the armpits, putting one of the girl’s arms over her own shoulder and supporting her around the waist to steady her as they move. Her body is as plump as a partridge and heavy now with the drug. The remains of a perfumed oil she must have used that morning are mixed in with the sourness of her sweat. She feels her breath on her cheek, tangy from the poppy syrup. Ah, along with the clubfooted and the squinty-eyed, Our Lord takes the most lovely of young women into His care to keep them from the defilement of the world beyond. She herself had never been so desirable. Not that such things had mattered to her.
“I am no …sleep,” she slurs defiantly, as she falls on the bed.
“Hush.” Zuana wraps the coverlet over her, tucking it tightly underneath like a swaddling cloth.
“Give thanks unto God, for He is good and His mercy endureth for ever.”
But no one is listening to her anymore.
She maneuvers the girl’s body onto her side so that her face is tilted to the mattress, as experience has taught her. Her father once treated a violent patient who—unbeknownst to him—had prefaced the draft with an excess of wine. Halfway through the night he retched up some of it and almost drowned in his own vomit as he lay unconscious on his back. Trial and observation. The true path to learning.
See how the marvels of nature work, Faustina? How a medicament, which taken alone can be fatal, becomes a healer if you understand how it moves with and complements other substances?
Her father’s voice, as always, is ready at the edges of her mind, waiting for the moment when the prayers end and there is space for her own thoughts.
There was a time at the beginning—she can no longer remember quite how long it went on—when his closeness was almost unbearable because it reminded her so powerfully of everything she could no longer have. But the idea of being without him had been even worse, and eventually the grief had softened, so that his presence had become benign: a living teacher as much as a dead father. Of course she knows it is its own transgression for a nun to live in her past rather than her convent present, but his companionship has become so normal she doesn’t bother to take it to confession anymore. There is a limit to the penance one can do for a sin that one cannot—will not— give up.
Watching over the sleeping young woman now, she invites him in again.
You must be sure to note the extra dose in your records. I know, I know, a few drops may seem a little, but they can be a lot. Ah, what a harmony there is in measurement, child. Authority and empiricism, trial and observation: the combination of ancient knowledge and our new world. Of course, we can’t do as the Greeks did and test our remedies on criminals. If that were possible, we might have rediscovered the secret of theriac by now, and our dominion over all poisons would be secure. Imagine that! Still, we have already found much that was lost. And when you are unsure, or when there is no patient on whom to test new compounds or balances, you can always try them on yourself Though with potions that deaden the senses you should take every precaution and mark the moments constantly before you fall asleep, so that you will have a close enough approximation when you wake.
She smiles. It was fine enough advice for all those university students who had stood in line for hours in the fog of a Ferrarese winter to gain entrance to his lectures and dissections. Over the years she had even met a few of them: his army of eager young scholar-physicians dedicated to prying the secrets out of God’s wondrous universe. She too had grown fat on his wisdom alongside them, though of course she could never show it in public. While his acolytes went on to courts and universities, taking their knowledge with them, she was tenured into another form of God’s service, one where the pursuit of knowledge was second to acts of devotion, eight times a day, seven days a week, until death would them part. No wonder it had hurt so much at the beginning. There was precious little space for experiment within these walls. No time for a nun to become her own patient here.
Still, having worked her way to the office of dispensary sister, she does now as he would have done: harvests her plants, distills their juices, and notes down their influences. While the steps may be small, she moves forward. It is more than she would have been allowed without him outside.
She puts a hand on the girl’s pulse: steady, if a little slow. How long will she sleep? It is late already. They will never wake her in time for Lauds, perhaps not even for Prime and Terce, though if they do rouse her she will have no appetite for resistance. Whatever the power of her will, for a while at least it will be tempered by physical compliance. The girl won’t thank her for it, but Zuana more than most knows it is a gift of sorts. If true acceptance comes only from God, there is nevertheless a kind of comfort to be gained from the passing of time: hour upon hour, day upon day, time falling like thick flakes of snow, the next laid upon the last, again and again, until what has been is gradually covered over, its original shape and color hidden under the blanket of what is now.
Eventually the Matins bell rings out from the chapel. She hears the watch sister’s footfalls on the flagstones as she makes her way through the cloisters. The knocks on the doors are sharp tonight. Habit (how apt that they should wear on their bodies what they also have to wear on their souls) will have some of them up and moving before they even know they are awake. But there will be others who have only just found sleep and will want to stay within it. In such circumstances, the watch sister is allowed to enter and shake the sleeper once by the shoulder. The ones who don’t rise then will be confessing their misdemeanor to the abbess later in chapter.
The cell doors start to open, followed by the shuffling of feet as the nuns gather and move after the watch sister, a procession of black shadows in the gloom, candles flickering like fireflies in the darkness. As they pass the novice’s door, someone stifles a yawn.
Zuana waits. While the abbess knows of her night wanderings, it is important that she should disturb the routine of the convent as little as possible. The door to the chapel groans open on heavy hinges, then closes again after the procession has passed through. Further snarls of wood mark out a first latecomer, then a second. The sound of chanting is already seeping under the door as she leaves the cell and crosses into the darkness. In front of her she notices a small figure with a slight limp moving out into the courtyard from the upstairs cloister. This is a night wandering that wants to keep itself hidden. She lets the image slide from her mind. There has been enough emotion spent tonight. No point in making more trouble.
She waits until the chapel door is closed again, then enters quickly, head bowed, moving between the choir stalls to where the great crucifix hangs down in front of the grille that divides the nuns from the outer public church. She prostrates herself before it, registering the momentary shock of cold stone through her robes, before slipping into her place at the end of the second row of the choir stalls. She is without her breviary—the book left sitting on the table in her cell. While she knows the lessons and the psalms by heart, its absence is still a misdemeanor. The abbess’s eye passes quickly over her. Zuana opens her mouth and begins to sing.
The convent is not at its best tonight. Winter has scoured a number of throats, and the chanting is disturbed by ragged bouts of coughing and sniffing. At night the church is fiercely cold, and across the choir stalls the dozen or so novices are struggling. With their fat cheeks and downy skin they look too young to be up both so late and so early. When they are tired, Zuana has noticed, some of them rub their eyes with their fists like small children. The convent’s indefatigable novice mistress, Suora Umiliana, is of the opinion that each new batch is worse than the last, more selfish and prone to the vanities of life. The truth is probably more complex, since Umiliana herself is also changing, growing more fervent and demanding with the years, while they at least remain young. Either way Zuana feels sympathy for them. Girls of their age are greedy for sleep, and Matins, slicing its way through the middle of the night, is the harshest of all the convent offices.
Yet its brutality is also its great sweetness, for its very meaning is to coax and draw up the soul through the body’s resistance, and when one is pulled from sleep there can be less distraction from the noise and chatter of the mind. Zuana knows sisters who, as they age, grow to love this service above all others, to feed off it like nectar, for once you have disciplined yourself to transcend tiredness, the wonder of being in His presence while the rest of the world is asleep is a rare gift, a form of privilege without pride, feasting without gluttony.
A few can become so close to God during such moments that they have been known to see angels hovering above them or, in one case, the figure of Christ lifting His arms off the great wooden crucifix and stretching out toward them. Such tremors of the soul happen more at Matins than at any other devotion, which is helpful for the young ones, as the occasional drama of palpitations or even fainting keeps them open to the possibility of ecstasy. Even Zuana herself, who has never been prone to visions, has felt moments of wonder: the way in which the night silence seems to make the voices more melodious, or how their breaths make the candles flare in the darkness, causing the most solid statues to melt, sending liquid shadows dancing onto the walls.
There is little chance of such marvels tonight. Old Suora Agnesina sits febrile with devotion, head cocked to one side, vigilant as ever for the divine note inside the human chorus, but in the back stalls Suora Ysbeta is already asleep, making much the same wheezing sounds as her rancid little dog, and for the rest it is an achievement just to keep their minds on the text.
To counter her weariness, Zuana pulls herself upright until her shoulders connect with the back of the seat. In most choir stalls, nuns rest their backs against plain wood, polished by years of cloth rubbing against it. But Santa Caterina is different. Here the seats are decorated by the wonder of intarsia: hundreds of cuts of different-colored woods, inlaid and glued together to create scenes and pictures. The stalls were a gift from one of the convent’s benefactors during the reign of the great Borso d’Este a century before, and the story is that it took a father and son over twenty years to complete them. Now, as the sisters of Santa Caterina pray to God, each and every spine rests against a different image of their beloved city—streets, rooftops, chimney pots, and spires—recognizable even down to the slivers of cherry or chestnut wood that mark out the edges of the wharves and the dark walnut veins that make the River Po. In this way, though they live separated from the city of their birth, their beloved Ferrara is kept alive for them.
When Zuana’s mind suffers badly from distraction, as it does tonight, she uses these little jewels of perspective as a way of connecting back to God’s devotion. She imagines the voices floating upward, a cloud of sound rising high into the nave, up and through the chapel roof into the air outside, then moving like a long plume of smoke out into that same city; twisting and turning around warehouses and palazzos, passing along the side of the cathedral, hovering over the dank moat surrounding the d’Este Palace, poking its way through windows and releasing mellifluous echoes in the great chambers, before slipping out and returning to the edge of the river itself, from where it rises up toward the night stars and the heavens behind.
And the beauty and clarity of that thought makes her tiredness fall away, so that she too feels herself lifting free and growing toward something greater, even if the transcendence does not manifest itself in the beating of angels’ wings or the warmth of Christ’s arms around her in the night.
IN THE CELL across the courtyard, the angry novice moves heavily in her sleep, full of the wonder and madness of drugged dreams.
“HOW QUICKLY WAS she calmed?”
“After the draft, soon enough. She was sleeping deeply when I left.”
“Too deeply. I could not wake her for Prime or Terce.” Suora Umiliana’s tone is sharp. “I feared that God might have taken her to Him in the night.”
“It was my duty to settle her. In my experience, when a body is warm and breathing it is easy enough to tell life from death.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt your medicinal skills, Suora Zuana. But I am concerned for her soul …and it is impossible to bring God’s comfort to a young woman who can barely sit up, let alone kneel.”
“Sisters, sisters, we are all weary, and it does no good to anyone to find fault with each other. Suora Zuana, you are to be thanked for calming her. The convent needed its rest. And Suora Umiliana, as novice mistress you have, as always, done all that could be asked of you. This novice is given to us as a challenge, and we must do what we can for her.”
The two nuns bow their heads in obedience to their abbess’s voice. It is early afternoon, and they are gathered in her outer chamber. The room is heated by a wood fire, but outside of its immediate orbit the air remains bitterly cold. The abbess herself sits with a rabbit-fur cape around her shoulders, leather shoes, newly tooled, peeking out from under spread robes. She is forty-three years of age but looks younger. Recently, Zuana has noticed, a few wispy curls have been allowed to escape from under her wimple, and her face is softened by them. While there are those who might suspect such attention to worldly detail as vanity, Zuana sees it more as a reflection of how fastidious she is with everything, from the painted finish on the gesso religious figures that the convent produces for sale to the pastoral care of her flock. Besides, God and fashion sit more easily together than those outside might imagine, and the sisters of Santa Caterina absorb the latest styles with the same appetite with which their choir voices explore the latest complexities of polyphony. In this way, while they may be cloistered, they are still true daughters of their fashionable, musical city.
“So. Let us consider the young soul we are dealing with. Your thoughts first, Suora Zuana. How did you find her?”
“Angry.”
“Yes. Well, that much we could all hear. What else?”
“Afraid. Sad. Outraged. There was a lot of spirit.”
“Though little of it directed toward our Savior, I would assume.”
“No. I think it safe to say she does not enter with a vocation.”
“Ah, always the diplomat with words, Zuana.” She laughs, and one of the curls dances on her forehead. It is not surprising that she is admired by the young as well as the old, since her style combines elements of the benign elder sister along with those of the strict mother. “Did she have anything to say on the matter?”
“She told me that the vows came from her mouth but not her heart.”
“I see.” The abbess pauses. “Those were the actual words she used?”
“Yes.”
At Zuana’s side, Suora Umiliana sighs heavily, as if this is a burden she is already shouldering. “I feared as much during the ceremony. She was opening her mouth but I could barely hear any words.”
“Well, if she was coerced, she gave no indication of it when I met her with her father. Had she been beaten, do you think, Zuana?”
Zuana feels the body again, soft and heavy in her arms. There had been no sign of wounds, or none that the girl herself seemed aware of. “I …I am not sure, but I think not.”
“Suora Umiliana. What were your impressions?”
The novice mistress clasps her hands together, as if asking for help before she speaks. In contrast to the abbess, she is a well-padded woman whose wimple is fixed so tight it seems to have impacted into her features, squashing them ever more closely together, her cheeks like puff pastry and her mouth small and puckered, with a covering of wispy white hairs across her upper lip and chin. She must have been young once, but Zuana cannot remember a time when she looked any different. While she is a ferocious shepherd of her novice flock, few pass through her hands without gaining some sense of Christ’s majesty, and the older sisters who go to her looking for spiritual respite report that beneath her crumpled exterior she has a soul as smooth as an unpacked bolt of silk. There are times when Zuana has felt something akin to envy for the simplicity of her certainty, though in such a close community it does not do to dwell on what one does not have.
“I agree with Suora Zuana. There is a great storm in her. When we undressed her after the ceremony her face was set like a black mask. I would not be surprised if her education has been directed more toward vanity than spirit.”
“If that is so, it will come as a surprise to her family,” the abbess says, fielding the implied rebuke to her judgment gently. “They have an excellent name in Milan. One of the best.”
“Also she didn’t sing—or even open her mouth—at Compline.”
“Perhaps she is unfamiliar with the texts,” Zuana says softly. “Not everybody knows them when they arrive.”
“Even those with no voice are able to read the words aloud,” Umiliana says tartly, in what may or may not be a reference to Zuana, who everyone knows arrived tone deaf and ignorant of everything but her remedies. “We were told that her singing was a marvel. Suora Benedicta has been beside herself, waiting for her to arrive.”
“Indeed she has.” The abbess smiles. “Though our dear choir mistress is no stranger to such a …heightened state, glory be to God, and the welfare of the convent is dear to her. The wedding of the duke’s sister already brings noble audiences into our church, and it would be a fine thing if this new young songbird could find her voice in time for the Feast of Saint Agnes and Carnival. Which I am sure she will.” Her voice is now as deliberately soothing as the novice mistress’s is agitated. “We have come through these heavy seas before. It was barely two summers ago that young Carità spent her first weeks soaked in tears. And look at her now: the most eager seamstress in the convent.”
Umiliana frowns and her face collapses further into itself. In her eyes noble weddings bring only distraction, and Suora Carità’s dexterity with her embroidery needle is as much about fashion as the solace of prayer. This is not, however, the time to mention such things.
“Madonna Abbess? If I might suggest …?” She keeps her eyes to the ground, so that unless the abbess sees fit to interrupt her she will go on anyway. “I would like to separate her from the rest of the novices for a while. That way she will have time to contemplate her rebellion, and her intransigence will not infect others.”
“Thank you for that thought, Suora Umiliana.” The abbess’s smile is immediate and full. “I am confident, however, that under your tutelage such a thing would not happen. And isolation at this stage might agitate rather than calm her.” She pauses. Zuana drops her eyes. She has witnessed it before, this quiet battle of authority between the two women. “Indeed, I think perhaps we should leave any further instruction until she has recovered from the effects of Suora Zuana’s potion.”
Zuana feels Umiliana stiffen, though her expression remains impassive. Within the rule of Saint Benedict, the first degree of humility is obedience without delay. “As you wish, Madonna Chiara.”
“I think at this stage nothing of what happened last night need go any farther than these walls. With all the dictates and instructions from the last meetings of the council at Trento, our dear bishop has far more important things on his plate than a rebellious novice. Perhaps you might make that clear to any novices who have family visiting, Suora Umiliana.”
The novice mistress bows her head, then hesitates, waiting for a sign from Zuana that the two nuns will leave the room together.
“Oh—and Suora Zuana, would you stay for a moment longer? I have dispensary business to discuss with you.”
ZUANA KEEPS HER head down until the door closes. When she looks up, the abbess is rearranging her skirts and drawing her cape farther around her. “Are you cold? You could come closer to the fire.”
Zuana shakes her head. Lack of sleep is beginning to overcome her, and she needs the chill to keep her mind alert.
“Perhaps you should tell me about the draft.”
“It is possible that I put too much poppy syrup in it.” She remembers her father’s words. “A few extra drops is a little, but it can be a lot.”
“Well, do not blame yourself too fiercely. She was making an awful din, and I doubt even Suora Umiliana’s prayers could have quieted her on their own.”
“I did say psalms while the draft was taking effect.”
“You did? Which ones?”
“And they cry unto God in their trouble: Who delivereth them out of their distress—”
“—For He maketh the storm to cease, so that the waves thereof are still: and He bringeth them to their haven”. Her voice joins in, melodious and soft. “One hundred and seven. A great solace and very apt. Are you sure you are not cold? Did you rest?”
“A few hours before Prime. Enough.”
The abbess looks at her for a while. “So. It seems we have a problem. Do you think we are looking at greensickness?”
Zuana frowns. It is a slippery illness, greensickness, since although it arrives with the onset of menstruation, many of its symptoms—rage, despair, excessive exhilaration—can come naturally to young women and pass without any treatment at all. “No. I believe she is just angry and frightened.”
“Is there anything else I should know?”
“Only that she thinks her dowry was a bribe to get us to accept her.”
“Oh! There is hardly a dowry that isn’t a bribe these days, whoever the husband. She would need to be a simpleton not to know that. Still, she is right about its size. The city agent says the rent on the commercial properties alone will bring in an extra hundred ducats a year—which makes it a substantial sum indeed.”
Substantial enough to make the vote in chapter unanimous when the abbess had announced it. Honor, breeding, a fat dowry, and a superior choir voice. What reason could there have been for refusing her? Did it matter that much if she needed a little coaxing? Hadn’t most of them? While it might damage their sense of charity to admit it, there was a certain satisfaction to be had from watching others pass through the same flame.
Zuana waits. The silence grows. With Umiliana gone they are comfortable in each other’s presence, these two brides of Christ. They have known each other for many years and have more in common than at first glance it might appear. Though one was born to the veil, with all the appetite for politics and gossip that convent life entails, and the other was unwillingly inducted, they both have a leaning to the life of the mind as much as the spirit and an enjoyment of the challenges that come with it. It was a bond forged early, when a newly appointed assistant novice mistress befriended an angry grieving novice and helped her through the tempests of convent entrance.
Since Suora Chiara’s elevation, the strength of their connection has loosened, as it must, given the shift in their relative status. No abbess who cares for her flock should be seen to show favoritism, and as head of her family faction in the convent she has support enough to call on should she need advice. Nevertheless, Zuana suspects there are times when Chiara mourns the freedom she enjoyed before the weight of such responsibility, just as Zuana herself misses the informality, even the companionship, that they once shared. Whatever the abbess chooses to say now, they both know Zuana’s lips will remain closed. With plants and invalids as her closest companions, whom would she tell anyway?
“Her father insisted that she had been bred for the veil.” She clicks her tongue. It is a sound Zuana recognizes well; it comes when she is frustrated with herself. “He made a most convincing case for Ferrara as a better home for her than Milan. Certainly her voice will be better used here. It seems that Cardinal Borromeo is turning out to be more of a reformer than the pope himself. From what I hear, if he has his way all the nuns of Milan will be singing plainchant with barely a few organ notes for accompaniment.” She laughs. “Imagine how our city would react to that! Half of our benefactors would desert us immediately. Though I daresay you would find the settings easier to follow,” she adds, almost mischievously.
Zuana smiles. When it comes to the glory of music, her reputation for having cloth ears is well known, and over the years she has grown used to the teasing. “I still don’t understand. Was her father hiding the truth? Was she really expecting marriage and not the veil?”
“If she was, I have heard nothing about it.” The abbess gives a sharp sigh. While her information is extensive in church matters, Milan is a long way away when it comes to domestic gossip, and clearly she is worried that she might have missed something. “There is another daughter, younger. To marry them both he would need a fortune. Eight hundred is a fine dowry for a nun but it wouldn’t buy much on the Milan marriage market. What? You look surprised.”
“No. I …I was thinking how much my father’s estate paid.”
“Ah, well, that was a long time ago and you came cheaply,” the abbess says bluntly, but with good humor. “ Good family over bad fortune, I think was the phrase.” She smiles broadly. “Though I recall you had reservations enough when you first arrived.”
Reservations. It is a cunning thing, convent language, full of words that smother as they try to smooth. Zuana, bred on the precision of her father’s use of words, has never adapted well to it. “Yes. A few.”
No doubt they are both thinking of the same moment: a great trunk deposited outside the main convent gate, so packed with a famous father’s books that the servant sisters could not carry it inside without help from the city porters, who, in turn, were not allowed to cross farther than the entrance. And alongside the trunk his one and only child, a young woman, her face disfigured with grief, refusing point-blank to take a step farther without it. Such was the impasse that a small crowd had gathered to watch. The drama had been ended only by the intervention of the energetic, newly appointed assistant novice mistress, one Suora Chiara, who suggested that they push the trunk half in and half out of the gatehouse and then unload the heaviest books into wheelbarrows brought from the gardens.
It had been nobody’s fault directly. The truth was that there had been no time to arrange anything. Her father was barely cold in his grave, yet his house was cleared and she, as part of his estate, was being walled up for her own protection. What other option was there? A single woman living on her own in a house with no immediate family to absorb her? Impossible. Marriage? Which man in his right mind would take on a twenty-three-year-old virgin with a dowry of forbidden knowledge and hands stinking of the distillery? Even had there been one willing, she would have refused him. No. This young woman wanted what she could not have: her old life back, the freedom of her father’s house, the satisfaction of their work, and the pleasure of his company and knowledge.
How long do you think it will take for the maggots and the worms to regenerate my body, Faustina? I would very much like to know that. It is the greatest pity I did not train you as a gravedigger. You could have eavesdropped on the process for me.
Sixteen years next All Saints’ Day; surely his body would have given birth to a commonwealth of worms by now.
“Still, you are well settled now.”
She says it as a statement rather than a question. The fire cracks open a log in the grate, and the wood spits a shower of fireworks into the air.
“In fact”—the abbess pauses—“there might be some who would almost envy you—would see in your way of life things that are not so easy in the world beyond the walls.”
They have not referred to this for a while, the two of them: how when the wind of church reform blew into Ferrara, it brought trouble even to those within the university; instances of men, scholars who sat at her father’s table or taught alongside him, who had been forced to make choices between certain books and the purity of their faith. Zuana has often wondered how he would have dealt with it, the many ways he would have convinced them, for in his world there was nothing in nature that was not part of God’s divinity and vice versa, and he had never done anything to offend or deny either. As it was, he had been saved the ordeal. A rich life and a timely death. They might all wish for as much for their tombstones.
“You are right, Madonna Chiara, I am as fortunate as I am content.” She pauses. The civic atmosphere is milder now. Nevertheless, the chest under her bed remains heavier in response to the stories told, and there are some books that she consults only while others are asleep. “And as diligent.” What is not known about cannot be taken away—or cause distress to those whose job it might be to prohibit it.
“I am pleased to hear it.” The abbess smiles, sitting more upright and smoothing her skirts. It is another gesture that Zuana has come to recognize: the abbess drawing attention to her own authority. “So: how was the rest of the convent last night?” Even her voice is changed. Whatever closeness there has been between them is ended. “Suora Clementia was in good voice, I heard.”
“She …she is eager for Our Lord’s coming and seems convinced that it will happen during the hours of darkness.”
“So I gather. Last week the night-watch sister says she found her roaming the second cloisters singing psalms. Perhaps we would do better to restrain her further during the night.”
“I fear that would make it worse. If you allow it, I will keep a closer watch on her.”
“Just as long as you do not interfere with the watch sister. I have better things to do than adjudicate territorial squabbles.”
“Also …I stopped by Suora Magdalenas cell.” Since they are back to convent business, Zuana has her own flock to take care of. “I think that, given her condition, she would be more comfortable in the infirmary now.”
“Your charity is exemplary. However, as you know, Suora Magdalena made her views clear some time ago. She has no wish to be moved, and it is our duty to respect that.” Her tone is a little sterner now. “Anything else I should be informed of?”
Zuana sees again the novice’s sheaf of papers tucked fast into the breviary, also the limping figure emerging from a cell that is not her own. She hesitates. The line between gossip and necessary information has never come easily to her.
“I broke the rule of silence and squandered words,” she says, deciding on her own misdemeanor rather than those of others.
“More than was necessary for the bringing of comfort?”
“I—perhaps a few.”
“Then it is just as well that you were about God’s business.” The abbess, if she has registered the hesitation, says nothing about it.
“I also came to chapel without my breviary.”
“Did you?” Her surprise sounds convincing enough, though they both knew she noted it at the time. There is a pause. “Anything more?”
Zuana hesitates. “Only the usual things.”
“You still spend as much time talking with your father as you do with God?”
Though her tone is gentler, Zuana registers the question almost as an intrusion. When they were sisters together, rather than abbess and choir nun, such confessions had come more easily. “Maybe a little less. He …he helps me with my work.”
The abbess gives a sigh, as if deciding what or how much more to say. “Of course it is your duty to honor him as any child would a parent—indeed, more so since he was both your mother and your father. But it is also your duty to honor the Lord in front of and above all others. Forget your people and your father’s house. Remember the vow you took? For He is the font of all life on this earth and the next, and it is only through Him that you will find a true and lasting place in the mercy of His infinite love.”
For the first time, the silence between them has an edge within it. Zuana finds it strange how she speaks like this sometimes. While it is an abbess’s business to care for her flock, there is something in her manner these days, as though God’s counsel were a quality she now receives firsthand through the grace of her position, naturally, effortlessly, like a young plant rising up toward the sun. While everyone accepts that her elevation to abbess was more about the influence of her family than the state of her soul, recently even her opponents have been heard to speak of a growing humility. Knowing her as well as she does, Zuana has assumed it is politics, the need to appeal to the whole convent and not simply to those who naturally agree with her. But there are moments now when even she is not sure.
“You must live more in the present and less in the past, Zuana. It is for your own good. It will make you a better—more contented—nun and bring you closer to God. Which is what we must all strive for.”
“I shall work on myself and take my faults to Father Romero,” Zuana says, dropping her eyes to hide her irritation.
“Ah, yes, Father Romero. Well, I …I am sure he will be able to guide you,” the abbess says coolly.
The fact is, they both know Father Romero could not guide a mouse out of a goblet of wine. With the storms of heretic propaganda about lascivious priests and nuns poisoning the air, such confessors have become almost fashionable in recent years: cautious bishops recruiting the most elderly into convent service, men in such advanced stages of decrepitude that they are oblivious not only to their own desires but also to any that might seep out from cloistered women, some of whom might appreciate, even seek out, a little male attention.
Father Romero avoids any such temptation by being asleep most of the time. In fact it is a current joke among the novices that, when he is not propped up in the confessional box, he spends his life upside down in the church rafters, so great is his resemblance to a shrunken bat.
“I believe he is at his best in the early morning,” the abbess adds quietly. It seems the joke has reached her ears, too.
Zuana bows her head. “Then I will make sure that is when I go. Thank you, Madonna Abbess.”
The audience is ended. She is halfway to the door when Chiara calls her back. She turns.
“You did the convent a fine service last night. Your remedies are their own kind of prayer. I am sure Our Lord understands that better than I.” She pauses, as if she is unsure of what she is going to say. “Oh, and speaking of remedies, I have an order from our bishop for lozenges and ointments. The festivities around the wedding have taken their toll on his voice and his digestion. Can we dispatch him some within the next few weeks?”
“I …I am not sure.” Zuana shakes her head. “The convent is drowning in winter phlegm and the melancholy of black bile. To do so I would need to put his care above those in my own.”
“And if you could be excused a few of the daily offices over the coming weeks?”
Zuana appears to consider the offer. While it takes a particularly rebellious nun to cross her abbess on spiritual decisions, it is accepted that each convent officer has her own sphere of expertise and must defend her territory when she sees fit. In reality, such negotiations are part of the responsibility of command on both sides. How else would a good abbess hone the skills of arbitration required to keep a community of almost a hundred women living together in peace and harmony? Over her four years, Madonna Chiara has developed considerable talent in this area.
“If that were the case, then yes, I think it could be done.”
“Very well. Take the time you need, but leave word of when you will not be in chapel so it will not be noted as a fault. I wonder, do you think she could help you in this?”
“Who?”
“Our troublesome novice,” she says, ignoring Zuana’s deliberate slowness.
“I …I have no need of help. It would take me much longer to instruct someone than to do it myself.”
“Nevertheless, she must be put to work in some way, and you and she have already established some connection.” The abbess hesitates, as if this is an idea that has just come to her and is only being thought through as she speaks. “Once I have seen her I shall send her to you. You may show her around the convent and then find her something useful to do in the dispensary. She is bright enough and may even find some pleasure in the instruction.” And now there is a ghost of smile on her lips. “Or you in the giving of it.”
Zuana thinks briefly of the drawings on her desk and the notes needed on the varying strengths of the drafts, not to mention her coveted solitude, which allows her father’s voice as her hidden companion. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. She bows her head. “This is my penance?”
“Not at all. No, this is a gift rather than a penance. For both of you. For penance you will forgo dinner tonight and eat scraps from the table. There. I think that completes the matter.”
They hold each other’s eyes for a moment, and then the abbess turns to the brushing of her gown again.
OH, SWEET, SWEET Jesus, is this how it will be? Day after day after day, is this how it will be? Because if it is, then surely she will die here. There has not been a second when she has not been prodded by or spied on by somebody, starting from the moment they had shaken her awake that morning, and she had felt so sick and dizzy she could barely focus, her head filled with tumbling nightmares, and she had opened her eyes onto this fat bearded woman’s face, thrusting itself into hers, telling her to thank the Lord for bringing her safely through the night, and glory be to Him for this, her first day in Santa Caterina.
And as soon as she heard those words she was back again: the same prison hole, only dark now, straw and debris everywhere, and another mad black-and-white magpie in front of her, but this one with a voice like a velvet cloak, trying to get her to drink something from a poison vial. She knew she shouldn’t have taken it; that it was giving in and would not—could not—help. Her kindness—for she was kinder than the rest—had made her want to howl and scream and howl again until the very pillars in the cloister started to shake and the whole place came smashing down around them. Only by then she was so tired, and suddenly she couldn’t cry anymore. So much sorrow, so many tears, had come out of her these past few weeks that her very insides were hollowed out and there was nothing left. She had almost been grateful when the drink had made her quiet. It was as if everything around her was going on behind a gauze curtain. Even the stone walls were no longer hard anymore, and when the magpie had opened up her dowry chest, waves of scarlet and gold light seemed to flow over and out of it.
And the woman had been so gentle. She had sat and talked to her, picked her up and held her—yes, she had done that; she had held her—so that she had felt the warmth of another body seeping through the robes, and it had reminded her of …and then she had wanted to cry all over again, only she was too muddled and too tired.
After that there had been nothing, then too much of everything, an avalanche of awesome, awful dreams, so vivid they were more real than life itself, ending in one in which she was half buried in a lake of liquid stone, so that every time she opened her mouth to sing, molten rock poured in. She was so frightened that she started to scream, only then the stone poured in even faster, until she couldn’t breathe.
That was when she had been shaken awake by the squashed-faced crone spitting and babbling about God’s grace. And though it was morning and she was no longer drowning, she was still in a cell in the convent of Santa Caterina in the city of Ferrara, while everyone she loved was far away, leaving her at the mercy of an army of gargoyles, all so stuffed with piety they can no longer remember what it is like to be living, breathing women.
Of course she cannot say that to them, or show it, or even think it. Because they are cunning, these pious, pecking birds. Oh, yes, already they are trying to get inside her thoughts. Not all of them. Not the fat, warty servant one who dressed her this morning, so angry and clumsy that her face now hurts from the tightness of the ugly headscarf strapped and pinned around her. But the others: the hairy-faced novice mistress and the abbess— oh, especially the abbess, she with the girlish curls and the kind-but-not-so-kind manner. Inside all her understanding words about how hard it is to be so young and lovely and plucked from the world (and what would she know about it?), or how Our Dear Lord Himself did not expect her to find it easy, but that in His loving mercy He would guide them all to help her …inside all that caressing had been a constant stream of questions: “How old is your sister?” “Is there promise of marriage for her?” “When did you start your menses?” “How often did you have confession?” “Did you both have singing and dancing lessons?”
Of course, she hadn’t told her anything. In some ways she didn’t even mind the poking; it meant her mad behavior the night before must have had some impact, since the abbess was clearly worrying that she might have been sold a fake. In fact it had made her feel better to say nothing. Or, if she did speak, just to hold to the same phrase she had used with the dispensary magpie, though her voice came out scratched from all the howling the night before: “The words came from my mouth, not my heart.”
It had made the abbess angry, her refusal to talk. Not that she showed it, not directly. Instead she had put on a pious face and emphasized how the bishop was such an important, busy man and the shame of scandal, the ruin of the family… After a while she had stopped listening and started singing songs silently inside her head instead, until the abbess became impatient and finished the interview abruptly. And while all the concentrating on not concentrating had made her head ache, she had felt pleased with herself. Because she had been in this stinking prison a whole twenty-four hours, and it had not dented her resolve one bit.
Now, as she walks across the cloisters—how cold the stone is all around her, truly like the inside of a crypt—alone with her thoughts for the first time that day, on her way to meet last night’s magpie, she promises herself that she will not be so scared or mad anymore but, instead, will use her wits as much as her fear. Yet even as she thinks it she feels a great rush of fire inside her, such a combustion of fury and panic that she wonders if it might consume her before it ever reaches the world outside.
No, no, she cannot stay. She cannot. A whole year before anyone will even listen to her! Three hundred and sixty-four more days of poking and prodding and dead time full of endless prayer. Even if she could hold to her resolve, it would kill her. No, she has to get out. Though such a thing might bring down a storm of scandal on her father’s house, she will do it. Well, he is not so blameless. He lied to her, locked her up, betrayed her. In such a case, a father is no longer a father, and she is no longer his daughter. Only now the flame of panic flares up again, and she feels sick to her stomach and has to stop as she walks to spit the bile out of her mouth.
Anyway, he will not let her rot in here. No. She knows that. Oh, God, she knows that as certainly as she knows the sun will rise tomorrow, except that in this infernal city there is only fog and gray so that no one can actually see it happening. No, he will not forget her. In some way or other he will find her, just as he said he would. Until then she will make herself ready and bide her time, and whatever happens she will not let the fire inside get the better of her.
THOUGH ZUANA IS bound by the rule of obedience, it is the memory of the distress of her own first days that determines her patience and good humor when Serafina comes to her that afternoon.
The after-effects of the drug are obvious. Where last night the girl was all spit and fury now she is sullen and heavy. Whoever has dressed her this morning has bound her novice headscarf too tight, and there is an angry indentation along her forehead and her cheeks where the starched material is biting into the soft skin. As the drug subsides she will notice a pain in her head as well as her heart.
Her eyes are so dull that for a moment Zuana is not sure that she recognizes her.
“God be with you, novice Serafina.”
“And with you, Suora Jailer.”
Yes, she is remembered. Jailer. The word had been her own, but in the novice’s mouth it is newly shocking. Of course, the girl knows that.
“How do you feel today?”
“Like a dog who has been poisoned on bad meat,” she says, her voice raw and scratched.
“Well, it will pass soon enough. Madonna Chiara has asked that I show you something of the convent. Are you well enough to walk? The air might help.”
She shrugs.
“Good. Here.” She hands her a cloak. “The weather is inhospitable today.”
Outside, a mist drapes the cloisters in gray gauze, sending plumes of smoke out of their mouths as they walk. Zuana has often thought that if fathers must offer their unwilling daughters to God they would do better to pick the warmer months to do the giving. Were it summer, they might stop in the orchard to split open a few bursting pomegranates or dawdle by the fishpond to catch the sun on the scales of the darting carp. But as anyone born and bred in Ferrara knows, the city is famed for its winter fog, which seeps down even to the bone, so that Zuana must keep the walk fast and the circuit short.
From the magnificence of the main cloister they move through a short corridor into another, smaller one. They pass an elderly sister walking quickly with a small procession of young girls, eight or nine years old, following like ducklings in her wake. One of them glances up to the novice, frankly curious, and then, when she catches Zuana’s eye, looks down again. Among these boarders of Santa Caterina, some are in safekeeping for marriage while others are destined for the veil. It is not, Zuana thinks, always evident which is which. Still, had their latest novice been born in Ferrara, it is likely that as a child she would have learned both her letters and her piety here, which might have saved them all a lot of trouble now.
This second cloister is humbler and older: weeds grow through the courtyard slabs and its brick pillars have crumbled in places. Yet there is more sense of life here. Along two sides, dormitories run above the kitchens, bakery, and laundry rooms, housing the converse—servant sisters—with a few cells opposite for those poorer choir nuns who come with less of a dowry. By her side the girl is now interested, Zuana notes with some amusement; her eyes dart everywhere. The smell of roasting meat sauce and boiling cabbage is in the air, and there is a clatter of pots and pans. In winter the heat of the work done here can make it almost inviting, but come the first hot spell and it turns into an inferno, with the night almost as hot as the day. In the doorway of the bakery a scrawny tortoiseshell cat lies sprawled on her side, half a dozen blind kittens mewling and clambering over one another for her teats. Suora Federica, who runs the kitchens, considers it an offense against God to put an extra spoonful on any plate, yet she is soft as butter when it comes to nursing mothers—or at least those ones who have not taken vows of chastity.
Once through the courtyard, they stop briefly in the herb garden for Zuana to check the plants for frost damage before passing alongside the kitchen garden, then out behind the slaughter and hanging house and—not so far that the noise of death does not carry—the animal pens.
In the open, with no cover of buildings, the temperature drops rapidly. Zuana sees the girl shiver.
“Why don’t we save the rest for another day?”
“No.” The girl shakes her head fiercely. “No, no, I want to go on.”
“You are not cold?”
“I’m not going back inside,” she says again, sharply. “If I am to be buried alive, I should at least be allowed to see the shape of my coffin.”
“In which case pull your shroud closer,” Zuana answers mildly. “You would not want to expire before the walk has ended.”
To keep the blood warm she quickens the pace. Above them a band of squabbling seagulls chased inland by bad weather wheel and scream before disappearing back into the mist. They cross through the open gardens down to the carp pond; clumps of frozen reed are caught upright inside thin floating islands of ice. In the distance to the left a few gray-robed figures digging in the vegetable plots rise out of the mist, then fade away again, like so many lost souls.
“Who are they?” The girl peers into the gloom after them.
“Converse. Lay servants to the choir nuns. Some of them work the gardens, some the laundry and kitchens. You will have your own assigned to you already to clean your cell and help you dress.”
She brings a hand involuntarily up to her head.
Which one have they given her, Zuana wonders, Augustina or Daniela? Malice or mischief, with a certain cruelty either way.
“How much did their fathers pay to put them here?” the girl mutters, almost to herself.
“Considerably less than yours. You’re lucky we are not one of those Poor Clare convents where the sisters rejoice in doing manual work themselves. Here Our Lord offers us many other ways to serve Him.”
“I am surprised you have to bolt the gates, then. Unless it is to prevent everyone from flocking in.”
The girl scowls, then bends down and grabs a great handful of stones. Zuana watches as she tosses them petulantly into the pond, the fatter ones sinking while a few others skitter and flash against the ice, and she thinks, not for the first time, that once this novice stops railing there are ways in which she might fit well in here. Under the guise of humility, the cloisters harbor more than their fair share of tart tongues.
They make their way through the orchard, with its army of pruned fruit trees stubby-fisted in the gloom, until they reach the convent wall, looming up in front of them to meet a leaden sky. The air is a thick gray now, the fog already swallowing up the buildings they have left behind.
“How big is this place?” The girl’s voice is dull with the scale of her incarceration.
“The walls mark out three blocks on each side. It is one of the largest convents in the city.”
So large, in fact, that girls from country families sometimes find solace in the amount of open ground and sky. Others, brought up on stories of court life and city streets, are less comforted, though even they can be surprised at the amount of land a rich convent can carve for itself in the middle of a town. How impressed was Zuana when she first walked here? All she remembers now is how small and ill-stocked the herb garden was, and how half the cuttings she’d brought with her, wrapped with the clothing inside her chest, had died in a freak snowstorm that first winter. Winter. Yes, always the most painful time of the novice’s first year.
“It takes maybe half an hour to walk the line of the walls all the way around. Of course, you can only do that from the inside, as the fourth wall is the river. You do not know any of this?”
The girl shrugs. If a prospective novice has not been a boarder, it is usual for them at least to visit the place where they are to spend the rest of their lives. But even this she has not done. Would it have made her passage any easier? Certainly the wealthy benefactors who come to see how their money is spent, or to reassure themselves about a daughter’s prospective future, are eager to be shown the wonders of it all, for Santa Caterina has a past as rich as its present. One of the first foundations in the city, it had originally been a small house for Benedictine monks on an island in the river, but over the years water fever scythed down so many souls that it fell into disuse, to be rebuilt and refounded only when trading money drained the marshes, rechanneling the river and with it the most deadly of the infections.
Every nun knows the litany of its current success: how, with better drainage and, now, the use of distilled oils and herbs for fumigants in all the main rooms and corridors (these additions are Zuana’s work, though the rules of modesty would prohibit singling her out for personal praise), the worst of the summer contagions are kept at bay, so that today Santa Caterina sustains a community of almost sixty choir nuns, eight or nine novices, a few young boarders, and twenty-five converse, all working so tirelessly together that most years the convent sends out baskets of early figs and pomegranates as gifts to the local bishop and as thanks—and encouragement—to its more generous patrons.
Not that they live on charity. Far from it. The river bordering the fourth side of the convent is its trade route as well as an extra form of security. Arriving by water, a visitor sees a dock carved out of the outer wall with a locked door, behind which are supply rooms, themselves locked again from the inner side so that all business can take place without the merchants or traders ever having to encounter the nuns directly. From here the convent takes in flour, fresh fish, whatever meat it does not rear itself, wine, spices, sugar, cloth, threads, inks, and paper. Some of the same barges that bring deliveries leave almost full again, with cases of hand-copied breviaries and hour books, embroidered cloths and church robes, medicines, liquors, and painted religious figurines. The convent’s cellars are packed with good wines for feast days and festivals, and the kitchens produce fresh bread daily, spiked with rosemary, along with bottles of the earliest pressings of olive oil, as green and fragrant as the pulp it is squeezed from. Add to this income the dowries of the choir nuns, the fees from the boarders, and the rents from a dozen or so properties bequeathed to the convent in perpetuity, and there are years when Santa Caterina boasts account books to rival a great estate.
Zuana offers Serafina morsels of this colorful picture as they pass along by the walls and the river storehouse, and there are moments when the young woman seems engaged enough even to ask questions. She would like to tell her more, but she knows there is no point.
It is always hard, understanding what is being gained in the moment at which something is also being taken away. For such a young woman to appreciate the different meanings of incarceration and freedom. How, for example, outside these walls free women will live their whole lives dictated by the decisions of others, yet inside, to a remarkable extent, they govern themselves. How here each and every nun has a voice and a vote (where else in Christendom would you find such a thing?), where they discuss and decide everything together, from the menu for the next saint’s day to the appointment of a new abbess or a choir mistress or a dozen other posts essential to the smooth governing of what is, in effect, a business as well as a spiritual refuge.
In this prison there are no fathers to bully or rage at the expensive uselessness of daughters, no brothers to tease and torment weaker sisters, no rutting drunken husbands poking constantly at tired or pious wives. Women live longer here: the plague finds it harder to jump the walls, and they are saved from all the scabby pus-filled diseases that pass from husband to wife through the marriage bed. Here no one’s womb drops out of her body from an excess of pregnancies, no one dies in the sweated agonies of childbirth or has to suffer the pain of burying half a dozen of her children. And if it is the sweetness of cherub flesh that pulls your heartstrings, there are young ones enough to coddle and nurture, either in the girl children sent to learn to read and write or in the newborn wide-eyed infants who pass through the parlatorio on family visits. Indeed, while angry new novices might laugh at the idea of leaving the gates open to the world, the fact is that for each half-dozen young women who come in howling, there is often an older one, newly widowed or longing to be so, eager for the moment when she might enter of her own accord.
But this is not the time for such special pleading, and Zuana keeps her thoughts to herself as she loops their course back toward the main buildings. As they reach the third quarter where the street begins again, there is sudden noise and chatter behind the walls: the rumble of carts on cobbles, snatches of laughter and raised voices, the everyday business of unsequestered life. Beside her, Serafina stiffens.
“Where are we? What is on the other side now?”
“Borgo San Bernardino,” Zuana says, orienting herself. At times when she was young, she accompanied her father on visits to his patients, and as a result she knows—or at least once knew—the city better than most. “It starts from the river and moves northwest toward the market square, the cathedral, and the palace.”
The girl looks confused.
“You don’t know the great d’Este Palace or the cathedral? They are the marvels of Ferrara. Those and the university, which has a medical school to rival Padua and Bologna in its teaching. The next time you are in chapel with time to spare, run your fingers over the backs of the choir stalls. The city is all there, fashioned through a thousand little cuts of the wood.”
But the girl is fading now, the cold and the disembodied life behind the walls suddenly pressing down on her.
“Come.” Zuara touches her arm. “It is time to go back inside.”
THEY REENTER THE main cloisters to the sound of the chapel bell, marking out the end of rest time and the beginning of afternoon work. As they move up the corner staircase, the opening bars of a lute melody are joined by a single rising voice, pure as spring water.
The girl’s head lifts sharply, like an animal taking in new scent.
“It is a setting for the Feast of the Epiphany. You like to sing?” Zuana puts the question casually, then watches as a manufactured scowl comes over the girl’s face in response.
“I have no voice anymore,” she says hoarsely.
“Then we will all pray for its return—as should you. The convent’s choir mistress—who, you should know, is the abbess’s cousin—was taught composition by no less a man than the duke’s father’s chapelmaster, and her settings are famous throughout the city. She is eager to meet you. The best voices get to practice when others are working. You would be amazed at the privileges that come from being a songbird here.”
Their route to the music room takes them by way of the scriptorium, where a dozen desks are positioned to catch every last ray of daylight, with a dozen heads bent diligently over them, the silence broken only by the tapping of pens against inkwells and the scratching of nibs across paper. At the podium, Suora Scholastica, her face as large and bright as the full moon, smiles up at them as they stand in the doorway. Zuana nods back. When she is not copying holy words, Scholastica is writing ones of her own, dramatic plays of saints and sinners in rhyming couplets, the best of them produced at Carnival or on special saint’s days. Her dedication infuses the atmosphere. There are other workrooms where a certain restlessness is always present, but over the years Zuana has come to notice how those who choose books and manuscripts over other forms of labor become most absorbed in their work, for while the task is mostly to copy what already exists, there are great skills to be learned and a slow pleasure to be had in watching an empty page fill. During the first six months, when she had been frantic for the garden and her pestle and mortar, even she had sucked some sweetness here, not to mention the mischief of using only medicinal herbs as her border illustrations, drawn accurately enough to signal a cure for all manner of ills, if only the reader knew how to recognize them.
They move farther along the upper cloister, past the embroidery room, where an intermittent starling chatter slides out from underneath the door. Francesca, the supervising sister here, is lenient with high spirits, believing as she does that laughter is one of God’s methods of purifying the heart, and as a result some of the younger nuns congregate here and take advantage of her. While there are those who disapprove, Zuana is more forgiving: in her eyes small transgressions can often prevent bigger ones.
Today, though, the starlings can wait. That single pure voice has now become a dance between many, a shoal of silvered fish slipping in and over one another in a fast-flowing stream, and Serafina’s footsteps move faster in response. When they reach the music room, Zuana pushes open the door quietly and moves aside to let her in.
Given the color of the sound, it is almost a shock to find the room so monochrome. In the gray light a nun sits bent over a lute, while others stand grouped in fives and sixes. A few move their heads to the music but most are statue-still. They all hold texts in front of them, but their eyes are constantly pulled toward a small figure in front whose arms flutter up and down, fingers bent as if she were plucking each and every note from her own set of invisible strings in the air. The atmosphere is so charged with concentration that no one seems to notice them come in. Zuana glances toward Serafina. Though she might later spend a lifetime denying it, there is evident appetite in her now. And wonder.
Even Zuana herself, whose voice has always been more seagull than lark, cannot help but be affected. Every woman in this room is familiar to her; she has treated them all for a host of ailments that raked their throats or splintered their voices, not to mention the hundred other pains and boils and bad humors of the bowels or stomach to which human bodies are prone. With the exception of Suora Benedicta, all of them are remarkably unremarkable outside this room, no better, no worse, no farther from and certainly no closer to God than any other of the convent sisters. Yet here you only have to close your eyes on their faces (which, in effect, every citizen of Ferrara does when they sit in church and hear only disembodied voices through the altar grille), and such is their sound that you would be tempted to think you were in close proximity to a choir of angels.
In this respect, heaven and earth are excellently connected in Ferrara, since the sweeter the voices of its nuns, the closer to paradise a city begins to feel. And the closer to paradise, the greater the worldly gratitude its rich citizens send flowing back into the convents that house such angels. Even the least musical of novices learns this fast enough, just as it is common knowledge that some convents in Bologna or Siena or Venice attract so many high-ranking visitors that the best choir voices are excused from Matins in winter to save their throats from the chills of the night air. Of course, such overt favoritism can bring resentment, and in Santa Caterina the abbess is careful to keep the peace with a semblance of equality. Nevertheless, there are all manner of ways to show favor.
The last note brings each voice together, rising, expanding, then falling through a graceful arc toward a silence that, when it finally comes, is as alive as the sound itself. “Huh.” Benedicta lets out a curious throaty sigh. “There is not enough clarity between the first and second parts on quia Gloria Domini super te orta es. And, Eugenia, the first two alleluias are too thin, next to Suora Margarita’s, and not sustained long enough.”
The door of the room jumps open a little with the wind, then catches back on its hinges, giving away their presence. While the tiny figure of Benedicta does not seem to hear it, the nuns, who are used to moving from heaven to earth with almost preternatural speed, are instantly curious. Any newcomer is fodder for gossip, let alone one who comes with the vocal power to disturb a whole convent through a closed door.
“Eugenia, can you mar—”
Finally she registers their presence and turns.
“Suora Benedicta.” Zuana bows her head. “I have brought the new novice to hear the choir at work.”
“Ah!” The tiny woman’s face lights up. “Ah, yes, yes. The voice from Milan. Come, come, come. We have been waiting for you.”
But the girl does not move.
“Welcome. Oh, look at you. You are well grown. Your menses have come already, yes? Is your voice settled yet?” She pauses but does not seem to notice too much when she gets no answer. “You read music? Possibly you were not taught—but you are not to worry; it is not as difficult as they make out. Still, your voice will learn it quicker than your mind. I have scored your part in the Gradual for the upper register, but it can be adapted easily enough if you have more depth. It moves like this.”
And she opens her mouth onto a tumble of hummed notes, bubbling up faster even than her speech and, to Zuana’s ears at least, impossible to follow. Serafina, though, is clearly listening, even if she never lifts her eyes from the ground.
Benedicta stops. “Will that be too high for you?”
In the silence that follows there is a snigger from somewhere within the choir, audible to everyone but Benedicta.
“What? What is it? Are you not well?”
“I do not sing anymore,” she says finally, her voice now more cracked and splintered than Zuana knows it to be.
“But why?” She comes over to her, ignoring Zuana but grabbing hold of the young woman’s hands. “Oh, but you are so cold. You have been outside? No wonder your voice is gone. It is a chill. The wind often steals the best voices. Or a strain, perhaps, from your long journey here. You must take care of yourself and do exactly as Suora Zuana tells you. Though she herself has been given only a mediocre instrument, God has compensated her with a prodigious talent to help others.” And she beams benignly at Zuana.
“Eugenia.” She turns back to the choir. “Come. Sing the part for our new novice, so she can have the notes in her head while her voice is healing.”
In the front row, young Eugenia, who could barely keep her eyes open last night in chapel, is now as chirpy as a newly fledged bird. As she puffs up her feathers to sing, Zuana notices the hint of what is surely a wispy curl peeking out from under her headband, homage no doubt to the abbess’s change of style.
“Surge, illuminare, Jerusalem …”
The words turn to burnished silver in her mouth. She is young and one of the best voices in the choir, with a healthy appetite for the gossip and drama of convent life. Six months before, she had arrived in Zuana’s dispensary nursing a limp from an infected splinter embedded while walking on Christ’s crown of thorns to share His Passion. Only it had begun to hurt so much that now she wanted it taken out. A week later she was chasing squirrels through the orchard during free time, her high spirits more infectious and inspiring than her halfhearted attempts at mortification. Zuana has felt a certain fondness toward her ever since.
“…alleluia.”
Those who know might say she holds the last note a little too long, as befits a songbird marking her territory against possible newcomers. In church no doubt it would have a few young bloods constructing their own versions of heaven.
All eyes are now on Serafina. She is standing taut, her face drawn and pale, her skin almost gray, her eyes focused somewhere out in front of her. Slowly she bends over, one arm clutched over her stomach.
As her head comes up again, Zuana thinks for a moment she might even be laughing—something about the way she is catching her breath. In the choir someone giggles nervously. Too late, Zuana realizes what is happening.
Serafina opens her mouth, and the retching sound that comes out is followed by an arching stream of bile.
“DRINK IT.”
The girl shakes her head.
“It is only water with an infusion of ginger.”
“In which case, you drink it.”
Zuana lifts the clay pot and takes a mouthful.
“Ask any of the sisters; my poisons are faster-acting than my remedies. If I am still on my feet now, you can be sure it is benign.” She takes another gulp, then puts the pot down in front of the girl. “You can do as you wish, but if you want to stop the sickness I suggest you take it.”
As she hopes, the edge of impatience in her voice sparks something in the novice’s eyes. She picks it up and drinks, small sips first, then deeper ones. They sit in silence while Zuana makes herself busy clearing away bottles and measuring bowls. When she turns back, the girl has more color in her cheeks.
“Better?”
“What was in it?”
“I told you: ginger root. It is good for the stomach.”
“I meant last night’s poison.”
“Ah. Nightshade, wolfsbane, crushed poplar leaves, poppy syrup.”
“And what part of that is making me sick now?”
“The poppy, I suspect. It seems to linger in the body longer.”
Serafina is sitting on the windowsill in the dispensary. Outside, in the distance, a simple plot of land marks the convent cemetery: a history of piety arranged in lines of small neat wooden crosses. Zuana chose to avoid it in her tour, and it is best if it remains unnoticed now.
“Did you dream?”
She nods slowly clearly unsure how much to tell. It is a reticence Zuana remembers well. In the early days, the horror of incarceration could make her suspicious of even the simplest intercessions and kindnesses.
“Nightmares?”
“I was drowning.” The girl’s voice is dark with the memory. “The water was stone, liquid stone. I kept trying to shout, but each time I opened my mouth more of it poured in.”
How many stories like this one has Zuana heard? Her father used to keep records of them, for he was interested in how the ancients had studied dreams and what one could learn from them. Those induced by the poppy were often the wildest, as the drug seems to feed off the anxieties and fears of the person taking it.
“The mixture can set off strange visions. But they will be gone soon enough.”
“Unlike me?” the girl says tartly. She takes another sip. “I won’t stay here, you know. The words came from my mouth, not my heart.”
She is fierce again, head down, determined.
Zuana watches her quietly. Of course they will have discussed it, the two of them together in the abbess’s chamber: how any novice forced into a convent against her will can after a year refuse to take her final vows and petition the bishop for her release. What else would they have talked about? Certainly the abbess would have seen it as her duty to emphasize the disgrace of such an action, to explain how, if the convent was unable to soothe the trouble at the source, there was scarcely a bishop in the church who would listen to such a protest, let alone a family that would be willing to take her back. So that in the end the only real choice open to a young woman was to yell herself into crazed silence or, with God’s grace, find the wit to turn rebellion into acceptance of what cannot be resisted. Just as so many others had done before her.
“You think I’ll change my mind!”
“I have no idea what you will do. Though since my stock of wolfsbane has been damaged by the frost, and it works as well with toothache as it does with tantrums, I hope you won’t spend too much time screaming in the night.”
“If I did, I wouldn’t take your potions. I—ah!” She stops, bringing her hands up over her ears.
“What is it? Are you sick again?”
She shakes her head. “There is a throbbing behind my eyes.”
“It’s the pressure of the headscarf. You can hear your own voice echoing between your ears? You will feel it more acutely when you start to sing. Who dressed you this morning?”
“I …I don’t know. She had a fat nose and a wart on her chin.”
Ah, malice rather than mischief. “Augustina. The butcher’s daughter. She grew up wringing the necks of chickens and likes to practice her skills elsewhere. You would do better to find someone else to tend your cell.”
“How do I do that?”
“I am sure, as soon as your voice returns, the choir mistress will organize it for you.”
She watches the scowl, then relents. It is too cruel to leave it like that.
“I could loosen it for you now if you like.”
The girl hesitates. Asking for help is not the same thing as giving in.
“Yes.” There is a pause. “Please.”
She sits statue-still as Zuana approaches and slips her hands around the back of Serafina’s head under the material to locate the pins. Close to, in the daylight, the girl’s skin is creamy now and moist with youth, the mouth full above a strong jaw, and the eyes so deep and dark—black rather than brown—that it is hard to tell the iris from the pupil. No melting Madonna beauty here but a presence nevertheless, strong, even striking.
She reaffixes the stiff material more gently. “Don’t worry. You will get used to it fast enough. Soon it will feel more strange to be without it.”
The girl blinks and a fat tear wells up and overflows, because of course that idea is even more unbearable. For a moment Zuana wants to tighten her arms around her and whisper into her ear all the ways in which resistance will tear her apart and how quickly wounds can heal when the right remedies and ointments are applied. The strength of her own feeling alarms her, and she moves her arms back to her sides. It has never been her role, the soothing of souls, and there is no reason to start now. Not least because some things one must learn for oneself.
She moves back to the table and starts pulling out boards and graters. The bishop’s remedies will take more time than she has, even with the dispensation to miss orders, and one day is almost passed. When she turns, the girl is standing next to her.
“This is where you work?”
“Here and the distillery, yes.”
“Who works with you?”
“There is a conversa who helps with the patients. But in the dispensary I am alone.”
“Is that allowed?”
“Since my voice is as cracked as my fingers, it is accepted that I am better employed on my own than in the choir or the embroidery room.”
It’s true enough. Even when she arrived her hands had been more the laborer’s than the lady’s, and over the years they have grown worse, the skin eaten and stained by the processes of gardening and the chemicals of distillation. As for her singing— well, in the hierarchy of convent voices, everyone knows she is a minnow swimming next to fat carp. She smiles at the thought. It does not worry her. There are times when she thinks she might be offering up her own kind of music here, for surely each and every ingredient she collects has its own voice—soft, loud, dark, light—each distinct enough when alone yet capable of making all manner of different sounds and resonances when mixed together.
At last count there were close to ninety glass bottles here, a veritable choir of cures! She has done penance for the pride of such a thought in the past, but the image stubbornly remains. Her father would have understood. He was forever in search of the music of nature, handed down through the spheres, though in church he too could barely hold a note.
“There are so many of them!” The girl is standing staring at the shelves. “How long did it take you to collect them all?”
“Perhaps it is better you don’t know,” Zuana says lightly. But she likes the fact that she is interested.
“And is every one of these a different remedy?”
“Some work alone, yes. They are known as simples. Others need to be mixed together to form compounds.”
“So what is that?” She points up at a bottle with a small twisted root inside.
“White hellebore.”
“What does it do?”
“It purges the system.”
“Of what?”
“Anything that is inside you. It causes powerful vomiting.”
“Worse than mine?”
“You can lose half your stomach with this if you’re not careful.”
“Really! What, do you eat it?”
“Not on its own. There is too much poison in it.”
“So how does it work?”
Curiosity. It is not the characteristic of a recalcitrant novice. But then the inside of an apothecary’s shop is not something that would excite every young girl’s imagination, except of course for the love potions—and Zuana has had no use for them in her study. “A way of making well people ill” was how her father saw them, though from things she heard people say about her mother he must have been ill thus once himself, however briefly.
“You put a portion of the root inside an apple or a pear and bake it in hot ashes. When it is cooked you throw away the hellebore and eat the pulp of the fruit instead.”
“How do you know how much to put in?”
“It depends on how heavy or light the person is. And on the nature of what you are looking to expel.”
“You mean you use a poison to cure a poison?”
“In a way yes. There are a number of ingredients that change their effect depending on their mixing.”
The girl points to another, farther along. “And this?”
“Verbena leaves.”
“What ills do they cure?”
“When they are fresh, their sweat against the skin is good for headaches. When the root is cooked it dulls toothache.”
“And when they are like this?”
“Mixed in sweet wine with Saint Mary’s mint, they are good for monthly cramps.” Of which the convent has more than a few, for empty wombs gathered together seem to produce regulated and in many cases singular suffering.
“Ha. I know someone who would have paid a fortune for this.” There is a touch of venom in her voice. “Do you have something to dissolve unwanted babies, too?”
“Unwanted babies? In a nunnery?” Zuana laughs.
Of course there are always stories. Nuns as the milking cows for the lust of the church. Luther’s poison has leaked everywhere, though a monk who married a nun would have had to construct gross heresy to save himself—and his apostate wife—from hell. However, even in Santa Caterina you hear things …such as the island convent in Venice that the confessor ran as a house of ill repute with himself as the only client. The whole of the city, it was said, had come out to watch him burn.
“Why? Do you know someone who has need of that as well?”
She scowls. Certainly she would not be the first daughter to find her future prospects altered by a sister’s strategic lust. But she is not about to tell Zuana her secrets. Not yet, anyway.
“And the poppy that gave me foul dreams. Which one is that?”
“It is there. On one of the shelves.”
The girl follows her eye. “This one? Or this one?” She reaches a hand out.
“No, no. And be careful with that.”
“Why? Is it poison, too?”
“No, it is blood.”
“Blood? Whose?”
“Sister Prudenza’s. She has begun to suffer from fits, and I am tending her.”
“It doesn’t look like blood.”
“That is because it is mixed with crow’s egg.”
The girl looks at Zuana as if the devil had just slid from under her skirts; Zuana has to smile.
“It is a known remedy. When taken internally in small doses regularly, it can help with fits, if the affliction is mild.”
“And if it is serious?”
“Then I wouldn’t be able to help her.” And she sees again a young novice, her body like a fish pulled out of water, rigid and thrashing on the cold cell floor.
The girl puts the bottle back on the shelf as if the very handling of it might contaminate her. “Are there many you can’t help?”
“That depends on what ails them.”
Zuana knows what she is thinking, of course: that she is the one who will never be cured, for her ailment is too grave.
“I wonder they let you do all this,” she says, looking around.
“What? You think because nuns serve God we should have to die sooner or hurt more?”
“No. I mean …well, there is not much praying about it.”
“Oh, but you are wrong.” Of course she has heard it before, this blindness to finding God in anything that does not involve praying or suffering. “This room is full of prayer. Look around you. Everything here—every herb, every juice, every ingredient of every remedy—comes from nature and the earth, which along with the heavens has been created by Him for us to worship. Even our capacity to understand it is given by Him. Honor the physician for the need one has of him. For the most High has created him. Ecclesiasticus 38, verse 1.”
The girl stares at her, then laughs nervously, as if they have changed places and now she is the solid one to Zuana’s madness.
Of course. When she first arrived it was the nuns who spoke in rivers of scriptures who were the worst company, the sheer intensity of their absorption making her feel even more abandoned. She is easier with them now. Sometimes they even bring her texts about herbs they have found in the scriptures, though they have yet to show her one she did not know before.
“You know a lot. Did you learn it all here?”
“No. My father taught me much of it. The rest I learned from books—or have found out myself.”
“Your father? Was he the one who put you inside?”
“No. Yes.” She pauses. “When he died there was nowhere else for me to go.”
“And what about you? Did you want to be here?”
“I—” She stops. Which is the worse sin: to lie or to encourage despair? “There was nowhere else for me to go.”
Serafina stares at her. “How long ago was that?”
“Sixteen years.”
Zuana registers her shocked intake of breath. The pity is palpable. She, of course, never intends to be so old or so defeated.
She has turned and is looking out the window. Upright now, she will be able to see the edge of the graveyard beyond the herb garden wall. Zuana watches as she stands transfixed. Then she turns back.
“She says I have to work with you.”
“Madonna Chiara?”
“Yes. She says the Lord brings each of us to Him in different ways. And that you are a good and loving nun.”
“Then you must listen to her. She is the abbess, picked for her humility and learning.”
“Really. Is that why she wears bits of her hair curled like a court lady?”
Once again Zuana admires the nimbleness of the girl’s mind. When she stops yearning for what she cannot have, such wit will add texture to the quotidian nature of convent life, which can seem so barren when you first experience it.
“Maybe it is her way of trying to make you feel at home.” “What, by wearing yesterday’s style?” she retorts sourly.
“Anyway, I will never, ever feel that way here.”
But in fact the process has started already. She just doesn’t know it yet.
SHE PULLS THE stones out of her pocket. What if none of them are big enough? They had been easy enough to scoop up into her sleeve as she tossed the handful into the pond, but there had been no time to sort out the heavy from the light. She rubs off the dirt and lays them down on one of the sheets of paper taken from her breviary. She does not need to read the words to know what is written there.
Who hath not gazed into my lady’s eyes nor gathered her sweet glances here on earth, he knoweth not love’s hell nor paradise who never heard her sighs as light as air, the gentle music of her speech and mirth.
She sings quietly keeping the sound within her own head. Yes, her voice is still there, thank God. If she opened her mouth now they would all hear it. Ha! If she chose she could pierce the very stones of the cell with it. That would bring the choir mistress running fast enough, her mad music gushing out of her like a broken water pipe. “Oh, our great city is filled with music lovers.” Well, let them wait. All of them: nobles and nuns. Hell will freeze before she opens her mouth for them.
On the table the tallow candle sputters and she has to coax it back to life, protecting the flame with her hands. No, no, the stones are too small! She takes the biggest and tries to fold the paper around it. It wraps around four times, but stiffly, and when she throws it up into the air toward the bed the paper is already uncurled and falling off before it lands. Heavier stones (where would she get them?) would help, but she will still need something to secure the edges. And even if she finds them—the right stone and the right kind of glue—even if she somehow manages to get out into the gardens and lob it over into the street, how in God’s name will she know where to throw it?
When they talked about it—that one snatched, desperate conversation through her bedroom door as it was all coming apart around them—she had imagined a building with windows or a bell tower; at worst a finite run of wall so he would know where to look. But this place is so endless you could walk around the perimeter for a month and still not recognize one bit from the next. What if she mistook the measurements and threw it into the river? Or it landed in some pothole or gutter where it would just rot and get lost? Maybe the gutters were full of them: notes of longing hurled out by women long since bearded and forgotten.
But how else could she respond to him when he came? How could she possibly get any message out? The outside façade has barely more windows than a prison, and those that exist are so high that the only thing that can reach them is light—and God knows, there is little enough of that either. At least in the gardens you can see and breathe. Though it’s like taking water into your lungs, the air is so damp. This whole city is thick with perpetual gloom. Ugh. What had the jailer sister said about all the old monks dying of swamp infection? No wonder. In Milan in winter, even when it got cold enough to make you cry, you could still look out the window and see the blue of the sky. But here there is not even real sky, just a swollen ceiling the color of dead rat fur and heavy as stone.
She can feel the tears smarting at the back of her eyes and makes herself take deep breaths. When they first closed the door on her tonight, she had started howling again, the panic welling up like sudden sickness, but with the drug still curdling her stomach she couldn’t keep it going for long. Oh, if she could have found the energy she would have yelled and screamed and smashed her fists against the door all night every night, so they would all be driven mad by her madness. Only she is scared that if she does that they will drug her again and maybe—who knows? — this time there will be blood and crow’s egg in it so she might be sent into fits. That slimy abbess had said as much when she had been pretending not to listen: how a convent kept awake at night was a bad-tempered place and if the alternative was a novice kept under lock and key too drugged to enjoy any recreation, then so be it, sad though it was.
Well, she would not give them that satisfaction. Not when there were other ways to make her mark.
For all her cunning she had not planned it—the refusal to sing. She had not really thought about it until the afternoon, when they had entered the cloisters and heard the voices practicing and the dispensary sister had asked her if she liked to sing. But then the closer they got to the room, the more perfect it had seemed: how if they wanted her for her voice (and God knows they were in need of it if that scrawny nun with her motet was anything to go by—far too much breath and thinness on the high notes), if singing was important to them, singing was what she would deny them. Though they might have her body, they would never have her voice. Which meant they had nothing of her, for it is in her voice where she is most herself. As he—of all people in her life—had understood.
Here she sang so sweetly, Here with lovely eyes she pierced my heart… My soul bereft that thinks of nothing else, my ears gone deaf, with nothing left to hear when her sweet words have vanished from our midst.
No, she will not sing for them. Of course she will have to talk sometimes, but as long as she makes her voice raw as she did today she can fool most of them. The dispensary bird will be the hardest. She is clever, even has some wit in her, though God knows how she keeps it flowering in this tomb of dried-up old flesh. Sixteen years! Imagine! Locked in that cell for sixteen years with just books and stinking bottles for company. And all that strange poetry about heaven and earth and divine remedies …
Still, if she had to work anywhere in this prison, the dispensary would do well enough (better than a lifetime spent blind and hunched with a pen in your hand—most of the magpies in the scriptorium looked dead already from the effort). At least on her shelves there are some wonders to be learned, if you could tell the consistency of blood from poppy syrup. You could put a whole convent to sleep if you knew the right recipe. She sees an image of a line of nuns, sipping deep from the communion wine, then keeling over one by one. The sheer viciousness of the thought makes her smile. The only one who might survive is that young gargoyle with the harelip that runs like a dredged canal from her mouth into her nostrils. She can barely drink at all. Ugh. At dinner she has to bend her head back at an angle to make sure the water in her mug doesn’t dribble into her bowl.
It makes her sick even to think about it. Maybe her father chose this place deliberately, knowing it to be packed with monstrosities: hunchbacks, idiots who smile when there’s nothing to smile about, the one whose right foot follows half an hour after her left, and—the most scary one of all—the novice with the poxy face, the scars so angry she might even have been lovely not so long ago.
The girl from the Dominici family who lived not far from her had suffered the same horror: one Sunday flicking lizard tongues at the boys beneath her veil in church, six weeks later so foul and pitted that her headdress at mass was thick as a winter curtain and everyone who sat near to her said they could hear her sobbing behind it. The story was that she asked to be put into a convent because she could not bear to be among sweet faces anymore. For who would possibly want her now? Oh, dear God, what if this one still has the disease, or some other kind of pox slides in through the windows here? They would all be dead or maimed within weeks. No. Please, please, Virgin Mother, don’t let such a thing happen!
Love opened my left side with his right hand, and there within my very heart he planted a laurel tree, so green that its rich hue exceeds the color of all emeralds.
She can feel hot tears flowing again. Ha! Outside she registers the footsteps of the watch sister moving into the cloisters on her rounds, and she moves swiftly to blow out the candle, so swiftly that the wax from the flame spatters onto her fingers.
She winces from its heat, then registers the change as it coagulates and sticks to her fingers. Hot wax. Like a seal. Of course! A seal. Yes!
As soon as she finds bigger stones, she will use the candle to seal the paper around them. At least that way she will be ready when he comes. Because come he will. She is sure of it.
THESE THINGS ZUANA has never seen and probably never will:
The ocean
The great veins underneath the earth where precious metals grow
The monster known as the lamia
A newborn baby
The insides of a dead person
Though when it comes to the last she has been closer than most.
HER FATHER WAS by no means the first to take his knife publicly to a human corpse. By the time he stood up in the lecture hall of Ferrara University his butcher’s apron tied around him, anatomical dissection was already an accepted part of medical education in cities such as Bologna and Padua. (The great Vesalius himself worked for many years in Padua, and it was there that he laid the foundation for his book on the fabric of the human body; this is a fact Zuana has known for so long that she cannot remember anymore when she was told it first.) But thanks to scholars like Mancardi and Brasalola, Ferrara was not far behind, and by the time she was old enough to understand the difference between a vein and a muscle a public dissection was taking place under the auspices of the university every other year: an audience of a hundred or more medical students bundled into thick cloaks and hats, packed alongside a few strong-stomached Ferrarese citizens with the curiosity and appetite to look inside themselves.
The event was held either in one of the regular lecture rooms, makeshift stacked seating arranged as best they could to allow as many people as possible to see the corpse espaliered on the table, or, later, when the crowd grew too large, in a nearby church specially commandeered for the process. In both cases the spaces were bitterly cold, the tang of preserving alcohol a persistent incense in the air. Dissection was, by necessity, a winter business, with windows and doors kept open so the bodies remained fresh over the two or three days it took to complete the process (though when it came to work on living dogs and pigs, it meant you could hear their terror and agony halfway round the town).
At moments when convent weather spikes to the bone—as it does now—or a task in the dispensary demands the same preserving fluid, or some feast day calls for the slaughtering of one of the pigs, their high-pitched squealing echoing through the cloisters, then Zuana is instantly pulled back: imagining herself as a young woman, beside herself with anticipation as she peers down at the table, her father’s voice booming out across the hall as he makes the first incision along the collarbone and down the side to create the skin flap which, when lifted, will expose the breastbone and the lungs and finally the heart underneath.
Alas, it is a dream that never happened. Oh, the sensations were real enough: the smells (her father stank of them when he returned that night), the cold, the hysteria of the penned waiting animals, which always seemed to know what was to happen to them, and the parallel sense of rising excitement in the streets as the students queued and then finally dispersed after the spectacle. But the rest took place behind closed doors for her. It was not for want of trying. By the age of fourteen she knew enough in theory to recognize most of the organs the knife would have revealed. And by sixteen she was tall and broad enough that with a cap and gown she might even have got lost in the crowd. But her father was adamant. While she might stand next to him in the study measuring and mixing, or help him in the gardens gathering herbs and roots—even down to the mandrake, which looked like a miniature human body as it was pulled squealing from the earth—while together they might trace a man’s insides through the study of a hundred woodcuts, when it came to witnessing the actual flesh flayed back to reveal the wonders beneath, to understand this divine creation in all its glory as God had made it, that could never be woman’s work, even to a mind as big as his.
She had come close to defying him once. Had got as far as hiding a cloak and a hat, left over by different visitors, ready to slip out as soon as he was gone. But he seemed to sense her excitement and chose not to leave the house until the dissection was almost due to begin, so that by the time she could get out, the lecture hall was already exploding with bodies and the waiting line stretched halfway down the street. Later, when his death had them all running in circles working out what to do with her, she wondered if he had already begun to question whether the young woman he had so lovingly filled with his knowledge might not be becoming a liability to herself as much as a treasure to him.
Perhaps he had thought he would live forever. She certainly had.
Thus her medical experience had been severely circumscribed, so that now in order to penetrate the insides of the human body she must rely on books: muscles, sinews, viscera, bones, and blood, all reduced to flat patterns of black lines on a white page. Had she kept the volumes of Vesalius’s great anatomical work—oh, if only! — she might have been able to educate herself afresh each time she opened its pages, for there was nowhere his knife and his curiosity had not penetrated. But when the scavengers descended after her father’s death, a few key treasures had walked out of his study before she had had the time or wit to hide them; Vesalius’s fat volumes had been the greatest loss. As for the bodies in the flesh—well, though she might feel swellings or catch glimpses through or under the habits of the convent women when their pain was great enough to disturb their modesty, any understanding of a man’s body was to be forever denied to her.
Except, that is, for one.
For she, like every one of her sisters, spends each and every day in the presence of the most singular, perfect male body: that of God Himself made flesh.
In this—although it would, no doubt, shock those in the church hierarchy to hear it—the convent has been, for Zuana, its own medical school. Because Christ’s body is everywhere: in the altars and nave of the main church, open to the nuns when it is closed to the city; in their own chapel behind the altar, where they pray eight times day and night; on the walls of the cloisters where they walk, in the refectory where they eat, even in the cells where they sleep. Everywhere. And in each and every stage of life and death: from the rosy plumpness of the holy baby reaching, arms outstretched, from Mary’s lap, through the beauty of a grave young man, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped under gathered robes, to the brutal step-by-step destruction of that same perfect body in its most exquisite state of manhood.
It is its destruction, however, that makes the greatest impact.
Over the years Christ’s naked, broken body has become more familiar to Zuana than her own, for not only is it everywhere, it is also lovingly, truthfully, anatomically depicted. She had recognized this in the very first days of her confinement: how the men who carved and sculpted the two most powerful crucifixes in Santa Caterina—the great wooden one that hangs above the altar and the more modest one set on the wall at the end of the main cloisters—were as informed about the human body as any anatomist, since for many years now any painter or sculptor with blood in his veins had made it his business to find his way into charnel houses or even those same lecture theaters that she had been denied, in order to perfect his craft.
In their hands, dead material became flesh. The very surface of the wood or stone appeared tender; you could see—feel— how the layers of skin were vulnerable to the sting and sear of the whip. The way the thorns pierced and hooked into the thin flesh of the forehead. The bowing of spine and shoulders under the burden of carrying the great cross. The force of the blows that sent iron nails smashing through tendon and bone, the knotting and screaming of the sinews as they took the body’s hanging weight, and how, once punctured, a man might bleed so copiously that, unless stanched, life could seep out through a single vicious opening.
On the crucifix in the chapel, the wound in Christ’s side has coagulated, so the edges of the gash lie open like thick scarlet lips with only a single ribbon of blood to be seen. But the figure in the cloisters has a deep fresh hole that weeps a river of brightest red, cascading down His side and legs onto the rock into which the cross is fixed. Even in the deepest winter mists, the fiery red stands out against the white skin, so that as they walk many sisters feel their eyes pulled upward to register the damage before moving on.
Of course not everyone sees or feels the same thing: this too was a revelation that came early to her. For some, usually the ones who come youngest or live longest, the very habit of such images has made them familiar, ordinary even—Christ’s death as a kind of furniture, glimpsed out of the corner of an eye when hurrying, late for office, or marking the usual route from one place to another. For others it is a reason, some might say an excuse, for decoration: the exquisite beauty of Suora Camilla’s silver crucified Christ or the ostentation of the abbess’s jeweled one.
Then there are the few—Suora Perseveranza is the most active—who in contrast find the experience of His suffering so constantly new and affecting that it makes them yearn to share the agony. Or those so moved by His resignation and loneliness on the cross that they are in danger of being constantly overwhelmed by the pity of it all. Before she had been confined to the infirmary, Suora Clementia could be found at all hours of the day and night huddled over the crucifixion in the cloisters trying to wipe the blood from His feet with a cloth. She had always been consumed by her compassion for Christ (more, it must be said, than she ever showed toward her fellow nuns), but recently she had spent so much of her life weeping that the abbess decided she would do better in with the sick. Zuana herself had been less sure. In many ways Clementia had seemed quite content being sad, and too many touched old souls together in the same place can create their own wind of madness. It is true that the old nun cries less now but, separated from familiar surroundings, what was left of her mind has slipped away with her sorrow, hence her distress and occasional night wanderings.
Still, better her than the ones who suffer for effect, parading His pain like their coat of arms. The worst offender here is Suora Elena, who spends her life telling anyone who will listen how much she endures. “Oh, I could not sleep last night because of the great stabbing in my side.” Or, limping into chapel wincing and groaning until someone is forced to ask her what is wrong, “Oh, it pleases God to let a thigh wound fester. I am grateful for it, though it is nothing compared with His suffering,” before limping off, smug in the knowledge that He has marked her out as more special than anyone else—though those with sharp eyes might notice how quickly she recovers her step when she thinks no one is watching.
ZUANA, IN CONTRAST, has never felt any of these things.
Her fault—for she understands that is what it is—lies in a different direction: the need to heal Him. So much is she her father’s daughter that by the time she became old enough to understand the Passion of Christ her instinct had been to save rather than worship Him. In her first weeks in the convent, when her future had felt like a life sentence, she had kept herself from despair during the endless hours in chapel by studying that great hanging body, detailing the ways in which, had she been called upon, she might have repaired the damage: which poultices and herbs she might have used to stanch the flow of blood, the salves with which she would have treated the whiplashes and the cuts, the ointments she would have rubbed around the jagged flesh to avoid infection. Even, most heretical of all, the draft she might have given Him to blunt the agony.
Had her father ever felt the same thing? She wonders sometimes what he would have made of this world in which she lives now. He had not been a total stranger to it. As a doctor at the university with connections to the court, he had occasionally been called upon to treat noble nuns, if their condition was dangerous enough and the abbess sanctioned his visit. Perhaps if he had taken her with him, she might have found it easier. As it was, she only heard these stories when he wrote them up in his treatment books. And out of those she remembers only one: the time he came back from a convent on the outskirts of the city where he treated a nun who had done violence to herself: first beating her head against the wall until the blood ran and then, when they confined her to her cell, somehow getting hold of a kitchen knife with which she stabbed herself a dozen times before they prized the weapon away from her. When he arrived she had been tied down and was delirious, her life dripping out through those dozen wounds onto the floor. So much blood had been lost there was nothing he could do except offer something to help her with the shock and the suffering. But the abbess had refused, convinced that the devil was inside her now and that if she was soothed by the potion he might renew his attack. “When I questioned them, they said no one had noticed anything amiss with her before that morning,” he had said, shaking his head, though whether from disbelief or pity he did not say.
She thinks about it sometimes, that story: how it could be possible that something so powerful should erupt out of nothing. In her experience, a well-run convent is as alert to the distress of its sisters as to any excess of joy, since either can tilt the balance of calm living. And even if it had been the work of the devil (and though she has come across mischief—even occasional malice—in this republic of women, she has yet to make the devil’s acquaintance), why had the abbess or the novice mistress seen no signs of it? So she gives thanks to God that when it came to the decision as to where she would spend the rest of her life, it had been Santa Caterina that had taken her in, welcoming her thin voice and her dowry chest as full of remedies as of prayers.
BECAUSE SHE HAS some understanding of the relationship between exhaustion and acquiescence, and because she does not want to resort to further potions to counter rebellion, Zuana finds herself taking a good deal of care in planning how she and the young woman begin their work together.
Over the first few days, as the effects of the poppy wear off, the impact of physical labor takes over: twice a day, every day excluding Sunday, either out in the cold tending the herb garden or inside cleaning the infirmary and the dispensary, sweeping and mopping floors, scouring pots and bowls, scrubbing down the workbenches. The eradication of previous ingredients to avoid the slippage of leftovers into new ones was a part of her father’s teaching, but Zuana has dismissed the conversa who usually does the heavy manual cleaning and uses her new assistant instead.
At first the girl’s resistance is palpable, her moods as storm-tossed as the weather: one day rage and rolling thunder with much slamming and crashing about, the next a hunched and haunted sadness, her shaking body turned defiantly away over the worktop, silent tears like unstoppable rain. Zuana does nothing to intervene. Better for her to vent her feelings through the scrubbing and scouring. At least that way she will tire herself enough to sleep at night and so, step by step, the process of acceptance may begin.
Though the convent rules allow for speech when necessary during working hours, Zuana makes sure these first days— whatever the emotional weather—pass in silence. Looking back on the memory of her own journey through those painful early weeks, she has come to understand how silence was part of the balm, albeit so slow and gradual that the physician in her found it hard to mark its progress. Now she finds herself studying it in another.
When they first enter, the young (particularly the more lively ones or those with less vocation) find it hardest to adapt to the restrictions on speech. The appetite for conversation is deeply embedded in them; it is there as they gather at table or in chapel, close enough to whisper but forbidden in both places to do so. Or in the way they move past one another through the cloisters during the quiet hours, unspoken words spinning out between them like glistening spiders’ threads. Watching them during those first weeks, Zuana has often thought that chatter is the hardest abstinence of all, harder to bear in some ways even than chastity, for while there is little temptation in that direction, the promise of careless talk is everywhere.
But with this girl it is different. Certainly there are other novices who are keen to talk to her, to draw her into their circle of gossip; Adrianna, Angelica, and Teresa are all as hungry for life as they are for God and the manner of her entrance has made her notable, with all kinds of stories in circulation about indiscretions with an older sister’s suitor or some mad passion for the dancing master. There is a fashion for nuns’ tales in cultivated circles nowadays, and a few of the more colorful ones have no doubt slipped in via the smuggler’s route of the visitors’ parlatorio. Or it could be that they simply make it up, fusing together bits of memory and longing. While Umiliana, in her role as novice mistress, sees only the devil in such gossip, Zuana is less disapproving: youth fades fast enough inside convent walls, and there are only so many hours when one can be on one’s knees.
Serafina, however, is not interested in their friendship. In fact, this incandescently angry young woman hardly speaks to anyone. And when it comes to those eight offices in chapel— well, while her lips move obediently enough to the words in her breviary, no voice comes out of her mouth, though whatever strain her howling might have caused has long since passed, soothed by the dandelion tea that Zuana makes each afternoon and which they drink together before the girl is dispatched to Umiliana for further novice instruction.
Tomorrow, however, will come their first day in earnest on the bishop’s remedies, and the rhythm of work will change between them.
THEY MEET THAT morning in the herb garden straight after Prime in a knife-sharp wind. The task: the harvesting of figwort root, the freshness of which is vital to the first recipe. The ground is so hard they have to use skewers to penetrate the top-soil, and the bitter weather collides with the girl’s morning tiredness, so that by the time they come inside she is almost blue, teeth chattering uncontrollably, too frozen even for resistance. The fire under the cauldron comes as a powerful relief, as does the ginger and molasses ball Zuana now gives her to suck, the slow release of warmth radiating through her body. Strictly speaking, such refreshment during work hours is against the rules, but they are starting the exacting business of measuring and making today, for which Zuana needs her full attention, if not her goodwill. Equally, the rule of silence within work hours is dependent on the nature of the task in hand, and if the girl is to be of any help as an assistant she is going to have to understand as well as to obey. It is time to start talking. Particularly since the bishop’s afflictions, while not life-threatening, are a somewhat delicate matter, affecting, as they do, both ends of his body.
The harvested figwort root sits on the table between them, dirty clumps of misshapen fleshlike nodules. Zuana explains the reason for them as simply—and as plainly—as she can.
“Ugh! How revolting.”
For the first words after so much silence, they erupt out of her with almost endearing energy.
“And extremely painful. Those who suffer from it say it is like trying to pass great lumps of itching, burning coal that can never be expelled. It leaves the sufferer in an almost perpetual bad temper.”
“How do you know this?”
“He told me.”
“What? The bishop told you that he had these …these things?”
“Hemorrhoids. Piles. Certainly. The last time he visited he could barely sit down to eat the feast the kitchen had prepared for him and complained about everything. The conversa who cleaned his rooms heard him groaning in the outhouse, and the next day there were specks of blood on the sheets. The urine from his chamber pot confirmed the diagnosis.”
She watches the girl’s face crinkle in further disgust. The young are always repulsed by the afflictions of their elders. What was it her father used to say? That it took a saint or a doctor to seek pleasure in the suppurating indignities of decay. Still, there is also a macabre fascination to be found in the grotesque.
“And—as you will see—the remedy is apt enough.”
“Ugh,” she says again, staring down at the figwort. “They’re as revolting as the disease.”
“Exactly.” Zuana laughs. “That is the secret. You have never heard of signifiers? The power of correspondence? The way certain plants are shaped by God to show us the ailment they heal?”
The girl shakes her head.
“Oh, it is one of the great wonders of nature. I have books if you want to study it further. This is a perfect example. One warty nodule to cure another. You would be astonished how elegant and simple it is. You grate and boil the roots with pork fat and mushroom until they are all dissolved, then leave the mixture to congeal. The figwort reduces the swelling, the mushroom—smooth and soft—soothes the itching, and the pork fat provides the ointment, with a little lavender added at the last minute to soak up the smells. It works on character as well as constitution. Most doctors believe that if the heretic Luther had found a physician to treat him early enough he would never have needed to rebel against the true church.”
Though Zuana keeps her countenance somber as she says this, she is alert to the spark that ignites in those dark watching eyes. Even were the girl immune to wit (and Zuana already knows she is not), she needs the bishop to be a man of even temper as much as they all do.
“Here. Be careful how you handle it.” She hands her a clump of root. “It is extremely bitter to the taste and is not meant to be ingested. And it must be finely grated, with every bit used.”
The girl takes the figwort, turns it over in her hands, and brings it to her nose. Zuana thinks of all the other smells and tastes that she could demonstrate. But it will not do to hurry her.
They set to work side by side. After a while the silence between them becomes natural rather than imposed. The room throws up its own sounds: the spitting of the boiling water, the chopping and grating, the scrape of the pestle inside the mortar, the simple rhythms of repetition. The air grows warmer with the fire, and the crushed lavender starts to release its scent. If there is another world out there, it seems a long way away, even for those who might yearn to be in it.
Zuana glances across at her as she works. The girl’s hands against the wood of the worktop are pale and unmarked, smoothed and softened no doubt by night creams and perfumed gloves. If there had been suitors they would surely have enjoyed praising them. But underneath the prettiness the fingers have a deftness to them: given a task that takes some skill—the grater’s edge is sharp and does not distinguish between skin and root— she is dexterous and focused, showing a natural aptitude for it. Of course she is unhappy; how could she not be? But there is less energy at hand now to indulge it. This much Zuana remembers: how it is hard to be in constant turmoil when such a level of concentration is called for. While your mind might stubbornly refuse to be quiet during chapel or private prayer, it can sometimes be tricked into stillness through work.
On the workbench Matalius’s great illustrated book of plants lies open—at last, a botanist who draws what he sees instead of just repeating what the ancients tell him; she can hear her father’s voice, caught between praise and envy—alongside his own handwritten book of remedies, the paper crisped and spattered from years of dispensary use. While Zuana knows the process without looking, she makes the girl study each and every step of the texts and then has her read them aloud, to learn them better. Later she catches her flipping through the pages further when she thinks she is not being observed.
From cutting and measuring they move on to combining the ingredients. Serafina hands Zuana the grated figwort and watches as she folds it into the boiling pork fat, careful to keep herself out of spitting distance of the pan.
“You say that you told this …disease …from his urine,” she says, after a while.
“Partly, yes.”
“But how do you know just from looking at it?”
Over the years she has noticed that those novices who fight hardest often have the liveliest minds and are, without realizing it, looking for a place to accommodate them. Well, there is a whole world to absorb her here if she will only allow herself to become interested.
“I have a chart. It was my father’s—doctors use them. It marks the colors and the smell and the cloudiness of the liquid, so you can distinguish which area of the body is ailing.”
She shudders. “Ugh. I …I can’t imagine anything worse— studying an old man’s pee.”
“You’re right,” Zuana says, smiling. “Making sick people better is a disgusting thing to do. I cannot think why Our Lord spent so much time doing it.”
But that afternoon, while the mixture is simmering on the fire and Zuana visits the infirmary briefly to check on the condition of her bleeding patient, she comes back to find the young woman deep in one of the books.
THE NEXT DAY, Serafina’s mood changes again. She arrives with a drawn face and sunken eyes, ill temper issuing from her like a bad smell.
“Did you sleep badly?”
“Ha! How does anyone sleep well here when there is no night to sleep in?”
“I know it’s hard. It takes time to adjust to such a different rhythm. But you will find that you—”
“Get used to it? What, in the same way I will get used to lumps of fat floating in the soup or the moans that come from that madwoman who sticks nails into herself every night? Well, thank you, Suora Jailer, your wisdom is almost as comforting as the Bearded Sister’s.”
Zuana suppresses a smile. “I see you have come from instruction with the novice mistress.”
She scowls.
Suora Umiliana’s nickname is common knowledge. There is even a debate among the choir nuns as to how many years have gone by since the novice mistress last saw herself in any kind of mirror. To which they might fruitfully add, how many more of them would be like her if the rules against vanity weren’t so easily ignored?
Zuana can still remember the time, years ago now, when an old bishop with a new broom set out to ban reflecting surfaces entirely from the convent. It took barely a week for the first silver tray to arrive under a relative’s skirts, during which time a number of the nuns had spent their resting hours poised like Narcissus over the surface of the fishpond. The overzealous confessor recruited by that bishop didn’t last much longer. After six months of confessions where a queue of nuns kept him busy from morning till night with a litany of misdemeanors so trivial as to be unpunishable—except to the ligaments in his knees— he begged to be transferred to another convent. The day before he left they sang specially composed Vespers and slaughtered three chickens for supper. All in his honor, of course.
“It is an interesting question: what, if anything, smooth chins have to do with smooth souls. You might be surprised to find how quickly some women here start to feel a certain prickling under the skin.”
“Ho! You think I’m going to grow a beard as well as everything else?”
“Not necessarily. I think God has better things to do with His miracles. As I’m sure you have noticed already, we make room for both kinds here: smooth and hairy. Which means you will be able to choose.”
The girl stares at her for a moment, as if still teasing out the meaning from under the words. Zuana turns her attention to the worktable, arranging the pots into which they will put the congealing liquid from the pans to cool. She knows it is risky, saying such direct things, even indirectly, to a novice. But the girl has been given into her care by the abbess, and if she is to help her, then it can only be in the way she has helped herself: by telling the truth of how it is, alongside the wonder of how it might be for others.
Once she is back at work, the girl’s bad temper does not last long. They are halfway through the process of scooping the liquid into the pots when she makes it her business to ask about the bishop’s next remedy.
“His Holiness suffers from sore throats. So bad at times that he can barely swallow, let alone preach. We make him lozenges and syrup. Boiled treacle and honey, mixed with cinnamon, ginger, and lemon. Plus a few secret ingredients.”
“What are they?”
Zuana pauses.
“If I am to be your assistant, I should know. Unless you are worried I’ll sell them around town as soon as I get out.” There is possibly a touch of mischief in her voice now.
“Very well. When the mixture is simmering we shall add angelica, mithridate, pennyroyal, and hyssop. I doubt they mean much to you.”
“Why are they so secret, then?”
“Because as long as we are the only apothecary that uses them, the bishop’s physicians must remain faithful to us. A little diplomacy is needed here. The fact is, the bishop suffers from a third ailment—one of which he himself is unaware but that wounds others deeply.”
“What is it?”
“He has venomous breath.”
She snorts. “Did you tell that from his pee also?”
“You may laugh. But it is a serious affliction in a man who speaks the word of God. When the inquisition needed to get the old Duke d’Este’s French wife, Renata, to take communion as a test of her commitment to the true faith, he was one of the priests they brought in to persuade her, so that in the end she would give in just to stop his talking.”
“Is that true?”
“Why would I risk penance for your amusement? If you want to know more, next time you sit with Suora Apollonia at recreation, ask her about when the bishop came for his first inspection and she was one of the nuns who met him at the gates. She thought she was going to die from the experience.”
She sees it again as she tells it: Apollonia and Ysbeta, staggering their way into the infirmary with hands over their faces, fanning themselves like madwomen, making so much noise that the novice mistress of the day finally had to come in to hush them.
The disbelief on Serafina’s face gives her sudden pleasure. It is generally accepted that a little gossip can be as vital as prayer to the settling of a recalcitrant novice—well, accepted by everyone but Suora Umiliana, who is so immune to its contagious properties that most of her news is ten years out of date. Alone in her dispensary, Zuana suffers somewhat from the same complaint, but she can still dredge up a few tidbits when called upon. It has been a surprise to her, these last few days, how much she has enjoyed imparting them. But then she has never had such a vital young mind working alongside her in the dispensary.
“When I was young, my father had a fellow teacher at the university—a brilliant man by all accounts—whose breath was so foul that his students could not stand being in his lectures. When my father examined his mouth he found his gums were half eaten away with yellow pus and rot. Yet in other ways his humors were dry rather than moist. He lived on nothing but meats in sweet sauces and strong wine, so my father put him on a diet of fish and vegetables and water. After three months his gums stopped suppurating completely. But by then they were so shrunken that most of his teeth had fallen out, so the students could barely make out a word he was saying anyway. And thus does brilliance go to the grave unnoticed.”
“And your father.” The girl’s expression is once again a mixture of horror and fascination. “I mean …he thought it was …good to teach you things like this?”
“I don’t know that he thought about it much. At the beginning they were more stories than lessons.” Was that how it started? she wonders. A hunger grown from listening? Or had it been that she had always wanted to learn?
“Well, I was never, ever told such stories. And certainly not by my father.” The girl shrugs. “But if your remedies for bad breath are that good, you should dose the old crone they have put me next to in chapel. Every time she opens her mouth, it smells as if something has died in there.”
Ah! The weapon of Maria Lucia. When kindness fails, the temptation to punish takes over. Zuana skims off the last of the ragged surface of the ointment, ready to move the pots to the outside ledge of the window for the cold to congeal them. It is time to move from gossip to the business in hand.
“I’m afraid I can do nothing for Suora Maria Lucia. Her gums are already rotted beyond my skills. However, there is one thing you could do.” She pauses. “Start singing. The minute that happens, you’ll find yourself moved to sweeter air fast enough.”
SHE HOLDS HER hand steady and tilts the candle a little more to the right over the folded edge of the paper. The thin hot wax dribbles onto it, and she presses the two sides together quickly. They stick for a few seconds, then spring open again. The failure makes her want to scream, but instead she closes her eyes and tries again. The same thing happens once more, only by now the paper is filthy with the grease stain. The problem is the wax; it is tallow, cheap and runny. The cell already stinks of its smoke, sour and fleshy, like the animal parts it comes from. It makes her eyes water and stuffs up her nose.
At home, she and her sister said their prayers to the smell of scented beeswax: two candles in silver candlesticks by the bed, with the satin sheets turned down ready, the clay bed warmer folded in at the bottom. Their knees rested on the thick weave of a rug, and when they were finished the maid would brush their hair a hundred and fifty strokes, until it gleamed, warm as a cloak, around their shoulders. Yet here when the foul Augustina unpins and pulls off her headscarf, her hair hangs in rat tails, abandoned and filthy. She hears that some of the novices pay their conversa to wash and even brush it dry. But for that she must find herself another conversa and she is not willing to do what is needed to make that happen—in the same way that she will not take the rug from her chest and lay it over the stones, even though the floor would be less unforgiving on her knees— because it would be admitting in some way that this was now her home.
She would dearly like a little comfort, though. Sweet Jesus, she has never been so tired. It is more like being imprisoned within a Greek myth than a convent, one of those stories where the gods’ punishment is fashioned as an endless repetition of the same horror. For days on end she has done nothing but the crudest, cruelest manual labor: no rest, just another scrubbing brush on another surface, and then always more. Her limbs throb from all the rubbing and scouring and cleaning and lifting. Some mornings she is so exhausted that all she can do is cry; some nights so numb that there is not even enough energy for tears. Inside the workroom there have been times when the panic and fury have grabbed her by the throat and she has had to clasp her hands together to avoid smashing every bottle off the shelf. But if the magpie Zuana notices, she pretends that she doesn’t and just keeps on with what she is doing.
She has come close to refusing outright. “If you want it scrubbed cleaner, do it yourself.” She even said the words, under her breath though loud enough to be heard. But nothing came in return, only the sound of the older woman’s brush moving back and forth across the wood.
Stupid silence. Stupid rules. The only consolation is that at the end of every day before the bell sounds, she—the magpie— makes up this special tea, and they stop and drink it together (the nun is clever enough to know that unless she tasted it first she wouldn’t touch it either). And it is good—so good—like a river of spices moving warmth and sweetness down into every part of her body until even the worst of the tiredness feels soothed away.
Warmth. Sweetness. Love like the penetration of a sword blade. From scrubbing to praying. Prayer is a blade of goodness that will pierce to the very center of your being, filling you with mercy and grace.
As if the work wasn’t bad enough, every day she has to suffer the inquisition of the novice mistress, hairy chin and squashed face, eyes like burning pebbles, trying to pry her open for the entrance of His love.
Talk to Him. He is waiting for you. You are His child as well as His betrothed bride, and He is always listening for your voice. He hears before you speak, feels before you have felt it yourself. Each prayer, each silence, each office that you offer Him brings you closer to comfort, to the great joy of His love and the final wondrous embrace of death.
Huh. The more she talks, the more you can feel your insides squirming. But you cannot not listen. You can be angry sad, desperate. You can fear her, laugh at her, even hate her, but you cannot not listen to her. Some of them are already turning. She can see it, see them getting teary-eyed with the prospect of so much joy. But when you are tired all the time, even the word comfort makes you want to give in, and resisting further seems more than it is possible to bear.
So it has gone, day after day. There are nights when she has been asleep almost before she lies down. Then, what seems like minutes later, they are hammering on the door to get her up for Matins. She sleepwalks into the chapel, props herself upright against the wood (if there is indeed a whole city at her back, she is far too tired to look for it), and moves her mouth over the words: no understanding, no thought. She might even be asleep. Others are. Yesterday one of the novices fainted—just heaved a great sigh and keeled over. What was it? Had she seen anything? Been pierced by some vision or some sign? That’s all they wanted to know. Ha! The poor girl probably just saw a feather bed by the altar or a plate of roasted pork rising up within the candle smoke, and the smell of it overwhelmed her. She herself has barely eaten anything for weeks, the food is so foul. Wait until the feast days, they all say. You will taste heaven then. But for now there are just fatty meats and watered wine. And cabbage. Sweet Jesus, if she has to eat any more cabbage she will surely start passing green water. Maybe the dispensary magpie would have a remedy for that, too. Certainly she would be able to diagnose it. God knows she can diagnose and cure everything else.
Oh, but she is a weird one, this Zuana bird, in some ways the weirdest of them all. Kind and fierce. Sweet and sour. And clever—there are times when she barely understands what she says, it has so many layers to it. She is a law unto herself. She makes a fuss about rules of silence and work and abstinence, and then a few days later breaks them all by serving ginger sweets and telling all manner of outrageous stories. All that stuff about beards and souls, heretics and bishop’s boils and poisonous breath. Even the novices when they are alone together do not gossip in such a way.
Of course, she is trying to coax her out of rebellion, just like the rest of them. Using stories in the way her father did (oh, he must have been a lunatic to teach his daughter such things), so that you can almost feel your eyes widening with surprise, and before you know it you are interested in what comes next. No piercing with swords of love here, just God’s great plan through herbs and clumps of filthy roots. No wonder she ended buried in this tomb. Who else would ever have had her?
She tilts the candle again, and now the wax moves too fast and the flame almost drowns in its own juice. She steadies her hand. Once it has gone out, it can’t be relit until the watch sister comes around at Matins with a taper. Even then you have to be careful. If she sees you have no candle left it will be clear you’ve been awake later than the appointed hour and you might be liable to penance for disobedience.
Not all those who disobey are found out, though. She’s not so tired that she hasn’t worked that one out. The last few nights when she’s opened her door a crack—the watch sister’s rounds are regular enough to be circumvented if you have the concentration to time them—she’s been able to make out flickering lights under two or three of the others. One belongs to Suora Zuana, but she has dispensation for working late (though she, too, must be dropping with exhaustion, for during all the days of cleaning she never stopped, either), as does the fat-faced sister from the scriptorium, because it seems she is writing some play or other for Carnival.
Suora Apollonia, though, has no such permission. But then to look at her you would think she is at court still, all those lacy collars and silky skirts, not to mention the hours she must spend on her toilette. Really! She has the whitest skin and the most perfectly plucked eyebrows. She must have a source for extra candles, too, since at Matins she always seems to have the same amount left as everyone else. As the supply is controlled by the chief conversa, who oversees the storerooms, there has to be a black market operating. Again, it depends on which conversa serves you, so for now there is nothing she can do; alongside her brutality, Augustina has proved incorruptible when it comes to bribery. She barely speaks, and appears—or pretends—to understand nothing that is said to her.
Well, until she gets another servant she must make do with what she has. It could be worse. When she takes the time to curb her panic, she can see that. Yes, this place is foul beyond words. But had it been a convent in Milan, the abbess would have known the family, no doubt have heard the gossip, and alerted them to the fuss she was causing. Here she was still an ordinary rebel rather than one with the mark of Cain. They have even given her work in the one place where she might learn something useful, if she keeps her wits about her. She is lucky that way, for she has always had a good memory. He had only to sing a melody once for her to have it. Not that anyone else cared. Certainly not her father. He had only had her voice trained as a complement to her dowry, to go with a pretty face and a docile temperament. Like her sister. Her sister—ha! — who was so “shy” her eyelashes couldn’t help but flutter whenever a man who was not her father looked at her.
She gets up and rolls the blanket back against the bottom of the door to block any sign of candlelight. It is almost time for the next watch round. When she returns to the table the candle is sputtering again, the wick curling over into the thin lake of hot wax. She tries to lift it up to save the flame but it spits once, twice, then goes out. She gathers up the drops around the wick, fast to avoid the burn, trying to flick them onto the paper while still molten, but in the dark it is useless. She can feel tears at the back of her eyes as hot and angry as the wax. Self-pity. Self-pity born of tiredness, that is all the tears are, and she will not give in to them. She lies down on the bed and curls the blanket around her. Once the watch has gone by she will get up again.
She has promised herself that in between watches tonight, with or without the candle, she will move out of the cell and time how long it takes her to get as far as the gardens and back, so she can start the routine.
But by the time the sister passes her door, she is deeply asleep.
ZUANA REGISTERS THE watch sister’s footsteps and looks up from her books, stretching her spine to counteract the ache in her lower back. The candle on the desk is half burned. It is well past the hour of retirement, but all this caring for the novice has left her no time for other work, most important the condition of young Suora Imbersaga in the infirmary, and she has asked for, and been given, permission to stay up a few hours later. The geranium and willow compound she tried had stemmed the bleeding for a while, but that morning the young woman passed another clot of blood, and she has become weaker since. When Zuana checked on her after Compline her face had been ghostly pale, though her pulse was stable.
The woodcut diagram in front of her shows a view of a body’s intestines. The face is blank, with arms and legs crudely drawn, but from the stomach down there are a mass of diagrammatic lines, with arrows coming out of each and every area. As far as she can ascertain, the problem in the young woman’s body is coming from inside the womb. In her experience once a woman starts flooding outside of her moon cycle, the problem can quickly become grave; it is as if the womb somehow loses the will to stay healthy without children growing in it. But what if it is not that? What if the bleeding comes from some tear or obstruction within her kidneys? It would certainly explain the pain; her father often spoke of stones being expelled through the urethra and how as they passed down from the kidney men would writhe and cry out in an agony worse than any torturer’s screws. Yet if that is the answer, why has the only expulsion here been liquid and not mass?
She closes her books and kneels to say her final prayers. Her knees crack as they reach the ground. She will be forty years old soon, too old to spend her days scrubbing floors and worktops, though remembering the last few days and the novice’s newfound curiosity, she does not regret it. Before it can start to bring comfort, the discipline of service must first take its toll. In this she and Suora Umiliana would no doubt agree. She thanks God for her health and prays for His help in allowing her to continue her work. She asks Him to guard and take care of young Sister Imbersaga, in pain in the infirmary, and for all the other nuns within these walls, both sick and well. She prays for the souls of her mother and her father and for all those who continue his work helping and training others; for the benefactors of the convent and all their families; to hold them within His love and guide their journeys through life and, where necessary, to lessen their stay in purgatory. And finally she prays for the journey of the novice, who, while still angry and confused, seems—with His infinite love and mercy—to be showing signs of a willingness to settle. God be praised.
When she finishes, she gets up and goes quietly to the door, opening it and stepping out into the corridor, from where she is able to make out any crying or distress from the infirmary below. But everything is still and quiet.
She stands for a moment taking in the atmosphere of the convent asleep around her. Out in the silence, from somewhere on the other side of the walls, comes the sound of a man singing—as he rolls home from a night in some drinking hole, no doubt. It is a fine voice: light but full, an edge of longing in its rises and cadences. The language of love. The song ends, and in the quiet that follows she hears the trill of a night songbird, indignantly protecting its territory from all intruders. As she stands there listening to its bright and insistent voice, her tiredness falls away and a feeling of sudden well-being floods through her: the sense of man and nature interlocking, the order and the beauty, both within God’s plan. And she here now, hearing, receiving it.
Matins tonight will be a cause for special celebration, even if Christ’s body does not move for her on the cross. She wonders if she should look in on Suora Magdalena. Letizia, her conversa, has reported that she has been agitated recently, but she is mindful of the abbess’s exhortation to keep herself free of the watch sister’s jurisdiction, and she does not want to meet her on her rounds.
Around her, the convent is in total darkness, no telltale candle glow from anywhere. Matins will come fast enough now and she should sleep. As she closes her cell door another man’s voice lifts up, this one deeper and darker but equally fine, offering up a swooping run of notes, as if in playful competition with the bird. There is always something to show God’s wonder. She smiles. It will need a fat rook or a crow to rival this one.
“I DON’T SEE why we cannot at least ask.”
“Because it would not be fitting, that is why.”
Half an hour into chapter, and the convent factions are already happily at one another’s throats.
A watery twilight filters in through a row of high-set windows, and despite the weather the place is warm from the heat of so many bodies. Gathered together they make a strange tribe: novices on one side, converse on the other, and in the middle a great swath of choir nuns, with the abbess on a raised dais at the end, immaculate in her newly pressed robes. Zuana looks out over the great room. There are times when she feels as much sense of community here in chapter meeting as she does in chapel. A stranger coming upon them now might see only a flock of identical black-and-white birds—magpies is the most common joke—but for those with sharp eyes the differences are there as soon as you start to look.
The most obvious are the deformities. As in many cities, Ferraras marriage market is cruel; it is easier to find a camel going through the eye of a needle than a cripple or a humpback being serenaded into her wedding bed, and Santa Caterina has its fair share of the rejects. Yet as they become familiar, are they really so monstrous? Consider Suora Lucrezia, sitting two rows in front of her. The first impression would shock anyone, since she was born with a gaping cleft where her upper lip should be. But if you could stop gawping long enough to lift your gaze from her malformed mouth to her eyes, you would find yourself drowning in pools of deepest lapis lazuli. Then there is Suora Stefana, whose peach-down skin and perfect Cupid’s-bow mouth might have poets outversing themselves, if it wasn’t for the fact that they would have to negotiate their way around the great question mark of her spine in order to find her assets.
But the ones who twist Zuana’s heart are the twin sisters, Credenza and Affiliata. It appears their love for each other was so great from the start that they could not bear to leave the togetherness of the womb. Credenza was pulled out first, and the newfangled tongs they used—though they saved her life—left her with such a mangled right leg that she walks like a listing ship. Affiliata, who came five minutes later, might win an army of suitors on the sweetness of her smile alone, except that after a while one senses an unnerving vacuity behind it: not surprising, perhaps, since it was her head that the tongs squeezed to get her out. Put together they would make a whole woman and a good wife for some great nobleman. As it is, in lieu of better offers, they are wedded to Christ and each other.
Zuana finds herself smiling as she looks at them, sitting together as always, robes spread generously to hide the fact that their hands are linked. Like the rest they are busy watching and listening. In the refectory everyone must keep her eyes on her plate, and in chapel they must address themselves only to God. But in chapter—oh, in chapter! — they may look at and talk with whomever they wish. And the greatest freedom of all is to be able to disagree.
“But why is it not fitting? Everyone wants to hear him, and there is still time within our Carnival calendar for such an event.”
“Really, Suora Apollonia! Do you think Our Lord would approve of such a thing?”
In the front row, Umiliana is in fighting form. With the city still reeling from the d’Este marriage and the climax of Carnival barely six weeks away, she has much to get agitated about. While Ferrara does not go as mad as some cities (Zuana’s father would tell tales of how in Venice, where he grew up, they slaughtered pigs in the main square, covering half the assembled government with blood), still the possibilities for mischief are manifest. Soon the streets will be packed with revelers, and everything, including convent rules, will bend a little to incorporate them. The convent itself will perform a short theatrical piece on the martyrdom of Santa Caterina, written by their wordsmith copyist Suora Scholastica, in front of a specially invited audience of women benefactors, and there will be a special concert in the parlatorio for families and friends of both sexes. Meanwhile, some of the city’s best-known musicians will pass by or even stand inside the portico of the main gates so the nuns can listen to them.
The talk this year is all of the new singer the duke has brought back from Mantua, a man with a voice so high and pure that every woman who hears him bursts into hot tears of envy. He has had to lose his manhood to achieve it, but according to Suora Apollonia’s aunt, herself a regular at the duke’s most intimate soirees, he is happy enough with his state. While such men have been talked of before, this is the first time one has ever been in the city, and such is the excitement that the convent is in debate as to whether, given the curtailed state of his manhood, he might be allowed to visit and give a recitation of his artistry.
“I don’t see why not.” Suora Apollonia raises her artfully plucked eyebrows in feigned innocence. Still a creature of the court as much as of the cloister, she can always be relied upon to fight for her—and others’—pleasures. “I mean, since he is not even a true he anymore, as long as he—or whatever he is—is a good Christian and comes with Suora Standini’s family in attendance, surely it does not infringe on any rules that we are bound by.”
A murmur runs like a breeze through grass. A castrato in the parlatorio? Whatever next? The novices, who attend chapter and can even speak if they have the courage, though they are not yet allowed to vote, can barely contain their enthusiasm at such a level of drama. Zuana locates Serafina among them. She had started out the meeting with her usual closed expression, but even she is visibly interested now.
“I am against it, Suora Apollonia—as you should be— because our duty is to serve God humbly and quietly without worldly distraction, not be blown off course by each and every scandal or petty novelty. And Carnival is a living source of such temptation, as this convent knows only too well. It is bad enough that in the lead-up to such debauchery we will have to suffer every would-be minstrel of Ferrara parading around the walls, serenading chaste women who do not want to hear them.”
Protecting her novice flock from the contamination that she sees seeping like rotten damp through the convent walls has become Suora Umiliana’s lifework. Certainly, without her, chapter would be a more mundane, even boring affair.
“Oh yes, indeed. In fact it has started already.” Where the novice mistress goes, Suora Felicità is never far behind. “Surely I am not the only one who was kept awake last night with the noise? Two of them, one with a voice as deep as the chapel bell, marching up and down, howling like lovesick puppies. But at least theirs were proper men’s voices, created by God, not the barber’s knife. Our novice mistress is right. Such a ‘half-man condition is an abomination of nature. Wouldn’t you agree, Suora Benedicta?”
“Oh, dear. Oh, I simply cannot say, for I have never heard one of them.” Zuana has to drop her eyes now, she is so close to smiling. Caught between her passion for new voices and the desire not to have her choir’s thunder stolen by some foreigner who has given up his genitals in the service of court employment, Santa Caterina’s radiant choir mistress is floundering. She sighs. “From what I hear, they have the ability to reach and sustain the highest notes with miraculous ease, but whether they can deliver the passaggio or the subtlety of decoration of a good soprano— well, those who witness them all say different things.”
Zuana glances toward Madonna Chiara, but the abbess’s expression gives nothing away. She sits with her fingers curved perfectly over the ends of the carved mahogany arms of the great chair, her head bent to one side, then to the other, the better to follow the discussion. The more seriously she is seen to take each and every opinion, the less those who lose the argument might feel they have not been listened to.
“Then how wonderful if we might be able to make up our own minds. It is Carnival, after all. We cannot pray all the time and can hardly avoid hearing what goes on in the streets.” Suora Apollonia is so excited there is a hint of color spreading through her whitened cheeks. “If seeing him is so corrupting, he could just come to the gate and we could stand inside and listen.”
“I agree.” Suora Francesca from the embroidery room is already aglow with the prospect of so much cleansing joy and laughter. “Other convents go much further than this. Everyone knows that last year when Corpus Domini performed their Carnival play they ‘accidentally’ left a portion of the main door open so that half the men in the city could see in.”
“Hargh!” In the silence that follows Umiliana’s strangulated bark, everyone waits for the intercession of the abbess. A series of glances move like crosscurrents through the room. Zuana seeks out Serafina again. Oh, yes, now her eyes are shining. It suits her, she thinks, such unguarded pleasure.
The silence grows. One, two …Zuana finds herself counting. Three, four …She is good at timing, is their spiritual leader. Five, six …
“You are absolutely right, Suora Francesca.” The voice, when it comes, is deep and commanding. “Corpus Domini indeed did as you say. And ended with a severe reprimand from the bishop for their pains—and the imposition of a penance that means this year they will perform no play at all.”
She pauses to let the words sink in.
“When it comes to music, I have no doubt that this ‘creature’s’ voice would be most interesting, though from what I have heard, Suora Benedicta is right and what he gains in range he gives up in subtlety. However, in this matter I think we should be led by our most reverend novice mistress. We would not want to be seen to be so eager for praise that we seek out competition from such a dubious source. I do not have to remind you that it was not so long ago that the good bishops at Trento ended their Herculean labors of purifying the church in the face of the grossest heresies by directing their attention to convents.” And here she looks directly at Suora Apollonia. “While we are blessed that our own dear bishop has seen fit to protect us from the fiercest of their restrictions, it would be unfortunate indeed if some ‘misdemeanor’ on our part drew attention to that which should be beyond reproach.”
While the words are mild, the message is clear. Apollonia’s perfect eyebrows meet now to form a perfect frown. But she bows her head and holds her tongue. When one is outmaneuvered in chapter, it is better to give in graciously.
“Besides,” the abbess says, more lightly now, “I have it on good authority that his Carnival calendar is fully booked. I daresay the only people outside court who will hear him will be those passing the open windows of Palazzo Schifanoia.”
A few stray titters rise up from the room. Palazzo Schifanoia is notorious for its great salon filled with paintings of pagan gods and goddesses enjoying the world—and at times each other. Though the rule of Saint Benedict is clear on the corrosive nature of careless laughter, it is also true that a healthy convent is a delicate mix of the sweet with the sour. It is a skill the abbess excels in, Zuana thinks: offering tidbits for those who thirst for novelty while at the same time supporting those who disapprove of it.
In contrast, Suora Umiliana remains stony-faced, seemingly unmoved by her victory. Recently she has started to find public fault in every chapter meeting. While the abbess has both the power and the strength of character to overrule her, she seems to be giving more ground than usual.
Zuana glances around the room. How many others, she wonders, are aware of the change? If the last election had not been a foregone conclusion, based as it was on the power of family factions within the city, it is conceivable that Umiliana might even be abbess herself now, for she is not without a following. Had that happened, Felicità would no doubt be her novice mistress, and together they would be tougher on all the souls in their care. There are a few, no doubt, who might be brought to a deeper comfort by their rule. But for the rest, all those noblewomen for whom these walls were never a free choice, it would be much harder.
As it was, Madonna Chiara had won with an indisputable majority, and the post of novice mistress had been Umiliana’s consolation prize. While no one had expected it to silence her, in a well-run convent it is better to have opposition inside rather than outside the fold. Zuana has begun to wonder if Madonna Chiara would still agree with that.
“Well, if that covers the entertainment, perhaps we might discuss the refreshments. Suora Federica, as cellarer, perhaps you will tell us your requirements? You will be needing to order extra stores, I think.”
“Oh, yes, indeed.” Federica, a florid-faced woman who runs the kitchens as if they were her own vassal state, has been waiting patiently for her moment. “For the cakes and puddings we will need two sacks of flour, extra sugar, vanilla, and at least three dozen extra eggs. Those expecting more than eight visitors must supply eggs from their own birds, as the convent chickens will be hard pressed to lay enough.” She directs this remark to Suora Fortunata, who keeps half a dozen hens in and around her spacious ground-floor cell and has a reputation for being insufficiently generous when it comes to donating their produce. “Also I will need more coloring dyes for the marzipan fruits. Suora Zuana?”
Zuana bows her head. In the years since she has been given an extra room to house her distillation equipment, Santa Caterina’s Carnival fruits have become famous around town for the veracity of their colors as well as their taste. “I will look through my stores for you.”
“Most particularly the red. The strawberries disappeared in no time last year.”
As much into the mouths of the nuns as the visitors’, Zuana thinks uncharitably. “I will do my best, but that dye comes from the bishop, not the distillery, and I have almost none left.”
She catches Serafina’s eye. They have already spoken of this in the dispensary: how in the outside world the cochinilla dye is a prized possession from the New World, traded at exorbitant prices by the Spanish: so expensive it is only since the convent took over as the bishop’s apothecary that Santa Caterina can rely on an occasional “gift” from the palace. Its reputation is well earned, for it turns everything it touches—from cardinals’ robes to women’s mouths—the most vivid shade of red. Federica, no doubt, has her head too much in her own ovens to notice how those nuns who gorge on her marzipan strawberries enter the first days of Lent with lips the same color as those of court ladies.
Such transgression is not lost on Umiliana. But for now, at least, this is too trivial a battle for her to fight. She frowns at Zuana. She regards her as her enemy in this, and she is right, though for the wrong reasons. Zuana is as eager for the dye as Federica, but that is because she has recently come across accounts of remedies that use it—in particular, one for breaking fevers—and until she has the opportunity to try it she is loath to give up her remaining stock for the sake of a few Carnival delicacies.
“Can’t we get more?” The kitchen mistress addresses the remark to the abbess. “It would be worth whatever extra trouble it took.”
“Oh, yes. We heard nothing but compliments in the parlatorio for months afterward.” Suora Apollonia, uncrushed by her earlier defeat, is back in force.
“We shall do what we can,” the abbess says mildly. “Suora Zuana is already at work on the bishop’s next order. I am sure His Holiness will be bountiful again in his thanks. How are you doing with the remedies?”
“They should be ready within the next week.” Zuana pauses. “I am much helped in this by our new novice, who shows aptitude and dedication in her work.”
Some sixty or so pairs of eyes swivel to the novice benches, where Serafina sits. As they do so, Zuana catches a flash of anger in the novice mistress’s face.
“Well, that is good to know. It seems Our Lord moves in wonderful ways to bring His beloved young lambs into the fold.” The abbess’s voice drips like thick cream. “We can only hope her ailing voice might recover in time to join us for the Carnival concert. It would be a great shame for a young woman to be isolated and constrained in her cell while the rest of the convent is so joyfully employed. Wouldn’t you agree, my child?”
And Serafina, taken aback by the sudden attention, drops her head hurriedly to hide the rising color in her cheeks.
“IT IS A risky business, giving a novice cause for pride while she is yet to master humility.”
“I simply told the truth. She is clever and a fast learner.”
The chapter room has emptied, but Zuana has been motioned to stay behind.
“Yes, well, the rebellious ones often are. Nevertheless, it would be better for the convent if all this ‘aptitude and dedication’ could be redirected toward her throat. The two of you talk together, I assume.”
“When we need to, yes.”
“Only when you need to?”
Zuana notices the lion’s heads on the arms of the great walnut chair, the way the manes have been worn smooth under the movement of centuries of restless fingers. It is no small thing, guiding the fortunes of so many souls. “If she is to be of help to me—to the convent—there are things she must know, questions she must ask and I must answer.”
“And?”
She pauses. “Her voice is clear enough when she talks.”
The abbess nods. “It is interesting. Even Suora Umiliana has time for her. More than one might have expected. Perhaps it is the challenge. She says there is spirit but that her soul is closed as tight as a fist.”
“If anyone can prize it open, it will be our good novice mistress.”
“True enough,” she says dryly.
At another time it is something they might talk about— Umiliana’s disapproval and its possible influence on some of the choir nuns—but it is clear the abbess has other things on her mind.
“I have sent a letter to her father, informing him of her distress and asking if there is anything we should know about her that might help us with her reticence. But the family is away and not due back for some weeks. It seems there is the rumor of a marriage—the younger daughter and a noble from Florence.” She sighs, as if this was not what she wanted to hear. “Tell me, the first night when you tended to her, did you notice anything in her dowry chest?”
“What kind of thing?”
“Lyrics, poems.”
“I—er, there were a few sheets of paper inside her breviary.”
“You read them?”
“No.”
“And you did not think to mention them?”
Of course she has thought about it since. But had she reported them and they were confiscated as a result, Serafina would have known beyond doubt that it was she who had betrayed her and any chance they might have had to forge a relationship would have been destroyed. Was that why she had said nothing?
“I …She came to us as a singer, and I thought they might be copies of songs. Madrigals, perhaps. Why? Has someone else found them?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Of course. She should have known it. Augustina may have blunt hands but her head is sharp enough to know where the real power lies. Zuana can see her bent inside the chest, rummaging for things it might be profitable to mention to others. As for the abbess? Well, unless she knows the things that are concealed, how can she decide whether or not they should be exposed? There are times when Zuana wonders if there are convents where godliness has expelled all trace of unwarranted commerce. If so, she really cannot imagine how they work.
The abbess sits for a second, her fingers playing with the lion’s mane.
“Possibly you are right. Certainly whoever wrote them had read his Petrarch extensively—indeed, one might say, swallowed it whole.” She pauses. “I daresay they would make fine song settings.”
“What will you do with them?”
“I have not decided. Confiscation at this stage would risk burning them deeper into her memory.” She sighs, as if this too were a decision not quite yet taken. “For now, they are back in her chest.”
“And Suora Umiliana?”
Another stroke of the fingers. “She is busy with her instruction. I am sure that once she hears the girl’s voice praising the Lord she will forget what else she was brought up singing.” She pauses. “Indeed, it would be better for us all if this novice found her voice soon. We will have half the court of Ferrara in chapel on the Feast of Saint Agnes. Perhaps some form of penance might have more impact.”
“From what I know of her, I don’t think that will help.” Zuana’s own first taste of penance had been sour to the mouth as well as the soul: table scraps laced with wormwood followed by an hour spent prostrate by the refectory door with the sisters stepping over her as they came and went, a few of the sterner ones deliberately miscalculating their stride and crushing flesh along with cloth underfoot. Her tears had been as much to do with memories of her father’s balms as any new closeness to God. Ever since she took over the dispensary she has kept a pot of calendula ointment for those who might find themselves in need of it. “I will do what I can,” she says quietly. “I did not ask for this burden.”
“No, no, indeed you did not. I imposed it upon you—for your own welfare as much as hers.” She pauses. “But then again, as burdens go, I do not think it is overpowering you. On the contrary, I would say that your spirit seems quite full with it.”
Now as they meet each other’s eyes, the abbess smiles for the first time. “Well, we will not be downhearted.” She smooths her skirts. “At least we are not entertaining a gelding in the parlatorio. The bishop would have had need of more than your suppositories to cure the fit of colic that would have brought on. Though it is a shame in some ways.”
“Is his voice so remarkable?”
“It would seem so, yes. Apparently he holds the high notes so long he creates his own chorus of vibrating crystals from the chandeliers in the duke’s palace. Imagine that. Perhaps Our Lord will see fit to let a few of them enter paradise just so we can have the pleasure of making—” Her eyes dart off to the side. “Ah, Suora Felicità. I did not see you hovering there by the door.”
“I am sorry Madonna Chiara.” The nun moves sheepishly from the doorway inside. “I did ask earlier if I might—”
“Yes, yes, so you did. Though I thought we had agreed …well, never mind, you may come forward. The dispensary mistress and I have finished our business.”
HE IS COME! He has found her! He was here last night, outside the walls, singing while she was asleep. Oh, it had to be him. He said he would come and he has. Two voices, one as deep as a chapel bell, that was what she said. If the other had been a perfect alto she would have known for sure, for there are few enough men who can span all twenty-two notes from the bass to the treble with such ease. How stupid she was to have fallen asleep. If only she could find out the words of the song he was singing, she would know immediately. But she dare not ask the old witch Felicità. Anything said to her would get back to the novice mistress within seconds.
She is so excited she can scarcely keep her hands still as she holds the candle. The flame flares and sputters. She forces herself to put it down on the table until she can recover herself a little.
It had to be him. Except …except such things do happen at this time of year. That is what everyone said: that men—on their own or in groups—parade around the walls singing madrigals, love songs. She remembers the madness in the streets around their palazzo; sees herself and her sister (always less docile when she was out of her father’s gaze) leaning out from the upper loggia catching blown kisses and declarations of love until they are chased back to their beds by a tutting nurse, who has been enjoying it as much as they have. Carnival: the triumph of misrule and mischief.
Recreation hour after supper was full of Carnival tales tonight, like the one told by Suora Apollonia—getting her own back on Umiliana, no doubt, for stopping the concert. How, many years ago, a group of nuns and novices had taken baskets of dried rose petals from the fumigant stores up into the bell tower and thrown them down on the crowds below, so that all the young men had started serenading them, singing love songs to Our Lord’s pure and spotless wives—except that some of them were still only betrothed. A few of the men had tried throwing up purses, and in one case even a rope to help them climb down. It had been such a scandal that from then on the tower had been locked permanently, with only the abbess and the watch sister holding the key.
Oh, if she could only get hold of that key, the view from the tower would show her half the city. But there must be other ways. If she could work out the general direction of his voice— it must have been him—she could get to the inside of the wall there and throw a letter over. She could use the new, fatter stones. She could do that, tonight even. Yes, tonight. She would stay awake all night if necessary.
She is far too agitated to sleep anyway. Oh, when Suora Felicità had said those words, a voice as deep as the chapel bell, it was as if a great fist had got into her chest and was squeezing her so hard she thought she would faint. Had anyone noticed? No, no, she didn’t think so. Everyone was twittering and muttering by then. A castrato singing in the convent. You would think it was the devil come to share their pallets. Really, they are like children with all their bickering and flapping. A great family of beaked sisters squabbling like a sack full of crows.
Crows. Ah, no one had mentioned birdsong. Maybe it was not him. Because if it was, surely he would have brought the instrument with him. They had talked about it: how she would be sure it was him from the sound of birdsong soon after his voice. They had agreed, hadn’t they? Except she could no longer quite remember. Those last few encounters had been so blurred with tears. It had all happened so fast. So fast …
The truth was that it had never been her intention to defy them all. When she was small she had been as eager as the next little girl that the angel Gabriel should be the first to pierce her heart. But instead it was Cupid who slid in through the window, and her father who opened it for him. By then he had already decided on the man she would marry—or, rather, the family name the man would bring with him. It had never occurred to him that a talented music teacher with no name might fly in and grab the prize first. It had been nobody’s fault. Or if blame must be apportioned, surely it should fall on the wonder of his God-given voice and the beauty of his settings of Petrarch’s sonnets, for the words of a great poet always water the seeds of love.
By the time the sanctioned suitor himself came to visit, she was already so besotted that she could barely bring herself to talk to him, let alone offer him encouragement. He didn’t care. The hour in his company was chaperoned by her sister, who excelled in flirtatious coyness—so much so that after a sleepless night (or so he claimed) he returned to announce that he would prefer the younger daughter instead. Since it was his name that was doing the choosing (the dowry would follow either girl), her father had been sanguine. “Well, we had planned for the younger one to serve God, but if she is willing—”
They only told her after her sister had agreed. By then she was so deep in love she thought for a moment it might even be good news. She and Jacopo—for this no-name singer did have a name, and a beautiful one at that—would take the smaller dowry and be glad of it. It cost so little to live on song.
Her father’s fury had torn the tapestries off the wall. Given the choice of an impoverished singing teacher or Christ, there was only one possible bridegroom. When she refused, he had locked her in her room and refused to let her out until she gave in. Between her stupidity and her disobedience was the fear that she was already compromised. When he found the teacher at the door whispering to her, he had thrown him out of the house and beaten her almost senseless, while her mother stood by howling. Within ten days she had been on her way to Ferrara, having bribed a servant to take the name of the convent to Jacopo so that he could follow her.
And he had. He had come for her. He was out there now, waiting.
But …but …a worm of doubt remains. What if, after all, it isn’t him? Oh, what if she is buried alive here for the rest of her life, listening for every bird that sings at night while another bit of her withers up inside and dies?
She glances nervously around the cell. The nun who was here before her had died of something exploding in her head. Part of her brains had spewed out of her mouth. That’s what one of the other novices had told her. Sometimes she thinks she can smell what happened here coming off the walls. She will go mad if she does not get out. It would be a great shame for someone to be so isolated and constrained in her cell while the rest of the convent is so joyfully employed. As the abbess had said it, you could almost feel how much she relished the idea.
They had all been staring at her by then. She had been as amazed as anyone by Suora Zuana’s compliment. What words had she used? Aptitude? Determination? No, dedication. That was it. But she didn’t really think those things about her. How could she? In which case, she had said it to be kind. Yet kindness might skewer her worse than malice, since now they will be watching her even more closely. The abbess, the novice mistress, all of them …
Her mind is racing so fast she feels almost sick. She has to quiet this mad skittering inside her so she can think straight. She takes her hands and clasps them together hard, getting down on her knees and bending over, all the force of her thought and feeling going into the words.
Dear God, please hear me. Please let it be him. Please make him sing again and let me find a way to contact him.
Only now it feels like another kind of madness: to be in this place and praying to God for help. If the Lord cared for her at all why had He let them put her here in the first place? She had done nothing. Well, almost nothing. A few furtive kisses here and there, the moistness of hands moving over skin and the touch of swelling tongues. They had sinned more inside the music; oh—their very souls had joined there. But no one could see that, except God Himself. Was it really so wrong to fall in love through voices? Was this His punishment? Could He really be so cruel?
Talk to Him. He is waiting, always, for the sign. We are His children, and He is listening. Umiliana’s exhortation slides into her mind.
“Forgive me.” She whispers the words. “Forgive me. And help me. Please.”
She kneels in silence, waiting. The edges of the stone flags dig into her knees, and she feels an ache from all the cleaning and scrubbing burn through her body. Gradually the noise inside her head clears, replaced by the throbbing pain, and she becomes a little calmer, more concentrated. “Thank you,” she says, savoring the stab in her knees. “Thank you.”
She gets up and goes to her chest. The excitement has been replaced by a sense of purpose. Under a cloth, next to the sheaf of papers, lie six stones, lifted from the edges of the herb garden the morning they had harvested the figwort. She picks up the largest and weighs it in her hand. It is smooth and full, as if something in the earth had been polishing it. Ha! She sounds like Suora Zuana. Rainbows in the sky, rivers of gold and silver in the earth, the cosmic spirit vivifying everything. Even stones have wonder for her. What madness!
Yet after they finished work today, when Zuana had brought out her lodestone and held it close to the metal spoon and they had watched the two almost leap together—well, that had been something she could understand, a force from within. Almost like the pull of music between her and Jacopo.
She goes back to the chest, rummaging farther till she finds what she is looking for: two petticoats, both silk: one red, one white. She lays them on the floor side by side. In the night on some cobbled path, which color will stand out more, the white? She moves the candle over it, but it looks gray and ordinary, while the red shines like a puddle of bright blood. Was this the color they were all talking about, the dye that paints lips, breaks fevers, and addresses melancholy? Wasn’t that what it had said in the book written by the dispensary sister’s father? Melancholy. Even the word is sad, like a gray fog suffocating everything it touches. There have been times these last few weeks when she has almost felt it creeping across the stones of her cell, in wait for the moment when she no longer has the energy to fight. But he has come, and that is not how she feels tonight.
My lady’s lips are red as rubies, and her hair is like a cloud of gold that is caught in the sun. But when she turns her back to me the day becomes night and frost is all around.
She takes the red petticoat and, tearing the fabric apart with her teeth, starts ripping it into thick strips. When she has finished she takes out two of the poems, turns them over, and begins to write.
IF ZUANA HAS been expecting gratitude from Serafina, she is quickly disillusioned. In fact, for a while she finds herself working alone in the dispensary, for things do not go well for the girl. That same night after chapter, the watch sister, who has been secretly instructed to increase the number of her rounds in response to the arrival of early Carnival singers, finds the novice skulking in the second cloister trying to get back to her cell, her hands frozen and her sandals caked with mud from whatever part of the gardens she has been wandering in.
When questioned, first by the novice mistress and then by the abbess, she refuses to say where she has been or what she has done. In absence of a confession, a more serious penance is imposed. She is confined to her cell for two days with only bread and water. Before she returns there the room is searched by Augustina and another conversa and certain papers are removed from her trunk. That night, her howling reverberates around the convent again. Zuana sits in her cell over her books, listening but unable to do anything. She, like every other nun, is forbidden to go near her. When the sisters move in procession through the cloisters at Matins, they hear the girl fling herself against her door as they pass her cell, raining blows against the wood until you might think either it or she must splinter from the force. The other novices glance nervously as they pass, and one of them starts crying. But when they emerge from chapel later, the banging and the yelling have stopped. From then on there is silence.
On the afternoon of the second day, Suora Umiliana spends an hour with Serafina in her cell and then accompanies her to dinner in the refectory, where the girl sits alone on the floor, her plate of leftovers thick with ash and bitter wormwood. The lesson, read by Suora Francesca with a slight quiver in her voice, is a teaching from Saint John Climacus, one of the desert fathers, who talks of repentance as the voluntary endurance of affliction, the purification of conscience, the daughter of hope, and the renunciation of despair. It is beautiful in its way, and a number of the nuns find their hearts lifting within them. When the meal finishes, the abbess instructs the girl to lie down in the doorway while the others walk over her, not all of them as carefully as Zuana.
To make matters worse, the next day is convent visiting.
It is not the first time Serafina has had to sit in her cell while others entertain (novices are forbidden outside contact for the first three months, a rule with some kindness in its cruelty, since meeting loved ones too soon can rip raw the wound of missing before new skin has had time to grow), but the growing excitement over Carnival gives this visit a special energy. The day afterward is the Feast of Saint Agnes, when there will be a special meal and a court audience for Suora Benedicta’s new psalm settings for Vespers. The parlatorio is full: almost two dozen nuns gathered in separate small groups, playing host to mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, nieces, aunts, and cousins, with such a noisy exchange of gifts and gossip that the casual passerby in the street might think they were eavesdropping on some court function rather than the visiting day of the holy order of Saint Benedict. Zuana, working alone in her cell (what little family she has left is in Venice and has long since left her to her fate), can make out individual sisters’ laughter, and even after the gates are closed and the convent is silent again, those who have played host to the outside world seem lighter, a little more radiant than the rest.
That night, somewhere on the other side of the walls, a perfect lone tenor sings of a woman with hair like a cloud of gold and cheeks like rose petals. The serenade lasts only a few verses, followed by the trill of a nightingale, and then the night silence returns.
THE DANDELION TEA is already brewing in the pot as the girl walks, eyes down, limping slightly, into the dispensary. Zuana pours out a bowl of it and puts it down next to a spiced ginger ball at her place on the workbench.
“Welcome,” she says brightly, keeping her voice matter-of-fact. “Sit and refresh yourself. We have a lot of work to do today.”
The rules of the convent are clear on such things. Penance, once over, is nobody’s business but the penitent’s and her spiritual adviser. And, of course, God. It is not to be referred to and certainly not to be pitied or commiserated over.
The muscles in the girl’s jaw tighten as she tries to swallow, and Zuana knows she is on the edge of tears. It would be better if she did not cry, and if she did, it would better if Zuana ignored it. “Drink the tea and eat the ginger,” she says quietly. “I have added extra herbs. They will address the stabs of hunger and give you some energy.”
Serafina takes a breath, picks up the ball, and takes a bite. Zuana imagines the honeyed spices oozing into her mouth, counteracting the leftovers of the wormwood plant, which can linger for days. When her father had first shown her the spiky leaves and made her chew an edge to taste their foul bitterness, he had told her of the entry in the Book of Revelation when the third of the avenging angels throws a star called wormwood from the heavens to earth, poisoning the rivers and fountains so that men died of drinking from them. That such an instrument of destruction might come from a simple plant had amazed her then. She wonders if she should remind Serafina of that story now, but the girl is too absorbed in her misery to be distracted.
The tears start to fall as she chews, but it is clear she has not given them permission and she sniffs angrily to try to pull them back. After a while, as she moves out her other hand to take the bowl, Zuana notices her wincing.
She takes a small clay pot from the back of the worktop and puts it down next to the drink. “Here.”
“What is it?” The girl’s voice is flat and thin.
“It is an ointment for flesh that has been pinched or crushed. It will bring out the bruise fast and lessen the soreness.”
“I thought penance was meant to hurt.”
“It is meant to help. At the beginning the two are not always the same thing.”
“Ha! Tell that to Suora Felicità.”
Zuana drops her eyes. While one is not meant to acknowledge the nuns who step hardest, of course everyone knows who they are.
The girl finishes the drink and pushes the pot away. “Was it you?”
“Me?”
“Who told them about my poems.”
And now they are trespassing into dangerous areas. Zuana says nothing, the shake of her head almost imperceptible.
“Who, then? Augustina can’t read.”
“No, she can’t.” She pauses. “However, she has a good nose for secrets…” She trails off.
The girl nods. Nothing more needs to be said.
“Here.” Zuana takes an apron cloth from the side and hands it to her. “Finish your drink. We have a lot of work. I prepared the ingredients for the syrups, but you are to do the mixing this time. That way, next time you will be able to make the whole remedy yourself.” She is aware of the implication in the words but she does not flinch. “Be careful, though. Boiling treacle sticks to any flesh it touches and can take a layer of skin off with it.”
The girl looks at her, finishes the drink in one gulp, and takes the apron.
Over the fire, the mixture thickens as it boils, but once she gets used to the weight she stirs it well enough. They work in silence, as they have so many other times over the last weeks, and it comes as a relief to both of them. On the worktop the spices sit, grated, chopped, and measured, alongside a small vial of brandy waiting to be added at the right time. As the ingredients fold into the treacle, the smell of caramelizing sugars suffused with cinnamon and cloves wraps itself around them. They are so much the aromas of Zuana’s own youth that if she closes her eyes now she can almost imagine herself back in her father’s company even down to the sound of his shuffling and clattering as he goes about his work on the other side of the room.
You must live more in the present and less in the past, Zuana. The abbess’s words move through her mind. It is for your own good. It will make you a better—more contented—nun and bring you closer to God.
She opens her eyes to find that the girl is staring at her. She moves her attention back to the mixture. A few moments pass.
“Those things you said about me. It was kind of you,” the girl says quietly a mumble almost, keeping her eyes on the pan as she does so. “I am sorry. I didn’t …I didn’t mean to let you down.”
The apology takes Zuana by surprise. While it is her duty not to feel any resentment toward the young woman, she has needed no effort to resist it. Neither—now she comes to consider it—has she felt any irritation or even impatience. On the contrary, there has been something about the girl’s presence over these weeks—her very refusal to be comforted or managed— that she has almost …what, enjoyed? No, that cannot be the right word. Sympathized with, perhaps? Or at least understood.
It is our duty to serve God humbly and quietly without worldly distraction, not to be blown off course by each and every scandal or petty novelty.
Now it is Umiliana’s voice she hears, coming back to her from the chapter meeting. Could this be what is happening to her? That she is being seduced by the novelty, the drama of it all? It is true that these days she wakes every morning wondering what the work hour will bring, even perhaps looking forward to its challenges. The idea disturbs her. It has been a hard-fought battle, the cultivation of serenity through the years, and she would not have it unwittingly undermined. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Serafina watching her again. “Keep stirring,” she says, a little sharply. “It is important that it stays moving at all times.”
The girl returns to the task. But after a few minutes she looks up again. “I …I need to ask you a question.” She pauses. “What kind of man is the bishop?”
“The bishop?” Zuana shakes her head. “It would be better for you to forget the bishop. He cannot help you.”
“He is the abbess’s superior,” she says stubbornly. “I think I have a right to know who he is.”
Zuana sighs. What were Madonna Chiara’s words on his appointment years before, when she was still a sister rather than the abbess? “As ugly as he is holy. But we will have to put up with him. Rome has had its eye on Ferrara ever since the last duke’s French wife, Renata, was found to be hiding heretics in her skirts.”
No doubt she would phrase it differently now, but the conclusion would be the same. Zuana is careful with her own words: “He has a reputation as a godly man and a reformer.”
The girl frowns. She is, of course, far too absorbed in her own troubles to appreciate the magnitude of the shift taking place all around them: this war within the faith in order to defeat the heresy outside it, bringing with it endless rules and definitions as to what is true thought and what is not. As yet, the nuns of Ferrara have been spared the worst of it (thanks be to God for the bishop’s ailments), but the future remains uncertain. It is better, perhaps, that she does not know the truth, for it would only make her journey harder, her passage to quiescence longer.
“He is also”—Zuana takes a breath; ah, well, she is long overdue a confession with Father Romero, asleep or awake— “exceedingly ugly. Possibly the ugliest bishop Ferrara has ever seen. Keep stirring. It must not be allowed to set until all the spices are absorbed.”
The girl moves her hand but the stare continues. I know what lies behind that look, Zuana thinks: she believes herself too lost and angry to find anything in the world worth enjoying or delighting in. But she is wrong. Oh, how she is wrong!
“You think I jest? Believe me, I do not. The bishop of Ferrara is as fat as a wild boar, with jowls like slabs of pitted rock and a skin as thick as that of a rhinoceros.”
“A what?”
“A rhinoceros. You don’t know this animal? Oh, it is a remarkable creation: a kind of overweight cow, with plates of gladiator’s armor for skin and the single thick horn of a unicorn coming out of its skull. I am amazed that you and it have never become acquainted.”
“You’ve seen it—this thing?”
“On the page, not in the flesh. It is to be found in only the wildest parts of the Indies, though I believe they once brought one back on a boat and showed it in Portugal.”
She watches Serafina’s eyes widening. Her father used to say that the world was full of young women with their heads clogged up with fabric and frippery, ignorant of the wonder of God’s universe everywhere around them—and he would not have his daughter wasted thus. Well, he has done a good job. When had she first learned about such creatures? Young enough that he had made her put her nose close to the page to catch the smell of the ink he claimed was still rising off it. This book left the printing press in Venice yesterday and has journeyed by boat all night and day to get to us. Imagine that, carina. Imagine that.
But she had cared less about the freshness of the printing than the pictures themselves: page after page of the most fantastical plants and creatures as recorded by men who had voyaged to the very edge of the world to catalog God’s creation. In contrast, her father’s interest in them had been as a source of medicine more than wonder; that great pointed horn from the rhinoceros was rumored to have miraculous healing properties, as potent as the unicorn’s. Years later, when she had caught sight of the bishop’s profile during service—the mass that accompanied his visit was endless, so that even the most saintly drifted off at times—the similarities had been immediate, even down to the horn of his miter sticking out from the top of his head. She had shown the image to Suora Chiara that same night, and they had laughed over it together. It had been barely a month later that the old abbess had taken to her bed with a running fever and the family factions had started gathering in anticipation of the next election.
“I daresay you have never heard of the lamia either.”
“Lamia? No.”
“Ah, if the accounts are to be believed, this is the most astonishing creature. Half tiger and half female, a woman’s face and breasts inside the fur, so that those who come across her in her natural habitat of the jungle don’t see the tiger until it is too late. Besotted, they rush toward her until they are close enough, at which point she leaps from the undergrowth and embraces them in her claws. You really know none of this? What did they teach you, your tutors in Milan?”
“I was taught well enough. Poetry. Music. Song.” And her tone is suddenly fierce. “The most beautiful things in the world.”
It is the first sign of a vivacity not bred from rage or desperation that Zuana has seen in her. Poetry, music, song. No, most certainly not bred for the veil, this one.
They work in silence for a few moments. The bait, however, has been too rich.
“You say you saw these animals in a book?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have it still? Is it in your chest?”
“In my chest?”
“Yes. Your father’s books that you brought with you when you came.” She shrugs, glancing up at the shelves where the herbs and remedy books that she uses most often are kept. “Everybody knows that was what your dowry was made up of.”
While the girl may not be sharing her own secrets in recreation, she must be listening avidly enough to those of others.
“Will you show it to me?”
Zuana, of course, is caught now, since the thing she must say truthfully must also be a lie. Such images, wondrous or not, are no longer the stuff of a good dispensary sister’s workshop.
“Even if I had such a book, Suora Umiliana would certainly not approve of its study.”
“Oh, she approves of nothing. Except prayer and death!” The words explode out of her. “Really. That is all she talks about: how the flesh decays and how we must be ready, praying every moment, for we may be taken at any time. I tell you, if she had burning nodules or gums full of pus she wouldn’t come to you but welcome them in as God’s messengers.” She shudders. “She makes me feel as if my insides are already being eaten by worms.”
She is not the first novice to find herself gripped by such images. Partly it is their age: girls around puberty taste everything more sharply, and though she might condemn poetry as the wordplay of the devil, the novice mistress, Zuana has noticed, is not above using some of its tools when it suits her, especially if she has smelled the poison of physical desire leaking out somewhere. Of course it is a great and honorable tradition within salvation: the elevation of the spirit through the vanquishing of the flesh. What were Tertullian’s words to converts to the cloth? “If you desire a woman, try to conjure up an image of how her body will be when she is dead. Think of the phlegm in her throat, the liquid in her nose, and the contents of her bowels.” He would have made a good doctor, as well as a great scholar.
“I know Suora Umiliana can be fierce sometimes.” Zuana picks her words carefully. “Yet she has a great flame of faith inside her, and she cannot help but want others to be warmed by its heat. I am sure once you give yourself up to her you too will feel it.”
But the girl does not want to hear this. She turns back to the pans, and the moment between them is lost. After a while, across the courtyard the choir voices begin.
Zuana watches how, despite the resistance within the girl, her head and upper torso lift instinctively to greet the sound. To mark the celebration of the feast day of the blessed virgin martyr Saint Agnes, there are special chants, and Benedicta’s new psalm settings must be perfected in time for Vespers that evening. The abbess had her sights set on this service to introduce her songbird to the city, and certainly the setting is lovely, even to Zuana’s less discerning ears. Such young saints usually go down well with novices, for there is always a kernel of rebellion inside their godliness, and while Serafina may not share the saint’s proclivity for martyrdom, it is clear that the drama of the music is already inside her.
By the time she was her age Zuana could recognize the tastes of most major herb ingredients within a given remedy and identify each of their various healing properties. It would not surprise her if the girl was singing every note inside the silence now. Certainly she is listening hard enough. The haunting antiphonal chant ends and the psalm setting begins.
“You know, I wonder why you choose to continue to give yourself such pain. It must be one of the greatest joys of life to have a beautiful voice.”
The girl shakes her head, staring down into the treacle. “Songbirds don’t sing when they are kept in the dark.”
“That is true …except for the ones whose songs bring on the dawn.” She pauses. “I have heard a nightingale recently whose voice has the sweetness to ease an ocean of agony,” she says, thinking back to the moment in the cloisters when she had felt so at one with the world.
Serafina glances up sharply, as if the words have stung her in some way. The gesture causes the spoon to jump in the pan and a fat gob of boiling treacle spits up at her.
“Oh!” She yanks her hand back, dropping the spoon inside, her face contorted with the burn.
Zuana moves swiftly, grabbing her by the wrist, ripping the burning treacle off her skin, and pulling her over to the water butt. “Put your hand in!”
She hesitates, so Zuana does it for her, and she yelps again, this time at the fierce cold. “Keep it there. It will stop the pain and hold off the burn.”
Back at the fire she sets about rescuing the wooden spoon, while behind her she registers the sound of the girl’s weeping. Once started, she is not able to stop.
Zuana finds herself remembering a winter afternoon in the scriptorium, so long ago. A young woman, furious and desperate by degrees, she sits staring at her own tears splashing onto the page she is copying. And as she tries to wipe them away before they cause damage to the paper, she finds herself studying the great illuminated letter O that begins the text, inside and around which, following the curve of the gold leaf, she can make out painstakingly tiny written words: once read, never to be forgotten.
My mother wanted me to become a nun to fatten the dowry of my sister. And to obey my mother I became one.
She repeats the words now, accentuating the patina of verse inside them.
Yet the first night I spent in a cell I heard my lover’s voice down below, and rushed down and tried to open the door.
Behind her in the room, the crying has stopped.
But the mother abbess caught me. “Tell me, little sister, do you have a fever or are you in love?”
She turns to the girl. “You are not the first, you know, to feel so angry or abandoned.”
“Ha! You wrote that?”
The incredulity on her face makes Zuana laugh out loud. “No, not me. My quarrel with these walls was different. But another novice—just like you.”
“Who?”
“Her name outside the convent was Veronica Grandi.”
“Was? Is she gone?”
“Oh, yes, it was a long time ago. When I first came— a novice like you—I was apprenticed to the scriptorium. I found the words disguised inside one of the illustrations in a psalter. There was a name and a date: 1449, a hundred years before me.”
“What happened to her?”
“How is your hand?”
“I can’t feel anything.”
“Then you can take it out.”
As the water drips off her fingers, Zuana can see a small welt of angry red skin. The numbness should stem the pain until the blister forms.
“Later I looked for her record in the convent archives. She took her vows a year later and became Suora Maria Teresa.”
“Oh. So she never left.” Her voice is hollow with the realization.
“No. When she died thirty years later she had been the convent’s abbess for nine years.” She pauses. “Her entry in the convent necrology tells of her great leadership and humility and how on her deathbed she sang the praises of the Lord with a wide smile on her face. I think it possible that she had forgotten whoever was waiting by the gate by then, don’t you?”
Zuana watches as the girl struggles to digest the wonder and the horror of it. If there had been someone waiting outside the gates for her, how much longer might it have taken? A dead father was an acceptable person to miss; even the sternest of confessors and novice mistresses found it hard to punish an excess of filial grief. But those who came with darker, more suspicious memories would have to keep them secret. It is not her job to ask. When the door closes behind a novice, her past remains outside. Yet sometimes it helps to have someone listen.
“I cannot …” The girl stumbles. “I mean, if you—”
But whatever she is about to say is interrupted by a hammering on the door.
“Suora Zuana! Suora Zuana!”
The conversa who enters is young and plump, her face glistening with sweat.
“You must come—please—now. It’s Suora Magdalena. I …I think …I don’t know …I can’t wake her.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I–I was crossing the courtyard with laundry when I heard voices coming out of her cell. It was work hour, but I thought—well, maybe one of the sisters was in there with her. There was laughter.” She stumbles over the words. “Girls’ voices, laughing. Then suddenly there was silence. So I opened the door …and there was no one there. The cell was completely empty. Just Suora Magdalena on her pallet.”
Zuana is already reaching for the pot of camphor crystals.
“I am coming, Letizia.” As she turns she sees Serafina’s face, alive with curiosity. “Um …you are excused the rest of the work hour. Go back to your cell and wait for Vespers.”
“Can’t I come with you?”
“No.”
“But …I am your assistant. That’s what the abbess said. That I was to help you.”
“Yes, and the help I need is for you to go back to your cell. Letizia, find a conversa to come to take charge of this liquid until I get back.”
“But I could do that,” Serafina protests. “I have studied the remedy. I know how and when to put in the herbs.”
Which is true enough, except that the rules forbid leaving a novice in an unattended dispensary. There are too many ingredients that could cause damage to others. Or herself.
“You are risking the charge of disobedience, Serafina. Go to your cell. Now.”
And whatever good work has been done between them is wiped out by the fury in her eyes. She pushes roughly past Letizia, and the door slams behind her.
THE WORK HOUR is still in force and the cloisters are deserted as Zuana makes her way swiftly across the courtyard. The choir has stopped but a few excited voices slip out from the embroidery room above, a dancing inflection inside them. This must have been the laughter that Letizia heard, she thinks; sound moves strangely through winter fogs, and while it is not as dense as some days the air is still gauzy gray around her.
The door to Suora Magdalena’s cell is half open, as if waiting for visitors. She feels a strange prickling down her neck as she walks in.
Before her eyes have had time to adjust to the gloom (even in daylight it remains murky in here), Zuana is struck by the smell. She has prepared herself for sickness, even the telltale scent of death, but this is different: light, fragrant, like a wave of perfume—roses or even frangipani—summer smells in winter. It is almost as shocking as the sight that greets her on the bed.
Magdalena’s pallet is on the floor against the back wall, next to a water jug and a plate, a bucket for excrement nearby. Recently, Letizia has reported, there has been almost nothing in it to empty. But then the less one takes in, the less there is to evacuate, and over the years, in her relentless quest for God, Suora Magdalena has been waging a steady war of attrition on her body, training it to survive on almost nothing.
When she entered the convent the century itself had been young, and there are no other sisters left alive from that time. Everyone, though—Zuana included—knows something of the story: how as a humble novice from the poorest family she had been able to go for weeks on end with only the host to sustain her, and that while she was in such a blessed state her hands and feet bled in sympathy with Christ’s own.
Such godliness had been all the fashion then and Duke Ercole, a man with an appetite for holy women, who collected piety as others collected china or antiquities, had found her in a nearby town and installed her in Santa Caterina, where he and his family would visit, bringing members of the court to hear her prophecies—for sometimes she would go into ecstasies for them.
Rumor was that she had been small even then—some said she weighed so little that it wasn’t hard to believe she could lift herself off the ground. It had been the time of the French invasions and the northern wars, and every city was searching for a way to protect itself. Such humble, uneducated women—living saints, as they were known then—who found God through prayers and their own goodness were talismans of purity in a world of corruption. But once Luther and his dissenters started lighting their fires of heresy across the mountains, such untutored salvation became suspect. After Ercole died the royal visits dried up—and so, it seemed, did Magdalena’s stigmata.
By the time Zuana arrived, she was a forgotten figure who, by her own request, never left her cell, and even those who might have shared her hunger for God were wary of her reputation. Successive bouts of fasting had left her too weak to attend chapel, and over the years convent confessors had proved either too tired or too forgetful to bring God’s food directly to her, so that for some time now she had lived without the host. Her cell door remained closed, and gradually even the memory of the memories had started to dry up. Since she had become dispensary sister, it had fallen to Zuana to oversee her care, which she did as best she could, making sure that her food was delivered and interceding in the appointment of a conversa who would not be cruel to her. There was nothing more anyone could do. Magdalena’s self-inflicted pariah status was a fact of convent life, unquestioned and secure. The rest was up to God.
It seems He may have spoken now.
Her body is so wasted that Zuana can barely register the shape of it under the blanket. Her skullcap has fallen from her head, and the stubble of white hair sits like frost on hard ground. But her face—oh, her face is vibrant: her eyes are fixed open, bright and shining in a sea of wrinkled skin, and she is smiling, a wild exuberant smile, lips apart, as if she has seen something so wondrous that she has taken a gasping breath in anticipation of laughter, only to find it caught in her throat.
Zuana uncorks the camphor salts and passes the bottle under her nose.
She remains transfixed, not a flicker of response.
The room grows dark again as Letizia’s form blocks the doorway. “Oh, sweet Jesus. He has taken her, hasn’t He?”
“Is this how you found her?”
“Yes, yes. Oh, but you should have heard the laughter.”
“Move from the doorway. I need more light.”
The old nun’s right hand is clasped over a crucifix, the knuckles bone-white. Zuana moves under the blanket to find the left hand; it lies loosely by her side, cold to the touch. When she brings it into the light she sees skin so thin and bruised and veins so pronounced they look like membranes on an animal’s stomach. She searches the underside of her wrist for any sign of a life pulse.
“Oh, Lord Jesus, take her soul. Lord Jesus, take her soul.” Behind her, Letizia’s moaning prayers fill the room.
Under her fingers she feels a faint fluttering beat. Then another. Slow, but there, surely. She slides a hand under the back of the old woman’s neck to try to lift her up, and her fingers register a run of vertebrae distinct as standing stones in a graveyard. But the body is rigid and will not move. Rigor mortis with a pulse? She looks back into the eyes, staring, unblinking, bright, with no film, no dullness at all. Dead, but with eyes that are still alive? She bends her cheek to her nostrils. Closer, the strange perfume seems stronger from the open mouth. And then, soft but unmistakable, she feels the heat of an exhaled breath.
“Lord Jesus, take her soul.”
The cell becomes gloomy again.
“Move, I said. I need more light.”
“What’s wrong with her?” But it is Serafina’s voice she hears now, harsh with fear. “Is she dead?”
“What are you doing here?” Zuana does not take her eyes off the old woman’s face.
“I heard someone running. And laughter. I …I was scared, alone in my cell.”
If it is the truth, it sounds disingenuous in her mouth. Such disobedience will mean penance if Zuana chooses to report it, but there is no time to think about that now. Somewhere she knows that she would have done the same thing, the spice of curiosity overwhelming the blandness of prudence.
The light returns as the girl steps in closer. “Oh, the smell …what is it? Is it death? Is she dead?”
Zuana picks up the jug by the bed and, lifting it high, splashes a thin stream of water on the old woman’s face. Nothing. Except this time, as the breath leaves her body, there is the faintest aah.
“No, she’s not dead.”
“What is it, then?” Serafina’s voice is as hushed as the room. “What’s happened to her?”
“I think she is in an ecstasy.”
“Oh! Oh, I knew it.” The conversa lets out a new moan. “You should have heard the laughter. It was as if Our Lady and all the saints and angels of heaven were in here keeping company with her.”
“That’s enough, Letizia,” Zuana says harshly. “Go and fetch the abbess. Tell her I need her here now.”
In the silence that follows Letizia’s exit, Zuana can feel Serafina’s fascination behind her. Maybe this disobedience has purpose after all. Even the most recalcitrant novice cannot help but be moved by the white heat at the center of the flame.
“Come.” She turns to her. “Since you are here, you had better see for yourself. There is nothing to be afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid,” she says boldly.
Zuana makes room for her by the pallet. And, of course, as soon as she sees the old woman’s face Serafina cannot take her eyes off her.
“Ooh, she looks so …so joyful. And the smell—”
“It happens sometimes. It is the scent of flowers, but more than flowers.”
“How do you know she is not dead?”
“Here, take her hand. Don’t worry; she doesn’t feel anything. Under her wrist where the great vein is …feel it? Feel the beat. Try again. Got it? Now, see how slow it is. Remember how fast it was in the sister with a fever.”
“But doesn’t that mean she is dying?”
“No. If it’s like the last time, she can stay like this for hours.”
“The last time? You have seen this before?”
When had it been? Seven—eight years ago? Maybe longer. Summer. As hot as hell itself. Suora Magdalena had been upright on the pallet then, her arms bent in front of her as if she were cradling a baby, her head flung back in what seemed like a paralysis of joy.
Of course Zuana had heard about such things—who had not? — but this was the first time she had ever seen it. As the newly appointed dispensary sister, she had been instructed by the abbess of the time to stay with her until it passed, so she had sat in the cell watching over her. Not that there had been much to see, unless you counted the fly that kept landing on her face, picking its way over her eyes and lips, even into her mouth, while all the while she remained oblivious. How long had it lasted? An hour, maybe less. But the journey had been longer for the old nun. She had been so dead to the world that when she first came back she could not understand where she was; not the time, or the place, or the day. But the wonder as to where she had been, and the sadness that she was no longer there, was painful to behold. With such sustenance for the spirit, what need does the body have for food?
Next to her, Serafina reaches out a hand toward the old woman’s staring eyes, but hesitates as she gets closer.
“Don’t worry. She can’t see you or hear you. You could stick a needle into her flesh and she would not even flinch. She is not here.”
“So where is she?”
“I don’t know. Except I think she has reached a place where her soul is as powerful as her body. So that she is able to move from one into the other for a while. To find herself with God.”
“With God!”
With God. Of course she would not know what that means. But then, who does? With God …When Zuana first came, the novice mistress of the day, a kinder though paler force than Umiliana, would talk of the journey toward Him as a path that could be followed by everyone, as if obedience and prayer practiced regularly would bring on divine love as surely as a dose of figs might regulate the bowels.
Except that it had never happened. Not to her or, it seemed, to anyone around her. Oh, there had been souls who had grown gentler and more humble over the years, even a few who had come in like spitting cats but grown gradually into lambs, albeit with less spring in their steps. There were some who accepted suffering without complaint and overexcited ones who might swoon occasionally in night chapel. Yet such elevation, whatever it was, was short-lived and, to Zuana’s eyes at least, always had the quality of a self-imposed state rather than sustained transcendence.
After a while it had been a relief to stop trying. Her books and her work brought their own rhythm, at times their own temporary loss of self. Still, one could not help but wonder at the idea: to be so consumed, so transfixed by joy… She glances at Serafina beside her, staring down at the old woman’s face, and knows she is feeling it too. Whatever the dangers within it, Suora Umiliana might do better to talk to her novices about ecstasy rather than contamination and decay. Such words would surely hook deeper into rebellious young hearts.
“What has happened here?” Madonna Chiara’s voice from the door is clean and matter-of-fact. “Is she transported?”
“It would seem so, yes.”
The abbess gives a small sigh, as if this is yet another unwarranted problem she must deal with in a busy day. “How long?”
“I don’t know. Letizia said she heard voices, but when she came in she was alone.”
“Who is that next to you?” Her tone is sharp.
Serafina starts, half turning her head.
“What is the novice doing here?”
“I …I asked her to help.” Later, Zuana cannot remember deciding to say this before the words came out.
“Well, this is not her place. Go back to your cell, young woman.”
Serafina moves immediately in response. “Ah!” Then stops. “I can’t …I cannot move my hand. She is holding it too tight.”
It is true enough. Zuana can see it now. Where before the girl had hold of Magdalena’s wrist, searching for a pulse, now, suddenly, the old nun’s hand has twisted to clasp hers back, claw-thin fingers pressing so tight they seem embedded in the younger woman’s flesh, the worst pressure over the burn where the skin has been starting to rise.
“Aah!”
Serafina’s pain and fright are apparent as the abbess moves across the cell toward her. Only as she does so, the figure on the bed starts to move too. Suddenly, it is all happening at once; even the smell in the air seems to be changing, the sweetness turning sour, as the old nun’s face comes alive again.
“Hahahaha.” The laughter that has been held inside for so long is pouring out of her, high and girlish, full of pleasure and wonder, far too young for such a dry, wrinkled form.
Zuana tries to soothe her. “It is all right. You are safe. You are here with us, Suora Magdalena.”
But her words are lost in the rolling moan that follows. The old woman, with unexpected strength, is trying to lift herself from the mattress, yet she still has hold of Serafina’s hand and cannot lever herself up. Zuana instinctively supports her until she is sitting upright, her body thin as a stick of wood. Her eyes blink hard in the gloom as if she is trying to expel some fleck of grit from them, and her mouth opens and closes like a fish, her lips making a dry slapping sound. Zuana lifts the jug carefully to her mouth and slowly she sips, coughs, gasps for breath, then drinks again. Water runs like spittle from her lips down her chin. Serafina, next to her, is whimpering slightly but whether from fear or from the powerful grip on her fingers it is hard to know.
“Suora Magdalena, can you hear me?” The abbess’s voice is full and powerful, like the convent bell. “Do you know where you are?”
The old woman seems to turn her head upward toward the speaker, but she never makes it as far as Chiara’s face—because now she sees Serafina.
“Oh, oh, oh, my dear one, it is you.” The voice has returned to its fragile, cracked age but the words are clear enough. “Oh, oh, come closer.”
The girl throws a frightened glance at Zuana but moves forward anyway. Perhaps she has no option, for Magdalena’s arm, a stick with a flap of crêpe flesh hanging off it, seems to have remarkable power. When she has Serafina close enough, the old woman puts out her other hand and touches, almost caresses, the girl’s cheek.
“Oh, welcome. Welcome, child. I have heard you crying and I knew you would come. You are not to be sad. He is here. He has been waiting for you.”
Serafina looks to Zuana again, panic in her eyes. But there is something else too, a kind of wonder. How could there not be? Zuana nods slightly. The girl turns back to the old nun, and a great smile breaks out on the ruined face.
“Oh, don’t be afraid—you must not be afraid.”
“Suora Magdalena!”
“He said I am to tell you that, whatever comes, He is here and will take good care of you.”
“This is Madonna Chiara, your abbess, talking.”
“He will take good care of us all.” And she laughs again, the pearly, girlish sound echoing around the cell. “For His love …oh, His love is boundless…”
“Can you hear me?”
It is clear Magdalena cannot. She sighs, her eyes closing as she finally loosens her grip. As Zuana helps her back onto the bed, Serafina slides her hand away, but her eyes never leave the old woman’s face.
Over their heads, Zuana and the abbess look at each other in the gloom.
Outside, the bell starts to ring for Vespers.
IT IS ONLY much later that Zuana comes to appreciate the power of the timing of that afternoon.
Certainly, if there was a “right” moment of the day for such a thing to happen, it would have been at Vespers, since Vespers is the only office when the choir nuns can be heard, though not seen, by anyone who chooses to enter the public church. And as everyone knew, it was no ordinary Vespers they sang that day. As the feast of a virgin martyr, the service was marked by specific settings and prayers; indeed, for those who knew their saints calendar—and the city was full of them—the celebration of Saint Agnes was considered to be particularly affecting, so that devout men of business as well as great families at court with young daughters of the saint’s age might make the journey especially that afternoon in order to be blessed by the heavenly sounds that flowed out through the grille behind the altar.
Even the weather played its part, for while the day had been foggy, miraculously—as the bell rang and the sisters started to make their way across the cloisters—the sky cleared, with a few rays of weak sunlight breaking through the clouds.
Then there was the impact of the afternoon’s commotion on the choir sisters themselves.
Inside the cell, Letizia took her place by the old woman’s pallet, and the abbess, the dispensary sister, and the novice waited with her behind the closed door while the choir nuns passed into the chapel. Madonna Chiara’s injunction to the three of them was instant and severe. “What has taken place in here this afternoon is for Suora Magdalena and God alone to know. Is that understood? Any further mention of it to anyone apart from myself will bring down on the offender the strictest penance.”
But, as she no doubt knew, it was already a lost cause. Though the convent had been at work when it happened, there were those who claimed afterward that they had heard the wild laughter, while others said they had followed the rushed footsteps through the cloisters, even down to one who, looking out from high windows, was sure she had spotted the open cell door.
All this certainty, though, comes much later.
At the time, with the bells ringing out over the city and the nuns gathering in chapel, there is only a sense of slight confusion, as if something has happened to agitate the surface of the water, but no one can tell what it is. With the doors shut in readiness for the beginning of the service, the nuns glance around them to see who, apart from the abbess, is missing.
This is the moment when Zuana and Serafina slip in quietly, heads down, eyes to the floor. As they enter, the girl grabs a breath, as if she might be about to cry, but her face is hidden from Zuana. The choir mistress, Suora Benedicta, is already seated at the small organ to the side from where she can both play and direct the singing, and the curtain is pulled aside to reveal the great grille that runs along the length of the wall, through which comes the soft glow of candlelight from the greater church beyond.
There are some convents where the nuns sing from a choir loft suspended over the nave of the church, so that sharp eyes might spot the odd movement or shaft of color from below through the slits between the wood at their feet. But inside the choir stalls in Santa Caterina, while the singers can see little they can hear everything: the shuffling of bodies, the clearing of throats, the odd raucous male cough or low chatter of voices. That evening they make out more unrest than usual. Santa Caterina’s reputation and the fact that the city is still celebrating the d’Este wedding mean the church is full, with many arriving early to find good seats and restless now for the service to begin.
From her place at the end of the second row Zuana tries to keep Serafina in her sight. The girl is still in shock. She is deathly pale and has not said a word since being freed from the grip of Suora Magdalena. Even before she had walked into the old nun’s cell she would have been light-headed from the lack of food and sleep, but now her disorientation is obvious. She sits stock-still, staring straight out at everyone and no one. Next to her, old Maria Lucia, she of the toxic breath, is hunched over her breviary, her chin trembling in anticipation.
At last the abbess enters and quickly finds her place. She nods to Benedicta and they both rise, the body of nuns following them. The rustle of cloth alerts the rest of the church, and beyond the grille the congregation quiets in readiness for the music.
Discounting the few sisters who are too simple or—in the case of Suora Lucrezia—too physically damaged to sing, some fifty earthly angels now stand waiting to bring glory to God and, perhaps, a little to themselves. The diminutive figure of Benedicta raises and then drops her head as the sign, and the voices lift into the air, the words of the order clean and clear, plunging the audience immediately into the drama of a young woman’s martyrdom.
“Blessed Agnes, in the middle of the flames, spreading her hands wide, prays …”
In the beat of silence that is her cue, the choir’s best songbird, Eugenia, head held high, draws a breath, ready. But before she can open her mouth to let it out, the voice of Agnes herself, ripe with youth and sharp as a golden spear, soars up from the fire into the air and out through the grille.
“O Great Father. Respected. Worshipped. Feared. ”
In the choir stalls there is an involuntary turn of heads toward the novice. Zuana registers a skewering in her stomach, though whether it is shock or pleasure she cannot tell. Serafina’s face remains pale, her eyes still focused somewhere in the middle distance. But she, or that other she that has been hidden for so long, is here now. The novice has found her voice.
“Through the power of your great Son, I have escaped the threats of a sacrilegious tyrant. ”
Within the great equality of God’s love, it is not considered healthy to pick out the single from the several, the particular thread from within the weave. The very purpose of convent life is to iron out the sense of the individual, to blend the one into the many and, from there, the many into the sublime Oneness of God. And nowhere is that ideal more powerfully realized than in chapel, where the voices of the choir meld into one coherent, seamless sound, praising God and His infinite bounty.
“I have crossed over the filth of the flesh And lo—I am left undefiled,”
There are, however, moments. And there are voices. And when the two come together it can be impossible, even undesirable, to resist.
“Behold, I come to You:”
As the phrase dies away in preparation for the next, Zuana watches the abbess secure Eugenia’s silence with a single glance, though the poor girl is so stunned it is unlikely she would have tried to take back her place. She closes her half-open mouth and drops her eyes. Whatever lesson she is learning now is made more potent by the fact that, in that instant, even her humiliation is irrelevant.
“You, my Lord, whom I have loved, have sought, have longed for—always. ”
Many of those present will talk later of it as a small but perfect miracle. On both sides of the grille they will search for words to describe the sound of the voice they heard, likening it first to the concentrated sweetness of the honeycomb or warm grain inside the wood, then contradicting themselves to speak of the burning flash of a comet, the purity of ice, even the shining transparency of heavenly bodies. But those who will do it most justice will speak not of the voice itself but of how it made them feel.
The old and the pious will speak of a piercing of their heart, so that they found it hard to breathe—a penetration which, though painful, unleashed a flow of love like Christ’s blood, gushing under the centurion’s spear, or the joy of the Virgin Madonna as the words of the angel Gabriel enter her breast. In contrast, the young will recall feeling it most powerfully in their gut, which is where another kind of love resides, though they will claim the arrow entered through the heart; and both young and old will, without noticing, hold their hands to their hearts while recalling the moment. And once they have tried to outdo each other in hyperbole they will sit back exhausted, quietly satisfied that their city is indeed a musical paradise, so much so that God sees fit to send new angels into its midst to guide its citizens on their way.
None of this word-spinning will mean much to Suora Benedicta. Though she might be a visionary in her compositions, she is also a choir mistress with a pragmatic understanding of the tools of her trade. The exuberant sweetness she has heard before (and can make good use of, for there can never be too much purity in a convent choir), but what she could never have predicted is how such a young body—still a girl’s as much as a woman’s—might produce a voice of such extraordinary range and control. How her lungs might hold so much within a single breath. How she might encompass so many registers, from the icicle point of a soprano to the chestnut honey of a tenor, or move between them so effortlessly, betraying no hint of strain or even the smallest of impurities with which the onset of menstruation can often infect the vocal cords. And then—most of all— how, when the choir reaches the new psalm settings in four or even six block parts, this single voice can know and travel between them all with equal assurance, though she can only have heard the notes once, or at best twice, through half-closed windows.
By the time the service ends, Benedicta is already halfway in her composition of the next, her mind filled with a voice that seems to be writing its own parts.
And meanwhile, what of Suora Zuana in all of this? Zuana, who remains as ignorant of the subtleties of vocal technique as she is impervious to the poetry of exaggeration. Zuana, who has been bred to observe and consider, to make sense of what her senses tell her. Except that everything her senses tell her now seems wrong. In front of her she is seeing a novice, apparently suffused with joy, singing her heart out to the glory of God and the joyful sacrifice of a virgin in the fires of martyrdom. But who is she, this girl? How can such a transformation have taken place? How can the strong-willed, recalcitrant, rebellious, angry young woman that she knows—a figure of much power but dubious spirituality—have disappeared so entirely, to be replaced by this new creature: absorbed, distilled, so consumed by the music she is making that she seems not even to be aware that any change has taken place.
Surely at some level she must know what she is doing. What, in effect, she has already done.
THE SERVICE MOVES triumphantly to its close. Yet as the last notes fade into silence—Serafina’s voice now plaited into, though not lost within, others—no one on either side of the grille moves.
The abbess, whose rising will mark the sign for others to do so, still sits in her seat. Around her the choir is caught, some looking down as they are instructed, others watching for the sign, a few staring more openly at the novice, who has dropped her hands and eyes and looks only at the floor.
The silence in the choir stall is matched by that in the body of the church. Not a sound can be heard through the grille now, no clearing of throats, no coughs or whispers. The good citizens of Ferrara are either unable or unwilling to accept that the experience is over.
Then, out of the silence, comes a man’s voice, clear and loud. A single word: “Brava!”
The shock of it runs through them all, so that now the abbess is spurred into movement and quickly the others follow.
And the girl? Well, for a moment the girl does nothing, just stands staring at the floor. But as those around her start to move she lifts her head up and for that second her eyes meet Zuana’s. What is it the elder woman sees there, exhilaration? Satisfaction? Even joy? Certainly. But also the unmistakable flash of triumph.
It is this last that Zuana registers most powerfully, for though the girl has reason to feel gratified by the impact she has made, she must surely also understand that she has pronounced her own life sentence. Because, whatever happens, they will never let her out now.