THE SMELLS FROM the bakery are almost overwhelming. It has been building up over the last few days, this assault on the senses, from when the first trays of ginger biscuits, followed by cakes and herb breads, went into the ovens, releasing their yeasts and sugars through the cloisters. Some sisters have even confessed to salivating as they pass by the kitchens (winter meals can become sparse and repetitive), but their confession only makes others more aware of the sin in themselves, and impatience is the mildest of transgressions. They will all be allowed to taste the results soon enough.
In the kitchens, Suora Federica has been excused the more exhausting of the daily offices, as she and her cohort of nuns and converse struggle with the extra work needed to produce the specialties that will feed a small army of visitors. Packages are delivered to the gatehouse every other day, and the chief conversa in charge of provisions is run ragged with journeys to and from the river storerooms to collect deliveries and further supplies. That very morning two barrels of wine have arrived from a new benefactor. One is to be opened and decanted, the other put into storage. The abbess has sanctioned the use of Suora Ysbeta’s private store of glasses. As a nun from one of the great families she has a passion for Murano glass, as well as small dogs, and came with a dowry chest full of it. There has been the annual discussion in chapter as to how far the use of such luxuries might count as ostentation or even vanity, with the vote going—though less smoothly this year—in favor of the demands of hospitality. As a consolation to the novice mistress and her followers, it is decided that the glasses will be used only to serve benefactors and the highest rank of visitors, and that should there be any breakages the convent will not be responsible for replacing them.
Soon the gilded goblets will be sitting next to full jugs of wine on the covered trestle tables along one side of the parlatorio. The room has been transformed: the small organ has been moved from the music chamber into one corner, with two high-backed chairs placed nearby for the lute and harp players and space for the choir. There are candles (beeswax of the highest grade, from the stores) on spiked stands, and branches of evergreens with winter berries have been woven together with garlands of herbs across the ceiling, and fumigants in metal pomades hang suspended, ready to be lighted, the air already fragrant with their scents. The room gives off such an appearance of a great domestic salon that those sisters who entered the flock late enough to recall feast-day gatherings with their families are flooded with memories as they stand in the entrance and marvel.
One end of the refectory has been cordoned off, ready for the construction of a platform stage upon which the martyrdom of Santa Caterina of Alexandria will be performed before a specially invited female audience, and a storeroom nearby has been opened to hold props and costumes. Some are being made by the nuns themselves, but the more exacting—doublets and hose for the emperor’s courtiers, boots and swords for the nun soldiers, and the wheel itself, which must appear solid only to be broken by divine intervention before Santa Caterina can be tied to it—have to be brought in from outside, courtesy of the nuns’ families. Those sisters and novices involved in the play can often be found during recreation walking briskly in the garden or around the cloisters reciting their lines, either to themselves or to one another. Santa Caterina herself will be played by Suora Perseveranza, whose habit of self-mortification does not prevent her from the pleasure of occasional performance, to which, everyone agrees, she brings a tender verisimilitude. In years past her portrayals of such shining saints have brought tears—and flowing donations—from many of the female benefactors who have seen them.
After a long spell of bitter cold the city has grown a little warmer, though not enough to drive off the mists. The change has come too late for Zuana’s fingers, which are raw from mornings spent in the herb garden fixing burlap hoods over her more vulnerable plants. While the collection of garlands and herbs and the making of the decorations and the fumigants are her responsibility too, she has been afforded some help with this, though not of the caliber to which she had grown accustomed over the last months.
With everything finally prepared, the sisters of Santa Caterina can look back and feel satisfied with their work, not least because the weeks behind them have been difficult in many ways, peppered with events that have brought sorrow and crisis as well as celebration. Events in which Zuana has found herself more affected than most.
IT HAD STARTED a few days after the Feast of Saint Agnes, when young Suora Imbersaga, whose bleeding Zuana could not stanch, was finally taken by God. She had been growing weaker for some time, until one afternoon during Vespers she had fallen into unconsciousness. She had received extreme unction from Father Romero that evening after Compline (a heroic feat, considering his sleeping patterns) and had died before Matins when the convent was at its stillest, while in Suora Umiliana’s care.
When Zuana had come to relieve her fellow sister so she might get a few hours’ sleep before the office, she had found her kneeling by the body, hands clasped and tears of joy streaming down her cheeks. With no words allowed or needed, the two women had knelt together side by side, praying and keeping vigil until the bell called them to Matins. Zuana couldn’t help but wonder at the depth of the novice mistress’s devotion; no young nun could have asked for a more faithful companion for her last hours on earth.
Early next morning, the body was cleansed and dressed in fresh robes and, after the rest of the convent had paid their respects, buried in a simple wooden coffin in the small cemetery at the back of the gardens. A mass was said for her, in which Serafinas voice brought more sense of God’s grace than all of Father Romero’s mumbled words, and her obituary, composed by the abbess and inscribed in perfect letters in the convent necrology by Suora Scholastica (whose own dramatic composition was already being memorized by half a dozen eager players), spoke of her chastity, obedience, humility, and forbearance in the face of suffering.
As such it was almost identical to every entry before it, though no one would suggest it was untruthful: at barely twenty-two years of age, Suora Imbersaga had not had a great deal of life in which to fall prey to temptation.
In her own records, however, Zuana is less forgiving, at least to herself, noting down the various compounds that had failed and suggesting a few others that might help if and when the same symptoms should occur in others. If she had had more time, perhaps …but she had not. She wonders if maybe she had been wrong to concentrate on the womb, and if the location of the pain might instead have indicated a tumor within the bladder or the bowels, for she has come across such a case—too late now—noted from a dissection done in Bologna. But in her limited experience such tumors are the ailments of the old rather than the young, and anyway, whatever the cause, she will never know for the secret has died with her. In contrast to Umiliana, whose exultation remains a scalding memory, Zuana is left with a persistent, almost painful disquiet, so that she gives herself the penance of extra prayers to try for exculpation.
Within a few days, however, another form of penance is visited on her when a powerful infection slides into the convent, an epidemic of wheezing and sneezing followed by a high fever and vomiting. Once in, it moves like water, with six choir nuns and one conversa brought down by it in as many days. While such maladies are common enough during winter, the virulence of this one takes Zuana by surprise, and to avoid further contagion she quarantines each afflicted nun to her cell, with only herself and a nurse conversa to tend them while she searches for remedies. Together they use cloths soaked in balm mint and vinegar water to keep down the fever and a tonic of ragwort and pennyroyal in wine to feed them when their stomachs have been purged. By the time the first sufferers are on their feet again, a further three sisters and a novice have fallen ill, and the nurse conversa is complaining of aches and fever flushes.
Zuana, who by then has barely slept for nights on end, asks for a meeting with the abbess to request that she be granted more help—or at least to inquire if the help she once had might be returned to her.
SOMETIMES AT NIGHT inside the cell she has to stop herself from dancing. He is here. He has come. They will find a way.
Though the pages of poems have not been returned to her, she knows the words—and his music for them—by heart, and when she twirls her body to the sounds inside her head she can feel the swish of soft petticoats beneath the serge, and the silk of her hair, washed and brushed under her loosely tied scarf, sliding over her shoulders. With her chest unpacked now, the cold stone has grown softer and there is color against the gray: the weave of the rug, the gold threads of the tablecloth, the glint of the silver candlesticks, the painted blues and scarlet within the Madonna’s robes, and the cherub-pink flesh of the baby on her lap in the small wood panel painting hung above her little table in the second chamber. Though the space is small, and even in daylight still half night, with the glow that comes from an extra candle the atmosphere is almost welcoming. Until you let your mind move to the walls and the locked doors outside it.
But she no longer thinks of that. And she will not be mean with her good fortune, either. When she goes she will leave all this here for the next one, an altogether kinder legacy than vomit and death.
Much of this comfort is thanks to her new conversa. Two days after the Feast of Saint Agnes, the malicious Augustina had been replaced by Candida, a sturdy young woman who knows her way around convent restrictions and who for a small sum (or the equivalent in clothing or trinkets) can make a novice’s life less bleak in many ways: extra candles, special soap, even leftover delicacies from the kitchens, from which she takes her own cut before delivery. But Candida’s finest gift is her hands, for though they are not those of a lady—too much scrubbing and washing for that—they have a gentle touch and sometimes, in the private hour before Compline, when she has finished brushing the river of Serafina’s hair, she plays a little at arranging the locks, and her fingers move across Serafina’s shoulders, sending a cascade of tiny shivers down her back. The first time it happens it lights a fluttery fire of memory in Serafina’s belly, as much for the playful hands of her younger sister as for the wilder caresses of her imagination. The next night, when Candida stands behind her waiting, as if for further instructions, for an instant Serafina’s mind goes to the gargoyle twins, who can often be spotted hand in hand and are rumored to compensate for each other’s deformities in the strangest of ways. The novice who told her that had a half smile on her face as she did so, and as Serafina turns toward Candida now she registers something similar in her look and it makes her confused. Whatever sweetness she is being offered, it will no doubt come at a price; and there are more important things for Serafina to spend her trinkets upon.
What she really wants from her, though, is impossible, for even corruption has its limits and Candida’s influence, it seems, does not extend outside the gates. She cannot, for example, spirit lovesick young men inside under piles of laundry as the romance stories would have you believe, or even redirect letters over the head of the censor nun who scrutinizes and vets every communication coming in and out. This much Serafina has learned casually, while exchanging tall tales of convent gossip, since she has no way of knowing if the payment that has already changed hands between her and Candida has bought loyalty or only goods. But in among the prattle, small seeds of information fall that she hoards away for later consumption: the whereabouts of the chief conversa’s cell (such is her status that it allows her a cell of her own outside the servants’ dormitory), the hours she keeps in her busy workday, and, most notably, the existence of her own set of keys to the river storeroom, which she carries with her almost constantly.
Though there is still a fast stream of excitement running inside her, so fast that it sometimes feels like panic, Serafina keeps it deeply buried, feeding off its energy. When she walks in the garden with other novices during recreation, the walls are still as high as they were but she no longer wants to scream or howl at them. Instead she uses the time to memorize the fastest shortcut from her cell to the place by the wall where she threw the first stone. Knowing he received it, she now makes the journey there and back within the space of the night-watch rounds, dropping sprinklings of white pebbles from under her robes as she goes in the hope that it will make the route easier to spot in the dark.
It still makes her shake to think of how, on that first night, she had lost her bearings trying to get back to the cloisters in time and been caught by the watch sister. It had been black as hell out there, with all manner of noises and scratching in the undergrowth, so that when she hit the tree root it felt as if something had grabbed her foot, and her stumble had sent her sprawling into thick mud. For the next two days she had stunk of its filth and her own sweat as the walls of her cell squeezed in around her. Still, she would go through it again just to hear that trill of the bird whistle, following his dancing voice. Dear God, she had thought then she might die of that feeling, the wild erupting sweetness of it. By the time they had let her out she was terrified that he might not have found the message she had lobbed over into the dark or have given up waiting. But if she could no longer hear him, then at least now he could hear her.
“Behold, I come to You; You whom I have loved …always. ”
And then that single word echoing back through the chapel grille: “Brava!”
It had been all she could do not to shout back to him: You have come. Oh, you have come. We will find a way.
Instead, though, she had put her head down and become a nun.
OH, THEY MUST be so proud of her, of what they think they have achieved. She is proud of herself. The transformation is everywhere: in the way she walks, eyes to the ground as if God were to be found in every flagstone, or the way she sits in chapter or refectory shy as a young Madonna. But the best is how she behaves in chapel, for there is a whole world in this performance when you choose to savor it: the prostration before the crucifix, the cold stone through the warm cloth, followed by sitting, alert and straight, so straight she even registers the indent of the slivered wood pictures of the choir stalls against her back. And then, depending on the hour of the office, the shifting daylight on the frescoes: paintings of Christ as humble as He is divine; carrying children on His back across raging streams, helping souls to clamber out of their graves, even climbing up onto His own cross by way of a ladder. Though all these images have been around her, she has been too angry or wounded to have looked at them properly. Now they help to quiet her mind, for she cannot sing well if she is elsewhere in her head, and it is her voice that is buying her freedom.
It still amazes them. You can see it in their snatched glances, even Suora Eugenia, whom she has displaced, whose envy and fury rise off her like smoke. She would feel sorry for her—for she knows something of that turmoil—only there is no time. Well, she will get her place back soon enough.
And then there is the grille, that wall of braided iron between them and the outside world, so close and so far. She has flirted with its possibilities often; once she even went into the chapel during private prayer hour in the wild hope that he might be able to know what was going on in her mind and that very same moment be standing on the other side waiting for her, their thoughts and their fingers entwining through a lacework of metal. She had even sung a few notes to alert him, but the sound had been huge and haunting in the empty space and she was terrified that if there was anyone there they might report her and she would be incarcerated again. And that she couldn’t bear.
No, there will be no further punishment. She is a good girl now, as good as she was once bad: obedient, humble, sweet-natured. Of course they are still judging her, even when they pretend they are not. Suora Umiliana is by far the worst: There is no hiding place from His Divine Majesty. His gaze burns wood, breaks rock, melts iron. Even when, as happens sometimes, the pleasure of singing in chapel overwhelms everything, including for a moment her own dissemblance, Suora Umiliana’s stare is still there when she surfaces, piercing straight into her. How easy is it then for Him to penetrate through human flesh to the spirit?
The choir mistress sees it, though—or rather hears it, for it is a knowing that moves through the ear, not the eye: this sense of calm at the center of one’s being, stillness in the middle of a great wind. If someone asked her to describe it she might say it was almost an absence of self, though not an ecstasy as such. Oh, no, not like that. Not like the corpse woman in her cell. Not like her at all …
Serafina tries not to think of that afternoon, because when she does her body goes hollow and her hand starts to throb as if the old woman’s nails were still buried in her skin, piercing her palm, drawing enough blood so that when she entered the chapel she had had to wipe it off on her robes for fear that someone might see it and think she had done damage to herself. In fact the wounds had healed fast, almost as fast as they came. But sometimes at night when the churning inside her is such that she cannot sleep, she could swear she hears the mad old nun’s voice seeping through the wall of the cell, talking to her, calling her name. Serafina, Serafina, are you there? I knew you would come. He is here. He has been waiting for you. And she sees those eyes again, fathoms deep with wonder, and feels the melting, the falling away inside herself. It sparks such panic that she has to put her fingers in her ears to stop it, as if it were a siren song pulling her onto the rocks, for though she was witch-old and half dead there had been an intensity and ardor—yes, ardor—in that wizened face greater than that of the rest of them put together.
She would like to know more about her, understand what took place in that cell, but the abbess’s imposed silence is law and she must be seen to obey her now. Even Suora Zuana will tell her nothing. Perhaps if they worked together still …but that is over too. Her voice is deemed too precious to be put at risk by the rank smells of distillation or the contagions of the flesh, especially as there is an influenza taking its toll within the choir. Suora Zuana looks so tired she is almost asleep over her plate at meals. She imagines her, head bent over the crisp pages in candlelight, words and drawings blurring in front of her closing eyes as she searches for the right ingredients with which to stew up health again.
She thinks about it sometimes, that room; at moments she almost misses its particular strangeness: the cold, the fire, the books, the smells, the taste of the dandelion tea, the spiced heat of the ginger balls, and, in the middle, this even stranger woman, broad face and ruined fingers, content inside her passion for it all, as if there were no world but this one and it was God Himself rather than crows’ eggs or boiled roots inside those fat little pots. Mad, certainly, but not without wonder, even comfort.
Still, better to be without it. She has no friends in this place, whatever they like to pretend, and the traps are everywhere. God knows there were times when Suora Zuana’s caring was harder to bear than cruelty, and though she may be crazy in some things she was sharp enough in others. When she had talked of the power of the night songbird, for instance …what if she had heard more than the song, if she knew more than she claimed? And that poem of the long-ago nun, with its rattling of convent doors and the lover’s voice outside. Had she picked it deliberately or made it up to draw some truth out of her? Even before the penance it had become harder to lie to Zuana; she recalls moments when the temptation to confide had been like vomit rising in her throat and she had had to clamp her lips together not to let it out. How would it be if Zuana could see inside her now, could understand what lay behind the excitement in the same way she had started nosing her way in behind the pain?
No. Better for them both to be alone. When the convent wakes up—as it will—to find her gone, she wouldn’t want the blame to fall on the one person who has shown her kindness, the one who has, without knowing it, already given her much— though not yet all—of what she needs to get out.
She lifts up the mattress and slides her hands under until she locates the tear in the material. Inside, deep within the straw and padding, her fingers find a lump of material. She extracts it carefully. The petticoat silk is stained dark and oily. She unwraps it to reveal a roughly fashioned pad of waxy ointment, scooped from the pan when it was cool enough to be touched but not yet set too hard, and squirreled away under her robes. In chapel the morning she had taken it, the smell of the rancid pork fat had been so strong she had been terrified someone would know, and she had had to press herself close to the gumless old bat with the vicious breath to cover up her own stink. Thank God, she has a new seat in chapel now, while the smell of the pork has faded as the ointment set harder.
Under the light she puts the pad on the table and presses the nail of her index finger deep into it. The surface gives a little to take the imprint. When she lifts it off, the shape of her nail is etched perfectly, even down to the slight ridge of skin around the cuticle. She rubs hard to make it smooth again. Then from under her shift she pulls out a silver medallion of the Virgin on a chain around her neck. She takes it off and embeds it facedown into the ointment, pressing it heavily, equally on all sides. When she pries it loose, the image of the metal face in the candlelight is clear, each line and the curve perfectly reproduced.
Thank God for the bishop’s pustules and the mad correspondences of figwort and pork fat. It can indeed cure all manner of things.
He has come. He is waiting. They will find a way.
WHEN ZUANA MEETS the abbess in her chamber that afternoon it is the first time since Suora Magdalena’s ecstasy that the two women have been alone together.
Inside the old nun’s cell, the routine of prayer and sleep has returned and she has been largely forgotten again. Whatever the initial excitement, the rumors of some kind of transcendence have been extinguished by the lack of firm facts plus the drama of Vespers and the death of Suora Imbersaga, with no less a figure than the abbess herself encouraging the distractions. Letizia still keeps her fed and watered as before and reports to Zuana that though she grows weaker, there are times when the old woman will close her eyes and rock to and fro, suffused with what seems like quiet joy, after which she often asks about the young novice and how it goes with her. But when Zuana visits, as often as her duties allow, there is no such excitement. Instead, Magdalena lies silently on her pallet, her expression dreamy, as if she is only half present. Her flesh is now so paper-thin that Zuana is almost afraid to touch her in case bits of it might peel away in her hands. If the decision were hers she would move Magdalena to the infirmary now, for a soul so close to death deserves better care. She wonders if, when Suora Scholastica comes to inscribe this particular entry in the convent necrology, her life might warrant more or different words.
The abbess welcomes her in and seems pleased to see her. The formerly errant curls are now scooped back under the wimple, but then she has hosted a number of eminent visitors recently and is always careful to fit her style to their differing expectations.
“I am glad you are come. I have been concerned that the work might be proving too much for you. I had wanted to see you earlier, but the passing of Suora Imbersaga and the communication with her family took up my time, along with everything else. You did a fine job of tending her.”
“I did nothing except fail to stop the bleeding. It was Suora Umiliana who eased her passage into the light.”
“You are hard on yourself. You have also been managing an onslaught of fever. We are grateful to you for your dedication.”
“I would do it better if I had my assistant back.”
“I am sure. And I would be the first to send her to you if the demand from the choir mistress was not so great.”
“Does it take so long to learn a few psalm settings? She has an excellent memory.”
“You are very forthright today,” the abbess says mildly. “Would you like to sit down? Or take a small refreshment of wine, perhaps?” She gestures to a decanter that sits on the table, its ruby color lit up by the firelight. “It is from the duke’s own vineyard.”
“No. Thank you.” Zuana bows her head. “I am sorry for my open tongue, Madonna Abbess. My mind is somewhat beset by problems.”
“I am sure it is. And let me assure you if it were only Carnival I would give the novice back to you now, for you did a wondrous job with her.” She pours herself a glass, then holds it up before taking a sip, as if raising it in Zuana’s praise. “But as you know, after Carnival comes Lent and then Easter. We will have full churches for quite a while and Suora Benedicta is up all night scribbling.” She pauses. “Sometimes I wonder if God has somehow singled Santa Caterina out—unworthy as we are—for special responsibilities: Suora Scholastica with her writings, Suora Benedicta with her passion for music, you with your pursuit of dispensary knowledge.”
It is a subtle reminder—which Zuana does not fail to register—that not every convent offers such freedoms. But while the words are humble they are also fat with pride. How could they not be? Following Saint Agnes’s Vespers her chambers have been filled with visitors: relatives come to share the triumph (any accomplishment of the convent is also a success for the family that runs it), benefactors from the court, representation from the bishop, even a wealthy father from Bologna who had been visiting friends and is thinking of where he might place his second daughter—a young girl whose voice, he assures her, is as sweet as her disposition. Then the letters start arriving, from other abbesses and more notably from her own brother in Rome, secretary to Cardinal Luigi d’Este, rich with church gossip and congratulations to his little sister for keeping such a wondrous songbird in hiding until the perfect moment for her debut. In this way, Santa Caterina has stolen a march on all the other convents around. With each appearance at Vespers the story grows. For a city that prides itself on its musical sophistication, the talk now is more of the simple wonder of God’s instrument than of the novelty of men with no balls. And through all this, Madonna Chiara must keep her feet on the ground, though she must surely be allowed a little pleasure.
“While I appreciate your plight—and will, as soon as I can, find you another conversa to help with your nursing—my first duty must be to the interests of the convent. I cannot allow the novice to risk infection or wear herself out with other work as well as all the extra hours in the choir room.”
“And the interests of the convent are also the interests of the novice herself?”
Zuana intends this as a statement, though the question is there for both of them to hear. She surprises herself with her own forthrightness.
“Ah! I am indeed a blessed abbess. It seems, as well as our great bishop to watch over me, I have been given two other consciences to supervise my decisions. No less figures than the dispensary and the novice mistresses.” While her tone is amused it does not preclude a certain tartness. “I think, Suora Zuana, it might be better if you sat down after all. Please.”
Zuana does as she is ordered.
The abbess pours another glass of wine and hands it to her.
“It was sent explicitly for all the choir nuns of Santa Caterina, with the duke’s compliments. You may drink less of it at dinner if you feel unfairly honored now.”
Zuana puts it to her lips. There is a flavor of rich berry underneath its smooth surface. How strange, she thinks, that it has taken the life of a nun to teach her such secrets of the grape; but then her father’s knowledge of wine was more about the remedies he mixed within it than the pleasure to be savored in its own right.
“So. I wonder if your fears for the novice are the same as Suora Umiliana’s. Is it the effects of pride on such a vulnerable young soul? Or perhaps the lack of time for proper prayer and instruction now that her choir duties are so demanding? Suora Umiliana is exercised by both. Though it is possible that neither of you appreciates the discipline that comes from using one’s voice in chapel to sing the praises of the Lord. As our great Saint Augustine said, ‘To sing is to pray twice.’ ”
Of course, Zuana has thought about this—how far her concern about the girl is born of her own selfishness. For yes, she has missed her company, more than she expected. More than she finds it easy to admit. But it is not only that. Watching from the outside, there is something about the girl herself, an almost fevered energy in the way she seems to hurl herself through each and every day—as amenable as she was once intransigent—that makes Zuana think of illness rather than health.
“It is not so much her singing that worries me as the sudden perfection of her behavior.”
“Hmm. First she is too bad and now she is too good. Our novice mistress mistrusts her motives for starting to sing at all. She thinks she is using it as a way of gaining privilege and that underneath she still remains resistant to God’s love. I have wanted to know for a while what you think.”
The wine has a slight metallic aftertaste. Zuana cannot tell whether it is pleasant or not. How much there is to note, even in a single mouthful of liquid. One lifetime barely scratches the surface of experience.
“I think …I think she would have started singing earlier if that was the reason. She could have saved herself a lot of trouble.”
“So why did she choose to do so when she did?”
Zuana is silent. It is something to which she has given a good deal of thought over these last weeks, like the study of an ailment whose cause she is struggling to understand.
“Let me ask you another question. How far do you think your tutelage may have helped?”
She shakes her head. “I simply taught her how to make lozenges and ointments.”
“Ah, Zuana, if you have the temerity to accuse your abbess of the sin of pride, you would do well to address the mote of false modesty in your own eye.” And now for the first time they smile. Sitting closer to her, Zuana can see the pull of sallow skin under her eyes and the furrows across her forehead. With all the triumph she is not without worries. “It’s clear that some kind of bond developed between you. I had wondered if perhaps she came to identify something of her own journey within yours.”
“Mine? Oh, no. I was never so …so accomplished. Or so eligible.”
“No, but you arrived with a similar anger and resistance.”
“Is that why you sent her to me?” she says quickly.
“I think you know why I sent her.” The reply is equally quick, almost brusque, in its tone. She gives an impatient shake of the head, as if to deny the inferred intimacy of the comment. “A good nun learns as much as she teaches.”
Zuana drops her eyes to her hands, which are folded in her lap, the correct position for a choir nun when in the presence of her abbess. Behavior. Order. Hierarchy. The power of obedience and humility. How many times must one learn the same lessons over and over again?
“I did what I could to show her how she might make a life here for herself, how resistance was”—she is at a loss for the word for a moment; futile, though it nudges around her tongue, will not do—“…was …fruitless. But I didn’t expect …I mean, that afternoon in Vespers I was as taken aback as anyone. Except for—” She stops.
“Except for what?”
“Nothing. It is a matter that is not to be discussed.”
“Ah! We are talking of Suora Magdalena?”
Zuana nods. Though she can make no sense of this, she has found herself returning to it: the look of awe in the girl’s face as she watches the old nun’s sublime joy; the way those talonlike fingers flick over and embed themselves in her flesh. And those words: “He told me you would come.” As if the novice had in some way already been marked out by Him.
“Has she spoken to you about it?”
“We do not work together anymore.”
“No, but you have seen each other.”
“Once.” Once, if one does not count the glances across the refectory table or the passing of the other in the cloisters.
“Suora Zuana, if you know something that I don’t about what happened in Magdalena’s cell that afternoon, I need you to tell me. Despite this new …humility, the girl is still highly strung and, while I thank God constantly for her newfound energy toward life here, with Carnival coming the last thing we need is further trouble.”
“She did speak of Suora Magdalena when we met, yes.”
“What did she say?”
“She asked me who she was and why we could not talk of her outside that room. She was concerned that if it was indeed an ecstasy, people should know of it. I told her that all those who needed to know—God and yourself—already did. And that it was our duty to obey your instructions.”
“It was well said.” The abbess smiles, leans over, and refills Zuana’s glass.
WHILE ZUANA HAS answered the question honestly, as is her duty under the rules of obedience, she is aware that there are things she has not told. The fact is that the one meeting between her and Serafina had not been an easy one, though how much that was to do with the girl and how much herself, Zuana does not fully understand.
On the surface it had simply been another work hour in the dispensary, the task in hand the finishing of the bishop’s lozenges. However, given that it had come the day after the drama of Suora Magdalena and Vespers, with Madonna Chiara already in strict conference with the choir mistress and the novice mistress over the novice’s future, they had both been aware that it might be their last together, at least for a while.
All morning the convent had been alight with excitement over the girl’s voice. She had sung sublimely in both of the early offices, eyes bright, manner open, the transformation so complete as to be almost miraculous. Yet when Zuana had turned to find her standing in the doorway, the young woman who greeted her was reserved, almost shy, unsure how to behave, dropping her eyes as she came in quietly and took her place at the workbench.
The table had been laid in readiness for the final stages of the lozenge making, and initially neither of them referred to what had gone before, busying themselves instead with slicing the cooled treacle and fashioning it between their fingers into mouth-sized bits, which they then rolled in a sprinkling of sugar and flour to make them more palatable and stop them from sticking, ready for packing together in the rough wooden box.
They worked quickly and efficiently but whereas at other times the silence would have stilled them, now it felt messy with unspoken words. Zuana could not work out to whom they belonged, for though the girl was clearly nervous—edgy almost skittish, as if her heart were beating too fast—she could feel a tension in herself, too. As the lumps of treacle grew into a hill of smooth sugared balls, they caught each other’s eye and the contact served to break the ice. It was Zuana who spoke first.
“So, you have found your voice at last.”
The girl’s responding smile was small and hurried—“Uh, I …yes”—the words half swallowed.
“The convent’s night songbird may be struggling with feelings of jealousy today.”
“Oh, the night songbird!” She laughed nervously. “Singing to bring on the dawn, yes?” She ducked her head back to the treacle. “You were right. I am grateful to you …for telling me to sing. It has eased my turmoil, helped me to find some peace being here.”
Though there was more agitation than peace in her as she said it.
“It had nothing to do with me. The Lord has worked within you. It is His love and His mercy that we should praise.”
“Yes …yes indeed,” she murmured, her fingers moving restlessly over the balls of treacle.
For the first time Zuana found herself almost uncomfortable in the girl’s presence. The realization troubled her more than she cared to admit. How could it be that all the spitting fury and rebellion, all the pain and tears, were easier to bear than this newfound harmony? If, indeed, harmony was what she was feeling.
Zuana was fashioning some form of question that might go deeper without seeming to intrude when the girl spoke again.
“I …I need to ask you something.”
When she had used those same words less than twenty-four hours before, they had found themselves in a jungle of fabulous animals and the poetry of disobedience. It already felt like a lifetime ago.
“That old woman in the cell. Who is she?”
But this Zuana was ready for. “She is a humble nun intent on her journey to God.”
“So why is she hidden away as if in prison? And why did the abbess forbid us to speak of it?”
“I …I think that is for the abbess to know.”
“But what happened to her yesterday …the ecstasy. I mean, it was an ecstasy. You said so yourself.”
Mindful as she must be now of Madonna Chiara’s injunction, Zuana hesitated. “She was transported in some way, yes.”
“Then shouldn’t other people know about it?”
“The only ones who matter know already. As Madonna Chiara said, it is no one’s business but her own and God’s.”
“But those things …that she said to me. I mean, if she was in ecstasy, then …”
Of course. Who would not have been affected, alarmed even, by such prophetic testimony?
“Serafina, there is nothing to be frightened of. The things she said to you were full of love, her own and God’s. Of that I have no doubt. And neither should you.”
For a second, Zuana saw what she would swear was a look of anguish pass over the girl’s face before she clenched her jaw (a gesture that recalled her rebelliousness) and gave her attention back to the lozenges.
They returned to work, side by side, their hands moving swiftly over the table, cutting, rolling, finishing.
“I do feel …more loved.” The girl’s voice was quiet but firm as she pushed another sugared ball toward the box. “As if I am …am looked after.”
“Then let us pray that feeling continues. Thank Him for His infinite mercy.”
“I should thank you, too.” The words came out in a rush, though she kept her eyes fixed on the bench, her right hand palm-down on the wood. “I mean, for all that you have done. You have …well, you have been good to me.”
“I have only done my duty through God’s love.”
“You say that—but I think you have done more.”
Zuana said nothing, for there was nothing to say. They stood silently their hands close together, resting on the wood of the workbench. Tomorrow she would be here alone, the room her own domain again. The things she had grown used to over these last weeks—the girl’s quickness and curiosity, the unpredictable, unexpected companionship that had developed between them— all this she will grow used to being without again. That is how it must be.
The girl flexed her palm downward so that her fingers splayed out across the wood. There was a dusting of flour on them at points where the treacle had stuck and acted as a glue. Despite the work they were still lovely, fine and tapered, the nails smooth and pink, with perfect pale crescent moons rising out from the cuticles. In contrast, Zuana’s own fingers looked more like newly dug vegetable roots, thick and stained. Staring at them side by side, it made her think of the youthful moistness of the girl’s cheeks, as she had loosened her headscarf the first morning, and the plump softness of her body as she had supported her from the floor to the bed that first night. Though there was less flesh to her now (an excess of emotion and the repetition of convent food had sculpted her more finely), she was still lovely. Yes, along with the clubfooted and the squinty-eyed, Our Lord takes the most luscious young women into his care to keep them from the defilement of the world beyond …the spiritual treasure of virginity. The words of Saint Jerome came into her mind: If you walk laden with gold, you must beware of a robber. We struggle here on earth that elsewhere we may be crowned. For those novices who enter yearning for God, it was an inspiring text. Though why Zuana should have thought of it now she did not quite understand.
Beside her, Serafina’s breath was like a fluttering sigh. Zuana glanced across at her, and as she did so she registered the girl’s right hand moving again, rising slightly, then falling, the last three fingers coming to rest lightly on the back of her own.
Zuana snatched her hand back sharply, as if the touch had scalded her.
“Oh—I am sorry.” The girl’s voice was light, surprised by her surprise. “I only wanted to show you …I mean—”
“Show me what?”
“What you have done for me. My hand. Where I hurt it yesterday on the treacle. See?”
And now Zuana was seeing. Or, rather, she wasn’t. For there was nothing to see. The back of the girl’s hand was clear, the skin smooth, no sign of a blister or a mark of any kind.
“It’s healed. See? No burn, not even any marks where Suora Magdalena grabbed me with her nails. Your ointment is miraculous.”
“It is not meant for burns. I gave it to you to bring out the bruises from your penance.”
“Oh, but they are gone, too.” And the girl’s face lit up, as if the healing had somehow gone deeper than her skin. “Really. I am completely healed.”
But Zuana was not thinking of her ointment now. She was seeing instead the old woman’s face, hearing that strange, pearly voice: He said I am to tell you that, whatever comes, He is here and will take good care of you.
Was the girl hearing it, too? Sweet Jesus, look after this child. Do not burden her with more than she can bear. Zuana, who was not prone to prayer creeping up on her unannounced, found herself suddenly unnerved.
“Come. There is no time for chatter,” she said roughly. “You roll the last lozenges while I start packing them.”
If Serafina felt rebuffed, she did nothing to show it; simply dropped her head and moved her hands back toward the treacle.
When the noon bell started to sound it was the girl who left the bench first, washing her hands in the bowl in readiness for chapel and wiping them on her apron cloth before taking it off and putting it carefully back on the hook on the wall where it came from. Habit. Familiarity. It does not take long to establish itself.
“God be with you, Suora Zuana,” she said, bowing her head humbly and offering the customary sisterly greeting as if it were something she had done all her life, rather than the first time she had spontaneously used it.
“And with you, novice Serafina.”
They were now dismissed from each other’s company. Yet she did not leave.
“I–I think I will be required at choir practice this afternoon.”
“Yes. I would think so, too. I wish you well with it.”
“I …I have a book to deliver back to you. On correspondences and remedies. You said I could borrow it, if you remember. I shall bring it later, if that is all right.”
Zuana nodded. The girl moved to the door. Then turned.
“It was most interesting …the book, I mean. I am sorry not to learn more.”
And then she was gone, leaving Zuana glancing at the shelf for the place where the volume had been and wondering why, although she remembered making the offer, she could not remember Serafina’s taking it.
“SUORA ZUANA?” IN her chambers, the abbess’s voice is gentle now. “Is all well with you?”
“What? Oh, yes, yes. I am sorry. My mind is full at the moment.”
“And you are weary, I can see that. Do you feel fever or aches within your body?”
“No. Thank you. I am quite well. Just tired.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That is good. We need you well while others are ailing.” She stops. “I wonder if being so close to Suora Magdalena’s …transportation may have affected you, too, a little?”
“Me? No, no …well, at the time perhaps. Her ecstasy was very …profound.”
“Indeed. Such things are part of the marvelous warp and weave of convent life. I think of the way Suora Agnesina is so moved by Matins sometimes,” she says briskly, as if both occurrences were as ordinary as another delivery of salt.
Zuana says nothing. To her mind the two women are oceans apart—and when the abbess had been simply Sister Maria Chiara she would surely have thought the same thing.
“And Suora Magdalena herself? How is she now?”
“I think …I believe she is dying.” Zuana pauses, seeing the old woman’s rheumy eyes and face, the skin like a dried-up riverbed. Well, it is what she thinks, so she might as well say it. “I would like to move her to the dispensary. She would be more comfortable there.”
“As always, your charity toward her is admirable. However, as you know, it is Magdalena’s own wish that she remain segregated, and in that she is still supported by her abbess.”
The sudden sharpness of her tone takes Zuana by surprise. She must remember to ask forgiveness within her prayers for the implied disobedience. She straightens her back and feels a singing ache move through the left side of her body and down one leg. Ah, now that the idea of illness has been planted, it seems she is experiencing it, too. It is interesting how the mind plays such tricks sometimes, making the body feel things it has no business feeling. Her father would have things to say on this subject if she could find more time to spend with him… Perhaps that explains some of her weariness and loss. Since the arrival of the novice everything in her life, even the comfort of her father’s presence, has been subject to change.
The abbess is looking at her carefully. “You find me hard on Suora Magdalena.”
“I …I do not think about it.” Now she must note the fault of lying as well. Some days it seems there are no thoughts that don’t contain the seed of an offense. Even the one that follows: that she is wasting her time sitting here discussing things she cannot change when there is so much she should be doing outside. She pulls herself back into the moment. “Perhaps …well, yes, I do find it strange. I mean, whatever happened in the past was a long time ago, and she seems so”—she gropes for the words—“harmless now.”
Madonna Chiara puts her glass down carefully on the small table by the fire, then brings her palms together, lifting up her hands until the tips of her fingers reach her lips. In any other of Santa Caterina’s nuns, Zuana would be reading prayer now, but with her abbess she knows better. She watches as the thoughts— whatever they are—clarify themselves.
“There is a further chapter to the story of Suora Magdalena that you do not know. Indeed, there is no reason why you should, since it happened long before you arrived, but it might help to hear it now. Some years ago she became briefly powerful again in the convent. The story is that this stopped when she was young and the first Duke Ercole died, and certainly no one from the court visited her after that time, and for some years she was confined to her cell. However, when all the fuss had died down and she had grown well enough—for despite all her fasting she was still a strong woman—she began to join in convent life again and the abbess of the time, a good and humble soul, did not have the heart to stop her.
“After some months, it seems that she began to suffer fits again, what appeared to be paralyses of holiness, not unlike her state in the cell. And once or twice in chapel—always at Matins, it seems—her hands and feet would start to bleed. In the middle of the service she would open her palms and there would be blood, dripping out from wounds no one could see. Those who witnessed it said she never made a sound, simply stood with tears rolling down her face; then at the end of the office she would go back to her cell and close the door.”
Zuana is no longer fretting to be at her work, for this is indeed a convent secret she has not heard before.
“Of course it caused a stir. How could it not? Especially with the novices. They were most taken. Even the confessor of the time was affected, but then he was a very simple fellow. Anyway, news got out through the parlatorio and people started to talk about how Duke Ercole’s humble little bird had started to sing and that Santa Caterina was housing a living saint again.”
“When was this?”
“When? The spring and summer of 1540, I believe.”
“But you were here by 1540. You must have seen it for yourself.”
“The convent was only my school then, not yet my home, and the nuns who taught us were forbidden to speak of it. No, I did not learn the things I am telling you until many years later.”
Nonetheless she would surely have noticed something. Such drama would have played havoc with convent discipline, and the clever ones always sense it. Zuana has learned to spot them over the years as they trip along behind the choir nun on the way to their classroom: the little ones whose curiosity is greater than the rules, their faces round and shiny as bubbles, mischief and goodness at war, the outcome as yet undecided. Oh, yes, she would have known something.
“The date will mean nothing to you now, but it was a disastrous time for such a thing to happen. The duke’s French wife, Renata, was causing a scandal at the court with her heretical sympathies. There were apostates eating at her table and some said that she had even given refuge to the arch-heretic John Calvin. The great church council was meeting again at Trento and the rumor was that the inquisition was on its way to Ferrara. An uneducated woman like Magdalena becoming a conduit to God again without the proper tutelage of the church could only bring the city the worst sort of attention at such a time.”
“What happened?”
“After some …discussion within the convent, the old abbess—who unfortunately had a sister at court inside Renata’s entourage—was removed and a new one, Madonna Leonora, appointed. With help from the bishop a more exacting confessor was brought in, and it was decided that it would be better for all if Suora Magdalena was returned to the confines of her cell again.”
Returned to the confines of her cell. In effect walled up within the walls. How had it taken place? Had she protested, howled, hammered on the door, or simply curled up on her pallet and turned her face to God? Even if He had been there to welcome her, the image sends a shudder down Zuana’s spine.
“So it was not her own decision. She was imprisoned.”
“No …” The abbess hesitates. “She was confined to her cell. And everyone—herself included—accepted it, because for the good of the convent it was better that way.” She pauses. “It is …noticeable that since then, without an audience, she has again remained without stigmata or any regular ecstasies.”
“You are saying she is a fraud?”
“No.” She shakes her head impatiently, as if this whole conversation is unsatisfactory in its use of language. “Though when she was younger it is true she was accused of that. No, I am simply saying how it has been. Only God knows what is taking place within her.”
But while that is sound enough, Zuana also knows what she saw. And a bird-boned old woman with skin like over-rolled pastry should not have the strength to manacle a strong young woman with her grasp, let alone be so transported that she allows flies to walk over her eyeballs.
“The story I have told you was only fully explained to me four years ago when I was elected abbess, and my duty to the convent with regard to Suora Magdalena was also made clear.”
Your duty to the convent, Zuana thinks, but also to your family. For what the abbess does not say—because they both know it anyway, as does every other choir sister with half a brain—is that those same tumultuous years of the early 1540s were also ones of shifting allegiances within Santa Caterina, and the appointment of Madonna Leonora to the position of abbess had seen the power return to Madonna Chiara’s family—where, despite gradations of opposition, it has remained ever since.
“I see.”
“So if she is indeed dying, as infirmary mistress you can perhaps find other ways of caring for her within these rules.”
“And what if …” Zuana hesitates.
“What if?”
“What if God really is talking through her?”
“Then He would do well to find other means,” the abbess says quietly. “Zuana, though you are not the most holy sister in Santa Caterina, you are certainly one of the more astute. This is not gossip I am sharing with you. Nor even old history. I am telling you these things now because once again we are voyaging in stormy waters.”
“But …but I thought the worst was passed. Duchess Renata is long returned to France, we have a new duke, a new pope, and the inquisition has moved on. Surely the city is out of danger now?”
“The reprieve is temporary. Our new Holy Father still has his eye on Ferrara. Without a legitimate heir, the city will return to the Papal States at the duke’s death, though God willing that will not happen. But there is a more immediate threat. You will know that among the final decrees passed by the council at Trento was one directed at convents, to purge them of any impurities or scandals by enclosing all nuns, regardless of their order or status.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t affect us. As Benedictines we are an enclosed order already.”
“That is true. However, it seems that there are meanings and meanings of the word enclosed. And what is becoming clear is that the decree was passed so quickly—some might say deliberately— that it is a blunt sword, which, if wielded equally bluntly, could change all our lives.”
Zuana is silent. For most nuns the inner workings of church politics hold more twists than a knotted intestine and there is always another piece of gossip sliding in over the walls, each more scandalous than the last. Which is where a brother in the church proves more reliable—and more useful—than any mystic in a cell.
“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
“I mean that within the idea of enclosure the decree empowers bishops—should they see fit—to limit or close down almost all contacts between convents and the outside world. It means they can, if they so choose, stop plays or concerts, cut down the number of visits or visitors, and sever trade connections with the outside so that we become dependent on charity rather than our business endeavors. The implications are severe. There is even talk that letter writing should be restricted, ‘as not conducive to the tranquillity of our state.’ ” She pauses. “It does not take much to imagine the impact of such a decree upon us here.”
Except she is wrong—to imagine Santa Caterina so changed, so shrunken, so constricted, is surely impossible. “But …but how can they do that? It is against the understanding on which the women entered.”
“I think that, when faced with the fear of heresy, such understanding was of little interest to the good cardinals and bishops who worked at Trento,” the abbess says tartly. “However, a decree is only words on a piece of paper until it is implemented, and not all church officials are so stoked with the fire. For now, at least, Ferrara’s own bishop is open to the entreaties of the city’s great families and is more liable to execute the reforms in the spirit than in the letter. But to make sure of that, we in turn must be seen to be above reproach, avoiding the scrutiny of those who would destroy in order to purify.”
Now, of course, Zuana understands it better: all the subtle changes in atmosphere in the convent over these last months; the abbess’s work to secure even bigger dowries to push the balance books into credit; the insistence on getting the novice settled and singing as fast as possible; the damping down of the more liberal faction in chapter, while holding Umiliana’s fierce fire in equal check. And now the blanket suppression of gossip concerning an ecstatic Magdalena.
It has always been impressive to Zuana, this sharpness of Chiara’s when it comes to the balance between the work of God and the work of man, especially when as an unwilling novice she had found it hard to disentangle the holiness from the hypocrisy of convent life. If she herself is in some ways the product of her father’s teaching, then surely the abbess’s talents, too, were bred in the bone. The names of Chiara’s ancestors run through the history of Santa Caterina like a rich seam of gold in the earth: women of shrewdness and distinction, perpetuating the family influence through a convent rather than children. The only question is—and it is one that Zuana has asked herself before without ever putting it into words—were such a woman to find herself having to choose between God and the power of family, which one would call louder?
“It will, I am sure, be clear to you now how wonderful it is for us to be offering the city a young virgin songbird. The reemergence of a living saint, however, having ecstasies with no proper confessor to control her, would be another thing entirely.” She pauses before picking up her glass from the table. “I hope that lays to rest any worries you might have in this matter.”
God versus family. It seems Zuana has the answer to her question. Perhaps it is not surprising that the realization makes her feel a little feverish.
BY THE TIME she arrives back in the infirmary, the morning work hour is almost finished. The mist seems to have found its way inside today as the room is gloomier than usual. She glances toward Imbersaga’s empty bed, and for a moment she is back in the still center of that night, the young woman’s face smooth as wax now that the pain has left, with Suora Umiliana’s vibrant devotion all around her, spinning sorrow into joy. Suora Umiliana. How would she feel if the convent was purged according to the letter of the decree? More at home than most of them, no doubt. And what then of Suora Magdalena? If Umiliana were abbess now, would she be so acquiescent in her imprisonment? Ah, these are not questions you are called upon to answer, Zuana, she says to herself firmly. As dispensary sister your calling is to care for the sick, and that is what you will do.
She looks around the room. There are five beds empty now. Perhaps those suffering from the infection would be better tended here, where she could watch them more continually. But what if they infected the others? Three of the four remaining old women will probably die of natural causes soon enough—they are asleep most of the time, anyway—and even Suora Clementia seems to be fading. With the arrival of the pestilence, Zuana has been forced to keep her restrained to prevent her from wandering the cloisters at all hours of the day and night, and the old nun has taken it hard. She spends most of the time now muttering into her bedclothes, but as Zuana passes she raises herself up, suddenly agitated, trying to get off the bed.
“Oh, you are back. The angel of the gardens is waiting for you. She is with us again,” she says, waving her arms in the direction of the dispensary, straining against the straps around her chest.
“Shhh. There is no need to shout. I can hear you well enough.”
“No—but I think she is wounded. She came in so quietly. Her wings must be broken. You must let her fly again. We need her to keep us safe at night.” Since the restraints went on, her mind has been fracturing into even smaller pieces.
“Don’t worry.” Zuana is by her now, gently pressing her down onto the bed. “There are angels enough already to guard over you.”
“No, look. There! I told you she had come. See—see—the night angel is returned.”
Zuana turns in time to see Serafina coming out from the dispensary door, her newly washed headscarf a white halo against her head. An angel with broken wings? Hardly. But a novice with broken rules, certainly.
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh. I have been waiting for you. I looked everywhere but no one knew where you were.” She pauses. “I …I brought you back the book I borrowed. I wasn’t sure where to put it so I left it on the workbench.”
“You should never have gone in there on your own. You are no longer working with me, and it is strictly against the rules.”
“Oh—I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Suora Clementia said it would be in order.”
And the girl smiles at the old woman, who waves back happily, madly. “The angel—I told you—the angel is returned to us.”
“Be quiet, sister. You will upset the others,” Zuana says tersely. “And you”—she nods at Serafina—“I will speak to you inside.”
With the door closed, Zuana casts a quick glance around the room. Everything seems in its place, apart from the book, which is on the worktop. Clementia’s celebration continues in muted tones through the wood behind them.
“What did you say to her?”
“Nothing. Nothing, I swear. I thought she was sleeping so I came in quietly, but then she woke up.”
“Why are you here, anyway? You should be in choir.”
“Suora Benedicta let us go early. She is working with the lute players on some new arrangements. She is very excited about them.”
So excited that she, too, thinks nothing of bending the rules. “In which case you should have gone back to your cell.”
“I am sorry. Please—I meant no harm. I told you. I just brought back the book. I thought you might need it now.”
Zuana stares at her. Ten weeks ago she did not even know of the existence of this young woman. She worked alone amid her plants and her remedies and kept her thoughts, such as they were, to herself. But now her whole life—even that of the convent, it seems—is full of her, as if the journey of this single novice is somehow a test in which they must all participate.
“The dispensary is out of bounds to everyone but myself. What you have done is a reportable offense. You could find yourself with grave penance upon you again.”
“Then you must report me for it,” she says quietly, the slightest of tremors in her voice. They stand for a few seconds in silence. “I know I did wrong but …I mean …I also came because I wanted to ask if I could help. So many people are ill now. I know there is just you and the conversa, and you cannot do it all alone. I could tend them with you. You have taught me something of fevers and vomiting.”
Zuana sighs. “It is charitable of you to think such things—”
“No, it isn’t charity. Well, I mean, I hope it is. But you helped me. Now I would like to help you.”
If I felt better would this be easier? Zuana thinks. What am I do to with her? What is for the best?
“I …I wondered if you had thought of using the cochinilla.”
“What?”
“The dye. We talked of it, remember? About its powers. Wasn’t that one of the things you said? That as well as turning the world red it could be used to break fevers.”
“You have a remarkable memory, Serafina.”
The girl bows her head. “The things you said interested me. Is it a good idea?”
“No, it is …it is an untried remedy. But I thank you for the thought. You have the makings of a good dispensary assistant.”
There is the beat of a pause before Serafina looks up and says, “I wondered if you might have asked for me again.”
Only now is Zuana visibly taken aback by the pride implicit in the comment.
“Enough! Your presence is required in chapel. That is the abbess’s decision. And you are her novice.”
The girl drops her head again. “I am sorry. I just …well, I do not understand why but—but I miss it here.”
“I am sure Suora Umiliana will be able to help you with that.” She takes a breath. “If you are lucky you will get back to your cell before the Sext bell.”
The novice’s eyes slip upward. “Does that mean you won’t report me? I really didn’t mean any harm.”
Zuana closes her eyes with impatience. She thinks back to the madrigals in the girl’s chest and her unbidden arrival in Suora Magdalena’s cell. There are those who would say that ignoring the transgression of others is a transgression in oneself. “Just go now. Go.”
The girl does not need telling again. Zuana hears the door closing behind her.
In heaven, they say, the body of a saved soul is so pure and with powers so alien to those on earth that not only can it travel faster than lightning across the sky, but its senses are so heightened, so crystal-clear, that it can hear the beat of a bird’s wing a hundred miles away and see through the densest of forms as if they were made of air itself. It is almost a shame, then, that Zuana is still mortal. For it means that she does not hear the noisy sigh of relief that Serafina blows from her lips as she closes the door behind her, or see that under her robe her right hand is clasped over a bottle of dark liquid.
As she moves through the infirmary, Clementia calls out plaintively to this unlikely angel, who passes her by without even a sideways glance.
AH! SHE CAN barely breathe with the thumping in her chest. Her chest and her head. She runs her fingers over the rim of the bottle under her robe to make sure the stopper is still in place. It would not do to be leaking poppy syrup in her wake.
This is not how she had planned it. She had intended to decant some of the liquid into another vial so as not to leave a gap on the shelves but she could not find any empty ones. There had to be a store of them somewhere but for the life of her she could not remember Zuana ever using one, so frugal is she with all her supplies. As it was, when she heard the voices outside she had barely had enough time to rearrange the other bottles and slide it into her pocket before propelling herself out the door.
She had not expected Zuana back before Sext. The spreading of the illness was disrupting the patterns of the convent, and when she had seen her go into the abbess’s chambers after breakfast she had known she would not find a better time. After Benedicta had dismissed them early (that much of the story was true—the choir mistress has indeed been overflowing with new notes, so many it was hard even for her to follow them), she had noticed that the shutters were still drawn on the outer chamber, which meant they were still in conference.
How close. She swallows to get her saliva back. She is out of the infirmary now, moving back into the cloister courtyard. She remains so agitated it is hard to know whether she is relieved or still scared. What might have happened, had she not heard Clementia warbling about her angels and Zuana’s voice answering, does not bear thinking about. She must be more careful. But then she had not foreseen the time it had taken to get past the crazy one, who had heard her even though she had moved on tiptoe.
“Oh, it’s you. Where have you been? How is it out in the night? Is the holy army gathered yet?” Such a river of nonsense she spouted. “I cannot count them anymore, so you must do it for me.”
As she spoke she had yanked against the restraints like some lunatic shackled to a prison wall. See? See what happens when they keep you against your will? Eventually the mind curdles, sprouting fancies like mold on old cheese. But they will not keep her. Not for a moment longer than she can help. Once she has the keys and they agree on a plan she will be away from here, however great a scandal she unleashes. And no one will stop her, not even Suora Zuana.
That is the only worry now: how much she knows. The rest of them she can fool. Even Suora Umiliana seems to have stopped picking on her, so intent is she on the welfare of the rest of her flock now that the fever of illness as well as Carnival is in the air. But Zuana.
What are you doing here?
She sees again Zuana’s face confronting her. She had been so fierce. Had she somehow guessed that she had not come back only to deliver the book? What if she had known she was lying? What if she could smell the syrup leaking out of the bottle or detect its shape through the folds of her cloth?
At least the threat of it had made her fight back.
I came because I wanted to ask if I could help.
Zuana had believed her then. Or, if she hadn’t, she had wanted to enough to let the suspicion go. And she’d been right. Though the answer had been born of cunning it was not without feeling. Serafina would have helped her if she could (her, not the others; she didn’t care a fig about them) because it was clear she was not well. She had wanted to offer to make her some dandelion tea, to sit down with her and watch the drink warm its way into her vital spirits while they talked of possible remedies for the contagion.
Just go now. Go.
It was as if Zuana had almost been frightened of her. She knew then that she had won. That Zuana would not report her. There would be no penance. Surely God is on her side after all. Somewhere He has understood how unfairly she has been treated and how she deserves to be free.
She sings to herself quietly to calm the thumping in her chest. Her head is full of new music now: lines of prayer that swoop and soar like evening swifts, their phrases full and lovely as any madrigal. When she is alone she can still hear the other parts in her mind, rising, fading, joining, curling around her own. Never in her life has she been inside so many voices before, and it surprises her sometimes, how much it calms and yet excites at the same time. There are moments after Vespers when if she were not incarcerated she might feel almost satisfied; when she can almost imagine how it must be for Suora Benedicta, spending every moment of her life pulling melodies out of her head. Oh, to so live for music. She cannot wait to see his face when she sings for him again, for there are things she has learned here that not even he could teach her.
Inside her cell, with the door closed, she takes out the bottle from her robe and turns over the mattress to locate the hiding place.
Her cunning in such things amazes even herself. She has gone through it all a thousand times: how, when, where. If someone were to ask her now, she might almost say she was enjoying herself, for as a child she always liked best those bits of learning that could be applied rather than simply memorized. “You have the makings of a good dispensary assistant.” That is what Zuana said to her just now. Well, perhaps she does. But she is bound for greater things. What they are she cannot quite imagine, for some days there is barely time to think of that—of him—at all, she is so full of it: the planning, the preparations.
At night, to blot out the voice of Magdalena, she tries to imagine herself out of here. She gets as far as a room (Ferrara beyond the convent walls is an unknown city to her), not as rich as her father’s house but comfortable enough, with a fire in the grate and musical instruments all around, and she and he are in each other’s arms, the music they have been making suddenly stopped by kisses. She tries to imagine his mouth, lips soft like the inside of a ripe plum, and to find it again she brings her own open lips to the back of her hand, feeling the wet heat of her own saliva, the probe of her tongue, the ridge of teeth pulling playfully at her own skin. It brings with it a pinching in her gut that leaves her slightly breathless. In her mind their embrace is so close that she cannot see his features and she has to step back to try to reacquaint herself with his face, only the image of him remains blurred so that she feels a twinge of disappointment, almost a sense of shame, which unnerves her a little.
Never mind. Soon it will be different. Soon she will see his dear face again and remember why she loves him so.
She has made her plan. The best time will be during Carnival. With so much distraction and the excitement of performance they will have too much on their hands to police the comings and goings of a single—and now radiantly obedient— novice. And with all the activity revolving around the cloisters and the parlatorio—she has thought this through, step by step—no one will even be thinking of the storehouse by the river, where, on the other side, a boat could surely loiter in the darkness without causing suspicion.
But for him to come in or for her to go out, separately or together, they will have to get through two sets of doors: one from the river to the storeroom and another from the storeroom into the convent. And for that she needs copies of the keys. Here lies the next challenge. Apart from the master keys held by the abbess, there are two sets. The first, kept by the cellarer, is impossible; Suora Federica has a face to match the rock in her soul, and everyone knows she wears the keys next to her skin day and night. However, the gossip is that the chief conversa is less amenable to the imprint of sharp metal between her breasts and so sleeps with her duplicate set under her bolster. Although the story has it that, like all good dragons, she sleeps lightly to protect her treasure.
In which case she would no doubt appreciate a good night’s rest—a touch of that same relief as is sometimes generously offered to those on their way to the gallows, though it would provoke dreams that would torment them further should they ever have the good fortune to wake up again. It is not easy even with the poppy syrup in her hands, for she has to find an innocent way to administer it. Candida has the wherewithal but she is too savvy for her own skin to take on something that would almost certainly end with her exposure. No, there has to be another way.
She slips the vial through the tear into the mattress, next to where the wax block is already nestling amid the horsehair and straw.
The bell for Sext sounds.
PERHAPS IF ZUANA had had more time. With time she might have thought further about the abbess’s story. With time she would have checked the supplies and samples in her room more rigorously. But a few minutes later the bell for Sext sounds, and between prayer and work and more prayer sometimes there is simply not enough time.
Over the next twenty-four hours the malady spreads further, strengthening as it goes, and in one of the infected sisters the fever becomes dangerously high. With the convent concert and play only a few weeks away, there is a growing concern that Santa Caterina will be too ill to participate or—more important—to entertain and impress others.
The next morning’s work hour finds Zuana in the dispensary sucking on a wad of ginger root to counteract the nausea that is rising in her stomach and ignoring the way her head is burning. She is ill, that is clear enough. But she is not yet incapacitated. Either the contagion will prove too strong for her or she will resist it. There is no point wasting time wondering which it will be. It is more important to find a way to fight back.
She has seen all the symptoms before in varying computations, the rhythm and severity transmuting over the years. One winter such an infection might come early, moving like a fast wind across a field, bending but not breaking any of the crop. Another year it might wait, feeding off the damp and fog until it is fat with fetid water, and affecting the oldest or those with moist humors worst, drowning more than a few in their own phlegm, only to be replaced the next year by one that favors heat rather than water, burning up rather than pulling down.
Remember, it is always best to try to contain rather than rely on curing, since by the time you have found a treatment that works the malady has often done its worst. During his lifetime her father had kept notes through the most virulent outbreaks, comparing the ages and constitutions of the ones who died with those same attributes in the ones who survived.
“That is all very well, but once started it is easier said than done,” Zuana murmurs, as she mixes up another batch of mint and rue vinegar water for the fever.
He had found that those people who nursed others— mothers, doctors, priests—were often most affected, which was not so surprising, for as well as their proximity it could be that God chose to take to Him the kindest and therefore those He loved best. Except that He also took at least as many sinners as would-be saints. While some resisted with tonics, others remained healthy without, as if they held the cure already within themselves. Then there were the ones who were not helped at all, even when they took anything and everything available.
As to the causes—well, the answers were as plentiful as the contagions. In his last years, her father had been drawn to the theory (which, like many, was built on an ancient one) of a physician colleague in Verona who argued that such diseases traveled by means of tiny malevolent seeds in the air that sat inside clothing and materials and, having entered the body, attacked and overcame the healthy seeds they found there, turning them into an enemy force within. Yet if they were so small as to be invisible, how could any doctor tell where they were hiding? Why were some more dangerous than others? And how, short of burning everything, even the air itself, could we destroy them? To the lack of answers he had brought only more questions. In the end, the outcome was the same: if it was not actually the plague or the pox, whatever it was eventually moved on, only to be replaced by something else the next year, and then another, not entirely unlike it, two years after.
In some ways Zuana is lucky to be kept so busy for if she were not she might find herself thinking of that winter, sixteen years ago, when her own life had started to unravel. The weather itself had been unusual that year, mild right into the beginning of February, and the infection, when he contracted it, had seemed benign enough, though he was old by then—over seventy—and already no longer quite as boundless in his energy. He had sneezed and wheezed, then turned hot and cold, but after two days in bed with a fever, which she had treated according to his instruction, he had got up again, declaring himself to be cured and with the appetite of a horse.
They had dined at table—he had had broth, roasted meat, and a bottle of good Trebbiano wine—and they were sitting together by the fire companionably reading, as was their habit. He was studying one of the recently arrived volumes of Vesalius, as he often did those days, and was deeply absorbed.
When it happened it had been so quick she could barely remember it. She had heard a fast intake of breath, as if he had come across something that annoyed or amazed him—recently he was as much in dialogue with his younger colleagues’ findings as he had first been in awe of them. She had looked up to see or ask what it was that had incensed him in time to register a frown on his face as his head slumped down onto his chest. For a second it seemed as if he had simply fallen asleep, as he did sometimes those days after a good dinner, but then, slowly—so slowly that it seemed as if time itself might have stilled to mark the event—he had leaned to one side and keeled over onto the floor, his hand sliding off the book heavily enough to tear the page as it went.
She had got to him almost as he hit the ground, screaming out for the servants and trying to raise him up. She had done all he taught her: loosening his collar, calling his name, rolling him onto his side—though his body was as heavy and loose as a great sack of grain—and pouring water from the jug into his slack half-open mouth. But already it felt as if there was nothing there. He, her father, was gone. No movement, no breath, no hint of a pulse, nothing. It was as if life, not wanting to cause any fuss or bother or the need for remedies or nursing, had slipped out of him in that one single exhalation of breath.
Later, when the priest had come and the body had been lifted and carried out to lie on the table in his workshop, and the place was full of servants and people wailing, she, who had been too stunned to cry, had gone back to the book on the table to find that it was the sixth volume, dedicated to the thorax, and that the torn page was an illustration from the dissection of the heart showing how the blood moved from the left to the right side. It had been a subject of some vexation to him, this chapter, since it exposed an apparent contradiction between the authority of the great Galen and the evidence of Vesalius’s own knife. Vesalius himself later went so far as to publicly declare Galen wrong—the blood did not, could not move that way, as it was evident to his own eyes that there were no holes in the wall of flesh through which it could travel.
When, many years on, the news of this reached her through the grille, she wondered if perhaps that was what her father had been thinking about when the fit took him, or if the correspondence between the dead organ on the page and the loss of his own vital spirit was a simpler affair, left there deliberately so that she might in some way understand this death better. Certainly with the silence of his heart came the silence of everything, from the sound of his voice to all those thoughts and words from the great library of his experience not yet written down and therefore lost forever.
Get up now, Faustina.
And yet, God be praised, an echo of his voice had returned.
You have mourned enough and there is work to be done.
He had been right. She could not grieve forever and there were things to be done. Almost before the priest had said the last prayers you could hear the flapping of vulture wings in the antechambers, and if she didn’t stop crying soon, how would she notice when his most precious volumes started to slide off the shelves, or how his papers were disturbed by teachers or ambitious students coming to pay their respects and take back a few things they had “left with him for safekeeping”? It was flattery of sorts. A doctor with connections at court left a hole waiting to be filled by others; and what young woman—even if she could command any offers—could possibly want books of herbs and remedies as part of her dowry?
But the real communication didn’t start until sometime after the funeral, a few days before she was due to leave for the convent, when the kitchen girl had been struck down with the most monstrous stomach cramps and headaches that had had her vomiting with their ferocity. She was a long, gangly strip of a girl from the country, at that age where she seemed to be growing too fast for her own flesh, and when Zuana had found her she was in such agonies that she could barely uncurl herself to show the source of the pain.
Come on! Have you forgotten everything I taught you so soon? he had said in her ear as she had bent down beside her.
She had been so nervous that her hand had been shaking as she took the girl’s pulse. When she couldn’t find it in her wrist she went to the neck, behind her ear, where he had taught her, and there she located it, forceful but not so fast as to suggest dangerous fever. She had set to work on the headache, making up a crown of verbena leaves in vinegar and wrapping it around the girl’s forehead, then dosing her with basil water and eau-de-vie to settle or expel whatever was wrenching her gut. And because she would not have slept even if she had gone to bed, she had sat with her through the night as she had tossed and moaned.
Well? he had said, just before dawn, at that hour which seems to suit the dead more than the living. What is your opinion now?
She had laid her hand on the girl’s forehead. “Whatever fever she had is gone. But the cramps continue. I would have expected bowel evacuation by now if there was gut poisoning. Perhaps I should increase the eau-de-vie to help expel whatever is there.”
“Perhaps. And what if there is nothing to evacuate?”
“But there is something. I can feel definite tenderness.”
“Where? Show me.”
She put her hands on the thin shift that covered the girl’s body, moving them down from her stomach gently toward the pubic bone. But the truth is she didn’t know exactly where, for while she had seen woodcuts of the insides of a woman, this was the first time she had actually had flesh under her hands.
“Here.”
But by now he had fallen silent.
The girl moaned, arching her body in response to the pressure and the pain. And now, through her shift, she noticed for the first time the fat buds of new breasts. She got up from the bedside and went into the workroom, pulling down a bag of Saint Mary’s mint and some bugloss leaves, infusing them in a mix of hot water and wine. How stupid! No wonder he had stopped talking to her.
Back at the bedside she helped the girl upright so she could sip it slowly.
“Ooh, I am dying.”
“No, you are not,” she said. “The problem is more that you are growing.”
Sometime next morning the girl passed small clots of black blood, followed not long after by a more recognizable menstrual flow.
“I should have realized.” Back in her room, she was almost too tired to undress. “How could I not realize? It was so simple.”
It is the simple that is sometimes hardest. That is why you have to continue to ask questions and keep looking.
Perhaps if I had had a mother, she wanted to say, but if she thought about this now she would have to accept the loss of two parents.
You did well enough. Go to bed now, Faustina. You need the sleep as much as your patient.
“No! Don’t go. Please don’t go.”
Do not worry. I will be here when you need me.
“BENEDICTA.” THE VOICE behind her in the dispensary is loud and real.
Zuana turns too suddenly, which causes her head to throb so that she has to steady herself to avoid falling. The novice mistress, Umiliana, is standing almost directly behind her, her cushion-fat cheeks red and veined from exposure to the winter winds.
“Deo gratias.” Has she been talking out loud to herself? Surely not.
“Do I disturb you, sister?” The older woman pauses. “I heard voices.”
“No. No, I”—Zuana stumbles, unsure of what or how much she has heard—“I was …praying. Is there something wrong?”
“A novice has been taken ill during instruction.”
“Who?”
“Angelica.”
“Angelica? She suffers with her lungs.”
“God has seen fit to afflict her that way, yes. But she bears it well.”
“I …I will come to her.” She turns back to the worktop as if to find something to give her, but the move makes her dizzy again.
“I would not worry yourself. She is recovered enough for a while. I have sent her to the chapel to pray”
But Zuana is thinking of how the infection might mix with the asthma and what they would do if the girl starts to find it hard to breathe. “It would be better if she were resting.”
“What? And make the chapel even emptier?”
She hesitates. It would help no one to have them bickering now. “It is only that the contagion moves more swiftly in places where we are gathered together.”
“So I have heard said. However, when it comes to the greater well-being of the convent, there is some disagreement as to what brings most relief.”
Zuana watches as the novice mistress’s gaze shifts away from her face down to the open books behind her on the worktop: woodcuts of the upper chest and respiratory system, with a commentary to the side of them. She is struck once again by the intensity of Umiliana’s concentration. It is no wonder that her novices find her so intimidating; it seems there is little, inside or outside the soul, that she does not notice.
“You use interesting prayer books, sister.”
“They are records. From a physician in Verona who dealt with an influenza similar to the one besetting us now.”
“And did he know the cause of it?”
Now that Zuana thinks about it, she cannot remember a time when the novice mistress has come to her in the dispensary like this. Certainly she does not need to be here. News of a novice’s illness could have been sent easily enough via a conversa.
“He had some idea, yes.”
“What was it?”
“He was of the opinion that it is connected with semina morborum.”
“Semina morborum? Bad seeds? What—that come from the ground?”
“No, they are all around us. In the air.”
“Where?” And Umiliana looks about her now with such innocent immediacy that Zuana can detect no hint of mockery.
“They are incorporeal and therefore invisible to the eye.”
“Then where do they come from?”
“They exist within nature.” As she says this she becomes suddenly aware of how ill she is now feeling.
“So they are created by God, then? On which day of creation did He make them?”
“I think there was not a particular day.” Maybe a vinegar and rue water cloth on her forehead would help. “The great Saint Augustine himself has this same idea within his work.” She will make up a further batch as soon Umiliana leaves. “Perhaps I have not explained it well.”
But it seems that the novice mistress is not that interested in leaving. “Well, I am only a simple nun. I do not have your …education in such things.” She pauses. “But I have another idea as to why such things happen. Of course, it is not as …newfangled as yours.”
As she says this she smiles, as if to show her business is not quarreling after all. Only it is hard to tell what she is really feeling, since when she smiles her eyes are swallowed up into cheek flesh.
Zuana leans back against the bench.
“You are sure I do not disturb you? I would not so presume if the welfare of the convent was not at stake.”
Zuana glances to the hourglass, which is pouring sand toward the end of her work hour. If the novice mistress has come simply to debate God’s place in medicine, she could have done it within chapter. It would not be the first time they had wrangled over such matters, and in chapter she could have been sure of having an audience to play to.
“No. You do not disturb me at all. Please, I would very much like to hear.”
Umiliana takes a step toward her now, as one might do if the intention was to share a special confidence. Her gaze slips over Zuana’s head to the wall of vials and pots behind her. My choir of cures, Zuana thinks, then checks herself. Never once has the novice mistress had recourse to them. Whatever pain she may encounter she keeps to herself. If that is strength, does that somehow make others’ suffering a weakness? Umiliana’s eyes move back to connect with her own. Certainly something is happening here, and she would do well to pay attention to it. She tries to concentrate.
“It seems to me that God may use such contagion for a purpose, sending it into people and places where He feels He is not worshipped properly.”
Their faces are close now. If the seeds are indeed turning more potent inside me, I must be careful not to breathe them out directly onto her, Zuana thinks. She looks away to the side. “Yes. Well, that …that can also be true.”
“Ah! So you are aware of it, too?”
“Of what?”
“The way He feels toward Santa Caterina. About what is happening here—how the convent is changing.”
“Changing? I …am not sure—”
“That night when Suora Imbersaga died, you did not sense something? You did not feel His blessed presence in the room?”
Certainly she had experienced something. “I …I felt His great compassion, that He had seen fit to end her suffering.”
“Oh, yes, indeed. But more than that. You did not feel that His taking her to Him was a sign of how He felt about Santa Caterina? That such a good soul would do better in His care?” And now she pulls back slightly. “You were much moved that night, Suora Zuana, I could tell. I would say more than I have seen you for years.”
“I was …I …yes—” She breaks off, not knowing what to say.
A soul as smooth as a bolt of silk. Those are the words her supporters use about Santa Caterina’s novice mistress. Though others might add and a tongue as sharp as a toothpick. Yes, Zuana had been in pain that night, though it had been more about what she could not feel than what was revealed. Had God really spoken to Umiliana and not to her? There was no question but that there had been an intensity of sweetness in her sorrow. No question either but that the young nun was deserving …But does that make Zuana so undeserving that she had noticed nothing?
She is aware that the silence is growing, can feel herself sweating further under the heat of Umiliana’s concentration. My work is to tend the plants and alleviate suffering, she thinks stubbornly, not to dabble in convent politics. If the abbess were here she would know what to say. Particularly with the welfare of the convent at stake. Well, it seems she must say something.
“The convent has grown in numbers in recent years. I think all change brings more change with it.”
“Yet Our Lord Jesus Christ does not change. His love, His sacrifice. And neither does our duty toward Him. We are bound to serve Him in obedience and humility, not look to the outside world for sustenance and praise. The great bishops at Trento warned against such contamination. Yet look around you, dear sister. Do you not think that in our hunger for ever more dowries and glory we take in too many young women who love themselves more than they love God?”
Ah, so it is the problem of young souls. Everyone knows it has been a source of distress to her for some time. Not to mention this latest challenge. “If you are talking of the young novice Serafina.” She pauses, not sure for a second what she is about to say. “I think …I think with your help—and God’s music—she is slowly finding her way.”
“Do you? I am not so sure. I think the Lord is crying out to her but that now she uses her voice to stop her ears against Him. And why not? These days Santa Caterina is more interested in training voices for profit than for prayers. Perhaps you do not see it because you do not remember, but this was once a convent of great devotion. Novices would feel it all around them. Angels would wrap Suora Agnesina in their arms during Matins, and Suora Magdalena had only to open her hands in chapel for blood to pour out from her wounds. But she is locked and forgotten in her cell.” She pauses. “Though I am sure that He still comes to her. Does He not?”
Ah! So even the novice mistress is not immune to the power of gossip. Surely this, too, is its own form of contagion, Zuana thinks: how words once spoken have no need of repetition, since instead they can travel through the air, invisible, incorporeal, becoming potent as soon as they are ingested. She has a sudden image of the world as it must be seen by the angels, vibrating with a cornucopia of unseen matter, a mix of the benevolent and the malign. On what day was all of this created? She wishes her father were here so she could ask him. But that is not the matter in hand. The matter in hand is Suora Magdalena and her possible transcendence. Is this what the conversation is really about? Could it be that the holy novice mistress is simply using the welfare of the convent as bait to catch a bigger fish? Such cunning seems—well, somehow unworthy of her.
Thank God, Zuana is safe from it, though. Unquestioning obedience is the greatest discipline a nun can aspire to. And the instruction of one’s abbess is the instruction of God Himself.
“The last time I tended her, the good sister was quiet in her cell.”
For that second, the disbelief in Umiliana’s eyes is so naked that Zuana is startled; more so as she watches the tears starting to flow down the plump slopes of the sister’s cheeks.
“Oh, oh, I know you have a good soul, Suora Zuana. I see it in the way you treat the sick. Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself was a healer, and you have been given a gift from Him in your work. But I fear we have failed you by not training your spirit to find His great love through prayer. I would have given much to have had you as my novice.”
“I …I would have liked that, too,” she says, and suddenly it feels as if the words have been wrenched out of her heart, which now feels as hot as her forehead. It may be that she even sways a little.
“Are you all right, sister?”
“Oh, yes, I am fine. I—well, I just have much to do to help the sick.”
Umiliana regards her solemnly, as if wondering how much more she should say. The tears now reach the deep creases around her mouth, slipping down toward the pitted pores of her chin. Zuana watches them, half mesmerized. She is so lovely and so ugly. If Suora Scholastica were to compose a play about the birth of Christ, surely the novice mistress would play the part of Elizabeth, her withered old womb filled by God’s grace…
Enough, enough. I must concentrate, Zuana thinks again.
“I am trespassing upon your work hour. God needs you for other things.” The elder nun takes a step back, but the gaze remains. “I thank you for this …this talk between us. You are always in my prayers. I hope I have not disturbed you too much.”
“No, not at all. I …I will come to Angelica soon.”
But she makes a dismissive gesture with her hands. “Do not worry. I will let you know if you are needed. If the prayers do not help. God be with you, Suora Zuana. You are precious to Him, and He is watching your journey.”
“And with you, Suora Umiliana.”
AS SOON AS she is alone again she mixes up the vinegar water and rue and moves on to some fresh eau-de-vie and basil. Though she knows she is ill, she is determined at least to finish the work hour.
How many batches of these remedies has she made up in this room? Twelve, thirteen years’ worth? How many more to come? What will be her allotted span? Fifty, fifty-five? Certainly there are nuns who live that long. Even sixty. Sixty years …She thinks of time almost as a weight. She sees a set of scales, with the years like bags of salt on one side, balanced on the other by good works and prayer. Perhaps when the two are in perfect harmony she will be ready. But how does one measure goodness? And does all time weigh the same? Surely not. Days spent in prayer or sacrifice should be worth more than those taken up in watering plants or distilling juices. Perhaps the point is not balance after all but the tilting of one side in favor of the other?
She wonders if this is something she already knows but has simply forgotten because she feels so strange. Yet she cannot shift the thought that recently her progress has seemed so slow. Sister Imbersaga was barely twenty-two years old when she was taken. On the surface she had been just another nun, in truth rather ordinary. So why her? Unless it was that very ordinariness that had made her the chosen one.
Chosen. Even the word smells of carrion these days. That is what heretics believe: that God has chosen some and not others, and that His choice is more important than a life of good works or a convent full of nuns interceding for your soul. Of course they will burn in everlasting fire for such thoughts—though hell must be overflowing now, for the sickness is still spreading, crossing mountains, seas, and borders, taking villages, universities, towns, even nobles and princes with it, almost as if it is another form of malevolence moving through the air. No wonder the true church grows so nervous for its flock. What had been the abbess’s words? They would even restrict letter writing as not conducive to the tranquillity of our state. Yet how could they do that? Such enforced isolation would surely start another kind of fever.
The basil and eau-de-vie is barely mixed when she hears footsteps and turns to find a young conversa, whose name she cannot remember, in the doorway, a package in her hand.
“I …Madonna Abbess sent this for you.”
The girl steps forward hesitantly. She is new to convent life and finds the infirmary the strangest place of all, inhabited as it is by mad crones, with the dispensary sister, flush-faced and sweating, suddenly the maddest of them all. Zuana holds out her hand but the girl ducks by her and leaves it on the workbench, moving away so fast she knocks against a table as she goes.
The package bears the bishop’s seal, though it has been broken. The abbess will have already checked the contents: no doubt some flowery message from His Holiness, thanking the worthy sisters for their kindness and offering them this gift of cochinilla in recompense for their goodness. Inside the cloth wrapping is a small burlap bag. Zuana holds it in her palm, weighing it up quickly. Ten grams, maybe more. Together with what she has put by, enough for both the kitchen and the dispensary. She pulls open the strings and lifts it to her nose. There is a dusky quality to its scent, of something grown and dried in great heat a long way away. How far has it traveled to get here? Carefully she pours a small quantity of it into her hand. The small granules are a dark dull gray. You would never think they could contain such fiery color. Red gold: that is what people call it. What little she knows of it comes from one of her father’s books, a history of New Spain written by a doctor who had followed the army there. He told of how the dye was made from worms that sprouted out of a cactus, grown in a desert somewhere where they had never heard of the Garden of Eden or Jesus Christ, but where the color produced was strong enough to paint His blood as if it had been shed for them that very day. The book had shown a drawing of the plant, soft and spiky at the same time, but not the men who cultivate it, so she has to imagine what they look like: naked, painted skins, or lips stuck out like plates into the air, as she has seen in drawings elsewhere.
It worries her that she is offending against modesty by even thinking such thoughts, and she moves on instead to the contemplation of how, with the help of God’s missionary fathers, these men—and women—would have found Jesus Christ by now. Some of them, she has heard said, are even taken into the church as monks and nuns themselves. Thus does the glory of the Lord bring light into dark places, especially ones where nature has fashioned an entirely different prism of wonders. What would she give to have seen some of those wonders herself?
Oh! But the illness is making her thoughts run wild. In her palm she sees that the edges of the granules are moist from the sweat on her skin, leaving a dark mark, and when she brushes her forehead with her other hand she finds it burning to the touch.
I wondered if you had thought of using the cochinilla.
Of course she has thought of it. To be taken to break a fever. That is what her father’s notes had said. But although she remembers him writing about such a remedy in theory, he left no measurements, for he had never had his hands on the dye, and therefore she has no way of knowing how strong would be too strong or what too strong might mean when taken internally.
She knows very well what her father would have done had he had the opportunity. The only thing to be aware of is that for such an experiment it is well to err on the side of caution and always be sure to note each and every step, so that when you look back you can mark its course with certainty.
His voice seems so close in her ear now that she turns her head to see where he might be standing, only to find her vision blurred by the speed of the gesture. I am more ill than I realize, she says to herself. I must be careful how I do this.
She moves slowly, notebook open to the side with a new heading, date, and time, while she measures out a portion of the granules into a clay bowl before wrapping up the rest and securing the bag within a drawer, ready for delivery to Suora Federica during the afternoon. Then she takes a measure of hot water and slowly mixes it into the grains, noting the proportions in her book as she goes. The resulting liquid is too dark to distinguish what depth of color it might be making. It occurs to her that this may mean it is too strong, but the work hour is almost over and if she wants to have time to test this it would be best done now. What does not occur to her is that she is so feverish that she is no longer capable of deciding what is and what is not best for herself.
She takes a few sips. Under the heat of the water the mixture is bitter to the taste. The shelves in front of her look strange suddenly—as if something is wrongly placed or missing, but she cannot think what. Her head is spinning. As she drinks the rest she wonders if it will stain her lips in the same way as the marzipan strawberries and, if so, what Suora Umiliana will make of her newfound vanity as they sit opposite each other during the midday office.
BECAUSE SO MANY of the choir sisters have been struck down in the last days, Suora Zuana’s absence is not immediately noticed in chapel. It is not until everyone is settled and the office has begun that the abbess, counting her flock and duly marking the return of Suora Ysbeta, pale but clearly better, seeks out her dispensary mistress to communicate her silent congratulations on the recovery, only to find that she is not there.
In her place amid the sweetest-voiced, sweetest-breathed choir sisters, it takes Serafina longer to notice, for she is caught today between her singing and her thoughts, which are still wrestling with the problem of how to get into the cell of the chief conversa. As soon as her eyes fall on the gap at the end of the second row, however, she knows straightaway what must have happened. She glances around surreptitiously to see who else has spotted it. But the abbess has her eyes on the crucifix and seems, at that point, unaware of her flock.
When the office ends she files out of the chapel into the courtyard with the others, then loiters a little as the rest disperse to their cells. The midday service is followed by personal prayer. Given her newfound compliance it would not be fitting for her to be found guilty of disobedience at this stage. But among the many things she owes to Zuana is her silence on a matter that might even now have had her incarcerated on bread and water. Anyway, if the dispensary sister is ill, it would surely be better if it is known about sooner rather than later.
In the infirmary Suora Clementia is fast asleep, her snores reverberating around the room as intermittent growling. She does not wake even when a few moments later the abbess herself enters, walking swiftly between the beds, her shoes clipping fast across the flagstone floor.
As she opens the door into the dispensary the sight that greets Madonna Chiara makes her forget momentarily that she has a duty to note at once the transgressions of any of her flock. In the middle of the room the novice Serafina is kneeling by the body of the dispensary mistress, who is slumped on the floor, blood dripping from her mouth.
FOR A WHILE now it feels as if time itself changes its form, becoming liquid as opposed to weight, moving faster for some than it does for others. And for Serafina it moves fastest of all, so that there are moments when it seems to her as if God Himself must have taken a hand in her well-being, so powerfully and smoothly does she find herself negotiating the rapids, anticipating, reacting, her eyes fixed on the horizon ahead regardless of the tilt and trembling of the world around her.
“What’s happened?” The abbess’s voice has none of its usual velvet nap. “Suora Zuana …can you hear me?”
“She has fainted. It’s the fever.”
“But the blood …look at the blood.”
“I …I think she has vomited it up.”
“There must be a wound inside her.” The abbess’s hand touches close to Zuana’s lips and her fingers come back bright with what looks like the reddest of blood. “We must get her to bed. Help me.”
But Serafina is staring at her own hand, equally stained from where it has come into contact with the liquid on the floor. She gets up quickly and moves to the workbench. She notes everything: the empty vial on the side (so she does have a supply!), the clay bowl next to it, its insides dark with a leftover mixture, and, nearby, the open notebook. The last entry marks a time: a half hour before Sext, followed by some figures, but the writing is too small to make them out. She puts a clean finger into the remains in the bowl. It comes out a fierce crimson. She lays it on her tongue, grimacing at the taste, then looks back to Zuana’s body and the red stain around it. If you didn’t know you might think she was indeed dying in a lake of her own blood.
“What are you doing, girl? Either help me or get a conversa here now.”
Serafina has a sudden image of herself turning back to the abbess, her mouth wide open, her bloody tongue flashing out like a viper’s. But instead she is already at the sink, finding a cloth and dipping it into the bowl of mint and rue vinegar water Zuana must have been mixing when the fit took her. Back on the ground, she lays the soaked material across Zuana’s forehead.
“Are you mad?” Madonna Chiara’s hand snaps out to take the cloth. “That is no use. She is bleeding to death.”
“No, Madonna Abbess, I think not.” As she says it she thinks how calm her voice is compared with that of her superior. “I think she has swallowed some grana and it has reacted badly with the disturbance in her stomach.”
“Grana?”
“Cochinilla. It is a remedy made from the bishop’s dye. She spoke about how it might work to bring down high fevers. Look—that is what is staining her lips.”
Now the abbess is catching up with her, seeing herself filing away His Holiness’s note in her leather ledger where she keeps all the testimonies of the convent’s benefactors, before sending the package off to Zuana, who she knows has been waiting for it. “Oh! She has tried it on herself first,” she says, because of course she knows her dispensary sister’s ways better than most. “Do we know how long it takes or what it can do?”
“No, though I think she must have known or she wouldn’t …” She trails off. “Anyway she still has the fever, so the vinegar and mint will help.”
The abbess moves her hand back from Zuana’s face. The girl is right. Though the skin is flushed she looks quite serene, not like someone who has vomited up her own insides. Chiara pulls herself up, her composure regained. “We must hope you are right. Go and get a conversa so we can carry her to her cell.”
Now that she is back in control, there is no opposing her. Serafina rises meekly from the floor.
“And when you return you will tell me what you were doing in the dispensary in the first place.”
But Serafina is not so easily disconcerted. “I came to bring back a book of remedies that Suora Zuana lent me to read and which she had need of now.” And she points to the notebook sitting obviously on the workbench, as if it had just been placed there.
As she moves by the unconscious Zuana she slips it quickly back onto the shelf.
IN THE SECOND cloister, the laundry room is belching steam into the courtyard, but inside there is only one conversa at work and she is as old and gnarled as a dead tree, barely able to lift a wet sheet, let alone a sturdy nun. Moving to the kitchens, Serafina finds Letizia shedding tears over a mountain of half-chopped onions. Suora Federica howls when she thinks she is going to lose her, until she hears the reason.
“God in heaven, what a day! First the chief conversa, now Suora Zuana. I will be cooking for a convent of corpses if we are not careful.”
“Don’t worry. We will bring them both back to health soon enough.”
And such is the young novice’s certainty—even joy— as she delivers this prediction that Federica marvels at the transformation that has taken place in her over the last few weeks and wonders if she had, perhaps, been a little heavy-handed with the bitter ashes she had mixed into her penance scraps.
As the two young women move swiftly back across the courtyard into the main cloisters together, Letizia glances at Serafina with an undisguised curiosity.
“What is it? What are you staring at?”
“Nothing.”
“Then keep your eyes to yourself.”
Back in the dispensary, they lift Zuana off the floor and move her through to the infirmary. The intention is to take her to her cell, but as they go Serafina says, “Madonna Abbess, perhaps we should put her in one of the beds here? That way, whoever takes over the dispensary can also keep watch over her. And as she recovers she will be able to advise and help. She would not want to be separated from her patients.”
Possibly because it is a sound idea, or maybe because the body is so unwieldy and heavy (knowledge must weigh more than flesh, Serafina thinks as they struggle to carry her), the abbess agrees.
They move her to the nearest bed, the one left empty by Imbersaga’s death.
As the abbess returns to the dispensary, Letizia makes a move to tend to Zuana but Serafina elbows her out of the way, covering the inert sister with the thin blanket and dabbing her forehead with the cloth.
“Dear Mary, Mother of God! What is happening here?” In the doorway the novice mistress is a sudden wind of anger. “Novice Serafina. You are meant to be at silent prayer. This is—” Then she catches sight of Zuana on the bed and, at the end of the room, the abbess emerging from the dispensary.
“Do not disturb yourself, Suora Umiliana.” Madonna Chiara’s voice makes it clear that the situation is under control. “Suora Zuana was taken ill and the novice is helping, as she knows the cause of it.”
But the old nun now glares at both of them, her undisguised disapproval making it clear that a convent beset by such troubles is a convent in need of more than the help of a rebellious novice. Oh, Serafina thinks triumphantly, but you have no idea how much trouble is still to come!
After a while Letizia braves the silence to ask if she may be allowed to leave. “Suora Federica has no one else to help her now. She will skin me alive if she is left alone much longer.”
“I would very much hope that she does not resort to such an undue punishment.” Now that the moment of crisis has passed, the abbess is almost gracious again. “You may go. Tell me, how is the chief conversa?”
The girl shakes her head. “Very poorly. Suora Zuana had said she would come to her later.”
“Ah, we are beleaguered on all sides.” The novice mistress’s cry has a note of anguish in it.
Letizia ducks out of the room as Suora Umiliana falls to her knees by the bed. “Oh, Lord Jesus, help us in our hour of darkness and bring respite to this good sister who works in Your name.”
She bends her head, deep in prayer, as if pointing out that amid all the drama this is the work that should really be done. Serafina hesitates for a second, then sinks to the floor next to her, eyes closed, praying silently but so hard she fears the words might be spraying out of her: Please God, please God, help me, too…
There is silence for a while. It is unclear whether or not the abbess herself is praying, but when her voice comes it is remarkably matter-of-fact. “I think that will do now. Serafina, you may go to your cell.”
The girl rises, eyes down, meek-voiced. “Mother Abbess, do I have permission to speak?”
“Very well.”
“I want to offer my help to the dispensary. To nurse the sick.”
She feels the novice mistress’s cluck of impatience behind her. It is not easy, having to charm two such different mistresses, though charm them she must. If she has learned one thing over these last months it is that her own sister’s simpering brought her more joy in life than all the natural defiance she herself displayed.
“I could help. Suora Zuana taught me how to treat fever… I mean, I know I am unworthy …that I have behaved with gross selfishness”—here she glances at the novice mistress—“for which I am deeply sorry. I …I have even feared that Santa Caterina may be being punished in some way for my bad behavior, and I—”
“Don’t talk nonsense, girl.” Madonna Chiara cuts across her sharply, but not before Serafina has registered how her comment has affected Umiliana. “Half the city is infected and Our Lord has better things to do than take notice of a puffed-up novice. If there are amends to be made, you can make them in the choir.”
Serafina looks so genuinely anguished now that even the abbess is slightly taken aback.
“Madonna Abbess.” She hears Umiliana’s voice over her head, quiet but firm. “Might we have a word?”
There is a small pause. Serafina keeps her eyes to the floor. She must not be seen to be part of this, and when the abbess orders her to leave the room she is up and out within seconds.
She stays close enough behind the door to hear the murmur of voices, though not to make out the words. She wonders what Zuana would have to say if she could join them now. Would she have been able to fool her, too? She hears the footsteps and backs away from the door as it is opened by the novice mistress. But it is impossible to tell anything from her face.
Back in the room she stands before the abbess, eyes to the ground.
“You are to go to your cell directly and spend the rest of the hour in private prayer.”
“Yes, Mother Abbess,” she says, with perfect meekness.
“If the convent has need of you we will call you later.”
“Thank you.”
And thank you, Suora Umiliana, she says silently. She could not have planned it better herself: this way, before she is given the chance to slip her hands under a certain mattress, she has time to retrieve something from beneath her own.
“Suora Umiliana,” she says quietly, “might I come to you for further instruction sometime today? I feel myself in the greatest need.”
AND SO IT happens that in preparation for caring for others, Serafina finds herself first addressing the sufferings of Christ Himself.
The old nun and the young novice meet together that afternoon in the chapel, with the great crucifix in their sight. Outside, the weather is almost clement for the time of year but the chapel remains as cold and damp as the grave. Umiliana, in contrast, heats the air with words, never letting her eyes move from the girl’s face while she describes passionately the ways in which beside the pain of Jesus Christ all the pain of the world is as nothing, how every drop of blood He shed was like a flood washing over the surface of the earth, taking man’s wickedness with it, so that through His sacrifice we are given the chance to live again, whatever our sins.
Then, to reinforce the message, she gives the novice a passage to read out loud from the teachings of Santa Caterina of Siena. It is a clever choice, for in her way Caterina was a great rebel herself, pursuing her ardent love for Christ against the more conventional marriage planned for her by her parents. Hers was a disobedience, however, that was exquisitely rewarded, as the passage shows, describing how after years of self-mortification and prayer the Lord saw fit to come to her and offer her His wounds to kiss, opening His side for her so that His blood flowed like milk, and as her lips tasted it she was filled to the brim with love, as if the spear had gone into her very own flesh.
Serafina has a good voice and the novice mistress listens attentively, joy like a soft sweat on her skin, almost as if the miracle is happening to her then and there. The saint’s words are so powerful, so visceral, that even the girl herself is affected—so for that moment she stops thinking of the pad of ointment concealed under her shift, or the white pebbles strewn in the grass to mark her way to the spot by the wall where, having taken the imprint of the chief conversa’s keys, she will throw the package over for him to catch.
Later, when the convent is on its way to supper and she is called instead by the abbess and given dispensation to miss the meal in order to assess the condition of the chief conversa, she is surprised by how calm she feels at the prospect. She remains unperturbed when she walks into the tiny dank cell, buried away in the corner of the second cloister and reeking of sweat and old menstrual blood, to be presented with the sight of the woman who lies there, arms as thick as ox legs and her face puffed up with fever. No doubt it helps that the patient is barely conscious, for it means that as Serafina leans down to listen to her breathing it is easy to slide her hand under the pallet far enough to locate a thick metal stem, then a wedge of key teeth. She still has to be careful, though, since the conversa Letizia stands directly behind her, assigned as an assistant but no doubt also a spy to report back anything that is worthy of reporting.
She removes her hand and goes to work on the woman’s wrist, searching for a pulse amid the fat flesh. She has no idea how ill she is but she smells as though she is dying and there are specks of froth around the edges of her mouth.
“She is in need of eau-de-vie and basil.” She turns to Letizia. “There is a bottle on the workbench. Suora Zuana left it there just before she became ill. Can you bring it to me?”
At first Letizia is having none of it. While she may be a good nurse, she knows when she has been given power of her own. “I have to stay with you at all times. That’s what the abbess said. Anyway, I don’t know which bottle you mean.”
“You will smell it clearly enough. Look at her. See how sick she is? If we are to help her I need that bottle. Get it. Now.” And she takes her tone from the one Zuana used when they were in the cell with the mad Magdalena. “Unless you want it known that you were the one who allowed her to die.”
The girl hesitates, then turns and goes.
It is done fast enough in her absence. The keys are big and heavy, and there is a moment when she fears that the waxy block will not be long enough to take the imprint of both of them. She is possessed by a sudden urge to slip them under her robe and walk out with them. It is the end of the working day; surely no one will need them until tomorrow morning at the earliest. But if she takes them now she must use them tonight. And that is not the plan, and there is no way she could tell him; even if she could, he could not get it organized in time. No. If it were tonight she would have to do it alone, and when she tries to imagine herself moving through both sets of doors and standing alone out on the dock, an ink-black expanse of water in front of her, she knows she couldn’t do it. There are limits even to her courage.
She uses the ball of her palm to push the keys evenly into the pad of wax. They sink satisfyingly deep, which means it is not easy to extract them without muddying the imprint. She cannot rush it but she also cannot waste time. As it is, she barely has time to push the keys back then wrap the pad in the strips of silk petticoat and slip it under her robe before she hears Letizia’s footsteps behind her.
Together they lift the woman’s head off the pallet and administer the dose. Afterward she still seems more dead than alive. At least there has been no need for Serafina to use the poppy syrup.
“There is nothing more we can do for her now but let her sleep.”
She stands up and as she does so feels the package slip from under her breast and has to bring her hand up to hold it through the cloth to stop it falling. She worries that Letizia may have spotted the movement but the girl is on her knees by the pallet still, busy with the patient, smoothing the grubby sheet and tucking its edges, pushing her hands so far under the mattress that surely her fingers will have found the cold metal of the keys by now; almost as if it is part of her job to make sure they are still there. She glances up at Serafina and for a second their eyes meet. Oh, yes, this place is full of cunning. How right she was to resist the temptation.
Nevertheless, she is sure Letizia must have seen something, for as they walk across the scrubby courtyard back to the main cloister she keeps staring at her, small keen glances. “What is it? I told you, don’t look at me like that.”
“It’s nothing.”
“If it is nothing, why do you keep looking?”
The girl shrugs, then looks shyly back to her. “I just wonder what she sees in you, that’s all.”
“What do you mean? Who?”
She purses her lips as if she knows she should not talk, but the opportunity for gossip, or maybe the taste of revenge, is too much for her. “Suora Magdalena. The way she keeps asking after you.”
“What?”
“She thinks I am you. Every time I bring her food or go in to empty the bucket, it’s the same: Serafina. Serafina, is that you? Are you come again? I knew you would.” And she makes her voice go high and wobbly as she says it.
“She says my name?” And Serafina feels a hollowness open up inside her again, as if someone is scraping at the bottom of her gut with a knife.
“Oh, yes, though I don’t know how she knows it, for as Jesus Himself is my judge, I never told it to her.”
“What else does she say?”
The girl shrugs again but there is no time for further revelation as they are already in the main cloister, busy now with its traffic of silent sisters on their way from the refectory back to their own cells for prayer or recreation. Letizia bows her head and disappears back to where she came from, leaving Serafina struggling to make sense of her words. She sees again those rheumy, unblinking eyes and the wild, frozen smile. Had Christ offered Suora Magdalena His wounds to kiss, too? Tasting the blood, sucking up strength from His overflowing love? No wonder her grasp had been so strong. Ugh! No, no, she will not think of this now. The old woman has nothing to do with her. Soon she will be out of this place, leaving all its holy madness behind. All she has to do is play the humble novice for a while longer.
She slides into the throng, passing one silent figure and then another. When the fog mingles with the twilight as it does today, it is almost like a gathering of phantoms, the hushing of skirts and the padding of feet offering up its own kind of spectral conversation. She lifts her head in time to catch Suora Apollonia’s ghost-white face moving past her in the thick air. Their eyes meet and she drops her gaze, as is the rule, but Apollonia keeps on looking, as if she is seeing something of interest there. During recreation this most worldly of choir nuns sometimes holds court in her cell, gathering together the more fashion-conscious sisters to play music and tell stories over glasses of wine and kitchen tidbits. Novices are not allowed, but it won’t be long before some of them are sisters in their own right and she is always on the lookout for the next generation of rebels.
Serafina passes the entrance to the infirmary. She has not seen Suora Zuana since the morning, after chapel. The wax seal needs a safe home, but if she is quick she might check on her now. And also perhaps manage to replace the syrup on the shelf. Once in her cell she will not be allowed out again except for Compline.
Inside, she is amazed to find the dispensary sister not only conscious but propped up in the bed, her head resting heavily back against the wall. She finds herself smiling, even laughing a little, as she hurries toward her.
“You are awake?”
Zuana stares at her as if trying to orientate herself. “Serafina? I …what are you doing here?”
“I have dispensation from the abbess. I …we were fearful for you.”
“What happened? Did I faint?”
“I think so.”
Her skin is almost gray, though her lips are a rich scarlet. Not the mark of God’s love but of her own experiments, Serafina thinks, as she pulls the cover over her.
The move upright seems to have exhausted her. “It was the cochinilla,” she says wearily.
“Yes. You threw it up all over the floor. We thought you were bleeding to death. Everyone was very worried. You had the most terrible fever.”
She shakes her head. “I …I remember drinking it, then feeling very ill.”
Serafina hesitates, then reaches out her hand tentatively and places it on Zuana’s forehead, first with the back and then with her palm, as she has seen the older woman do with other patients.
“Oh!” She takes her hand away, then puts it back again to confirm, as if she cannot quite believe it. “But you are cool! The fever has gone.”
Zuana frowns up at her, touching her own forehead. She locates the pulse on her wrist, registering it for a few seconds. “So it would seem.”
“But how? I mean—it couldn’t be the cochinilla. You vomited it up.”
“You said there was some on the floor. Did it smell as if it had passed through my stomach?”
“I …er, I don’t know. It smelled”—and she tries to remember—“musty? There was a little left in the bowl. That’s how I realized what it was.”
“I didn’t drink it all. As I fell, the rest must have fallen with me. Did you give me anything else?”
“No, no, just bathed your head with the mint and vinegar. I was scared to do more in case you vomited it up again.”
“What time is it?”
“The hour before Compline.”
“What day?” she says impatiently.
“Oh, still today.”
“So—six hours. The remedy takes six hours. I have to write it down.” And she makes a move to get up.
“No. I mean, you’re not well yet.”
But she is still moving. “I am well enough.”
“Wait. I’ll get the book for you.” She gets up. Then hesitates. “Am I allowed to go into the dispensary alone?”
Zuana puts her head back against the wall and smiles weakly. “It seems you have been there anyway.”
“Oh, only with the ab—” She breaks off. No, that is not true. She was there before the abbess. But she does not want to draw attention to it now.
Inside the dispensary she spots the stain on the floor and feels—what? — almost joyful? Yes, joyful. Suora Zuana is better. She will not die. Had she really been so worried for her? It seems that in some part of her she must have been.
But there is no time for that now. She takes the bottle of syrup out of her robe, quickly transfers some of it to the waiting empty vial, then slips the original back onto the shelf. The row of bottles nestle up to one another again. It has been missing for barely twenty-four hours. She can only hope it was really not noticed. Now she still has to get back to the cell with the wax imprint, for the bell is ringing for private prayer, and the cloisters will be deserted soon enough.
“How is the convent?” Zuana says, as soon as she returns with the book. “What of the chief conversa?”
“Her fever is high. I gave her a dose of basil and eau-de-vie a while ago.”
“You?”
“I told you. They gave me dispensation to help. The novice mistress said it would be good for me.”
Zuana stares at her. “Well. We will make a dispensary mistress of you yet.”
But Serafina’s duplicity is now so far advanced that the compliment makes her uncomfortable rather than pleased.
“Santa Caterina doesn’t need another healer,” she says quietly. “It already has you.” The feeling is made worse by the awareness that the block of ointment wax under her robe is growing ever warmer from her skin, and she cannot afford for the imprint to be less than perfect.
Zuana starts to pull herself out of the bed again. “Give me the book. I will write the notes while you prepare another draft.”
“I …I must go. The bell is ringing.”
“It will only take a few minutes, and I will make sure the abbess knows why you are late. Come. Help me get out of here before Clementia realizes she has a new companion.”
LATER, WHEN SUORA Zuana arrives for Compline, weak but nevertheless on her feet, the rest of the convent is amazed, for everyone knows by now that she was found half dead from bleeding on the dispensary floor. If speech were allowed they might congratulate her, even marvel a little at how, despite her pale face, there is such a ruddiness of health to her lips. As it is, Federica is the only one who regards her at all suspiciously—but then she is impatient to start her marzipan fruits and is alert to the color of strawberries wherever she sees it.
Others express their gratitude through the words of the office, for Compline, which, marking the end of the day and the beginning of the Great Silence of the night, opens with penitence but moves toward joy. Even Suora Umiliana seems relaxed, almost satisfied, and the once-so-troublesome novice Serafina, who it is rumored was given special dispensation to tend her former mentor, offers up the words of the 30th psalm—Thou hast turned mourning into dances, put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness. O Lord, I will give thanks to Thee for ever—in purest voice. Those sisters—and there are a few of them—who have been as suspicious of her sudden goodness as they had been tired of her outright rebellion find themselves giving extra thanks that the convent has regained its balance. And that there is nothing now to interfere with Carnival, with all its opportunities for pleasure and performance.
The abbess, as ever impeccable in her formality and avoidance of favoritism, waits until the service ends to show her delight, pausing briefly in front of her dispensary sister and bowing her head to welcome her back to the flock. Those who are close enough to note the encounter are struck by the deep warmth in Madonna Chiara’s eyes, not to mention the way she offers the lightest of nods in the direction of the young Serafina herself, who seems so taken aback that the blush is evident behind her veil.
Three hours later, when the convent is deeply asleep, that same young novice slips out of her cell, a parcel concealed under her robe. Not long after, the voice of a perfect male tenor, moving along the street toward the river wharf, lifts up and over the walls. It sings of young love and a woman whose hair is a cloud of gold, Petrarch’s words set to haunting music. When the song ends it is answered by a single high vibrating note, a female voice rather than male, and then a heavy thud as something hurled from inside the walls lands somewhere on the other side.
Three days later the same procedure takes place the other way around. That night Serafina is especially fortunate. With the Carnival spirit on the move again, the watch sister has changed the timing of her rounds, and the novice barely reaches her cell before the footsteps hit the flagstones outside.
She lies on her pallet, fully dressed, heart thudding, the heavy package clasped to her breast, as she hears the footsteps stop by her door, hesitate, then go forward again. In the dark when all is silent once more she pulls open the wrapping and feels underneath her fingers the shape of two newly forged iron keys and the fold of a letter around them.
There is nothing they can do to hurt her now. She is ready. It is only a question of waiting.
WITH ZUANA BACK on her feet, it takes less than a week for the contagion to be halted. The fever passes naturally from the remaining sisters (in the city, the severity of the attack is already waning), while the chief conversa, in whom it proves more stubborn, emerges three days later with rosy lips and renewed strength: a happy outcome, since her trips to and from the storehouse are even more frequent.
The rehearsals for the play enter their final stage. Suora Perseveranza comes out of her cell word-perfect, having been heard reciting her lines while in the midst of her delirium. Except for meal hours the refectory is now strictly out of bounds, as workmen are brought in from outside to build the stage and set. For three days their sawing and hammering offer a background percussion to the daily orders, and their presence—invisible though it is—introduces a level of exhilaration into the convent, with the novices and boarders closely chaperoned on every journey. There is a story, so often repeated that it is almost certainly apocryphal, of how a particularly beautiful postulant from a convent in Prato had her lover dress up as a workman to come in and fix the pews in the church and then, at the end of his time, he smuggled her out in a great bag of his tools. The very idea is enough to have a few of the younger ones swooning with excitement—but it is Carnival, after all, and when the body is incarcerated the mind cannot help but play a little.
Outside, too, the city has come alive. Family visits to the parlatorio tell of a wave of new arrivals: visitors from Mantua, Bologna, Padua, Venice—even a few from Rome itself. Ferrara has a reputation for good living as well as beautiful voices, and celebrations are already in full swing. It is said that if you walk by the palace you can hear the trumpeting of elephants brought in especially for the d’Este marriage feast and kept on for Carnival. The ducal garden has been transformed into a huge stage set, lit by a thousand candles, with grottoes and temples and even a great pyramid, all part of an elaborate game of valor in which a group of knights must win their ladies’ hands by slaying dragons and answering riddles—though since the duke must triumph there are rumors of the riddles being adapted to fit his somewhat limited knowledge.
Meanwhile, the streets outside the convent have become their own stage for debauchery. All over the city young men are trying on their Carnival masks, and once disguised how can they possibly stay indoors? Disturbing the city’s peace is an accepted part of the celebrations. Disturbing its nuns is a more serious affair, a crime against God as much as against the women themselves, but even here a little leeway is granted in the name of high spirits. Soon the odd slingshot pellet is arriving over the walls, to be picked up by the watch sister after Lauds: balls of paper scrawled with madrigals and bad poetry. Madonna Chiara sighs as she reads them and feeds them to the fire. The sentiments are predictable: unrequited love like evergreen laurel for ladies whose virtue is so fierce that it freezes the sun itself, alongside a handful of scurrilous verses offering a more instant heaven on earth for those with the wit to imagine it. Any abbess worth her salt has seen it all before. Most men are tempted by what they cannot have, and the truth is that it is not just heretics who are greedy for tales of lustful nuns that, like bad confessors, they can both enjoy and denounce at the same time. If anything, she thinks, this year’s crop is somewhat tamer than the last. Surely the city’s poets used to be wittier and cleverer than this? Or perhaps she, like Suora Umiliana, is becoming nostalgic for times past.
When the great annual procession takes to the streets, the whole city stops to watch. The road outside the main entrance of the convent becomes a moving wall of people. At different times throughout the day, small groups of converse and the more adventurous of the choir nuns crane their necks out of the few available high windows to watch as the biggest floats go by. From this vantage point they see giants, dwarfs, mermaids, goddesses, angels, popes, and devils. By now most of the performers have spent so much time waving and shouting up to the noblewomen on the balconies that they have permanent cricks in their necks. The convents, however, are always a challenge, especially for the key makers, who have a float of their own this year and who make a special effort, strutting up and down waving huge counterfeit keys and shouting out verses about their tools being especially useful for women behind locked doors and inviting everyone to come down to the float and handle a few for themselves.
With the cochinilla at last delivered to the kitchens, the first marzipan fruit bowls are now complete. There is a tradition within the convent that the kitchen mistress is allowed to choose one sister and one novice to sample the first batch. After supper one evening Suora Benedicta and Serafina are called to the back cloisters, where Federica gives the choir mistress a fat green pear—“Because your melodies bring us closer to God”—while Serafina is presented with a somewhat misshapen but exceedingly red strawberry—“And your singing gives more pleasure than your howling ever did; also, as the last novice to come inside, you can still remember the tastes you left behind and can judge how this compares.”
While it is probable that the recipe for marzipan remains constant whichever side of the convent wall one lives on, Serafina’s reaction—she is clearly affected by the intensity of the taste—satisfies even Federica.
“Here, wipe your mouth,” she says, handing her a cloth. “We would not want you getting into trouble now that you are doing so well.”
And doing well she is. With every passing day Serafina grows more radiant, despite her humble demeanor. She shines even when she is silent, as if God’s great love were trying to burst out of her heart, and her voice in chapel, especially at the darkest point of the night, entrances everyone. When she is not singing she is at prayer. She has even dispensed with Candida and taken on the duties of cleaning her own cell, washing the floor, making her own bed, changing her own linen. There are those who whisper behind her back that she is only trying so hard in the hope that she will be allowed to join the visiting in the parlatorio after the concert is over (the rules are clear that she is not yet eligible to entertain or be entertained). But if that is her aim, she says nothing about it. In fact, these days she says almost nothing at all.
SERAFINA’S BEHAVIOR MIGHT be more remarked upon were it not for the drama that takes place within the convent in the days leading up to the concert and play
Following some urgent exchanges of letters and out-of-hours visits in the parlatorio, Suora Apollonia’s sister, the lady Camilla Bendidio, arrives late one night with a maidservant and a small bag and is quickly settled in the guesthouse to the side of the main cloisters. It doesn’t take long for the news to spread that there is trouble in the marriage and she has asked for refuge away from her husband while negotiations take place within the family to try to bring peace. Apollonia is given special dispensation to spend time with her, and that same night Zuana is called by the abbess to attend her. She has a deep cut at the hairline of her forehead, as if something has been thrown at her, and sits without movement or murmur while Zuana cleans and tends the wound. When asked if there is anything else she needs help with, she removes her shawl and upper bodice to reveal a set of large ripening bruises on her arms and shoulders and sits weeping silently as Zuana rubs ointment gently into the damaged skin.
She was a pretty woman once, Zuana remembers, but she is grown gaunt now, older than her years. Those young nuns who cry themselves to sleep at night for want of a man’s hands on them might find pause for thought here, for this is not the first time she has used the convent as a haven. Her husband, the eldest son of the splendid Bendidio family, is one of the duke’s most favored courtiers and by all accounts a man with a quick temper. There might be more sympathy for his long-suffering wife were it not for the fact that in seven years of marriage she is yet to produce a child. He, in contrast, has no such problems, having already sired half a dozen illegitimate children. If it continues much longer, she will be under pressure to allow the marriage to be dissolved so that he can get himself a sturdier, more fertile bride—in which case she will find herself coming back to Santa Caterina permanently, as there is nowhere else that would take such a castoff Perhaps that would be a relief to her. Looking at Apollonia’s healthy young body and her rebelliously fashionable courtier face, Zuana cannot help but think that Bendidio married the wrong sister. But it is too late now—for both of them.
The next afternoon their father, along with the abbess, meets with a representative of the husband’s family in the guesthouse to discuss her future, while the parlatorio overflows with the last visit before the Carnival concert.
Zuana, in contrast, sits alone in her cell with her books. She has more than enough work but cannot concentrate on doing it. It has been like this for a while now. The time of year has much to do with it. While many of the inhabitants of Santa Caterina find Carnival an exquisite distraction, for Zuana it is more a disruption than a pleasure. During her long and painful assimilation into convent life, it was the rhythm of routine that became one of her greatest solaces, and to have it so rudely interrupted makes her almost nervous. Perhaps it would be different if she were more connected to the outside, if she had family to visit and entertain: mother and aunts, cousins or sisters with an ever-expanding brood of little ones to cuddle and coo over. But all she has is her herbs and her remedies, and while they keep the convent healthy they count for little in the world beyond.
This much she is used to, has grown to understand. Yet there is something else going on now. Over recent weeks, even before the illness, if she is honest, she has detected in herself a strange restlessness that she cannot entirely explain. While it is possible that the contagion may have exacerbated it, with the exception of the blood-red urine she passed for two days after the draft (a shock in itself until she realized it was the drug and not her own insides pouring out of her), she has felt well enough.
No, it seems that it is not her body that is ailing but rather her mind.
She finds herself feeling sad—yes, sad is the right word—for no reason. It is as if for the first time in her life her own company is not enough. She prays, of course, each and every day, but often her mind slips in and around the words, so that they never rise high enough for Him to hear.
The healer in her has witnessed such things in others; convents are full of nuns who become lethargic or tearful or distraught by turns. Winter sadness. Summer madness. Monthly moon cycles, or the more persistent melancholia that comes with their ending. There are as many terms for it as there are states of mind. The stricter nuns—the novice mistress and Suora Felicità (even her name marks her out as immune)—regard it almost as a rebellion against God and counsel stern treatment of work and prayer. But over the years Zuana has tested and used other remedies. Her father’s books are full of them: infusions, pills, borage steeped in wine, Saint John’s wort, fumigants of incense and hypericum, with mandragora and poppy syrups to ease the insomnia that often accompanies such distress. Then there are other treatments that involve neither simples nor compounds: kindness, sympathy, a little relaxation of the rules of solitude. In the darkest cases the best is a combination of all of these. Prayer, work, sleep, and care: God, nature, and man working together as they were meant to.
Of course Zuana is not so distressed herself. Nowhere near. More likely she is simply tired. She disciplines herself through duty. The parlatorio needs more perfumed herb tablets to place on the brazier during the concert, and she busies herself preparing them. When ordinary prayer does not work, she uses recitations from the psalms.
“The voice of the Lord is powerful, I will praise Thee, my Lord, with my whole heart, and show forth all Thy marvelous works. ”
She says these particular phrases over and over again under her breath, wrapping them around her like a blanket, leaving no room for the cold drafts of distraction to slide in around the edges.
“For God is good, His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endureth to all generations. ”
AFTER A WHILE, the simplicity and the repetition bring her a certain calm. Like tonight.
Somewhere outside the walls a muted roar goes up. They must be lighting the Carnival bonfire in the piazza in front of the cathedral in time for the sunset. Her father took her to see it once when she was very small. There were so many people they could barely move, and he had to hold her up amid the crowd. She remembers that the smoke made her eyes water and her throat sore. At least she thinks that is what happened. Recently she has noticed that she is less sure of things she was once certain about, as if her life before the convent is slipping away altogether. Her father’s face, for instance: the broadness of his forehead, the shadows under his eyes, the way his bottom lip always seemed a little pulled downward by the weight of his beard. All this she had assumed was imprinted in her forever. Only, sometimes when she studies the face of Christ on the cloister crucifix, she could swear she sees the same features in Him too, as if the familiarity of one face has simply blended into another.
In contrast, there are a few memories that have become, if anything, almost more powerful. Like the stone carvings in the Ferrara cathedral. There must have been twelve of them, one for each month of the year, but if she closes her eyes there is one she can still see as clearly as if it were in front of her now. In it, a small naked child is crouching on all fours under a goat, suckling from the animal. She can see his mouth, clasped almost lewdly over the fat teat, the fullness of his stone cheeks, the roundness of his belly as the milk pours into it. It surprises her, the power of this memory, for in other ways she does not care much for children; certainly she is not one of those nuns who yearn for the babies they could never have, bringing in Jesus dolls in their dowry chests or imagining themselves taking the suckling baby from Mary’s arms and offering Him their own breasts instead. Nevertheless this less than holy child—with its evident greed for nourishment—has stayed with her.
She pushes back her books and closes her eyes. These are hardly thoughts befitting an infirmary sister with a history of convent infection to write up. If she cannot work she should be praying. Why is it that her mind spirals away from her so easily these days?
The voice of the Lord is powerful …
She closes her eyes.
The voice of the Lord is full of majesty …
By the time the knock comes at her door she has managed to pull herself deep enough inside the words, so that she at first does not hear it.
I will praise Thee, my Lord, with my whole heart.
It comes again, sharper.
She turns, and as she does so she wonders if it might be the novice. Since the day of Zuana’s illness and recovery in the dispensary they have not spoken a word to each other, and when their paths do cross, on their way to chapel or in the cloisters, the girl keeps her head bowed as if she is afraid to meet Zuana’s eyes. Over the years she has watched other young women come in angry and rebellious, hysterical even, only to soften gradually, but she has never seen a change as swift and strange as this. It is as if all the molten fury that had been erupting out of her has simply changed course and is now directed toward God. It should be cause for celebration but when she thinks about it— which she tries not to—it makes her uncomfortable. And that, in turn, adds to the restlessness to which she seems so prone these days.
The door opens. If it is the novice she will have to chide her for disrupting prayer, but she will still be pleased to see her. She thinks this at the same instant as she sees Madonna Chiara standing in the doorway.
“Good evening, sister.”
“Am I needed?” Zuana is already on her feet. “Is someone ill?”
“No, no …far from it. The convent is exceedingly well. As you can hear for yourself.”
“How is our guest?”
“The meeting between the families has ended and there are signs of progress. It is agreed that she will stay with us until Carnival is ended. The break between them may bring back a little …fondness.”
She does not need to add that this way, when Bendidio drinks himself stupid on the duke’s wine cellar, he will not have his wife to take it out on.
“I could look in on her again if you think it would help.”
“No. She is with Suora Umiliana at the moment, and Suora Apollonia has dispensation to join her afterward.” She pauses. “It seems they were not so close as children, but her troubles have made them fonder. It is a wonder to see. Thus doth the Lord bring comfort out of adversity.”
“For His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endureth to all generations”
“Indeed it does.” The abbess sounds mildly surprised. She glances down at the open books. “I have come to offer you some respite from your work, Suora Zuana. The rest of the convent is at recreation with their families, and it is only right that you should enjoy the same privilege.”
“Oh, no, I …I am …” The words well and content battle with each other to be the first out of her mouth, and as a result neither of them succeeds. The abbess, who cannot help but notice the struggle, smiles.
“What is the phrase that Suora Scholastica has written for the prologue to the play? As the body needs food to thrive, so the spirit also needs recreation and rest” She laughs. “You have not heard the speech? Oh, it is most charming and will bring us many pious plaudits, I am sure. I think even Suora Umiliana would find it hard to fault its advice.” She pauses. “So, if you have a cloak to protect you from the breeze, I wonder if you would like to see something that I think will bring you pleasure.”
“Thank you, Madonna,” Zuana says, for it is clear that the offer is also an order. “I would like that.”
Outside, the air is crisp and the sky clear. The final week of Carnival often marks the end of winter fogs, though Lent will deliver some bitter days of its own along the way. She follows the abbess across the cloisters and into the chapel. Inside, on the left behind the choir stalls, is the door to the bell tower. The abbess brings out a key and slips it into the lock.
“They are setting light to the Carnival bonfires. We will get a particularly good view of our great city from the top of the tower. God has given us a wondrously clear night for the proceedings.”
Aware of the privilege she is being offered, Zuana bows her head and starts to climb. Halfway up she reaches the wooden platform where the ropes for the great chapel bells hang down for the bell ringer. This is as far as any sister is allowed without special permission. If the nun in charge of the bells ever disobeys the injunction it remains her secret. Given the wrecked back and damaged hearing that come with the office, some compensation is perhaps deserved.
The abbess takes the lead. The bottom of her robe sends out a cloud of dust around her. The stone steps are narrower now, the walls and ceilings thick with cobwebs. Zuana has a sudden image of herself thrusting her hands into the corners and harvesting the gauze: the deathly stickiness of spiders’ silk mixed with honey has a reputation as a miraculous salve for flesh wounds. I will praise the Lord with all my heart and show forth His marvelous works. Even the best-trained apothecaries find some preparations difficult, however. Another day, perhaps.
They reach the top and step out into the open bell chamber. Their arrival disturbs a host of roosting pigeons, which rise up in a squawking fury of feathers and beating wings. The abbess waves her arms in wide circles, shooing them away, and the two women let out their own squawks of laughter as the birds swoop and clatter around their heads before lifting off and out into the air.
“I wonder how they stand the noise of the bells,” the abbess shouts above the flurry of their wings. “We should put up pigeon traps. The kitchen could use a few extra fowl in winter, though I cannot imagine Suora Federica coming up here to collect them.”
With the birds gone, the tower becomes theirs. The two great bells sit suspended above them, their fat clappers hanging heavy underneath. Around them the wall reaches to their waists, high enough to protect but low enough to reveal the city far below.
The abbess is right. The view is breathtaking. Zuana registers a sudden dizziness, less from the height than from the exhilaration of the perspective. In the twilight to the north and west she can see right across the old town, a jumble of burnt-ocher roof tiles and cobbled streets, to the great cathedral and its piazza, the two parts of the castle with its crenellated towers and moat, then out into the new Ferrara with its grid of wide modern streets and palaces laid out by the second Duke Ercole in his role as great humanist ruler and town planner. And all around them, massive brick walls mark the boundaries of the city.
“It is beautiful, yes?” The abbess smiles at her.
Zuana nods; for the moment she cannot speak. The abbess, understanding, looks away, giving her time to compose herself.
Bricks and cobbles. That was how her father had once described their hometown. There were other cities, he said, more full of stone and marble, with great domes and towers and every surface plastered and painted, and they were in their way fabulous enough; but to appreciate the power of the humble brick, so small and yet so mighty and filled with so many colors of the earth, then a man must come to Ferrara on a summer’s evening when the very fabric of the city was alight and glowing.
“See the fires?”
As yet there are only two of them: one great plume of smoke rising up from the main square, another smaller one from within the courtyard of the palace. Outside the ring caused by the blaze, people, small as ants, are milling and flowing everywhere. Zuana follows one of the larger streets back from the cathedral square into the old town, trying to locate where she once lived. She can get as far as the long thin space—not big enough for a piazza— in front of the main university buildings but then becomes tumblingly lost in the curling alleys that branch off all around.
“You are looking for your father’s house?”
“Yes.”
“You should find a landmark and work backward or perhaps a journey you remember taking.”
But the one she had vowed she would never forget—the walk from the house to the doors of the convent—has gone completely.
She shakes her head. “The streets nearby are too muddled. They all look the same. And you? Can you see your home?”
The abbess spreads out a hand toward the north. “The new city is easier. It is a few blocks to the west of the Palazzo Diamante. There is a garden in the middle—see? — I used to play there with my brother when I was a small child. At least, so he tells me. I don’t remember it myself.”
She says the words lightly. The youngest boarder in Santa Caterina now is six—no, five—years old. If she were to stay and take the veil at sixteen as Chiara had done, there would be precious little past for her to forget. Presumably, what one has never had, one cannot regret losing.
“How much do you remember?”
Zuana does not look at Chiara as she asks this. Instead the two women stand side by side, their arms leaning on the parapet, looking out over their city, as if this is no longer a convent but simply a high balcony in a rich house where two noble wives have chosen to take the evening air for a while, gossiping about this and that.
“Less as the years go by. Though a few things strongly. Being inside a carriage at night going across water, with the noise of the wheels on wood and the torches on fire at the end—the drawbridge over the moat of the castle, no doubt. And there is someone telling me that if the ground were to give way now we would all drown.”
“Were you frightened?”
“No …no, I think I was excited.” She smiles. “And a room—I remember a room I was taken to, with a painting in the cupola ceiling of a round balcony, with the sky above and people and cherubs leaning and peering over the painted parapet as if they were in danger of falling. It was so lifelike. One of the men had black skin and there was a monkey perched on the edge next to him, holding a necklace as if it were about to drop. I remember standing underneath with my arms out waiting to catch it, I was so sure it would fall.” She laughs. “As a young nun I used to dream that when I became abbess I would commission a work by that same artist for one of the chapels. Imagine! The bishop or our benefactors looking up to see Our Lord and all the apostles leaning over a balcony as if they were about to tumble over.”
As she says it, Zuana can think of a good few sisters who would be there waiting to catch them.
The sunset is moving faster now, throwing up great gaudy streaks of pinks and purples. No cherubs or monkeys, though; only a high-pitched chorus of evening swifts darting like showers of arrowheads across the sky. After a while, Zuana turns from the view across the city toward the other side, to the world they do not need to make up, the one they cannot forget.
From this height, Santa Caterina resembles a palace rather than a prison. She looks down over the swooping nave of the chapel into the two cloister courtyards, alive in the golden light, then out over the side houses, by the vegetable and herb patches into the sweep of the gardens and the great bow-shaped pond, onward to orchards backing onto the river, a thick silver ribbon of mercury, with its sluggish traffic of boats and barges. And around the edges the long run of brick wall, so low from up here that one might think all one had to do was to step over it to reach the world outside.
Oh, but there is beauty in here, too, Zuana thinks: the richness of the earth, the warmth of the bricks, the coolness of stone. Beauty, space, and, once you stop wanting it to be different, peace, a relief from the madness outside. If someone were to open the doors now, what point would there be in walking out into the world? Where would she go? Who would she be? The house where a young woman called Faustina grew up is home to another family now, while the city that surrounds it is a maelstrom of people who neither know nor care about her. That infinitesimal space in the world that was once hers has long since disappeared—and to appreciate quiet one must accept less excitement.
No, whatever restlessness is going on within her it is a cloud passing across the sun, the temporary blindness that comes with a morning fog. In all the gossip that filters through the walls, she has never heard of a well-born woman with her own apothecary shop or her own list of patients. I am like the green olive tree in the house of the Lord. I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever. The cloud will pass, the fog will lift. For the first time in many days she feels quieter.
As her eye moves back across the garden to the cloister, it picks out what looks like a broken line—no, more of an arc— made up of random pale stones on the grass and in among the leafless trees, moving from the edge of the wall close to the river to the path leading past the outhouses back to the cloisters. At this distance it resembles a run of uneven stitches on the hem of a garment or a long necklace of white rose petals fallen onto dark ground.
Far below them on the street in front of the convent, a clash of young men’s voices rises up: laughter, shouts, what sounds like playful jeering at one another. Rose petals. Zuana moves to face the town side again. She has an image of herself, both arms held wide over the parapet into the air, opening her fists and letting loose cascades of rose petals onto the crowds of spectators below.
“May I ask you a question, Madonna Abbess?”
“If you wish, certainly,” the abbess says, almost surprised at the return of formality in her former friend.
“Is it true, the story that Apollonia tells about the tower?”
“Which story is that?”
“About how one year at Carnival a group of novices came up here with dried petals from the storehouse and threw them down on the revelers in the streets below.”
“And what happened then?”
“It seems the young men went mad. Shouted, threw up ropes, tried to climb up to reach them.”
“Hah. I have always thought Suora Apollonia should be writing plays alongside Scholastica,” she says mildly.
She bends down and picks up something at her feet. As she straightens, her fist uncurls over a handful of molted pigeon feathers. She leans over the edge and lets them go.
“Certainly such a thing might have driven young men mad.” The feathers dance coquettishly in the air before floating down. “But as you can see yourself”—and now she leans farther out and over, so far that Zuana has an image of the painting inside the cupola ceiling and begins to feel anxious—“the height of the wall and the angle of the tower over the ground are such that you cannot see directly down to the street immediately below. Or from there up into the tower.” She pulls her body back again. “So, though the petals might have seemed like a shower of grace from heaven, there was little chance of anyone actually seeing the angels who threw them.”
She wipes her hands on her robe.
“However, it is true that when the authorities found out it caused a scandal, such that new locks had to be fitted to the tower door, and a rule was instituted that neither choir nuns nor novices were allowed to enter without the express permission of the abbess.” She sighs. “I cannot tell you how many years it took me to find my way up here again.”
They stand together for a moment, watching the bonfires throwing up broad ribbons of smoke against a luminous sky. Zuana finds herself smiling. Of course she would have been one of them. She should have guessed. The Lord punishes but he also forgives. The world is full of saints who began as sinners or, if they were always good, found their goodness pitted against rules others imposed upon them. She thinks of the novice with her incandescent anger, Benedicta with her mad music, Apollonia with her fashion-white face and stock of stories. Even the holy ones: Magdalena and her visions that are not allowed; Umiliana, who, if she could, would break the rules by having even more of them. Without the rebels there would be no stories to tell, no fellow travelers to identify with.
In front of them the sky is now on fire. She thinks of the cochinilla. Using a dye to treat a fever might be seen by some as a breaking of the rules. While there is wisdom in authority, there must always be room for experiment. Though you must also know how to question the answers you find. Are you listening, Faustina? There is a lot to learn, and I will not always be here to teach it. She has not heard his voice since before the illness. So which answers should she be questioning? The dye broke the fever, yes. In doing so it turned her urine red. But what if it also stained her spirit a little? Such things have been known to happen: a good remedy having another, bad effect. Those who take mercury for the pox suffer as much from the cure as from the illness; everyone knows that. She must ask the chief conversa how she feels now that she is better. If she has time, she will write an entry before Compline.
“It is amazing how beauty offers sustenance to the soul as well as the eye, don’t you think?” the abbess says, as if this has been a conversation between them, rather than she alone who is doing the talking. “On the few occasions I have stood here with a sister since I became abbess, I have watched it bring God’s peace back into some of the saddest of hearts. Or refresh some who are simply tired and in need of rest.” She pauses. “Though of course it is not something to be talked about with everyone.”
The sunset is burning itself out now, the reds already shading into gray. Zuana glances at her. The lines on her face have been smoothed by the twilight and her skin has almost a glow to it.
“Thank you, Madonna Abbess,” she says quietly.
“Oh, I only do as the Lord bids me. If He sees one of His flock dispirited or buffeted, it is my job as abbess to bring her back into safe harbor. Come,” she says briskly, turning. “The light is going and the staircase will become treacherous in the gloom. Oh, I almost forgot. There is something I need you to do, for the well-being of the convent. It concerns the novice.”
IN THE DARKNESS Serafina shifts her weight, registering a sharp lump along her upper thigh. The pallet mattress has so little stuffing in it she can feel the imprint of the keys wherever she turns. She likes the discomfort. For a while it brought her only terror, for with her chest unlocked there was no hiding place where she could be sure that her treasure would not be found. She could have tried to buy more stuffing, of course—such a thing is possible—but it might have brought suspicion. The discovery of a little poppy syrup or an extra lump of wax was one thing—Candida was being paid to make her life easier—but a duplicate set of keys to the outside doors …well, the profit to be made from that information would far exceed any paltry gain she could offer her. So instead she had had to pay the conversa off with a good piece of cloth when she took over cleaning the cell herself. Who would have thought it? A noble young novice scrubbing out her own cell. Well, it gives her something to do to make the time pass quicker.
Time. There is so little of it left and yet what there is seems endless. She closes her eyes but knows she will not sleep. Her public docility has come at a cost. While her head stays bowed and her face remains serene, there are moments when the insides of her gut feel so twisted into knots that it is hard to walk upright. This state of constant excitement has become almost a pleasurable pain. She remembers it from before, at home—how every moment between her singing lessons was like a torture of waiting, sometimes so bad that she could barely breathe with it. Now the idea of him—the freezing, burning anticipation—blots out everything: sleep, thought, hunger.
She has had precious little appetite since her arrival, but recently she has come to enjoy the feeling that comes from not eating; the hollowness, the gnawing and fizzing in her stomach, is a kind of exhilaration in itself, like having something alive dancing inside her. Even her voice sounds purer, with less to hold it down, and when she is made to eat—when Federica calls her to the kitchen and presents her with the marzipan strawberry—the syrupy sweetness is so strong it is all she can do not to vomit it back up again.
It is not easy, though—deliberately contriving not to eat. You might think a convent would be happy to have its sisters starving a little—didn’t the saints live on air? — but here there is moderation in everything: enough prayer, enough work, enough sleep (well, once you get used to the mad clock they live by), and enough food. The rule is that each nun must finish what is on her plate, and disobedience is a matter for penance.
Of course there are ways. Deceptions, pretenses. She is fooling them in everything else, why not in this as well? At meals she comes into the refectory and finds her seat at the long table quickly, bending low over the plate, hands clasped under her chin for grace. When the grace is over she keeps her left hand close to her mouth while her right holds the spoon. In this way it is simple to transfer the food into her hand before it reaches her lips. No one is watching, anyway. Those who are not intent on stuffing their faces are too busy listening to the readings: stories of mad men and women living in caves in the desert, vying with each other to endure the worst suffering.
It is a technique—this squirreling away of food inside her habit—that she perfected after she had started singing. It was as if she had been in need of some minor disobedience to reassure herself that she was not becoming one of them. She liked the way the fear of being caught mixed in with the guilt and the fury: sweet and sour at the same time. She had hidden the scraps away in her cell and eaten a few of them later (how dare she, a novice eating in her cell when she should be asleep!) or used them to pay Candida, for the trade in tidbits moved both ways.
Now she holds on to them until recreation, then surreptitiously lets them fall from under her robe as she wanders in the gardens. She is not the only one doing this. She spotted Eugenia doing the same thing the other day. They exchanged shy, sly little looks as they passed. At least they will not betray each other. The evidence is gone within seconds, thanks to the birds; the pigeons pecking away the finches and sparrows, then pecking at one another. Today they swooped down from the bell tower even before anything had been dropped. Still, she must be careful. Suora Umiliana, though she might approve of fasting and would no doubt love to see their flesh withering on their bones, is hawk-eyed when it comes to any infraction of the rules, however small.
Well, it is only a few days before it is over and she is gone from here forever.
Only a few days. The thought slices into her belly. Sometimes it is hard to tell the hunger from the excitement. Gone from here. But to where? How? Oh, if only she could sleep! You could die of waiting here. She slides her hand into the mattress and extracts the keys from the cloth. The iron is cold to the touch. She runs her fingers over the cut of the teeth, clean and smooth. Of course he would have found a good blacksmith. Like those men on the Carnival carts. When she had heard the stories of their songs she had felt her cheeks burning. She had died a thousand deaths that night he had brought back the keys. He had been so late she had thought he wasn’t coming. She had barely made it back to her cell in time to avoid the watch sister. When she had unwrapped them there was a scrap of paper inside with the confirmation of the day and time upon it. That was it. No endearments, no poetry, no words of love. Since then there has been nothing. His face has long since blurred in her mind, and now she cannot even hear his voice, so that when she thinks about the future, sometimes all she can see is the black ink of the river at night.
She lives so much in her own head now (with so many novices involved in the play, the religious instruction has been reduced until the performance is over). Even at her most rebellious as a child she was never so alone. The only contact she has is within the choir, and while the actual singing steadies her a little, the rawness returns as soon as it stops. There are moments when she craves company, a way to soak up some of the tension inside her, only she is terrified of what someone might spot in her, even though most of them are half mad with Carnival anticipation themselves. Except for Suora Zuana. The dispensary mistress seems oblivious to it, almost distant. Yet out of all of them Zuana is the one she cannot see, the one she fears most. She goes out of her way to avoid her, and when they pass each other, on the way to chapel or in the cloisters, she is certain she can feel the older woman watching her, probing to see what is going on within her.
Their time spent together in the dispensary feels like a lifetime ago. The ointments, the spitting treacle, the ginger balls— she thinks about them more than she wants to. She tells herself it is because the nun is clever that she needs to be careful of her in case she suspects something. But it is more than that. What started as anxiety has turned into something more uncomfortable, a gnawing that has nothing to do with hunger but comes instead from guilt. Guilt that the one person who has helped her, shown her kindness and understanding (God knows, more than her own mother ever did), will be seen to have failed with her and brought disgrace upon the convent—perhaps even be blamed in some way for her escape.
These thoughts make her angry and she tries to push them away, but when she is awake at night they return. What if they punish Zuana? Take away her privileges, stop her working on her remedies, even confiscate her books? How would she live then?
Serafina considers leaving a letter saying that it is nothing to do with Zuana, relating how much she has helped her, but she knows that would make things worse. She would pray for her, only prayer is not possible anymore. How can she ask God’s help for anything now? Whatever the wrongs done to her, they are nothing compared with the one she is about to commit.
She closes her eyes again and tries to sleep. From somewhere in the gardens comes the screeching and yowling of a catfight. She relishes the noise, finds it exhilarating rather than alarming. She brings her right arm up and lays it across her belly feeling the flatness of her empty stomach, the ridge of her hip bone, as a hot and cold shiver runs down into her groin. So be it. Even if she brings the world down upon all their heads, there is no going back now.
Oh, you will never be His bride if you go by the easy path. You fool yourself that you can fly to heaven without wings. But there is no value in being good after death.
THE VOICES DIE away and the harp brings the song to a close. An audible hum of appreciation moves through the audience. The parlatorio is packed, all the best seats taken by the women: a sea of jeweled hairnets, starched ruffs, slashed sleeves, and pinched waists with such expanses of satin and brocades flowing around them that every time they settle themselves they bring their own rustling accompaniment to the music.
In front of them, on a set of benches, Zuana sits with those few choir nuns who are not called upon to perform. They face the stage and keep their backs to the audience so that there is little risk of making eye contact with the men, who are crowded in at the back, unrecognizable in cloaks and masks: brothers, fathers, uncles, and cousins, not to mention a sprinkling of those who, though they will have argued family status at the gatehouse, have just come for the singing, their Carnival calendar taking them around to all the best concerts in town, with Santa Caterina high on the list this year.
At the front the choir and convent orchestra face each other, as if to pretend they are performing for themselves alone. Suora Purità has her head and hands poised over the organ, Lucia and Perpetua are bent over lute and viol, while Ursula keeps her fingers cupped around the strings of her harp as if she is still cradling the notes she has just released. At her feet sits a flute, which she will play later. Its presence in the room has already caused a lively debate in chapter since there are those—some outside as well as in—who would consider it almost indecent for a woman to be seen in public playing any instrument with her mouth. The fact that the flute is there at all is testimony to the passion of Benedicta’s arguments, along with the thinly veiled threat that it may not be possible to perform her arrangement of one of the more popular song cycles without it.
Across from the orchestra sits the choir itself, each of its fifty-some sisters in freshly laundered robes and pressed black veils over wimples newly starched with egg whites left over from the baking. And in front, marked out by white robes with an echo of the angelic about them, a handful of novices, easy on the eye as well as the ear. One especially.
Benedicta gives her a signal. As she takes in her breath, it seems as if everyone else holds theirs.
“Here am I, a little lamb, a new bride of God. I live in splendor and celestial ardor.”
The words are from Rome, written by one of the pope’s new favorites, though the setting—as joyful as Serafina’s own voice—is Benedicta’s. Even Zuana, who is not generally susceptible to such sugary sounds, is charmed. She glances to the carved wooden seat (brought especially from chapter for the occasion) where the abbess sits, ramrod-straight, her hands like a pair of resting white doves in her lap. It had been she who had suggested the text as a suitable one for Carnival, during the same chapter meeting at which tempers had flared over the use of the flute. Not surprisingly, with the exception of Umiliana and Felicità, everyone had been won over by it.
“I cheer the holy angels with my song. My eyes are fixed on the sun of paradise and my life sustained by an infinite beauty. ”
Certainly it is perfect for the occasion, the mix of innocence and fervor irresistible to any prospective novices in the audience and also—more important—their parents. “Christ is the one son-in-law who will not cause me trouble.” The words had been those of Ferrara’s great Isabella d’Este, when she married two of her own daughters to the church. The nunnery that received them had been lucky indeed, since there had been no greater patron in the whole of Italy. However, with a songbird such as this one, Santa Caterina will do well enough.
And it is not yet over. There are still Petrarch’s sonnets to the Virgin to come, in a new setting that shows the girl’s voice at its finest; then, after refreshments, the play in the refectory before an audience of female relations and benefactors. If the performance goes as well as the concert—and the only concerns are that Suora Lavinia finds her courtier’s costume, which has gone missing, and that the nun in charge of special effects gets the moment right so the thunder coincides with the miraculous breaking of the wheel rather than rumbling irrelevantly two or three speeches later—the convent will surely have delivered up its finest Carnival entertainment ever. Yes, Zuana thinks, the abbess has every right to look satisfied.
As the song draws to a close, all eyes are fixed on the girl. She glances up quickly toward the audience, then drops her gaze demurely to the ground. Though some will see a glow of performance about her, to Zuana’s eyes she looks gaunt and exhausted, almost feverish with the excitement of it all. Perhaps it is no wonder. Extreme goodness can be as taxing as extreme rebellion. Once Carnival is over and normality has returned, she will find convent life gentler and more soothing. If, that is, gentleness and soothing are what she really wants.
In the orchestra, Suora Ursula picks up her flute and brings it to her lips as the audience settles itself for more pleasure.
THE CONCERT ENDS and the singers disband. Behind a screen a table is now revealed laden with refreshments: fine wines next to fine glasses, hand-painted ceramic plates piled high with biscuits and sugared almonds, and, in the middle, a glass bowl full of the glowing colors of marzipan fruits. The families and visitors surge forward to meet and congratulate the performers; a few of the younger men are so eager to get to the front that there is some shoving and pushing along the way (protected by their masks, there is now the chance for a little Carnival courtesy as well as compliment). When they arrive, however, they are disappointed. The songbird herself is already gone, whisked out through the back door by Umiliana, who, having been a veritable lioness in her protection of all her novices, now sacrifices her visiting rights to chaperone Serafina in the interval between the concert and the performance.
They go first to the chapel, where they are joined by Suora Perseveranza, excused from the festivities to spiritually compose herself for her ordeal at the hands of the pagan emperor. From prayer they move to the refectory, where it becomes Serafina’s task to arrange the remaining chairs and light the candles in readiness for the performance. Though it is humble work for a young woman whose voice has just captivated some of the city’s most discriminating music lovers, she exhibits no resentment or impatience at her fate; she simply does everything as she is instructed, occasionally glancing out through the window to where the day is gradually dying.
By the time the watch sisters in the gatehouse have counted out the last male visitor and closed and secured the doors against possible intruders (a procedure most rigidly observed today of all days), and the abbess has accompanied the noblewomen, sashaying across the courtyard like a fleet of well-rigged galleons, into the refectory, the twilight is advanced enough for the candles to light up the stage, leaving just enough remaining natural light for the actors to move behind the curtains.
The novice mistress’s attention is now divided between those of her charges who will perform and the others who will be spectators, and everyone is vying for the best seats behind the benefactors. Such are the bustle and chatter that Serafina finds it easy to slip away from the throng and select a place for herself at the far end of a row at the back.
There are still a few empty places elsewhere when Zuana takes a seat to the right, almost directly in front of her. She turns a little to survey the room and as she does she catches Serafina’s eye.
“Your voice was heavenly in the concert,” she says lightly, before the girl can drop her gaze. “The parlatorio was ringing with your praises.”
Far from taking pleasure in being complimented, the novice looks confused, almost anxious. “Thank you,” she says, with a half smile. Zuana glances back toward the stage across a sea of elaborate veils and tall headdresses. “I fear you will not see much from here. You should find a place closer to the front.”
“Oh, no, no …I am happy here.” The girl shakes her head. Zuana notices how her hands are clasped tightly in her lap, one on top of the other as if to stop them from trying to escape. “I am …well, but I am very tired now.”
Her voice trails away as the noise level in the room rises. With the men gone, the women are more animated, rowdy even. She would not be the first young novice to yearn for company after solitude only to find it hard to be amid so many people and so much clamor.
There comes a sudden hushing and shushing as Suora Scholastica emerges from behind the curtain and stands waiting patiently, her full-moon face beaming with nervous excitement. Someone claps her hands to signal silence. She clears her throat.
“Welcome, dear friends and benefactors of the convent of Santa Caterina, to this, our humble entertainment.” Behind her the curtain rolls and twitches as someone moves along against it.
“In the same way that the body needs food and sleep to thrive, so the spirit also needs recreation and rest.”
She pauses, smiling broadly, and around the room people smile back, for it is impossible not to be affected by her enthusiasm.
“For this reason those wise men who established convents saw fit to allow the sisters to put on sacred plays and comedies by which to aid learning and to enjoy a little spiritual fun.”
Someone in the audience lets out a little cheer, and a ripple of laughter moves through the rows. A few of the noblewomen of Ferrara will no doubt have heard stories of convents where such entertainments are banned or curtailed, following the new rules from Trento, and are concerned lest the same thing should befall their own sisters and daughters here.
“The first scene—” Scholastica raises her voice to make it heard. These words have taken her many months to compose, and she is determined that people are going to listen to them. “The first scene of our presentation of the martyrdom of Santa Caterina takes place in the emperor’s palace in Alexandria.”
The curtain parts, pulling slowly back from either side to reveal a wooden cutout of an entrance with two painted pillars on either side. To the left stand a few noble courtiers and scribes, draped in fabrics and hats, and opposite them the emperor, tall and imperious, though still recognizable as Suora Obedienza, in a velvet cloak and a gold diadem, with a fuzzy black beard clinging precariously by two straps to her chin. A spirited interchange takes place between them about the pleasures of pagan living and the power of the gods, and then the music starts, with the courtiers giving a short dance, the steps of which most of the ladies in the audience could execute with their eyes shut.
Everyone now is craning her neck to see. Even Umiliana, who of course must disapprove in principle, cannot help but be a little curious in practice. Zuana glances back toward Serafina, who sits upright, eyes to the stage with an almost fierce attention. This time next year she could be behind the curtain herself, for there are ample opportunities for good voices during the musical interludes. Next year. How many Matins and Vespers and prayer hours will have come and gone before then? There was a time when Zuana knew the answer to that—could compute the number of offices, even the number of psalms sung, between each and every feast day. Everything becomes easier when you stop counting. Has the girl reached that stage already?
The dance is interrupted by the banging of a drum and through the back entrance two soldiers appear, their brass helmets picking up the flare of the candles. They pull with them a figure in a long white shift and a wig of golden curls down to her shoulders. This arrogant young girl has been found defying the will of the gods in favor of her own Savior. The audience gives a little gasp of pleasure. She seems so small, too fragile almost to be God’s messenger. Yet she must debate with the emperor’s scribes and either recant her Christian beliefs or be tortured.
She—Perseveranza—opens her mouth, and a breathy singsong voice comes out. She is not the convent’s greatest actress but there is a passion to her when it comes to portraying martyrdom, and once given the stage she is not afraid to use it.
The emperor claps his hands to begin the debate. The scribes open their books and pontificate but Santa Caterina passionately rebuts every argument. From offstage comes a loud crash, followed by a cry. The actors momentarily freeze, glancing nervously in the direction of the noise. The audience hears a stifled giggle and hushing. The debate starts again. Words fly. Caterina trumps her opponents, and the emperor claps his hands to mark the end of the debate, only to trap part of his beard between his palms so that it pulls away from his face and he/she has to hold on to it as the curtain closes. The smiles are everywhere now. Everyone except the actors yearns for such mistakes, for in a world so finely ordered they offer a taste of splendid, infectious chaos.
Out from behind the curtain three young women in peasant costumes emerge to talk about the wonder of the young virgin (and give the converse time to move the scenery). One of them, Eugenia, offers up a song about the joys of nature. The audience is entranced. She is a pretty thing, and with her veil and habit gone she moves her body elegantly to the music. It is as well that there are no men in the audience to admire her, though they might find her a little thin for the fashion. Before Serafina’s arrival she had been the nightingale of Santa Caterina, and she has clearly taken her dethronement hard. I must mention it to the abbess, Zuana thinks. She moves her head to try to spot Chiara—she will be in the front somewhere, next to the most influential of the guests—but the crowd is too thick.
The song ends and the audience offers up a little gasp of pleasure. Onstage, Eugenia positively glows with her triumph. Zuana glances back to see what Serafina is making of the challenge.
But Serafina is not there. Her seat is empty.
Zuana turns and looks farther along the row—perhaps she has moved to get a better view—but it is hard to tell, as the room outside the throw of the candle flames is gloomy.
In the twilight beauty of the bell tower in Zuana’s mind’s eye, the abbess speaks to her again. Officially, as it is within the first three months, she should not be allowed to watch the play, but she has done the convent such service with her voice that I feel it would be cruel to deny her the entertainment.
Could she have left? Become so tired that she must retire to her cell? Surely not. No novice, however fatigued, would miss such entertainment. Though if she had slipped away no one would have noticed, for the whole audience, especially those toward the back, are transfixed by what is taking place onstage.
Zuana acknowledges a sharp twinge in her gut.
Of course, usually the novice mistress would look after her, but she will be too busy with the other performers. So I would like you to keep a watch on her.
She slips out of her seat and moves behind, to the back of the refectory, to check more thoroughly.
Though it would be better if you do not make your observation too obvious. She has worked hard these last few weeks, and I would not like her to think we do not trust her.
There is no one there. The girl has disappeared.
Zuana makes her way toward the door, trying not to disturb those around her. The last thing she sees is the curtain opening to reveal two of the converse scuttling offstage too late after setting up the wheel.
Outside, the upper loggia of the cloisters is growing dark and it takes a few seconds to adjust her eyes. Once she does she is surefooted: down the stairs and across the courtyard toward the girl’s cell in the corner. The door is shut, no light from underneath.
She turns the latch and pushes it open.
She has not been in here since that first night almost three months before. She has an image of a young woman flattened against the wall, hair wild, howling for her lost freedom. I am buried alive in this tomb. The snarl of fury. So much rebellion. So much life …
In the deep gloom she makes out the shape of a figure in the bed. Where has it all gone? She remembers the weight of her body as the sedative started to work. “It will not make me give in.” And now what? Was she really so broken? So ready to curl up and die here, just like all the rest?
“Serafina?”
She moves toward the bed. But even before she reaches it she knows what she will find, realizes suddenly what is happening here; understands it exactly, deeply, completely, as if she had known it always but chosen not to look. And a wave of cold and hot wonder runs through her.
The words came from my mouth, not from my heart.
She rips back the bedclothes. The fat bundle of cloth roughly fashioned to the shape of a human figure looks pathetic even in the gloom. She picks it up, and it unrolls to reveal a Christ doll in the center. There are those who would see the use of the baby as a blasphemy.
She is moving fast now, out of the cell along the corridor toward the gatehouse. The parlatorio is dark and the gateroom empty; there is no sister on duty here, as everyone is given dispensation from their work to see the play But both outer doors are locked and bolted, and the only keys will be in the pockets of the chief conversa and the abbess.
So if not here, then where? And how?
As she crosses the courtyard into the second cloisters a great crash of thunder explodes into the air. In the refectory, God is entering the drama. The noise is such that it penetrates the infirmary, and a few seconds later Clementia’s voice rises up, moaning, straining against her cords. Will it be angels or devils this time? But it brings with it another glancing memory: the girl coming out of the dispensary, hands hidden in her robe. And behind her Clementia’s insistent voice: The angel from the gardens is waiting for you… See, see, my night angel is returned.
Inside her ranting what had she been saying? Yes, Serafina had been caught once out of her cell after dark. And had suffered penance for it. But now that Zuana thinks about it, that had been after Clementia had been put under restraints, surely? In which case, how often might she have seen her before then?
She has worked hard these last few weeks, and I would not like her to think we do not trust her.
Has everyone been fooled?
Through the second cloisters she moves into the grounds. This is forbidden territory after dark, and though she has done it once—no, twice, with special dispensation, to collect an herb that was needed urgently—she is less sure of her way. She recalls the image of the convent from the perspective of the tower: the gardens, the pond, the fruit trees, and out to the walls. And with it comes the straggling line of pale rocks and stones, like ragged stitching, moving from the edge of the second cloisters to— where? A point near the wall by the river’s edge. Pale stones. On the ground in daylight no one would notice them, but at night, unless there was no moon at all, their brightness would mark a path, which once picked out could be navigated swiftly enough.
Now that she knows what she is looking for, it is easy to find, and as she follows the line, lifting her skirts to avoid the undergrowth and brambles, she remembers an angry young novice picking up a handful of stones and hurling them into the pond, while she, her appointed guide and mentor, showed her around the grounds, describing the wonders of a convent with its walled river storeroom, through which a great wealth of trade moves in—and out—through double-locked doors to the world beyond. Sweet Jesus, has the girl remembered and used everything?
By the time she reaches the storeroom doors, she is panting and breathless. She can hear sounds from the streets around, but the wall near to where the line of stones ends is deserted and the doors themselves are closed. No sign of life. Nothing. She leans against the wood, gasping to get her breath back. As she stands there, her mind racing, she becomes aware of something, some scratching or sliding noise, from within. She turns her head so that her ear is hard against the wood and listens. Beyond is the inner storeroom, with another door that leads to the outer store and from there to the river. Is someone there? Yes? No?
She puts out a hand to the iron handle above the keyhole, then as quietly as she can she pushes against it. It holds firm. Of course, it is locked. As will be the one beyond, no doubt. No. She is imagining the noise. Who could possibly get their hands on these keys? The abbess apart, both the cellarer and the chief conversa are diligent beyond words.
Aaaah! Sweet Madonna. The chief conversa …
I dosed her with basil and eau-de-vie. They gave me dispensation to help. The novice mistress said it would be good for me.
Even Zuana, who knows nothing, knows that at night the chief conversa—a light sleeper—keeps the keys under her own weight beneath the mattress. Were she in a fever, however, how easy would it have been to slip one’s hand under …But her illness was almost two weeks ago. If the keys had gone missing, everyone would know by now. Could she have had them copied? How? By whom? The more Zuana thinks, the less she understands. But something is happening here. The girl’s absence and the wrapped body of clothes are proof enough. That and the rolling panic in her stomach.
By the time she gets back to the refectory, the spectacle has finished. The nuns are lighting candles all around and there is excited chatter and laughter as the audience mingles with the performers. The chief conversa is nowhere to be seen but the abbess is prominent enough, basking in the glow of success with two or three finely dressed women grouped around her. While this is hardly the time to announce that they may have lost a novice over the wall, it is clear she has to know.
A good abbess has eyes in the back of her head, and long before Zuana reaches her she has registered her arrival in the room, flicking a glance and then a frown in her direction. As she approaches, Zuana hastily wipes the sweat from her face.
“Suora Zuana.” The abbess turns and welcomes her easily.
“Lady Paolo, Signora Fiammetta, this is our beloved dispensary mistress. It is she we have to thank for the health of the convent and the splendid aromas that rise up from our pomades and hanging baskets.”
The women glance at her, politely uninterested. They are both so thickly painted that the slightest smiles would crack their faces. Ambergris and honeysuckle, Zuana thinks. And a hint of musk underneath. It would cost the convent a small fortune to produce their smells. She bows her head.
“I ask forgiveness for the interruption, Madonna Chiara, but I need the keys to the river storehouse.”
“The river storehouse?” The abbess’s voice is light. “What? Are we in need of more supplies at this time of the evening?”
“Yes. Something for one of the …younger novices.”
She watches the abbess’s eyes narrow. “I see. Of course, then. Do you need help? I …I am not sure whom I can spare for you at this moment.”
“No. No, I …I’ll be fine alone.”
The abbess moves her hands inside her robe to the belt that she wears underneath, always, whatever the occasion, and from it unclips a ring with two solid iron keys.
“Here. At this hour you will need a candle and a taper. Take one from the stage.” She continues brightly. “And come back to us soon, yes?”
The flash in her eye belies the comfortable smile she gives as she turns back to her painted guests.
ONCE DOWN THE stairs and across the courtyard, Zuana quickens her pace, the taper protected in her hands, until she is half running through the second cloisters, out by the herb and kitchen gardens, but then bypassing the stones to go instead around the pond and out across the small orchard toward the river.
Do not make your observation too obvious. She has worked hard these last few weeks, and I would not like her to think we do not trust her. The abbess’s words, thrown over her shoulder as they descended the stairs of the tower, had been casual, almost an afterthought.
Except how was one supposed to watch over someone who must not know she is being watched? Dear God. The girl had been out of her sight for—what, five? — maybe ten minutes at the longest. Zuana’s skirts catch on brambles and she has to wrench them free, feeling the material snag and tear. Had the abbess herself known something when she said that? Suspected, even? In which case, who is not trusting whom here?
In the gloom she misses her step and almost trips. She forces herself to slow down. Running within the convent is strictly forbidden except in the case of fire, as the very act gives birth to panic. More important, she cannot afford to sacrifice the light of the taper, for the dusk is fast turning to night.
The brick façade of the storehouse comes up ahead of her, the convent walls rising behind it. At the doors she bows her head. Dear God, she begins again. Dear God, I give myself into Your— But the prayer is interrupted by what is definitely the sound of something moving on the other side.
She slips the key into the hole and feels it bite against the lock, then turn heavily. There is a flat clunk as the bolt moves and the door cracks open. The noise sounds enormous. She pushes the door farther and steps inside. The yawning gap reveals only darkness. She stands for a moment, registering the silence. She feels stinging like a thousand needle pricks running through her body and knows it is fear. If there is someone in here—
On the ground nearby comes a sudden scrabbling, something heavy scuttles fast over her feet, and it is all she can do not to cry out. An animal—it is only an animal running, Zuana, she tells herself. Most likely a rat. Was that what she had heard? Has she come all this way just to trap a water rat, gorging itself on convent supplies? She brings the taper to the candle and is pleased to find that her hand is steady as she lights it.
The flame jumps up into the darkness to reveal a room that is already mapped out in her mind: one wall stacked with crates and sacks, another with wine barrels and a salt container, and at the back a locked door, which leads to the outside storeroom and from there to the river itself. Everything is as she imagined it. Except for one thing. The door in the back wall is not locked. Indeed, it is not even properly closed.
She takes a few steps toward it. Her sandals are soft on the floor, but not so soft that she can conceal the rustle of cloth over grit and straw. As she stops, so does the noise. There is no sound anywhere. But there is something stronger than sound now. There is feeling. Someone has been here. Is here now. She knows it.
She reaches the door. It opens inward, and as she pulls it quietly she lifts the light so that she sees everything at the same time. The room is empty save for a few crates. But straight ahead, the double doors that give out onto the river are open. She can hear the slap of the water and the thud of the convent’s old rowboat bumping against the small dock. And in the middle, in silhouette, is the figure of a woman dressed in full skirts, tucked bodice, and piled hair. The missing donated courtier’s costume, no doubt, out of fashion already but wealthy enough to denote status on the body of a young woman, one with such a fine head of long hair that if anyone were to pass her on a Carnival street it would never occur to them to see her as a fugitive from a convent.
The figure is already turning as she crosses the floor.
“Serafina!”
“Aah!” The wail she lets out echoes out over the water.
“What are you doing here?”
“No! No! Stop. Don’t come near me!”
And such is her anguish that for a second Zuana hesitates.
“Be careful. Step away from the water’s edge. What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” Her voice is all spit and panic. “I am getting out. He is come for me. He is taking me away.”
He? Zuana glances quickly around her. But the room behind is empty and there is no one on the dock. The girl is clearly alone.
“Who? Who is come?”
“He will be here directly.” She waves her hand wildly. “I can hear the boat. It is coming. Don’t move, I tell you. Just go away, go back now, and nothing bad will happen.”
But instead of going back Zuana walks toward her. Close to, the water is choppy, butting angrily against the wood. If someone is out there, he will still have to negotiate the way to the wharf and moor in the semidarkness. And if there is no one, surely she will be able to pull the girl back.
“Don’t move. I told you—if you move, I’ll …I’ll jump.” And she shifts her weight closer to the dock’s edge.
Zuana stops. How long has the girl been standing here in the darkness waiting, half an hour? No, by now surely it would be more. There is a wind building and the air smells of rain. “Serafina, Serafina,” she says, and she keeps her voice gentle. “Listen to me. It doesn’t have to be like this. At the end of the year you can—”
“I will never make it to the end of the year. And even if I d-did, no one would listen to me. You s-said so yourself. Not the abbess, not the b-bishop.”
“But what you are doing here will only bring catastrophe upon yourself. You cannot live alone outside. The scandal—”
“I don’t c-care about scandal. I don’t care. I can’t stay here. I’ll die in this place. Don’t you see? I am not like you. It will k-kill me.” The depth of her terror is sending stammer tremors through her voice. “He is coming. He—he—he will look after me.” She stares out quickly over the black water, but the truth is that there is no boat to be heard or seen anywhere. “He—he is coming,” she repeats. “He is coming. He is waiting on the other b-bank”
She moves toward the old rowboat.
“No!” Zuana steps forward instinctively. “There is nothing for you out there. Only disgrace.”
But the girl is crouched already, fumbling with the ropes. She is probably only three or four arms’ lengths away.
Zuana stretches out her hand to her. “Come. Take my hand. It will be all right. I will help you.”
The girl glances up at her, and in the flickering candlelight her eyes for that moment shine out. “I can’t. Don’t you see? I can’t,” she hisses. “Please, leave me, just turn and go away. I will never tell a living soul you found me. Even if they c-catch me and put the screws on me and break all my fingers I will never tell them. I swear. Just turn around and go.”
“And what if you drown?”
“I don’t care.” And now suddenly the girl’s voice is calm. “Whatever happens, it is better than slow death in here. Please. I beg you.”
Zuana stands paralyzed. She knows she should move, take hold of her, bring her back, but …
The moment stretches out around them.
The girl smiles. “Thank you,” she says simply.
She turns her attention to the ropes—and as she does so there is sudden movement behind them.
“Get hold of her. Stop her—now!”
It is the voice of the abbess.
Zuana responds involuntarily, throwing herself across the wood, grabbing the girl’s arm, pulling her back while she flails and kicks and yells. Within seconds the abbess is with her, grasping the other arm, wrenching the girl’s fingers off the ropes, and then both of them are dragging her away from the river’s edge, back from the boat toward the open doors, inch by screaming inch, until they cross the storeroom threshold. Anyone within listening distance will be hearing bloody murder now, though being Carnival it might be mistaken for overenthusiastic courtship.
“The keys. Give me the keys, Zuana.”
The abbess lets go of the girl to lock the doors behind them.
“Noooo!” the girl howls in the darkness, breaking free of Zuana again and throwing herself toward that disappearing sliver of freedom between the closing doors. But the abbess is there, blocking her way, and Zuana grabs her again.
“Noooo! Jacopo! Jacopo! Where are you?” The desperation bounces and echoes off the walls.
The door bangs shut, the key turns, and suddenly the outside world is gone: no lapping water, no expanse of night sky, no open air, nothing. Nothing.
“Aaah! No-o-o-o!”
The girl sags, suddenly such a dead weight that Zuana has to let her down onto the floor. The abbess recovers a hooded candle from by the door and, lifting it up, moves over to where the girl is lying, slumped and moaning in Zuana’s arms. She stares at her for a moment, then shakes her head. “It is over,” she says quietly, almost wearily. “It is over.”
But the girl is moaning to herself and does not seem to hear her.
She raises her voice. “You should thank me. You could have waited out there all night and he would still not have come.”
Now she has her attention. “What? What do you mean?”
“I mean he is not here anymore. He left Ferrara two days ago.”
“No! No, you are lying! You don’t know anything about him.”
“On the contrary, I know a great deal. I know for instance that he—Jacopo Bracciolini; that is his name, yes? — is a very fortunate young man. His composing and vocal talents have been recognized, and he has accepted an offer of work in Parma as assistant capella master. You should be happy for him. It means he is saved from the prosecution and imprisonment that would certainly have followed an attempt to kidnap a novice of one of the city’s greatest convents.” She brushes down her skirts, as if this is an ordinary matter of convent business she is now attending to. “Indeed, he is doubly lucky, since I cannot imagine any other employer would have taken him, given that he was dismissed from his last post for the attempted rape of one of his noble pupils.”
“No-o-o-o,” the girl moans.
The abbess waits. She looks at Zuana and shakes her head slightly. While there are things they must talk about, this is clearly not the time.
She bends down and offers the girl her hand. “Come. It would be best if you walked back yourself rather than having to be carried.”
But the girl recoils fiercely from her.
“You think me cruel, no doubt.” And her voice now is almost friendly. “But I am less cruel than he has been. You should know it was not hard to persuade him to abandon you. He does not really care, you see. He may say he does, he may have sworn everlasting love—I am sure he did; you were fruit ripe for picking, and had he been able to trick your father into marriage there would have been money in it for him. But in the end you are not worth the trouble you would cause him. The trouble you would cause all of them. Do you understand?”
But the girl does not answer, just moans quietly to herself.
“The truth is that God cares for you much more than any man ever will. And so will we—however much you might hate us now.”
Now the girl looks up. “You’re wrong. You’re wrong about him. He loves me. He wouldn’t just leave.”
The abbess sighs. “Believe that if you will. But believe this also.” Her tone is harder now. “For the welfare of your family and the convent, this—what happened here tonight—never took place. Is that clear? And if one word of it should become gossip, I will make sure that, however good his voice, Jacopo Bracciolini will spend the rest of his life rotting in a castle prison for gross indecency.” The girl stares at her. “I think you know by now that I can do this.”
She gets up, making a gesture to Zuana to do the same, leaving the girl curled on the ground like a broken doll.
They move quickly into the outer storeroom.
“I must return to the refectory. I have been away too long. You will have to get her back to the cloisters on your own.”
Zuana nods, though it may be too dark for it to be seen.
“Take her to her cell and stay with her until I decide what to do. Can you do that?”
It is only a short pause, nowhere near as long as the one when Zuana had stood paralyzed on the dock, with the abbess somewhere in the room behind her. But now, as then, the air is too gloomy to know for certain what anyone could have seen. Or heard.
“Yes,” she says flatly.
“Good.” The abbess moves out into the gardens, the door swinging behind her.
But inside, on the floor of the inner storeroom, the girl has already made her own decision.
While the two women have been talking, Serafina has had her fingers inside the pocket of her skirts. She has drawn out a glass vial and removed its stopper, careful not to lose a drop of the liquid as she takes it out. By the time Zuana turns back to her she has it to her mouth and is gulping greedily.
Zuana reaches her fast and smashes the bottle out of her hand so that it jumps and clatters on the stone, the glass too thick to shatter. Immediately she is on her hands and knees feeling for it, a barrage of images instantly assaulting her. She is standing in the dispensary mixing cochinilla and water, a fever cooking her brain—and there is something strange about the arrangement on the shelves in front of her. Yet when she is well and upright again and studies them more carefully, there is nothing missing; every ingredient is in its rightful place and there is no reason for her to check the level on each and every bottle.
Her fingers close around the glass. She brings it to her nose. God help us now. The ground is dry and the bottle is empty. She crawls back over to the girl, grabs her by the shoulders, and pulls her up, bringing her face so close to her own that she has to look at her. “How much, Serafina? How much was in there?”
But in answer the girl only licks her lips to make sure there is no drop left.
“Tell me!”
She shakes her head. “It’s one of the ingredients they give to those who are going to be tortured to death. Isn’t that what you told me that night?”
“Oh, Heavenly Father,” Zuana says under her breath. “What have we done to deserve this?”
She puts out her hand and strokes back the hair from the girl’s face. She looks so tired and worn. Too much youth. Too much emotion. The lunar madness that can strike some young women at the onset of menstruation. This is how it started all those months ago. Please God, don’t let it be how it finishes. “Come,” she says gently. “Come. Let’s take you somewhere more comfortable.” She picks the girl up and hauls her to her feet, noting as she does so how thin her body feels beneath the robes, so much lighter than when she lifted her up from the floor of her cell all those months ago, and she wonders how this weight loss will affect her susceptibility to the drug. But none of this shows in her voice, which is kind, loving almost. “So, Serafina, can you help me? Can you walk with me?”
The girl nods and starts to move her feet obediently. In the gloom she offers up what seems a crooked half smile. “I think it was enough not to feel pain. I hope so.”
THE VOMITING AND the evacuation go on through that night and into the next day.
Because Zuana has no idea how much poppy syrup the girl has drunk, she must assume the vial was full. The dose of hellebore she gives must be enough to empty her stomach but not so much that it will kill her. It is a balance no apothecary however experienced, can be sure of.
At least she is given the freedom of a night without interruption to start the process.
With the visitors gone, the abbess brings her flock together. She congratulates them on the wondrous performances of the day and the glory they have brought to Santa Caterina and announces that tonight of all nights they have earned a rest that will not be disturbed, even by prayer, so there will be no service of Matins. The convent bell will remain silent until dawn. It is a popular dispensation, for now that the excitement is over they are exhausted; indeed, a few of the younger ones even weep a little at the news. If the novice mistress does not entirely approve of the decision, she is as tired as everyone else and says nothing against it.
As the convent slides into a satisfied deep sleep, the abbess and the dispensary mistress meet in the corner cell of the main cloister, where one of them holds open a young woman’s mouth while the other pours into it a draft of poison made from pulped apple saturated with white hellebore root.
It does not take long for the first spasm to hit. Though by now she is almost unconscious, the agony is sharp enough to wake her; she opens her eyes in a kind of drugged terror and an unholy groan comes out of her mouth. Together they drag her from the bed to the floor. For the next however many hours they must keep her sitting up with her head bowed over, to facilitate the evacuation but also to stop her from drowning in her own vomit. It might be better if they could pray and the abbess is quick enough to find the right psalm on her behalf.
“O God, rebuke me not in Thine indignation, neither chasten me in Thy wrath, for I am weak and my soul is in anguish. ”
But once the spasms start in earnest, they are so violent and frequent that there is no time for speech, let alone prayer. It is physically exhausting work. The bowls Zuana brings fill and refill. When the diarrhea begins, the girl’s body is racked by double agony. The stench fast becomes almost unbearable. They roll up their sleeves and tuck their habits into their belts to avoid the worst of the contamination. They strip her down to her shift so she will soil herself as little as possible and wrap her hair in a piece of material to keep it from falling over her face into the vomit. But they can do nothing about the sweat that pours off her or the way her limbs shake uncontrollably from the spasms that crack through her body.
There are those who swear to the efficacy of hellebore as an aid to exorcism, since any demon trying to bury itself deeper to escape the burns inflicted by holy water will find its hold on the body severed from within. While Zuana has never had cause to use it in such a way, she has seen it work enough to understand what that might look like: the torso so gripped by spasm that it can go as rigid as wood, lifting the backbone high off the bed as if some spiteful spirit is controlling it from within. But what she has never witnessed before is its effect on top of such a powerful soporific. The battle between a body wanting to let go and the eruptions seizing it from within is truly terrible to watch, so that there are times when the girl feels like a rag doll held between the teeth of a great dog that shakes her to and fro before flinging her down on the ground, only to pick her up and start the whole thing again minutes later.
“Don’t be frightened, Serafina,” she finds herself whispering, as they lift her back up in anticipation of the next wave. “Remember how we said that sometimes one must use a poison to cure a poison? It will not last forever.”
But the poppy and the hellebore have her too deeply in their grip, and it feels as if there is no reaching her. Across the girl’s body, Zuana meets the abbess’s eyes and sees in them a look of such unashamed admiration that she feels almost shy. On the wall above the bed the figure of Christ looks down from a wooden crucifix. Suffering upon suffering. Who is to know how much is enough? Which sins can be forgiven and which remain?
As she falls backward into Zuana’s arms again, the girl murmurs something.
“Srree—m srree.”
Zuana puts her head close to her mouth to try to hear more but it is gone, swallowed up in a long growl of pain as her insides contract again.
Somewhere toward the end of the night the abbess leaves. She will have to appear at Lauds, and before then she must return the stolen costume to the props cupboard, cleanse and dress herself, and get at least some sleep. By now the spasms have become less frequent, and for a while Zuana wonders if the worst may be over. But almost immediately a new wave of vomiting begins, and it is all she can do to manage the girl on her own.
They had pulled the mattress down on the floor to give the girl some respite from the hard stone, and once the spasm has passed she lies flattened on it, her breathing fast and shallow, her skin covered in a mist of sweat that returns however many times Zuana mops her. How successful the hellebore has been will only become clear when the spasms finally stop and she becomes conscious again. But Zuana has no idea if—no, she will not hear that word—when that will happen.
“Out of the deep I have called unto Thee, O God. Lord, hear my voice. Let Thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication. ”
Outside, rain starts to fall, gentle at first, then much fiercer, with a wind driving the water. Whoever is still out after the madness of Carnival will be chased home by it. Our Lord is washing the streets clean in time for the beginning of Lent. Tomorrow the city will wake with a collective hangover and turn its face to abstinence and repentance. And if the repentance is sincere, then surely He will listen.
“If Thou, O God, shall mark iniquities, then who shall stand unaccused? Yet there is pardon of sin with Thee, that Thou mayest be feared.”
The downpour is so relentless that soon she can hear water from the roof gushing out in streams through gargoyle mouths onto the flagstones in the courtyard beneath. She has a sudden desire to be out in it, to be standing in the middle of the deluge, drowning in its freshness.
The cloth of her habit is stiff with vomit and traces of feces, and the smell is so pungent that the girl’s condition will surely become obvious to everyone as soon as they wake. She turns her on her side in case another spasm should take her and quickly slips out of the cell into the courtyard, taking the bowls with her. She puts them on the ground and the water hammers down into them. She washes them out as best she can and lets them fill again as she lifts her face to the rain. The night is black, the half-moon that was there before engulfed in thick cloud. Within minutes she is soaked, gasping with the cold. But she is also awake. On the river the wind will be smashing the rowboat against the dock, the convent doors behind closed and locked. But then nothing happened there tonight, did it? Did it? She will not think about that now.
She goes back into the cell with the fresh water and washes the girl as best she can.
“Purge Thou me with hyssop and I shall be clean; wash Thou me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Turn Thy face from my sins and wipe out all my misdeeds, make Thou unto me a clean heart, O Lord, and renew a right spirit within me. ”
There are a dozen other psalms she could recite: verses of supplication, cries of shame and guilt, calls for repentance, for forgiveness, for God’s boundless mercy. But sitting over the novice’s unconscious body, she is suddenly no longer sure about their efficacy; while the words are fine enough, none of them say what really needs to be said here.
The truth is that forgiveness can come only to those who are repentant. Yet the girl lying on the pallet is sixteen years old, in love, and incarcerated against her will. What if, when she wakes and finds herself back in her cell for the rest of her life, she is not sorry for what she has done, only sorry that she has failed in the doing of it? The list of her sins is long: deceit, cunning, rage, lies, lust, disobedience. But the worst is surely despair. Sworn to silence now, where will she go for relief? Without the intervention of God’s grace as well as His penance, what reason will she have not to fall prey to desperation?
“Forgive me, Lord, for not seeing what was in front of my eyes. ”
The girl is not the only one in need of grace and forgiveness. Zuana bows her head on her own behalf.
“Forgive me for not recognizing her despair. For thinking only of my own sadness when I should have been listening to that of others. For not keeping guard over the poppy syrup in the dispensary. For my loss of concentration during the play. Forgive me for being too proud or too blind or too busy. For all these sins send me penance and, in Your infinite mercy, if it be possible, save this young woman from further torment.”
After a while she notices a muddy line of light under the door of the cell; dawn has come, muted this morning by the rain. She hears the bell for Lauds, followed by the watch sister’s steps and the slapping of sandals on the soaked stone. She sits back against the wall and closes her eyes.
She has no idea of how long she sleeps. The day has already begun when the sound of groaning and the smell of fresh feces wake her.
Outside, the sisters go about their daily business, moving quietly around them. The news has traveled fast. Santa Caterina’s songbird has been taken ill with sudden fitting and from where a lovely voice once came, now there is only a river of vomit. Her condition is grave. There is talk of how the cell itself is cursed; of how its predecessor, Suora Tommasa, had been healthy—and sweet-voiced also—until one day she was found throwing up her life all over the walls. This story is given more credence by the fact that the cell, even the cloister corridor close to it, has been placed strictly out of bounds, as if there were indeed some hideous contagion at work there.
Before the midday meal the abbess returns, bringing Zuana a change of robes and food and fresh water from the kitchen. She stands looking down at the girl. The face is calm now, the mouth slack, lips blistered where the poison has scorched them.
“When was the last spasm?”
“A while ago. Half an hour, maybe longer.”
“So the remedy has worked?”
“I don’t know.”
The abbess glances up at her. “But she is not going to die?”
“I don’t know.”
“She is not going to die,” she says firmly, the words as matter-of-fact as the announcement of the menu for a feast day. How wonderful, Zuana thinks, to be so certain of everything. How wonderful and how terrible. “I will sit with her if you want to rest.”
“No. I must watch still.”
After the abbess leaves, the girl’s breathing becomes noisy through her parched mouth. Zuana puts a few drops of rosemary essence into the water and lifts her head while she moistens her lips, then pours a little gently down her throat. It is her father’s remedy. Once the body has no more to evacuate, one must start to put something back, for with so much liquid gone the organs will dry up and no longer work properly. The girl chokes on it and this time does not throw it back up again immediately. But there is no sign of regained consciousness.
A few hours later Suora Umiliana comes to the cell, given permission by the abbess to say prayers over her most troublesome novice. Her distress at the sight that meets her is palpable. She sinks to the floor, hands clasped, lips moving almost before her old knees have found purchase on the hard ground.
Zuana feels a lurch in her stomach. Does Umiliana see something she does not? Perhaps she knows the girl is dying, senses it as she did with Imbersaga. Has she missed some change, some sign within the body? But the girl’s pulse, when she finds it, is still the same weak but steady beat.
The room settles around the novice mistress’s whispered intercession: God’s love, His horror of our sins, the depth of His suffering, the wonder of a sinner returned to the fold. The joy of the final reunion even in death, the power of the light, the pull of the boundless, boundless sea of love.
Zuana listens, mesmerized by the older nun’s flow. If only I could pray like that, she thinks: pray with my whole being poured into each and every word. Pray as if I could hear Him listening.
The prayers end, and Umiliana leans over and puts her finger gently on the girl’s forehead before rising. “Shall I ask the abbess to bring Father Romero?”
“No.” Zuana’s voice is clear. “She is not going to die.” The abbess’s words have become her own. “This reaction to the remedy is to be expected. She will wake soon.”
But while Umiliana has been praying, Serafina’s face has moved from pale to a kind of gray, and though her lips are open it is hard to know if she is still breathing. It was too much, Zuana thinks. If not the poppy, then the hellebore. I gave her too much …God help me.
“We must keep praying for her. That is all we can do.” The novice mistress takes hold of Zuana’s fingers and squeezes them. “Do not despair,” she says, as if she knows that this is one of Zuana’s darkest temptations. “You have done all that could be asked of you. He will know that.”
Oh, but I haven’t, Zuana thinks. Not at all. And He will know that, too.
Time passes. She strokes the girl’s head and pulls a cover over her. The bell sounds for supper, and once more she hears the shuffle of feet across the cloisters. She pinches herself to stay awake.
There is nothing more to be done, Faustina.
She shakes her head. “There has to be. There has to be something.”
You are only a healer. There comes a point when you must give it up to God.
“Ha! You sound like Umiliana.”
Why don’t you leave her for a while? Walk out in the air. Maybe take something to give you energy. Do you keep infusion of angelica root? I think you must.
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
Then take a dose of it, with some mint essence. Make it strong. It will help you get through the night. But before you go, give her some more rosemary water.
“What if she vomits it back up while I am gone?”
If she does, there will be only a little bile. Not enough to choke on if she is on her side. At least it will show some sign of life.
“Papa, Papa, I don’t want her to die.”
I’m afraid you have grown too fond of her, child. It does not make for good healing. Go now. You have done all you can.
IT SEEMS DAYS since she was last in the infirmary. The two elder nuns are asleep, while Clementia lies in her bed, singing quietly to herself. The room is clean, the floor washed, the hanging baskets fresh, and the night candle already prepared on the small altar. Letizia has done a good job. Life, it seems, must go on. The very thought makes her want to cry. You are tired, Zuana, she says to herself sternly. And too much tiredness makes one maudlin.
In the dispensary she finds the angelica root and mixes it with a little wine and peppermint. It has kept her awake before and it will do so again. She swallows the preparation and feels it moving into her stomach. It will take a while to work. She transfers more to another vial. She will need something for the second night, if indeed there is going to be one.
The bell marking the end of supper is already ringing as she leaves the room. She must hurry. The sisters will be returning to their cells and this is not the time to meet anyone, however kind and sympathetic.
But as she crosses back over the courtyard she sees something that makes her heart pound. In the corner of the cloisters, the door to the girl’s cell that she had closed so carefully behind her is now wide open.
There is no way the girl could have done it herself. So who is in there? Has the abbess returned, bringing her supper? In which case why hasn’t she closed the door?
She runs across the courtyard, regardless of the rules. As she nears the open door she hears something—more a sound than a voice—a whining, like a line of taut thread vibrating in the air.
Inside, on the floor by the mattress, a figure is crouched, so small and bowed it looks more goblin than human, the head larger than the body and naked, save for a covering of white stubble over scabby skin.
For a moment Zuana stands transfixed in the doorway. Then as she goes closer the keening turns into words.
“See—oh, yes, you can see Him. Yes, yes, I know you can. He is come to welcome you back. Oh, see how He bleeds for you, Serafina. Feel His breath on your face. If you open your eyes He will be there. He has been waiting for you to find Him. He has been waiting so long for you.”
“Suora Magdalena.” Zuana tries to keep her own voice gentle.
The old woman does not turn but simply tilts her head to one side, like a beady-eyed bird detecting a sound. “Not yet, not yet. I am with the child. See—she is better.” She gives a sudden girlish giggle. “See what He has done for her?”
And as she comes closer, Zuana does indeed see. For the girl, lying on her side on the mattress, is awake, her eyes open and blinking.
Zuana takes a sharp breath and moves toward her, dropping to her knees next to the old woman.
“Serafina!” she says urgently.
The eyes are huge in her thin face, and there is a strange blankness to them, as if she has woken to something she does not yet understand. Three months ago she had been so young. Well, she is not young anymore. But she is alive.
“Welcome, welcome.” Zuana cannot stop smiling. The girl stares at her, then seems to give a small nod.
“What happened?” Zuana’s question is directed at the old woman, but she is not listening, simply rocking to and fro, singing to herself, the holy goblin returned.
Behind, out in the courtyard, Zuana can hear people moving. She must get up and close the door.
It is already too late.
“Oh, Sweet Lord Jesus, she is alive!” Suora Umiliana is standing in the doorway, a few brave souls willing to risk disobedience gathered behind her. “Suora Magdalena has brought her back to us.”
But Magdalena is not listening to her either. She has taken hold of the girl’s hand, thin claw on soft flesh, and is stroking the skin. “See, see, I said He would come.”
The girl tries to pull herself up on the mattress but does not have the strength. Zuana supports her until she is almost sitting.
Umiliana is inside the cell now, others crowding in behind her.
Serafina opens her mouth a little, moving her tongue around her blistered lips. She looks at Zuana, then out across the room.
“I saw Him,” she says—and though hers is a sad little voice, its silky beauty all burned out, it reaches everyone in the room. “Yes, I do think I saw Him.”
IN THE BEGINNING there was nothing. Just darkness, blessed darkness, deep and soft, like being wrapped in swaths of black velvet and held within the silence of an eternal night sky. No past. No future. No present. And it was good, this nothingness, an oblivion of mercy with no pain.
It had descended upon her as she moved across the gardens. She did not have to do anything. After all that had been done, nothing more was asked of her. She was not even scared. Zuana’s arms were around her, her voice was in her ears, and she was safe.
“Help me, Serafina. Walk a little, yes? Oh, sweet child, I am so sorry.”
She wants to tell her it is all right. It doesn’t matter anymore. She wants to say she is the one who should be sorry, not Zuana. To thank her for what she has done, and to ask forgiveness, for she is not yet so lost that she doesn’t know that what took place on the dock between them will bring trouble on her head.
“No, no, don’t try to speak. Save your strength. Just a little farther. We can talk later.”
Only there will be no later. Because when the drowsiness comes it is not to be argued with. Behind it she feels the pull of the darkness, with its deep rich velvet touch.
“We are nearly there. Keep walking, keep walking.”
And she does walk, because she does not want to disappoint Zuana, not again. But after a while she has to stop, because the nothingness wraps itself around her and takes her away. And, just as she hoped, there is no pain.
EXCEPT, EXCEPT— how can this be? — it does not last. How long she floats in the velvet black she has no idea. But she knows when it ends. Knows when the dark is torn apart by scorching white pain. Someone is hammering a long nail into the center of her stomach. After the first there is another, then another. Once inside, the nails become scissors, slicing and chopping her innards into pieces small enough to be able to come out of her mouth. It happens so fast that she barely registers the nausea before the stuff is already up in her throat. The force of it sends her reeling so powerfully that if something or someone had not been holding her she would have fallen over. She watches in horror as her insides explode out of her mouth. The shock is almost worse than the pain. The next time the hammer hits, the nail goes through her stomach into the bowels beneath. The sound of her groans and the smell of her own decay are everywhere.
She tries to breathe, to find her way back to the blessed darkness, but when she gets there it isn’t blessed at all. She sees herself suspended, arms and legs dangling uselessly on either side, a spiked pole rammed through her, anus to mouth, like an animal on a spit ready for roasting. And when she looks around she is not alone. There are hundreds, even thousands, like her, figures stretching into the darkness as far as she can see, their bodies eviscerated, roasted, grilled, sliced, and diced into bleeding bits by an army of squat, grinning torturers, black as the night they are born out of. There is flesh and pulp everywhere, and the terrible emptiness of silent screams, each soul locked forever in its own suffering.
“Oh, but we did not sin like this,” she hears herself say. “It was love, not lust, I swear. Bodies singing together, that was all …Oh, Jacopo.” But even as the words form, her offending lips are wrenched open and another stream of bile pours out.
Now as she looks around, instead of devils in the darkness she sees a water rat, sleek wet fur like a black veil around its head, face pale and twitching, teeth drawn, ready to sink into her insides. It looks up at her and smiles.
“Sometimes one must use a poison to cure a poison. Don’t be frightened, Serafina. It will not last forever,” it says, before the fangs go back in and the agony returns.
Farther into eternity, when her guts are on the floor and there is nothing more to lose, she comes far enough out of the pain to open her eyes onto the inside of her cell. She knows it must be her cell from the crucifix on the wall.
She fixes her gaze on it to keep from sliding back into hell. She studies how He hangs there, slumped forward against the nails, ribs pushing out against His skin, each muscle singing in agony. Oh, yes, He understands pain. He knows what it is to be consumed by suffering, the terror and the terrible aloneness of it. Oh, no one should be so alone. She keeps Him in her mind after her eyes close: His bloodied face, His lacerated body. He would be so beautiful were He not in agony. She sees a young man standing tall, hair falling and curling over broad shoulders, the smooth unblemished skin of his chest and the fine, fine face: high forehead, full lips, and clean clear gaze. If one loves him broken, how much would one love him whole? Oh, Jacopo, where were you? A good savior. Such strength, such goodness.
He does not really care for you. You are not worth the trouble you would cause him.
No. No. No. But He cares. Look at Him—oh, yes, He cares. Always. Whatever the trouble, He cares enough to climb up the stairs onto His own cross and hang there in agony for an eternity waiting for her.
“I’m sorry. I am sorry…”
She tries to say the words loud enough for Him to hear but the slicing starts again, and all that is there is the long groan of her own voice.
The darkness returns, changed again. No bodies now but also no velvet. Instead parched stone, hard, unforgiving, stretching up and out all around her, and she must lie on it forever and ever. At least she has no bones. They have been ground up and vomited out or melted in the furnace of her insides. Her limbs are filled with sand, so heavy it means she cannot move at all unless the pain does the moving for her. And everywhere is so dry—no moisture anywhere, only sand. In her body, in her mouth. She cannot swallow. She is so thirsty. So thirsty.
Now someone lifts her head and puts a finger across her lips, moving droplets of water inside her mouth. How it stings! After so much agony it is wonderful to be able to feel such a small, distinct pain. Then there is more water. It dribbles into her mouth, burns down the back of her neck. She chokes. It hurts, but not enough to stop. She takes more, would be greedy if the hand did not gently resist her. Her insides start to groan and heave as it hits, and she feels herself retching, but nothing comes out.
Later—is it days or only hours? — she realizes that the pain has stopped.
She is flooded with relief, the utter joy of feeling nothing. Serenity like a flat surface of water: no ripple, no wind, nothing, just the wonder of being still. How is it possible for it to have gone? For there to have been so much of it and now none at all? How does that happen? How much care does it take? What kind of miracle?
“Dominussalvedeigratias.”
The singing is high and thin. She moves her eyes up from the still surface of the water to see a bank of reeds moving in the wind. And there is light now, she thinks. Surely it must be the sun, because she can feel warmth on her skin. In the distance there is a heat haze across the world, and inside it something— a figure? — walking toward her.
“See? Oh, yes, can you see Him, Serafina? Oh, He cares so much. He sent me to wake you.”
It is a strange voice, childish except for the cracks of age in it. She knows it immediately, feels it inside as a familiar hollowness. She concentrates on the image ahead of her. The air is so warm. No wonder everything shimmers so. Within the shimmer a figure forms, tall flowing hair, then seems to unform again, as if stumbling, and is engulfed in haze again.
“See how His poor hands and feet bleed. But He smiles for you. He has been waiting for you. He is come to welcome you back.”
Back. She feels a sudden terrible ache inside her, as if after her innards they have scooped out her womb. But she keeps on looking and He is closer now. Yes, yes, she sees Him: that beautiful broad forehead pierced by a line of fat little wounds, the eyes clear, filled with so much understanding. He cares. He would not leave. He loves me.
“If you open your eyes He will be there.”
She lets out a slight cry. She knows she must wake now. Knows that is what He wants her to do.
She opens her eyes. It is gray in the cell. No shimmer or light here. The smell is foul and stale. On the wall Christ hangs forlornly off the cross. Next to her the shriveled figure of Magdalena, her face like a pickled walnut, is rocking and laughing with girlish delight.
“Serafina?” And now Suora Zuana is on the floor next to her, her face close to hers, tired but smiling, smiling like the sun. “Oh, welcome, welcome.”
Beyond, in the doorway, she sees Suora Umiliana, with Eugenia, Perseveranza, Apollonia, Felicità, and others peering in around her.
“Sweet Jesus! She is alive! Suora Magdalena has brought her back to us.”
The novice mistress’s happiness is so complete, so infectious, that a few of the nuns behind her start to laugh, too.
The room fills up as she tries to move, but of course her bones are weak and she cannot raise herself off the bed.
The old woman puts out her hand. “See?” she says, with a toothless grin. “See? I said He would come.”
She opens her mouth a little, moving her tongue around her blistered lips. No, she did not escape, did not find a way to get free after all. She looks at Zuana, then out across the room. They are all here, this family with whom she must now live until she dies, until the white hairs grow on her chin and her skin shrivels up like old leather, each and every drop of juice squeezed out of her.
Except she is not dead yet.
“I saw Him,” she says, so softly that the voice barely reaches those inside the room. “Yes, I do think I saw Him.”
“Oh, but it is a miracle.” In contrast, Suora Umiliana’s voice carries far out into the courtyard beyond.