by Sarah Dunant
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.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
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 ke
ys 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 co
nvent 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.
