Sacred Hearts (17 page)

But she had cared less about the freshness of the printing than the pictures themselves: page after page of the most fantastical plants and creatures as recorded by men who had voyaged to the very edge of the world to catalog God’s creation. In contrast, her father’s interest in them had been as a source of medicine more than wonder; that great pointed horn from the rhinoceros was rumored to have miraculous healing properties, as potent as the unicorn’s. Years later, when she had caught sight of the bishop’s profile during service—the mass that accompanied his visit was endless, so that even the most saintly drifted off at times—the similarities had been immediate, even down to the horn of his miter sticking out from the top of his head. She had shown the image to Suora Chiara that same night, and they had laughed over it together. It had been barely a month later that the old abbess had taken to her bed with a running fever and the family factions had started gathering in anticipation of the next election.

“I daresay you have never heard of the lamia either.”

“Lamia? No.”

“Ah, if the accounts are to be believed, this is the most astonishing creature. Half tiger and half female, a woman’s face and breasts inside the fur, so that those who come across her in her natural habitat of the jungle don’t see the tiger until it is too late. Besotted, they rush toward her until they are close enough, at which point she leaps from the undergrowth and embraces them in her claws. You really know none of this? What did they teach you, your tutors in Milan?”

“I was taught well enough. Poetry. Music. Song.” And her tone is suddenly fierce. “The most beautiful things in the world.”

It is the first sign of a vivacity not bred from rage or desperation that Zuana has seen in her. Poetry, music, song. No, most certainly not bred for the veil, this one.

They work in silence for a few moments. The bait, however, has been too rich.

“You say you saw these animals in a book?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have it still? Is it in your chest?”

“In my chest?”

“Yes. Your father’s books that you brought with you when you came.” She shrugs, glancing up at the shelves where the herbs and remedy books that she uses most often are kept. “Everybody knows that was what your dowry was made up of.”

While the girl may not be sharing her own secrets in recreation, she must be listening avidly enough to those of others.

“Will you show it to me?”

Zuana, of course, is caught now, since the thing she must say truthfully must also be a lie. Such images, wondrous or not, are no longer the stuff of a good dispensary sister’s workshop.

“Even if I had such a book, Suora Umiliana would certainly not approve of its study.”

“Oh, she approves of nothing. Except prayer and death!” The words explode out of her. “Really. That is all she talks about: how the flesh decays and how we must be ready, praying every moment, for we may be taken at any time. I tell you, if she had burning nodules or gums full of pus she wouldn’t come to you but welcome them in as God’s messengers.” She shudders. “She makes me feel as if my insides are already being eaten by worms.”

She is not the first novice to find herself gripped by such images. Partly it is their age: girls around puberty taste everything more sharply, and though she might condemn poetry as the wordplay of the devil, the novice mistress, Zuana has noticed, is not above using some of its tools when it suits her, especially if she has smelled the poison of physical desire leaking out somewhere. Of course it is a great and honorable tradition within salvation: the elevation of the spirit through the vanquishing of the flesh. What were Tertullian’s words to converts to the cloth? “If you desire a woman, try to conjure up an image of how her body will be when she is dead. Think of the phlegm in her throat, the liquid in her nose, and the contents of her bowels.” He would have made a good doctor, as well as a great scholar.

“I know Suora Umiliana can be fierce sometimes.” Zuana picks her words carefully. “Yet she has a great flame of faith inside her, and she cannot help but want others to be warmed by its heat. I am sure once you give yourself up to her you too will feel it.”

But the girl does not want to hear this. She turns back to the pans, and the moment between them is lost. After a while, across the courtyard the choir voices begin.

Zuana watches how, despite the resistance within the girl, her head and upper torso lift instinctively to greet the sound. To mark the celebration of the feast day of the blessed virgin martyr Saint Agnes, there are special chants, and Benedicta’s new psalm settings must be perfected in time for Vespers that evening. The abbess had her sights set on this service to introduce her songbird to the city, and certainly the setting is lovely, even to Zuana’s less discerning ears. Such young saints usually go down well with novices, for there is always a kernel of rebellion inside their godliness, and while Serafina may not share the saint’s proclivity for martyrdom, it is clear that the drama of the music is already inside her.

By the time she was her age Zuana could recognize the tastes of most major herb ingredients within a given remedy and identify each of their various healing properties. It would not surprise her if the girl was singing every note inside the silence now. Certainly she is listening hard enough. The haunting antiphonal chant ends and the psalm setting begins.

“You know, I wonder why you choose to continue to give yourself such pain. It must be one of the greatest joys of life to have a beautiful voice.”

The girl shakes her head, staring down into the treacle. “Songbirds don’t sing when they are kept in the dark.”

“That is true …except for the ones whose songs bring on the dawn.” She pauses. “I have heard a nightingale recently whose voice has the sweetness to ease an ocean of agony,” she says, thinking back to the moment in the cloisters when she had felt so at one with the world.

Serafina glances up sharply, as if the words have stung her in some way. The gesture causes the spoon to jump in the pan and a fat gob of boiling treacle spits up at her.

“Oh!” She yanks her hand back, dropping the spoon inside, her face contorted with the burn.

Zuana moves swiftly, grabbing her by the wrist, ripping the burning treacle off her skin, and pulling her over to the water butt. “Put your hand in!”

She hesitates, so Zuana does it for her, and she yelps again, this time at the fierce cold. “Keep it there. It will stop the pain and hold off the burn.”

Back at the fire she sets about rescuing the wooden spoon, while behind her she registers the sound of the girl’s weeping. Once started, she is not able to stop.

Zuana finds herself remembering a winter afternoon in the scriptorium, so long ago. A young woman, furious and desperate by degrees, she sits staring at her own tears splashing onto the page she is copying. And as she tries to wipe them away before they cause damage to the paper, she finds herself studying the great illuminated letter O that begins the text, inside and around which, following the curve of the gold leaf, she can make out painstakingly tiny written words: once read, never to be forgotten.

My mother wanted me to become a nun
to fatten the dowry of my sister.
And to obey my mother I became one
.

She repeats the words now, accentuating the patina of verse inside them.

Yet the first night I spent in a cell
I heard my lover’s voice down below,
and rushed down and tried to open the door
.

Behind her in the room, the crying has stopped.

But the mother abbess caught me.
“Tell me, little sister,
do you have a fever or are you in love?”

She turns to the girl. “You are not the first, you know, to feel so angry or abandoned.”

“Ha! You wrote that?”

The incredulity on her face makes Zuana laugh out loud. “No, not me. My quarrel with these walls was different. But another novice—just like you.”

“Who?”

“Her name outside the convent was Veronica Grandi.”

“Was? Is she gone?”

“Oh, yes, it was a long time ago. When I first came— a novice like you—I was apprenticed to the scriptorium. I found the words disguised inside one of the illustrations in a psalter. There was a name and a date: 1449, a hundred years before me.”

“What happened to her?”

“How is your hand?”

“I can’t feel anything.”

“Then you can take it out.”

As the water drips off her fingers, Zuana can see a small welt of angry red skin. The numbness should stem the pain until the blister forms.

“Later I looked for her record in the convent archives. She took her vows a year later and became Suora Maria Teresa.”

“Oh. So she never left.” Her voice is hollow with the realization.

“No. When she died thirty years later she had been the convent’s abbess for nine years.” She pauses. “Her entry in the convent necrology tells of her great leadership and humility and how on her deathbed she sang the praises of the Lord with a wide smile on her face. I think it possible that she had forgotten whoever was waiting by the gate by then, don’t you?”

Zuana watches as the girl struggles to digest the wonder and the horror of it. If there had been someone waiting outside the gates for her, how much longer might it have taken? A dead father was an acceptable person to miss; even the sternest of confessors and novice mistresses found it hard to punish an excess of filial grief. But those who came with darker, more suspicious memories would have to keep them secret. It is not her job to ask. When the door closes behind a novice, her past remains outside. Yet sometimes it helps to have someone listen.

“I cannot …” The girl stumbles. “I mean, if you—”

But whatever she is about to say is interrupted by a hammering on the door.

“Suora Zuana! Suora Zuana!”

The conversa who enters is young and plump, her face glistening with sweat.

“You must come—please—now. It’s Suora Magdalena. I …I think …I don’t know …I can’t wake her.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I—I was crossing the courtyard with laundry when I heard voices coming out of her cell. It was work hour, but I thought—well, maybe one of the sisters was in there with her. There was laughter.” She stumbles over the words. “Girls’ voices, laughing. Then suddenly there was silence. So I opened the door …and there was no one there. The cell was completely empty. Just Suora Magdalena on her pallet.”

Zuana is already reaching for the pot of camphor crystals.

“I am coming, Letizia.” As she turns she sees Serafina’s face, alive with curiosity. “Um …you are excused the rest of the work hour. Go back to your cell and wait for Vespers.”

“Can’t I come with you?”

“No.”

“But …I am your assistant. That’s what the abbess said. That I was to help you.”

“Yes, and the help I need is for you to go back to your cell. Letizia, find a conversa to come to take charge of this liquid until I get back.”

“But I could do that,” Serafina protests. “I have studied the remedy. I know how and when to put in the herbs.”

Which is true enough, except that the rules forbid leaving a novice in an unattended dispensary. There are too many ingredients that could cause damage to others. Or herself.

“You are risking the charge of disobedience, Serafina. Go to your cell. Now.”

And whatever good work has been done between them is wiped out by the fury in her eyes. She pushes roughly past Letizia, and the door slams behind her.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE WORK HOUR
is still in force and the cloisters are deserted as Zuana makes her way swiftly across the courtyard. The choir has stopped but a few excited voices slip out from the embroidery room above, a dancing inflection inside them. This must have been the laughter that Letizia heard, she thinks; sound moves strangely through winter fogs, and while it is not as dense as some days the air is still gauzy gray around her.

The door to Suora Magdalena’s cell is half open, as if waiting for visitors. She feels a strange prickling down her neck as she walks in.

Before her eyes have had time to adjust to the gloom (even in daylight it remains murky in here), Zuana is struck by the smell. She has prepared herself for sickness, even the telltale scent of death, but this is different: light, fragrant, like a wave of perfume—roses or even frangipani—summer smells in winter. It is almost as shocking as the sight that greets her on the bed.

Magdalena’s pallet is on the floor against the back wall, next to a water jug and a plate, a bucket for excrement nearby. Recently, Letizia has reported, there has been almost nothing in it to empty. But then the less one takes in, the less there is to evacuate, and over the years, in her relentless quest for God, Suora Magdalena has been waging a steady war of attrition on her body, training it to survive on almost nothing.