Sacred Hearts (2 page)

Tonight, however, no one will do much sleeping.

In the bottom of the hourglass the hill of sand is almost complete, and the wailing has grown so violent that Zuana feels it in her stomach as well as her head—as if a wayward troop of devils has forced its way inside the girl’s cell and is even now winding her intestines on a spit. In their dormitory, the young boarders will be waking in terror. The hours between Compline and Matins mark the longest sleep of the night, and any disturbance now will make the convent bleary-eyed and foul-tempered tomorrow. In between the screams, Zuana registers a cracked voice rising up in tuneless song from the infirmary. Night fevers conjure up all manner of visions among the ill, not all of them holy, and it will not help to have the crazed and the sickly joining in the chorus.

Zuana leaves her cell swiftly, her feet knowing the way better than her eyes. As she moves down the stairs into the main cloister and enters the great courtyard, she is held for a second, as she often is, by its sheer beauty. From the moment she first stood here, sixteen years ago, the walls around threatening to crush her, it has offered a space for peace and dreams. By day the air is so still it seems as if time itself has stopped, while in the dark you can almost hear the rush of angels’ wings behind you. Not tonight, though. Tonight the stone well in the middle looms up like a gray ship in a sea of black, the sound of the girl’s sobbing a wild wind echoing around it. It reminds her of the story her father used to tell of the time he sailed to the East Indies to collect plant specimens and how they found a merchant boat abandoned in steamy waters, the only sign of life the screeching of a starving parrot left on board.
Just imagine, carissima. If only we could have understood that bird’s language, what secrets might it have revealed?

Unlike him, Zuana has never seen the ocean, and the only siren voices she knows are those of soaring sopranos in chapel or wailing women in the night. Or the yelping of noisy dogs—like the one now yapping in Suora Ysbeta’s cell, a small matted ball of hair and bad smells with teeth sharp enough to bite through its night muzzle and join in the drama. Yes, it is time for the sleeping draft.

The air in the infirmary is thick with tallow-candle smoke and the rosemary fumigant that she keeps burning constantly to counteract the stench of illness. She passes the young choir sister crippled by her bleeding insides, her body curled in over itself, eyes tight shut in a way that speaks of prayer rather than sleep. In the remaining beds the other sisters are as old as they are ill, their lungs filled with winter damp, so they bubble and rasp as they breathe. Most of them are deaf to anything but the voices of angels, though not above competing as to whose choir is the sweetest.

“Oh, sweet Jesus! It is coming. Save us all.”

While Suora Clementia’s ears are still sharp enough to make out the pad of a cat’s paw, her mind is so clouded that she might read it as the footfall of the devil’s messenger or the first sign of the Second Coming.

“Hush.”

“Hear the screaming! Hear the screaming!” The old woman is bolt upright in the last bed, her arms flapping as if to beat off some invisible attack. “The graves are opening. We will all be consumed.”

Zuana catches her hands and pulls them down onto the sheets, holding them still while she waits for the nun to register her presence. In the Great Silence that runs from Compline until daybreak, the ill and the mad will be forgiven for breaking the rule but others risk grave penance for any squandered speech.

“Shhh.”

Across the courtyard another howl rises up, followed by a crash and a splintering of wood. Zuana pushes the old nun gently back down toward the bed, settling her as best she can. The tang of fresh urine lifts off the sheet. It can wait until morning. The servant sisters will be gentler if they have had some sleep.

Taking the night-light, she moves swiftly into the dispensary, which lies behind a door at the far end of the infirmary. On the wall in front of her, pots, vials, and bottles dance in rhythm to the flickering flame. She knows each and every one of them; this room is her home, more familiar to her even than her cell. She takes a glass vial from a drawer and, after a second’s hesitation, reaches for a bottle from the second shelf, uncorks it, and adds some further drops of syrup. Any novice who breaks furniture as well as silence will need a strong soporific.

Back in the main cloisters, Zuana notes a ribbon of light under the door of the abbess’s outer chamber. Madonna Chiara will be up and dressed, sitting at her carved walnut table, head erect, prayer book open under the silver crucifix, a cloak around her shoulders, no doubt, to keep out the night chill. She will not interfere—unless for some reason Zuana’s intervention fails. They have an understanding on such matters.

Zuana moves quickly down the corridor, stopping briefly outside Suora Magdalena’s door. She is the oldest nun in the convent, so old that there is no one left alive who knows her age. Her decrepitude should have had her in the infirmary long ago, but her will and her piety are so fused that she will accept no comfort but prayer. She talks to no one and never leaves her cell. Of all the souls inside Santa Caterina, God must surely be most eager for hers. Yet still He keeps her at arm’s length. There are times when Zuana passes her cell at night when she might swear she can hear Suora Magdalena’s lips moving through the wood, each word inching her closer to paradise.

But God is good and His mercy endureth for ever. Be thankful to Him and bless His name
. The words of the psalm flow into Zuana’s head without her bidding as she moves along the corridor.

The new girl is in the double cell in the corner. Some might argue that it was an unfortunate choice. Less than a month before, the sweet-voiced Suora Tommasa had been singing the latest madrigals in here, verses slipped in by a sister who had learned them at court, until some malignant growth had erupted in her brain and she had keeled over into a fit from which she never woke. They had barely cleaned the vomit off the walls by the time the new entrant had been approved. Zuana wonders now if perhaps they didn’t clean hard enough. Over the years she has come to suspect that convent cells hold on to their past longer than other places. Certainly she wouldn’t be the first young novice to feel ecstasy or malignancy pulsing off the walls around her.

The sobs grow louder as she trips the outer latch and pushes open the door. She imagines a child caught in an endless tantrum, flailing across the bed or crouched, cornered like an animal. Instead her candle throws up a figure standing flat against the wall, shift sweat-sucked to her skin, hair plastered around her face. When glimpsed through the grille in church the girl had seemed too delicate for such a voice, but she is more substantial in the flesh, every sob fueled by a great lungful of air. The one she is reaching for now stops in her throat. What does she see in front of her, a jailer or a savior? Zuana can still feel the terror of those first days; the way each and every nun looked the same. When had she started to spot the differences under the cloth? How strange that she can no longer remember something she thought she would never forget.

“Benedicta,”
she says quietly, the word denoting her intention to break the Great Silence.

In her head she hears the abbess’s voice adding the absolution
Deo gratias
. Within her penance it will be recognized that she is about convent duty.

“God be with you, Serafina.” She lifts the candle higher so the girl can see there is no malice in her eyes.

“Aaah!” The held breath explodes in a wind of fury. “I am not Serafina. That’s not my name.”

The words reach Zuana as flecks of saliva on her face.

“You will feel better when you have rested.”

“Ha! I will feel better when I am dead.”

How old is this one, fifteen? Maybe sixteen? Young enough to have a life to look forward to. Old enough to know that it is being cut short. What had the abbess told them when they voted her in? That hers was a noble family from Milan with important business connections to Ferrara, eager to show loyalty to the city by giving their daughter to one of its greatest convents: a pure child bred on God’s love, with a voice like that of a nightingale. Sadly, no one had seen fit to mention the howling of a werewolf.

“Maybe I am dead already. Buried in this …this stinking tomb.” She kicks furiously at the ground, sending a ball of horsehair spinning along the floor.

Zuana lifts the candle higher and registers the debris in the room: the bed tipped over on its side, the mattress and bolster ripped open, stuffing strewn everywhere. The chaos is impressive in its way.

The girl rubs the back of her hand roughly across her nose to stop the stream of tears and mucus. “You don’t understand.” And now there is a furious pleading in the voice. “I should not be here. I am put in against my will.”

Zuana sees her, kneeling in a whirlpool of velvet before the altar, head bowed while the priest guides her through the litany of assent.

“What about the vows you spoke in chapel?” she says gently.

“Words. I said words, that’s all. They came from my mouth, not my heart.”

Ah. Now it is clearer. The phrase is as well known as any litany. Words from the mouth, not from the heart: the official language of coercion. In the right court, before a sympathetic judge, this is the defense a wife might use to try to get a desperate marriage annulled, or a novice before her bishop to have her vows dissolved. But they are a long way from any court here, and it will help neither the girl nor the convent to be awake all night debating the problem.

“Then you must tell the abbess. She is a wise woman and will guide you.”

“So where is she now?”

Zuana smiles. “Like the rest of us, she is trying to sleep.”

“You think I am stupid?” The voice rises again. “She does not care about me. I’m only another dowry to her. Oh, I have no doubt my father paid very generously to keep me hidden.”

“Even the greatest dowries come with souls,” Zuana says gently. Each word that breaks the Great Silence is as painful to the Lord as it should be to the nun who utters it, but kindness and charity are also virtues within these walls; anyway, she is committed now. “You will come to understand that soon enough.”

“No! Agh!” And the girl flings her head against the wall, hard enough for them both to hear the thud. “No, no, no!”

Only now when the tears come they are of despair as much as fury or pain, as if she knows the battle is already half lost and all she can do is mourn it. There are some sisters in Santa Caterina, women of great faith and compassion, who believe that this is the moment when Christ first truly enters into a young woman’s soul, His great love sowing seeds of hope and obedience in the soil of desperation. Zuana’s own harvest had taken longer, and over the years she has come to understand that the only true comfort one can offer another is the one you yourself feel. While it is not something she is proud of, at moments such as this it is impossible to pretend otherwise.

“Listen to me,” she says quietly, moving closer. “I cannot open the gates for you. But I can, if you let me, make tonight easier. Which in its way will help you with tomorrow, I promise you.”

The girl is listening now. She can feel it. Her body has started to tremble and her eyes dart everywhere. What is going through her head, escape? The cell is not locked and there is no one to stop her flight. If she wanted she could easily push past, out the door, across the cloisters, and down the corridor toward the gatehouse—only to find when she got there that it is not the gatekeeper who holds the night keys to the main door but the abbess herself. Or out into the gardens, then, through the orchards, eventually reaching the outer walls—except that they are so smooth and high that scaling them would be like trying to climb a sheet of ice. All this, of course, is common knowledge to those living within. Indeed, for some the real terror only starts to bite when they imagine themselves standing in the world outside.

“No, no …” But it is more a moan than a protest. The girl covers her face with her hands and slides slowly down the wall, her back scraping against the stone, until she is crouching, curled over, crushed with sorrow.

Zuana kneels on the floor beside her.

The girl jerks away. “Get away from me. I don’t want your prayers.”

“That’s just as well,” Zuana says lightly, sweeping away the horsehair to find a safe spot to rest the candle, “since Our Lord is surely temporarily deaf by now.” She smiles so the girl will know the words are meant kindly. Close to, in the candlelight, she sees a lovely enough face, though a little swollen and pockmarked now with rage. Zuana can think of half a dozen giggling young novices who would happily help nurse her back to beauty again.

She takes the vial out from under her robe and uncorks it.

“Stop crying.” Her voice is firm now. “This panic that you feel will pass. And it will do nothing for you or your cause if you keep the convent awake all night. Do you understand me?”

Their eyes connect over the vial.

“Here.”

“What is it?”

“Something to make you rest.”

“What?” She doesn’t touch it. “I still won’t sleep.”

“If you drink this you will, I promise. The ingredients are those they give to criminals on the cart to the gallows so their drowsiness will blunt the torment long enough for the worst to be carried out. For those suffering less it brings a faster and sweeter relief.”

“The gallows.” She laughs bitterly. “Then you must be my executioner.”

I am the jailer, Zuana thinks. So be it. How much energy it takes to fuel rebellion. And how hard it is when you are the only one. She holds the vial out farther, as one might offer a tidbit to a wild animal that could bolt at any moment.

Slowly, slowly, the girl’s fingers reach out to take it. “It will not make me give in.”

Now Zuana cannot help but smile. If she knew how to make a draft that could do that, every convent in the country would want her for their infirmary. “You don’t need to worry. My job is to tend your body not your soul.”