Sacred Hearts (21 page)

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.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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.”