Sacred Hearts (9 page)

“You put a portion of the root inside an apple or a pear and bake it in hot ashes. When it is cooked you throw away the hellebore and eat the pulp of the fruit instead.”

“How do you know how much to put in?”

“It depends on how heavy or light the person is. And on the nature of what you are looking to expel.”

“You mean you use a poison to cure a poison?”

“In a way yes. There are a number of ingredients that change their effect depending on their mixing.”

The girl points to another, farther along. “And this?”

“Verbena leaves.”

“What ills do they cure?”

“When they are fresh, their sweat against the skin is good for headaches. When the root is cooked it dulls toothache.”

“And when they are like this?”

“Mixed in sweet wine with Saint Mary’s mint, they are good for monthly cramps.” Of which the convent has more than a few, for empty wombs gathered together seem to produce regulated and in many cases singular suffering.

“Ha. I know someone who would have paid a fortune for this.” There is a touch of venom in her voice. “Do you have something to dissolve unwanted babies, too?”

“Unwanted babies? In a nunnery?” Zuana laughs.

Of course there are always stories. Nuns as the milking cows for the lust of the church. Luther’s poison has leaked everywhere, though a monk who married a nun would have had to construct gross heresy to save himself—and his apostate wife—from hell. However, even in Santa Caterina you hear things …such as the island convent in Venice that the confessor ran as a house of ill repute with himself as the only client. The whole of the city, it was said, had come out to watch him burn.

“Why? Do you know someone who has need of that as well?”

She scowls. Certainly she would not be the first daughter to find her future prospects altered by a sister’s strategic lust. But she is not about to tell Zuana her secrets. Not yet, anyway.

“And the poppy that gave me foul dreams. Which one is that?”

“It is there. On one of the shelves.”

The girl follows her eye. “This one? Or this one?” She reaches a hand out.

“No, no. And be careful with that.”

“Why? Is it poison, too?”

“No, it is blood.”

“Blood? Whose?”

“Sister Prudenza’s. She has begun to suffer from fits, and I am tending her.”

“It doesn’t look like blood.”

“That is because it is mixed with crow’s egg.”

The girl looks at Zuana as if the devil had just slid from under her skirts; Zuana has to smile.

“It is a known remedy. When taken internally in small doses regularly, it can help with fits, if the affliction is mild.”

“And if it is serious?”

“Then I wouldn’t be able to help her.” And she sees again a young novice, her body like a fish pulled out of water, rigid and thrashing on the cold cell floor.

The girl puts the bottle back on the shelf as if the very handling of it might contaminate her. “Are there many you can’t help?”

“That depends on what ails them.”

Zuana knows what she is thinking, of course: that she is the one who will never be cured, for her ailment is too grave.

“I wonder they let you do all this,” she says, looking around.

“What? You think because nuns serve God we should have to die sooner or hurt more?”

“No. I mean …well, there is not much praying about it.”

“Oh, but you are wrong.” Of course she has heard it before, this blindness to finding God in anything that does not involve praying or suffering. “This room is full of prayer. Look around you. Everything here—every herb, every juice, every ingredient of every remedy—comes from nature and the earth, which along with the heavens has been created by Him for us to worship. Even our capacity to understand it is given by Him.
Honor the physician for the need one has of him. For the most High has created him
. Ecclesiasticus 38, verse 1.”

The girl stares at her, then laughs nervously, as if they have changed places and now she is the solid one to Zuana’s madness.

Of course. When she first arrived it was the nuns who spoke in rivers of scriptures who were the worst company, the sheer intensity of their absorption making her feel even more abandoned. She is easier with them now. Sometimes they even bring her texts about herbs they have found in the scriptures, though they have yet to show her one she did not know before.

“You know a lot. Did you learn it all here?”

“No. My father taught me much of it. The rest I learned from books—or have found out myself.”

“Your father? Was he the one who put you inside?”

“No. Yes.” She pauses. “When he died there was nowhere else for me to go.”

“And what about you? Did you want to be here?”

“I—” She stops. Which is the worse sin: to lie or to encourage despair? “There was nowhere else for me to go.”

Serafina stares at her. “How long ago was that?”

“Sixteen years.”

Zuana registers her shocked intake of breath. The pity is palpable. She, of course, never intends to be so old or so defeated.

She has turned and is looking out the window. Upright now, she will be able to see the edge of the graveyard beyond the herb garden wall. Zuana watches as she stands transfixed. Then she turns back.

“She
says I have to work with you.”

“Madonna Chiara?”

“Yes. She says the Lord brings each of us to Him in different ways. And that you are a good and loving nun.”

“Then you must listen to her. She is the abbess, picked for her humility and learning.”

“Really. Is that why she wears bits of her hair curled like a court lady?”

Once again Zuana admires the nimbleness of the girl’s mind. When she stops yearning for what she cannot have, such wit will add texture to the quotidian nature of convent life, which can seem so barren when you first experience it.

“Maybe it is her way of trying to make you feel at home.” “What, by wearing yesterday’s style?” she retorts sourly.

“Anyway, I will never, ever feel that way here.”

But in fact the process has started already. She just doesn’t know it yet.

CHAPTER SIX

SHE PULLS THE
stones out of her pocket. What if none of them are big enough? They had been easy enough to scoop up into her sleeve as she tossed the handful into the pond, but there had been no time to sort out the heavy from the light. She rubs off the dirt and lays them down on one of the sheets of paper taken from her breviary. She does not need to read the words to know what is written there.

Who hath not gazed into my lady’s eyes nor gathered her sweet glances here on earth, he knoweth not love’s hell nor paradise who never heard her sighs as light as air, the gentle music of her speech and mirth
.

She sings quietly keeping the sound within her own head. Yes, her voice is still there, thank God. If she opened her mouth now they would all hear it. Ha! If she chose she could pierce the very stones of the cell with it. That would bring the choir mistress running fast enough, her mad music gushing out of her like a broken water pipe. “Oh, our great city is filled with music lovers.” Well, let them wait. All of them: nobles and nuns. Hell will freeze before she opens her mouth for them.

On the table the tallow candle sputters and she has to coax it back to life, protecting the flame with her hands. No, no, the stones are too small! She takes the biggest and tries to fold the paper around it. It wraps around four times, but stiffly, and when she throws it up into the air toward the bed the paper is already uncurled and falling off before it lands. Heavier stones (where would she get them?) would help, but she will still need something to secure the edges. And even if she finds them—the right stone and the right kind of glue—even if she somehow manages to get out into the gardens and lob it over into the street, how in God’s name will she know where to throw it?

When they talked about it—that one snatched, desperate conversation through her bedroom door as it was all coming apart around them—she had imagined a building with windows or a bell tower; at worst a finite run of wall so he would know where to look. But this place is so endless you could walk around the perimeter for a month and still not recognize one bit from the next. What if she mistook the measurements and threw it into the river? Or it landed in some pothole or gutter where it would just rot and get lost? Maybe the gutters were full of them: notes of longing hurled out by women long since bearded and forgotten.

But how else could she respond to him when he came? How could she possibly get any message out? The outside façade has barely more windows than a prison, and those that exist are so high that the only thing that can reach them is light—and God knows, there is little enough of that either. At least in the gardens you can see and breathe. Though it’s like taking water into your lungs, the air is so damp. This whole city is thick with perpetual gloom. Ugh. What had the jailer sister said about all the old monks dying of swamp infection? No wonder. In Milan in winter, even when it got cold enough to make you cry, you could still look out the window and see the blue of the sky. But here there is not even real sky, just a swollen ceiling the color of dead rat fur and heavy as stone.

She can feel the tears smarting at the back of her eyes and makes herself take deep breaths. When they first closed the door on her tonight, she had started howling again, the panic welling up like sudden sickness, but with the drug still curdling her stomach she couldn’t keep it going for long. Oh, if she could have found the energy she would have yelled and screamed and smashed her fists against the door all night every night, so they would all be driven mad by her madness. Only she is scared that if she does that they will drug her again and maybe—who knows?—this time there will be blood and crow’s egg in it so she might be sent into fits. That slimy abbess had said as much when she had been pretending not to listen: how a convent kept awake at night was a bad-tempered place and if the alternative was a novice kept under lock and key too drugged to enjoy any recreation, then so be it, sad though it was.

Well, she would not give them that satisfaction. Not when there were other ways to make her mark.

For all her cunning she had not planned it—the refusal to sing. She had not really thought about it until the afternoon, when they had entered the cloisters and heard the voices practicing and the dispensary sister had asked her if she liked to sing. But then the closer they got to the room, the more perfect it had seemed: how if they wanted her for her voice (and God knows they were in need of it if that scrawny nun with her motet was anything to go by—far too much breath and thinness on the high notes), if singing was important to them, singing was what she would deny them. Though they might have her body, they would never have her voice. Which meant they had nothing of her, for it is in her voice where she is most herself. As he—of all people in her life—had understood.

Here she sang so sweetly, Here with lovely eyes she pierced my heart… My soul bereft that thinks of nothing else, my ears gone deaf, with nothing left to hear when her sweet words have vanished from our midst
.

No, she will not sing for them. Of course she will have to talk sometimes, but as long as she makes her voice raw as she did today she can fool most of them. The dispensary bird will be the hardest. She is clever, even has some wit in her, though God knows how she keeps it flowering in this tomb of dried-up old flesh. Sixteen years! Imagine! Locked in that cell for sixteen years with just books and stinking bottles for company. And all that strange poetry about heaven and earth and divine remedies …

Still, if she had to work anywhere in this prison, the dispensary would do well enough (better than a lifetime spent blind and hunched with a pen in your hand—most of the magpies in the scriptorium looked dead already from the effort). At least on her shelves there are some wonders to be learned, if you could tell the consistency of blood from poppy syrup. You could put a whole convent to sleep if you knew the right recipe. She sees an image of a line of nuns, sipping deep from the communion wine, then keeling over one by one. The sheer viciousness of the thought makes her smile. The only one who might survive is that young gargoyle with the harelip that runs like a dredged canal from her mouth into her nostrils. She can barely drink at all. Ugh. At dinner she has to bend her head back at an angle to make sure the water in her mug doesn’t dribble into her bowl.

It makes her sick even to think about it. Maybe her father chose this place deliberately, knowing it to be packed with monstrosities: hunchbacks, idiots who smile when there’s nothing to smile about, the one whose right foot follows half an hour after her left, and—the most scary one of all—the novice with the poxy face, the scars so angry she might even have been lovely not so long ago.

The girl from the Dominici family who lived not far from her had suffered the same horror: one Sunday flicking lizard tongues at the boys beneath her veil in church, six weeks later so foul and pitted that her headdress at mass was thick as a winter curtain and everyone who sat near to her said they could hear her sobbing behind it. The story was that she asked to be put into a convent because she could not bear to be among sweet faces anymore. For who would possibly want her now? Oh, dear God, what if this one still has the disease, or some other kind of pox slides in through the windows here? They would all be dead or maimed within weeks. No. Please, please, Virgin Mother, don’t let such a thing happen!