Sacred Hearts (13 page)

Not all those who disobey are found out, though. She’s not so tired that she hasn’t worked that one out. The last few nights when she’s opened her door a crack—the watch sister’s rounds are regular enough to be circumvented if you have the concentration to time them—she’s been able to make out flickering lights under two or three of the others. One belongs to Suora Zuana, but she has dispensation for working late (though she, too, must be dropping with exhaustion, for during all the days of cleaning she never stopped, either), as does the fat-faced sister from the scriptorium, because it seems she is writing some play or other for Carnival.

Suora Apollonia, though, has no such permission. But then to look at her you would think she is at court still, all those lacy collars and silky skirts, not to mention the hours she must spend on her toilette. Really! She has the whitest skin and the most perfectly plucked eyebrows. She must have a source for extra candles, too, since at Matins she always seems to have the same amount left as everyone else. As the supply is controlled by the chief conversa, who oversees the storerooms, there has to be a black market operating. Again, it depends on which conversa serves you, so for now there is nothing she can do; alongside her brutality, Augustina has proved incorruptible when it comes to bribery. She barely speaks, and appears—or pretends—to understand nothing that is said to her.

Well, until she gets another servant she must make do with what she has. It could be worse. When she takes the time to curb her panic, she can see that. Yes, this place is foul beyond words. But had it been a convent in Milan, the abbess would have known the family, no doubt have heard the gossip, and alerted them to the fuss she was causing. Here she was still an ordinary rebel rather than one with the mark of Cain. They have even given her work in the one place where she might learn something useful, if she keeps her wits about her. She is lucky that way, for she has always had a good memory.
He
had only to sing a melody once for her to have it. Not that anyone else cared. Certainly not her father. He had only had her voice trained as a complement to her dowry, to go with a pretty face and a docile temperament. Like her sister. Her sister—ha!—who was so “shy” her eyelashes couldn’t help but flutter whenever a man who was not her father looked at her.

She gets up and rolls the blanket back against the bottom of the door to block any sign of candlelight. It is almost time for the next watch round. When she returns to the table the candle is sputtering again, the wick curling over into the thin lake of hot wax. She tries to lift it up to save the flame but it spits once, twice, then goes out. She gathers up the drops around the wick, fast to avoid the burn, trying to flick them onto the paper while still molten, but in the dark it is useless. She can feel tears at the back of her eyes as hot and angry as the wax. Self-pity. Self-pity born of tiredness, that is all the tears are, and she will not give in to them. She lies down on the bed and curls the blanket around her. Once the watch has gone by she will get up again.

She has promised herself that in between watches tonight, with or without the candle, she will move out of the cell and time how long it takes her to get as far as the gardens and back, so she can start the routine.

But by the time the sister passes her door, she is deeply asleep.

ZUANA REGISTERS THE
watch sister’s footsteps and looks up from her books, stretching her spine to counteract the ache in her lower back. The candle on the desk is half burned. It is well past the hour of retirement, but all this caring for the novice has left her no time for other work, most important the condition of young Suora Imbersaga in the infirmary, and she has asked for, and been given, permission to stay up a few hours later. The geranium and willow compound she tried had stemmed the bleeding for a while, but that morning the young woman passed another clot of blood, and she has become weaker since. When Zuana checked on her after Compline her face had been ghostly pale, though her pulse was stable.

The woodcut diagram in front of her shows a view of a body’s intestines. The face is blank, with arms and legs crudely drawn, but from the stomach down there are a mass of diagrammatic lines, with arrows coming out of each and every area. As far as she can ascertain, the problem in the young woman’s body is coming from inside the womb. In her experience once a woman starts flooding outside of her moon cycle, the problem can quickly become grave; it is as if the womb somehow loses the will to stay healthy without children growing in it. But what if it is not that? What if the bleeding comes from some tear or obstruction within her kidneys? It would certainly explain the pain; her father often spoke of stones being expelled through the urethra and how as they passed down from the kidney men would writhe and cry out in an agony worse than any torturer’s screws. Yet if that is the answer, why has the only expulsion here been liquid and not mass?

She closes her books and kneels to say her final prayers. Her knees crack as they reach the ground. She will be forty years old soon, too old to spend her days scrubbing floors and worktops, though remembering the last few days and the novice’s newfound curiosity, she does not regret it. Before it can start to bring comfort, the discipline of service must first take its toll. In this she and Suora Umiliana would no doubt agree. She thanks God for her health and prays for His help in allowing her to continue her work. She asks Him to guard and take care of young Sister Imbersaga, in pain in the infirmary, and for all the other nuns within these walls, both sick and well. She prays for the souls of her mother and her father and for all those who continue his work helping and training others; for the benefactors of the convent and all their families; to hold them within His love and guide their journeys through life and, where necessary, to lessen their stay in purgatory. And finally she prays for the journey of the novice, who, while still angry and confused, seems—with His infinite love and mercy—to be showing signs of a willingness to settle. God be praised.

When she finishes, she gets up and goes quietly to the door, opening it and stepping out into the corridor, from where she is able to make out any crying or distress from the infirmary below. But everything is still and quiet.

She stands for a moment taking in the atmosphere of the convent asleep around her. Out in the silence, from somewhere on the other side of the walls, comes the sound of a man singing—as he rolls home from a night in some drinking hole, no doubt. It is a fine voice: light but full, an edge of longing in its rises and cadences. The language of love. The song ends, and in the quiet that follows she hears the trill of a night songbird, indignantly protecting its territory from all intruders. As she stands there listening to its bright and insistent voice, her tiredness falls away and a feeling of sudden well-being floods through her: the sense of man and nature interlocking, the order and the beauty, both within God’s plan. And she here now, hearing, receiving it.

Matins tonight will be a cause for special celebration, even if Christ’s body does not move for her on the cross. She wonders if she should look in on Suora Magdalena. Letizia, her conversa, has reported that she has been agitated recently, but she is mindful of the abbess’s exhortation to keep herself free of the watch sister’s jurisdiction, and she does not want to meet her on her rounds.

Around her, the convent is in total darkness, no telltale candle glow from anywhere. Matins will come fast enough now and she should sleep. As she closes her cell door another man’s voice lifts up, this one deeper and darker but equally fine, offering up a swooping run of notes, as if in playful competition with the bird. There is always something to show God’s wonder. She smiles. It will need a fat rook or a crow to rival this one.

CHAPTER TEN

“
I DON’T SEE
why we cannot at least ask.”

“Because it would not be fitting, that is why.”

Half an hour into chapter, and the convent factions are already happily at one another’s throats.

A watery twilight filters in through a row of high-set windows, and despite the weather the place is warm from the heat of so many bodies. Gathered together they make a strange tribe: novices on one side, converse on the other, and in the middle a great swath of choir nuns, with the abbess on a raised dais at the end, immaculate in her newly pressed robes. Zuana looks out over the great room. There are times when she feels as much sense of community here in chapter meeting as she does in chapel. A stranger coming upon them now might see only a flock of identical black-and-white birds—magpies is the most common joke—but for those with sharp eyes the differences are there as soon as you start to look.

The most obvious are the deformities. As in many cities, Ferraras marriage market is cruel; it is easier to find a camel going through the eye of a needle than a cripple or a humpback being serenaded into her wedding bed, and Santa Caterina has its fair share of the rejects. Yet as they become familiar, are they really so monstrous? Consider Suora Lucrezia, sitting two rows in front of her. The first impression would shock anyone, since she was born with a gaping cleft where her upper lip should be. But if you could stop gawping long enough to lift your gaze from her malformed mouth to her eyes, you would find yourself drowning in pools of deepest lapis lazuli. Then there is Suora Stefana, whose peach-down skin and perfect Cupid’s-bow mouth might have poets outversing themselves, if it wasn’t for the fact that they would have to negotiate their way around the great question mark of her spine in order to find her assets.

But the ones who twist Zuana’s heart are the twin sisters, Credenza and Affiliata. It appears their love for each other was so great from the start that they could not bear to leave the togetherness of the womb. Credenza was pulled out first, and the newfangled tongs they used—though they saved her life—left her with such a mangled right leg that she walks like a listing ship. Affiliata, who came five minutes later, might win an army of suitors on the sweetness of her smile alone, except that after a while one senses an unnerving vacuity behind it: not surprising, perhaps, since it was her head that the tongs squeezed to get her out. Put together they would make a whole woman and a good wife for some great nobleman. As it is, in lieu of better offers, they are wedded to Christ and each other.

Zuana finds herself smiling as she looks at them, sitting together as always, robes spread generously to hide the fact that their hands are linked. Like the rest they are busy watching and listening. In the refectory everyone must keep her eyes on her plate, and in chapel they must address themselves only to God. But in chapter—oh, in chapter!—they may look at and talk with whomever they wish. And the greatest freedom of all is to be able to disagree.

“But why is it not fitting? Everyone wants to hear him, and there is still time within our Carnival calendar for such an event.”

“Really, Suora Apollonia! Do you think Our Lord would approve of such a thing?”

In the front row, Umiliana is in fighting form. With the city still reeling from the d’Este marriage and the climax of Carnival barely six weeks away, she has much to get agitated about. While Ferrara does not go as mad as some cities (Zuana’s father would tell tales of how in Venice, where he grew up, they slaughtered pigs in the main square, covering half the assembled government with blood), still the possibilities for mischief are manifest. Soon the streets will be packed with revelers, and everything, including convent rules, will bend a little to incorporate them. The convent itself will perform a short theatrical piece on the martyrdom of Santa Caterina, written by their wordsmith copyist Suora Scholastica, in front of a specially invited audience of women benefactors, and there will be a special concert in the parlatorio for families and friends of both sexes. Meanwhile, some of the city’s best-known musicians will pass by or even stand inside the portico of the main gates so the nuns can listen to them.

The talk this year is all of the new singer the duke has brought back from Mantua, a man with a voice so high and pure that every woman who hears him bursts into hot tears of envy. He has had to lose his manhood to achieve it, but according to Suora Apollonia’s aunt, herself a regular at the duke’s most intimate soirees, he is happy enough with his state. While such men have been talked of before, this is the first time one has ever been in the city, and such is the excitement that the convent is in debate as to whether, given the curtailed state of his manhood, he might be allowed to visit and give a recitation of his artistry.

“I don’t see why not.” Suora Apollonia raises her artfully plucked eyebrows in feigned innocence. Still a creature of the court as much as of the cloister, she can always be relied upon to fight for her—and others’—pleasures. “I mean, since
he
is not even a true
he
anymore, as long as he—or whatever he is—is a good Christian and comes with Suora Standini’s family in attendance, surely it does not infringe on any rules that we are bound by.”