Sacred Hearts (6 page)

“Who?”

“Our troublesome novice,” she says, ignoring Zuana’s deliberate slowness.

“I …I have no need of help. It would take me much longer to instruct someone than to do it myself.”

“Nevertheless, she must be put to work in some way, and you and she have already established some connection.” The abbess hesitates, as if this is an idea that has just come to her and is only being thought through as she speaks. “Once I have seen her I shall send her to you. You may show her around the convent and then find her something useful to do in the dispensary. She is bright enough and may even find some pleasure in the instruction.” And now there is a ghost of smile on her lips. “Or you in the giving of it.”

Zuana thinks briefly of the drawings on her desk and the notes needed on the varying strengths of the drafts, not to mention her coveted solitude, which allows her father’s voice as her hidden companion. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. She bows her head. “This is my penance?”

“Not at all. No, this is a gift rather than a penance. For both of you. For penance you will forgo dinner tonight and eat scraps from the table. There. I think that completes the matter.”

They hold each other’s eyes for a moment, and then the abbess turns to the brushing of her gown again.

CHAPTER THREE

OH, SWEET, SWEET
Jesus, is this how it will be? Day after day after day, is this how it will be? Because if it is, then surely she will die here. There has not been a second when she has not been prodded by or spied on by somebody, starting from the moment they had shaken her awake that morning, and she had felt so sick and dizzy she could barely focus, her head filled with tumbling nightmares, and she had opened her eyes onto this fat bearded woman’s face, thrusting itself into hers, telling her to thank the Lord for bringing her safely through the night, and glory be to Him for this, her first day in Santa Caterina.

And as soon as she heard those words she was back again: the same prison hole, only dark now, straw and debris everywhere, and another mad black-and-white magpie in front of her, but this one with a voice like a velvet cloak, trying to get her to drink something from a poison vial. She knew she shouldn’t have taken it; that it was giving in and would not—could not—help. Her kindness—for she was kinder than the rest—had made her want to howl and scream and howl again until the very pillars in the cloister started to shake and the whole place came smashing down around them. Only by then she was so tired, and suddenly she couldn’t cry anymore. So much sorrow, so many tears, had come out of her these past few weeks that her very insides were hollowed out and there was nothing left. She had almost been grateful when the drink had made her quiet. It was as if everything around her was going on behind a gauze curtain. Even the stone walls were no longer hard anymore, and when the magpie had opened up her dowry chest, waves of scarlet and gold light seemed to flow over and out of it.

And the woman had been so gentle. She had sat and talked to her, picked her up and held her—yes, she had done that; she had held her—so that she had felt the warmth of another body seeping through the robes, and it had reminded her of …and then she had wanted to cry all over again, only she was too muddled and too tired.

After that there had been nothing, then too much of everything, an avalanche of awesome, awful dreams, so vivid they were more real than life itself, ending in one in which she was half buried in a lake of liquid stone, so that every time she opened her mouth to sing, molten rock poured in. She was so frightened that she started to scream, only then the stone poured in even faster, until she couldn’t breathe.

That was when she had been shaken awake by the squashed-faced crone spitting and babbling about God’s grace. And though it was morning and she was no longer drowning, she was still in a cell in the convent of Santa Caterina in the city of Ferrara, while everyone she loved was far away, leaving her at the mercy of an army of gargoyles, all so stuffed with piety they can no longer remember what it is like to be living, breathing women.

Of course she cannot say that to them, or show it, or even think it. Because they are cunning, these pious, pecking birds. Oh, yes, already they are trying to get inside her thoughts. Not all of them. Not the fat, warty servant one who dressed her this morning, so angry and clumsy that her face now hurts from the tightness of the ugly headscarf strapped and pinned around her. But the others: the hairy-faced novice mistress and the abbess— oh, especially the abbess, she with the girlish curls and the kind-but-not-so-kind manner. Inside all her understanding words about how hard it is to be so young and lovely and plucked from the world (and what would she know about it?), or how Our Dear Lord Himself did not expect her to find it easy, but that in His loving mercy He would guide them all to help her …inside all that caressing had been a constant stream of questions: “How old is your sister?” “Is there promise of marriage for her?” “When did you start your menses?” “How often did you have confession?” “Did you both have singing and dancing lessons?”

Of course, she hadn’t told her anything. In some ways she didn’t even mind the poking; it meant her mad behavior the night before must have had some impact, since the abbess was clearly worrying that she might have been sold a fake. In fact it had made her feel better to say nothing. Or, if she did speak, just to hold to the same phrase she had used with the dispensary magpie, though her voice came out scratched from all the howling the night before: “The words came from my mouth, not my heart.”

It had made the abbess angry, her refusal to talk. Not that she showed it, not directly. Instead she had put on a pious face and emphasized how the bishop was such an important, busy man and the shame of scandal, the ruin of the family… After a while she had stopped listening and started singing songs silently inside her head instead, until the abbess became impatient and finished the interview abruptly. And while all the concentrating on not concentrating had made her head ache, she had felt pleased with herself. Because she had been in this stinking prison a whole twenty-four hours, and it had not dented her resolve one bit.

Now, as she walks across the cloisters—how cold the stone is all around her, truly like the inside of a crypt—alone with her thoughts for the first time that day, on her way to meet last night’s magpie, she promises herself that she will not be so scared or mad anymore but, instead, will use her wits as much as her fear. Yet even as she thinks it she feels a great rush of fire inside her, such a combustion of fury and panic that she wonders if it might consume her before it ever reaches the world outside.

No, no, she cannot stay. She cannot. A whole year before anyone will even listen to her! Three hundred and sixty-four more days of poking and prodding and dead time full of endless prayer. Even if she could hold to her resolve, it would kill her. No, she has to get out. Though such a thing might bring down a storm of scandal on her father’s house, she will do it. Well, he is not so blameless. He lied to her, locked her up, betrayed her. In such a case, a father is no longer a father, and she is no longer his daughter. Only now the flame of panic flares up again, and she feels sick to her stomach and has to stop as she walks to spit the bile out of her mouth.

Anyway,
he
will not let her rot in here. No. She knows that. Oh, God, she knows that as certainly as she knows the sun will rise tomorrow, except that in this infernal city there is only fog and gray so that no one can actually see it happening. No, he will not forget her. In some way or other he will find her, just as he said he would. Until then she will make herself ready and bide her time, and whatever happens she will not let the fire inside get the better of her.

CHAPTER FOUR

THOUGH ZUANA IS
bound by the rule of obedience, it is the memory of the distress of her own first days that determines her patience and good humor when Serafina comes to her that afternoon.

The after-effects of the drug are obvious. Where last night the girl was all spit and fury now she is sullen and heavy. Whoever has dressed her this morning has bound her novice headscarf too tight, and there is an angry indentation along her forehead and her cheeks where the starched material is biting into the soft skin. As the drug subsides she will notice a pain in her head as well as her heart.

Her eyes are so dull that for a moment Zuana is not sure that she recognizes her.

“God be with you, novice Serafina.”

“And with you, Suora Jailer.”

Yes, she is remembered. Jailer. The word had been her own, but in the novice’s mouth it is newly shocking. Of course, the girl knows that.

“How do you feel today?”

“Like a dog who has been poisoned on bad meat,” she says, her voice raw and scratched.

“Well, it will pass soon enough. Madonna Chiara has asked that I show you something of the convent. Are you well enough to walk? The air might help.”

She shrugs.

“Good. Here.” She hands her a cloak. “The weather is inhospitable today.”

Outside, a mist drapes the cloisters in gray gauze, sending plumes of smoke out of their mouths as they walk. Zuana has often thought that if fathers must offer their unwilling daughters to God they would do better to pick the warmer months to do the giving. Were it summer, they might stop in the orchard to split open a few bursting pomegranates or dawdle by the fishpond to catch the sun on the scales of the darting carp. But as anyone born and bred in Ferrara knows, the city is famed for its winter fog, which seeps down even to the bone, so that Zuana must keep the walk fast and the circuit short.

From the magnificence of the main cloister they move through a short corridor into another, smaller one. They pass an elderly sister walking quickly with a small procession of young girls, eight or nine years old, following like ducklings in her wake. One of them glances up to the novice, frankly curious, and then, when she catches Zuana’s eye, looks down again. Among these boarders of Santa Caterina, some are in safekeeping for marriage while others are destined for the veil. It is not, Zuana thinks, always evident which is which. Still, had their latest novice been born in Ferrara, it is likely that as a child she would have learned both her letters and her piety here, which might have saved them all a lot of trouble now.

This second cloister is humbler and older: weeds grow through the courtyard slabs and its brick pillars have crumbled in places. Yet there is more sense of life here. Along two sides, dormitories run above the kitchens, bakery, and laundry rooms, housing the converse—servant sisters—with a few cells opposite for those poorer choir nuns who come with less of a dowry. By her side the girl is now interested, Zuana notes with some amusement; her eyes dart everywhere. The smell of roasting meat sauce and boiling cabbage is in the air, and there is a clatter of pots and pans. In winter the heat of the work done here can make it almost inviting, but come the first hot spell and it turns into an inferno, with the night almost as hot as the day. In the doorway of the bakery a scrawny tortoiseshell cat lies sprawled on her side, half a dozen blind kittens mewling and clambering over one another for her teats. Suora Federica, who runs the kitchens, considers it an offense against God to put an extra spoonful on any plate, yet she is soft as butter when it comes to nursing mothers—or at least those ones who have not taken vows of chastity.

Once through the courtyard, they stop briefly in the herb garden for Zuana to check the plants for frost damage before passing alongside the kitchen garden, then out behind the slaughter and hanging house and—not so far that the noise of death does not carry—the animal pens.

In the open, with no cover of buildings, the temperature drops rapidly. Zuana sees the girl shiver.

“Why don’t we save the rest for another day?”

“No.” The girl shakes her head fiercely. “No, no, I want to go on.”

“You are not cold?”

“I’m not going back inside,” she says again, sharply. “If I am to be buried alive, I should at least be allowed to see the shape of my coffin.”