“How do I do that?”
“I am sure, as soon as your voice returns, the choir mistress will organize it for you.”
She watches the scowl, then relents. It is too cruel to leave it like that.
“I could loosen it for you now if you like.”
The girl hesitates. Asking for help is not the same thing as giving in.
“Yes.” There is a pause. “Please.”
She sits statue-still as Zuana approaches and slips her hands around the back of Serafina’s head under the material to locate the pins. Close to, in the daylight, the girl’s skin is creamy now and moist with youth, the mouth full above a strong jaw, and the eyes so deep and dark—black rather than brown—that it is hard to tell the iris from the pupil. No melting Madonna beauty here but a presence nevertheless, strong, even striking.
She reaffixes the stiff material more gently. “Don’t worry. You will get used to it fast enough. Soon it will feel more strange to be without it.”
The girl blinks and a fat tear wells up and overflows, because of course that idea is even more unbearable. For a moment Zuana wants to tighten her arms around her and whisper into her ear all the ways in which resistance will tear her apart and how quickly wounds can heal when the right remedies and ointments are applied. The strength of her own feeling alarms her, and she moves her arms back to her sides. It has never been her role, the soothing of souls, and there is no reason to start now. Not least because some things one must learn for oneself.
She moves back to the table and starts pulling out boards and graters. The bishop’s remedies will take more time than she has, even with the dispensation to miss orders, and one day is almost passed. When she turns, the girl is standing next to her.
“This is where you work?”
“Here and the distillery, yes.”
“Who works with you?”
“There is a conversa who helps with the patients. But in the dispensary I am alone.”
“Is that allowed?”
“Since my voice is as cracked as my fingers, it is accepted that I am better employed on my own than in the choir or the embroidery room.”
It’s true enough. Even when she arrived her hands had been more the laborer’s than the lady’s, and over the years they have grown worse, the skin eaten and stained by the processes of gardening and the chemicals of distillation. As for her singing— well, in the hierarchy of convent voices, everyone knows she is a minnow swimming next to fat carp. She smiles at the thought. It does not worry her. There are times when she thinks she might be offering up her own kind of music here, for surely each and every ingredient she collects has its own voice—soft, loud, dark, light—each distinct enough when alone yet capable of making all manner of different sounds and resonances when mixed together.
At last count there were close to ninety glass bottles here, a veritable choir of cures! She has done penance for the pride of such a thought in the past, but the image stubbornly remains. Her father would have understood. He was forever in search of the music of nature, handed down through the spheres, though in church he too could barely hold a note.
“There are so many of them!” The girl is standing staring at the shelves. “How long did it take you to collect them all?”
“Perhaps it is better you don’t know,” Zuana says lightly. But she likes the fact that she is interested.
“And is every one of these a different remedy?”
“Some work alone, yes. They are known as simples. Others need to be mixed together to form compounds.”
“So what is that?” She points up at a bottle with a small twisted root inside.
“White hellebore.”
“What does it do?”
“It purges the system.”
“Of what?”
“Anything that is inside you. It causes powerful vomiting.”
“Worse than mine?”
“You can lose half your stomach with this if you’re not careful.”
“Really! What, do you eat it?”
“Not on its own. There is too much poison in it.”
“So how does it work?”
Curiosity. It is not the characteristic of a recalcitrant novice. But then the inside of an apothecary’s shop is not something that would excite every young girl’s imagination, except of course for the love potions—and Zuana has had no use for them in her study. “A way of making well people ill” was how her father saw them, though from things she heard people say about her mother he must have been ill thus once himself, however briefly.
“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.