“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.