“And—as you will see—the remedy is apt enough.”
“Ugh,” she says again, staring down at the figwort. “They’re as revolting as the disease.”
“Exactly.” Zuana laughs. “That is the secret. You have never heard of signifiers? The power of correspondence? The way certain plants are shaped by God to show us the ailment they heal?”
The girl shakes her head.
“Oh, it is one of the great wonders of nature. I have books if you want to study it further. This is a perfect example. One warty nodule to cure another. You would be astonished how elegant and simple it is. You grate and boil the roots with pork fat and mushroom until they are all dissolved, then leave the mixture to congeal. The figwort reduces the swelling, the mushroom—smooth and soft—soothes the itching, and the pork fat provides the ointment, with a little lavender added at the last minute to soak up the smells. It works on character as well as constitution. Most doctors believe that if the heretic Luther had found a physician to treat him early enough he would never have needed to rebel against the true church.”
Though Zuana keeps her countenance somber as she says this, she is alert to the spark that ignites in those dark watching eyes. Even were the girl immune to wit (and Zuana already knows she is not), she needs the bishop to be a man of even temper as much as they all do.
“Here. Be careful how you handle it.” She hands her a clump of root. “It is extremely bitter to the taste and is not meant to be ingested. And it must be finely grated, with every bit used.”
The girl takes the figwort, turns it over in her hands, and brings it to her nose. Zuana thinks of all the other smells and tastes that she could demonstrate. But it will not do to hurry her.
They set to work side by side. After a while the silence between them becomes natural rather than imposed. The room throws up its own sounds: the spitting of the boiling water, the chopping and grating, the scrape of the pestle inside the mortar, the simple rhythms of repetition. The air grows warmer with the fire, and the crushed lavender starts to release its scent. If there is another world out there, it seems a long way away, even for those who might yearn to be in it.
Zuana glances across at her as she works. The girl’s hands against the wood of the worktop are pale and unmarked, smoothed and softened no doubt by night creams and perfumed gloves. If there had been suitors they would surely have enjoyed praising them. But underneath the prettiness the fingers have a deftness to them: given a task that takes some skill—the grater’s edge is sharp and does not distinguish between skin and root— she is dexterous and focused, showing a natural aptitude for it. Of course she is unhappy; how could she not be? But there is less energy at hand now to indulge it. This much Zuana remembers: how it is hard to be in constant turmoil when such a level of concentration is called for. While your mind might stubbornly refuse to be quiet during chapel or private prayer, it can sometimes be tricked into stillness through work.
On the workbench Matalius’s great illustrated book of plants lies open—at last, a botanist who draws what he sees instead of just repeating what the ancients tell him; she can hear her father’s voice, caught between praise and envy—alongside his own handwritten book of remedies, the paper crisped and spattered from years of dispensary use. While Zuana knows the process without looking, she makes the girl study each and every step of the texts and then has her read them aloud, to learn them better. Later she catches her flipping through the pages further when she thinks she is not being observed.
From cutting and measuring they move on to combining the ingredients. Serafina hands Zuana the grated figwort and watches as she folds it into the boiling pork fat, careful to keep herself out of spitting distance of the pan.
“You say that you told this …disease …from his urine,” she says, after a while.
“Partly, yes.”
“But how do you know just from looking at it?”
Over the years she has noticed that those novices who fight hardest often have the liveliest minds and are, without realizing it, looking for a place to accommodate them. Well, there is a whole world to absorb her here if she will only allow herself to become interested.
“I have a chart. It was my father’s—doctors use them. It marks the colors and the smell and the cloudiness of the liquid, so you can distinguish which area of the body is ailing.”
She shudders. “Ugh. I …I can’t imagine anything worse— studying an old man’s pee.”
“You’re right,” Zuana says, smiling. “Making sick people better is a disgusting thing to do. I cannot think why Our Lord spent so much time doing it.”
But that afternoon, while the mixture is simmering on the fire and Zuana visits the infirmary briefly to check on the condition of her bleeding patient, she comes back to find the young woman deep in one of the books.
THE NEXT DAY, Serafina’s mood changes again. She arrives with a drawn face and sunken eyes, ill temper issuing from her like a bad smell.
“Did you sleep badly?”
“Ha! How does anyone sleep well here when there is no night to sleep in?”
“I know it’s hard. It takes time to adjust to such a different rhythm. But you will find that you—”
“Get used to it? What, in the same way I will get used to lumps of fat floating in the soup or the moans that come from that madwoman who sticks nails into herself every night? Well, thank you, Suora Jailer, your wisdom is almost as comforting as the Bearded Sister’s.”
Zuana suppresses a smile. “I see you have come from instruction with the novice mistress.”
She scowls.
Suora Umiliana’s nickname is common knowledge. There is even a debate among the choir nuns as to how many years have gone by since the novice mistress last saw herself in any kind of mirror. To which they might fruitfully add, how many more of them would be like her if the rules against vanity weren’t so easily ignored?
Zuana can still remember the time, years ago now, when an old bishop with a new broom set out to ban reflecting surfaces entirely from the convent. It took barely a week for the first silver tray to arrive under a relative’s skirts, during which time a number of the nuns had spent their resting hours poised like Narcissus over the surface of the fishpond. The overzealous confessor recruited by that bishop didn’t last much longer. After six months of confessions where a queue of nuns kept him busy from morning till night with a litany of misdemeanors so trivial as to be unpunishable—except to the ligaments in his knees— he begged to be transferred to another convent. The day before he left they sang specially composed Vespers and slaughtered three chickens for supper. All in his honor, of course.
“It is an interesting question: what, if anything, smooth chins have to do with smooth souls. You might be surprised to find how quickly some women here start to feel a certain prickling under the skin.”
“Ho! You think I’m going to grow a beard as well as everything else?”
“Not necessarily. I think God has better things to do with His miracles. As I’m sure you have noticed already, we make room for both kinds here: smooth and hairy. Which means you will be able to choose.”
The girl stares at her for a moment, as if still teasing out the meaning from under the words. Zuana turns her attention to the worktable, arranging the pots into which they will put the congealing liquid from the pans to cool. She knows it is risky, saying such direct things, even indirectly, to a novice. But the girl has been given into her care by the abbess, and if she is to help her, then it can only be in the way she has helped herself: by telling the truth of how it is, alongside the wonder of how it might be for others.