“God be with you, Suora Zuana,” she said, bowing her head humbly and offering the customary sisterly greeting as if it were something she had done all her life, rather than the first time she had spontaneously used it.
“And with you, novice Serafina.”
They were now dismissed from each other’s company. Yet she did not leave.
“I–I think I will be required at choir practice this afternoon.”
“Yes. I would think so, too. I wish you well with it.”
“I …I have a book to deliver back to you. On correspondences and remedies. You said I could borrow it, if you remember. I shall bring it later, if that is all right.”
Zuana nodded. The girl moved to the door. Then turned.
“It was most interesting …the book, I mean. I am sorry not to learn more.”
And then she was gone, leaving Zuana glancing at the shelf for the place where the volume had been and wondering why, although she remembered making the offer, she could not remember Serafina’s taking it.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“SUORA ZUANA?” IN her chambers, the abbess’s voice is gentle now. “Is all well with you?”
“What? Oh, yes, yes. I am sorry. My mind is full at the moment.”
“And you are weary, I can see that. Do you feel fever or aches within your body?”
“No. Thank you. I am quite well. Just tired.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That is good. We need you well while others are ailing.” She stops. “I wonder if being so close to Suora Magdalena’s …transportation may have affected you, too, a little?”
“Me? No, no …well, at the time perhaps. Her ecstasy was very …profound.”
“Indeed. Such things are part of the marvelous warp and weave of convent life. I think of the way Suora Agnesina is so moved by Matins sometimes,” she says briskly, as if both occurrences were as ordinary as another delivery of salt.
Zuana says nothing. To her mind the two women are oceans apart—and when the abbess had been simply Sister Maria Chiara she would surely have thought the same thing.
“And Suora Magdalena herself? How is she now?”
“I think …I believe she is dying.” Zuana pauses, seeing the old woman’s rheumy eyes and face, the skin like a dried-up riverbed. Well, it is what she thinks, so she might as well say it. “I would like to move her to the dispensary. She would be more comfortable there.”
“As always, your charity toward her is admirable. However, as you know, it is Magdalena’s own wish that she remain segregated, and in that she is still supported by her abbess.”
The sudden sharpness of her tone takes Zuana by surprise. She must remember to ask forgiveness within her prayers for the implied disobedience. She straightens her back and feels a singing ache move through the left side of her body and down one leg. Ah, now that the idea of illness has been planted, it seems she is experiencing it, too. It is interesting how the mind plays such tricks sometimes, making the body feel things it has no business feeling. Her father would have things to say on this subject if she could find more time to spend with him… Perhaps that explains some of her weariness and loss. Since the arrival of the novice everything in her life, even the comfort of her father’s presence, has been subject to change.
The abbess is looking at her carefully. “You find me hard on Suora Magdalena.”
“I …I do not think about it.” Now she must note the fault of lying as well. Some days it seems there are no thoughts that don’t contain the seed of an offense. Even the one that follows: that she is wasting her time sitting here discussing things she cannot change when there is so much she should be doing outside. She pulls herself back into the moment. “Perhaps …well, yes, I do find it strange. I mean, whatever happened in the past was a long time ago, and she seems so”—she gropes for the words—“harmless now.”
Madonna Chiara puts her glass down carefully on the small table by the fire, then brings her palms together, lifting up her hands until the tips of her fingers reach her lips. In any other of Santa Caterina’s nuns, Zuana would be reading prayer now, but with her abbess she knows better. She watches as the thoughts— whatever they are—clarify themselves.
“There is a further chapter to the story of Suora Magdalena that you do not know. Indeed, there is no reason why you should, since it happened long before you arrived, but it might help to hear it now. Some years ago she became briefly powerful again in the convent. The story is that this stopped when she was young and the first Duke Ercole died, and certainly no one from the court visited her after that time, and for some years she was confined to her cell. However, when all the fuss had died down and she had grown well enough—for despite all her fasting she was still a strong woman—she began to join in convent life again and the abbess of the time, a good and humble soul, did not have the heart to stop her.
“After some months, it seems that she began to suffer fits again, what appeared to be paralyses of holiness, not unlike her state in the cell. And once or twice in chapel—always at Matins, it seems—her hands and feet would start to bleed. In the middle of the service she would open her palms and there would be blood, dripping out from wounds no one could see. Those who witnessed it said she never made a sound, simply stood with tears rolling down her face; then at the end of the office she would go back to her cell and close the door.”
Zuana is no longer fretting to be at her work, for this is indeed a convent secret she has not heard before.
“Of course it caused a stir. How could it not? Especially with the novices. They were most taken. Even the confessor of the time was affected, but then he was a very simple fellow. Anyway, news got out through the parlatorio and people started to talk about how Duke Ercole’s humble little bird had started to sing and that Santa Caterina was housing a living saint again.”
“When was this?”
“When? The spring and summer of 1540, I believe.”
“But you were here by 1540. You must have seen it for yourself.”
“The convent was only my school then, not yet my home, and the nuns who taught us were forbidden to speak of it. No, I did not learn the things I am telling you until many years later.”
Nonetheless she would surely have noticed something. Such drama would have played havoc with convent discipline, and the clever ones always sense it. Zuana has learned to spot them over the years as they trip along behind the choir nun on the way to their classroom: the little ones whose curiosity is greater than the rules, their faces round and shiny as bubbles, mischief and goodness at war, the outcome as yet undecided. Oh, yes, she would have known something.
“The date will mean nothing to you now, but it was a disastrous time for such a thing to happen. The duke’s French wife, Renata, was causing a scandal at the court with her heretical sympathies. There were apostates eating at her table and some said that she had even given refuge to the arch-heretic John Calvin. The great church council was meeting again at Trento and the rumor was that the inquisition was on its way to Ferrara. An uneducated woman like Magdalena becoming a conduit to God again without the proper tutelage of the church could only bring the city the worst sort of attention at such a time.”
“What happened?”
“After some …discussion within the convent, the old abbess—who unfortunately had a sister at court inside Renata’s entourage—was removed and a new one, Madonna Leonora, appointed. With help from the bishop a more exacting confessor was brought in, and it was decided that it would be better for all if Suora Magdalena was returned to the confines of her cell again.”
Returned to the confines of her cell. In effect walled up within the walls. How had it taken place? Had she protested, howled, hammered on the door, or simply curled up on her pallet and turned her face to God? Even if He had been there to welcome her, the image sends a shudder down Zuana’s spine.