In the infirmary Suora Clementia is fast asleep, her snores reverberating around the room as intermittent growling. She does not wake even when a few moments later the abbess herself enters, walking swiftly between the beds, her shoes clipping fast across the flagstone floor.
As she opens the door into the dispensary the sight that greets Madonna Chiara makes her forget momentarily that she has a duty to note at once the transgressions of any of her flock. In the middle of the room the novice Serafina is kneeling by the body of the dispensary mistress, who is slumped on the floor, blood dripping from her mouth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
FOR A WHILE now it feels as if time itself changes its form, becoming liquid as opposed to weight, moving faster for some than it does for others. And for Serafina it moves fastest of all, so that there are moments when it seems to her as if God Himself must have taken a hand in her well-being, so powerfully and smoothly does she find herself negotiating the rapids, anticipating, reacting, her eyes fixed on the horizon ahead regardless of the tilt and trembling of the world around her.
“What’s happened?” The abbess’s voice has none of its usual velvet nap. “Suora Zuana …can you hear me?”
“She has fainted. It’s the fever.”
“But the blood …look at the blood.”
“I …I think she has vomited it up.”
“There must be a wound inside her.” The abbess’s hand touches close to Zuana’s lips and her fingers come back bright with what looks like the reddest of blood. “We must get her to bed. Help me.”
But Serafina is staring at her own hand, equally stained from where it has come into contact with the liquid on the floor. She gets up quickly and moves to the workbench. She notes everything: the empty vial on the side (so she does have a supply!), the clay bowl next to it, its insides dark with a leftover mixture, and, nearby, the open notebook. The last entry marks a time: a half hour before Sext, followed by some figures, but the writing is too small to make them out. She puts a clean finger into the remains in the bowl. It comes out a fierce crimson. She lays it on her tongue, grimacing at the taste, then looks back to Zuana’s body and the red stain around it. If you didn’t know you might think she was indeed dying in a lake of her own blood.
“What are you doing, girl? Either help me or get a conversa here now.”
Serafina has a sudden image of herself turning back to the abbess, her mouth wide open, her bloody tongue flashing out like a viper’s. But instead she is already at the sink, finding a cloth and dipping it into the bowl of mint and rue vinegar water Zuana must have been mixing when the fit took her. Back on the ground, she lays the soaked material across Zuana’s forehead.
“Are you mad?” Madonna Chiara’s hand snaps out to take the cloth. “That is no use. She is bleeding to death.”
“No, Madonna Abbess, I think not.” As she says it she thinks how calm her voice is compared with that of her superior. “I think she has swallowed some grana and it has reacted badly with the disturbance in her stomach.”
“Grana?”
“Cochinilla. It is a remedy made from the bishop’s dye. She spoke about how it might work to bring down high fevers. Look—that is what is staining her lips.”
Now the abbess is catching up with her, seeing herself filing away His Holiness’s note in her leather ledger where she keeps all the testimonies of the convent’s benefactors, before sending the package off to Zuana, who she knows has been waiting for it. “Oh! She has tried it on herself first,” she says, because of course she knows her dispensary sister’s ways better than most. “Do we know how long it takes or what it can do?”
“No, though I think she must have known or she wouldn’t …” She trails off. “Anyway she still has the fever, so the vinegar and mint will help.”
The abbess moves her hand back from Zuana’s face. The girl is right. Though the skin is flushed she looks quite serene, not like someone who has vomited up her own insides. Chiara pulls herself up, her composure regained. “We must hope you are right. Go and get a conversa so we can carry her to her cell.”
Now that she is back in control, there is no opposing her. Serafina rises meekly from the floor.
“And when you return you will tell me what you were doing in the dispensary in the first place.”
But Serafina is not so easily disconcerted. “I came to bring back a book of remedies that Suora Zuana lent me to read and which she had need of now.” And she points to the notebook sitting obviously on the workbench, as if it had just been placed there.
As she moves by the unconscious Zuana she slips it quickly back onto the shelf.
IN THE SECOND cloister, the laundry room is belching steam into the courtyard, but inside there is only one conversa at work and she is as old and gnarled as a dead tree, barely able to lift a wet sheet, let alone a sturdy nun. Moving to the kitchens, Serafina finds Letizia shedding tears over a mountain of half-chopped onions. Suora Federica howls when she thinks she is going to lose her, until she hears the reason.
“God in heaven, what a day! First the chief conversa, now Suora Zuana. I will be cooking for a convent of corpses if we are not careful.”
“Don’t worry. We will bring them both back to health soon enough.”
And such is the young novice’s certainty—even joy— as she delivers this prediction that Federica marvels at the transformation that has taken place in her over the last few weeks and wonders if she had, perhaps, been a little heavy-handed with the bitter ashes she had mixed into her penance scraps.
As the two young women move swiftly back across the courtyard into the main cloisters together, Letizia glances at Serafina with an undisguised curiosity.
“What is it? What are you staring at?”
“Nothing.”
“Then keep your eyes to yourself.”
Back in the dispensary, they lift Zuana off the floor and move her through to the infirmary. The intention is to take her to her cell, but as they go Serafina says, “Madonna Abbess, perhaps we should put her in one of the beds here? That way, whoever takes over the dispensary can also keep watch over her. And as she recovers she will be able to advise and help. She would not want to be separated from her patients.”
Possibly because it is a sound idea, or maybe because the body is so unwieldy and heavy (knowledge must weigh more than flesh, Serafina thinks as they struggle to carry her), the abbess agrees.
They move her to the nearest bed, the one left empty by Imbersaga’s death.
As the abbess returns to the dispensary, Letizia makes a move to tend to Zuana but Serafina elbows her out of the way, covering the inert sister with the thin blanket and dabbing her forehead with the cloth.
“Dear Mary, Mother of God! What is happening here?” In the doorway the novice mistress is a sudden wind of anger. “Novice Serafina. You are meant to be at silent prayer. This is—” Then she catches sight of Zuana on the bed and, at the end of the room, the abbess emerging from the dispensary.
“Do not disturb yourself, Suora Umiliana.” Madonna Chiara’s voice makes it clear that the situation is under control. “Suora Zuana was taken ill and the novice is helping, as she knows the cause of it.”
But the old nun now glares at both of them, her undisguised disapproval making it clear that a convent beset by such troubles is a convent in need of more than the help of a rebellious novice. Oh, Serafina thinks triumphantly, but you have no idea how much trouble is still to come!