To look forward. Such a simple idea, like waiting for the sun to rise again in the morning. It is a grave sin for any novice to try to escape the convent and an equally grave one to aid or abet her. Serafina has confessed and been forgiven. Zuana should be looking to her own soul now. There is nothing more she can do for the girl. Still …
“Serafina, listen to me. The hellebore along with the poppy is a poisonous evacuator, and the dose that I gave you was not small. You will feel strange for a while. There will be lethargy and sadness, some confusion in your mind, even.”
“I don’t feel anything,” she says flatly.
“That will be part of it. But it will pass.”
She stops because she does not know what else to say.
The girl puts her head back against the wall. “I did see things,” she says quietly. “Terrible things.”
“It was the potion. Remember that: only the visions of the potion.”
“Have you ever seen such things?”
As she looks at Zuana her eyes are huge in her face. And black, black as lumps of charcoal.
“Yes, I have.”
“And wondrous ones, too?”
“I …yes, in a way.”
“But you have never seen Him?”
Zuana does not wait long on this. “No.”
“Why not? You are a good nun.”
“No. I …I am—”
“Yes, yes, you are. I know.”
“Well, I …I think there are many levels of goodness. And only the fewest of the few are given such an honor.”
“But she is given it. She sees Him.”
They do not need to give her a name. We are not allowed to speak of this, Zuana thinks. It is forbidden territory. But then so much has changed over these last weeks. The list of secrets inside the convent is growing ever longer and there seems no point in denying this one, especially since this young woman has been witness to it more profoundly than anyone else.
“Yes. She does.”
“She has always seen Him, hasn’t she?”
“It appears so.”
“Why her? One of the novices told me she was just a peasant girl from a village whom the old duke found somewhere. No family, no study, nothing. Was she born holy? Is it how she prayed? Or was it the fasting? Is that how she did it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think I saw Him, too.” She shakes her head. “Just for a moment.”
The poppy: it can show you anything and everything. “It is possible that this, too, was the potion, Serafina,” she says softly.
“How do you know?” Her voice has a tremble in it. “If we all saw Him maybe it would be all right to live and die here.”
Yes, something has changed in her, Zuana thinks. But then how could it not have? Please God, let it bring her to peace. “I think Our Lord is always here, even if one does not see Him directly.”
Serafina is silent for a moment, as if considering this idea.
“She was wrong about him, you know,” she says at last, and her voice remains small, with none of the edge or energy from before. “The abbess said he didn’t care. But it’s not true. He did love me.”
She should eat something, a little bread at least. That much is permitted. Zuana breaks off a small chunk, dips it in the water, and holds it out to her. “Here.”
The girl stares at it and shakes her head.
“I am not hungry.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE BELL FOR work hour is beginning to sound as Zuana comes out of the girl’s cell and moves along the cloister. Directly in front of her she sees Suora Umiliana walking toward her. She drops her head, intending that they should pass without words— the novice mistress practices silence even when it is not called for—but instead the elder woman meets her eye. Her manner is welcoming, almost joyful.
“You have come from the novice? How do you find her? The change is powerful, yes?”
“I …yes, yes, she is different.”
“Praise be to God, He has seen fit to cleanse her of her anger and pretense and plant in their place a seed of humility. Thanks be to Him. And also to you for the care within your remedy.”
Zuana stares at her. Since their encounter in chapter she has expected hostility, even prepared herself for it, but there seems none here. She wonders what the novice mistress would say if she knew why the “remedy” had been administered in the first place. Of course Zuana cannot tell her that. Just as she cannot tell her what went on in Suora Magdalena’s cell all those weeks ago. Secrets within secrets—they grow like mold in a badly run storeroom. But does that also make it a badly run convent? How much deception is permitted in the pursuit of peace? She realizes that she does not know anymore.
“She is grown quieter, that is true. But I am concerned about her health. The remedy has left her very weak. She should be eating, not fasting.”
“In unquiet souls the body must be subdued sometimes to give room to the soul. She will come to no harm, Suora Zuana, I will see to that. These are wondrous times we are living through in Santa Caterina, would you not agree? The Lord has answered our prayers and is come among us. Come through both the old and the young. I fear you have not seen it yet but it is here, as clear as sunshine on water. You must look to your own soul, Suora Zuana. He is longing for you to find Him, too. And you will, I know. All you need is to—”
“I thank you for your good wishes, Suora Umiliana.” Zuana smiles as she cuts across her words. “I long for Him, too. But still I think the girl should not be fasting.”
The novice mistress claps her hands together and pulls them back under her robe. “Neither you nor I have the right to question the wisdom of our father confessor,” she says, the old Umiliana reemerging out of her certainty. “She is in my care and I will tend to her as if she were my own child. God be with you, Suora Zuana.”
“And with you,” Zuana replies, as they pass each other. Ah, if only the love of God moved like the bad seeds of infection through the air, she thinks. Then perhaps we would not need so much constant saving. The boldness of her irreverence takes her by surprise. I am tired, she thinks, and in need of air for my body, if not for my soul.
THE BELL FOR the work hour is still sounding as she puts on her cloak and goes to the herb garden, taking her burlap bag of forks and other tools. The great rain has finally passed, leaving the sky as washed as the earth, and the day that has emerged is cloudless and almost warm. In summer after such storms the cloisters steam as the sun burns off the moisture. There is nothing so dramatic today, but in the gardens the ground will have been softened by the long downpour and whatever early growth has started under the soil may now have a chance to push farther through.
She has not been out of the cloisters since the night in the storeroom, and she is amazed by the difference it makes to her spirits to be in the open again. It will do her good to be working in the garden, surrounded by plants rather than people. She walks briskly, feeling the wind fresh on her cheeks, and as she does so she lets go of her anxieties about the girl and Umiliana and the abbess, all the tangled threads of convent politics and conspiracy, and remembers instead what it is she does here: how the work of a good dispensary mistress is as much about tending plants as tending people.
The garden is probably no bigger than the abbess’s chambers (though Zuana has expanded it by half since she was voted into the post), yet it is home to close to a hundred herbs and medicinal shrubs. There are days between spring and autumn when the workload is such that she barely has time for mental prayer—when the fecundity of nature fills her with wonder and thanks, but her gratitude is waylaid by the attention, even devotion, that the plants require: weeding, splitting, staking, pruning, feeding, harvesting, deadheading, even waging war on their behalf, picking off and crushing small plagues of slugs and snails, which grow out of putrefaction and dampness to lay waste to her most tender and precious herbs.