“Isabetta. Isabetta.”
She says this name, her name, twice, then again. For every student of medicine knows that there are times when a word can be its own talisman and carry a certain power of healing.
“Isabetta, listen to me. I may not be a nun who sees visions, but this I do know. God is as much in life as He is in death. And without a true vocation, starvation is no way to reach Him.”
The girl shakes her head again. “Suora Umiliana says—”
“Suora Umiliana is not to be trusted. She is looking to take over the convent by mounting an attack on the authority of the abbess, and your starving purity is most helpful to her. If you had eaten more, or had more of your wits about you, you of all people would see that.”
Such confidence. Such certainty. As she speaks, Zuana thinks how much like the abbess she herself now sounds. Except that when she remembers the novice mistress scooping up the fainting girl from under the cross, or catches again the look of triumph in her face when their paths met outside Madonna Chiara’s chambers, she knows that what she herself says is true. The abbess was right. The world is full of young women who do not want to become nuns. But she was also wrong. For this young woman is no longer just another one of them. In the midst of this chess game of church and convent politics, she has been elevated unwittingly to the role of a more powerful piece, greater than her worth but also vulnerable to being used and sacrificed.
And it is not just she. For, like it or not, by bringing the girl the letter, Zuana herself has become one of the players. Now it is her turn to move.
“Yet meanwhile—are you listening to me, Isabetta? — meanwhile there is someone outside these walls who cares for you deeply. A young man who has risked a good deal to get in touch with you and who surely deserves an answer.”
The girl stares at her, then shakes her head as if to rid herself of the fog within. “What do you mean, an answer? What are you talking about? It is over. I am in prison, and he is half dead and gone.” And now she lets out a low wailing moan, the words awakening memory and the memory awakening despair.
“Hush, hush, you will wake the whole convent. Yes, you are in prison. But some of it is of your own making. And from what I hear, though his wounds are grave he will not die of them, nor will he be on the road to Naples—not yet, at least. Perhaps you should look at the page again. Look in the bottom corner around the edge. Someone has written an address there.”
She had only seen it herself later, when studying again the content. The letters were small and not in the same hand. An apothecary’s wife would surely know how to write, if only to help label her husband’s bottles.
The girl pulls herself up and holds the page toward the candlelight. She locates the address; then her eyes go back to the letter. She runs her finger over the lines of ink, then brings the paper to her nose as if to drink in the scent of him.
Does a man’s smell come through his handwriting? It is one of the many things Zuana will never know. She holds out the hand again with the soaked bread.
At last the girl takes it, moving it slowly toward her mouth. To her mouth but no farther. The portcullis of her teeth remains clamped shut. The air is charged with the conflict: words from without and the will from within. How does this half-starved young woman know anymore which is the true voice?
“Eat, Isabetta. It is the only way.”
Her teeth part and she starts to chew, slowly, stubbornly, a dribble of saliva trickling down from her mouth.
“Good. Good.”
She swallows, then takes another bite.
“Oh, you are doing fine. Well done.”
And now the tears come, running silently down her cheeks, as if eating must be the saddest thing on earth.
“Not too fast. Here, drink something. It is full of nourishment.” She hands her the vial. “Just a little at first …good. Now rest a bit.”
The girl leans her head back against the wall, her eyes closed, as the tears fall. The two women sit for a while in silence, the night curled around them.
Zuana puts another small soaked piece into her hands.
“I feel sick,” she says. “I feel sick.”
“That is because your body has forgotten what to do with food. Make sure you chew slowly. Each mouthful.”
But she cannot chew anything, for suddenly she is crying too much, strangled sobs, as if her heart is breaking all over again. Even when the body is drying up with starvation there are always more tears.
“I’m scared, I’m scared.” She crushes the bread within her fingers.
“There is nothing to be scared of.”
“Oh, yes, there is. You don’t understand. Suora Umiliana will damn me, the abbess will hate me, and I will die in here while he is out there.”
Zuana looks at her. What can she say? She cannot lie to her, for she is right: that will be her future. Just another young woman who did not want to become a nun. When she thinks about it later, she does not remember an actual decision. All she knows is the compulsion to bring a body back from death toward life.
Surely God would not damn her for such an action.
“Eat the bread while I read the letter again, Isabetta. It seems to me that you have missed the proposal of marriage it contains.”
The girl stares at her. “What? What are you talking about?”
“Look. I know little enough about such things, but a man who has promised God that he will not love or marry any other woman must be sure enough about the one he wants to spend his life with. Is that not what you want, too?”
“Sweet Jesus, what are you saying? You are mad.”
“Well, if I am mad then you had better get healthy to help cure me.”
And she hands her another piece of soaked bread.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
ZUANA BARELY HAS time to reach her own cell before the bell for Matins starts to sound.
She and Serafina take their respective places in chapel without a glance or any sign between them. But even with her eyes to the floor, it is impossible for Zuana not to feel the abbess’s gaze upon her. On them both. Does she know of her visit to the novice already? Well, if she does not, she will soon enough, for the watch sister is a loyal soul and neither as deaf nor as stupid as some might like to believe.
Back in her cell again, Zuana kneels in darkness for a while, then gets up and lies on her pallet. Prayer can do only so much. She needs a different kind of intervention now.
“Dear father, there is a disease inside the convent,” she says, under her breath. “A deep malignancy. A young woman needs to be released from here—but in a manner that saves the convent rather than taking it down with her. What remedy can there be for this?”
In the silence that follows—she no longer expects her father to answer, but there is quiet in the place left by his absence—she begins, slowly, to fashion a plan. As befits the complexity of the malady, it will call for the combination of different ingredients: a number of simples that must be compounded not only in the right doses but also at the right moments. Despite her tiredness she feels an energy, almost an excitement, growing within her. When she finally closes her eyes, her sleep is deep and dreamless.
Next morning she prepares the first ingredient. It is both straightforward and difficult: a young man in the house of an apothecary by the west gate must be prevented from leaving the city. Even if the girl had strength and wit enough now to write a letter, no convent censor would pass any communication from a novice unless approved by the abbess first. Zuana, however, is a choir nun of many years’ standing and can write to whomever she chooses, so long as the content is not inappropriate. In the morning hour of private prayer she takes a sheet of paper and writes a letter, already memorized in her head.