“Who are they?” The girl peers into the gloom after them.
“Converse. Lay servants to the choir nuns. Some of them work the gardens, some the laundry and kitchens. You will have your own assigned to you already to clean your cell and help you dress.”
She brings a hand involuntarily up to her head.
Which one have they given her, Zuana wonders, Augustina or Daniela? Malice or mischief, with a certain cruelty either way.
“How much did their fathers pay to put them here?” the girl mutters, almost to herself.
“Considerably less than yours. You’re lucky we are not one of those Poor Clare convents where the sisters rejoice in doing manual work themselves. Here Our Lord offers us many other ways to serve Him.”
“I am surprised you have to bolt the gates, then. Unless it is to prevent everyone from flocking in.”
The girl scowls, then bends down and grabs a great handful of stones. Zuana watches as she tosses them petulantly into the pond, the fatter ones sinking while a few others skitter and flash against the ice, and she thinks, not for the first time, that once this novice stops railing there are ways in which she might fit well in here. Under the guise of humility, the cloisters harbor more than their fair share of tart tongues.
They make their way through the orchard, with its army of pruned fruit trees stubby-fisted in the gloom, until they reach the convent wall, looming up in front of them to meet a leaden sky. The air is a thick gray now, the fog already swallowing up the buildings they have left behind.
“How big is this place?” The girl’s voice is dull with the scale of her incarceration.
“The walls mark out three blocks on each side. It is one of the largest convents in the city.”
So large, in fact, that girls from country families sometimes find solace in the amount of open ground and sky. Others, brought up on stories of court life and city streets, are less comforted, though even they can be surprised at the amount of land a rich convent can carve for itself in the middle of a town. How impressed was Zuana when she first walked here? All she remembers now is how small and ill-stocked the herb garden was, and how half the cuttings she’d brought with her, wrapped with the clothing inside her chest, had died in a freak snowstorm that first winter. Winter. Yes, always the most painful time of the novice’s first year.
“It takes maybe half an hour to walk the line of the walls all the way around. Of course, you can only do that from the inside, as the fourth wall is the river. You do not know any of this?”
The girl shrugs. If a prospective novice has not been a boarder, it is usual for them at least to visit the place where they are to spend the rest of their lives. But even this she has not done. Would it have made her passage any easier? Certainly the wealthy benefactors who come to see how their money is spent, or to reassure themselves about a daughter’s prospective future, are eager to be shown the wonders of it all, for Santa Caterina has a past as rich as its present. One of the first foundations in the city, it had originally been a small house for Benedictine monks on an island in the river, but over the years water fever scythed down so many souls that it fell into disuse, to be rebuilt and refounded only when trading money drained the marshes, rechanneling the river and with it the most deadly of the infections.
Every nun knows the litany of its current success: how, with better drainage and, now, the use of distilled oils and herbs for fumigants in all the main rooms and corridors (these additions are Zuana’s work, though the rules of modesty would prohibit singling her out for personal praise), the worst of the summer contagions are kept at bay, so that today Santa Caterina sustains a community of almost sixty choir nuns, eight or nine novices, a few young boarders, and twenty-five converse, all working so tirelessly together that most years the convent sends out baskets of early figs and pomegranates as gifts to the local bishop and as thanks—and encouragement—to its more generous patrons.
Not that they live on charity. Far from it. The river bordering the fourth side of the convent is its trade route as well as an extra form of security. Arriving by water, a visitor sees a dock carved out of the outer wall with a locked door, behind which are supply rooms, themselves locked again from the inner side so that all business can take place without the merchants or traders ever having to encounter the nuns directly. From here the convent takes in flour, fresh fish, whatever meat it does not rear itself, wine, spices, sugar, cloth, threads, inks, and paper. Some of the same barges that bring deliveries leave almost full again, with cases of hand-copied breviaries and hour books, embroidered cloths and church robes, medicines, liquors, and painted religious figurines. The convent’s cellars are packed with good wines for feast days and festivals, and the kitchens produce fresh bread daily, spiked with rosemary, along with bottles of the earliest pressings of olive oil, as green and fragrant as the pulp it is squeezed from. Add to this income the dowries of the choir nuns, the fees from the boarders, and the rents from a dozen or so properties bequeathed to the convent in perpetuity, and there are years when Santa Caterina boasts account books to rival a great estate.
Zuana offers Serafina morsels of this colorful picture as they pass along by the walls and the river storehouse, and there are moments when the young woman seems engaged enough even to ask questions. She would like to tell her more, but she knows there is no point.
It is always hard, understanding what is being gained in the moment at which something is also being taken away. For such a young woman to appreciate the different meanings of incarceration and freedom. How, for example, outside these walls free women will live their whole lives dictated by the decisions of others, yet inside, to a remarkable extent, they govern themselves. How here each and every nun has a voice and a vote (where else in Christendom would you find such a thing?), where they discuss and decide everything together, from the menu for the next saint’s day to the appointment of a new abbess or a choir mistress or a dozen other posts essential to the smooth governing of what is, in effect, a business as well as a spiritual refuge.
In this prison there are no fathers to bully or rage at the expensive uselessness of daughters, no brothers to tease and torment weaker sisters, no rutting drunken husbands poking constantly at tired or pious wives. Women live longer here: the plague finds it harder to jump the walls, and they are saved from all the scabby pus-filled diseases that pass from husband to wife through the marriage bed. Here no one’s womb drops out of her body from an excess of pregnancies, no one dies in the sweated agonies of childbirth or has to suffer the pain of burying half a dozen of her children. And if it is the sweetness of cherub flesh that pulls your heartstrings, there are young ones enough to coddle and nurture, either in the girl children sent to learn to read and write or in the newborn wide-eyed infants who pass through the parlatorio on family visits. Indeed, while angry new novices might laugh at the idea of leaving the gates open to the world, the fact is that for each half-dozen young women who come in howling, there is often an older one, newly widowed or longing to be so, eager for the moment when she might enter of her own accord.
But this is not the time for such special pleading, and Zuana keeps her thoughts to herself as she loops their course back toward the main buildings. As they reach the third quarter where the street begins again, there is sudden noise and chatter behind the walls: the rumble of carts on cobbles, snatches of laughter and raised voices, the everyday business of unsequestered life. Beside her, Serafina stiffens.