She glances nervously around the cell. The nun who was here before her had died of something exploding in her head. Part of her brains had spewed out of her mouth. That’s what one of the other novices had told her. Sometimes she thinks she can smell what happened here coming off the walls. She will go mad if she does not get out. It would be a great shame for someone to be so isolated and constrained in her cell while the rest of the convent is so joyfully employed. As the abbess had said it, you could almost feel how much she relished the idea.
They had all been staring at her by then. She had been as amazed as anyone by Suora Zuana’s compliment. What words had she used? Aptitude? Determination? No, dedication. That was it. But she didn’t really think those things about her. How could she? In which case, she had said it to be kind. Yet kindness might skewer her worse than malice, since now they will be watching her even more closely. The abbess, the novice mistress, all of them …
Her mind is racing so fast she feels almost sick. She has to quiet this mad skittering inside her so she can think straight. She takes her hands and clasps them together hard, getting down on her knees and bending over, all the force of her thought and feeling going into the words.
Dear God, please hear me. Please let it be him. Please make him sing again and let me find a way to contact him.
Only now it feels like another kind of madness: to be in this place and praying to God for help. If the Lord cared for her at all why had He let them put her here in the first place? She had done nothing. Well, almost nothing. A few furtive kisses here and there, the moistness of hands moving over skin and the touch of swelling tongues. They had sinned more inside the music; oh—their very souls had joined there. But no one could see that, except God Himself. Was it really so wrong to fall in love through voices? Was this His punishment? Could He really be so cruel?
Talk to Him. He is waiting, always, for the sign. We are His children, and He is listening. Umiliana’s exhortation slides into her mind.
“Forgive me.” She whispers the words. “Forgive me. And help me. Please.”
She kneels in silence, waiting. The edges of the stone flags dig into her knees, and she feels an ache from all the cleaning and scrubbing burn through her body. Gradually the noise inside her head clears, replaced by the throbbing pain, and she becomes a little calmer, more concentrated. “Thank you,” she says, savoring the stab in her knees. “Thank you.”
She gets up and goes to her chest. The excitement has been replaced by a sense of purpose. Under a cloth, next to the sheaf of papers, lie six stones, lifted from the edges of the herb garden the morning they had harvested the figwort. She picks up the largest and weighs it in her hand. It is smooth and full, as if something in the earth had been polishing it. Ha! She sounds like Suora Zuana. Rainbows in the sky, rivers of gold and silver in the earth, the cosmic spirit vivifying everything. Even stones have wonder for her. What madness!
Yet after they finished work today, when Zuana had brought out her lodestone and held it close to the metal spoon and they had watched the two almost leap together—well, that had been something she could understand, a force from within. Almost like the pull of music between her and Jacopo.
She goes back to the chest, rummaging farther till she finds what she is looking for: two petticoats, both silk: one red, one white. She lays them on the floor side by side. In the night on some cobbled path, which color will stand out more, the white? She moves the candle over it, but it looks gray and ordinary, while the red shines like a puddle of bright blood. Was this the color they were all talking about, the dye that paints lips, breaks fevers, and addresses melancholy? Wasn’t that what it had said in the book written by the dispensary sister’s father? Melancholy. Even the word is sad, like a gray fog suffocating everything it touches. There have been times these last few weeks when she has almost felt it creeping across the stones of her cell, in wait for the moment when she no longer has the energy to fight. But he has come, and that is not how she feels tonight.
My lady’s lips are red as rubies, and her hair is like a cloud of gold that is caught in the sun. But when she turns her back to me the day becomes night and frost is all around.
She takes the red petticoat and, tearing the fabric apart with her teeth, starts ripping it into thick strips. When she has finished she takes out two of the poems, turns them over, and begins to write.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IF ZUANA HAS been expecting gratitude from Serafina, she is quickly disillusioned. In fact, for a while she finds herself working alone in the dispensary, for things do not go well for the girl. That same night after chapter, the watch sister, who has been secretly instructed to increase the number of her rounds in response to the arrival of early Carnival singers, finds the novice skulking in the second cloister trying to get back to her cell, her hands frozen and her sandals caked with mud from whatever part of the gardens she has been wandering in.
When questioned, first by the novice mistress and then by the abbess, she refuses to say where she has been or what she has done. In absence of a confession, a more serious penance is imposed. She is confined to her cell for two days with only bread and water. Before she returns there the room is searched by Augustina and another conversa and certain papers are removed from her trunk. That night, her howling reverberates around the convent again. Zuana sits in her cell over her books, listening but unable to do anything. She, like every other nun, is forbidden to go near her. When the sisters move in procession through the cloisters at Matins, they hear the girl fling herself against her door as they pass her cell, raining blows against the wood until you might think either it or she must splinter from the force. The other novices glance nervously as they pass, and one of them starts crying. But when they emerge from chapel later, the banging and the yelling have stopped. From then on there is silence.
On the afternoon of the second day, Suora Umiliana spends an hour with Serafina in her cell and then accompanies her to dinner in the refectory, where the girl sits alone on the floor, her plate of leftovers thick with ash and bitter wormwood. The lesson, read by Suora Francesca with a slight quiver in her voice, is a teaching from Saint John Climacus, one of the desert fathers, who talks of repentance as the voluntary endurance of affliction, the purification of conscience, the daughter of hope, and the renunciation of despair. It is beautiful in its way, and a number of the nuns find their hearts lifting within them. When the meal finishes, the abbess instructs the girl to lie down in the doorway while the others walk over her, not all of them as carefully as Zuana.
To make matters worse, the next day is convent visiting.
It is not the first time Serafina has had to sit in her cell while others entertain (novices are forbidden outside contact for the first three months, a rule with some kindness in its cruelty, since meeting loved ones too soon can rip raw the wound of missing before new skin has had time to grow), but the growing excitement over Carnival gives this visit a special energy. The day afterward is the Feast of Saint Agnes, when there will be a special meal and a court audience for Suora Benedicta’s new psalm settings for Vespers. The parlatorio is fulclass="underline" almost two dozen nuns gathered in separate small groups, playing host to mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, nieces, aunts, and cousins, with such a noisy exchange of gifts and gossip that the casual passerby in the street might think they were eavesdropping on some court function rather than the visiting day of the holy order of Saint Benedict. Zuana, working alone in her cell (what little family she has left is in Venice and has long since left her to her fate), can make out individual sisters’ laughter, and even after the gates are closed and the convent is silent again, those who have played host to the outside world seem lighter, a little more radiant than the rest.