Sacred Hearts

by Sarah Dunant

  Beside her, Serafina’s breath was like a fluttering sigh. Zuana glanced across at her, and as she did so she registered the girl’s right hand moving again, rising slightly, then falling, the last three fingers coming to rest lightly on the back of her own.

  Zuana snatched her hand back sharply, as if the touch had scalded her.

  “Oh—I am sorry.” The girl’s voice was light, surprised by her surprise. “I only wanted to show you …I mean—”

  “Show me what?”

  “What you have done for me. My hand. Where I hurt it yesterday on the treacle. See?”

  And now Zuana was seeing. Or, rather, she wasn’t. For there was nothing to see. The back of the girl’s hand was clear, the skin smooth, no sign of a blister or a mark of any kind.

  “It’s healed. See? No burn, not even any marks where Suora Magdalena grabbed me with her nails. Your ointment is miraculous.”

  “It is not meant for burns. I gave it to you to bring out the bruises from your penance.”

  “Oh, but they are gone, too.” And the girl’s face lit up, as if the healing had somehow gone deeper than her skin. “Really. I am completely healed.”

  But Zuana was not thinking of her ointment now. She was seeing instead the old woman’s face, hearing that strange, pearly voice: He said I am to tell you that, whatever comes, He is here and will take good care of you.

  Was the girl hearing it, too? Sweet Jesus, look after this child. Do not burden her with more than she can bear. Zuana, who was not prone to prayer creeping up on her unannounced, found herself suddenly unnerved.

  “Come. There is no time for chatter,” she said roughly. “You roll the last lozenges while I start packing them.”

  If Serafina felt rebuffed, she did nothing to show it; simply dropped her head and moved her hands back toward the treacle.

  When the noon bell started to sound it was the girl who left the bench first, washing her hands in the bowl in readiness for chapel and wiping them on her apron cloth before taking it off and putting it carefully back on the hook on the wall where it came from. Habit. Familiarity. It does not take long to establish itself.

  “God be with you, Suora Zuana,” she said, bowing her head humbly and offering the customary sisterly greeting as if it were something she had done all her life, rather than the first time she had spontaneously used it.

  “And with you, novice Serafina.”

  They were now dismissed from each other’s company. Yet she did not leave.

  “I–I think I will be required at choir practice this afternoon.”

  “Yes. I would think so, too. I wish you well with it.”

  “I …I have a book to deliver back to you. On correspondences and remedies. You said I could borrow it, if you remember. I shall bring it later, if that is all right.”

  Zuana nodded. The girl moved to the door. Then turned.

  “It was most interesting …the book, I mean. I am sorry not to learn more.”

  And then she was gone, leaving Zuana glancing at the shelf for the place where the volume had been and wondering why, although she remembered making the offer, she could not remember Serafina’s taking it.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “SUORA ZUANA?” IN her chambers, the abbess’s voice is gentle now. “Is all well with you?”

  “What? Oh, yes, yes. I am sorry. My mind is full at the moment.”

  “And you are weary, I can see that. Do you feel fever or aches within your body?”

  “No. Thank you. I am quite well. Just tired.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. That is good. We need you well while others are ailing.” She stops. “I wonder if being so close to Suora Magdalena’s …transportation may have affected you, too, a little?”

  “Me? No, no …well, at the time perhaps. Her ecstasy was very …profound.”

  “Indeed. Such things are part of the marvelous warp and weave of convent life. I think of the way Suora Agnesina is so moved by Matins sometimes,” she says briskly, as if both occurrences were as ordinary as another delivery of salt.

  Zuana says nothing. To her mind the two women are oceans apart—and when the abbess had been simply Sister Maria Chiara she would surely have thought the same thing.

  “And Suora Magdalena herself? How is she now?”

  “I think …I believe she is dying.” Zuana pauses, seeing the old woman’s rheumy eyes and face, the skin like a dried-up riverbed. Well, it is what she thinks, so she might as well say it. “I would like to move her to the dispensary. She would be more comfortable there.”

  “As always, your charity toward her is admirable. However, as you know, it is Magdalena’s own wish that she remain segregated, and in that she is still supported by her abbess.”

  The sudden sharpness of her tone takes Zuana by surprise. She must remember to ask forgiveness within her prayers for the implied disobedience. She straightens her back and feels a singing ache move through the left side of her body and down one leg. Ah, now that the idea of illness has been planted, it seems she is experiencing it, too. It is interesting how the mind plays such tricks sometimes, making the body feel things it has no business feeling. Her father would have things to say on this subject if she could find more time to spend with him… Perhaps that explains some of her weariness and loss. Since the arrival of the novice everything in her life, even the comfort of her father’s presence, has been subject to change.

  The abbess is looking at her carefully. “You find me hard on Suora Magdalena.”

  “I …I do not think about it.” Now she must note the fault of lying as well. Some days it seems there are no thoughts that don’t contain the seed of an offense. Even the one that follows: that she is wasting her time sitting here discussing things she cannot change when there is so much she should be doing outside. She pulls herself back into the moment. “Perhaps …well, yes, I do find it strange. I mean, whatever happened in the past was a long time ago, and she seems so”—she gropes for the words—“harmless now.”

  Madonna Chiara puts her glass down carefully on the small table by the fire, then brings her palms together, lifting up her hands until the tips of her fingers reach her lips. In any other of Santa Caterina’s nuns, Zuana would be reading prayer now, but with her abbess she knows better. She watches as the thoughts— whatever they are—clarify themselves.

  “There is a further chapter to the story of Suora Magdalena that you do not know. Indeed, there is no reason why you should, since it happened long before you arrived, but it might help to hear it now. Some years ago she became briefly powerful again in the convent. The story is that this stopped when she was young and the first Duke Ercole died, and certainly no one from the court visited her after that time, and for some years she was confined to her cell. However, when all the fuss had died down and she had grown well enough—for despite all her fasting she was still a strong woman—she began to join in convent life again and the abbess of the time, a good and humble soul, did not have the heart to stop her.

  “After some months, it seems that she began to suffer fits again, what appeared to be paralyses of holiness, not unlike her state in the cell. And once or twice in chapel—always at Matins, it seems—her hands and feet would start to bleed. In the middle of the service she would open her palms and there would be blood, dripping out from wounds no one could see. Those who witnessed it said she never made a sound, simply stood with tears rolling down her face; then at the end of the office she would go back to her cell and close the door.”

  Zuana is no longer fretting to be at her work, for this is indeed a convent secret she has not heard before.

  “Of course it caused a stir. How could it not? Especially with the novices. They were most taken. Even the confessor of the time was affected, but then he was a very simple fellow. Anyway, news got out through the parlatorio and people started to talk about how Duke Ercole’s humble little bird had started to sing and that Santa Caterina was housing a living saint
again.”

  “When was this?”

  “When? The spring and summer of 1540, I believe.”

  “But you were here by 1540. You must have seen it for yourself.”

  “The convent was only my school then, not yet my home, and the nuns who taught us were forbidden to speak of it. No, I did not learn the things I am telling you until many years later.”

  Nonetheless she would surely have noticed something. Such drama would have played havoc with convent discipline, and the clever ones always sense it. Zuana has learned to spot them over the years as they trip along behind the choir nun on the way to their classroom: the little ones whose curiosity is greater than the rules, their faces round and shiny as bubbles, mischief and goodness at war, the outcome as yet undecided. Oh, yes, she would have known something.

  “The date will mean nothing to you now, but it was a disastrous time for such a thing to happen. The duke’s French wife, Renata, was causing a scandal at the court with her heretical sympathies. There were apostates eating at her table and some said that she had even given refuge to the arch-heretic John Calvin. The great church council was meeting again at Trento and the rumor was that the inquisition was on its way to Ferrara. An uneducated woman like Magdalena becoming a conduit to God again without the proper tutelage of the church could only bring the city the worst sort of attention at such a time.”

  “What happened?”

  “After some …discussion within the convent, the old abbess—who unfortunately had a sister at court inside Renata’s entourage—was removed and a new one, Madonna Leonora, appointed. With help from the bishop a more exacting confessor was brought in, and it was decided that it would be better for all if Suora Magdalena was returned to the confines of her cell again.”

  Returned to the confines of her cell. In effect walled up within the walls. How had it taken place? Had she protested, howled, hammered on the door, or simply curled up on her pallet and turned her face to God? Even if He had been there to welcome her, the image sends a shudder down Zuana’s spine.

  “So it was not her own decision. She was imprisoned.”

  “No …” The abbess hesitates. “She was confined to her cell. And everyone—herself included—accepted it, because for the good of the convent it was better that way.” She pauses. “It is …noticeable that since then, without an audience, she has again remained without stigmata or any regular ecstasies.”

  “You are saying she is a fraud?”

  “No.” She shakes her head impatiently, as if this whole conversation is unsatisfactory in its use of language. “Though when she was younger it is true she was accused of that. No, I am simply saying how it has been. Only God knows what is taking place within her.”

  But while that is sound enough, Zuana also knows what she saw. And a bird-boned old woman with skin like over-rolled pastry should not have the strength to manacle a strong young woman with her grasp, let alone be so transported that she allows flies to walk over her eyeballs.

  “The story I have told you was only fully explained to me four years ago when I was elected abbess, and my duty to the convent with regard to Suora Magdalena was also made clear.”

  Your duty to the convent, Zuana thinks, but also to your family. For what the abbess does not say—because they both know it anyway, as does every other choir sister with half a brain—is that those same tumultuous years of the early 1540s were also ones of shifting allegiances within Santa Caterina, and the appointment of Madonna Leonora to the position of abbess had seen the power return to Madonna Chiara’s family—where, despite gradations of opposition, it has remained ever since.

  “I see.”

  “So if she is indeed dying, as infirmary mistress you can perhaps find other ways of caring for her within these rules.”

  “And what if …” Zuana hesitates.

  “What if?”

  “What if God really is talking through her?”

  “Then He would do well to find other means,” the abbess says quietly. “Zuana, though you are not the most holy sister in Santa Caterina, you are certainly one of the more astute. This is not gossip I am sharing with you. Nor even old history. I am telling you these things now because once again we are voyaging in stormy waters.”

  “But …but I thought the worst was passed. Duchess Renata is long returned to France, we have a new duke, a new pope, and the inquisition has moved on. Surely the city is out of danger now?”

  “The reprieve is temporary. Our new Holy Father still has his eye on Ferrara. Without a legitimate heir, the city will return to the Papal States at the duke’s death, though God willing that will not happen. But there is a more immediate threat. You will know that among the final decrees passed by the council at Trento was one directed at convents, to purge them of any impurities or scandals by enclosing all nuns, regardless of their order or status.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t affect us. As Benedictines we are an enclosed order already.”

  “That is true. However, it seems that there are meanings and meanings of the word enclosed. And what is becoming clear is that the decree was passed so quickly—some might say deliberately— that it is a blunt sword, which, if wielded equally bluntly, could change all our lives.”

  Zuana is silent. For most nuns the inner workings of church politics hold more twists than a knotted intestine and there is always another piece of gossip sliding in over the walls, each more scandalous than the last. Which is where a brother in the church proves more reliable—and more useful—than any mystic in a cell.

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

  “I mean that within the idea of enclosure the decree empowers bishops—should they see fit—to limit or close down almost all contacts between convents and the outside world. It means they can, if they so choose, stop plays or concerts, cut down the number of visits or visitors, and sever trade connections with the outside so that we become dependent on charity rather than our business endeavors. The implications are severe. There is even talk that letter writing should be restricted, ‘as not conducive to the tranquillity of our state.’ ” She pauses. “It does not take much to imagine the impact of such a decree upon us here.”

  Except she is wrong—to imagine Santa Caterina so changed, so shrunken, so constricted, is surely impossible. “But …but how can they do that? It is against the understanding on which the women entered.”

  “I think that, when faced with the fear of heresy, such understanding was of little interest to the good cardinals and bishops who worked at Trento,” the abbess says tartly. “However, a decree is only words on a piece of paper until it is implemented, and not all church officials are so stoked with the fire. For now, at least, Ferrara’s own bishop is open to the entreaties of the city’s great families and is more liable to execute the reforms in the spirit than in the letter. But to make sure of that, we in turn must be seen to be above reproach, avoiding the scrutiny of those who would destroy in order to purify.”

  Now, of course, Zuana understands it better: all the subtle changes in atmosphere in the convent over these last months; the abbess’s work to secure even bigger dowries to push the balance books into credit; the insistence on getting the novice settled and singing as fast as possible; the damping down of the more liberal faction in chapter, while holding Umiliana’s fierce fire in equal check. And now the blanket suppression of gossip concerning an ecstatic Magdalena.

  It has always been impressive to Zuana, this sharpness of Chiara’s when it comes to the balance between the work of God and the work of man, especially when as an unwilling novice she had found it hard to disentangle the holiness from the hypocrisy of convent life. If she herself is in some ways the product of her father’s teaching, then surely the abbess’s talents, too, were bred in the bone. The names of Chiara’s ancestors run through the history of Santa Caterina like a rich seam of gold in the earth: women of shrewdness and distinction, perpetuating the family influence through a convent rather than children. The only qu
estion is—and it is one that Zuana has asked herself before without ever putting it into words—were such a woman to find herself having to choose between God and the power of family, which one would call louder?

  “It will, I am sure, be clear to you now how wonderful it is for us to be offering the city a young virgin songbird. The reemergence of a living saint, however, having ecstasies with no proper confessor to control her, would be another thing entirely.” She pauses before picking up her glass from the table. “I hope that lays to rest any worries you might have in this matter.”

  God versus family. It seems Zuana has the answer to her question. Perhaps it is not surprising that the realization makes her feel a little feverish.

  • • •

  BY THE TIME she arrives back in the infirmary, the morning work hour is almost finished. The mist seems to have found its way inside today as the room is gloomier than usual. She glances toward Imbersaga’s empty bed, and for a moment she is back in the still center of that night, the young woman’s face smooth as wax now that the pain has left, with Suora Umiliana’s vibrant devotion all around her, spinning sorrow into joy. Suora Umiliana. How would she feel if the convent was purged according to the letter of the decree? More at home than most of them, no doubt. And what then of Suora Magdalena? If Umiliana were abbess now, would she be so acquiescent in her imprisonment? Ah, these are not questions you are called upon to answer, Zuana, she says to herself firmly. As dispensary sister your calling is to care for the sick, and that is what you will do.