Sacred Hearts

by Sarah Dunant

  The door opens. If it is the novice she will have to chide her for disrupting prayer, but she will still be pleased to see her. She thinks this at the same instant as she sees Madonna Chiara standing in the doorway.

  “Good evening, sister.”

  “Am I needed?” Zuana is already on her feet. “Is someone ill?”

  “No, no …far from it. The convent is exceedingly well. As you can hear for yourself.”

  “How is our guest?”

  “The meeting between the families has ended and there are signs of progress. It is agreed that she will stay with us until Carnival is ended. The break between them may bring back a little …fondness.”

  She does not need to add that this way, when Bendidio drinks himself stupid on the duke’s wine cellar, he will not have his wife to take it out on.

  “I could look in on her again if you think it would help.”

  “No. She is with Suora Umiliana at the moment, and Suora Apollonia has dispensation to join her afterward.” She pauses. “It seems they were not so close as children, but her troubles have made them fonder. It is a wonder to see. Thus doth the Lord bring comfort out of adversity.”

  “For His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endureth to all generations”

  “Indeed it does.” The abbess sounds mildly surprised. She glances down at the open books. “I have come to offer you some respite from your work, Suora Zuana. The rest of the convent is at recreation with their families, and it is only right that you should enjoy the same privilege.”

  “Oh, no, I …I am …” The words well and content battle with each other to be the first out of her mouth, and as a result neither of them succeeds. The abbess, who cannot help but notice the struggle, smiles.

  “What is the phrase that Suora Scholastica has written for the prologue to the play? As the body needs food to thrive, so the spirit also needs recreation and rest” She laughs. “You have not heard the speech? Oh, it is most charming and will bring us many pious plaudits, I am sure. I think even Suora Umiliana would find it hard to fault its advice.” She pauses. “So, if you have a cloak to protect you from the breeze, I wonder if you would like to see something that I think will bring you pleasure.”

  “Thank you, Madonna,” Zuana says, for it is clear that the offer is also an order. “I would like that.”

  Outside, the air is crisp and the sky clear. The final week of Carnival often marks the end of winter fogs, though Lent will deliver some bitter days of its own along the way. She follows the abbess across the cloisters and into the chapel. Inside, on the left behind the choir stalls, is the door to the bell tower. The abbess brings out a key and slips it into the lock.

  “They are setting light to the Carnival bonfires. We will get a particularly good view of our great city from the top of the tower. God has given us a wondrously clear night for the proceedings.”

  Aware of the privilege she is being offered, Zuana bows her head and starts to climb. Halfway up she reaches the wooden platform where the ropes for the great chapel bells hang down for the bell ringer. This is as far as any sister is allowed without special permission. If the nun in charge of the bells ever disobeys the injunction it remains her secret. Given the wrecked back and damaged hearing that come with the office, some compensation is perhaps deserved.

  The abbess takes the lead. The bottom of her robe sends out a cloud of dust around her. The stone steps are narrower now, the walls and ceilings thick with cobwebs. Zuana has a sudden image of herself thrusting her hands into the corners and harvesting the gauze: the deathly stickiness of spiders’ silk mixed with honey has a reputation as a miraculous salve for flesh wounds. I will praise the Lord with all my heart and show forth His marvelous works. Even the best-trained apothecaries find some preparations difficult, however. Another day, perhaps.

  They reach the top and step out into the open bell chamber. Their arrival disturbs a host of roosting pigeons, which rise up in a squawking fury of feathers and beating wings. The abbess waves her arms in wide circles, shooing them away, and the two women let out their own squawks of laughter as the birds swoop and clatter around their heads before lifting off and out into the air.

  “I wonder how they stand the noise of the bells,” the abbess shouts above the flurry of their wings. “We should put up pigeon traps. The kitchen could use a few extra fowl in winter, though I cannot imagine Suora Federica coming up here to collect them.”

  With the birds gone, the tower becomes theirs. The two great bells sit suspended above them, their fat clappers hanging heavy underneath. Around them the wall reaches to their waists, high enough to protect but low enough to reveal the city far below.

  The abbess is right. The view is breathtaking. Zuana registers a sudden dizziness, less from the height than from the exhilaration of the perspective. In the twilight to the north and west she can see right across the old town, a jumble of burnt-ocher roof tiles and cobbled streets, to the great cathedral and its piazza, the two parts of the castle with its crenellated towers and moat, then out into the new Ferrara with its grid of wide modern streets and palaces laid out by the second Duke Ercole in his role as great humanist ruler and town planner. And all around them, massive brick walls mark the boundaries of the city.

  “It is beautiful, yes?” The abbess smiles at her.

  Zuana nods; for the moment she cannot speak. The abbess, understanding, looks away, giving her time to compose herself.

  Bricks and cobbles. That was how her father had once described their hometown. There were other cities, he said, more full of stone and marble, with great domes and towers and every surface plastered and painted, and they were in their way fabulous enough; but to appreciate the power of the humble brick, so small and yet so mighty and filled with so many colors of the earth, then a man must come to Ferrara on a summer’s evening when the very fabric of the city was alight and glowing.

  “See the fires?”

  As yet there are only two of them: one great plume of smoke rising up from the main square, another smaller one from within the courtyard of the palace. Outside the ring caused by the blaze, people, small as ants, are milling and flowing everywhere. Zuana follows one of the larger streets back from the cathedral square into the old town, trying to locate where she once lived. She can get as far as the long thin space—not big enough for a piazza— in front of the main university buildings but then becomes tumblingly lost in the curling alleys that branch off all around.

  “You are looking for your father’s house?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should find a landmark and work backward or perhaps a journey you remember taking.”

  But the one she had vowed she would never forget—the walk from the house to the doors of the convent—has gone completely.

  She shakes her head. “The streets nearby are too muddled. They all look the same. And you? Can you see your home?”

  The abbess spreads out a hand toward the north. “The new city is easier. It is a few blocks to the west of the Palazzo Diamante. There is a garden in the middle—see? — I used to play there with my brother when I was a small child. At least, so he tells me. I don’t remember it myself.”

  She says the words lightly. The youngest boarder in Santa Caterina now is six—no, five—years old. If she were to stay and take the veil at sixteen as Chiara had done, there would be precious little past for her to forget. Presumably, what one has never had, one cannot regret losing.

  “How much do you remember?”

  Zuana does not look at Chiara as she asks this. Instead the two women stand side by side, their arms leaning on the parapet, looking out over their city, as if this is no longer a convent but simply a high balcony in a rich house where two noble wives have chosen to take the evening air for a while, gossiping about this and that.

  “Less as the years go by. Though a few things strongly. Being inside a carriage at night going across water, with the noise of the wheels on wood and the torches on fire at the end—the drawbridge over
the moat of the castle, no doubt. And there is someone telling me that if the ground were to give way now we would all drown.”

  “Were you frightened?”

  “No …no, I think I was excited.” She smiles. “And a room—I remember a room I was taken to, with a painting in the cupola ceiling of a round balcony, with the sky above and people and cherubs leaning and peering over the painted parapet as if they were in danger of falling. It was so lifelike. One of the men had black skin and there was a monkey perched on the edge next to him, holding a necklace as if it were about to drop. I remember standing underneath with my arms out waiting to catch it, I was so sure it would fall.” She laughs. “As a young nun I used to dream that when I became abbess I would commission a work by that same artist for one of the chapels. Imagine! The bishop or our benefactors looking up to see Our Lord and all the apostles leaning over a balcony as if they were about to tumble over.”

  As she says it, Zuana can think of a good few sisters who would be there waiting to catch them.

  The sunset is moving faster now, throwing up great gaudy streaks of pinks and purples. No cherubs or monkeys, though; only a high-pitched chorus of evening swifts darting like showers of arrowheads across the sky. After a while, Zuana turns from the view across the city toward the other side, to the world they do not need to make up, the one they cannot forget.

  From this height, Santa Caterina resembles a palace rather than a prison. She looks down over the swooping nave of the chapel into the two cloister courtyards, alive in the golden light, then out over the side houses, by the vegetable and herb patches into the sweep of the gardens and the great bow-shaped pond, onward to orchards backing onto the river, a thick silver ribbon of mercury, with its sluggish traffic of boats and barges. And around the edges the long run of brick wall, so low from up here that one might think all one had to do was to step over it to reach the world outside.

  Oh, but there is beauty in here, too, Zuana thinks: the richness of the earth, the warmth of the bricks, the coolness of stone. Beauty, space, and, once you stop wanting it to be different, peace, a relief from the madness outside. If someone were to open the doors now, what point would there be in walking out into the world? Where would she go? Who would she be? The house where a young woman called Faustina grew up is home to another family now, while the city that surrounds it is a maelstrom of people who neither know nor care about her. That infinitesimal space in the world that was once hers has long since disappeared—and to appreciate quiet one must accept less excitement.

  No, whatever restlessness is going on within her it is a cloud passing across the sun, the temporary blindness that comes with a morning fog. In all the gossip that filters through the walls, she has never heard of a well-born woman with her own apothecary shop or her own list of patients. I am like the green olive tree in the house of the Lord. I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever. The cloud will pass, the fog will lift. For the first time in many days she feels quieter.

  As her eye moves back across the garden to the cloister, it picks out what looks like a broken line—no, more of an arc— made up of random pale stones on the grass and in among the leafless trees, moving from the edge of the wall close to the river to the path leading past the outhouses back to the cloisters. At this distance it resembles a run of uneven stitches on the hem of a garment or a long necklace of white rose petals fallen onto dark ground.

  Far below them on the street in front of the convent, a clash of young men’s voices rises up: laughter, shouts, what sounds like playful jeering at one another. Rose petals. Zuana moves to face the town side again. She has an image of herself, both arms held wide over the parapet into the air, opening her fists and letting loose cascades of rose petals onto the crowds of spectators below.

  “May I ask you a question, Madonna Abbess?”

  “If you wish, certainly,” the abbess says, almost surprised at the return of formality in her former friend.

  “Is it true, the story that Apollonia tells about the tower?”

  “Which story is that?”

  “About how one year at Carnival a group of novices came up here with dried petals from the storehouse and threw them down on the revelers in the streets below.”

  “And what happened then?”

  “It seems the young men went mad. Shouted, threw up ropes, tried to climb up to reach them.”

  “Hah. I have always thought Suora Apollonia should be writing plays alongside Scholastica,” she says mildly.

  She bends down and picks up something at her feet. As she straightens, her fist uncurls over a handful of molted pigeon feathers. She leans over the edge and lets them go.

  “Certainly such a thing might have driven young men mad.” The feathers dance coquettishly in the air before floating down. “But as you can see yourself”—and now she leans farther out and over, so far that Zuana has an image of the painting inside the cupola ceiling and begins to feel anxious—“the height of the wall and the angle of the tower over the ground are such that you cannot see directly down to the street immediately below. Or from there up into the tower.” She pulls her body back again. “So, though the petals might have seemed like a shower of grace from heaven, there was little chance of anyone actually seeing the angels who threw them.”

  She wipes her hands on her robe.

  “However, it is true that when the authorities found out it caused a scandal, such that new locks had to be fitted to the tower door, and a rule was instituted that neither choir nuns nor novices were allowed to enter without the express permission of the abbess.” She sighs. “I cannot tell you how many years it took me to find my way up here again.”

  They stand together for a moment, watching the bonfires throwing up broad ribbons of smoke against a luminous sky. Zuana finds herself smiling. Of course she would have been one of them. She should have guessed. The Lord punishes but he also forgives. The world is full of saints who began as sinners or, if they were always good, found their goodness pitted against rules others imposed upon them. She thinks of the novice with her incandescent anger, Benedicta with her mad music, Apollonia with her fashion-white face and stock of stories. Even the holy ones: Magdalena and her visions that are not allowed; Umiliana, who, if she could, would break the rules by having even more of them. Without the rebels there would be no stories to tell, no fellow travelers to identify with.

  In front of them the sky is now on fire. She thinks of the cochinilla. Using a dye to treat a fever might be seen by some as a breaking of the rules. While there is wisdom in authority, there must always be room for experiment. Though you must also know how to question the answers you find. Are you listening, Faustina? There is a lot to learn, and I will not always be here to teach it. She has not heard his voice since before the illness. So which answers should she be questioning? The dye broke the fever, yes. In doing so it turned her urine red. But what if it also stained her spirit a little? Such things have been known to happen: a good remedy having another, bad effect. Those who take mercury for the pox suffer as much from the cure as from the illness; everyone knows that. She must ask the chief conversa how she feels now that she is better. If she has time, she will write an entry before Compline.

  “It is amazing how beauty offers sustenance to the soul as well as the eye, don’t you think?” the abbess says, as if this has been a conversation between them, rather than she alone who is doing the talking. “On the few occasions I have stood here with a sister since I became abbess, I have watched it bring God’s peace back into some of the saddest of hearts. Or refresh some who are simply tired and in need of rest.” She pauses. “Though of course it is not something to be talked about with everyone.”

  The sunset is burning itself out now, the reds already shading into gray. Zuana glances at her. The lines on her face have been smoothed by the twilight and her skin has almost a glow to it.

  “Thank you, Madonna Abbess,” she says quietly.

  “Oh, I only do as the Lord bids me. If He sees one o
f His flock dispirited or buffeted, it is my job as abbess to bring her back into safe harbor. Come,” she says briskly, turning. “The light is going and the staircase will become treacherous in the gloom. Oh, I almost forgot. There is something I need you to do, for the well-being of the convent. It concerns the novice.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  IN THE DARKNESS Serafina shifts her weight, registering a sharp lump along her upper thigh. The pallet mattress has so little stuffing in it she can feel the imprint of the keys wherever she turns. She likes the discomfort. For a while it brought her only terror, for with her chest unlocked there was no hiding place where she could be sure that her treasure would not be found. She could have tried to buy more stuffing, of course—such a thing is possible—but it might have brought suspicion. The discovery of a little poppy syrup or an extra lump of wax was one thing—Candida was being paid to make her life easier—but a duplicate set of keys to the outside doors …well, the profit to be made from that information would far exceed any paltry gain she could offer her. So instead she had had to pay the conversa off with a good piece of cloth when she took over cleaning the cell herself. Who would have thought it? A noble young novice scrubbing out her own cell. Well, it gives her something to do to make the time pass quicker.

  Time. There is so little of it left and yet what there is seems endless. She closes her eyes but knows she will not sleep. Her public docility has come at a cost. While her head stays bowed and her face remains serene, there are moments when the insides of her gut feel so twisted into knots that it is hard to walk upright. This state of constant excitement has become almost a pleasurable pain. She remembers it from before, at home—how every moment between her singing lessons was like a torture of waiting, sometimes so bad that she could barely breathe with it. Now the idea of him—the freezing, burning anticipation—blots out everything: sleep, thought, hunger.