by Sarah Dunant
“Well, I …I think there are many levels of goodness. And only the fewest of the few are given such an honor.”
“But she is given it. She sees Him.”
They do not need to give her a name. We are not allowed to speak of this, Zuana thinks. It is forbidden territory. But then so much has changed over these last weeks. The list of secrets inside the convent is growing ever longer and there seems no point in denying this one, especially since this young woman has been witness to it more profoundly than anyone else.
“Yes. She does.”
“She has always seen Him, hasn’t she?”
“It appears so.”
“Why her? One of the novices told me she was just a peasant girl from a village whom the old duke found somewhere. No family, no study, nothing. Was she born holy? Is it how she prayed? Or was it the fasting? Is that how she did it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think I saw Him, too.” She shakes her head. “Just for a moment.”
The poppy: it can show you anything and everything. “It is possible that this, too, was the potion, Serafina,” she says softly.
“How do you know?” Her voice has a tremble in it. “If we all saw Him maybe it would be all right to live and die here.”
Yes, something has changed in her, Zuana thinks. But then how could it not have? Please God, let it bring her to peace. “I think Our Lord is always here, even if one does not see Him directly.”
Serafina is silent for a moment, as if considering this idea.
“She was wrong about him, you know,” she says at last, and her voice remains small, with none of the edge or energy from before. “The abbess said he didn’t care. But it’s not true. He did love me.”
She should eat something, a little bread at least. That much is permitted. Zuana breaks off a small chunk, dips it in the water, and holds it out to her. “Here.”
The girl stares at it and shakes her head.
“I am not hungry.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE BELL FOR work hour is beginning to sound as Zuana comes out of the girl’s cell and moves along the cloister. Directly in front of her she sees Suora Umiliana walking toward her. She drops her head, intending that they should pass without words— the novice mistress practices silence even when it is not called for—but instead the elder woman meets her eye. Her manner is welcoming, almost joyful.
“You have come from the novice? How do you find her? The change is powerful, yes?”
“I …yes, yes, she is different.”
“Praise be to God, He has seen fit to cleanse her of her anger and pretense and plant in their place a seed of humility. Thanks be to Him. And also to you for the care within your remedy.”
Zuana stares at her. Since their encounter in chapter she has expected hostility, even prepared herself for it, but there seems none here. She wonders what the novice mistress would say if she knew why the “remedy” had been administered in the first place. Of course Zuana cannot tell her that. Just as she cannot tell her what went on in Suora Magdalena’s cell all those weeks ago. Secrets within secrets—they grow like mold in a badly run storeroom. But does that also make it a badly run convent? How much deception is permitted in the pursuit of peace? She realizes that she does not know anymore.
“She is grown quieter, that is true. But I am concerned about her health. The remedy has left her very weak. She should be eating, not fasting.”
“In unquiet souls the body must be subdued sometimes to give room to the soul. She will come to no harm, Suora Zuana, I will see to that. These are wondrous times we are living through in Santa Caterina, would you not agree? The Lord has answered our prayers and is come among us. Come through both the old and the young. I fear you have not seen it yet but it is here, as clear as sunshine on water. You must look to your own soul, Suora Zuana. He is longing for you to find Him, too. And you will, I know. All you need is to—”
“I thank you for your good wishes, Suora Umiliana.” Zuana smiles as she cuts across her words. “I long for Him, too. But still I think the girl should not be fasting.”
The novice mistress claps her hands together and pulls them back under her robe. “Neither you nor I have the right to question the wisdom of our father confessor,” she says, the old Umiliana reemerging out of her certainty. “She is in my care and I will tend to her as if she were my own child. God be with you, Suora Zuana.”
“And with you,” Zuana replies, as they pass each other. Ah, if only the love of God moved like the bad seeds of infection through the air, she thinks. Then perhaps we would not need so much constant saving. The boldness of her irreverence takes her by surprise. I am tired, she thinks, and in need of air for my body, if not for my soul.
THE BELL FOR the work hour is still sounding as she puts on her cloak and goes to the herb garden, taking her burlap bag of forks and other tools. The great rain has finally passed, leaving the sky as washed as the earth, and the day that has emerged is cloudless and almost warm. In summer after such storms the cloisters steam as the sun burns off the moisture. There is nothing so dramatic today, but in the gardens the ground will have been softened by the long downpour and whatever early growth has started under the soil may now have a chance to push farther through.
She has not been out of the cloisters since the night in the storeroom, and she is amazed by the difference it makes to her spirits to be in the open again. It will do her good to be working in the garden, surrounded by plants rather than people. She walks briskly, feeling the wind fresh on her cheeks, and as she does so she lets go of her anxieties about the girl and Umiliana and the abbess, all the tangled threads of convent politics and conspiracy, and remembers instead what it is she does here: how the work of a good dispensary mistress is as much about tending plants as tending people.
The garden is probably no bigger than the abbess’s chambers (though Zuana has expanded it by half since she was voted into the post), yet it is home to close to a hundred herbs and medicinal shrubs. There are days between spring and autumn when the workload is such that she barely has time for mental prayer—when the fecundity of nature fills her with wonder and thanks, but her gratitude is waylaid by the attention, even devotion, that the plants require: weeding, splitting, staking, pruning, feeding, harvesting, deadheading, even waging war on their behalf, picking off and crushing small plagues of slugs and snails, which grow out of putrefaction and dampness to lay waste to her most tender and precious herbs.
This winter has been harsh, on both her fingers and the plants, but the worst is over now. She can feel it as soon as she moves into open ground. Protected on one side by the back of the smaller cloister and on the other by the vegetable garden wall, the herb patch is a sheltered enough space for spring to make an early appearance. During a clement March she will see most of the more robust or courageous plants poking their heads aboveground. This mass arrival is one of the most powerful memories of her childhood, for before the university instituted its own medicinal garden (spurred on, no doubt, by the fact that Padua and Pisa were already famous for theirs), the courtyard of her father’s house was a field of old buckets, pots, and wooden trays filled with seeds and cuttings. He would take her out sometimes in the first days of warm weather and make her listen to the silence.
There are scholars, great men of the present as well as the past, who believe that God created man because only through us could He celebrate the power of His vast creation. And thus it is both our pleasure and our duty to witness the wonder. You cannot hear it, can you? But even now as we stand here, under the earth a thousand bulbs and seeds and roots are budding and cracking and sprouting, an army of small tendrils and shoots rising up, moving through the earth toward the light, each one of them so tender that when you see them you will marvel at how they could have moved such a weight of soil above them to emerge. Imagine that, Faustina. Each year the repeating miracle of it.
The picture he painted was so strong, and he had such awe in his voice, th
at whenever she reads about or imagines the Second Coming, she sees graveyards like vast herb gardens, with bodies, as tender and young as those new shoots, pushing up against the rotten wood of their coffins and rising up toward the light of God to the sound of trumpets. Flesh incorruptible. She had told him of this vision once and he had smiled in that way parents do when their children are wiser or more charming than their years. But she could see that for him it was in some ways no more impressive than the more humble version of God’s glory that nature presented.
Given the complexities of the world around her, she has need of such a simple miracle today.
Save for the occasional drops of rain coming off the evergreen shrubs and trees, it is quiet in the garden. The lavender and the rosemary, bruised from the downpour, are thick with aromatic pungency as she rolls her fingers along their stems. In the early beds, the calendula and fennel and hypericum are already reviving. She clears a space and softens the soil around them so that the shoots can expand. Next will come the belladonna and the betonica and the cardiaca, the plant that strengthens the heart, which once it starts will grow as thick as nettles and as fast as weeds. She used to wonder whether in the very beginning someone had plaited together the alphabet and the seasons: marking the first plants as B’s and C’s, then F’s and H’s, leaving the poppy, the valerian, and the verbena to come later. By then the garden will have gone wild, so there will be barely an inch of space left.
She slips her fingers under the newly sprouting fennel, with its lacy, feathery fronds. Her father was right. It is indeed a wonder how something that can barely hold its head up in the air has the force to break through heavy, sodden earth. Yet give it another month of good weather, and its stem will be proudly upright, thick with its own juice. Soil, light, water, sun. Growth, death, putrefaction, regeneration. No need for confession or forgiveness or redemption here. Life without soul. So clear, so simple. Oh, Zuana, you were bred for plants, not convent politics.
“I thought I might find you here.”
She turns quickly. The abbess is treading her way carefully through the undergrowth.
“So. How are all your new children doing?” She gestures to the garden around them.
“It’s early days. But I think we will have good crop of calendula.”
“Possibly you will be able to harvest some off your cheek.”
Zuana puts her hand up and wipes away a streak of mud. The abbess, in contrast, is clean and newly pressed, though it is her complexion that gives her away most obviously; the choir nuns who live in cloisters stay pale and smooth without the aid of Apollonia’s powders, while those who work outside find the sun and the winter winds excavating rivers of broken veins in their cheeks and noses. How much this releases them from the sin of vanity is hard to know, though an inspection might find fewer silver trays doubling as mirrors in their cells.
“I am come to talk to you about the novice. To explain what happened that night at the dock.”
“You don’t have to explain anything, Madonna Abbess.”
“No, I don’t have to, that is true. Rather I choose to.” She smiles and looks around. “Tell me—where is the hellebore?”
Zuana points to an evergreen shrub toward the back of one of the beds. The abbess lifts her skirts and moves over to it.
“It looks so …innocent.”
“The poison comes from the root, not the foliage.”
She nods, studying it as she starts to talk.
“After I wrote to her father, he took an unconscionably long time in replying. By the time he did she appeared to have settled, which is why I did not think fit to communicate his answer. To his credit, he was as frank in his responses as I had been in my questions. He told me that his daughter had always been of strong character, clever and full of passion, first for one thing, then another, and it was this …volatility …that had decided him that although she had initially been chosen for marriage she might be better ruled by God than any husband. Unfortunately he had omitted to inform her—and us—of this decision until rather late in the proceedings.”
Zuana moves her eyes over the garden beds. Strong character. There are plants like that, ones that survive no matter what— frost, rain, sun, insects—while others born from the same handful of seeds wither away beside them. They are the ones you should nurture and take cuttings from, rather than putting them behind walls to die without propagating. “And the young man?”
“The music teacher? Unfortunately, he was less than frank about him. By then, by God’s grace, I had other information. It seems it was a considerable attachment. When it was discovered, there were accusations and violent scenes, and the man was dismissed. Hence the decision to send her to us here in Ferrara rather than Milan, to separate them with distance and avoid further scandal. It was only later that I found he had made his way independently to the city so he could stay in touch with her, by a form of communication the manner of which they had decided earlier.”
“That is a great deal to have discovered,” Zuana says, for there is no way she cannot be impressed.
The abbess shrugs. “In a good family there is always someone who knows how to find things out. An impoverished stranger in a foreign city warms to friends who open their purses—and a young man who has made a noble conquest likes to boast about it.”
She knows so much about men, Zuana thinks admiringly. How could that be? She has never seen the inside of a tavern, never sat and drunk wine with any man, let alone wooed or been wooed by one. Yet she talks of them, talks of all of it, as if she imbibed the wisdom of the world with her mother’s milk. Perhaps there was some manual passed down in her family, too, hidden away in her dowry chest. She would need to protect such a volume against the long noses of church inspectors.
“And these friends? Are they the same ones who found him the post at Parma?”
“The same.” The abbess nods, her attention now distracted as she brushes some piece of dirt or insect carefully from her skirts. “I would have told you this before, but I did not want to compromise your relationship with the girl. You seemed to have such a …a connection with her that I hoped, despite it all, that she might change her mind. I involved you that night only because I was not privy to what had been arranged between them and because I could not watch her all the time.”
“I should have seen it myself. It was in front of my eyes.”
“No. The level of deception was too great. I would not have seen it if I hadn’t known.”
Zuana shakes her head. “I was thinking more of the poppy syrup missing from the dispensary bottle.”
“As always, you are hard on yourself, Zuana. You had been ill and the convent was mad with Carnival. There is no reason to blame yourself.”
“The thing I do not understand is why, having gone to such trouble to find and contact her, he had no qualms about suddenly deserting her.”
The abbess plucks a leaf from the hellebore bush and crushes it in her hand. “As I said, such young men do not care a fig for anything but their own pleasure. If he had had his way he would have taken her, ruined her, and cast her aside. We must thank God that He saw fit to let you save her from herself.”
Zuana sees the two of them standing on the dock, the black water in the background, Serafina fumbling with the ropes on the boat, while she herself does nothing to stop her. The abbess had known all along that there would be no one there to meet her. It had never been Zuana’s job to prevent her from escaping, only to bring her back from the edge when she realized she had been betrayed. “Thank you.” She hears the girl’s voice low in her ears. Surely the abbess must have heard something, too.
“Madonna Chiara, there is something I must tell you.”
“Actually, Zuana, I think that there is not.” She lets the leaf fall, wiping its juice off her hands. “As far as I am concerned, whatever faults you have committed in this matter, you paid your penance in the room with her that night. Anything else that burdens you, you should take to Father Romero.”
It is clear from her tone that the matter is closed.
Yet there are so many frayed ends.
“What happens now? To the girl?”
“She will take the veil and in time become a valued and valuable sister of the convent.”
“And if she is still unwilling?”
“I do not believe there will be any further rebellion. Not now.”
Again the conversation seems finished but Zuana hesitates. “I am concerned that she is fasting so quickly after the evacuation. I—”
“And I am concerned that she continues to take up so much of your—and this convent’s—time.” Her tone is sharp now. “If she is to settle she must accept her lot as an ordinary novice and taste a little bitter fruit like everyone else. Given her sins, it is hardly an onerous penance and will do her no lasting harm. Suora Umiliana can tend to her needs for a while, not you.”
The abbess’s evident anger, and the fact that Zuana is being forbidden access to the girl, is confirmation in itself that she had seen or suspected what took place on the jetty that night. Zuana bows her head to show obedience. It occurs to her that she might mention Umiliana’s evident joy in the novice’s “conversion,” but she knows this is not the time. In the life of any nun, criticism must be accepted with the same humility as praise. You must look to your own soul, Suora Zuana. Umiliana’s words come back to her. Maybe they are both right: she has given too much of her journey to this volatile young woman. There are others who need her more.
“Anyway, you will have your hands filled in the dispensary looking after Suora Magdalena,” the abbess says, more kindly. “I cannot tell you how good it will be for her to be in your care— how good it will be for all of us.” She pauses, rubbing her hands together hard. “Ooh, it is cold out here. You must have grown a second skin in your work. I think I shall go back in time to see Suora Federica before the Sext bell. Perhaps we might walk as far as the second cloisters together.”
Zuana packs her fork and trowel into her bag, and they make their way along the wall of the vegetable garden.