Sacred Hearts

by Sarah Dunant

  Behind her a few of the other novices are moaning now, as much in fear as in wonder. Suora Umiliana stands transfixed. Inside her, there is a great falling away. She has waited so long for this moment. Yet she is not tasting ecstasy, either. Far from it. She has spent too long in the company of volatile young women not to recognize hysteria when she sees it. This is not God’s work. The novice is suffering from some other ailment.

  She is not so proud that she cannot admit it—but even as she is pushing her way toward the girl, something else happens. As Serafina jitters and twirls, howling like a stuck pig, there is a loud clatter as an object drops from the inside of her habit and skitters across the stone floor.

  The nuns closest to the girl see it immediately. But it takes the abbess’s picking it up and holding it aloft for its true significance to become apparent to all present: a small shining knife, with what can only be streaks of blood on the blade.

  “My herb knife!” Zuana’s voice now rises above the throng. “It is my herb knife. It disappeared weeks ago from the dispensary, when I was ill. She must have taken it then.”

  After this no one can say or do anything, because the place is in such uproar. In the middle of it all the girl whirls and howls, shaking her hands in the face of anyone who comes near her so that the blood spatters around the room, until eventually she is restrained by the abbess and the watch sister and a few others of the braver nuns. She continues to spit and struggle as they pin her to the ground. Then, equally as suddenly, she gives way, her body going totally limp and curling in upon itself until she looks more like a pile of rags than a person. “Oh, I am sorry, I am sorry,” she moans, over and over again. “Oh, oh, I am so hungry. Please, please can I eat now? Please, someone, help me.”

  On the orders of the abbess she is picked up by the watch sister and carried from the room under the supervision of the dispensary mistress. “Take her to the infirmary and put restraints on her. Come back when you can.”

  As Zuana leaves she sees Suora Umiliana dropping to her knees where she stands, her head in her hands.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  IN THE INFIRMARY they pick the nearest bed by the door.

  Clementia is beside herself with excitement. “Oh, the angel has come! The angel has come! Welcome, poor thing. She is so small now. Oh, no, no, don’t put her in that bed. They all die there.”

  No one is listening to her. The girl puts up no fight as the restraints go on. It is as if she is utterly exhausted, almost unconscious. The watch sister stands staring down at her. “I always knew she would come to no good, “ she says grimly. “Still, imagine Suora Umiliana being so fooled.”

  “You can go now,” Zuana says. “I will give her something to make sure she sleeps and join you when I can.”

  The watch sister, who spends much of her life bored rigid while the convent sleeps, scuttles back to the drama in the chapter room.

  Zuana waits until the door closes then leans over the cot. “You did well,” she whispers.

  The girl opens her eyes. “Oh, my hands are burning so.”

  “I know. But you must lie quietly now. I will bring you something for them later.”

  The door opens. Augustina with her blunt face and blunt hands stands waiting. “I am called for?”

  “Yes, you are to sit with the novice. Let no one come close to her and be careful. She is very ill indeed.”

  But as she starts to rise, the girl pulls at her.

  “Suora Zuana.” Her voice is so small that Zuana has to bend her head to her lips to catch the words. “I …I am scared.”

  “I know.” She smiles. “But it will be all right.”

  By the time she straightens up, her face is grim again.

  BACK IN CHAPTER, the convent is on its knees.

  “Bring us to safe harbor from the tempest we are traveling through. For while we are not worthy of Your grace, we strive to be Your true and humble servants.”

  From the side of her eye, the abbess spots Zuana in the doorway and brings the prayers to a close. She motions for them all to rise and sit again.

  “Dear, dear sisters, we have been subject to a dreadful storm—for which, as your abbess, I must hold myself responsible. Ah, Suora Zuana. Tell us, please. How is the girl?”

  “She is restrained.”

  “Good. Did you have a chance to examine her?”

  “Only enough to know that she has wounded herself severely and is pitifully thin and undernourished.”

  “Which may have contributed to her madness.” The abbess bows her head for a moment, as if asking now for help outside herself. “However”—she looks up again—“it is perhaps worth remembering that this sad young woman was, well, most erratic in her behavior when she first entered.”

  In the fourth row Suora Umiliana sits, pale, eyes on the floor. The room falls quiet. She starts to stand. “Madonna Abbess, I—”

  “Suora Umiliana.” The abbess’s voice cuts across her gently. “You will, I know, be feeling this pain more acutely than the rest of us, for you have spent so much of your time and blessed instruction on her behalf. How much more important it is, then, that we ask for God’s understanding on this before we offer up any blame. And if there is blame, it will fall on my shoulders, for I am the abbess. Please, please, dear sister, sit and rest yourself.”

  This kindness silences Umiliana faster than any rebuke. It also leaves the floor to Chiara. She lifts herself up, resting her hands on the lion’s heads of the chair. It is a familiar, almost comforting gesture that everyone knows well, which is all to the good, because they are in great need of comfort now.

  “You will know, I think, that even before the distressing events of today I have been concerned about the welfare of the convent. We are living in turbulent times. There is change and debate everywhere, and it is not a surprise if some of this anxiety finds its way inside these walls, with disagreements and confusions as to how we should be conducting our lives as nuns. In many cities, others are asking the same questions—and some are being forced to make changes under grave duress.” The abbess sighs. “These past few weeks I have spent many nights in prayer, asking for God’s advice in this, my great task of caring for His flock. And He has taken pity on my distress and come to my aid. He has helped me to understand much. And perhaps the most important thing He has helped me to see is how some of the burden we have been laboring under has come from the presence of this young woman.”

  She pauses. The room is utterly still, waiting on her words.

  “Dear sisters, I would ask you to consider this now, as He revealed it to me. How since the novice Serafina arrived with us all those months ago, her fury, her disobedience, the fame and glory that came with her voice, her tremendous sudden piety, her illness, her secret confession with its dramatic penance, her exaggerated fasting nigh unto starvation, and now this—this exhibition of fraud and madness—all this behavior has taken its toll on the peace and comfort of Santa Caterina. While we have done our best to absorb and contain her—in particular the work of Suora Zuana in the dispensary, Suora Benedicta in the choir, and the selfless care and discipline of Suora Umiliana—despite all our efforts, this young woman has grown more rather than less distressed. It is perhaps not a surprise.

  “All these stages of behavior, these phases of the moon that she has passed through—for there has been some correlation between her mood swings and the moon’s cycles—have one thing in common: they have needed—no, demanded—and received our attention. Such symptoms are consistent with a most virulent form of greensickness, which though it can beset many young girls of her age, at its worst brings full-blown lunacy. Until this point, Santa Caterina has been mercifully free of it. I had some worry about this on that very first morning—Suora Zuana will no doubt remember that we discussed the possibility that the girl was sick rather than simply rebellious. I wrote then to her father to ask for further information. His reply was reassuring. And yet since then it has only grown worse rather than better—so much so i
t is surely no surprise that we have all, in some way or other, been influenced by it. For what we have been living through is the presence of a mad young woman who has dedicated her life to performance rather than piety.”

  All this the abbess says slowly and with quiet conviction, leaving pauses every now and then so that you would think the words are somehow precious, fragile things that must be handled with care; either that, or they are so heavy one must hold them for a while in order to absorb them.

  The message she offers is simple: a young woman has destroyed the equilibrium of the convent by dedicating herself to deceit rather than devotion. Very simple, in fact, yet it speaks to many of the nuns present.

  Zuana looks out over the sea of faces. To the left of the room sit the novices, a group of young women overshadowed by Serafina up to now but who can perhaps feel vindicated for their occasional flashes of envy or lack of charity toward her. Could it be that they have been pious enough to suspect that she was a fraud all along? Close by, young Suora Eugenia is no doubt remembering how contented she had been as the convent songbird before Serafina opened her mouth at Vespers, and how lost and tortured she has become since.

  On the converse bench Letizia hears again the girl’s sniping, angry tone, so different from her public piety, as they crossed the cloisters together to tend the chief conversa in her cell, while Candida thinks about all those evenings she spent brushing her hair, and how she can always tell the ones who yearn to be touched more, even when they seek to deny it.

  In among the choir nuns, the twins, who have long since had to make do with being ignored, remember that once she tripped one of them up in her hurry to get to chapel and never apologized. Suora Benedicta thinks that though she composes for God, the young girl often seemed more interested in singing for her own pleasure, while Suora Federica knows she never really liked her, even though she felt compelled to pick her out for the first marzipan strawberry, and wishes now that she had put more wormwood into her penance food. Devout old Suora Agnesina reminds herself that she was never sure of her, even when Umiliana spoke so hotly about her emerging purity. Felicità, meanwhile, does not feel so bad about the resentment she has harbored toward Umiliana, whose time has been taken up with this shallow novice rather than other, more deserving sisters such as herself.

  And Suora Umiliana? Well, Suora Umiliana is thinking and remembering a great number of things.

  “Performance rather than piety. The noisy seeking of attention over the gentler business of living humbly inside God’s love. That has been a fear close to your heart, I know, Suora Umiliana, and one must say that in this you are right,” the abbess says, with a generosity that cannot help but draw attention to Umiliana’s own gullibility and failed judgment in this whole sordid business.

  “We need to come back to the true path: Not to love strife. Not to love pride. Not to be jealous or entertain envy. To hate one’s own will. To love one’s neighbor as oneself and—”

  And here she does not need to add—because each nun knows the words of the rule of Saint Benedict backward—and to obey the commands of the abbess in all things.

  “In this way I am sure we will ride out the storm and return our convent to what it once was, a place of harmony and honest worship.”

  The room is silent. It is a remarkable performance, and no one is more impressed than Zuana.

  The bones of the plan, the central ingredients, were hers. But this …this elaboration …this decoration has come spinning out of the abbess’s own head, and its skill and cleverness amaze her. Here is a woman who cares so much for the reputation of her convent that she was willing to allow a young man to be killed to prevent scandal from coming upon them, but also a woman willing to forgo the chance of revenge on her most potent opponent in order to bring peace and reconciliation. For, as she well knows, only in that way can they hope to avoid interference from outside.

  Zuana thinks back again to the rule of the order. The abbess is one to whom much hath been entrusted, from whom much will be required; the difficult and arduous task of governing souls and accommodating herself to a variety of characters, mingling gentleness with severity, so that she not only suffers no loss in the flock but may rejoice in the increase of a worthy fold.

  Who else in this room could do it so well?

  She lifts her hand gently.

  “Yes, Suora Zuana? You have permission to speak.”

  “I—well, I wonder, what are we to do with the novice now?”

  The abbess sighs. “We must try our hardest to bring her back from her fasting madness into health and then address her spiritual state. The first, I think, falls to you.”

  “I will do my best.” She bows her head. “But I must say that examining her in the infirmary just now, I found her to be in a grave state. In her lunacy she has been using the knife to harm herself in many ways alongside which she is emaciated unto starvation.”

  “My dear Suora Zuana, every sister in this convent knows you will do whatever can be done. I shall ask Father Romero to go to her now. The rest is up to God. We shall pray for His guidance.”

  THE NUNS OF Santa Caterina retire to their cells for prayer and private contemplation with an unexpected sense of peace and harmony. And as they kneel praying, long into the dark, there are those who swear they hear a voice coming out of the infirmary, the soaring notes of a young songbird, and though some fear it to be further madness, it is hard not to be seduced by its purity and wonder perhaps whether their prayers have been answered and this disturbed young woman is at last made welcome by God.

  At the darkest part of that same night, long after Suora Zuana has bid good night to her patients, Clementia wakes to see a figure in the room, a figure she swears is that of the Virgin herself, for she comes on quiet footfall with a white veil over her face and the smell of flowers around her. She stands by the girl’s bed and immediately the novice sits up and prays as if she were not near death at all. Then the Virgin seems to lean over and kiss her and offer her the communion cup, from which she drinks deeply. The girl lies down again and, after praying for a while by her side, the figure leaves as quietly as she came in.

  Clementia is known to be as mad as a field of spring lambs, yet when it is discovered, close on sunrise, that the girl has quietly died in the night, this account of hers moves like a soft breeze through the convent, bringing a sense of wonder and hope to all who hear it.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  IN THE MIDST of death, however, life must go on, and a convent leading up to Easter is a busy place.

  Letizia and Suora Zuana, who had been the ones to find the girl without pulse or any sign of life, take the body to the mortuary room behind the dispensary, where they wash and dress it for burial. In lieu of a public laying out, prayers are said in chapel. While everyone is mad with curiosity to see the corpse, it is the abbess’s duty to return the convent to normal life as soon as possible, and with her authority renewed she is obeyed without question.

  That same day is also when the trousseau for the noble wedding must be completed and packed for collection the next morning. Such is the importance of the commission that the abbess herself supervises the process as the chest is brought downstairs to a room close to the infirmary ready for transportation to the river storehouse that afternoon.

  In the mortuary, Zuana and Letizia place the girl in a rough wood coffin, covering her body with a length of white muslin (the gold cloth is used only for those who have taken their vows). Zuana then dismisses Letizia—who has been unexpectedly affected by the sight of the bone-thin young body, to the point where she is overcome by tears—and keeps vigil herself during the afternoon work hour.

  Halfway through she is joined by the novice mistress, who has humbly gone to the abbess and asked if she might be allowed to say her own private farewell.

  The two women kneel by the coffin together. The last time they tended a corpse was at the death of Suora Imbersaga, when Zuana had been so moved by the novice mistress’s febrile joy.
Now she cannot help but be aware of a dark turmoil within her fellow choir nun, as if however much she tries she cannot, will not, forgive herself for whatever her part was in this strange young woman’s death.

  Eventually, after what feels like hours of prayer, the older woman rises slowly to her feet and makes her way silently to the door.

  “Suora Umiliana?”

  She stops and waits.

  “You told me once that you wished you had been my novice mistress. Well, I share that feeling, and if you would let me I would like to come to you sometimes, to talk more about how I might reach closer to our Holy Father.”

  The old woman shivers. “You should not come to me,” she says harshly. “I am not worthy.”

  “Oh, but I think you are. Please. I do believe that you might help me.”

  And while there are some things in this room that are ripe with deceit, this is not one of them.

  Umiliana stares at her, nodding slightly, her white hairs and pitted chin trembling as the tears start to flow.

  “I will do my best.”

  JUST BEFORE VESPERS the abbess calls the chief conversa to her chambers and asks her to wait until after supper before they move the chest to the storehouse, since she herself would like to make a last check on the contents.

  When the nuns disperse to their cells for private prayer, Zuana and the abbess meet in the mortuary. Between them they easily lift the girl’s body out of the coffin and carry it through a now unlocked door to the room where the trousseau chest is waiting. As they place her under layers of embroidered wedding silk, Zuana searches for a pulse. It is steady enough when she finds it, though faint, like that of someone heading toward death. The consensus of the two sources is that a body can remain as if in a state close to death for up to twenty-four hours and still emerge in health. But the first source is an observation from some heathen tribe found in the Levant, and the second, her father’s, relies on descriptions but no living proof. They will just have to hope. At rest the girl looks so fragile, more bone than body still, her hands carefully bandaged with salve beneath. Such a long way from the peach-ripe young beauty who first entered. But then, with the scars of having half his throat cut open, her prospective husband will surely be no prettier.