Sacred Hearts (11 page)

She thinks about it sometimes, that story: how it could be possible that something so powerful should erupt out of nothing. In her experience, a well-run convent is as alert to the distress of its sisters as to any excess of joy, since either can tilt the balance of calm living. And even if it had been the work of the devil (and though she has come across mischief—even occasional malice—in this republic of women, she has yet to make the devil’s acquaintance), why had the abbess or the novice mistress seen no signs of it? So she gives thanks to God that when it came to the decision as to where she would spend the rest of her life, it had been Santa Caterina that had taken her in, welcoming her thin voice and her dowry chest as full of remedies as of prayers.

CHAPTER EIGHT

BECAUSE SHE HAS
some understanding of the relationship between exhaustion and acquiescence, and because she does not want to resort to further potions to counter rebellion, Zuana finds herself taking a good deal of care in planning how she and the young woman begin their work together.

Over the first few days, as the effects of the poppy wear off, the impact of physical labor takes over: twice a day, every day excluding Sunday, either out in the cold tending the herb garden or inside cleaning the infirmary and the dispensary, sweeping and mopping floors, scouring pots and bowls, scrubbing down the workbenches. The eradication of previous ingredients to avoid the slippage of leftovers into new ones was a part of her father’s teaching, but Zuana has dismissed the conversa who usually does the heavy manual cleaning and uses her new assistant instead.

At first the girl’s resistance is palpable, her moods as storm-tossed as the weather: one day rage and rolling thunder with much slamming and crashing about, the next a hunched and haunted sadness, her shaking body turned defiantly away over the worktop, silent tears like unstoppable rain. Zuana does nothing to intervene. Better for her to vent her feelings through the scrubbing and scouring. At least that way she will tire herself enough to sleep at night and so, step by step, the process of acceptance may begin.

Though the convent rules allow for speech when necessary during working hours, Zuana makes sure these first days— whatever the emotional weather—pass in silence. Looking back on the memory of her own journey through those painful early weeks, she has come to understand how silence was part of the balm, albeit so slow and gradual that the physician in her found it hard to mark its progress. Now she finds herself studying it in another.

When they first enter, the young (particularly the more lively ones or those with less vocation) find it hardest to adapt to the restrictions on speech. The appetite for conversation is deeply embedded in them; it is there as they gather at table or in chapel, close enough to whisper but forbidden in both places to do so. Or in the way they move past one another through the cloisters during the quiet hours, unspoken words spinning out between them like glistening spiders’ threads. Watching them during those first weeks, Zuana has often thought that chatter is the hardest abstinence of all, harder to bear in some ways even than chastity, for while there is little temptation in that direction, the promise of careless talk is everywhere.

But with this girl it is different. Certainly there are other novices who are keen to talk to her, to draw her into their circle of gossip; Adrianna, Angelica, and Teresa are all as hungry for life as they are for God and the manner of her entrance has made her notable, with all kinds of stories in circulation about indiscretions with an older sister’s suitor or some mad passion for the dancing master. There is a fashion for nuns’ tales in cultivated circles nowadays, and a few of the more colorful ones have no doubt slipped in via the smuggler’s route of the visitors’ parlatorio. Or it could be that they simply make it up, fusing together bits of memory and longing. While Umiliana, in her role as novice mistress, sees only the devil in such gossip, Zuana is less disapproving: youth fades fast enough inside convent walls, and there are only so many hours when one can be on one’s knees.

Serafina, however, is not interested in their friendship. In fact, this incandescently angry young woman hardly speaks to anyone. And when it comes to those eight offices in chapel— well, while her lips move obediently enough to the words in her breviary, no voice comes out of her mouth, though whatever strain her howling might have caused has long since passed, soothed by the dandelion tea that Zuana makes each afternoon and which they drink together before the girl is dispatched to Umiliana for further novice instruction.

Tomorrow, however, will come their first day in earnest on the bishop’s remedies, and the rhythm of work will change between them.

THEY MEET THAT
morning in the herb garden straight after Prime in a knife-sharp wind. The task: the harvesting of figwort root, the freshness of which is vital to the first recipe. The ground is so hard they have to use skewers to penetrate the top-soil, and the bitter weather collides with the girl’s morning tiredness, so that by the time they come inside she is almost blue, teeth chattering uncontrollably, too frozen even for resistance. The fire under the cauldron comes as a powerful relief, as does the ginger and molasses ball Zuana now gives her to suck, the slow release of warmth radiating through her body. Strictly speaking, such refreshment during work hours is against the rules, but they are starting the exacting business of measuring and making today, for which Zuana needs her full attention, if not her goodwill. Equally, the rule of silence within work hours is dependent on the nature of the task in hand, and if the girl is to be of any help as an assistant she is going to have to understand as well as to obey. It is time to start talking. Particularly since the bishop’s afflictions, while not life-threatening, are a somewhat delicate matter, affecting, as they do, both ends of his body.

The harvested figwort root sits on the table between them, dirty clumps of misshapen fleshlike nodules. Zuana explains the reason for them as simply—and as plainly—as she can.

“Ugh! How revolting.”

For the first words after so much silence, they erupt out of her with almost endearing energy.

“And extremely painful. Those who suffer from it say it is like trying to pass great lumps of itching, burning coal that can never be expelled. It leaves the sufferer in an almost perpetual bad temper.”

“How do you know this?”

“He told me.”

“What? The bishop told you that he had these …these things?”

“Hemorrhoids. Piles. Certainly. The last time he visited he could barely sit down to eat the feast the kitchen had prepared for him and complained about everything. The conversa who cleaned his rooms heard him groaning in the outhouse, and the next day there were specks of blood on the sheets. The urine from his chamber pot confirmed the diagnosis.”

She watches the girl’s face crinkle in further disgust. The young are always repulsed by the afflictions of their elders. What was it her father used to say? That it took a saint or a doctor to seek pleasure in the suppurating indignities of decay. Still, there is also a macabre fascination to be found in the grotesque.

“And—as you will see—the remedy is apt enough.”

“Ugh,” she says again, staring down at the figwort. “They’re as revolting as the disease.”

“Exactly.” Zuana laughs. “That is the secret. You have never heard of signifiers? The power of correspondence? The way certain plants are shaped by God to show us the ailment they heal?”

The girl shakes her head.

“Oh, it is one of the great wonders of nature. I have books if you want to study it further. This is a perfect example. One warty nodule to cure another. You would be astonished how elegant and simple it is. You grate and boil the roots with pork fat and mushroom until they are all dissolved, then leave the mixture to congeal. The figwort reduces the swelling, the mushroom—smooth and soft—soothes the itching, and the pork fat provides the ointment, with a little lavender added at the last minute to soak up the smells. It works on character as well as constitution. Most doctors believe that if the heretic Luther had found a physician to treat him early enough he would never have needed to rebel against the true church.”

Though Zuana keeps her countenance somber as she says this, she is alert to the spark that ignites in those dark watching eyes. Even were the girl immune to wit (and Zuana already knows she is not), she needs the bishop to be a man of even temper as much as they all do.

“Here. Be careful how you handle it.” She hands her a clump of root. “It is extremely bitter to the taste and is not meant to be ingested. And it must be finely grated, with every bit used.”

The girl takes the figwort, turns it over in her hands, and brings it to her nose. Zuana thinks of all the other smells and tastes that she could demonstrate. But it will not do to hurry her.

They set to work side by side. After a while the silence between them becomes natural rather than imposed. The room throws up its own sounds: the spitting of the boiling water, the chopping and grating, the scrape of the pestle inside the mortar, the simple rhythms of repetition. The air grows warmer with the fire, and the crushed lavender starts to release its scent. If there is another world out there, it seems a long way away, even for those who might yearn to be in it.

Zuana glances across at her as she works. The girl’s hands against the wood of the worktop are pale and unmarked, smoothed and softened no doubt by night creams and perfumed gloves. If there had been suitors they would surely have enjoyed praising them. But underneath the prettiness the fingers have a deftness to them: given a task that takes some skill—the grater’s edge is sharp and does not distinguish between skin and root— she is dexterous and focused, showing a natural aptitude for it. Of course she is unhappy; how could she not be? But there is less energy at hand now to indulge it. This much Zuana remembers: how it is hard to be in constant turmoil when such a level of concentration is called for. While your mind might stubbornly refuse to be quiet during chapel or private prayer, it can sometimes be tricked into stillness through work.

On the workbench Matalius’s great illustrated book of plants lies open—
at last, a botanist who draws what he sees instead of just repeating what the ancients tell him;
she can hear her father’s voice, caught between praise and envy—alongside his own handwritten book of remedies, the paper crisped and spattered from years of dispensary use. While Zuana knows the process without looking, she makes the girl study each and every step of the texts and then has her read them aloud, to learn them better. Later she catches her flipping through the pages further when she thinks she is not being observed.

From cutting and measuring they move on to combining the ingredients. Serafina hands Zuana the grated figwort and watches as she folds it into the boiling pork fat, careful to keep herself out of spitting distance of the pan.

“You say that you told this …disease …from his urine,” she says, after a while.

“Partly, yes.”

“But how do you know just from looking at it?”

Over the years she has noticed that those novices who fight hardest often have the liveliest minds and are, without realizing it, looking for a place to accommodate them. Well, there is a whole world to absorb her here if she will only allow herself to become interested.

“I have a chart. It was my father’s—doctors use them. It marks the colors and the smell and the cloudiness of the liquid, so you can distinguish which area of the body is ailing.”

She shudders. “Ugh. I …I can’t imagine anything worse— studying an old man’s pee.”

“You’re right,” Zuana says, smiling. “Making sick people better is a disgusting thing to do. I cannot think why Our Lord spent so much time doing it.”

But that afternoon, while the mixture is simmering on the fire and Zuana visits the infirmary briefly to check on the condition of her bleeding patient, she comes back to find the young woman deep in one of the books.

THE NEXT DAY
, Serafina’s mood changes again. She arrives with a drawn face and sunken eyes, ill temper issuing from her like a bad smell.

“Did you sleep badly?”

“Ha! How does anyone sleep well here when there is no night to sleep in?”

“I know it’s hard. It takes time to adjust to such a different rhythm. But you will find that you—”

“Get used to it? What, in the same way I will get used to lumps of fat floating in the soup or the moans that come from that madwoman who sticks nails into herself every night? Well, thank you, Suora Jailer, your wisdom is almost as comforting as the Bearded Sister’s.”

Zuana suppresses a smile. “I see you have come from instruction with the novice mistress.”

She scowls.

Suora Umiliana’s nickname is common knowledge. There is even a debate among the choir nuns as to how many years have gone by since the novice mistress last saw herself in any kind of mirror. To which they might fruitfully add, how many more of them would be like her if the rules against vanity weren’t so easily ignored?