Sacred Hearts (32 page)
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 of 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.
She has had precious little appetite since her arrival, but recently she has come to enjoy the feeling that comes from not eating; the hollowness, the gnawing and fizzing in her stomach, is a kind of exhilaration in itself, like having something alive dancing inside her. Even her voice sounds purer, with less to hold it down, and when she is made to eat—when Federica calls her to the kitchen and presents her with the marzipan strawberry—the syrupy sweetness is so strong it is all she can do not to vomit it back up again.
It is not easy, though—deliberately contriving not to eat. You might think a convent would be happy to have its sisters starving a little—didn’t the saints live on air?—but here there is moderation in everything: enough prayer, enough work, enough sleep (well, once you get used to the mad clock they live by), and enough food. The rule is that each nun must finish what is on her plate, and disobedience is a matter for penance.
Of course there are ways. Deceptions, pretenses. She is fooling them in everything else, why not in this as well? At meals she comes into the refectory and finds her seat at the long table quickly, bending low over the plate, hands clasped under her chin for grace. When the grace is over she keeps her left hand close to her mouth while her right holds the spoon. In this way it is simple to transfer the food into her hand before it reaches her lips. No one is watching, anyway. Those who are not intent on stuffing their faces are too busy listening to the readings: stories of mad men and women living in caves in the desert, vying with each other to endure the worst suffering.
It is a technique—this squirreling away of food inside her habit—that she perfected after she had started singing. It was as if she had been in need of some minor disobedience to reassure herself that she was not becoming one of them. She liked the way the fear of being caught mixed in with the guilt and the fury: sweet and sour at the same time. She had hidden the scraps away in her cell and eaten a few of them later (how dare she, a novice eating in her cell when she should be asleep!) or used them to pay Candida, for the trade in tidbits moved both ways.
Now she holds on to them until recreation, then surreptitiously lets them fall from under her robe as she wanders in the gardens. She is not the only one doing this. She spotted Eugenia doing the same thing the other day. They exchanged shy, sly little looks as they passed. At least they will not betray each other. The evidence is gone within seconds, thanks to the birds; the pigeons pecking away the finches and sparrows, then pecking at one another. Today they swooped down from the bell tower even before anything had been dropped. Still, she must be careful. Suora Umiliana, though she might approve of fasting and would no doubt love to see their flesh withering on their bones, is hawk-eyed when it comes to any infraction of the rules, however small.
Well, it is only a few days before it is over and she is gone from here forever.
Only a few days. The thought slices into her belly. Sometimes it is hard to tell the hunger from the excitement. Gone from here. But to where? How? Oh, if only she could sleep! You could die of waiting here. She slides her hand into the mattress and extracts the keys from the cloth. The iron is cold to the touch. She runs her fingers over the cut of the teeth, clean and smooth. Of course he would have found a good blacksmith. Like those men on the Carnival carts. When she had heard the stories of their songs she had felt her cheeks burning. She had died a thousand deaths that night he had brought back the keys. He had been so late she had thought he wasn’t coming. She had barely made it back to her cell in time to avoid the watch sister. When she had unwrapped them there was a scrap of paper inside with the confirmation of the day and time upon it. That was it. No endearments, no poetry, no words of love. Since then there has been nothing. His face has long since blurred in her mind, and now she cannot even hear his voice, so that when she thinks about the future, sometimes all she can see is the black ink of the river at night.
She lives so much in her own head now (with so many novices involved in the play, the religious instruction has been reduced until the performance is over). Even at her most rebellious as a child she was never so alone. The only contact she has is within the choir, and while the actual singing steadies her a little, the rawness returns as soon as it stops. There are moments when she craves company, a way to soak up some of the tension inside her, only she is terrified of what someone might spot in her, even though most of them are half mad with Carnival anticipation themselves. Except for Suora Zuana. The dispensary mistress seems oblivious to it, almost distant. Yet out of all of them Zuana is the one she cannot see, the one she fears most. She goes out of her way to avoid her, and when they pass each other, on the way to chapel or in the cloisters, she is certain she can feel the older woman watching her, probing to see what is going on within her.
Their time spent together in the dispensary feels like a lifetime ago. The ointments, the spitting treacle, the ginger balls— she thinks about them more than she wants to. She tells herself it is because the nun is clever that she needs to be careful of her in case she suspects something. But it is more than that. What started as anxiety has turned into something more uncomfortable, a gnawing that has nothing to do with hunger but comes instead from guilt. Guilt that the one person who has helped her, shown her kindness and understanding (God knows, more than her own mother ever did), will be seen to have failed with her and brought disgrace upon the convent—perhaps even be blamed in some way for her escape.
These thoughts make her angry and she tries to push them away, but when she is awake at night they return. What if they punish Zuana? Take away her privileges, stop her working on her remedies, even confiscate her books? How would she live then?
Serafina considers leaving a letter saying that it is nothing to do with Zuana, relating how much she has helped her, but she knows that would make things worse. She would pray for her, only prayer is not possible anymore. How can she ask God’s help for anything now? Whatever the wrongs done to her, they are nothing compared with the one she is about to commit.
She closes her eyes again and tries to sleep. From somewhere in the gardens comes the screeching and yowling of a catfight. She relishes the noise, finds it exhilarating rather than alarming. She brings her right arm up and lays it across her belly feeling the flatness of her empty stomach, the ridge of her hip bone, as a hot and cold shiver runs down into her groin. So be it. Even if she brings the world down upon all their heads, there is no going back now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
