Sacred Hearts (3 page)

The girl’s eyes lock on Zuana’s as she swallows. The taste is strong and makes her choke, her throat raw already from the yelling. If that talk of a nightingale was not another lie, she will need a soothing syrup to coax her singing voice back out.

She finishes the draft and puts her head back against the wall. The tears keep flowing, but with less noise. Zuana watches carefully, the healer in her now alert to the progress of the drug.

Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my crying come unto Thee
.

When was the last time she had to use this level of dosage? Two—no, three—years ago, on a girl with an equally fat dowry but a hidden history of fits. Her first-night panic had unleashed a seizure so violent it had taken three sisters to hold her down. Had the family been more powerful the convent might have been forced to keep her, for though epilepsy is one of the few recognized causes for the annulment of vows, that, like many things, depends on levels of influence. As it was, Madonna Chiara had successfully negotiated her return, along with a portion of her dowry somewhat reduced for their trouble. Such was the diplomatic acumen of Santa Caterina’s current abbess— though what she might do with this recalcitrant young spirit was yet to be seen.

Hide not Thy face from me in the day of my distress
.

The voice inside Zuana’s head grows into a whisper.

“Through the noise of my groaning my bones cleave to my flesh”

When she thinks back on it later, she cannot remember what makes her say this particular psalm, though, once started, the words are apposite enough.

“I am like a pelican in the wilderness. Like an owl of the desert. I watch and am as a sparrow that sitteth alone on the house top. ”

“It’s not working.” The girl shakes herself upright, flailing, angry again.

“Yes, yes, it is. Stop fighting and just breathe.”

“I have eaten ashes as if it were bread and mingled drink with weeping.”

The novice gives a little cry, then slumps back down again.

“For Thou hast set me up and cast me down. My days fade away like shadows, and I am withered like grass. ”

She groans and closes her eyes.

It won’t be long now. Zuana moves closer, to provide support when she starts to slide. The girl pulls her arms tight around her knees, then after a while drops her head down on them. It is a gesture of tiredness as much as defeat.

“But Thou, O God, endurest for ever: and Thy remembrance throughout all generations.”

Outside, the night silence renews itself, moving out through the cloisters, across the courtyard, nosing its way under the doorframes. The convent lets out the breath it has been holding and slides toward sleep. The girl’s body starts to lean toward Zuana’s.

“So will He regard the prayers of the destitute, and He will not despise their call.”

It is over; the rebellion has ended. Zuana registers a certain sadness mixed with relief, as if the words of the psalm might not after all be enough to guarantee comfort. She chides herself for the unworthiness of the thought. Her job is not to question but to settle.

And it is happening. The girl will be unconscious soon enough. Zuana glances around the cell.

At the entrance to the second chamber is a heavy chest. With cunning packing a nun might carry half a world within it. Certainly she would have her own linen; those whose dowries buy double cells sleep on satin sheets and goose-feather pillows. The bed frame can be turned upright without help, but even with the remains of the mattress in place she will need thicker covers. Her body, no longer heated by the force of her distress, will grow clammy, and what started as outrage might turn into fever.

“For He maketh the storm to cease, so that the waters thereof are still.”

She moves the girl gently back against the wall and goes over to the chest. The lid releases a wave of beeswax and camphor. A set of silver candlesticks lies across a bed of fabrics, a velvet cloak and linen shifts next to a wooden Christ child doll. Farther down there is a rug, thick Persian weave, and next to it a handsome Book of Hours, the cover elaborately embossed, newly commissioned no doubt for her entrance. She can think of a few sisters who will find themselves wrestling with the sin of envy when they see this in chapel. As she picks it up, it falls open to a lavishly illustrated text of the Magnificat: intricate figures and animals entwined in swirling tendrils of gold leaf, shimmering in the candlelight. And tucked inside, like a page marker, some sheets of paper covered in handwriting. Had they been read and passed as acceptable? Or did the inspecting gate sister perhaps miss them in among such riches? It would not be the first time.

“What are you doing?” She is alert again now, head jerking up despite the pull of the drug. “Those are mine.”

Mine
. It is a word she will have to learn to use less in the coming months. The girl’s panic answers Zuana’s question. Not prayers, evidently. Poems, perhaps? Even letters from a loved one, as precious as any prayer …The light is too dim to make out any words. It is better that way. What she cannot read she cannot be expected to condemn.

She thinks of her own chest and how the books inside it saved her life all those years ago. What if someone had seen fit to confiscate them? She would have needed more than a sleeping draft to dull the pain.

“You have a rich life in here.” She shuts the book and slips it back into the chest. “And you are lucky to have these rooms,” she says, pulling out a piece of heavy velvet cloth. “The sister who lived here before you kept court some evenings between dinner and Compline. Served wine and biscuits and played music, sang court madrigals even.”

She moves the bed upright and hauls the remains of the mattress back onto the frame.

“From the outside the walls are forbidding, I know. But once you get used to it, life in here need not be the desert you fear it to be.”

“Iss your job to tend ma body, no ma soul.” Though she is still propped against the wall, her eyes are half closed now and the words fall away into one another. While the spirit may be unwilling, the flesh at least is now weak.

“And they are glad because they are at rest and He bringeth them to a haven wherein they would be. ”

Zuana lays the coverlet carefully over the open mattress so she will not have the worst of the horsehair sticking into her skin. When she is finished the girl’s eyes are closed again.

She pulls her up by the armpits, putting one of the girl’s arms over her own shoulder and supporting her around the waist to steady her as they move. Her body is as plump as a partridge and heavy now with the drug. The remains of a perfumed oil she must have used that morning are mixed in with the sourness of her sweat. She feels her breath on her cheek, tangy from the poppy syrup. Ah, along with the clubfooted and the squinty-eyed, Our Lord takes the most lovely of young women into His care to keep them from the defilement of the world beyond. She herself had never been so desirable. Not that such things had mattered to her.

“I am no …sleep,” she slurs defiantly, as she falls on the bed.

“Hush.” Zuana wraps the coverlet over her, tucking it tightly underneath like a swaddling cloth.

“Give thanks unto God, for He is good and His mercy endureth for ever.”

But no one is listening to her anymore.

She maneuvers the girl’s body onto her side so that her face is tilted to the mattress, as experience has taught her. Her father once treated a violent patient who—unbeknownst to him—had prefaced the draft with an excess of wine. Halfway through the night he retched up some of it and almost drowned in his own vomit as he lay unconscious on his back. Trial and observation. The true path to learning.

See how the marvels of nature work, Faustina? How a medicament, which taken alone can be fatal, becomes a healer if you understand how it moves with and complements other substances?

Her father’s voice, as always, is ready at the edges of her mind, waiting for the moment when the prayers end and there is space for her own thoughts.

There was a time at the beginning—she can no longer remember quite how long it went on—when his closeness was almost unbearable because it reminded her so powerfully of everything she could no longer have. But the idea of being without him had been even worse, and eventually the grief had softened, so that his presence had become benign: a living teacher as much as a dead father. Of course she knows it is its own transgression for a nun to live in her past rather than her convent present, but his companionship has become so normal she doesn’t bother to take it to confession anymore. There is a limit to the penance one can do for a sin that one cannot—will not— give up.

Watching over the sleeping young woman now, she invites him in again.

You must be sure to note the extra dose in your records. I know, I know, a few drops may seem a little, but they can be a lot. Ah, what a harmony there is in measurement, child. Authority and empiricism, trial and observation: the combination of ancient knowledge and our new world. Of course, we can’t do as the Greeks did and test our remedies on criminals. If that were possible, we might have rediscovered the secret of theriac by now, and our dominion over all poisons would be secure. Imagine that! Still, we have already found much that was lost. And when you are unsure, or when there is no patient on whom to test new compounds or balances, you can always try them on yourself Though with potions that deaden the senses you should take every precaution and mark the moments constantly before you fall asleep, so that you will have a close enough approximation when you wake
.

She smiles. It was fine enough advice for all those university students who had stood in line for hours in the fog of a Ferrarese winter to gain entrance to his lectures and dissections. Over the years she had even met a few of them: his army of eager young scholar-physicians dedicated to prying the secrets out of God’s wondrous universe. She too had grown fat on his wisdom alongside them, though of course she could never show it in public. While his acolytes went on to courts and universities, taking their knowledge with them, she was tenured into another form of God’s service, one where the pursuit of knowledge was second to acts of devotion, eight times a day, seven days a week, until death would them part. No wonder it had hurt so much at the beginning. There was precious little space for experiment within these walls. No time for a nun to become her own patient here.

Still, having worked her way to the office of dispensary sister, she does now as he would have done: harvests her plants, distills their juices, and notes down their influences. While the steps may be small, she moves forward. It is more than she would have been allowed without him outside.

She puts a hand on the girl’s pulse: steady, if a little slow. How long will she sleep? It is late already. They will never wake her in time for Lauds, perhaps not even for Prime and Terce, though if they do rouse her she will have no appetite for resistance. Whatever the power of her will, for a while at least it will be tempered by physical compliance. The girl won’t thank her for it, but Zuana more than most knows it is a gift of sorts. If true acceptance comes only from God, there is nevertheless a kind of comfort to be gained from the passing of time: hour upon hour, day upon day, time falling like thick flakes of snow, the next laid upon the last, again and again, until what has been is gradually covered over, its original shape and color hidden under the blanket of what is now.

Eventually the Matins bell rings out from the chapel. She hears the watch sister’s footfalls on the flagstones as she makes her way through the cloisters. The knocks on the doors are sharp tonight. Habit (how apt that they should wear on their bodies what they also have to wear on their souls) will have some of them up and moving before they even know they are awake. But there will be others who have only just found sleep and will want to stay within it. In such circumstances, the watch sister is allowed to enter and shake the sleeper once by the shoulder. The ones who don’t rise then will be confessing their misdemeanor to the abbess later in chapter.

The cell doors start to open, followed by the shuffling of feet as the nuns gather and move after the watch sister, a procession of black shadows in the gloom, candles flickering like fireflies in the darkness. As they pass the novice’s door, someone stifles a yawn.

Zuana waits. While the abbess knows of her night wanderings, it is important that she should disturb the routine of the convent as little as possible. The door to the chapel groans open on heavy hinges, then closes again after the procession has passed through. Further snarls of wood mark out a first latecomer, then a second. The sound of chanting is already seeping under the door as she leaves the cell and crosses into the darkness. In front of her she notices a small figure with a slight limp moving out into the courtyard from the upstairs cloister. This is a night wandering that wants to keep itself hidden. She lets the image slide from her mind. There has been enough emotion spent tonight. No point in making more trouble.

She waits until the chapel door is closed again, then enters quickly, head bowed, moving between the choir stalls to where the great crucifix hangs down in front of the grille that divides the nuns from the outer public church. She prostrates herself before it, registering the momentary shock of cold stone through her robes, before slipping into her place at the end of the second row of the choir stalls. She is without her breviary—the book left sitting on the table in her cell. While she knows the lessons and the psalms by heart, its absence is still a misdemeanor. The abbess’s eye passes quickly over her. Zuana opens her mouth and begins to sing.

The convent is not at its best tonight. Winter has scoured a number of throats, and the chanting is disturbed by ragged bouts of coughing and sniffing. At night the church is fiercely cold, and across the choir stalls the dozen or so novices are struggling. With their fat cheeks and downy skin they look too young to be up both so late and so early. When they are tired, Zuana has noticed, some of them rub their eyes with their fists like small children. The convent’s indefatigable novice mistress, Suora Umiliana, is of the opinion that each new batch is worse than the last, more selfish and prone to the vanities of life. The truth is probably more complex, since Umiliana herself is also changing, growing more fervent and demanding with the years, while they at least remain young. Either way Zuana feels sympathy for them. Girls of their age are greedy for sleep, and Matins, slicing its way through the middle of the night, is the harshest of all the convent offices.