Sacred Hearts (54 page)

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.

Before they close the lid, the abbess unwraps something from beneath her cloak and sets it under the young girl’s bandaged hands. It is a jeweled crucifix, less precious than the one she uses for special feast days but rich enough to buy the beginnings of a new life for the person who possesses it. The instructions have already been made clear: on no account should she attempt to sell or pawn it within the city of Ferrara or its dominions. But once the young couple is far enough away, it is theirs to do with as they see fit. No one will question where it came from, and even if they did there will be no record of a precious cross missing from any convent in Ferrara, and certainly none of any escapee who might have stolen it. The novice Serafina will be long dead and buried by then, her obituary, largely indistinguishable from a hundred others, inscribed in the convent necrology by Suora Scholastica’s elegant hand and part of her dowry passed on to the convent.

The girl had listened and understood. “I don’t deserve this,” she had said, staring at the crucifix.

“I don’t know about that, but I fear you will find it hard to live without it.”

Though now, as the two women stand looking down at her, surely the same thought is going through both their heads.

“Because she is so weak I gave her too little rather than too much,” Zuana says quietly. “I pray it will be the right amount.”

Her words put speed into their step and they close the chest (picked for its empty knots, through which a certain amount of air will flow) and return to the mortuary, where they face the problem of how to weigh down the empty coffin enough not to arouse suspicion when it is carried to the chapel and burial plot the next morning.

Zuana has the answer ready. From the dispensary she brings an armful of books and lays them at the bottom.

The abbess stares at her. “We are both sacrificing jewels, it seems.”

Zuana shakes her head. “She is not so heavy—and like you I have greater ones. Many of the remedies in these I have tried and found wanting. The better ones I have already memorized.”

“Good.” She pauses. “Perhaps it would be wise for you to memorize more.”

Zuana feels the hollowness open up inside her. “When? When will it come?”

“I do not know for certain. Her leaving will steady us for a while. But it will happen, for in the end it does not depend on us. If it is not this bishop, it will be the next, or the one after him.” She smiles. “I am sorry.”

But of course Zuana has known it all along. How bad will it be? Though she can fill her mind with information, she will be able to do little with it if they see fit to destroy her choir of cures. She imagines the convent graveyard in the future, with two neatly dug new graves. Perhaps God will see fit to take them both by the time the worst happens.

“Come,” the abbess says briskly. “We had better finish this.”

Together they fashion a softer shape made from the abbess’s old shifts wrapped around the books, then cover the whole thing with the thick muslin. The abbess has already agreed with Father Romero that by the time he comes at dawn to conduct the service the coffin will be nailed down. Until then either Zuana or she herself will keep the night vigil over the “body.”

There is nothing more to do.

“God be with you, Suora Zuana.”

“And with you, Madonna Abbess.”

And so, leaving Zuana with the coffin full of books, Madonna Chiara calls for the chief conversa and supervises as four sturdy younger converse hoist the trousseau chest onto the cart and pull it through the gardens in the fading light down to the storehouse, where it is placed in the outer chamber, ready for the bargemen to find it there the next morning.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE