The cloth of her habit is stiff with vomit and traces of feces, and the smell is so pungent that the girl’s condition will surely become obvious to everyone as soon as they wake. She turns her on her side in case another spasm should take her and quickly slips out of the cell into the courtyard, taking the bowls with her. She puts them on the ground and the water hammers down into them. She washes them out as best she can and lets them fill again as she lifts her face to the rain. The night is black, the half-moon that was there before engulfed in thick cloud. Within minutes she is soaked, gasping with the cold. But she is also awake. On the river the wind will be smashing the rowboat against the dock, the convent doors behind closed and locked. But then nothing happened there tonight, did it? Did it? She will not think about that now.
She goes back into the cell with the fresh water and washes the girl as best she can.
“Purge Thou me with hyssop and I shall be clean; wash Thou me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Turn Thy face from my sins and wipe out all my misdeeds, make Thou unto me a clean heart, O Lord, and renew a right spirit within me. ”
There are a dozen other psalms she could recite: verses of supplication, cries of shame and guilt, calls for repentance, for forgiveness, for God’s boundless mercy. But sitting over the novice’s unconscious body, she is suddenly no longer sure about their efficacy; while the words are fine enough, none of them say what really needs to be said here.
The truth is that forgiveness can come only to those who are repentant. Yet the girl lying on the pallet is sixteen years old, in love, and incarcerated against her will. What if, when she wakes and finds herself back in her cell for the rest of her life, she is not sorry for what she has done, only sorry that she has failed in the doing of it? The list of her sins is long: deceit, cunning, rage, lies, lust, disobedience. But the worst is surely despair. Sworn to silence now, where will she go for relief? Without the intervention of God’s grace as well as His penance, what reason will she have not to fall prey to desperation?
“Forgive me, Lord, for not seeing what was in front of my eyes. ”
The girl is not the only one in need of grace and forgiveness. Zuana bows her head on her own behalf.
“Forgive me for not recognizing her despair. For thinking only of my own sadness when I should have been listening to that of others. For not keeping guard over the poppy syrup in the dispensary. For my loss of concentration during the play. Forgive me for being too proud or too blind or too busy. For all these sins send me penance and, in Your infinite mercy, if it be possible, save this young woman from further torment.”
After a while she notices a muddy line of light under the door of the cell; dawn has come, muted this morning by the rain. She hears the bell for Lauds, followed by the watch sister’s steps and the slapping of sandals on the soaked stone. She sits back against the wall and closes her eyes.
She has no idea of how long she sleeps. The day has already begun when the sound of groaning and the smell of fresh feces wake her.
Outside, the sisters go about their daily business, moving quietly around them. The news has traveled fast. Santa Caterina’s songbird has been taken ill with sudden fitting and from where a lovely voice once came, now there is only a river of vomit. Her condition is grave. There is talk of how the cell itself is cursed; of how its predecessor, Suora Tommasa, had been healthy—and sweet-voiced also—until one day she was found throwing up her life all over the walls. This story is given more credence by the fact that the cell, even the cloister corridor close to it, has been placed strictly out of bounds, as if there were indeed some hideous contagion at work there.
Before the midday meal the abbess returns, bringing Zuana a change of robes and food and fresh water from the kitchen. She stands looking down at the girl. The face is calm now, the mouth slack, lips blistered where the poison has scorched them.
“When was the last spasm?”
“A while ago. Half an hour, maybe longer.”
“So the remedy has worked?”
“I don’t know.”
The abbess glances up at her. “But she is not going to die?”
“I don’t know.”
“She is not going to die,” she says firmly, the words as matter-of-fact as the announcement of the menu for a feast day. How wonderful, Zuana thinks, to be so certain of everything. How wonderful and how terrible. “I will sit with her if you want to rest.”
“No. I must watch still.”
