Suora Felicità’s voice is now tearful, so that a few of the young ones look positively alarmed. Umiliana glances at her sharply. It is one thing to pit your wits against a skilled opponent, another thing entirely to find yourself undermined by your own side.
“We must all die in the end, Suora Felicità,” the abbess says gently, “and we must not be selfish. For Magdalena herself it will be the greatest celebration to be taken by God.”
The words, so humble that in other circumstances they might have been spoken by the novice mistress herself, still the room. In her chair on the dais, the abbess sits upright and graceful.
“Suora Zuana? As dispensary mistress you have seen our dear sister the most recently of all of us. Perhaps you might give us your thoughts on her strength or frailty?”
She turns to Zuana and her eyes are shining. To look at her you would think she was positively enjoying herself. At recreation the more mischievous nuns sometimes speculate on what a perfect wife for a great noble she would have made, running his family and his palace as efficiently as she runs the convent. They do her an injustice, Zuana thinks. It is not a mere palace she should run but a state. For surely in its way that is what she is doing here. Right down to a network of spies and agents to help keep her authority intact.
“When I saw her this morning she was unconscious and most weak. She is also suffering from chronic bedsores. In my opinion it would be kinder if she was moved as little as possible.”
A network in which Zuana appears now to have been granted a position of considerable authority.
“And if it was so decided, would you take over her care in the infirmary? You have in the past expressed grave concern over her state, I know.”
But how much does Zuana really want the role? It is not a question she can answer now. She bows her head.
“If it is the will of the convent, I would be honored to do so.”
The abbess smooths her skirts and turns to the audience.
“So. Let us put it to the vote. The motion before the sisters of Santa Caterina today is whether to move our aged and beloved Suora Magdalena from her cell into the infirmary, where we may ease her passage into God’s hands.”
The novices watch as the choir nuns come up one by one to the front and, with their backs to the rest of the room to ensure anonymity, pick out a small wooden ball from the bucket— white for yes, black for no—and drop it through a hole into the voting box.
When everyone has voted, the box is emptied and the balls are counted by the sacristan and witnessed by the gate mistress; the motion is declared duly carried. It is noticeable, however, that among the winning white balls are a greater than usual number of black.
SHE IS EMPTY. Quiet. Still. Maybe stiller than she has ever been in her life. It must be the aftermath of the poison. During her time in the dispensary, she had wondered about the drama of the hellebore: what it might feel like to have one’s insides ripped apart, scraped out nigh unto death. To be so purged, so emptied out. Almost as if one might be able to start again. Another Serafina. Newer, lighter, cleaner, with no hand gripping her heart and twisting her guts. No man to love and yearn for anymore. Because it seems, after all, that he never loved her.
He does not care, you see.
He does not care. Yet how could that be? What of all the poetry? The music? The harmony of voices, the starburst sweetness of mouth on mouth, skin on skin, the mingling of souls that made them for that instant pure, afraid of nothing? Ah, now—now it is too late, she knows that she did really love him; that, amid all the rebellion and hot blood, the very exhilaration of being alive, separately and together, Jacopo had been a man worth loving, himself generous, filled with song and no malice.
Except, it seems, he wasn’t. Instead, he, like she, had been a master of deception. Yet how could that be?
At any other time these thoughts would have been like hooks in her flesh, but there is nothing left to lacerate. She is so tired, too tired to think properly. Certainly this new cleansed Serafina cannot hold on to anything for very long. Her head feels as light and empty as her body. It is not so awful; more like dizziness, like holding a high note for longer even than your longest breath allows, hearing it vibrate, shimmering inside your head.
Perhaps this sensation is the result of her confession? The scouring of her soul as well as her stomach. She has told the old priest everything. With the screams of the pierced and the sliced still inside her, how could she not? Everything—the bliss, the rage, the terror, the disobedience, even the self-destruction—such a fast-flowing river of sin. How much of it he heard she has no idea, for both their eyes were closed as she spoke. But at the end he had prayed for her, imposed a penance of confinement with bread-and-water fasting for two weeks, and given her absolution.
