The novice mistress claps her hands together and pulls them back under her robe. “Neither you nor I have the right to question the wisdom of our father confessor,” she says, the old Umiliana reemerging out of her certainty. “She is in my care and I will tend to her as if she were my own child. God be with you, Suora Zuana.”
“And with you,” Zuana replies, as they pass each other. Ah, if only the love of God moved like the bad seeds of infection through the air, she thinks. Then perhaps we would not need so much constant saving. The boldness of her irreverence takes her by surprise. I am tired, she thinks, and in need of air for my body, if not for my soul.
THE BELL FOR the work hour is still sounding as she puts on her cloak and goes to the herb garden, taking her burlap bag of forks and other tools. The great rain has finally passed, leaving the sky as washed as the earth, and the day that has emerged is cloudless and almost warm. In summer after such storms the cloisters steam as the sun burns off the moisture. There is nothing so dramatic today, but in the gardens the ground will have been softened by the long downpour and whatever early growth has started under the soil may now have a chance to push farther through.
She has not been out of the cloisters since the night in the storeroom, and she is amazed by the difference it makes to her spirits to be in the open again. It will do her good to be working in the garden, surrounded by plants rather than people. She walks briskly, feeling the wind fresh on her cheeks, and as she does so she lets go of her anxieties about the girl and Umiliana and the abbess, all the tangled threads of convent politics and conspiracy, and remembers instead what it is she does here: how the work of a good dispensary mistress is as much about tending plants as tending people.
The garden is probably no bigger than the abbess’s chambers (though Zuana has expanded it by half since she was voted into the post), yet it is home to close to a hundred herbs and medicinal shrubs. There are days between spring and autumn when the workload is such that she barely has time for mental prayer—when the fecundity of nature fills her with wonder and thanks, but her gratitude is waylaid by the attention, even devotion, that the plants require: weeding, splitting, staking, pruning, feeding, harvesting, deadheading, even waging war on their behalf, picking off and crushing small plagues of slugs and snails, which grow out of putrefaction and dampness to lay waste to her most tender and precious herbs.
This winter has been harsh, on both her fingers and the plants, but the worst is over now. She can feel it as soon as she moves into open ground. Protected on one side by the back of the smaller cloister and on the other by the vegetable garden wall, the herb patch is a sheltered enough space for spring to make an early appearance. During a clement March she will see most of the more robust or courageous plants poking their heads aboveground. This mass arrival is one of the most powerful memories of her childhood, for before the university instituted its own medicinal garden (spurred on, no doubt, by the fact that Padua and Pisa were already famous for theirs), the courtyard of her father’s house was a field of old buckets, pots, and wooden trays filled with seeds and cuttings. He would take her out sometimes in the first days of warm weather and make her listen to the silence.
There are scholars, great men of the present as well as the past, who believe that God created man because only through us could He celebrate the power of His vast creation. And thus it is both our pleasure and our duty to witness the wonder. You cannot hear it, can you? But even now as we stand here, under the earth a thousand bulbs and seeds and roots are budding and cracking and sprouting, an army of small tendrils and shoots rising up, moving through the earth toward the light, each one of them so tender that when you see them you will marvel at how they could have moved such a weight of soil above them to emerge. Imagine that, Faustina. Each year the repeating miracle of it.
The picture he painted was so strong, and he had such awe in his voice, that whenever she reads about or imagines the Second Coming, she sees graveyards like vast herb gardens, with bodies, as tender and young as those new shoots, pushing up against the rotten wood of their coffins and rising up toward the light of God to the sound of trumpets. Flesh incorruptible. She had told him of this vision once and he had smiled in that way parents do when their children are wiser or more charming than their years. But she could see that for him it was in some ways no more impressive than the more humble version of God’s glory that nature presented.
Given the complexities of the world around her, she has need of such a simple miracle today.
