Save for the occasional drops of rain coming off the evergreen shrubs and trees, it is quiet in the garden. The lavender and the rosemary, bruised from the downpour, are thick with aromatic pungency as she rolls her fingers along their stems. In the early beds, the calendula and fennel and hypericum are already reviving. She clears a space and softens the soil around them so that the shoots can expand. Next will come the belladonna and the betonica and the cardiaca, the plant that strengthens the heart, which once it starts will grow as thick as nettles and as fast as weeds. She used to wonder whether in the very beginning someone had plaited together the alphabet and the seasons: marking the first plants as B’s and C’s, then F’s and H’s, leaving the poppy, the valerian, and the verbena to come later. By then the garden will have gone wild, so there will be barely an inch of space left.
She slips her fingers under the newly sprouting fennel, with its lacy, feathery fronds. Her father was right. It is indeed a wonder how something that can barely hold its head up in the air has the force to break through heavy, sodden earth. Yet give it another month of good weather, and its stem will be proudly upright, thick with its own juice. Soil, light, water, sun. Growth, death, putrefaction, regeneration. No need for confession or forgiveness or redemption here. Life without soul. So clear, so simple. Oh, Zuana, you were bred for plants, not convent politics.
“I thought I might find you here.”
She turns quickly. The abbess is treading her way carefully through the undergrowth.
“So. How are all your new children doing?” She gestures to the garden around them.
“It’s early days. But I think we will have good crop of calendula.”
“Possibly you will be able to harvest some off your cheek.”
Zuana puts her hand up and wipes away a streak of mud. The abbess, in contrast, is clean and newly pressed, though it is her complexion that gives her away most obviously; the choir nuns who live in cloisters stay pale and smooth without the aid of Apollonia’s powders, while those who work outside find the sun and the winter winds excavating rivers of broken veins in their cheeks and noses. How much this releases them from the sin of vanity is hard to know, though an inspection might find fewer silver trays doubling as mirrors in their cells.
“I am come to talk to you about the novice. To explain what happened that night at the dock.”
“You don’t have to explain anything, Madonna Abbess.”
“No, I don’t have to, that is true. Rather I choose to.” She smiles and looks around. “Tell me—where is the hellebore?”
Zuana points to an evergreen shrub toward the back of one of the beds. The abbess lifts her skirts and moves over to it.
“It looks so …innocent.”
“The poison comes from the root, not the foliage.”
She nods, studying it as she starts to talk.
“After I wrote to her father, he took an unconscionably long time in replying. By the time he did she appeared to have settled, which is why I did not think fit to communicate his answer. To his credit, he was as frank in his responses as I had been in my questions. He told me that his daughter had always been of strong character, clever and full of passion, first for one thing, then another, and it was this …volatility …that had decided him that although she had initially been chosen for marriage she might be better ruled by God than any husband. Unfortunately he had omitted to inform her—and us—of this decision until rather late in the proceedings.”
Zuana moves her eyes over the garden beds. Strong character. There are plants like that, ones that survive no matter what— frost, rain, sun, insects—while others born from the same handful of seeds wither away beside them. They are the ones you should nurture and take cuttings from, rather than putting them behind walls to die without propagating. “And the young man?”
“The music teacher? Unfortunately, he was less than frank about him. By then, by God’s grace, I had other information. It seems it was a considerable attachment. When it was discovered, there were accusations and violent scenes, and the man was dismissed. Hence the decision to send her to us here in Ferrara rather than Milan, to separate them with distance and avoid further scandal. It was only later that I found he had made his way independently to the city so he could stay in touch with her, by a form of communication the manner of which they had decided earlier.”
“That is a great deal to have discovered,” Zuana says, for there is no way she cannot be impressed.
The abbess shrugs. “In a good family there is always someone who knows how to find things out. An impoverished stranger in a foreign city warms to friends who open their purses—and a young man who has made a noble conquest likes to boast about it.”
