“Nevertheless, she must be put to work in some way, and you and she have already established some connection.” The abbess hesitates, as if this is an idea that has just come to her and is only being thought through as she speaks. “Once I have seen her I shall send her to you. You may show her around the convent and then find her something useful to do in the dispensary. She is bright enough and may even find some pleasure in the instruction.” And now there is a ghost of smile on her lips. “Or you in the giving of it.”
Zuana thinks briefly of the drawings on her desk and the notes needed on the varying strengths of the drafts, not to mention her coveted solitude, which allows her father’s voice as her hidden companion. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. She bows her head. “This is my penance?”
“Not at all. No, this is a gift rather than a penance. For both of you. For penance you will forgo dinner tonight and eat scraps from the table. There. I think that completes the matter.”
They hold each other’s eyes for a moment, and then the abbess turns to the brushing of her gown again.
OH, SWEET, SWEET Jesus, is this how it will be? Day after day after day, is this how it will be? Because if it is, then surely she will die here. There has not been a second when she has not been prodded by or spied on by somebody, starting from the moment they had shaken her awake that morning, and she had felt so sick and dizzy she could barely focus, her head filled with tumbling nightmares, and she had opened her eyes onto this fat bearded woman’s face, thrusting itself into hers, telling her to thank the Lord for bringing her safely through the night, and glory be to Him for this, her first day in Santa Caterina.
And as soon as she heard those words she was back again: the same prison hole, only dark now, straw and debris everywhere, and another mad black-and-white magpie in front of her, but this one with a voice like a velvet cloak, trying to get her to drink something from a poison vial. She knew she shouldn’t have taken it; that it was giving in and would not—could not—help. Her kindness—for she was kinder than the rest—had made her want to howl and scream and howl again until the very pillars in the cloister started to shake and the whole place came smashing down around them. Only by then she was so tired, and suddenly she couldn’t cry anymore. So much sorrow, so many tears, had come out of her these past few weeks that her very insides were hollowed out and there was nothing left. She had almost been grateful when the drink had made her quiet. It was as if everything around her was going on behind a gauze curtain. Even the stone walls were no longer hard anymore, and when the magpie had opened up her dowry chest, waves of scarlet and gold light seemed to flow over and out of it.
And the woman had been so gentle. She had sat and talked to her, picked her up and held her—yes, she had done that; she had held her—so that she had felt the warmth of another body seeping through the robes, and it had reminded her of …and then she had wanted to cry all over again, only she was too muddled and too tired.
After that there had been nothing, then too much of everything, an avalanche of awesome, awful dreams, so vivid they were more real than life itself, ending in one in which she was half buried in a lake of liquid stone, so that every time she opened her mouth to sing, molten rock poured in. She was so frightened that she started to scream, only then the stone poured in even faster, until she couldn’t breathe.
That was when she had been shaken awake by the squashed-faced crone spitting and babbling about God’s grace. And though it was morning and she was no longer drowning, she was still in a cell in the convent of Santa Caterina in the city of Ferrara, while everyone she loved was far away, leaving her at the mercy of an army of gargoyles, all so stuffed with piety they can no longer remember what it is like to be living, breathing women.
