Before they close the lid, the abbess unwraps something from beneath her cloak and sets it under the young girl’s bandaged hands. It is a jeweled crucifix, less precious than the one she uses for special feast days but rich enough to buy the beginnings of a new life for the person who possesses it. The instructions have already been made clear: on no account should she attempt to sell or pawn it within the city of Ferrara or its dominions. But once the young couple is far enough away, it is theirs to do with as they see fit. No one will question where it came from, and even if they did there will be no record of a precious cross missing from any convent in Ferrara, and certainly none of any escapee who might have stolen it. The novice Serafina will be long dead and buried by then, her obituary, largely indistinguishable from a hundred others, inscribed in the convent necrology by Suora Scholastica’s elegant hand and part of her dowry passed on to the convent.
The girl had listened and understood. “I don’t deserve this,” she had said, staring at the crucifix.
“I don’t know about that, but I fear you will find it hard to live without it.”
Though now, as the two women stand looking down at her, surely the same thought is going through both their heads.
“Because she is so weak I gave her too little rather than too much,” Zuana says quietly. “I pray it will be the right amount.”
Her words put speed into their step and they close the chest (picked for its empty knots, through which a certain amount of air will flow) and return to the mortuary, where they face the problem of how to weigh down the empty coffin enough not to arouse suspicion when it is carried to the chapel and burial plot the next morning.
Zuana has the answer ready. From the dispensary she brings an armful of books and lays them at the bottom.
The abbess stares at her. “We are both sacrificing jewels, it seems.”
Zuana shakes her head. “She is not so heavy—and like you I have greater ones. Many of the remedies in these I have tried and found wanting. The better ones I have already memorized.”
“Good.” She pauses. “Perhaps it would be wise for you to memorize more.”
Zuana feels the hollowness open up inside her. “When? When will it come?”
“I do not know for certain. Her leaving will steady us for a while. But it will happen, for in the end it does not depend on us. If it is not this bishop, it will be the next, or the one after him.” She smiles. “I am sorry.”
But of course Zuana has known it all along. How bad will it be? Though she can fill her mind with information, she will be able to do little with it if they see fit to destroy her choir of cures. She imagines the convent graveyard in the future, with two neatly dug new graves. Perhaps God will see fit to take them both by the time the worst happens.
“Come,” the abbess says briskly. “We had better finish this.”
Together they fashion a softer shape made from the abbess’s old shifts wrapped around the books, then cover the whole thing with the thick muslin. The abbess has already agreed with Father Romero that by the time he comes at dawn to conduct the service the coffin will be nailed down. Until then either Zuana or she herself will keep the night vigil over the “body.”
There is nothing more to do.
“God be with you, Suora Zuana.”
“And with you, Madonna Abbess.”
And so, leaving Zuana with the coffin full of books, Madonna Chiara calls for the chief conversa and supervises as four sturdy younger converse hoist the trousseau chest onto the cart and pull it through the gardens in the fading light down to the storehouse, where it is placed in the outer chamber, ready for the bargemen to find it there the next morning.
HER PALMS THROB. Her palms throb and her throat hurts. Her throat hurts and she cannot breathe well. When she opens her eyes she is blind. In the few seconds it takes her to remember and make sense of where she is, she is gripped by panic, which smothers as powerfully as the layers of heavy fabric that cover her face when she tries to move.
She relaxes her body and tries to breathe more calmly. There is air but it feels thick in her nostrils, and she knows from a thousand stories of premature burial that it cannot last forever.
But she is not buried. She is in the trousseau chest. In the storehouse. And somewhere out there, behind the door, on the river, is a boat even now perhaps pulling up and …
Yes, yes. That is surely what is happening. They have been through this, Zuana and she, a dozen times: how, as soon as the convent is asleep, Zuana will make her way across the gardens and, using the abbess’s keys, let herself through first one door and then the other. She will open the chest, the girl will get out, and together they will go through the outer doors to wait on the dock until …
