The girl scowls, then bends down and grabs a great handful of stones. Zuana watches as she tosses them petulantly into the pond, the fatter ones sinking while a few others skitter and flash against the ice, and she thinks, not for the first time, that once this novice stops railing there are ways in which she might fit well in here. Under the guise of humility, the cloisters harbor more than their fair share of tart tongues.
They make their way through the orchard, with its army of pruned fruit trees stubby-fisted in the gloom, until they reach the convent wall, looming up in front of them to meet a leaden sky. The air is a thick gray now, the fog already swallowing up the buildings they have left behind.
“How big is this place?” The girl’s voice is dull with the scale of her incarceration.
“The walls mark out three blocks on each side. It is one of the largest convents in the city.”
So large, in fact, that girls from country families sometimes find solace in the amount of open ground and sky. Others, brought up on stories of court life and city streets, are less comforted, though even they can be surprised at the amount of land a rich convent can carve for itself in the middle of a town. How impressed was Zuana when she first walked here? All she remembers now is how small and ill-stocked the herb garden was, and how half the cuttings she’d brought with her, wrapped with the clothing inside her chest, had died in a freak snowstorm that first winter. Winter. Yes, always the most painful time of the novice’s first year.
“It takes maybe half an hour to walk the line of the walls all the way around. Of course, you can only do that from the inside, as the fourth wall is the river. You do not know any of this?”
The girl shrugs. If a prospective novice has not been a boarder, it is usual for them at least to visit the place where they are to spend the rest of their lives. But even this she has not done. Would it have made her passage any easier? Certainly the wealthy benefactors who come to see how their money is spent, or to reassure themselves about a daughter’s prospective future, are eager to be shown the wonders of it all, for Santa Caterina has a past as rich as its present. One of the first foundations in the city, it had originally been a small house for Benedictine monks on an island in the river, but over the years water fever scythed down so many souls that it fell into disuse, to be rebuilt and refounded only when trading money drained the marshes, rechanneling the river and with it the most deadly of the infections.
Every nun knows the litany of its current success: how, with better drainage and, now, the use of distilled oils and herbs for fumigants in all the main rooms and corridors (these additions are Zuana’s work, though the rules of modesty would prohibit singling her out for personal praise), the worst of the summer contagions are kept at bay, so that today Santa Caterina sustains a community of almost sixty choir nuns, eight or nine novices, a few young boarders, and twenty-five converse, all working so tirelessly together that most years the convent sends out baskets of early figs and pomegranates as gifts to the local bishop and as thanks—and encouragement—to its more generous patrons.
Not that they live on charity. Far from it. The river bordering the fourth side of the convent is its trade route as well as an extra form of security. Arriving by water, a visitor sees a dock carved out of the outer wall with a locked door, behind which are supply rooms, themselves locked again from the inner side so that all business can take place without the merchants or traders ever having to encounter the nuns directly. From here the convent takes in flour, fresh fish, whatever meat it does not rear itself, wine, spices, sugar, cloth, threads, inks, and paper. Some of the same barges that bring deliveries leave almost full again, with cases of hand-copied breviaries and hour books, embroidered cloths and church robes, medicines, liquors, and painted religious figurines. The convent’s cellars are packed with good wines for feast days and festivals, and the kitchens produce fresh bread daily, spiked with rosemary, along with bottles of the earliest pressings of olive oil, as green and fragrant as the pulp it is squeezed from. Add to this income the dowries of the choir nuns, the fees from the boarders, and the rents from a dozen or so properties bequeathed to the convent in perpetuity, and there are years when Santa Caterina boasts account books to rival a great estate.
Zuana offers Serafina morsels of this colorful picture as they pass along by the walls and the river storehouse, and there are moments when the young woman seems engaged enough even to ask questions. She would like to tell her more, but she knows there is no point.
