“Why? Do you know someone who has need of that as well?”
She scowls. Certainly she would not be the first daughter to find her future prospects altered by a sister’s strategic lust. But she is not about to tell Zuana her secrets. Not yet, anyway.
“And the poppy that gave me foul dreams. Which one is that?”
“It is there. On one of the shelves.”
The girl follows her eye. “This one? Or this one?” She reaches a hand out.
“No, no. And be careful with that.”
“Why? Is it poison, too?”
“No, it is blood.”
“Blood? Whose?”
“Sister Prudenza’s. She has begun to suffer from fits, and I am tending her.”
“It doesn’t look like blood.”
“That is because it is mixed with crow’s egg.”
The girl looks at Zuana as if the devil had just slid from under her skirts; Zuana has to smile.
“It is a known remedy. When taken internally in small doses regularly, it can help with fits, if the affliction is mild.”
“And if it is serious?”
“Then I wouldn’t be able to help her.” And she sees again a young novice, her body like a fish pulled out of water, rigid and thrashing on the cold cell floor.
The girl puts the bottle back on the shelf as if the very handling of it might contaminate her. “Are there many you can’t help?”
“That depends on what ails them.”
Zuana knows what she is thinking, of course: that she is the one who will never be cured, for her ailment is too grave.
“I wonder they let you do all this,” she says, looking around.
“What? You think because nuns serve God we should have to die sooner or hurt more?”
“No. I mean …well, there is not much praying about it.”
“Oh, but you are wrong.” Of course she has heard it before, this blindness to finding God in anything that does not involve praying or suffering. “This room is full of prayer. Look around you. Everything here—every herb, every juice, every ingredient of every remedy—comes from nature and the earth, which along with the heavens has been created by Him for us to worship. Even our capacity to understand it is given by Him. Honor the physician for the need one has of him. For the most High has created him. Ecclesiasticus 38, verse 1.”
The girl stares at her, then laughs nervously, as if they have changed places and now she is the solid one to Zuana’s madness.
Of course. When she first arrived it was the nuns who spoke in rivers of scriptures who were the worst company, the sheer intensity of their absorption making her feel even more abandoned. She is easier with them now. Sometimes they even bring her texts about herbs they have found in the scriptures, though they have yet to show her one she did not know before.
“You know a lot. Did you learn it all here?”
“No. My father taught me much of it. The rest I learned from books—or have found out myself.”
“Your father? Was he the one who put you inside?”
“No. Yes.” She pauses. “When he died there was nowhere else for me to go.”
“And what about you? Did you want to be here?”
“I—” She stops. Which is the worse sin: to lie or to encourage despair? “There was nowhere else for me to go.”
Serafina stares at her. “How long ago was that?”
“Sixteen years.”
Zuana registers her shocked intake of breath. The pity is palpable. She, of course, never intends to be so old or so defeated.
She has turned and is looking out the window. Upright now, she will be able to see the edge of the graveyard beyond the herb garden wall. Zuana watches as she stands transfixed. Then she turns back.
“She says I have to work with you.”
“Madonna Chiara?”
“Yes. She says the Lord brings each of us to Him in different ways. And that you are a good and loving nun.”
“Then you must listen to her. She is the abbess, picked for her humility and learning.”
“Really. Is that why she wears bits of her hair curled like a court lady?”
Once again Zuana admires the nimbleness of the girl’s mind. When she stops yearning for what she cannot have, such wit will add texture to the quotidian nature of convent life, which can seem so barren when you first experience it.
“Maybe it is her way of trying to make you feel at home.” “What, by wearing yesterday’s style?” she retorts sourly.
“Anyway, I will never, ever feel that way here.”
But in fact the process has started already. She just doesn’t know it yet.
SHE PULLS THE stones out of her pocket. What if none of them are big enough? They had been easy enough to scoop up into her sleeve as she tossed the handful into the pond, but there had been no time to sort out the heavy from the light. She rubs off the dirt and lays them down on one of the sheets of paper taken from her breviary. She does not need to read the words to know what is written there.
Who hath not gazed into my lady’s eyes nor gathered her sweet glances here on earth, he knoweth not love’s hell nor paradise who never heard her sighs as light as air, the gentle music of her speech and mirth.
