Still, better her than the ones who suffer for effect, parading His pain like their coat of arms. The worst offender here is Suora Elena, who spends her life telling anyone who will listen how much she endures. “Oh, I could not sleep last night because of the great stabbing in my side.” Or, limping into chapel wincing and groaning until someone is forced to ask her what is wrong, “Oh, it pleases God to let a thigh wound fester. I am grateful for it, though it is nothing compared with His suffering,” before limping off, smug in the knowledge that He has marked her out as more special than anyone else—though those with sharp eyes might notice how quickly she recovers her step when she thinks no one is watching.
ZUANA, IN CONTRAST, has never felt any of these things.
Her fault—for she understands that is what it is—lies in a different direction: the need to heal Him. So much is she her father’s daughter that by the time she became old enough to understand the Passion of Christ her instinct had been to save rather than worship Him. In her first weeks in the convent, when her future had felt like a life sentence, she had kept herself from despair during the endless hours in chapel by studying that great hanging body, detailing the ways in which, had she been called upon, she might have repaired the damage: which poultices and herbs she might have used to stanch the flow of blood, the salves with which she would have treated the whiplashes and the cuts, the ointments she would have rubbed around the jagged flesh to avoid infection. Even, most heretical of all, the draft she might have given Him to blunt the agony.
Had her father ever felt the same thing? She wonders sometimes what he would have made of this world in which she lives now. He had not been a total stranger to it. As a doctor at the university with connections to the court, he had occasionally been called upon to treat noble nuns, if their condition was dangerous enough and the abbess sanctioned his visit. Perhaps if he had taken her with him, she might have found it easier. As it was, she only heard these stories when he wrote them up in his treatment books. And out of those she remembers only one: the time he came back from a convent on the outskirts of the city where he treated a nun who had done violence to herself: first beating her head against the wall until the blood ran and then, when they confined her to her cell, somehow getting hold of a kitchen knife with which she stabbed herself a dozen times before they prized the weapon away from her. When he arrived she had been tied down and was delirious, her life dripping out through those dozen wounds onto the floor. So much blood had been lost there was nothing he could do except offer something to help her with the shock and the suffering. But the abbess had refused, convinced that the devil was inside her now and that if she was soothed by the potion he might renew his attack. “When I questioned them, they said no one had noticed anything amiss with her before that morning,” he had said, shaking his head, though whether from disbelief or pity he did not say.
She thinks about it sometimes, that story: how it could be possible that something so powerful should erupt out of nothing. In her experience, a well-run convent is as alert to the distress of its sisters as to any excess of joy, since either can tilt the balance of calm living. And even if it had been the work of the devil (and though she has come across mischief—even occasional malice—in this republic of women, she has yet to make the devil’s acquaintance), why had the abbess or the novice mistress seen no signs of it? So she gives thanks to God that when it came to the decision as to where she would spend the rest of her life, it had been Santa Caterina that had taken her in, welcoming her thin voice and her dowry chest as full of remedies as of prayers.
BECAUSE SHE HAS some understanding of the relationship between exhaustion and acquiescence, and because she does not want to resort to further potions to counter rebellion, Zuana finds herself taking a good deal of care in planning how she and the young woman begin their work together.
Over the first few days, as the effects of the poppy wear off, the impact of physical labor takes over: twice a day, every day excluding Sunday, either out in the cold tending the herb garden or inside cleaning the infirmary and the dispensary, sweeping and mopping floors, scouring pots and bowls, scrubbing down the workbenches. The eradication of previous ingredients to avoid the slippage of leftovers into new ones was a part of her father’s teaching, but Zuana has dismissed the conversa who usually does the heavy manual cleaning and uses her new assistant instead.
