Over the years she has noticed that those novices who fight hardest often have the liveliest minds and are, without realizing it, looking for a place to accommodate them. Well, there is a whole world to absorb her here if she will only allow herself to become interested.
“I have a chart. It was my father’s—doctors use them. It marks the colors and the smell and the cloudiness of the liquid, so you can distinguish which area of the body is ailing.”
She shudders. “Ugh. I …I can’t imagine anything worse— studying an old man’s pee.”
“You’re right,” Zuana says, smiling. “Making sick people better is a disgusting thing to do. I cannot think why Our Lord spent so much time doing it.”
But that afternoon, while the mixture is simmering on the fire and Zuana visits the infirmary briefly to check on the condition of her bleeding patient, she comes back to find the young woman deep in one of the books.
THE NEXT DAY, Serafina’s mood changes again. She arrives with a drawn face and sunken eyes, ill temper issuing from her like a bad smell.
“Did you sleep badly?”
“Ha! How does anyone sleep well here when there is no night to sleep in?”
“I know it’s hard. It takes time to adjust to such a different rhythm. But you will find that you—”
“Get used to it? What, in the same way I will get used to lumps of fat floating in the soup or the moans that come from that madwoman who sticks nails into herself every night? Well, thank you, Suora Jailer, your wisdom is almost as comforting as the Bearded Sister’s.”
Zuana suppresses a smile. “I see you have come from instruction with the novice mistress.”
She scowls.
Suora Umiliana’s nickname is common knowledge. There is even a debate among the choir nuns as to how many years have gone by since the novice mistress last saw herself in any kind of mirror. To which they might fruitfully add, how many more of them would be like her if the rules against vanity weren’t so easily ignored?
Zuana can still remember the time, years ago now, when an old bishop with a new broom set out to ban reflecting surfaces entirely from the convent. It took barely a week for the first silver tray to arrive under a relative’s skirts, during which time a number of the nuns had spent their resting hours poised like Narcissus over the surface of the fishpond. The overzealous confessor recruited by that bishop didn’t last much longer. After six months of confessions where a queue of nuns kept him busy from morning till night with a litany of misdemeanors so trivial as to be unpunishable—except to the ligaments in his knees— he begged to be transferred to another convent. The day before he left they sang specially composed Vespers and slaughtered three chickens for supper. All in his honor, of course.
“It is an interesting question: what, if anything, smooth chins have to do with smooth souls. You might be surprised to find how quickly some women here start to feel a certain prickling under the skin.”
“Ho! You think I’m going to grow a beard as well as everything else?”
“Not necessarily. I think God has better things to do with His miracles. As I’m sure you have noticed already, we make room for both kinds here: smooth and hairy. Which means you will be able to choose.”
The girl stares at her for a moment, as if still teasing out the meaning from under the words. Zuana turns her attention to the worktable, arranging the pots into which they will put the congealing liquid from the pans to cool. She knows it is risky, saying such direct things, even indirectly, to a novice. But the girl has been given into her care by the abbess, and if she is to help her, then it can only be in the way she has helped herself: by telling the truth of how it is, alongside the wonder of how it might be for others.
Once she is back at work, the girl’s bad temper does not last long. They are halfway through the process of scooping the liquid into the pots when she makes it her business to ask about the bishop’s next remedy.
“His Holiness suffers from sore throats. So bad at times that he can barely swallow, let alone preach. We make him lozenges and syrup. Boiled treacle and honey, mixed with cinnamon, ginger, and lemon. Plus a few secret ingredients.”
“What are they?”
Zuana pauses.
“If I am to be your assistant, I should know. Unless you are worried I’ll sell them around town as soon as I get out.” There is possibly a touch of mischief in her voice now.
“Very well. When the mixture is simmering we shall add angelica, mithridate, pennyroyal, and hyssop. I doubt they mean much to you.”
“Why are they so secret, then?”
“Because as long as we are the only apothecary that uses them, the bishop’s physicians must remain faithful to us. A little diplomacy is needed here. The fact is, the bishop suffers from a third ailment—one of which he himself is unaware but that wounds others deeply.”
“What is it?”
“He has venomous breath.”
She snorts. “Did you tell that from his pee also?”
