Zuana watches how, despite the resistance within the girl, her head and upper torso lift instinctively to greet the sound. To mark the celebration of the feast day of the blessed virgin martyr Saint Agnes, there are special chants, and Benedicta’s new psalm settings must be perfected in time for Vespers that evening. The abbess had her sights set on this service to introduce her songbird to the city, and certainly the setting is lovely, even to Zuana’s less discerning ears. Such young saints usually go down well with novices, for there is always a kernel of rebellion inside their godliness, and while Serafina may not share the saint’s proclivity for martyrdom, it is clear that the drama of the music is already inside her.
By the time she was her age Zuana could recognize the tastes of most major herb ingredients within a given remedy and identify each of their various healing properties. It would not surprise her if the girl was singing every note inside the silence now. Certainly she is listening hard enough. The haunting antiphonal chant ends and the psalm setting begins.
“You know, I wonder why you choose to continue to give yourself such pain. It must be one of the greatest joys of life to have a beautiful voice.”
The girl shakes her head, staring down into the treacle. “Songbirds don’t sing when they are kept in the dark.”
“That is true …except for the ones whose songs bring on the dawn.” She pauses. “I have heard a nightingale recently whose voice has the sweetness to ease an ocean of agony,” she says, thinking back to the moment in the cloisters when she had felt so at one with the world.
Serafina glances up sharply, as if the words have stung her in some way. The gesture causes the spoon to jump in the pan and a fat gob of boiling treacle spits up at her.
“Oh!” She yanks her hand back, dropping the spoon inside, her face contorted with the burn.
Zuana moves swiftly, grabbing her by the wrist, ripping the burning treacle off her skin, and pulling her over to the water butt. “Put your hand in!”
She hesitates, so Zuana does it for her, and she yelps again, this time at the fierce cold. “Keep it there. It will stop the pain and hold off the burn.”
Back at the fire she sets about rescuing the wooden spoon, while behind her she registers the sound of the girl’s weeping. Once started, she is not able to stop.
Zuana finds herself remembering a winter afternoon in the scriptorium, so long ago. A young woman, furious and desperate by degrees, she sits staring at her own tears splashing onto the page she is copying. And as she tries to wipe them away before they cause damage to the paper, she finds herself studying the great illuminated letter O that begins the text, inside and around which, following the curve of the gold leaf, she can make out painstakingly tiny written words: once read, never to be forgotten.
My mother wanted me to become a nun to fatten the dowry of my sister. And to obey my mother I became one.
She repeats the words now, accentuating the patina of verse inside them.
Yet the first night I spent in a cell I heard my lover’s voice down below, and rushed down and tried to open the door.
Behind her in the room, the crying has stopped.
But the mother abbess caught me. “Tell me, little sister, do you have a fever or are you in love?”
She turns to the girl. “You are not the first, you know, to feel so angry or abandoned.”
“Ha! You wrote that?”
The incredulity on her face makes Zuana laugh out loud. “No, not me. My quarrel with these walls was different. But another novice—just like you.”
“Who?”
“Her name outside the convent was Veronica Grandi.”
“Was? Is she gone?”
“Oh, yes, it was a long time ago. When I first came— a novice like you—I was apprenticed to the scriptorium. I found the words disguised inside one of the illustrations in a psalter. There was a name and a date: 1449, a hundred years before me.”
“What happened to her?”
“How is your hand?”
“I can’t feel anything.”
“Then you can take it out.”
As the water drips off her fingers, Zuana can see a small welt of angry red skin. The numbness should stem the pain until the blister forms.
“Later I looked for her record in the convent archives. She took her vows a year later and became Suora Maria Teresa.”
“Oh. So she never left.” Her voice is hollow with the realization.
“No. When she died thirty years later she had been the convent’s abbess for nine years.” She pauses. “Her entry in the convent necrology tells of her great leadership and humility and how on her deathbed she sang the praises of the Lord with a wide smile on her face. I think it possible that she had forgotten whoever was waiting by the gate by then, don’t you?”
