Zuana watches as the girl struggles to digest the wonder and the horror of it. If there had been someone waiting outside the gates for her, how much longer might it have taken? A dead father was an acceptable person to miss; even the sternest of confessors and novice mistresses found it hard to punish an excess of filial grief. But those who came with darker, more suspicious memories would have to keep them secret. It is not her job to ask. When the door closes behind a novice, her past remains outside. Yet sometimes it helps to have someone listen.
“I cannot …” The girl stumbles. “I mean, if you—”
But whatever she is about to say is interrupted by a hammering on the door.
“Suora Zuana! Suora Zuana!”
The conversa who enters is young and plump, her face glistening with sweat.
“You must come—please—now. It’s Suora Magdalena. I …I think …I don’t know …I can’t wake her.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I–I was crossing the courtyard with laundry when I heard voices coming out of her cell. It was work hour, but I thought—well, maybe one of the sisters was in there with her. There was laughter.” She stumbles over the words. “Girls’ voices, laughing. Then suddenly there was silence. So I opened the door …and there was no one there. The cell was completely empty. Just Suora Magdalena on her pallet.”
Zuana is already reaching for the pot of camphor crystals.
“I am coming, Letizia.” As she turns she sees Serafina’s face, alive with curiosity. “Um …you are excused the rest of the work hour. Go back to your cell and wait for Vespers.”
“Can’t I come with you?”
“No.”
“But …I am your assistant. That’s what the abbess said. That I was to help you.”
“Yes, and the help I need is for you to go back to your cell. Letizia, find a conversa to come to take charge of this liquid until I get back.”
“But I could do that,” Serafina protests. “I have studied the remedy. I know how and when to put in the herbs.”
Which is true enough, except that the rules forbid leaving a novice in an unattended dispensary. There are too many ingredients that could cause damage to others. Or herself.
“You are risking the charge of disobedience, Serafina. Go to your cell. Now.”
And whatever good work has been done between them is wiped out by the fury in her eyes. She pushes roughly past Letizia, and the door slams behind her.
THE WORK HOUR is still in force and the cloisters are deserted as Zuana makes her way swiftly across the courtyard. The choir has stopped but a few excited voices slip out from the embroidery room above, a dancing inflection inside them. This must have been the laughter that Letizia heard, she thinks; sound moves strangely through winter fogs, and while it is not as dense as some days the air is still gauzy gray around her.
The door to Suora Magdalena’s cell is half open, as if waiting for visitors. She feels a strange prickling down her neck as she walks in.
Before her eyes have had time to adjust to the gloom (even in daylight it remains murky in here), Zuana is struck by the smell. She has prepared herself for sickness, even the telltale scent of death, but this is different: light, fragrant, like a wave of perfume—roses or even frangipani—summer smells in winter. It is almost as shocking as the sight that greets her on the bed.
Magdalena’s pallet is on the floor against the back wall, next to a water jug and a plate, a bucket for excrement nearby. Recently, Letizia has reported, there has been almost nothing in it to empty. But then the less one takes in, the less there is to evacuate, and over the years, in her relentless quest for God, Suora Magdalena has been waging a steady war of attrition on her body, training it to survive on almost nothing.
When she entered the convent the century itself had been young, and there are no other sisters left alive from that time. Everyone, though—Zuana included—knows something of the story: how as a humble novice from the poorest family she had been able to go for weeks on end with only the host to sustain her, and that while she was in such a blessed state her hands and feet bled in sympathy with Christ’s own.
Such godliness had been all the fashion then and Duke Ercole, a man with an appetite for holy women, who collected piety as others collected china or antiquities, had found her in a nearby town and installed her in Santa Caterina, where he and his family would visit, bringing members of the court to hear her prophecies—for sometimes she would go into ecstasies for them.
