And then there is the grille, that wall of braided iron between them and the outside world, so close and so far. She has flirted with its possibilities often; once she even went into the chapel during private prayer hour in the wild hope that he might be able to know what was going on in her mind and that very same moment be standing on the other side waiting for her, their thoughts and their fingers entwining through a lacework of metal. She had even sung a few notes to alert him, but the sound had been huge and haunting in the empty space and she was terrified that if there was anyone there they might report her and she would be incarcerated again. And that she couldn’t bear.
No, there will be no further punishment. She is a good girl now, as good as she was once bad: obedient, humble, sweet-natured. Of course they are still judging her, even when they pretend they are not. Suora Umiliana is by far the worst: There is no hiding place from His Divine Majesty. His gaze burns wood, breaks rock, melts iron. Even when, as happens sometimes, the pleasure of singing in chapel overwhelms everything, including for a moment her own dissemblance, Suora Umiliana’s stare is still there when she surfaces, piercing straight into her. How easy is it then for Him to penetrate through human flesh to the spirit?
The choir mistress sees it, though—or rather hears it, for it is a knowing that moves through the ear, not the eye: this sense of calm at the center of one’s being, stillness in the middle of a great wind. If someone asked her to describe it she might say it was almost an absence of self, though not an ecstasy as such. Oh, no, not like that. Not like the corpse woman in her cell. Not like her at all …
Serafina tries not to think of that afternoon, because when she does her body goes hollow and her hand starts to throb as if the old woman’s nails were still buried in her skin, piercing her palm, drawing enough blood so that when she entered the chapel she had had to wipe it off on her robes for fear that someone might see it and think she had done damage to herself. In fact the wounds had healed fast, almost as fast as they came. But sometimes at night when the churning inside her is such that she cannot sleep, she could swear she hears the mad old nun’s voice seeping through the wall of the cell, talking to her, calling her name. Serafina, Serafina, are you there? I knew you would come. He is here. He has been waiting for you. And she sees those eyes again, fathoms deep with wonder, and feels the melting, the falling away inside herself. It sparks such panic that she has to put her fingers in her ears to stop it, as if it were a siren song pulling her onto the rocks, for though she was witch-old and half dead there had been an intensity and ardor—yes, ardor—in that wizened face greater than that of the rest of them put together.
She would like to know more about her, understand what took place in that cell, but the abbess’s imposed silence is law and she must be seen to obey her now. Even Suora Zuana will tell her nothing. Perhaps if they worked together still …but that is over too. Her voice is deemed too precious to be put at risk by the rank smells of distillation or the contagions of the flesh, especially as there is an influenza taking its toll within the choir. Suora Zuana looks so tired she is almost asleep over her plate at meals. She imagines her, head bent over the crisp pages in candlelight, words and drawings blurring in front of her closing eyes as she searches for the right ingredients with which to stew up health again.
She thinks about it sometimes, that room; at moments she almost misses its particular strangeness: the cold, the fire, the books, the smells, the taste of the dandelion tea, the spiced heat of the ginger balls, and, in the middle, this even stranger woman, broad face and ruined fingers, content inside her passion for it all, as if there were no world but this one and it was God Himself rather than crows’ eggs or boiled roots inside those fat little pots. Mad, certainly, but not without wonder, even comfort.
