In which case she would no doubt appreciate a good night’s rest—a touch of that same relief as is sometimes generously offered to those on their way to the gallows, though it would provoke dreams that would torment them further should they ever have the good fortune to wake up again. It is not easy even with the poppy syrup in her hands, for she has to find an innocent way to administer it. Candida has the wherewithal but she is too savvy for her own skin to take on something that would almost certainly end with her exposure. No, there has to be another way.
She slips the vial through the tear into the mattress, next to where the wax block is already nestling amid the horsehair and straw.
The bell for Sext sounds.
PERHAPS IF ZUANA had had more time. With time she might have thought further about the abbess’s story. With time she would have checked the supplies and samples in her room more rigorously. But a few minutes later the bell for Sext sounds, and between prayer and work and more prayer sometimes there is simply not enough time.
Over the next twenty-four hours the malady spreads further, strengthening as it goes, and in one of the infected sisters the fever becomes dangerously high. With the convent concert and play only a few weeks away, there is a growing concern that Santa Caterina will be too ill to participate or—more important—to entertain and impress others.
The next morning’s work hour finds Zuana in the dispensary sucking on a wad of ginger root to counteract the nausea that is rising in her stomach and ignoring the way her head is burning. She is ill, that is clear enough. But she is not yet incapacitated. Either the contagion will prove too strong for her or she will resist it. There is no point wasting time wondering which it will be. It is more important to find a way to fight back.
She has seen all the symptoms before in varying computations, the rhythm and severity transmuting over the years. One winter such an infection might come early, moving like a fast wind across a field, bending but not breaking any of the crop. Another year it might wait, feeding off the damp and fog until it is fat with fetid water, and affecting the oldest or those with moist humors worst, drowning more than a few in their own phlegm, only to be replaced the next year by one that favors heat rather than water, burning up rather than pulling down.
Remember, it is always best to try to contain rather than rely on curing, since by the time you have found a treatment that works the malady has often done its worst. During his lifetime her father had kept notes through the most virulent outbreaks, comparing the ages and constitutions of the ones who died with those same attributes in the ones who survived.
“That is all very well, but once started it is easier said than done,” Zuana murmurs, as she mixes up another batch of mint and rue vinegar water for the fever.
He had found that those people who nursed others— mothers, doctors, priests—were often most affected, which was not so surprising, for as well as their proximity it could be that God chose to take to Him the kindest and therefore those He loved best. Except that He also took at least as many sinners as would-be saints. While some resisted with tonics, others remained healthy without, as if they held the cure already within themselves. Then there were the ones who were not helped at all, even when they took anything and everything available.
As to the causes—well, the answers were as plentiful as the contagions. In his last years, her father had been drawn to the theory (which, like many, was built on an ancient one) of a physician colleague in Verona who argued that such diseases traveled by means of tiny malevolent seeds in the air that sat inside clothing and materials and, having entered the body, attacked and overcame the healthy seeds they found there, turning them into an enemy force within. Yet if they were so small as to be invisible, how could any doctor tell where they were hiding? Why were some more dangerous than others? And how, short of burning everything, even the air itself, could we destroy them? To the lack of answers he had brought only more questions. In the end, the outcome was the same: if it was not actually the plague or the pox, whatever it was eventually moved on, only to be replaced by something else the next year, and then another, not entirely unlike it, two years after.
