“I am trespassing upon your work hour. God needs you for other things.” The elder nun takes a step back, but the gaze remains. “I thank you for this …this talk between us. You are always in my prayers. I hope I have not disturbed you too much.”
“No, not at all. I …I will come to Angelica soon.”
But she makes a dismissive gesture with her hands. “Do not worry. I will let you know if you are needed. If the prayers do not help. God be with you, Suora Zuana. You are precious to Him, and He is watching your journey.”
“And with you, Suora Umiliana.”
AS SOON AS she is alone again she mixes up the vinegar water and rue and moves on to some fresh eau-de-vie and basil. Though she knows she is ill, she is determined at least to finish the work hour.
How many batches of these remedies has she made up in this room? Twelve, thirteen years’ worth? How many more to come? What will be her allotted span? Fifty, fifty-five? Certainly there are nuns who live that long. Even sixty. Sixty years …She thinks of time almost as a weight. She sees a set of scales, with the years like bags of salt on one side, balanced on the other by good works and prayer. Perhaps when the two are in perfect harmony she will be ready. But how does one measure goodness? And does all time weigh the same? Surely not. Days spent in prayer or sacrifice should be worth more than those taken up in watering plants or distilling juices. Perhaps the point is not balance after all but the tilting of one side in favor of the other?
She wonders if this is something she already knows but has simply forgotten because she feels so strange. Yet she cannot shift the thought that recently her progress has seemed so slow. Sister Imbersaga was barely twenty-two years old when she was taken. On the surface she had been just another nun, in truth rather ordinary. So why her? Unless it was that very ordinariness that had made her the chosen one.
Chosen. Even the word smells of carrion these days. That is what heretics believe: that God has chosen some and not others, and that His choice is more important than a life of good works or a convent full of nuns interceding for your soul. Of course they will burn in everlasting fire for such thoughts—though hell must be overflowing now, for the sickness is still spreading, crossing mountains, seas, and borders, taking villages, universities, towns, even nobles and princes with it, almost as if it is another form of malevolence moving through the air. No wonder the true church grows so nervous for its flock. What had been the abbess’s words? They would even restrict letter writing as not conducive to the tranquillity of our state. Yet how could they do that? Such enforced isolation would surely start another kind of fever.
The basil and eau-de-vie is barely mixed when she hears footsteps and turns to find a young conversa, whose name she cannot remember, in the doorway, a package in her hand.
“I …Madonna Abbess sent this for you.”
The girl steps forward hesitantly. She is new to convent life and finds the infirmary the strangest place of all, inhabited as it is by mad crones, with the dispensary sister, flush-faced and sweating, suddenly the maddest of them all. Zuana holds out her hand but the girl ducks by her and leaves it on the workbench, moving away so fast she knocks against a table as she goes.
The package bears the bishop’s seal, though it has been broken. The abbess will have already checked the contents: no doubt some flowery message from His Holiness, thanking the worthy sisters for their kindness and offering them this gift of cochinilla in recompense for their goodness. Inside the cloth wrapping is a small burlap bag. Zuana holds it in her palm, weighing it up quickly. Ten grams, maybe more. Together with what she has put by, enough for both the kitchen and the dispensary. She pulls open the strings and lifts it to her nose. There is a dusky quality to its scent, of something grown and dried in great heat a long way away. How far has it traveled to get here? Carefully she pours a small quantity of it into her hand. The small granules are a dark dull gray. You would never think they could contain such fiery color. Red gold: that is what people call it. What little she knows of it comes from one of her father’s books, a history of New Spain written by a doctor who had followed the army there. He told of how the dye was made from worms that sprouted out of a cactus, grown in a desert somewhere where they had never heard of the Garden of Eden or Jesus Christ, but where the color produced was strong enough to paint His blood as if it had been shed for them that very day. The book had shown a drawing of the plant, soft and spiky at the same time, but not the men who cultivate it, so she has to imagine what they look like: naked, painted skins, or lips stuck out like plates into the air, as she has seen in drawings elsewhere.
