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Within a few days, however, another form of penance is visited on her when a powerful infection slides into the convent, an epidemic of wheezing and sneezing followed by a high fever and vomiting. Once in, it moves like water, with six choir nuns and one conversa brought down by it in as many days. While such maladies are common enough during winter, the virulence of this one takes Zuana by surprise, and to avoid further contagion she quarantines each afflicted nun to her cell, with only herself and a nurse conversa to tend them while she searches for remedies. Together they use cloths soaked in balm mint and vinegar water to keep down the fever and a tonic of ragwort and pe
Zuana, who by then has barely slept for nights on end, asks for a meeting with the abbess to request that she be granted more help—or at least to inquire if the help she once had might be returned to her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SOMETIMES AT NIGHT inside the cell she has to stop herself from dancing. He is here. He has come. They will find a way.
Though the pages of poems have not been returned to her, she knows the words—and his music for them—by heart, and when she twirls her body to the sounds inside her head she can feel the swish of soft petticoats beneath the serge, and the silk of her hair, washed and brushed under her loosely tied scarf, sliding over her shoulders. With her chest unpacked now, the cold stone has grown softer and there is color against the gray: the weave of the rug, the gold threads of the tablecloth, the glint of the silver candlesticks, the painted blues and scarlet within the Mado
But she no longer thinks of that. And she will not be mean with her good fortune, either. When she goes she will leave all this here for the next one, an altogether kinder legacy than vomit and death.
Much of this comfort is thanks to her new conversa. Two days after the Feast of Saint Agnes, the malicious Augustina had been replaced by Candida, a sturdy young woman who knows her way around convent restrictions and who for a small sum (or the equivalent in clothing or trinkets) can make a novice’s life less bleak in many ways: extra candles, special soap, even leftover delicacies from the kitchens, from which she takes her own cut before delivery. But Candida’s finest gift is her hands, for though they are not those of a lady—too much scrubbing and washing for that—they have a gentle touch and sometimes, in the private hour before Compline, when she has finished brushing the river of Serafina’s hair, she plays a little at arranging the locks, and her fingers move across Serafina’s shoulders, sending a cascade of tiny shivers down her back. The first time it happens it lights a fluttery fire of memory in Serafina’s belly, as much for the playful hands of her younger sister as for the wilder caresses of her imagination. The next night, when Candida stands behind her waiting, as if for further instructions, for an instant Serafina’s mind goes to the gargoyle twins, who can often be spotted hand in hand and are rumored to compensate for each other’s deformities in the strangest of ways. The novice who told her that had a half smile on her face as she did so, and as Serafina turns toward Candida now she registers something similar in her look and it makes her confused. Whatever sweetness she is being offered, it will no doubt come at a price; and there are more important things for Serafina to spend her trinkets upon.
What she really wants from her, though, is impossible, for even corruption has its limits and Candida’s influence, it seems, does not extend outside the gates. She ca
Though there is still a fast stream of excitement ru
It still makes her shake to think of how, on that first night, she had lost her bearings trying to get back to the cloisters in time and been caught by the watch sister. It had been black as hell out there, with all ma
“Behold, I come to You; You whom I have loved …always. ”
And then that single word echoing back through the chapel grille: “Brava!”
It had been all she could do not to shout back to him: You have come. Oh, you have come. We will find a way.
Instead, though, she had put her head down and become a nun.
OH, THEY MUST be so proud of her, of what they think they have achieved. She is proud of herself. The transformation is everywhere: in the way she walks, eyes to the ground as if God were to be found in every flagstone, or the way she sits in chapter or refectory shy as a young Mado