Of course, she hadn’t told her anything. In some ways she didn’t even mind the poking; it meant her mad behavior the night before must have had some impact, since the abbess was clearly worrying that she might have been sold a fake. In fact it had made her feel better to say nothing. Or, if she did speak, just to hold to the same phrase she had used with the dispensary magpie, though her voice came out scratched from all the howling the night before: “The words came from my mouth, not my heart.”
It had made the abbess angry, her refusal to talk. Not that she showed it, not directly. Instead she had put on a pious face and emphasized how the bishop was such an important, busy man and the shame of scandal, the ruin of the family… After a while she had stopped listening and started singing songs silently inside her head instead, until the abbess became impatient and finished the interview abruptly. And while all the concentrating on not concentrating had made her head ache, she had felt pleased with herself. Because she had been in this stinking prison a whole twenty-four hours, and it had not dented her resolve one bit.
Now, as she walks across the cloisters—how cold the stone is all around her, truly like the inside of a crypt—alone with her thoughts for the first time that day, on her way to meet last night’s magpie, she promises herself that she will not be so scared or mad anymore but, instead, will use her wits as much as her fear. Yet even as she thinks it she feels a great rush of fire inside her, such a combustion of fury and panic that she wonders if it might consume her before it ever reaches the world outside.
No, no, she cannot stay. She cannot. A whole year before anyone will even listen to her! Three hundred and sixty-four more days of poking and prodding and dead time full of endless prayer. Even if she could hold to her resolve, it would kill her. No, she has to get out. Though such a thing might bring down a storm of scandal on her father’s house, she will do it. Well, he is not so blameless. He lied to her, locked her up, betrayed her. In such a case, a father is no longer a father, and she is no longer his daughter. Only now the flame of panic flares up again, and she feels sick to her stomach and has to stop as she walks to spit the bile out of her mouth.
Anyway, he will not let her rot in here. No. She knows that. Oh, God, she knows that as certainly as she knows the sun will rise tomorrow, except that in this infernal city there is only fog and gray so that no one can actually see it happening. No, he will not forget her. In some way or other he will find her, just as he said he would. Until then she will make herself ready and bide her time, and whatever happens she will not let the fire inside get the better of her.
CHAPTER FOUR
THOUGH ZUANA IS bound by the rule of obedience, it is the memory of the distress of her own first days that determines her patience and good humor when Serafina comes to her that afternoon.
The after-effects of the drug are obvious. Where last night the girl was all spit and fury now she is sullen and heavy. Whoever has dressed her this morning has bound her novice headscarf too tight, and there is an angry indentation along her forehead and her cheeks where the starched material is biting into the soft skin. As the drug subsides she will notice a pain in her head as well as her heart.
Her eyes are so dull that for a moment Zuana is not sure that she recognizes her.
“God be with you, novice Serafina.”
“And with you, Suora Jailer.”
Yes, she is remembered. Jailer. The word had been her own, but in the novice’s mouth it is newly shocking. Of course, the girl knows that.
“How do you feel today?”
“Like a dog who has been poisoned on bad meat,” she says, her voice raw and scratched.
“Well, it will pass soon enough. Madonna Chiara has asked that I show you something of the convent. Are you well enough to walk? The air might help.”
She shrugs.
“Good. Here.” She hands her a cloak. “The weather is inhospitable today.”
Outside, a mist drapes the cloisters in gray gauze, sending plumes of smoke out of their mouths as they walk. Zuana has often thought that if fathers must offer their unwilling daughters to God they would do better to pick the warmer months to do the giving. Were it summer, they might stop in the orchard to split open a few bursting pomegranates or dawdle by the fishpond to catch the sun on the scales of the darting carp. But as anyone born and bred in Ferrara knows, the city is famed for its winter fog, which seeps down even to the bone, so that Zuana must keep the walk fast and the circuit short.
From the magnificence of the main cloister they move through a short corridor into another, smaller one. They pass an elderly sister walking quickly with a small procession of young girls, eight or nine years old, following like ducklings in her wake. One of them glances up to the novice, frankly curious, and then, when she catches Zuana’s eye, looks down again. Among these boarders of Santa Caterina, some are in safekeeping for marriage while others are destined for the veil. It is not, Zuana thinks, always evident which is which. Still, had their latest novice been born in Ferrara, it is likely that as a child she would have learned both her letters and her piety here, which might have saved them all a lot of trouble now.
This second cloister is humbler and older: weeds grow through the courtyard slabs and its brick pillars have crumbled in places. Yet there is more sense of life here. Along two sides, dormitories run above the kitchens, bakery, and laundry rooms, housing the converse—servant sisters—with a few cells opposite for those poorer choir nuns who come with less of a dowry. By her side the girl is now interested, Zuana notes with some amusement; her eyes dart everywhere. The smell of roasting meat sauce and boiling cabbage is in the air, and there is a clatter of pots and pans. In winter the heat of the work done here can make it almost inviting, but come the first hot spell and it turns into an inferno, with the night almost as hot as the day. In the doorway of the bakery a scrawny tortoiseshell cat lies sprawled on her side, half a dozen blind kittens mewling and clambering over one another for her teats. Suora Federica, who runs the kitchens, considers it an offense against God to put an extra spoonful on any plate, yet she is soft as butter when it comes to nursing mothers—or at least those ones who have not taken vows of chastity.
Once through the courtyard, they stop briefly in the herb garden for Zuana to check the plants for frost damage before passing alongside the kitchen garden, then out behind the slaughter and hanging house and—not so far that the noise of death does not carry—the animal pens.
In the open, with no cover of buildings, the temperature drops rapidly. Zuana sees the girl shiver.
“Why don’t we save the rest for another day?”
“No.” The girl shakes her head fiercely. “No, no, I want to go on.”
“You are not cold?”
“I’m not going back inside,” she says again, sharply. “If I am to be buried alive, I should at least be allowed to see the shape of my coffin.”
“In which case pull your shroud closer,” Zuana answers mildly. “You would not want to expire before the walk has ended.”
To keep the blood warm she quickens the pace. Above them a band of squabbling seagulls chased inland by bad weather wheel and scream before disappearing back into the mist. They cross through the open gardens down to the carp pond; clumps of frozen reed are caught upright inside thin floating islands of ice. In the distance to the left a few gray-robed figures digging in the vegetable plots rise out of the mist, then fade away again, like so many lost souls.
“Who are they?” The girl peers into the gloom after them.