Chapter 33
She understood what she was going through. She worked through her postnatal exercises for her abdomen and waist and pelvis. Her uterus was returning to its normal size. Her postpartum discharges did not trouble her and were soon dwindling. Like everything about the pregnancy, her recovery seemed remarkably rapid.
But she was not allowed to see the baby again.
Lucia tried to immerse herself in the workings of the Order once more, to forget as she was supposed to. But her anger grew, as did an indefinable ache in her belly, a sense of loss.
Rosa worked in a small office on the Crypt’s top story. She had a role in the management of the larger corporate clients of the scrinium.
Lucia stood before her desk, and waited until Rosa looked up and acknowledged her.
“Why can’t I see my baby?”
Rosa sighed. She stood, came around her desk and had Lucia sit with her in two upright chairs before a low coffee table. “Lucia, must we go through all this again? You have to trust those around you. It is a basic principle of how we live. You know that.”
Perhaps, Lucia thought. But it was also a basic principle that they should not have conversations like this. You weren’t supposed to talk about the Order at all; ideally you wouldn’t even be aware of it. Rosa had her own flaws, she saw. Perhaps it was inevitable that Rosa, who was once a contadino, had a broader perspective than the rest, whether she liked it or not. She said none of this aloud.
She insisted, “I want to see my baby. I don’t even know what name you have given her. ”
“So? … I think we’re talking about your needs, not the baby’s. Aren’t we, Lucia? You grew up in nurseries and crиches. Did you know your mother?”
“No—”
“And did that harm you?”
Lucia said defiantly, “Perhaps it did. How can I know?”
“Can you be so selfish as to blight your baby’s life?”
Rosa’s calm composure enraged Lucia. “Why didn’t you tell me that my pregnancy would only last thirteen weeks instead of thirty-eight?”
“Is that what the Internet says a pregnancy ought to be? Lucia, there are twenty-seven mamme-nonne, who must among them produce a hundred babies a year — three or four each and every year … If you hadn’t filled your head with nonsense from the outside, you would have expected a thirteen-week pregnancy, because that’s the way we do things here. And whether you knew what was going on or not — Lucia, there was nothing to fear. It is what your body is designed for, you know.” Rosa leaned closer and touched her hand. “Let her go, Lucia. You are one of the mamme now. In a sense you are already the mother of us all.”
Lucia tried not to draw back. We always touch, she thought with a faint sense of distaste, we are always so close we can smell each other. “And this will be my life? Morning sickness and labor rooms forever?”
Rosa laughed. “It needn’t be so bad. Here.” She went to her desk, opened a drawer, and produced a cell phone.
Lucia studied the phone. It had gone dead. “It is my cell. Patrizia took it.”
“Have it back. Use it as you like. Look at the Internet, if you want. Would you like to go outside again? There’s no reason why not. I can talk to Pina—”
“I thought you didn’t trust me.”
“You mustn’t turn this into some personal conflict between the two of us, Lucia. I am not your monitor. I am merely reacting to how you behave, in the best interests of the Order, which is all any of us do.
“Lucia, things are different now, for girls like you. You saw the pictures in Maria Ludovica’s apartment — scenes like the Sack of Rome. Once a girl growing up in the Crypt had no realistic choice but to stay here. The world outside, chaotic and uncontrolled, was simply too dangerous. Now things have changed.” She pointed to Lucia’s phone. “Outside is a bright and superficially attractive world. Technology has liberated people in a way that could not have been imagined a couple of centuries ago. People are free to travel wherever they want, to speak to whoever they want, at any time, to call up any information they like.
“And all this penetrates even the Crypt. It is all shallow, of course.” She snapped her fingers. “The great information highways could break down tomorrow, just as the Roman aqueducts once fell into ruin. But the world outside looks attractive. That’s my point. You feel you have a choice, about whether to stay on in the Crypt, or seek some new life outside. But the truth is, you have no choice. Perhaps you must see that for yourself.”
No choice because I’m different , Lucia thought. I would never find a place outside the Crypt. And besides, there is something that will hold me here forever. “I can’t leave, because of my child. That’s why you’re letting me go outside, isn’t it? Because you know I’ll have to come back. Because you have my baby.”
A look of uncertainty crossed Rosa’s face. “There is no you and we — this conversation has been inappropriate. We should forget it.”
“Yes,” said Lucia.
“Take your phone. Go out, have a good time while you can. I don’t think we’ll need to talk again.” Rosa stood; the meeting was evidently over.
As it turned out, Rosa was right, unsurprisingly. Despite her new freedom Lucia felt very reluctant to leave the Crypt. It would have felt like an abandonment of the baby that was even now yelling its lungs out in one of the Crypt’s huge nurseries, even if she never saw it again. She returned to her studies, and considered going back to work in the scrinium. She would go back outside sometime in the future, she decided. Not yet.
Two months after the birth, though, she detected yet more changes in her body. Changes unexpected, and unwelcome. She went to Patrizia again. The strange truth was quickly confirmed.
She knew the time had come to go out. If not now, then never. She still had Daniel’s business card. It wasn’t that she’d consciously kept it, not exactly, but it was there nonetheless. It took her only a moment to find it.
Chapter 34
In the last days they gathered around her bed, faces drifting in the candlelit gloom.
Here were Leda, Venus, Julia, pretty Aemilia, even Agrippina. Oval faces, strong noses, eyes like cool stone, eyes so like hers, as if she were surrounded by fragments of herself. And there beyond them, silent witnesses to her death as her life, were the three matres, her lifelong companions, the last relic of her childhood home.
She was still concerned about the Crypt, the Order. Even as the illness rose around her like a bloody tide, she thought and calculated, worrying obsessively that there might be something she had overlooked, some flaw she had failed to spot. If the Order was to survive indefinitely, it had to be perfect — for, like a tiny crack in a marble fascia, enough time would inevitably expose the slightest defect.
When a coherent thought coalesced in her mind, she would summon one of the women, and insist she record her sayings.
Thus: “Three,” she whispered.
“Three, Regina?” Venus murmured. “Three what?”
“Three mothers. Like the matres. At any time, three mothers, three wombs. Or if the Order grows, three times three, or … Three mothers. That is all. For the rest, sisters matter more than daughters — that is the rule.”
“Yes—”
“When a womb dries, another must come forward.”