“She is grown quieter, that is true. But I am concerned about her health. The remedy has left her very weak. She should be eating, not fasting.”
“In unquiet souls the body must be subdued sometimes to give room to the soul. She will come to no harm, Suora Zuana, I will see to that. These are wondrous times we are living through in Santa Caterina, would you not agree? The Lord has answered our prayers and is come among us. Come through both the old and the young. I fear you have not seen it yet but it is here, as clear as sunshine on water. You must look to your own soul, Suora Zuana. He is longing for you to find Him, too. And you will, I know. All you need is to—”
“I thank you for your good wishes, Suora Umiliana.” Zuana smiles as she cuts across her words. “I long for Him, too. But still I think the girl should not be fasting.”
The novice mistress claps her hands together and pulls them back under her robe. “Neither you nor I have the right to question the wisdom of our father confessor,” she says, the old Umiliana reemerging out of her certainty. “She is in my care and I will tend to her as if she were my own child. God be with you, Suora Zuana.”
“And with you,” Zuana replies, as they pass each other. Ah, if only the love of God moved like the bad seeds of infection through the air, she thinks. Then perhaps we would not need so much constant saving. The boldness of her irreverence takes her by surprise. I am tired, she thinks, and in need of air for my body, if not for my soul.
THE BELL FOR the work hour is still sounding as she puts on her cloak and goes to the herb garden, taking her burlap bag of forks and other tools. The great rain has finally passed, leaving the sky as washed as the earth, and the day that has emerged is cloudless and almost warm. In summer after such storms the cloisters steam as the sun burns off the moisture. There is nothing so dramatic today, but in the gardens the ground will have been softened by the long downpour and whatever early growth has started under the soil may now have a chance to push farther through.
She has not been out of the cloisters since the night in the storeroom, and she is amazed by the difference it makes to her spirits to be in the open again. It will do her good to be working in the garden, surrounded by plants rather than people. She walks briskly, feeling the wind fresh on her cheeks, and as she does so she lets go of her anxieties about the girl and Umiliana and the abbess, all the tangled threads of convent politics and conspiracy, and remembers instead what it is she does here: how the work of a good dispensary mistress is as much about tending plants as tending people.
The garden is probably no bigger than the abbess’s chambers (though Zuana has expanded it by half since she was voted into the post), yet it is home to close to a hundred herbs and medicinal shrubs. There are days between spring and autumn when the workload is such that she barely has time for mental prayer—when the fecundity of nature fills her with wonder and thanks, but her gratitude is waylaid by the attention, even devotion, that the plants require: weeding, splitting, staking, pruning, feeding, harvesting, deadheading, even waging war on their behalf, picking off and crushing small plagues of slugs and snails, which grow out of putrefaction and dampness to lay waste to her most tender and precious herbs.
This winter has been harsh, on both her fingers and the plants, but the worst is over now. She can feel it as soon as she moves into open ground. Protected on one side by the back of the smaller cloister and on the other by the vegetable garden wall, the herb patch is a sheltered enough space for spring to make an early appearance. During a clement March she will see most of the more robust or courageous plants poking their heads aboveground. This mass arrival is one of the most powerful memories of her childhood, for before the university instituted its own medicinal garden (spurred on, no doubt, by the fact that Padua and Pisa were already famous for theirs), the courtyard of her father’s house was a field of old buckets, pots, and wooden trays filled with seeds and cuttings. He would take her out sometimes in the first days of warm weather and make her listen to the silence.
There are scholars, great men of the present as well as the past, who believe that God created man because only through us could He celebrate the power of His vast creation. And thus it is both our pleasure and our duty to witness the wonder. You cannot hear it, can you? But even now as we stand here, under the earth a thousand bulbs and seeds and roots are budding and cracking and sprouting, an army of small tendrils and shoots rising up, moving through the earth toward the light, each one of them so tender that when you see them you will marvel at how they could have moved such a weight of soil above them to emerge. Imagine that, Faustina. Each year the repeating miracle of it.
The picture he painted was so strong, and he had such awe in his voice, that whenever she reads about or imagines the Second Coming, she sees graveyards like vast herb gardens, with bodies, as tender and young as those new shoots, pushing up against the rotten wood of their coffins and rising up toward the light of God to the sound of trumpets. Flesh incorruptible. She had told him of this vision once and he had smiled in that way parents do when their children are wiser or more charming than their years. But she could see that for him it was in some ways no more impressive than the more humble version of God’s glory that nature presented.
Given the complexities of the world around her, she has need of such a simple miracle today.
Save for the occasional drops of rain coming off the evergreen shrubs and trees, it is quiet in the garden. The lavender and the rosemary, bruised from the downpour, are thick with aromatic pungency as she rolls her fingers along their stems. In the early beds, the calendula and fennel and hypericum are already reviving. She clears a space and softens the soil around them so that the shoots can expand. Next will come the belladonna and the betonica and the cardiaca, the plant that strengthens the heart, which once it starts will grow as thick as nettles and as fast as weeds. She used to wonder whether in the very beginning someone had plaited together the alphabet and the seasons: marking the first plants as B’s and C’s, then F’s and H’s, leaving the poppy, the valerian, and the verbena to come later. By then the garden will have gone wild, so there will be barely an inch of space left.
She slips her fingers under the newly sprouting fennel, with its lacy, feathery fronds. Her father was right. It is indeed a wonder how something that can barely hold its head up in the air has the force to break through heavy, sodden earth. Yet give it another month of good weather, and its stem will be proudly upright, thick with its own juice. Soil, light, water, sun. Growth, death, putrefaction, regeneration. No need for confession or forgiveness or redemption here. Life without soul. So clear, so simple. Oh, Zuana, you were bred for plants, not convent politics.
“I thought I might find you here.”
She turns quickly. The abbess is treading her way carefully through the undergrowth.
“So. How are all your new children doing?” She gestures to the garden around them.
“It’s early days. But I think we will have good crop of calendula.”
“Possibly you will be able to harvest some off your cheek.”
Zuana puts her hand up and wipes away a streak of mud. The abbess, in contrast, is clean and newly pressed, though it is her complexion that gives her away most obviously; the choir nuns who live in cloisters stay pale and smooth without the aid of Apollonia’s powders, while those who work outside find the sun and the winter winds excavating rivers of broken veins in their cheeks and noses. How much this releases them from the sin of vanity is hard to know, though an inspection might find fewer silver trays doubling as mirrors in their cells.