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.
“Converse. Lay servants to the choir nuns. Some of them work the gardens, some the laundry and kitchens. You will have your own assigned to you already to clean your cell and help you dress.”
She brings a hand involuntarily up to her head.
Which one have they given her, Zuana wonders, Augustina or Daniela? Malice or mischief, with a certain cruelty either way.
“How much did their fathers pay to put them here?” the girl mutters, almost to herself.
“Considerably less than yours. You’re lucky we are not one of those Poor Clare convents where the sisters rejoice in doing manual work themselves. Here Our Lord offers us many other ways to serve Him.”
“I am surprised you have to bolt the gates, then. Unless it is to prevent everyone from flocking in.”
The girl scowls, then bends down and grabs a great handful of stones. Zuana watches as she tosses them petulantly into the pond, the fatter ones sinking while a few others skitter and flash against the ice, and she thinks, not for the first time, that once this novice stops railing there are ways in which she might fit well in here. Under the guise of humility, the cloisters harbor more than their fair share of tart tongues.
They make their way through the orchard, with its army of pruned fruit trees stubby-fisted in the gloom, until they reach the convent wall, looming up in front of them to meet a leaden sky. The air is a thick gray now, the fog already swallowing up the buildings they have left behind.
“How big is this place?” The girl’s voice is dull with the scale of her incarceration.
“The walls mark out three blocks on each side. It is one of the largest convents in the city.”
So large, in fact, that girls from country families sometimes find solace in the amount of open ground and sky. Others, brought up on stories of court life and city streets, are less comforted, though even they can be surprised at the amount of land a rich convent can carve for itself in the middle of a town. How impressed was Zuana when she first walked here? All she remembers now is how small and ill-stocked the herb garden was, and how half the cuttings she’d brought with her, wrapped with the clothing inside her chest, had died in a freak snowstorm that first winter. Winter. Yes, always the most painful time of the novice’s first year.
“It takes maybe half an hour to walk the line of the walls all the way around. Of course, you can only do that from the inside, as the fourth wall is the river. You do not know any of this?”
The girl shrugs. If a prospective novice has not been a boarder, it is usual for them at least to visit the place where they are to spend the rest of their lives. But even this she has not done. Would it have made her passage any easier? Certainly the wealthy benefactors who come to see how their money is spent, or to reassure themselves about a daughter’s prospective future, are eager to be shown the wonders of it all, for Santa Caterina has a past as rich as its present. One of the first foundations in the city, it had originally been a small house for Benedictine monks on an island in the river, but over the years water fever scythed down so many souls that it fell into disuse, to be rebuilt and refounded only when trading money drained the marshes, rechanneling the river and with it the most deadly of the infections.
Every nun knows the litany of its current success: how, with better drainage and, now, the use of distilled oils and herbs for fumigants in all the main rooms and corridors (these additions are Zuana’s work, though the rules of modesty would prohibit singling her out for personal praise), the worst of the summer contagions are kept at bay, so that today Santa Caterina sustains a community of
“Who are they?” The girl peers into the gloom after them.
“Converse. Lay servants to the choir nuns. Some of them work the gardens, some the laundry and kitchens. You will have your own assigned to you already to clean your cell and help you dress.”
She brings a hand involuntarily up to her head.
Which one have they given her, Zuana wonders, Augustina or Daniela? Malice or mischief, with a certain cruelty either way.
“How much did their fathers pay to put them here?” the girl mutters, almost to herself.
“Considerably less than yours. You’re lucky we are not one of those Poor Clare convents where the sisters rejoice in doing manual work themselves. Here Our Lord offers us many other ways to serve Him.”
“I am surprised you have to bolt the gates, then. Unless it is to prevent everyone from flocking in.”
The girl scowls, then bends down and grabs a great handful of stones. Zuana watches as she tosses them petulantly into the pond, the fatter ones sinking while a few others skitter and flash against the ice, and she thinks, not for the first time, that once this novice stops railing there are ways in which she might fit well in here. Under the guise of humility, the cloisters harbor more than their fair share of tart tongues.
They make their way through the orchard, with its army of pruned fruit trees stubby-fisted in the gloom, until they reach the convent wall, looming up in front of them to meet a leaden sky. The air is a thick gray now, the fog already swallowing up the buildings they have left behind.
“How big is this place?” The girl’s voice is dull with the scale of her incarceration.
“The walls mark out three blocks on each side. It is one of the largest convents in the city.”
So large, in fact, that girls from country families sometimes find solace in the amount of open ground and sky. Others, brought up on stories of court life and city streets, are less comforted, though even they can be surprised at the amount of land a rich convent can carve for itself in the middle of a town. How impressed was Zuana when she first walked here? All she remembers now is how small and ill-stocked the herb garden was, and how half the cuttings she’d brought with her, wrapped with the clothing inside her chest, had died in a freak snowstorm that first winter. Winter. Yes, always the most painful time of the novice’s first year.
“It takes maybe half an hour to walk the line of the walls all the way around. Of course, you can only do that from the inside, as the fourth wall is the river. You do not know any of this?”
The girl shrugs. If a prospective novice has not been a boarder, it is usual for them at least to visit the place where they are to spend the rest of their lives. But even this she has not done. Would it have made her passage any easier? Certainly the wealthy benefactors who come to see how their money is spent, or to reassure themselves about a daughter’s prospective future, are eager to be shown the wonders of it all, for Santa Caterina has a past as rich as its present. One of the first foundations in the city, it had originally been a small house for Benedictine monks on an island in the river, but over the years water fever scythed down so many souls that it fell into disuse, to be rebuilt and refounded only when trading money drained the marshes, rechanneling the river and with it the most deadly of the infections.
Every nun knows the litany of its current success: how, with better drainage and, now, the use of distilled oils and herbs for fumigants in all the main rooms and corridors (these additions are Zuana’s work, though the rules of modesty would prohibit singling her out for personal praise), the worst of the summer contagions are kept at bay, so that today Santa Caterina sustains a community of
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