BEFORE THE SCREAMING starts, the night silence of the convent is already alive with its own particular sounds.

In a downstairs cell, Suora Ysbeta’s lapdog, swaddled like a baby in satin cloth, is hunting in its dreams, muzzled grunts and growls marking the pleasure of each rabbit cornered. Ysbeta herself is also busy with the chase, her silver tray doubling as a mirror, her right hand poised as she closes a pair of tweezers over a stubborn white hair on her chin. She pulls sharply, the sting and the satisfaction of the release in the same short aah of breath.

Across the courtyard two young women, plump and soft-cheeked as children, lie together on a single pallet, entwined like kindling twigs, their faces so close they seem almost to be exchanging breaths, the one inhaling as the other lets go: in, out, in, out. There is a slight sweetness to the air—angelica, perhaps, or sweet mint—as if they have both eaten the same sugared cake or drunk from the same spiced wine cup. Whatever they have imbibed, it has left them both sleeping soundly, their contentment a low hum of pleasure in the room.

In contrast, young Suora Perseveranza is in thrall to the music of suffering. A single tallow candle spits shadows across her cell. Her shift is so thin she can feel the winter damp as she leans back against the stone wall. She pulls the cloth up over her calves and thighs, then more carefully across her stomach, letting out a series of fluttering moans as the material sticks and catches on the open wounds underneath. She stops, breathing fast once or twice to still herself, then tugs harder where she meets resistance, until the half-formed skin tears and lifts off with the cloth. The candlelight reveals a leather belt nipped around her waist, a series of short nails on the inside, a few so deeply embedded in the flesh beneath that all that can be seen are the crusted swollen wounds where leather and skin have fused together. Slowly, deliberately, she presses on one of the studs. Her hand jumps back involuntarily, a cry bursting out of her, but there is an exhilaration to the sound, a challenge to herself as her fingers go back again.

She keeps her gaze fixed on the wall ahead, where the guttering light picks out a carved wooden crucifix: Christ, young, alive, His muscles running through the grain as His body strains forward against the nails, His face etched with sorrow. She stares at Him, her own body trembling, tears wet on her cheeks, her eyes bright. Wood, iron, leather, flesh. Her world is contained in this moment. She is within His suffering; He is within hers. She is not alone. Pain has become pleasure. She presses the stud again and her breath comes out in a long satisfying growl, almost an animal sound, consumed and consuming.

In the next-door cell, Suora Umiliana’s fingers pause briefly over her chattering rosary beads. The sound of the young sister’s devotion is like the taste of honey in her mouth. When she was younger she too had sought God through open wounds, but now as novice mistress it is her duty to put the spiritual well-being of others before her own. She bows her head and returns to her beads.

IN HER CELL above the infirmary, Suora Zuana, Santa Caterina’s dispensary mistress, is busy with her own kind of prayer. She sits bent over Brunfels’s great book of herbs, her forehead creased in concentration. Next to her is a recently finished sketch of a geranium plant, the leaves of which have proved effective at stanching cuts and flesh wounds—one of the younger nuns has started passing clots of blood, and she is searching for a compound to stop a wound she cannot see.

Perseveranza’s moans echo along the upper cloister corridor. Last summer, when the heat brought the beginnings of infection to the wounds and those who sat next to the young nun in chapel complained about the smell, the abbess had sent her to the dispensary for treatment. Zuana had washed and dressed the angry lesions as best she could and given her ointment to reduce the swelling. There is nothing more she can do. While it is possible that Perseveranza might eventually poison herself with some deeper infection, she is healthy enough otherwise, and from what Zuana knows of the way the body works she doesn’t think this will happen. The world is full of stories of men and women who live with such mutilations for years, and while Perseveranza might talk fondly enough of death, it is clear that she gains too much joy from her suffering to want to end it prematurely.

Zuana herself doesn’t share this passion for self-mortification. Before she came to the convent she had lived for many years as the only child of a professor of medicine. His very reason for being alive had been to explore the power of nature to heal the body, and she cannot remember a moment in her life when she didn’t share his fervor. She would have made a fine doctor or teacher like him, had such a thing been possible. As it is, she was fortunate that after his death his name and his estate were good enough to buy her a cell in the convent of Santa Caterina, where so many noblewomen of Ferrara find space to pursue their own ways to live inside God’s protection.

Still, any convent, however well adjusted, trembles a little when it takes in one who really does not want to be there.

•    •    •

It is a delicate business, judging the depth of a novice’s distress. A certain level of upset is only natural: once the feasting is over and the family has left, the great doors bolted behind them, even the most devout of young women can suffer a rush of panic when faced with the solitude and silence of the closed cell.

Those with relatives inside are the easiest to settle. Most of them have cut their teeth on convent cakes and biscuits, so pampered and fussed over through years of visiting that the cloister is already a second home. If—as it might—the day itself unleashes a flurry of exhausted tears, there is always an aunt, sister, or cousin on hand to cajole or comfort them.

For others, who might have harbored dreams of a more flesh-and-blood bridegroom or left a favorite brother or doting mother, the tears are as much a mourning for the past as fear of the future. The sisters in charge treat them gently as they clamber out of dresses and petticoats, shivering from nerves rather than cold, their naked arms raised high in the air in readiness for the shift. But all the care in the world cannot disguise the loss of freedom, and though some might later substitute silk for serge (such fashionable transgressions are ignored rather than allowed), that first night, girls with soft skin and no proclivity for penance can be driven mad by the itch and the scratch. These tears have an edge of self-pity to them, and it is better to cry them now, for they can become a slow poison if left to fester.

Tonight, however, no one will do much sleeping.

In the bottom of the hourglass the hill of sand is almost complete, and the wailing has grown so violent that Zuana feels it in her stomach as well as her head—as if a wayward troop of devils has forced its way inside the girl’s cell and is even now winding her intestines on a spit. In their dormitory, the young boarders will be waking in terror. The hours between Compline and Matins mark the longest sleep of the night, and any disturbance now will make the convent bleary-eyed and foul-tempered tomorrow. In between the screams, Zuana registers a cracked voice rising up in tuneless song from the infirmary. Night fevers conjure up all manner of visions among the ill, not all of them holy, and it will not help to have the crazed and the sickly joining in the chorus.

Zuana leaves her cell swiftly, her feet knowing the way better than her eyes. As she moves down the stairs into the main cloister and enters the great courtyard, she is held for a second, as she often is, by its sheer beauty. From the moment she first stood here, sixteen years ago, the walls around threatening to crush her, it has offered a space for peace and dreams. By day the air is so still it seems as if time itself has stopped, while in the dark you can almost hear the rush of angels’ wings behind you. Not tonight, though. Tonight the stone well in the middle looms up like a gray ship in a sea of black, the sound of the girl’s sobbing a wild wind echoing around it. It reminds her of the story her father used to tell of the time he sailed to the East Indies to collect plant specimens and how they found a merchant boat abandoned in steamy waters, the only sign of life the screeching of a starving parrot left on board. Just imagine, carissima. If only we could have understood that bird’s language, what secrets might it have revealed?

The air in the infirmary is thick with tallow-candle smoke and the rosemary fumigant that she keeps burning constantly to counteract the stench of illness. She passes the young choir sister crippled by her bleeding insides, her body curled in over itself, eyes tight shut in a way that speaks of prayer rather than sleep. In the remaining beds the other sisters are as old as they are ill, their lungs filled with winter damp, so they bubble and rasp as they breathe. Most of them are deaf to anything but the voices of angels, though not above competing as to whose choir is the sweetest.

“Oh, sweet Jesus! It is coming. Save us all.”

While Suora Clementia’s ears are still sharp enough to make out the pad of a cat’s paw, her mind is so clouded that she might read it as the footfall of the devil’s messenger or the first sign of the Second Coming.

“Hush.”

“Hear the screaming! Hear the screaming!” The old woman is bolt upright in the last bed, her arms flapping as if to beat off some invisible attack. “The graves are opening. We will all be consumed.”

Zuana catches her hands and pulls them down onto the sheets, holding them still while she waits for the nun to register her presence. In the Great Silence that runs from Compline until daybreak, the ill and the mad will be forgiven for breaking the rule but others risk grave penance for any squandered speech.

“Shhh.”

Across the courtyard another howl rises up, followed by a crash and a splintering of wood. Zuana pushes the old nun gently back down toward the bed, settling her as best she can. The tang of fresh urine lifts off the sheet. It can wait until morning. The servant sisters will be gentler if they have had some sleep.

“HOW QUICKLY WAS she calmed?”

“After the draft, soon enough. She was sleeping deeply when I left.”

“Too deeply. I could not wake her for Prime or Terce.” Suora Umiliana’s tone is sharp. “I feared that God might have taken her to Him in the night.”

“It was my duty to settle her. In my experience, when a body is warm and breathing it is easy enough to tell life from death.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt your medicinal skills, Suora Zuana. But I am concerned for her soul …and it is impossible to bring God’s comfort to a young woman who can barely sit up, let alone kneel.”

“Sisters, sisters, we are all weary, and it does no good to anyone to find fault with each other. Suora Zuana, you are to be thanked for calming her. The convent needed its rest. And Suora Umiliana, as novice mistress you have, as always, done all that could be asked of you. This novice is given to us as a challenge, and we must do what we can for her.”

“So. Let us consider the young soul we are dealing with. Your thoughts first, Suora Zuana. How did you find her?”

“Angry.”

“Yes. Well, that much we could all hear. What else?”

“Afraid. Sad. Outraged. There was a lot of spirit.”

“Though little of it directed toward our Savior, I would assume.”

“No. I think it safe to say she does not enter with a vocation.”

“Ah, always the diplomat with words, Zuana.” She laughs, and one of the curls dances on her forehead. It is not surprising that she is admired by the young as well as the old, since her style combines elements of the benign elder sister along with those of the strict mother. “Did she have anything to say on the matter?”

“She told me that the vows came from her mouth but not her heart.”

“I see.” The abbess pauses. “Those were the actual words she used?”

“Yes.”

At Zuana’s side, Suora Umiliana sighs heavily, as if this is a burden she is already shouldering. “I feared as much during the ceremony. She was opening her mouth but I could barely hear any words.”

“Well, if she was coerced, she gave no indication of it when I met her with her father. Had she been beaten, do you think, Zuana?”

“Suora Umiliana. What were your impressions?”

The novice mistress clasps her hands together, as if asking for help before she speaks. In contrast to the abbess, she is a well-padded woman whose wimple is fixed so tight it seems to have impacted into her features, squashing them ever more closely together, her cheeks like puff pastry and her mouth small and puckered, with a covering of wispy white hairs across her upper lip and chin. She must have been young once, but Zuana cannot remember a time when she looked any different. While she is a ferocious shepherd of her novice flock, few pass through her hands without gaining some sense of Christ’s majesty, and the older sisters who go to her looking for spiritual respite report that beneath her crumpled exterior she has a soul as smooth as an unpacked bolt of silk. There are times when Zuana has felt something akin to envy for the simplicity of her certainty, though in such a close community it does not do to dwell on what one does not have.

“I agree with Suora Zuana. There is a great storm in her. When we undressed her after the ceremony her face was set like a black mask. I would not be surprised if her education has been directed more toward vanity than spirit.”

“If that is so, it will come as a surprise to her family,” the abbess says, fielding the implied rebuke to her judgment gently. “They have an excellent name in Milan. One of the best.”

“Also she didn’t sing—or even open her mouth—at Compline.”

“Perhaps she is unfamiliar with the texts,” Zuana says softly. “Not everybody knows them when they arrive.”

“Even those with no voice are able to read the words aloud,” Umiliana says tartly, in what may or may not be a reference to Zuana, who everyone knows arrived tone deaf and ignorant of everything but her remedies. “We were told that her singing was a marvel. Suora Benedicta has been beside herself, waiting for her to arrive.”

Umiliana frowns and her face collapses further into itself. In her eyes noble weddings bring only distraction, and Suora Carità’s dexterity with her embroidery needle is as much about fashion as the solace of prayer. This is not, however, the time to mention such things.

“Madonna Abbess? If I might suggest …?” She keeps her eyes to the ground, so that unless the abbess sees fit to interrupt her she will go on anyway. “I would like to separate her from the rest of the novices for a while. That way she will have time to contemplate her rebellion, and her intransigence will not infect others.”

“Thank you for that thought, Suora Umiliana.” The abbess’s smile is immediate and full. “I am confident, however, that under your tutelage such a thing would not happen. And isolation at this stage might agitate rather than calm her.” She pauses. Zuana drops her eyes. She has witnessed it before, this quiet battle of authority between the two women. “Indeed, I think perhaps we should leave any further instruction until she has recovered from the effects of Suora Zuana’s potion.”

Zuana feels Umiliana stiffen, though her expression remains impassive. Within the rule of Saint Benedict, the first degree of humility is obedience without delay. “As you wish, Madonna Chiara.”

The novice mistress bows her head, then hesitates, waiting for a sign from Zuana that the two nuns will leave the room together.

OH, SWEET, SWEET Jesus, is this how it will be? Day after day after day, is this how it will be? Because if it is, then surely she will die here. There has not been a second when she has not been prodded by or spied on by somebody, starting from the moment they had shaken her awake that morning, and she had felt so sick and dizzy she could barely focus, her head filled with tumbling nightmares, and she had opened her eyes onto this fat bearded woman’s face, thrusting itself into hers, telling her to thank the Lord for bringing her safely through the night, and glory be to Him for this, her first day in Santa Caterina.

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.”

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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

Sensing the Past

A note from Sarah Dunant

Imagine yourself in an old church in a town in northern Italy. The wall behind the altar is made up of a grille too fine to see through, with a small wooden cupboard opening, just large enough to let a chalice pass through. Now close your eyes. On the other side you hear a shuffling of feet, a cough, then the clearing of throats. An organ sounds a couple of notes. You are about to hear the voices of a choir of enclosed nuns…

ALL THE CHARACTERS in this novel are imaginary, as is the convent of Santa Caterina, though its history and architecture draw on Sant’Antonio in Polesine, in Ferrara, which still exists today as an enclosed Benedictine community.

The history in which the novel is embedded, however, is all fact.

One of the final decrees of the Council of Trent before it disbanded in December 1563 was a rushed but detailed reform of nunneries, in response to the fierce challenges and criticisms thrown up by the Protestant Reformation. These changes, which were extensive, took time to be implemented, depending on the zeal of the local bishops, the order, the convent, and the opposing influence of local families.

SARAH DUNANT is the author of the international bestsellers The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan, which have received major acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Her earlier novels include three Hannah Wolfe crime thrillers, as well as Snowstorms in a Hot Climate, Transgressions, and Mapping the Edge, all three of which are available as Random House Trade Paperbacks. She has two daughters and lives in London and Florence.

Sacred Hearts is a work of historical fiction. Apart from thewell-known actual people, events, and locales that figure inthe narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents arethe products of the authors imagination or are usedfictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, orto living persons, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Sarah Dunant

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