Sarah Dunant - Sacred Hearts

But the girl is not listening anymore. She sits, head on her hands, rocking to and fro, staring dully into the dark. After a while she pulls herself up, slowly, wobbly almost, like a newborn calf not yet steady on its feet. She moves past Zuana as if she were not there and goes to the bed, where she lies down with her face to the wall, curling herself up and pulling the blanket over her.

The room grows quiet. Outside, the convent sleeps. And, beyond it, the city, too.

“No one can live without sustenance,” Zuana says again.

She does not respond or move a muscle. Yet she is not sleeping. Of that Zuana is sure.

“So I have brought you some.”

She takes the letter out from under her robe and unfolds it.

“My dearest Isabetta,

“If this letter reaches your hands, I would understand if you did not want to read it. Yet please, for the sake of what once was between us, continue.”

His handwriting is dense and elaborate, as if he has put his heart into every pen stroke, and in the candlelight the words dance and move on the page. Zuana keeps her voice low, for fear it might penetrate beyond the walls of the cell. Occasionally she stumbles over a phrase and has to stop and begin again. But none of this matters. Not once the first words have been uttered.

“Should you have come through the locked doors onto the dock that night, you will know that I was not there to meet you. I, who had promised on pain of death to be there, deserted you. But what you do not know is that it was only death—or the extreme closeness of it—that kept me from you. A few nights before our planned meeting I was set upon by a group of erstwhile friends, who attacked me with daggers and left me for dead on the riverbank. There have been moments since then when I have wished I had indeed died. But God was with me and I have been saved.

“I write this from the house of two good people who found me, took me in, and cared for me. You spoke once about how you feared your incarceration was God’s punishment for our love. At my worst I wondered if this was my punishment, too. I knew if I lived I would never see you again. But now that I have come to that moment, I cannot go without trying to communicate with you one last time. To tell you I did not, nor would I ever, knowingly desert you.”

Zuana pauses. She is a stranger to the art of love letters. At the time when other young girls were sighing over sonnets and court madrigals she had been tending seedlings and memorizing the names of the organs of the body. It is not something she mourns, for how can one miss what one has never had? And yet, and yet …how honestly and persuasively he writes, this young man. The abbess would no doubt say it is all lies, born out of lust like flies on a dung heap. But then how would she know either? She returns to the page.

“I am in desperate straits. I have no money (all that I owned and had gathered for our life together was about my person that night), and I am disfigured in ways I fear will disqualify me from any kind of polite work. Nevertheless, I shall try. I am leaving Ferrara to travel south, to Naples, where I hear there is a thriving musical culture and where I may find someone who is content to keep their eyes closed while I sing.

“I will never speak to a living soul of our liaison. You told me once that men say such things easily. You were always wiser than your years. But you do not know everything. I will never love or marry another. That is the promise I made to God if He would let me live, and it will be my pleasure to keep it. I hear your voice each night before I go to sleep, its beauty seducing the very sweetness out of silence, and when I wake it is the first thing I remember. I ask for no more.

“I hope the sister you spoke of, whose goodwill I now depend on to deliver this letter, may help you to find a way to live. Forgive me for whatever pain I have caused you. Pray for me, my dear Isabetta.

“I remain, forever, your Jacopo.”

The silence in the cell grows. The girl remains motionless, her face to the wall. Somewhere inside her, though, there is movement. It is as if she is rising slowly from some deep place on the ocean bed, pulled out of the dark by the promise of a world above the water.

As she breaks the surface she has an image of a young man walking toward her through hazy sunlight, long dark hair and broad open face.

“He did not desert me,” she says, so quietly that Zuana can barely hear her.

“No, he did not desert you.”

“He loved me.”

“And, it seems, still does.”

Now, finally, she turns over. Zuana holds out the letter and her hand comes out from the blanket, pale fingers, snap-thin wrist. She pulls it toward her, then lets it fall on the bed, as if it is somehow too heavy to hold.

Zuana takes a small bottle out from under her robe and uncorks it. The air picks up the tangy smell of acqua-vita. She pours some out onto a wooden plate, picks up the lump of bread from under the bed, and dips a small chunk into the liquid to soften it. “So. Will you eat now?”

The girl looks at her, frowning, as if she is having trouble focusing.

Zuana’s hand holds out the dripping bread.

“I …I can’t.” She shakes her head. “I can’t.”

“What? Is Umiliana’s voice stronger than his?”

His …Him. But which him? The very idea seems to unsteady her. “I told you, I can’t. Leave me alone.” And her voice is suddenly hard, full of snake-spit and anger.

Zuana does not move. She has seen this once before, years ago, in a sad, mad young nun who starved herself almost to death: the way in which after a certain point the emptiness becomes its own force, like a whirlpool sucking and destroying anything or anyone who dares challenge its supremacy. If it was not to do with the yearning for purity one might almost fear that the devil had a hand in it, for there is something of his malicious pleasure in such self-destruction.

“Isabetta. Isabetta.”

She says this name, her name, twice, then again. For every student of medicine knows that there are times when a word can be its own talisman and carry a certain power of healing.

“Isabetta, listen to me. I may not be a nun who sees visions, but this I do know. God is as much in life as He is in death. And without a true vocation, starvation is no way to reach Him.”

The girl shakes her head again. “Suora Umiliana says—”

“Suora Umiliana is not to be trusted. She is looking to take over the convent by mounting an attack on the authority of the abbess, and your starving purity is most helpful to her. If you had eaten more, or had more of your wits about you, you of all people would see that.”

Such confidence. Such certainty. As she speaks, Zuana thinks how much like the abbess she herself now sounds. Except that when she remembers the novice mistress scooping up the fainting girl from under the cross, or catches again the look of triumph in her face when their paths met outside Madonna Chiara’s chambers, she knows that what she herself says is true. The abbess was right. The world is full of young women who do not want to become nuns. But she was also wrong. For this young woman is no longer just another one of them. In the midst of this chess game of church and convent politics, she has been elevated unwittingly to the role of a more powerful piece, greater than her worth but also vulnerable to being used and sacrificed.

And it is not just she. For, like it or not, by bringing the girl the letter, Zuana herself has become one of the players. Now it is her turn to move.

“Yet meanwhile—are you listening to me, Isabetta? — meanwhile there is someone outside these walls who cares for you deeply. A young man who has risked a good deal to get in touch with you and who surely deserves an answer.”