From her place at the end of the second row Zuana tries to keep Serafina in her sight. The girl is still in shock. She is deathly pale and has not said a word since being freed from the grip of Suora Magdalena. Even before she had walked into the old nun’s cell she would have been light-headed from the lack of food and sleep, but now her disorientation is obvious. She sits stock-still, staring straight out at everyone and no one. Next to her, old Maria Lucia, she of the toxic breath, is hunched over her breviary, her chin trembling in anticipation.

At last the abbess enters and quickly finds her place. She nods to Benedicta and they both rise, the body of nuns following them. The rustle of cloth alerts the rest of the church, and beyond the grille the congregation quiets in readiness for the music.

Discounting the few sisters who are too simple or—in the case of Suora Lucrezia—too physically damaged to sing, some fifty earthly angels now stand waiting to bring glory to God and, perhaps, a little to themselves. The diminutive figure of Benedicta raises and then drops her head as the sign, and the voices lift into the air, the words of the order clean and clear, plunging the audience immediately into the drama of a young woman’s martyrdom.

“Blessed Agnes, in the middle of the flames, spreading her hands wide, prays …”

In the beat of silence that is her cue, the choir’s best songbird, Eugenia, head held high, draws a breath, ready. But before she can open her mouth to let it out, the voice of Agnes herself, ripe with youth and sharp as a golden spear, soars up from the fire into the air and out through the grille.

“O Great Father. Respected. Worshipped. Feared. ”

In the choir stalls there is an involuntary turn of heads toward the novice. Zuana registers a skewering in her stomach, though whether it is shock or pleasure she cannot tell. Serafina’s face remains pale, her eyes still focused somewhere in the middle distance. But she, or that other she that has been hidden for so long, is here now. The novice has found her voice.

“Through the power of your great Son, I have escaped the threats of a sacrilegious tyrant. ”

Within the great equality of God’s love, it is not considered healthy to pick out the single from the several, the particular thread from within the weave. The very purpose of convent life is to iron out the sense of the individual, to blend the one into the many and, from there, the many into the sublime Oneness of God. And nowhere is that ideal more powerfully realized than in chapel, where the voices of the choir meld into one coherent, seamless sound, praising God and His infinite bounty.

“I have crossed over the filth of the flesh And lo—I am left undefiled,”

There are, however, moments. And there are voices. And when the two come together it can be impossible, even undesirable, to resist.

“Behold, I come to You:”

As the phrase dies away in preparation for the next, Zuana watches the abbess secure Eugenia’s silence with a single glance, though the poor girl is so stunned it is unlikely she would have tried to take back her place. She closes her half-open mouth and drops her eyes. Whatever lesson she is learning now is made more potent by the fact that, in that instant, even her humiliation is irrelevant.

“You, my Lord, whom I have loved, have sought, have longed for—always. ”

Many of those present will talk later of it as a small but perfect miracle. On both sides of the grille they will search for words to describe the sound of the voice they heard, likening it first to the concentrated sweetness of the honeycomb or warm grain inside the wood, then contradicting themselves to speak of the burning flash of a comet, the purity of ice, even the shining transparency of heavenly bodies. But those who will do it most justice will speak not of the voice itself but of how it made them feel.

The old and the pious will speak of a piercing of their heart, so that they found it hard to breathe—a penetration which, though painful, unleashed a flow of love like Christ’s blood, gushing under the centurion’s spear, or the joy of the Virgin Madonna as the words of the angel Gabriel enter her breast. In contrast, the young will recall feeling it most powerfully in their gut, which is where another kind of love resides, though they will claim the arrow entered through the heart; and both young and old will, without noticing, hold their hands to their hearts while recalling the moment. And once they have tried to outdo each other in hyperbole they will sit back exhausted, quietly satisfied that their city is indeed a musical paradise, so much so that God sees fit to send new angels into its midst to guide its citizens on their way.

None of this word-spinning will mean much to Suora Benedicta. Though she might be a visionary in her compositions, she is also a choir mistress with a pragmatic understanding of the tools of her trade. The exuberant sweetness she has heard before (and can make good use of, for there can never be too much purity in a convent choir), but what she could never have predicted is how such a young body—still a girl’s as much as a woman’s—might produce a voice of such extraordinary range and control. How her lungs might hold so much within a single breath. How she might encompass so many registers, from the icicle point of a soprano to the chestnut honey of a tenor, or move between them so effortlessly, betraying no hint of strain or even the smallest of impurities with which the onset of menstruation can often infect the vocal cords. And then—most of all— how, when the choir reaches the new psalm settings in four or even six block parts, this single voice can know and travel between them all with equal assurance, though she can only have heard the notes once, or at best twice, through half-closed windows.

By the time the service ends, Benedicta is already halfway in her composition of the next, her mind filled with a voice that seems to be writing its own parts.

And meanwhile, what of Suora Zuana in all of this? Zuana, who remains as ignorant of the subtleties of vocal technique as she is impervious to the poetry of exaggeration. Zuana, who has been bred to observe and consider, to make sense of what her senses tell her. Except that everything her senses tell her now seems wrong. In front of her she is seeing a novice, apparently suffused with joy, singing her heart out to the glory of God and the joyful sacrifice of a virgin in the fires of martyrdom. But who is she, this girl? How can such a transformation have taken place? How can the strong-willed, recalcitrant, rebellious, angry young woman that she knows—a figure of much power but dubious spirituality—have disappeared so entirely, to be replaced by this new creature: absorbed, distilled, so consumed by the music she is making that she seems not even to be aware that any change has taken place.

Surely at some level she must know what she is doing. What, in effect, she has already done.

THE SERVICE MOVES triumphantly to its close. Yet as the last notes fade into silence—Serafina’s voice now plaited into, though not lost within, others—no one on either side of the grille moves.

The abbess, whose rising will mark the sign for others to do so, still sits in her seat. Around her the choir is caught, some looking down as they are instructed, others watching for the sign, a few staring more openly at the novice, who has dropped her hands and eyes and looks only at the floor.

The silence in the choir stall is matched by that in the body of the church. Not a sound can be heard through the grille now, no clearing of throats, no coughs or whispers. The good citizens of Ferrara are either unable or unwilling to accept that the experience is over.

Then, out of the silence, comes a man’s voice, clear and loud. A single word: “Brava!”

The shock of it runs through them all, so that now the abbess is spurred into movement and quickly the others follow.