Within a few days, however, another form of penance is visited on her when a powerful infection slides into the convent, an epidemic of wheezing and sneezing followed by a high fever and vomiting. Once in, it moves like water, with six choir nuns and one conversa brought down by it in as many days. While such maladies are common enough during winter, the virulence of this one takes Zuana by surprise, and to avoid further contagion she quarantines each afflicted nun to her cell, with only herself and a nurse conversa to tend them while she searches for remedies. Together they use cloths soaked in balm mint and vinegar water to keep down the fever and a tonic of ragwort and pennyroyal in wine to feed them when their stomachs have been purged. By the time the first sufferers are on their feet again, a further three sisters and a novice have fallen ill, and the nurse conversa is complaining of aches and fever flushes.

Zuana, who by then has barely slept for nights on end, asks for a meeting with the abbess to request that she be granted more help—or at least to inquire if the help she once had might be returned to her.

SOMETIMES AT NIGHT inside the cell she has to stop herself from dancing. He is here. He has come. They will find a way.

Though the pages of poems have not been returned to her, she knows the words—and his music for them—by heart, and when she twirls her body to the sounds inside her head she can feel the swish of soft petticoats beneath the serge, and the silk of her hair, washed and brushed under her loosely tied scarf, sliding over her shoulders. With her chest unpacked now, the cold stone has grown softer and there is color against the gray: the weave of the rug, the gold threads of the tablecloth, the glint of the silver candlesticks, the painted blues and scarlet within the Madonna’s robes, and the cherub-pink flesh of the baby on her lap in the small wood panel painting hung above her little table in the second chamber. Though the space is small, and even in daylight still half night, with the glow that comes from an extra candle the atmosphere is almost welcoming. Until you let your mind move to the walls and the locked doors outside it.

But she no longer thinks of that. And she will not be mean with her good fortune, either. When she goes she will leave all this here for the next one, an altogether kinder legacy than vomit and death.

Much of this comfort is thanks to her new conversa. Two days after the Feast of Saint Agnes, the malicious Augustina had been replaced by Candida, a sturdy young woman who knows her way around convent restrictions and who for a small sum (or the equivalent in clothing or trinkets) can make a novice’s life less bleak in many ways: extra candles, special soap, even leftover delicacies from the kitchens, from which she takes her own cut before delivery. But Candida’s finest gift is her hands, for though they are not those of a lady—too much scrubbing and washing for that—they have a gentle touch and sometimes, in the private hour before Compline, when she has finished brushing the river of Serafina’s hair, she plays a little at arranging the locks, and her fingers move across Serafina’s shoulders, sending a cascade of tiny shivers down her back. The first time it happens it lights a fluttery fire of memory in Serafina’s belly, as much for the playful hands of her younger sister as for the wilder caresses of her imagination. The next night, when Candida stands behind her waiting, as if for further instructions, for an instant Serafina’s mind goes to the gargoyle twins, who can often be spotted hand in hand and are rumored to compensate for each other’s deformities in the strangest of ways. The novice who told her that had a half smile on her face as she did so, and as Serafina turns toward Candida now she registers something similar in her look and it makes her confused. Whatever sweetness she is being offered, it will no doubt come at a price; and there are more important things for Serafina to spend her trinkets upon.

What she really wants from her, though, is impossible, for even corruption has its limits and Candida’s influence, it seems, does not extend outside the gates. She cannot, for example, spirit lovesick young men inside under piles of laundry as the romance stories would have you believe, or even redirect letters over the head of the censor nun who scrutinizes and vets every communication coming in and out. This much Serafina has learned casually, while exchanging tall tales of convent gossip, since she has no way of knowing if the payment that has already changed hands between her and Candida has bought loyalty or only goods. But in among the prattle, small seeds of information fall that she hoards away for later consumption: the whereabouts of the chief conversa’s cell (such is her status that it allows her a cell of her own outside the servants’ dormitory), the hours she keeps in her busy workday, and, most notably, the existence of her own set of keys to the river storeroom, which she carries with her almost constantly.

Though there is still a fast stream of excitement running inside her, so fast that it sometimes feels like panic, Serafina keeps it deeply buried, feeding off its energy. When she walks in the garden with other novices during recreation, the walls are still as high as they were but she no longer wants to scream or howl at them. Instead she uses the time to memorize the fastest shortcut from her cell to the place by the wall where she threw the first stone. Knowing he received it, she now makes the journey there and back within the space of the night-watch rounds, dropping sprinklings of white pebbles from under her robes as she goes in the hope that it will make the route easier to spot in the dark.

It still makes her shake to think of how, on that first night, she had lost her bearings trying to get back to the cloisters in time and been caught by the watch sister. It had been black as hell out there, with all manner of noises and scratching in the undergrowth, so that when she hit the tree root it felt as if something had grabbed her foot, and her stumble had sent her sprawling into thick mud. For the next two days she had stunk of its filth and her own sweat as the walls of her cell squeezed in around her. Still, she would go through it again just to hear that trill of the bird whistle, following his dancing voice. Dear God, she had thought then she might die of that feeling, the wild erupting sweetness of it. By the time they had let her out she was terrified that he might not have found the message she had lobbed over into the dark or have given up waiting. But if she could no longer hear him, then at least now he could hear her.

“Behold, I come to You; You whom I have loved …always. ”

And then that single word echoing back through the chapel grille: “Brava!”

It had been all she could do not to shout back to him: You have come. Oh, you have come. We will find a way.

Instead, though, she had put her head down and become a nun.

OH, THEY MUST be so proud of her, of what they think they have achieved. She is proud of herself. The transformation is everywhere: in the way she walks, eyes to the ground as if God were to be found in every flagstone, or the way she sits in chapter or refectory shy as a young Madonna. But the best is how she behaves in chapel, for there is a whole world in this performance when you choose to savor it: the prostration before the crucifix, the cold stone through the warm cloth, followed by sitting, alert and straight, so straight she even registers the indent of the slivered wood pictures of the choir stalls against her back. And then, depending on the hour of the office, the shifting daylight on the frescoes: paintings of Christ as humble as He is divine; carrying children on His back across raging streams, helping souls to clamber out of their graves, even climbing up onto His own cross by way of a ladder. Though all these images have been around her, she has been too angry or wounded to have looked at them properly. Now they help to quiet her mind, for she cannot sing well if she is elsewhere in her head, and it is her voice that is buying her freedom.