Three days later the same procedure takes place the other way around. That night Serafina is especially fortunate. With the Carnival spirit on the move again, the watch sister has changed the timing of her rounds, and the novice barely reaches her cell before the footsteps hit the flagstones outside.

She lies on her pallet, fully dressed, heart thudding, the heavy package clasped to her breast, as she hears the footsteps stop by her door, hesitate, then go forward again. In the dark when all is silent once more she pulls open the wrapping and feels underneath her fingers the shape of two newly forged iron keys and the fold of a letter around them.

There is nothing they can do to hurt her now. She is ready. It is only a question of waiting.

WITH ZUANA BACK on her feet, it takes less than a week for the contagion to be halted. The fever passes naturally from the remaining sisters (in the city, the severity of the attack is already waning), while the chief conversa, in whom it proves more stubborn, emerges three days later with rosy lips and renewed strength: a happy outcome, since her trips to and from the storehouse are even more frequent.

The rehearsals for the play enter their final stage. Suora Perseveranza comes out of her cell word-perfect, having been heard reciting her lines while in the midst of her delirium. Except for meal hours the refectory is now strictly out of bounds, as workmen are brought in from outside to build the stage and set. For three days their sawing and hammering offer a background percussion to the daily orders, and their presence—invisible though it is—introduces a level of exhilaration into the convent, with the novices and boarders closely chaperoned on every journey. There is a story, so often repeated that it is almost certainly apocryphal, of how a particularly beautiful postulant from a convent in Prato had her lover dress up as a workman to come in and fix the pews in the church and then, at the end of his time, he smuggled her out in a great bag of his tools. The very idea is enough to have a few of the younger ones swooning with excitement—but it is Carnival, after all, and when the body is incarcerated the mind cannot help but play a little.

Outside, too, the city has come alive. Family visits to the parlatorio tell of a wave of new arrivals: visitors from Mantua, Bologna, Padua, Venice—even a few from Rome itself. Ferrara has a reputation for good living as well as beautiful voices, and celebrations are already in full swing. It is said that if you walk by the palace you can hear the trumpeting of elephants brought in especially for the d’Este marriage feast and kept on for Carnival. The ducal garden has been transformed into a huge stage set, lit by a thousand candles, with grottoes and temples and even a great pyramid, all part of an elaborate game of valor in which a group of knights must win their ladies’ hands by slaying dragons and answering riddles—though since the duke must triumph there are rumors of the riddles being adapted to fit his somewhat limited knowledge.

Meanwhile, the streets outside the convent have become their own stage for debauchery. All over the city young men are trying on their Carnival masks, and once disguised how can they possibly stay indoors? Disturbing the city’s peace is an accepted part of the celebrations. Disturbing its nuns is a more serious affair, a crime against God as much as against the women themselves, but even here a little leeway is granted in the name of high spirits. Soon the odd slingshot pellet is arriving over the walls, to be picked up by the watch sister after Lauds: balls of paper scrawled with madrigals and bad poetry. Madonna Chiara sighs as she reads them and feeds them to the fire. The sentiments are predictable: unrequited love like evergreen laurel for ladies whose virtue is so fierce that it freezes the sun itself, alongside a handful of scurrilous verses offering a more instant heaven on earth for those with the wit to imagine it. Any abbess worth her salt has seen it all before. Most men are tempted by what they cannot have, and the truth is that it is not just heretics who are greedy for tales of lustful nuns that, like bad confessors, they can both enjoy and denounce at the same time. If anything, she thinks, this year’s crop is somewhat tamer than the last. Surely the city’s poets used to be wittier and cleverer than this? Or perhaps she, like Suora Umiliana, is becoming nostalgic for times past.

When the great annual procession takes to the streets, the whole city stops to watch. The road outside the main entrance of the convent becomes a moving wall of people. At different times throughout the day, small groups of converse and the more adventurous of the choir nuns crane their necks out of the few available high windows to watch as the biggest floats go by. From this vantage point they see giants, dwarfs, mermaids, goddesses, angels, popes, and devils. By now most of the performers have spent so much time waving and shouting up to the noblewomen on the balconies that they have permanent cricks in their necks. The convents, however, are always a challenge, especially for the key makers, who have a float of their own this year and who make a special effort, strutting up and down waving huge counterfeit keys and shouting out verses about their tools being especially useful for women behind locked doors and inviting everyone to come down to the float and handle a few for themselves.

With the cochinilla at last delivered to the kitchens, the first marzipan fruit bowls are now complete. There is a tradition within the convent that the kitchen mistress is allowed to choose one sister and one novice to sample the first batch. After supper one evening Suora Benedicta and Serafina are called to the back cloisters, where Federica gives the choir mistress a fat green pear—“Because your melodies bring us closer to God”—while Serafina is presented with a somewhat misshapen but exceedingly red strawberry—“And your singing gives more pleasure than your howling ever did; also, as the last novice to come inside, you can still remember the tastes you left behind and can judge how this compares.”

While it is probable that the recipe for marzipan remains constant whichever side of the convent wall one lives on, Serafina’s reaction—she is clearly affected by the intensity of the taste—satisfies even Federica.

“Here, wipe your mouth,” she says, handing her a cloth. “We would not want you getting into trouble now that you are doing so well.”

And doing well she is. With every passing day Serafina grows more radiant, despite her humble demeanor. She shines even when she is silent, as if God’s great love were trying to burst out of her heart, and her voice in chapel, especially at the darkest point of the night, entrances everyone. When she is not singing she is at prayer. She has even dispensed with Candida and taken on the duties of cleaning her own cell, washing the floor, making her own bed, changing her own linen. There are those who whisper behind her back that she is only trying so hard in the hope that she will be allowed to join the visiting in the parlatorio after the concert is over (the rules are clear that she is not yet eligible to entertain or be entertained). But if that is her aim, she says nothing about it. In fact, these days she says almost nothing at all.

SERAFINA’S BEHAVIOR MIGHT be more remarked upon were it not for the drama that takes place within the convent in the days leading up to the concert and play

Following some urgent exchanges of letters and out-of-hours visits in the parlatorio, Suora Apollonia’s sister, the lady Camilla Bendidio, arrives late one night with a maidservant and a small bag and is quickly settled in the guesthouse to the side of the main cloisters. It doesn’t take long for the news to spread that there is trouble in the marriage and she has asked for refuge away from her husband while negotiations take place within the family to try to bring peace. Apollonia is given special dispensation to spend time with her, and that same night Zuana is called by the abbess to attend her. She has a deep cut at the hairline of her forehead, as if something has been thrown at her, and sits without movement or murmur while Zuana cleans and tends the wound. When asked if there is anything else she needs help with, she removes her shawl and upper bodice to reveal a set of large ripening bruises on her arms and shoulders and sits weeping silently as Zuana rubs ointment gently into the damaged skin.