Free Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant Page A

then relents. It is too cruel to leave it like that.
    “I could loosen it for you now if you like.”
    The girl hesitates. Asking for help is not the same thing as giving in.
    “Yes.” There is a pause. “Please.”
    She sits statue-still as Zuana approaches and slips her hands around the back of Serafina’s head under the material to locate the pins. Close to, in the daylight, the girl’s skin is creamy now and moist with youth, the mouth full above a strong jaw, and the eyes so deep and dark—black rather than brown—that it is hard to tell the iris from the pupil. No melting Madonna beauty here but a presence nevertheless, strong, even striking.
    She reaffixes the stiff material more gently. “Don’t worry. You will get used to it fast enough. Soon it will feel more strange to be without it.”
    The girl blinks and a fat tear wells up and overflows, because of course that idea is even more unbearable. For a moment Zuana wants to tighten her arms around her and whisper into her ear all the ways in which resistance will tear her apart and how quickly wounds can heal when the right remedies and ointments are applied. The strength of her own feeling alarms her, and she moves her arms back to her sides. It has never been her role, the soothing of souls, and there is no reason to start now. Not least because some things one must learn for oneself.
    She moves back to the table and starts pulling out boards and graters. The bishop’s remedies will take more time than she has, even with the dispensation to miss orders, and one day is almost passed. When she turns, the girl is standing next to her.
    “This is where you work?”
    “Here and the distillery, yes.”
    “Who works with you?”
    “There is a conversa who helps with the patients. But in the dispensary I am alone.”
    “Is that allowed?”
    “Since my voice is as cracked as my fingers, it is accepted that I am better employed on my own than in the choir or the embroidery room.”
    It’s true enough. Even when she arrived her hands had been more the laborer’s than the lady’s, and over the years they have grown worse, the skin eaten and stained by the processes of gardening and the chemicals of distillation. As for her singing— well, in the hierarchy of convent voices, everyone knows she is a minnow swimming next to fat carp. She smiles at the thought. It does not worry her. There are times when she thinks she might be offering up her own kind of music here, for surely each and every ingredient she collects has its own voice—soft, loud, dark, light—each distinct enough when alone yet capable of making all manner of different sounds and resonances when mixed together.
    At last count there were close to ninety glass bottles here, a veritable choir of cures! She has done penance for the pride of such a thought in the past, but the image stubbornly remains. Her father would have understood. He was forever in search of the music of nature, handed down through the spheres, though in church he too could barely hold a note.
    “There are so many of them!” The girl is standing staring at the shelves. “How long did it take you to collect them all?”
    “Perhaps it is better you don’t know,” Zuana says lightly. But she likes the fact that she is interested.
    “And is every one of these a different remedy?”
    “Some work alone, yes. They are known as simples. Others need to be mixed together to form compounds.”
    “So what is that?” She points up at a bottle with a small twisted root inside.
    “White hellebore.”
    “What does it do?”
    “It purges the system.”
    “Of what?”
    “Anything that is inside you. It causes powerful vomiting.”
    “Worse than mine?”
    “You can lose half your stomach with this if you’re not careful.”
    “Really! What, do you eat it?”
    “Not on its own. There is too much poison in it.”
    “So how does it work?”
    Curiosity. It is not the characteristic of a recalcitrant novice. But then the inside