Sarah Dunant - The Birth of Venus

THE BIRTH OF VENUS

A Novel

SARAH DUNANT

RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS

NEW YORK

CONTENTS

TO

MY MOTHER,

ESTELLE,

AND

MY DAUGHTERS,

ZOE

AND

GEORGIA

PROLOGUE

N O ONE HAD SEEN HER NAKED UNTIL HER DEATH. IT WAS A rule of the order that the Sisters should not look on human flesh, neither their own nor anyone elses. A considerable amount of thought had gone into the drafting of this observance. Under the billowing folds of their habits each nun wore a long cotton shift, a garment they kept on always, even when they washed, so that it acted as a screen and partial drying cloth as well as a night shift. This shift they changed once a month (more in summer when the stagnant Tuscan air bathed them in sweat), and there were careful instructions as to correct procedure: how they should keep their eyes firmly fixed on the crucifix above their bed as they disrobed. If any did let their gaze stray downward, the sin was a matter for the confessional and therefore not for history.

There was a rumor that when Sister Lucrezia had first entered cloisters she had brought with her a certain vanity along with her vocation (her dowry to the church, it was said, included a lavishly decorated marriage chest filled with books and paintings fit for the attentions of the Sumptuary Police). But that was a time when the sisterhood had been prone to such accidents of abuse and luxury, and since the reforming of the convent the rules were stricter. None of the present inhabitants could remember that far back, save for the Reverend Mother, who had become a bride of Christ around the same time as Lucrezia but had long since turned her back on such worldliness. As for Sister Lucrezia herself, she never spoke of her past. In fact, in the last few years she had spoken very little at all. That she was pious there was no doubt. And as her bones stooped and glued together with age, so her piety and modesty had fused. In some ways it was natural. Even if she had been tempted to vanity, what surface could she have found to reflect herself in? The cloisters held no mirrors, the windows no glass; even the fishpond in the gardens had been designed with a fountain at its center sending out an endless shower of rain to prevent any possible narcissism in the waters surface. Of course, even in the purest of orders some infringement is inevitable, and there had been times when a few of the more sophisticated novitiates had been caught surreptitiously considering their own portrait miniaturized in the pupils of their elders eyes. But more often than not this faded as the image of Our Lord loomed larger.

Sister Lucrezia seemed not to have looked directly at anyone for some years. Instead, she had spent increasing time at devotion in her cell, her eyes filming over with age and the love of God. As she became more ill, so she had been absolved from manual labor, and while others were working she could be found sitting in the gardens or in the herb plot, which she had sometimes tended. The week before her death she had been spotted there by the young novitiate Sister Carmilla, who had been alarmed by coming upon the elderly nun sitting not on the bench but stretched out upon the bare ground, her body under the habit distended by the tumors growth, her headdress cast aside, and her face tilted up to the late-afternoon rays of the sun. Such an undressing was a flagrant breach of regulations, but by then the disease had eaten so deep inside, and her pain was so evident, that the Reverend Mother could not bring herself to discipline her. Later, after the authorities had left and the body had finally been taken away, Carmilla would spread the echoing gossip of that encounter along the refectory table, telling how the nuns unruly hair, freed from her wimple, had blazed out like a gray halo around her head, and how her face had been lit up with happinessonly the smile playing upon her lips had been one more of triumph than of beatification.

That last week of her life, as the pain flowed in ever deeper waves, dragging her away in its undertow, the corridor outside her cell began to smell of death: a fetid aroma as if her flesh were already rotting away. The tumor had grown so tender by then that she could no longer sit up for its size. They brought in church physicians, even a doctor from Florence (flesh could be exposed in the cause of the alleviation of suffering), but she had refused them all and shared her agony with no one.

The lump remained not only covered but hidden away. The summer was upon them by then, and the convent simmered by day and sweltered by night, but still she lay under the blanket fully clothed. No one knew how long the disease had been eating into her flesh. The volume of their habit was designed to hide any hint of shape or female curve. Five years before, in the greatest scandal to hit the nunnery since the bad old days, a fourteen-year-old novitiate from Siena had concealed nine months of growth so successfully that she was only found out when the kitchen Sister came upon traces of the afterbirth in the corner of the wine cellar and, fearing it was the entrails of some half-devoured animal, nosed around till she found the tiny bloated body weighted down by a bag of flour in a vat of Communion wine. Of the girl herself there was no sign.

When questioned after she had first fainted during Matins a month earlier, Sister Lucrezia confessed that the lump in her left breast had been there for some time, its malignant energy pulsing against her skin like a small volcano. But right from the start she was adamant that there was nothing to be done for it. After a meeting with the Reverend Mother, which caused the latter to be late for Vespers, the matter was not referred to again. Death was, after all, a temporary staging post in a longer journey and one that in a house of God was as much to be welcomed as feared.

In the last hours she grew crazy with pain and fever. The strongest herb concoctions gave her no release. Where she had first borne her suffering with fortitude, now she could be heard howling through the night like an animal, a desperate sound that frightened awake the younger nuns in the cells close by. Along with the howling came sporadic words, yelled out in staccato bursts or whispered like lines from a frenzied prayer: Latin, Greek, and Tuscan all stuck together in a thick verbal glue.

She was finally taken by God one morning as another suffocating day was dawning. The priest who had come to deliver last rites had gone and she was alone with one of the nursing Sisters, who recounted how, at the moment the soul departed, Lucrezias face had miraculously changed, the lines etched by pain melting away, leaving the skin smooth, almost translucent: an echo of the tender young nun who had first arrived at the convent doors some thirty years before.

The death was formally announced at Matins. Because of the heat (the temperature over the last few days had turned the butter liquid in the kitchen), it was thought necessary to inter the corpse with the day. It was the custom of the convent to give any departing Sister the dignity of a clean body as well as a spotless soul and to clothe her in a bright new habit: a wedding dress for the bride finally united with the Godhead husband. This ritual was performed by Sister Magdalena, who ran the pharmacy and administered the medicines (given special dispensation to witness flesh for this most divine of occasions) aided by a younger nun, Sister Maria, who would eventually take on the job herself. Together they would wash and dress the body, then lay it out in the chapel, where it would remain for a day while the rest of the convent paid its respects. But on this occasion their services were not required. Sister Lucrezia, it appeared, had made a special request before she died, asking that her body be left untouched, in the habit in which she had served her Lord for all these years. It was, to say the least, unusualthere was talk among the sisters as to whether it might qualify as disobediencebut the Reverend Mother had sanctioned it and it would have gone unquestioned had it not been for the news, also received that morning, of an outbreak of plague in the village nearby.