converse.' Her voice was deep, indeed, almost masculine in tonality. She was tall and slender, with the narrow hips of a boy, and seemed to glide across the stone flagging by some mysterious means of locomotion. 'My name is Suor Maffia di Albori. I am one of the madri di consiglio, the ruling council of Santa Marina Maggiore.'
The moment Jenny stepped across the threshold Suor Maffia di Albori slammed the door shut and threw the huge ancient lock. Without a word, she led Jenny to a stone fount, below which was a basin of cool water.
'Wash your face, please,' Suor Maffia di Albori said.
Obediently, Jenny bent over, cupping the water in her hands, splashing it up over her face, washing off the charcoal. When she turned, Suor Maffia di Albori handed her a square of undyed muslin, which she used to dry her face.
'Take off your cap, please.' As Jenny did so, the nun made a sound deep in her throat. 'Now you may properly introduce yourself.'
'My name is Jenny Logan.'
'And who or what are you running from, Jenny Logan?' Suor Maffia di Albori was not a handsome woman. She had no need for beauty, for she was possessed of a powerful face with a strong Roman nose, prominent cheekbones and a thrusting chin like a sword blade.
'The Knights of St. Clement,' Jenny said. 'Two or more of their agents infiltrated the church and murdered Father Mosto.'
'Is that so?' Suor Maffia di Albori examined Jenny with the deep-set curious eyes of the intellectual. 'Would you hazard a guess as to the method of Father Mosto's murder?'
'I don't have to guess, I saw him,' Jenny said. 'His throat was slit.'
'The murder weapon?' Suor Maffia di Albori said rather coolly.
'A knife-a pearl-scaled switchblade, to be exact.'
Suor Maffia di Albori took a quick and determined step toward her. 'Don't lie to me, girl!'
'I know because it's my knife. It was taken from me.' She explained briefly what had happened to her.
The madre di consiglio listened to the account entirely without comment or expression. Jenny might have been explaining how she'd lost the two euros Suor Maffia di Albori had given her to buy a carton of milk.
'And why have you come to Santa Marina Maggiore, Jenny Logan?'
'I need help,' Jenny said.
'What makes you believe that you will find it here?'
'I was told to ask to see the Anchorite.'
A deathly silence now fell between them.
'Who told you that?'
'The Plumber.'
It appeared as if Suor Maffia di Albori's face had gone chalk white. It took her a moment to recover. 'You are that Jenny?'
'Yes.'
Suor Maffia di Albori said, 'You will wait here. You will not move or speak to anyone but myself, even if spoken to, is that understood?'
'Yes, Mother,' Jenny said as meekly as Suor Andriana.
'You are neither converse nor monache da cow. You are not obliged to address me as 'Mother'.'
'Nevertheless, I will, Mother.'
The madre di consiglio nodded. 'As you wish.' She turned away, but not before Jenny caught the tiny flicker of pleasure in her eyes.
Jenny, alone in the dark and musty anteroom, stood quite still, waiting as she had been ordered to do. There were no windows, and what little furniture there was-two chairs and a settee-looked as forbidding and uncomfortable as if they had been manufactured for the visiting room of a prison. The floor was a mosaic of the Crucifixion, dimmed now with age and perhaps the waters of the lagoon. Even so, it was clear that only the dullest of colors had been used, because in the convent bright hues were deemed unseemly and to be avoided. On three sides, arches led to an even gloomier interior.
A distant chanting started up, as Sexte, the noon prayer, floated through the nunnery. As always, her mind was filled with Dex. It was he who had told her of Santa Marina Maggiore, who had told her to ask for the Anchorite. Dex was the plumber-it was, he had told her, how the nuns of Santa Marina Maggiore referred to him. When she had asked him why, he had given her that wry, lopsided smile of his that so endeared him to her.
'Like everything else of import, it returns to the Latin, plumb being Latin for lead,' he had said. 'In medieval times, roofs were made of lead, so plumbers were roofers. The nuns of Santa Marina Maggiore call me the Plumber because they believe I kept the roof over their heads.'
'Did you?' she had asked.
Again that wry, lopsided smile dented his face. 'In a way, I guess, in money… and in my belief in them.'
She wanted to know more, of course, but she hadn't asked him, and he hadn't volunteered any more. Now, against all odds, here she was at Santa Marina Maggiore, asking to see the Anchorite, not even knowing who or what the Anchorite was. But, she told herself, that was how it had always been between her and Dex-he said things, and she took them on faith. It was him she had faith in, ever since… But she didn't want to think about that, and with a violent mental wrench, turned her thoughts in another direction.
She opened her eyes. Below her, Christ's sorrowful eyes beseeched her. What was He calling for? Faith, of course. For a Catholic with faith, life was simple. The phrase 'Have faith, it's God will' covered every situation, no matter how disastrous. Life, however, was anything but simple, and it seemed to her that the platitudes that escaped from the mouths of priests were like soap bubbles, unable to sustain themselves, collapsing almost as soon as they were spoken.
Sexte was almost done by the time Suor Maffia di Albori returned. Her cheeks were flushed, as if she was in a hurry to return.
'Come with me, Jenny,' she said.
Jenny dutifully followed behind the madre di consiglio.
Passing beneath the central arch, she went through a door, out onto a stone portico held up by delicate columns of pale limestone with trefoil capitals. The portico stepped down into a square garden, divided into four equal plots, each holding different plants. One grew green herbs, another, small fig, lime and pear trees. In a third, she could see the tops of carrots and beets, along with the deeply-hued glossy skins of baby eggplant and the frothy ruffled edges of chicory, while the fourth contained a series of tiny complex leafed plants she could not identify.
It was in this that Suor Andriana worked on her knees, turning over the soil with a trowel, pulling out weeds, carefully trimming the plants. She did not look up as they passed, but Jenny could see her hunched shoulders tense, and she felt a pluck of sympathy for the girl.
The walkways between the sections formed a cross through whose center they passed on their way to the private rooms of Santa Marina Maggiore. Jenny was familiar enough with nunneries to know that she was being accorded a signal honor-normally, no outsider was allowed into the inner chambers.
'It's best I prepare you for your interview,' Suor Maffia di Albori said in her sober, vaguely masculine voice. 'Perhaps you know that the majority of Venetian nuns came from the upper crust of society. The society inside-our society-is formed along strictly hierarchical lines. There are the monache da cow, the choir nuns, those of noble birth, and then there are the converse, the social inferiors. This was how it was in the fifteen hundreds, and here it remains so today.'
They had by this time crossed the garden and had passed through another, larger archway, the portal to the cloistered grounds of the nunnery proper. This part of the structure was set back quite far from the street, closer to the church than Jenny would have imagined. But then Venetian architecture had a way of mimicking the city's streets, which often bent, curling back on themselves. It was inevitable that one got lost in Venice; that was part of the city's pleasurable distinctions.
Sexte had ended and it was very still inside the building, with only the barest suggestion of echoes now and again reaching them, like the soft lapping of the lagoon against ancient pilings.
