I had begun to suspect the real cause of Adelheid’s decline; I had seen it enough times in the infirmary. I was preparing myself for an honest talk with her when she called me to the dorter one day she was alone there. She stood facing away for a while, head bowed in prayer or meditation, then turned to me. “Sister—I can call you that, for soon you will be one of us,” she said softly, “I believe God is going to take me soon.”
Though I was prepared for this, I felt a lump rising in my throat. “Why do you think that?”
“I am in pain . . . have been for a while.” She swallowed. “I have a growth on my breast, and I think it is consuming my vital humors.”
“Can I see it?” I was cautious after my experience with Jutta, but without a word Adelheid slid the robe off her right shoulder to reveal a breast, still youthfully firm, with a protuberance under the nipple the size of a hen’s egg.
I dropped my gaze so she would not read the dismay in my eyes. I had seen this before. Growths like this appeared in various places, most commonly on breasts and around the neck, but also on people’s bottoms and other fleshy parts. While some had claimed to have had them for years, others wasted away and died soon after discovering these lumps. On rare occasions, if they were small enough, Brother Wigbert excised them with the knife he used for lancing boils, but there was nothing else—no powder, draft, or mixture—that would slow the disease down or reverse its course.
I touched the growth. It was more solid that the normal flesh. I gently lifted Adelheid’s right arm and felt around the armpit, causing her to grimace with pain. More swellings there, also familiar. Yes, her presentiment was likely correct. My heart sank, for my attachment to her was deep. The vesper bell tore through the air with its metallic urgency, and it seemed particularly mournful just then.
Gingerly, I lifted the sleeve of Adelheid’s robe to cover her and was struck by the serenity of her gaze when I finally met it. With a sense of relief, I realized that she was reconciled to her fate and accepted it. That was probably for the best. “I will make sure you are as comfortable as possible,” I said in a low voice, still not trusting myself to be able to control it.
“Comfort is not in store for me.” There was no fear in her voice, only a hint of resignation. “My mother died of the same disease when I was a little child. She suffered greatly.”
“There are infusions I can make for you that will alleviate the pain and help you sleep.” I tried to sound reassuring, but I was worried. The agony this disease often brought with it was fierce; if it lasted long enough, the poppy syrup, though effective at first in numbing the senses, would become increasingly useless in procuring relief.
I spent the next several days frantically reviewing each of Brother Wigbert’s reference volumes, hoping to find a cure everyone else had missed. I consulted with him, and he brought Book XXVI of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia from the library, which classifies remedies according to specific diseases. Wigbert dismissed the herbal treatments because of Pliny’s suggestion that they should be applied while repeating invocations to Apollo, one of the ancients’ heathen gods. We also reviewed the sections of Galen and Hippocrates about growths, which Hippocrates referred to as carcinos, after a mythical Greek creature. But few of the suggested treatments were feasible; given the size of Adelheid’s lump, a surgery would kill her before the disease did. As for purgatives, which Galen strongly recommended, they seemed a bad idea for an already weak patient who was unable to swallow more than a few spoonfuls of broth.
In the end, the poppy extract was our only recourse, and perhaps the only blessing was that Adelheid’s death, a month later, came in the depth of the dreamless sleep it induces.
Jutta spent the first day of mourning prostrated on the chapel’s floor, but Juliana was unable to pray. She threw herself on the body of her companion, and after I managed to persuade her to let go, she lay on her pallet, turned to the wall, and remained that way for hours. She did not rise even when we washed the body and wrapped it in a shroud. But she did come to the chapel, drawn and hollow-eyed, during the overnight vigil and started to wail again, the tremulous circles of light from the candles by Adelheid’s head giving the scene an almost demonic quality.
Juliana regained a measure of peace only after the body had been removed to the church on the night before the burial. After matins, Jutta announced that she would stay in the chapel for the rest of the night, and I tried not to think about how she was going to spend those solitary hours. Back in bed I was hoping for some sleep, for my exhaustion was great, when Juliana’s voice reached me from the shadows barely scattered by the single candle. “She was a recluse like myself, but she had about her something of the world without.” Juliana’s voice was low, but it seemed to ring out in the darkness. Despite my weariness, I turned toward her.
“I left that world unwillingly,” she went on, haltingly at first, then
