The Phoenix of Florence by Philip Kazan

Author:Philip Kazan [Philip Kazan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780749022181
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2019-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

The nuns had washed and repaired my clothes. I found them waiting for me one morning when I came back to my cell after hobbling around the lovely little garden behind the convent. I had been on my feet for two days, though at first I could do nothing but walk out into the cloister and back to my bed. There didn’t seem to be any serious damage to my thigh. It had been a small miracle, Sister Vittoria said, the spear had missed both my stockings and my breeches, which must have ridden up as I stood in the saddle, and there were no pieces of dirty cloth in the wound. So, while the hole in my thigh was still leaking yellowish fluid into the bandages, it was giving me an honest pain, like a freshly cut finger, and not the dizzy heat of infection. One of the sisters had brought me an old crutch, and another had sewn me a rough shift out of old bedlinen, not much more than a long white sack with wide arms and a hole for my head which, when I pulled it on, looked a little like a shroud. That was how we buried men in the company: wrapped in white cloth. I had been wondering how many men had been buried after the skirmish and, looking down at myself, naked beneath the crude drapery, I felt another pang of the guilt that had been growing in me since my fever had broken. That day I limped around the cloister until my leg ached, then rested on the single stone bench, breathing in the scent of the rose bush that grew in the centre of the gravel square, then limped again. The nuns – there were five of them, apart from the Mother Superior and Sister Vittoria – came and went on their daily errands or followed the fixed ritual of the holy hours. At first, they had found me interesting, but that place moved to its own inexorable rhythm, and had little time for novelty. The convent was not one of those places where daughters of good family are deposited out of convenience, or where girls from questionable families are locked away to protect them from the appetites of men. It was a place, so Sister Vittoria told me one day as she was changing my bandages, where nuns from several other convents down the coast had come after their own houses had been overrun by the Turkish advance. There was no one here without a true vocation. I liked the fact that I could be so easily ignored, even though every sister knew my story by now. I felt invisible yet cared for, like the ghost of someone whose family misses them, and is glad when they hear footsteps in an upstairs room, or the sudden, soft brush of an unseen robe. It was how I wished I could spend my whole life. But I could not.

I closed the door

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