The last thing Amadore Griffuccio expected was a wimple, at least not during his usual working hours. But there it stood, casting its shadow by votive candlelight and subtly swaying lamp, against the stone peeking through the scorched plaster. Its owner knelt before the tiny altar in the side chapel, nodding, bobbing even, almost as though the nun underneath was dancing rather than praying.

And so, crouched behind a corner pew in the convent chapel, he waited.

And waited.

The moon rose.

The moon set.

He had ample time to regret the conversation that led to his present position, literal and figurative. Normally such deeds were simple affairs: get in, get out. He had heard tell of monks disguising themselves as a brother of another monastery, waiting ten years or more for a chance at grabbing a given relic. Amadore, however, was no monk, in disguise or otherwise. Quite to the contrary, as a priest’s bastard, each feat of daring-do served as a private blow of revenge against his long-gone father. And from runty little runaway he had now reached the prime of life and career. He knew his business. Normally he avoided nunneries as too highly guarded, preferring a catacomb razzia for early martyrs, while bits of the cross, scattered generously across the churches of Italy, lay there for the taking. Pride of place went to “transferring guardianship” —as his clients preferred to phrase it—of a Holy Foreskin, perhaps even The Holy Foreskin, but he generally stayed out of that side of the business. At all events, Amadore stood tall as the go-to man for stealing relics in all the land.

At least that was the report garnered by Father Gervasio—Abbot of San Stefano, the custodial monastery of the fire-ravaged convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli—after subtly sending out feelers amongst the bishops and the cardinals to find the lightest-handed, nimblest-fingered man for a job he knew must be done.

The prelate rattled his pink jowls at the thief. “A relic of this import should not be in a nunnery! The sisters cannot receive pilgrims and this heart must have its due honors of veneration. It is sacrilegious, even, to think of these muliericulae guarding such an august, and indeed powerful, piece of a saint and keeping the body from its integral wholeness.”

It hadn’t even been that long since Suora Ilaria had passed, a year at most, perhaps a year further since the blaze that had brought the convent, poor already, to a pile of rubble and cinders. The sisters continued there, barely roofed, but persisting as they could in their vows and duties. Then came the rumor that one among them—a new postulate come from afar, whose family was known to none—began to levitate.  First in simple floating, then rising to the rafters during orison. This much at least had leaked out of the convent walls to the common folks who told the tale round the fireplace, gathered at the well and gossiping at the mill. Then the postulate performed a full-blown miracle. According to common report, a cousin of one of the sisters, a woman married to a rich but violent man, came for a visit at the parlatorio, covered in bruises and nursing a broken arm. This Sister Ilaria reached through the grate and, touching the woman, healed her completely. When the woman returned home, her husband, upon seeing her whole again, took his vows to go to the Holy Land and left his wife his fortune.

One miracle certainly turned heads, but when the nun died shortly thereafter, wonders did not cease. News spread and soon all manner of suffering humanity made their way to the barred doors of Santa Maria degli Angeli.  The sisters could not raise their gates to allow in layfolk en masse. The laws of cloistered life forbade it. Anyone who came to visit had to go, with Mother Superior’s permission, into the small parlatorio, but this was no social call.  This was an overwhelming tide of the needful and suffering that came in giant waves one over the other. No matter that they could not enter.  Even at touching those gates, even at reaching the threshold, lepers—men and women—became paragons of beauty, the crippled leapt, danced, and skipped home to the rhythm of tunes warbled now by the deaf and the mute, the barren bore children, and the blind witnessed it all through eyes restored to the fullness of sight. And, as pilgrims came flooding to the convent doors, so too did riches to the poor sisters.

Father Gervasio—as protector of both the nunnery and his monastery of San Stefano, whose relic collection was vaster and yet far more tranquil—kindly offered to take in the sacred remains of the Suora, now Santa, Ilaria. Her title mattered little to the community: whatever the Pope had yet to pronounce concerning her holy status, popular conviction had already promoted her to the company of the Blessed. The sisters accepted the translatio, the transfer, even if they had but little say in the matter. The Abbot, in his paternal concern, did not like to tempt the weaker vessel with so much sudden wealth; his generosity had allowed them, on the other hand, to keep the heart, to bury in the pavement in front of the main altar once the formalities of her sainthood were declared. For the time being a reliquary held it safe in their church’s side chapel of San Raffaello, whose statue kept guard over the treasure.

If Father Gervasio had rubbed his hands together at the thought of the coins soon to come pouring into San Stefano’s coffers, as they had for Santa Maria degli Angeli, he was to be sorely disappointed. Not a single miracle followed. Pilgrims slowed to a trickle and no donations lit up the holy faces of the brothers. Meanwhile, the heart at Santa Maria degli Angeli continued with its prodigies and the sisters, the thought obsessed him, must be rolling in ceaseless waves of gold, gold in such quantity as to escape the careful fingers of the monastery’s countinghouse. This could not stand.

As the Abbot poured ruby red liquid from his finely wrought silver ewer, the wine released its full fragrance to Amadore’s sharp nose. Gervasio first filled his own goblet, then, almost as an afterthought, his guest’s. Amadore took his time savoring the fruity bodied liquid on his tongue. Surrounded as they were by tapestries to keep out any draft, the Abbot, ensconced in his silks and velvets, and snug in his throne, set forth the situation. Saint Ilaria had come to him in a dream, confiding to him her wish that her body be united and made whole. He even explained, as he gave the relic thief his half-fee up front, that money was the root of all evil and perhaps better the sisters do without than put their immortal souls at risk.

The relic thief nodded at his superior’s unequaled wisdom, weighed his purse, took out a coin and bit it. Satisfied, he promised the Abbot the heart within a fortnight and went his way to scout the environs of his next target and toast the rest of the fee to come.

Squatting now in a shadowy corner of the chapel, eyeing the archangel’s statue, he dreamed of how he would spend it once in his hands, the wine and the women. A velvet doublet would not be amiss. A new mount, perhaps? After hours of this musing, cramps invaded his usually sturdy haunches and he snuffed at a terrible need to sneeze. Though the blaze had come two years before, the smell of the burnt stone still haunted the air. Amadore thought of the Abbot’s insulating tapestries as he studied the patterns in the soot stains, seeing in them profiles and eyes spying upon his hiding place. His nerves had never played such tricks upon him before. These visions were not improved by a slight swing in the overhead lamp that, with the double illumination of the candlelight, made the shadow of the horned wimple seem to dance with itself against the thicker black of the fire’s eerie traces. Still the faceless nun knelt before the altar, under the slow undulations of the lamp. What she could possibly be praying over that long he could not guess, for nuns, as far as he knew, had no sins to speak of. They simply did not have the opportunity. But then he remembered that they prayed for the souls of others, of people like him, in fact, one the world’s wide array of transgressors.

If she kept at it, he might just start praying himself. Amadore was beginning to think his present circumstances might require it when the convent bell sounded and soon enough the other sisters would shuffle in to sing the offices.  He scurried his way to safety, the better to try again the following night.  

*     *     *
Suora Benetta tried her best to concentrate, no easy feat with the sensation of being watched, even here when she knew herself alone with the heart, the other sisters grabbing what sleep they could before matins. Perhaps it was only Ilaria watching over her from on high, but why then should the feeling be of eyes boring into the back of her head?   

Ilaria had been Benetta’s friend, as much as a walking, breathing saint could be friend to anyone. The woman had come comparatively late to Santa Maria degli Angeli and Mother Superior entrusted her to Suora Benetta, who had been among them since a child. Thus it fell to the younger girl to show the newcomer the ways and customs of their abbey. 

In return, and on the sly, Suora Ilaria taught Suora Benetta to chant their hymns of praise to the tunes of love songs from the world outside. The younger nun took readily to the merriment. The two would laugh over whether it would be liturgically appropriate to flavor the Eucharist with rosewater or whether a strawberry could be transsubstantiated or simply transsubstantiate itself, by virtue of its perfection, without priestly or even human intervention. They thought of trying. About this and other matters, they would giggle. They giggled drawing water from the cloister well, culling simples of borage and verbena to steep for the sick sisters; they giggled inadministering them in the infirmary, in the corridor leading to chapel, leaning breathless under a sculpted capital, on scullery duty with filthy hands, wherever the laughter seized them. That giggling would bubble up into something boundless, something beyond what initially triggered it, until their mad bursts seemed a divine gift, even under the frown of the Abbess. Despite that glare, with the peering, piercing, unblinking eyes, the Holy Spirit insisted in visiting fits of merriment upon the two hearts in a delectable grace of mirth.

*     *     *
Kneeling before the reliquary in the San Raffaello chapel, under the outstretched wings of the archangel’s statue, Benetta could not settle her mind to rote prayer. Instead of the Seven Dolorous Mysteries of Our Lady to contemplate on the decades of her rosary, there came instead the mystery of Ilaria, and how their friendship grew.

She thought back on the first night they shared their cell, their two little pallet beds each on one side of the tiny room. Lights were out, paternosters said, and the next office to sing was a brief doze away, but Ilaria reached over to her.

“Why are you here, you young thing? Why are you imprisoned in these walls with that dragon watching every breath?”

Over the following weeks, little by little Benetta’s story came out, with Ilaria’s gentle prodding. Slowly the tale unfolded:  When Benetta’s worldly mother remarried, her new lord could not bear reminders of his predecessor, and so Benetta was packed off to Santa Maria degli Angeli where her aunt Paola had served as Abbess before her passing.

“My mother according to the flesh could not suffer the token of her previous marriage to ruin her new chances for happiness. I was glad to be with my auntie and the other sisters played with me like a doll, for I was little enough. It was not much different than how my brothers had always treated me, and what I recalled of my father’s doting. It was fine. Then, when Mother Modesta came, everything changed.”

At that, the church bell sounded for the office, calling forth the sisters into their orison of praise. Entirely unused to ears opening to her woes, Benetta knew not how to react, but the tolling relieved her confusion. Their conversation suspended, the two women joined the bleary-eyed nuns in singing the antiphon, “I am the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done to me according to thy word.”

When Mother Modesta informed her that her stepfather too had passed away, Benetta spent the days following anticipating a summons home to be with her mother, who was now free to embrace and welcome her. She even began to gather together what little things she called her own—a comb, a needle, a handkerchief — for a quick departure to her family’s open arms.

After a week of silence, then two, then three, she began to stop expecting. The night that Benetta finally unpacked her tiny holdall, she broke into sobs that did not cease between nones and compline. Ilaria came to her pallet and held her shaking body close the while, helping her to regain composure before the offices started again, and she must sing with her clearest voice.

As their friendship grew, so too did Ilaria begin to waste, her mortal coil shrinking and vanishing before Benetta’s eyes. No money could be had for a physician, so Ilaria wasted. With leeches administered in vain, the sister tried cupping and bleeding, even mutton broth offered by the neighboring farms, but nothing brought back flesh to her frame. The younger sister tended to Ilaria in the infirmary, dodging the other duties Mother Modesta assigned in order to be with her friend. As earthly sustenance had no effect, Benetta brought her the blossoms that she thought might gladden Ilaria’s soul—for Benetta suspected black bile must be eating away at her substance. She brought her posies that changed as the season passed, simply for their charms, from violets to speedwell and yarrow. Benetta even screwed up her courage to offer her back the songs Ilaria had whispered to her, and hummed them under her breath, not daring the words aloud. Ilaria would grin despite what she suffered, and a soundless breath passed from her like phantom laughter.

On a day of fewer demands on her time, Benetta sat with Ilaria in silence. Merriment seemed a thing from someone else’s life, in another time. As the quiet stretched on, Benetta screwed up her courage to ask if she had ever known a man. Ilaria giggled her answer, like a girl much younger and healthier than Benetta knew her to be.

“Read the Song of Songs, The Song of Solomon, and that will tell you all you need to know of men and love. It is prayer, girl, and it is wisdom, in this world and out of it. Now carry me outside into the garden for me to breathe something other than the miasmas of sick.”

Once amongst the sweet smell of greenery, the neighboring white rose bush opened before its hour into red blooms. Ilaria sighed and began to sing “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” Before she could utter the second line, the nun shattered into a fit of gasping mirth, laughter and effort both breaking her. The silence afterward confirmed Benetta’s worst fears. Even the birdsong of the garden turned to a hush.

A cloud of doves, entirely out of season, gathered overhead. They rose above her remains, rose above the convent, then scattering into the skies, as Ilaria’s soul journeyed to her reward.  The sisters too flocked to witness the marvel occurring on high before their very eyes.

*     *     *
In her chambers, Mother Superior reflected. She did not believe in such heretical nonsense as ghosts but still Ilaria haunted the convent. In the corners of stairwells, in the cobwebs of the rafters, in the shadows of the chapels, in the very soot still staining the walls, her larks and capers echoed, above all in the susceptible heart of Benetta. Though past the age of suggestion, the age at which Benetta had come to them, that docile and rather stupid girl had fallen victim to the stranger’s laughing antics, despite the Abbess’s best efforts.

Modesta had tried. She had spoken sternly to the pair, threatened bread and water, then a penance of absolute silence, as though for gossip which was just as pernicious. Against her better judgment Modesta had asked Benetta, who knew their rules to the letter and obeyed them, Modesta had to admit, better than most, to take Ilaria in hand and teach her the ways of Santa Maria degli Angeli. The young girl had always been tractable if somewhat useless. Something undefinable, however, niggled at Mother Modesta’s opinion of her. Benetta had ever seemed somewhere else, present in the flesh but her mind floating in unreachable spheres. Mother Modesta had attempted to make her into a good handmaiden of the Lord. As Benetta had been niece to Paola, the preceding Abbess, Modesta could hardly dislodge her into the streets, whatever the defects of both. For Paola had been bad enough, juggling the ledger entries in such a way as to disguise the effects of Benetta’s mother defaulting on her daughter’s upkeep. With Modesta in charge, those days were now over. She would see to it that the girl would take her final vows directly, ending this eternal dilly-dallying and with a fine and handsome dowry for the girl’s profession, her wedding to Christ himself. Otherwise, there would be the devil to pay. Meanwhile, Modesta had thought imposing duties of instruction on Benetta towards a newcomer might awaken sterner stuff within, like calling her the name of sister proper rather than that silly moniker she came in with.

Modesta’s first misstep came in accepting Ilaria at all, no matter her story. It was a tired tale.  The daughter of a rich but suddenly impoverished father found herself cast upon the wide and bad world. Her only recourse from starvation was to fall into the clutches and the bed of a charming nobleman whose promises of marriage never materialized. She discovered, only too late, that he already possessed a lady wife. She then she left the scoundrel: years later, that is. So old was the story that Modesta almost fell asleep. The only thing missing was some misbegotten, bastard child. The Abbess could nearly recite herself the refrains of contrition, and their doubtful sincerity, so many times had women in her position already heard some version of it.

Still, and this was the element that made no sense given the story, Ilaria had the money upfront. The sum was enough that she would never be in the financial desperation that a failed and aging courtesan must find herself in, to come to a convent’s doors.

Whatever the puzzle of it, as Abbess, Modesta could not refuse the entry funds. She could not even allow herself to ask the probing questions she wished. The fire put paid to all semblance of choice; there could simply be no refusal of the dowry money newcomers brought with them. Thus, the Abbess took Ilaria in against her better judgment, along with the feeling that this woman brought trouble somehow. She could read it in the way her eyes did not dip in humility before her betters when asked pointedly about her past. Furthermore, she did not show repentance for her former life of sin in the world. The Abbess sensed in fact something hard-necked and obdurate. A feeling nagged her that Ilaria grimaced and mimicked her when just out of Modesta’s rigorous sightline.

With the arrival of that cursed creature, that was the end of efforts with Benetta. Ilaria’s presence acted as though on a dormant substance; something sleeping in the girl awoke. Benetta’s lackadaisical, daydreaming ways which had so long vexed Modesta became disturbances of wandering levity in ill accord with the duties of the novitiate. Thus, whenever one of those fits of tittering came upon Ilaria and Benetta, the Abbess ordered them to go about barefoot on the cold flagstones, recite the psalter, or any suitable penance she might conceive. Still their merriment persisted, and there seemed to be nothing she, Mother Modesta, could do to stifle it. It even sometimes spread like contagion to the other girls and women, and that was the worst of it. The Abbess would not have that kind of community, not under her watch. They had been poor enough, with rich postulates thin on the ground, but they would not be plagued by disorder and scandal, as they had under the rule of Mother Paola.

The giggling annoyed the Abbess enough as matters stood, but then Ilaria began to levitate. The newcomer coupled it with her snickering, as uncontrolled as her wafting upwards like so much incense, laughter bouncing off the thick walls in rebounding echoes. Mother superior forbade speaking of it in the parlatorio, unsure as the grande dame was as to whether this floating was inspired by the divine or the devil. The laughter led Mother to believe the latter. The Evil One also worked in mysterious ways. 

When Sister Ilaria fell ill, Mother Superior offered up her thanks that a sick nun would surely cease her visits to the vaulted ceilings and certainly lose all interest in that infernal chortling. Yet even as the illness lingered, a month, then two, wasting Ilaria’s flesh into her bones, she laughed, and laughed even louder as her final moments came and left along with her soul. Benetta had been with her in the garden. The sisters said doves cooed in unison over the rooftops, hovering in the form of a heart.

When her body did not putrefy, holding its form and color as in life, they insisted that she be placed in the holy chapel. Beyond all remedy now, word in the convent and beyond was that these brides of Christ possessed a saint. Then the miracles began in earnest. It started with the witless children, whose beggar mother had brought them to the gate, drooling from their babbling mouths. The mother touched their hands to the iron bars and of a sudden they chanted Latin plainsong in perfect pitch, until Modesta realized that the Latin was Catullus, and his least respectable verses. Then a school of deaf mutes gathered, supplicating, and suddenly burst into a polyphonic motet of a poet wooing a fetching shepherdess. A girl with a club foot came dragging her useless limb all the way up the hill and even the steps, bleeding at her torn knees. In touching the gates she fell backward, only to lift herself up again and leap as though to an estampie that only she could hear. Others with deformed legs began to join her, in perfect time of the unheard rhythm they seemed to share in perceiving, out of the range of anyone else.

Rumor leaked out and soon troops of unfortunates stood at their gates, a cacophony of beggars of all stripes, their cries and chaos unchanneled despite the best efforts of the brothers from San Stefano, whom Modesta had been reduced to call upon. No one listened to the monks’ pleas, then commands, to leave, then at least to step back, then to form an orderly line, to pray together in unison, no.

Miracles occurred with no respect for boundaries or turns, they struck out of nowhere and the witnesses would burst into peals of laughter. The sound reached Modesta’s chambers and enraged her.

*     *     *
Those outside Santa Maria’s walls remained entirely unaware of and unconcerned with the giggling inside—but donations in Ilaria’s honor had by now repaired the roof while making headway into some of the other burnt-out and dilapidated buildings. They brought in whiter, healthier bread, chicken of a Sunday and even meat for major feasts, longer-burning firewood and more of it. The nuns’ darned habits could be replaced and covered over with warmer cloaks and perhaps even mittens. 

Mother Superior begrudged the dead woman that much. Austerity was one thing, penury quite another. Whether she would or no, Ilaria seemed to be looking after her fellow sisters even in death and that urged respect. Modesta rendered the dead woman her due. Still, she did not like or trust the clerics that had since come sniffing around in order to rewrite Ilaria’s story to one of untrammeled, matchless sanctity. 

That old viper Gervasio sent them. Seeing her treasury thus “burdened by worldly care” the Abbot lost no time in requesting to relieve them of the duty to the relics, while suffering them to remain in possession of the heart. Modesta knew this for a ploy to divert the new-found wealth to himself and the brothers. It stood transparent to anyone with a functioning wit. And much good may it do him, them, she thought, for given the miracles produced, she was still unconvinced of the nature of the spirit that possessed Ilaria and the forces that inspired the ongoing marvels of Santa Ilaria at the convent door.

*     *     *
As Sister Benetta had guided Ilaria through her entry into Santa Maria, so the Abbess entrusted her with keeping the oil lamp. Under the young sister’s watch, it would burn in honor of the holy remains, or at least what remained of the remains. And of course, Benetta must pray over them. The idea, she knew, was to keep her exhausted and out of trouble, but Benetta felt little desire to do anything else but kneel before that reliquary, to ponder and mourn the nature of the heart that lay within it, pursuing good works among those who brought their sorrows to the convent gates.

Keeping her vigil, Benetta wondered whether it was wayward or was it holy, that heart? Or both? 

For a week, then two weeks, the girl knelt there and asked forgiveness for her own lightness. She implored pardon as well for her tears, for how can one mourn when one knows that the dead are among the Blessed in Heaven, a saint now pursuing the salvation and healing of others, watching over the welfare of her erstwhile sisters?

But just when she managed to roil up a proper sentiment of penitence, then the music would come to her, all those songs that Ilaria had taught her and the dance steps with them. Benetta’s prayerful words then turned to lyric nonsense, her own body swaying to the rhythmic tunes, like the lamp above her, and she would have to swallow back her invading laughter into her throat. Which would immediately turn to ash, for she could not laugh without her Sister Ilaria. 

At those moments of stillborn sport, Benetta could feel, still, that sense of being watched. It occurred to her that she was not alone, after all, with this sense of a friendly presence somewhere she could not pin down, above her, beside her, behind her, none of that and all of it. But as her hair lay flat rather than standing on end, she decided then that Ilaria had not left her without consolation.

During one such passage from midnight to dawn,  the lamp shone more brightly, swinging gently as if to chase off the surrounding darkness, as if to show Benetta that the night held naught to be feared. The dancing shadow play recalled Ilaria’s quick, light foot, the grace of her arms, as she sketched a bassa danza to Benetta when no one was watching, teaching the girl the steps that they then repeated each time they were called to infirmary or scullery or whatever other penitential duties Mother Modesta had imposed upon them, until their heaving laughter itself prevented them from further larks.  The young woman recalled the thrill of transgression in their moves and their merriment that seemed so like the oscillating swing of the lamp, that thumbed its nose at the staid behavior of the straight votive candle flames on the altar itself. It was literally and figuratively above all that, twirling its mad dance steps from on high. Benetta swore she felt a presence keeping vigil beside her. She took what comfort she could until inevitably the sense of being watched vanished, and the light in the lamp lowered.  Benetta filled it again with its measure of oil, but the glow remained dim. The sisters filed in for their sleepy orison under its half-light, all unawares of its blazing escapades from moments before.

*     *     *
The following night, Amadore clambered the high walls, once more, starting south, in the kitchens where the flame had first broken out and the dilapidation was most severe. His usual reservations about nunneries vanished in the face of how easy the damage had left the cloister to enter. He skirted close to the walls, then crawling about the crumbing tunnels and around about the refectory, the infirmary and dormitories, northward to the church, he cringed at just how vulnerable these little women were, their defenses down and open to intruders. But then Amadore thought of his father, drunk on communion wine, slapping his face with an open hand, and pressed onward.

On the church roof now, a calico mouser yowled her indignance at his intrusion. Amadore almost stepped into a nest of dove eggs, whether abandoned or not, he could not tell, but this tripped him into a statue of the Virgin, looming above him, shadowy in the moonlight. He turned away and shook his head only to find himself face-to-face with a gargoyle twisting its mouth in open disgust at the thief’s intentions. Not easily influenced, Amadore then swung from a buttress to the roof, slipping his slim person through a hole in the attic, under the rafters of the roof space. Down through a partially caved-in cross vault and its attendant shattered stained glass, he proceeded then to the side chapel of the ambulatory that housed the heart. He kept his eye out for the sign of the Raphael statue, as directed by Gervasio.  Once arrived, Amadore found himself again thwarted by the bobbing wimple, under the bright glow of the swinging lamp above her.  

He stood by, for this game was one of patience now, attrition even, and if the past were any predictor of the future it was one he would surely win, if only he could remain still enough, long enough, persistent enough. Another hour passed, and then another. Just as he thought to make his escape and return again the following night for the next match, the head turned. Framed by their wimple, a stunning pair of green eyes against an olive complexion stared back at him, wide with curiosity, taking him in from head to foot.

“Sister, forgive me, I fear I am lost.” It was rash, idiotic even, inside a cloister chapel in the depths of the night, but he did not know what else to say. Such a thing had never in his working life happened to him. 

Yet she did not scream; she did not cry out. In fact, she burst out laughing. Uncontrollably.   

He turned and ran.

*     *     *
Lost indeed. He must have gone sorely astray to find himself in a such a place between matins and lauds. Lost to all sense, yes and perhaps worse still. 

Yet Suora Benetta said nothing. She remained unsure of the reason, only she had not laughed so since Ilaria’s passing. He seemed an apparition sent by her late friend, this absurd creature with the forked beard. She could not help but recall her brother who wore his whiskers in the same fashion and would pluck at them when teasing her. The codpiece only inspired more hilarity. She had seen few men since her enclosure. Such beings were glimpsed only briefly, and in cassocks for the most part. Still, she felt not in the least profaned, only giddy.

As she knelt before the heart’s shrine in the chapel of Saint Raphael, looking up at his beatific face, she pondered the Book of Tobias. Those passages told how the archangel guided that young man, who rescued Sarah from the demon and wed her, freeing her now from her torment. Tobias’s journey had begun to another purpose entirely but ended, as Benetta recalled it, in the arms of true love. Thus Raphael, she knew, watched over those whose paths wound them into unexpected places and events, paths that may wander from their original intention, but brought them home in the end. The archangel could not fail to bring them whither they were always meant to arrive.

Her own steps had been guided to the abbey of Santa Maria. Surely her stars had willed this fate, that she should lose her worldly name to become Benetta. The girl bowed her head in acquiescence as she had always done. She would soon have to take her formal vows, accept her induction as one among the professed sisters, nevermore to leave the walls of the convent. She rendered an Ave of thanks for the protection of those high fortifications, crumbling though they were, but heaved a sigh all the same, with no words to put to the why or wherefore.

If she could find no way to articulate this except in a breath that tasted something like regret, it was that this time too, this time above all when there would be no turning back, no way forward or back from the towering stone cloister’s eternal, sheltering embrace, no one had thought to consult her about her own wishes in the matter. She simply had no experience in knowing her own will, much less expressing it to any successful effect. She had never known what it might be to shape her fate rather than simply obey it, to bend the stars to her own will rather than her neck to theirs, be it the heavens or her family.

Ilaria had stood again as the exception to all Benetta’s kith and kin. Having taken the veil proper, Ilaria was well-placed to ask about her vocation. Benetta remembered the day that they were scraping wax from the floor of a chapel, after scrubbing the soot from the walls next to the votive candles. Ilaria abruptly asked what no one else ever had.

“Bacciamea, if I may call you by your worldly name, what state do you prefer, that of nun or that of a wedded wife, sooner or later?”

At her own blank-eyed response, Benetta was sure the sister would laugh, but she did not. 

“Bacciamea—for so I must call you—you, my dear girl, who have not even the choice of her own name, here is what I advise: pretend the decision is made now, already. You have passed the novitiate and are now forever after within these walls, one of the nuns, Sister Benetta, never again to hear the name Bacciamea. So, do you feel happy or sad?”

“I do not know,” she replied, but what she did not know was how to find the words to say that she felt lost.

*     *     *
After one week, then two, the thief’s promised deadline of a fortnight’s wait had passed. An empty-handed and irritable Father Gervasio summoned Amadore into his private chambers at San Stefano. A mouthwatering aroma of roasted meat wafted from a plate at the small table installed there. Amadore’s present state of hunger made him acutely aware that it was venison, although no invitation to partake was forthcoming. The thief was also aware that it was Lent. He kept his own counsel.

“What is the wait, Griffuccio? Why have I not even heard from you?”

Amadore did not like it, not one bit, this coming to a client, whatever client, unprovided-for, and well past the promised date of delivery too. Not only was his professional pride at risk, so too was his reputation and hence his livelihood. He had accepted his half-fee, and that stood as good as giving his word that the relic would land in the hands of the Abbot. 

He did not speak of the debacle, only that entry and accessing the object had grown difficult, without further detail. 

“That old bat must suspect something,” Gervasio muttered, his rosy nose sniffing the air.

Amadore’s thoughts flew to what he considered now a rendezvous, in spite of himself. He would need all his wit to subdue the sister into handing the heart over to him of her own will and volition. Or, he might distract her long enough to break open the reliquary and pocket it. 

And yet he found himself charmed. His life had accustomed him to the unsavory habits of harlots after gold and no more than that. And this he understood, for he understood the transaction. Love, whether the kind spoken of by poets or by prelates, might well be in the realm of the miracles. A good solid ducat, a shiny florin—such as the many brought to his purse by the tongue of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, by Saint Balthazar’s myrrh, the nail parings of Doubting Thomas’s finger, Saint Andrew’s sandal straps, both Saint Agatha’s breasts, a locust of John the Baptist, and the sweat of Saint Joseph’s brow—the coins were things you only needed to be able to count, and could count on. It was not necessary to believe in them.

Still, he could not dislodge from his thoughts that wide-eyed gaze he had never seen on another woman before.

*     *     *
Sister Benetta took up her watch, pouring a night’s worth of oil into the lamp. She began to pray her beads. Her mind, though, would not settle on the words, try as she might, for she wondered if the intruder would again show himself. Nor did she feel trepidation, only wonderment at this apparition. 

No sooner did the lamp begin to brighten but she turned to the shadows, and out crept the creature in the codpiece.

A long moment of silence melted into giggles. They bubbled forth from her first, but infectious as they were, as she was, so Amadore joined in not even knowing what the joke was.

Still he could not help but ask, “What’s so funny?” 

“Are you lost again?”

“I seem to keep taking the wrong turn, yes.” 

“Who are you? And what in the world are you doing here?”

He had to think fast about what tack to take. “I am a magician. I make things disappear.”

“As mysteriously as you appear?”

He hesitated at an inspiration that came to him, but risked advancing all the same. When she did not flinch, he furthered sinews forward, while she herself seemed to him to lean in, as if to help close the distance over the flagstones separating them.

“Moreso, and not just my person either.” He pulled the Abbot’s coin from her ear, with his quick, stealthy grace. He bowed to her with a flourish, as though she were a worldly lady, his hand nearly caressing the length of her veil. Another peal escaped her lips and he fell under its spell, swore he would inspire it again—a sweet thing was a giggling nun, he learned. He hoped what charm he could convey might tame this creature, until he found some way to distract her, to leave him alone in the chapel. Still, his own delight at provoking her glee surprised him too.

“I didn’t know that nuns laughed—I thought you only prayed and expiated the sins of people like, well, me.” 

“Nor have I since the passing of Suora Ilaria. She too reminded me of my brothers’ tricks and toys, from the time before I came here amongst the sisters. Since Ilaria ... well, I have been mouse-quiet, so as not to risk Mother Modesta’s ire. Not that there is ever much to laugh over anymore, so for that I thank you. How should I call you?”

“Would you like to call me, then?”

She thought a moment, “Yes, yes I would.” 

“Amadore. And you?” 

“Suora Benetta, at least since my life began here.”  

“And I take it you guard this relic, of Suora Ilaria, this heart that is at the, well, heart of all of this miracle ruckus?”

“I pray over it for my own sake and then the relic performs miracles in more ways than one. I cannot tell you how sunk in debt our community is and has been since even before the fire. Our habits had gone threadbare just as our bedding,” here she blushed, “with no replacements for the torn and the tattered, no matter the weather. We now read our psalter by wax candle, where before we had but tallow that barely gives off enough light along with its smell and smoke.

“Now we can pay the wages of the workers, and make up the arrears of those who out of pity still came and did what they could for us, despite their own poverty. And so now too might we have the joy of giving alms and accepting once more the indigent into our hospital. Before all this, even at table the cellaress watered our wine so we could barely taste it. With the heart relic and its miracles, all that is over now.”

She smiled at something, thinking back. “If she were here Ilaria would have certainly made a jest about the miracle of the water into wine at Cana.”  

“Sister Ilaria sounds well named. Merry as you are, you must be happy here, in spite of it all?”

“What is happiness? Mother Modesta thinks I am lost to all hope of ever being a good and proper sister.”

“Did you ever want to be?”

She looked at him again with those wide eyes, puzzled. No one had ever put it to her quite like that, except Ilaria.

“My earthly mother gave me to Santa Maria when she remarried, near my tenth summer. Before Mother Modesta, my auntie served as Abbess and made much of me, which I enjoyed, perhaps too much. Of course, I had no thought of marriage then. Sometimes I do wonder, especially since Ilaria, told me … things.” How he loved to see that blush take her cheek again. “These are my stars. I am well looked after. How could I ask for more?”

Amadore, who had run away and made his own fate at just the age this girl had been handed over to the nuns, could hardly grasp her words and yet wanted to know, to understand. He had never had the slightest desire to know the life’s tale of his companions of a night at inn or tavern. But this sad and laughing sister’s story wrenched at him and he must have more.

Just as he opened his mouth for another question, the bell for matins tolled. The relic thief melted into the shadows.

*     *     *
Without fail, as the lamplight brightened, her heart began to skip beats.

He appeared from the shadows the blaze had chased away. 

“How is it that you are a nun?

“Well, first I am only a handmaiden and not a bride of Christ.”

“What do you mean?”

“I never formally took the veil, my—I never took the sacred vows, only they started calling me Sister Benetta out of habit, and in the habit, if you’ll pardon the pun—my hair was never shorn, wimple aside. Mother Modesta—who is, well, difficult—has just about given me up. But if my worldly mother does not make up for the back pay of my upkeep, there will be another kind of price to pay.” 

“You mean you’re not a nun? You took no vow?  

“Not yet; but I will, I must. In fact, Mother Modesta has set up the solemnity already, we are only waiting for Father Gervasio to organize the ceremony.”

“But what do you want, what is your own desire?”

Benetta hesitated, not knowing how to even begin to formulate a reply. Patiently, he waited, watching her intently until he cocked his head at a sleepy scuff of shoes over pavement. The sisters were entering to sing lauds. Benetta too turned to the entryway, trying to imagine an explanation to give the others for the presence of this man in the chapel, but when she returned her gaze to the place where he had stood a moment before, she found herself alone. Amadore had absconded.

*     *     *
When he arrived again in the chapel the following night, he lost no time.

“And your name? You never told me.”

“But I did, Suora Benetta, for Mother Modesta never liked my baptismal name, which is all I have left of my father.”

“But, precisely, what were you christened?”

“Bacciamea.”

She was not the first Bacciamea he had ever encountered, but somehow from her lips it sounded so much more like “Baciami” to his ears that Amadore preferred to take this as a command he would happily obey from on high. He strode over and kissed her. The lamp, burning like a comet, began to swing wildly like a child’s top that had lost its mind.

Mirabile! His mouth upon hers was a revelation, for one who had only known the Kiss of Peace during Mass. Her heart leapt like the saltarello Ilaria had taught her and all those words to all those songs made sense now, as she melted into his embrace. This then, she imagined, resembled reaching destination at the close of a pilgrimage, a kind of homecoming to someplace awaited eagerly yet strange and unknown. As she blessed Saint Raphael’s name, other refrains came floating to her ear.

With him who, worshipping my charms,
For aye would fold me in his arms
As one unto his service sworn.

While Benetta had always felt some sense of trespass when she would hear these verses, here and now, all sense of sin dissolved into the words that Ilaria had whispered with her last breath, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!”

After her passing, Benetta had gone to the library and read the glosses, “Normally the touch of lip on lip is the sign of the loving embrace of hearts, but this conjoining of natures brings together the human and divine, shows God reconciling ‘to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven.”

Her arms rose from her sides of their own volition to embrace his neck, despite his tickling beard, and she could almost guess at the rest, what Ilaria had whispered in those nights and had seemed so incomprehensible.

She caught her breath as Amadore broke away from her clasping hands, touched her cheek, brushed away the wimple’s linen overhang.

“Wait for me, do not take the vows. Promise me that.”

Ilaria had warned her of men making promises. This man was not making one, but asking it of her.

The lamp all the while continued with its dizzying swirl, dancing its rounds, its light bouncing off the reliquary and illuminating the chapel entire beyond the strength of its tiny flame. Raphael’s very wings seemed to blaze and dazzle under its lustrous twirl, as though setting off himself to fly away. Benetta took that as a sign as to where and how to place her faith. She let Amadore free to escape discovery from the rank and file of sisters soon to arrive in the chapel.

*     *     *
The following night, Amadore brought not only the halffee for his pains but his whole purse of savings—the net worth of so many relics he fondly recalled procuring over his years of fingerwork.

He had even once, down in Naples, lifted a feather moulted by Saint Raphael, whose statue’s unfurled wings cast their protective shadow over the heart relic. He had nervously eyed the creature since his first comings and goings into the chapel. Amadore prayed in spite of himself that this archangel who had guided a young man through wandering ways to true love might also watch over his own forking roads, now as the stakes grew dire and his intentions of what to steal had changed so utterly.

He was playing now not only for a heart but for his own and his soul into the bargain, and perhaps hers as well, leading astray a girl destined to be bride of Christ—but had she no vocation, no will to this life, what indeed was the sin? That he was even thinking in this manner left him perplexed, for never before had he concerned himself with sin and salvation. This was perilous stuff indeed.

He thought back to each of the adventures that had made the fortune he carried with him now. 

However stained, however ill-gotten, this would be the coup of his career, and likely its final feat, for he would carry off not a relic but the sister who guarded the saint’s heart, the sister who had stolen his own heart instead. He didn’t know if the gift of it went both ways, but on the off chance, a gambler ever, he was willing to bet buying another steed for quick getaway on a long and weary road out of that place.

*     *     *
At first he said, “Come with me,” and then rethought his words, “No, let me put that another way: do you want to come with me?”

Benetta thought of Ilaria’s heart, entrusted to her watch, her care. But then she thought back, remembered to pretend the decision is already made: what should she feel to stay here, with no choice but to live her life enclosed? She did not so much mind the meager fare or tending to the sick and the suffering, the poor of the world. Certainly, the eagle eye and iron fist of Mother Modesta would brook no more laughter, no more dancing, no more singing other than plainchant. But above all, those mighty walls rose high enough to almost block out the stars she believed in, and it cut her breath short. The decades stretched before her, and they seemed very long indeed.

“Bacciamea?”

At the name her father gave her, at the sound of it, here and now, tenderly rolling off Amadore’s lips and tongue, she decided. She took her fate in her own two hands and joined it to the relic thief’s. The lamp set to swinging wildly. 

Under the relic thief’s expert and agile fingers, the reliquary came apart in a trice. Once the shrine had been pried open, they took the heart—fresh, bloody, as if about to beat once more—in the newly woven altar cloth and buried it, safe from prying eyes and the fingers of grasping hands, in a place that only a thief would think of, concealed it so cleverly that none would ever guess where, hidden to any eye that didn’t already know the trick of the shadows and the stone of the chapel of San Raffaello. 

The two left a note upon the altar for Modesta that the heart was safe from avid abbots, somewhere under the ogives, but even for the Mother Superior, the precise spot would remain secret. Gervasio would certainly come sniffing around, but without ripping apart the sacred space stone by stone, all his searching would be in vain. 

This, though, no longer concerned them.

And the oil lamp that Bacciamea had filled but shortly before went dim and then extinguished, as though offering them the gift of shadows for their escape. The pair made their way through the chinks in Santa Maria’s stone walls to the night outside. The stars above seemed friendlier than either runaway had ever glimpsed before. Bacciamea—for Benetta was no more—might trace now the lines from one bright speck of light to another, creating her own pictures to explain the lines so drawn and the stories they told and foretold.

*     *     *
Only moments after they vanished, Mother Modesta found the note, just as the sleepy-eyed sisters filed in for matins. The oil lamp, shining brightly once again, swung to and fro and all around, as though dancing, which seemed a silly antic for it to be up to.

One nun started to giggle, and then the next, until they became an entire choir of uproarious laughter, no longer a discreet titter but a chorus of unprovoked hilarity resounding on the walls with their pointed arches. Modesta, on the verge of calling order and assigning penance, began to smile, and before she knew it a giggle escaped her lips.