Juliet's Nurse (12 page)

“It was you who brought me here,” I remind him. “You set your mark on the nursing contract, hiring me away.”

“It was Friar Lorenzo’s idea, not mine,” he says. “He told me there was one other baby born that day in all Verona, and by God’s grace the family was in want of a wet-nurse.” My strong Pietro quivers like a too-shorn sheep. “I waved his words away, thinking I could not bear to let you go. But when I saw how your body ached, like my own heart, for our dead daughter, it seemed the only way to stop your weeping. The only comfort I could give to you.”

I pull Juliet close against my heart, feeling the weight of how much my husband loves me. “You were right, Pietro. She’s my comfort for all we’ve lost. Just as you wanted her to be.”

“As I wanted, and you needed, a year ago.” He dips his little pinky into the depths of the honeypot, then traces my lips with the golden liquid. Dots it on my sweat-damp brow, his finger lingering between my eyes like Friar Lorenzo offering Ash Wednesday absolution. “But now I need you home with me again.”

Instead of answering with words, I lead him into the tower and up to Juliet’s room. Laying her in the cradle, I bid him gather back the sun-warmed honey with tongue instead of finger. He savors that and more from me. For the first time in a twelve-month, I let him spend himself deep inside me, and I shiver with the pleasure of it.

Afterward, I steal to the privy pot, as though his seed means no more to me than what else is squatted out here. I mouth a silent plea to the Virgin Mother.
Sacred Maria, you who did not bear your own husband’s child so that you could raise the one God gave to you
—a shrewd opening, to remind her of our likened states—
I beg of you, take pity on me. On me, and on Juliet. Most Holy Madonna,
keep us together, always
. Then I rouse Pietro, telling him it’s time for him to take what he’s harvested back to the Via Zancani.

But the pleasures I steal with my husband are not the only delights I must keep secret. Come nightfall, while Tybalt and the other Cappelletti sleep with bellies full of the evening’s meal of roasted capon, I do what I’ve never so much as hinted to anyone, even Pietro or Friar Lorenzo, I’ve long been doing. I unwrap the swaddling bands, letting Juliet’s arms and legs spring free.

She gurgles with pleasure at the rush of air. I match her throaty purrs, nuzzling the delicious plump of her legs and arms, cupping my belly against the soft bottoms of her feet.

This is my secret joy, and hers. It started one half-mooned night before the Pentecost, when I awoke to her crying over having soiled herself. I unswaddled her and wiped her clean, but in my exhaustion I fell back to sleep before binding her arms and legs again. I dozed and dreamt and woke to Juliet grabbing at my hair and ears. She even wiggled her curious hand into my gaping mouth to touch my broken teeth and full, wet tongue. When I laughed, she folded herself and stuck her own toes into her mouth. I gobbled up her other foot, humming as she squealed. In that delicious moment, I knew the same pleasure she’d known months before, my mouth as full of her as hers has been of me.

We slept again, entwined like vines heavy with ripe grapes. When sun and lark roused the house the next morning, I reswaddled her, pressing a finger first to my lips, then to hers. She nodded, sure and solemn, as though she knew we needed to keep anyone from suspecting how free she’d been.

When the next night came and I took her into bed with me, she looked up with such expectation in her dark eyes, I could not leave her bound. I woke terrified through those first weeks, fearing her limbs would go crooked because they were not kept wrapped tight. For that is all we ever hear: the tighter the swaddling, the straighter the arms and legs. But the fear that comes with morning’s light is nothing compared to what I feel in the dark, once her arms are free and she reaches for me, or when she tests her uncertain legs by stepping against my thighs. We are lovers of the purest kind, for what greater love is there than the one between a mother and a milk-babe? Happy nights, when we take such simple, secret pleasures.

Swaddled, she is safe. Suckling, she is satisfied. That is all Ca’ Cappelletti, or Friar Lorenzo, or even my own dear Pietro need know.

SEVEN

W
hen Juliet is nearly a year and a half old, Prince Cansignorio comes to dine. Lord Cappelletto, eager to please his powerful guest, lets Carmignano flow by the cask, and I do not miss the chance to drink my fill as I hold Juliet for her royal godfather and the other guests to admire. The prince has brought a half dozen musicians with him, and they play different styles of song, some brightly plucked upon the lute and some heavy with the viol’s melancholy, to match each course as it’s served. While I soothe Juliet by swaying to the melodies, Cansignorio sits at the table-head drinking down one round of the Cappelletti’s wine after another. Lord Cappelletto twines compliments over his regal guest until the prince interrupts and, with a tongue heavy as wet wool, announces that he’s sent counselors to every ruling-house within a month’s travel by horse
or sail. They’re seeking a woman not too old, not too ugly, with not too many brothers in her powerful family, to become Cansignorio’s holy wedded wife.

Lord Cappelletto raises his goblet before anyone else can. “To a goodly, Godly match.”

The prince nods and drains his cup once more, as Lord Cappelletto leans forward to suggest that Cansignorio’s good fortune would be best served if, before any dowry is negotiated, he dismissed a certain maladminstering Uberti, appointing Lord Cappelletto to oversee his treasury instead.

Though the prince waves in wine-flushed agreement, all Europe knows it’s not only by the size of the dowry-portion that a ruler values his wife. I see it in how Cansignorio looks at Juliet, eyes full of pity for Lord Cappelletto, and something else for Lady Cappelletta, who still cannot produce a son. Eggs are eaten, herbs are applied, prayers are said. But nothing quickens. Her blood has stopped and started three times in twelve months, what is purged from her each time not even formed enough to bury beside her other lost one. The fault cannot be in the stars, or something gone off in the year’s grain, for bellies spread all over Verona. The prince’s mistress is thin and carrying high, so that not even the bishop can pretend not to notice that Cansignorio will have another bastard long before he ever takes a bride. Lord Cappelletto takes careful note, commissioning a finely worked silver dog with sapphires for its eyes as a gift of congratulations to the prince, and an even more ornate silver-and-sapphire cross for the altar of one of the chapels in the Duomo as penance for his envy.

While the thickest of winter’s fog twists through Verona’s streets, Lord Cappelletto sends the nittish house-page searching through the family’s storerooms. It takes a half-day’s hunt before he barges into our chamber bearing such a contraption as I’ve never seen, a thick wooden ring etched with the Cappelletti crest, held up by four carved legs set on a larger ring balanced on wooden wheels. “Girello,” Lord Cappelletto calls it. He orders me to unswaddle Juliet and set her inside the frame, as though she’s a cork being fitted with feathers for a game of shuttlecock, and he means for me to bandy her back and forth.

Juliet has no need for this strange machine of which Lord Cappelletto is so fond. She is ample-limbed and dimple-fleshed like me, not wan and sullen like Lady Cappelletta. I know how ready her chubby legs are, a sturdy match to her plump, impatient arms. I’d bid Tybalt to teach Juliet to walk as my boys taught their younger brothers, for a ready babe will give toddling chase to an apple rolled along the floor. Pietro’s army roly-polied an entire orchard’s worth of apples between the six of them. I baked each bruised fruit with parsnip, fig, and turnip, seasoning the mixture with anise, fennel, and a touch of mustard. Then I chewed with my own mouth the portion to feed whichever boy was just out of swaddling. The whole neighborhood could smell the scent, imagine the taste of one of our sons learning to walk.

But Ca’ Cappelletti fills only with the dull, grating sound of wood wheels along the stone floors. Juliet careens in the
girello,
dark eyes flashing wonder at how she can make herself go. But then comes the pause as she turns, looking back to make sure I’m following. I am all she seeks, and she ventures in her walker only so far that she can please herself at being able to waddle her way back to me again.

As Juliet masters the girello, Lord Cappelletto tells me the page is to take the cradle from her chamber. He says it is to make more space for Juliet to practice walking, but from the way his scheming tongue darts at the spittle that gathers in the corner of his mouth, I can tell this is a lie—or at least not all I’d have of the truth.

I piece the fuller truth together hours later when I stand in the sala window, straining in the last of the day’s light to sew a border of Damascus cloth onto one of Tybalt’s doublets. It is a lurid violet, as costly for the vivid color as for the exotic fabric. Tybalt begged for it in imitation of the new fashion the prince’s nephews wear. Lord Cappelletto, ever wanting to outdo his noble rivals, happily indulges anything that ties his household to Cansignorio’s. Never mind how my eyes strain to work such careful stitches, attaching the border to a garment that Tybalt, already long in the leg, will soon outgrow.

As I pierce the needle into the precious Damascus cloth, I catch sight out the window of the house-page. He’s bearing the cradle along the Via Cappello as though Lord Cappelletto has ordered him to float an infant Moses down the Adige to some unknown pharaoh. But no, just before the page reaches the Porta dei Leoni, he turns into a humble doorway.

It’s the house of a pursemaker. He is a man with maybe six, maybe seven daughters. I can never keep track as they pass back
and forth on their household errands. However many they total, you do not need an abacus to tally that there are too many of them for a pursemaker to dowry.

Wide-hipped and young, those daughters are. It flashes on me like a lightning bolt: Lord Cappelletto means to have his pick, trying one and then another to fill that cradle with a son.

I store away the discovery like Tybalt stores candies in his sleeve, though it gives me something more sour than sweet to chew. I draw Juliet out of the girello, saying I must go to San Fermo to be shriven, though we head first to the Via Zancani.

“You cannot warm two houses with only one woodpile,” I say, after I’ve shared the gossip with Pietro. Lord Cappelletto will never have heat enough to make a son in his marriage bed, if he spends himself among the pursemaker’s daughters.

Pietro, who has heat enough for an ironmaker’s furnace, swings himself before me. “But if your fire’s big enough, who knows how many pots you can bring to a boil.”

My husband is a merry man. It’s a truth I treasured when he and I had every night together, for we always made good use of them. But the stolen hour here or there we’ve had these seasons past to take our quickest pleasures—they are like crumbs of stale bread to a starving man. And worse, to a starving woman.

There are undowried
daughters up and down the Via Zancani, the same as on the Via Cappello. And Pietro can easily find time as he travels from hive to hive to stop among the prostitutes who ply their trade in the sun-bleached stands and shadowed corridors of the Arena.

“Have you been bringing many pots to boil?” I ask.

He pulls me to him. “One pot is all a good cook needs to make the most savory of stews.” Burying his face in my bare belly, he runs those big hands above and below, touching and then tasting all the places he knows well. What we make is more savory than stew, fills me more than whole loaves of bread. We lie so long together, I have to skip my shrift, carrying my sins along with the precious taste of Pietro on my tongue. The smell of him lingers on me as I bear Juliet through the wintry streets, clinging to Pietro’s promise that he passes solitary days and nights while I am gone.

Back in Ca’ Cappelletti, Lady Cappelletta is wearing a new gilt-and-emerald brooch and a puzzled look, not sure what to make of her husband’s sudden generosity. I remind her it is a rich man’s duty to purchase such sumptuous things, for how else are the silversmiths, gem traders, and silk merchants to keep their families fed?

It’s true Lord Cappelletto wants all Verona to know he is a rich man. But there are other things he’d not have his wife know, and that is why he buys what he believes will distract her. During the next months, the Cappelletti wardrobes swell. But Lady Cappelletta’s womb does not. Whether the same can be said of the pursemaker’s daughters, I cannot tell, their bodies hidden beneath new cloaks as they scurry along the Via Cappello.

The year’s first snow does not come until the middle of February, falling just past dawn in great fat flakes that make Juliet press her nose against the cold glass of the window. Tybalt would carry her
out into the courtyard still in her nightclothes if I did not stop them long enough to bundle her, and him, and myself as well. Outside, the chill air tingles against our skin, as Tybalt insists we turn our faces up to the sky, open-mouthed like three baby birds waiting for worms to drop from their mama’s beak. Juliet giggles at the silver taste of falling snow, but whimpers with disappointment when she watches the flakes melt into moist nothing in her cupped hand. Tybalt lifts her up, spinning with her in his arms until she laughs once more.

A man’s boots crunch along the entryway. It is Pietro, come to check how the hive is faring in the blustery cold. Juliet wriggles free of Tybalt and totters toward my husband, half-singing and half-panting, “Po, Po, Po,” in perfect imitation of the tone with which I call Pietro’s name when he and I lay together. Why does this surprise me? She’s heard it enough times, when I’ve given her a top or doll or just a pot-spoon to bang against the floor, anything to distract her while my husband and I take our tumble. “Po,” she says again, insistent, reaching up her arms.

Pietro scoops her up, planting a warming kiss on her reddened ear. But as she shrieks another joyful “Po,” Lord Cappelletto appears behind my husband.

“What’s this?” he asks.

I’m not sure which distresses him more, to find Juliet outside at this hour and in such weather, or to see her beaming at the beekeeper with a grander version of the same adoring look Lord Cappelletto believes she saves only for him.

“Where have you been so early, Uncle?” Tybalt asks, juggling
snowballs. The four perfect rounds arc up, only to smash apart when he tries to catch them.

Lord Cappelletto blinks once, twice, as though he is trying to conjure the right answer, then says, “A business matter. For the prince.”

But his clothes are dry, his cheeks pale, not the wet and pink they’d be if he’d come all the way from the prince’s castle, or even one of the lordly palaces that line the Piazza dei Signori. He must have passed the smallest hours of the night at the pursemaker’s house, hoping to slip back here before anyone noticed he was gone.

My teeth ache in the wintry air as I reach for Juliet. I mean to hurry her inside, but when I take her from Pietro, she shrieks,
“
Po, Po, Po,” so fiercely that Lady Cappelletta rushes down into the courtyard, asking whether the house is under attack.

“Such a bright child.” I speak as though Juliet’s recognizing Pietro should please the Cappelletti. “She knows it is the beekeeper, and she asks for a little honey.”

I pray the mention of sweets will distract Lady Cappelletta as well as Tybalt, just as surely as needing to deceive Lady Cappelletta will distract Lord Cappelletto.

Pietro, who never comes to Ca’ Cappelletti with an empty pocket, pulls out a bundle of candies and passes them to Lord Cappelletto, who doles them to his wife and nephew, and to Juliet, like a guilt-faced priest giving out the sacrament. Lady Cappelletta shivers, blue-lipped in the cold, and lets her husband drape an arm around her, guiding her inside. I follow, carrying Juliet back to our
room without any farewell to my husband, who is already answering a new round of Tybalt’s never-ending questions.

A child will parrot whatever it might hear, and who knows what the consequences will be, for the child or for the one whose words she innocently repeats. When I was a girl—older surely than Juliet though I could not say how much older—I repeated what I’d heard my father say a hundred times:
pox-faced son of the Devil
. His hateful name for our hated landlord. Yes, a child too easily recites what it does not understand, and that is how I spoke those words when Luca Covoni appeared one summer day to take his share of my father’s harvest.