Juliet's Nurse (2 page)

We have some small bit of salt-fish in our store, but as I’ve never found much call in my kitchen for horse hoof, one twin is sent off for that, while the other scrounges up the last of our apples. This is a disappointment for the midwife, who would prefer an artichoke.
I’m not sure it matters much, as she shoves it inside my behind, saying it will tip the womb to help slide the baby free.

But it does not, and neither does the fumigation. The day turns to slant-light, then twilight, then dark, and still the baby is not born. The midwife mutters incantations over me while the twins doze in a heap in the corner and Pietro, having snuck back inside, snores from the kitchen floor. In these small hours, I sink into a wet chasm of pain. Muddy, bloody walls undulate high on either side of me, threatening to cave in if I struggle too hard to claw my way out. From this place I pray, not to the Sacred Madonna or any of the blessed saints or even to the Most Holy Trinity, but to my own child.
Come out to me, dearest lamb. If the world is so cruel you are frightened of it, I will hold you, and protect you, and teach it to love you as I already love you
. Words I dare not say aloud but form in my mind, so that my little one alone can hear.

By the next ringing of matins bells, I fear there is no baby in me. Had I not bled four days in a row, some time this past spring? But as the sun slowly rises I feel that my belly is indeed full, though what is waiting to be birthed is not a new babe. It must be one of my well-grown boys, come back to claim the mother-love that floods through me once again, a love I thought I’d buried in the single grave that swallowed all of them. In such delirium, I do not mark the new ways in which my body is stretched and twisted by the midwife’s apprentices, what is rubbed or dripped or shoved onto or into the varying parts of me. I come to my senses as the sext bells ring at midday, to find myself standing with an arm over each twin’s shoulders, the three of us walking a circle like blinded mules
turning a mill-wheel. We grind on and on for hours. When, bathed in sweat and mad with thirst, I beg for water, the midwife gives me only wine. But when I plead to be numbed by wine, all I get is tepid water. You can pray to God and holy saints for compassion, but do not bother to ask it of this midwife.

It is the afternoon of Lammas Eve when the baby finally arrives. A daughter, the first I ever bore. I am so grateful when she passes from me, I croak out an exhausted, “Hosanna.” But “Susanna” is what the ancient midwife hears. She bathes, swaddles, and bundles my babe. Worn as I am, I can barely raise my head to steal a glimpse of my precious girl before the midwife calls out the window for Pietro, who she chased back out of the house at daybreak, to take Susanna to be baptized. Then she orders one twin to shove hellebore petals up my nose until I sneeze the afterbirth into the other twin’s waiting hands.

Delivered of my daughter, I sleep. When I wake the night is late, the fire out, the room empty. I might believe the laboring and birth all a dream, but for the soreness between my legs, the animal stench of blood and sweat and secundine that hangs in the dark. And the terrific ache that swells my breasts, my hardened nipples ready for Susanna’s mouth. Swollen and tender, I hear Pietro’s sobs filling the dark house.

A man will cry for joy when his wife has born his son. A soft-hearted man will even weep astonished tears over the delicate beauty of a new daughter. But this animal sound Pietro makes is different. I know it, and the knowing stings spear-sharp through my waiting breasts.

This is why the midwife sent her off so quick, that my child’s tiny soul might fare better than her tiny body would. What ill-formed thing did the midwife sense in my newborn that, with a mother’s heart, I missed? I cannot know. And I’ll not forgive myself for not knowing.

In my sleep, I’d clutched the Santa Margherita charm in one hand and the marten’s tooth in the other. Cupping my belly against the crude stigmata they’ve pressed into my palms, I wonder how, in all the months my daughter lived in me, babe and mother a single breathing being, I’d not let myself know her. Such a fool I was, not to even admit that she was there. And now, when I most crave her, crave the hungry suck with which she would crave me, she is gone.

Wha
t’s tomb is womb
. That is what the holy friars preached when Death with his plaguey army robbed us of so much, more than a decade past. Worms will turn dead leaves, dead trees, dead men into new soil. But what can worms do for a living, grieving woman?

Let the brown-frocked friars tremble with awe over how the tomb of earth sprouts seedlings. Such wonders are no comfort when you birth a babe who dies.

When next I wake, the room is filled with golden light, and all Verona smells of yeasty bread. It is Lammas Day, a harvest feast. Sown seeds reaped as grain, then ground and baked to rounded loaves. Pietro, red-eyed and bewildered, kneels beside our bed, tearing small pieces of the blessed bread. Dipping some in honey, some in wine. Feeding each to me. Could anything be so sweet against the metallic taste of grief?

A Lammas Day procession winds past, its drums and shouts
and trumpets echoing against the tight-packed buildings, resonating across our floor and up our walls. After the noise passes away, Pietro slips his hands beneath me, his palms warm against the ache across my back. “Susanna is—”

I shake my head, cutting him off. I will not let him say the word. Will not make myself listen to it.

Why could we two not just be alone, like we’d been the seasons past, and happy? But there they are, the portrait of the Holy Madonna suckling sacred babe upon our wall, and some saint or other being newly born upon the parto tray that holds the honey, bread, and wine. Icons of what we cannot have, blessed mothers such as I’m reminded I’ll never again be. The plague that stole our other children laid half the city dead. But this fresh loss comes to us alone. This is grief’s great trick: you think you have faced the worst of it, not dreaming of all that is yet to come.

Somewhere outside a lonely kitten mewls, and my milk begins to run. Pietro catches the first weak drops on his pinky finger, a too-delicate gesture for a lustful husband. He wets a cloth and washes me, dresses me, rebraids the great length of my hair, and covers it. Then he guides me to my feet, and leads me down the stairs and through Verona’s crooked streets. Sore and stiff, I move slowly. But what aches most drives me on, as I hold Pietro’s arm, repeating to myself the promise he whispered as he lifted me from our bed. There is a baby waiting. Needing me as much as I need her.

We leave our familiar parish, Pietro guiding me past the towers and guild-halls and churches that mark the way to the Piazza delle Erbe. Even with the merchant stalls closed up for Lammas Day, the
air hangs fragrant with basil, rosemary, and fennel, the last reminding me that I left my herb-filled eggshells behind. But I’ll not turn back. I need no remedies, no potions. I need only a child to draw out what is already thick in me.

We cross below the Lamberti tower, to where the piazza narrows into the Via Cappello. This parish is not a place I ever come, for what have I to do with the Scaligeri princes and the wealthy families who guarantee their power? Nothing. Until today. This holy-day when, stopping midway along the Via Cappello, my husband raises a grand carved knocker and swings it hard against the wooden door. The door opens, and beneath an archway tall enough to admit a man on horseback, I enter Ca’ Cappelletti.

The Cappelletti house does not smell of yeasty Lammas Day offerings, nor of the goods sold in the herb-market. There is no hint of the fetid waste that fills Verona’s streets or the hogs roaming loose to feed upon it. Those odors cannot breach these walls, thick as a cathedral’s. I breathe in the miracle of it, as a house-page no older than an altar boy nods a curt dismissal to Pietro, then leads me alone through the cool air of the ground floor, perfumed by the household’s stores of wine and grains, cured meats, hard cheeses, and infused oils. I follow him up stone stairs to a storey so full of wool carpets, fur robes, and lit perfumers, their rich smells settle as tastes on my tongue. The walls and even the wooden ceiling beams are painted with holy images here, and exotic beasts there, and everywhere repeating shapes and dancing patterns that dizzy me.

We wind past the great sala and through the family’s private apartments to an intimate corner of the house. The page stops before a heavy pair of curtains, scraping agitated lines along his neck and stammering out that he’s not bidden to go any farther. I part the curtains and, passing between their woven scenes of hinds and hares frolicking in some imagined forest, I enter the confinement room.

A maid-servant weaves through the room with trays of roasted capon and sweetmeats, serving a dozen gossiping women who circle around the new mother’s bed. Most of the guests wear jeweled overdresses heavily embroidered with the crests of the city’s finest families. The others have the full-skirted habits of Verona’s wealthiest convents. No one notices me enter, except a sharp-eyed midwife’s assistant, who slips a swaddled bundle into my arms, whispering, “Juliet.”

Juliet—a little jewel. No ruby, no sapphire, no diamond could dazzle more. My little jewel and I are as eager for each other as young lovers. Settling upon an enormous pillow on the floor, I cradle her in one arm, loose my milk-soaked blouse, and offer up a breast. She takes it with such lively greed as makes me smile. When she’s sucked that, and then the other, to her satisfaction, I lay her down before me on the silken cushion. I snug her head between my calves, her swaddled feet tucking into my plump thighs, my thumbs tracing the soft smooth of her tiny cheeks. Sainted Maria, the very sight of her bursts my mother-heart.

Juliet is my earth, and I am her moon, so caught in our celestial sphere we exist entirely apart from the rest of the bustling confinement room. Invisible even to the new mother lying in the parto bed, who lifts her slender arm, coral bracelets jangling down
her wrists. With no more signal than that, silver goblets and flasks of trebbiano are brought out for the guests. Bright maiolica bowls appear, their lids hiding spiced stews. Trays come piled with sponge cakes and marzipans and fine salts. All eaten with a set of delicately worked silver forks brought by Prince Cansignorio’s aunt, who repeats to each woman who arrives how they were chosen from the Scaligeri inventories by the prince himself.

I care nothing for the lavish confinement gifts, nor for any of the room’s fine furnishings, except the heavy silver tub in which I wash Juliet, and the iron brazier over which I warm the swaddling bands to wrap her. To tend, to touch so little a living delight. I lean close to smell the delicate baby scent of her, and know it is my milk on her breath, my kiss on her downy hair.
Dearest lamb
,
I whisper with those kisses,
do not worry or wonder what all those other noises are, who makes them and why. They do not matter, now that I am here. Here for you.