Juliet's Nurse (20 page)

“Afterwards, I’ll finish harvesting the hives,” he says. “I’ll collect the wax and honey, and separate them out. I helped Pietro enough times, I’m sure I can do it on my own. But I’ve no way to make comfits. When the honey’s ready, I’ll sell it to an apothecary who’ll work with it himself, as the chandler does the beeswax.”

“Is this all you can think of, honey and candles and candy—even with Pietro gone?”

“Bees die each day, but the hive goes on,” Tybalt says. “That’s what Pietro taught me. He said the ones who gather pollen may never taste the honey it will make. He told me it’s why he loved the bees. The way they build, creating combs not for themselves but for the future brood. Like the men who lay a church’s marble
cornerstone knowing they’ll not live long enough to pray within the finished nave.” He draws a deep, wavering breath, laying a hand on his mourning cape as if to touch his own great grief. “Pietro said this is why we must take care in tending them. The hive must live, and in its life we’ll find our hope.”

I’d not known such things about a hive—or about my husband. Never understood why the bees that afrighted me could so comfort him. What other things had I been too afraid to hear from him? What else about Pietro will I now never know?

Tybalt urges me to braid my hair and ready Juliet, so we’ll not be late. When I set my jaw and make no answer, he says, “I did not want to go to my father’s funeral, until my uncle said I must. He said that we must show everyone the strength of our piety, even when we are bereaved. But the friar says we go for God, to implore him to take my father’s soul, and now Pietro’s, into heaven.”

“Those are a nobleman’s reasons, or a clergyman’s,” I tell him. “Not a woman’s.” Not a widow’s.

My whole life I’ve seen them. You can tell which ones truly loved their husbands, some wailing and pulling hair and clawing at their own faces, and some still and stony silent as they kneel through the Requiem Mass. All listening from under their dark veils as though something in the priest’s impenetrable Latin might meliorate their grief.

But what could lessen my loss, what can console me, now that it’s too late to beg Pietro’s forgiveness and give myself wholly back to him?

I busy myself with calling Juliet to me, dabbing her face and
untangling the knots sleep worked into her hair. “We’ll not go anywhere,” I tell Tybalt. “The streets have grown too dangerous.”

“I’m not afraid.” He pulls himself tall, widening his shoulders as broad as they’ll go. Which is not nearly broad enough to carry all he thinks he can.

“What good did a fool’s bravery do Pietro?” I lace my words with enough venom to sting us both. “A full-grown man, and the brace of murderers left him in the street to die.”

Juliet whimpers. I’ve pulled her hair too hard, and made her hear such ugly things. Shrinking from me, she reaches for Tybalt. He bends to her, offering her kisses and a second comfit. Distracts her with her toy bird before he straightens up again and kisses me as well, the same tender way my sons did.

“I’ll go alone. I’m Tybalt, king of cats, and I’m not scared. I loved Pietro. And you said that he loved me. I’ll kneel and pray the Mass for him, even if you’ll not.”

This is how he leaves us, Juliet playing with that beady-eyed bird while I stand at the window staring out at the hive thrumming in the arbor. Wondering over what parts of Tybalt are yet boy, and what are already man, that make him able to face what I cannot.

Tybalt is the nimble king of cats, and the legal heir to Lord Cappelletto. But who am I? Not who I’ve been for more than thirty years. No longer Pietro’s adored wife. Nor Juliet’s wet-nurse. I gave up my husband for her—but what am I to her now? What will I be a year, a decade, hence, should God make me live so long without Pietro? What is a milk-mother to a child who’s been weaned?

I’ll not forget how she turned away from me, seeking solace from
Tybalt instead. And worse than her turning away was the moment before, when she looked at me just as Pietro had when last I saw him—the last I’ll ever see him. The same accusing look almonding her eyes, the same surprised hurt stippling her still-bruised brow.

Like a clapper smacking hard against a bell, it hits me. Rings hard at my temples, reverberates across my head, down to my heart. It makes my arms shake, and my legs. I turn from the window, sun-blind as I look back to Juliet. In two strides I’m beside her, swooping her up so quick her toy bird tumbles to the floor.

“Nurse?” She is too startled to utter any more than that, as I carry her back to the open window, hold her in the brightness of the light. And realize what surely has been there to see all along.

Her coarse, dark hair. Her deep brown eyes. Friar Lorenzo himself marked how much they are like mine. Colored by my milk, he claimed. But the shape of those eyes, how they sit in her face. The way emotions dance across her features. It is a face I know better than I know my own, and yet I’ve not recognized it until now.

It is Pietro’s.

I know what Lord Cappelletto, with his treatise-reading, feared. It’s why men draw the nursing contracts as they do: to keep a husband’s humors from tainting his wife’s milk, and transforming the nursling’s features. But what I recognize is not just in her features. It’s the child’s very nature—for is not my sweet, loving Juliet more like Pietro than like Lord Cappelletto or Lady Cappelletta?

Surely this is something more than milk or taint. All these years, Lord Cappelletto’s seed could no more quicken into healthy babe in Lady Cappelletta than Pietro’s could help but make strong ba
bies in me. Except for their first, and our last. How could we make something as weak as Susanna, to not live a single day, and they make such a precious, lasting jewel as my Juliet?

How’ve I not seen it before, not known how truly she is mine? For surely she was mine even before she sucked the first milk of me, mine before I even knew she stirred within me. Mine, as she could never be the Cappelletti’s.

Why else would Friar Lorenzo arrange for me to come here, yet howl at me, over and over, about being only a wet-nurse? Who else but he could know what happened the day two daughters were born, both brought to him for baptism, but only one survived? The priests are ever saying we must trust God’s plan for us, and with all their Latin learning making us believe they always know such plans better than we ever can.

I breathe in the honeyed spice of the remaining comfits, more redolent than all the incense of a Requiem Mass. I swear by the Sacred Maria and the Holy Infant and every heavenly saint that sits among them, I still cannot believe I’ve truly lost my husband. That Pietro could have slipped from this life without bidding me farewell.

This is the loneliest, the most unbearable, part. To have not said one last
I love you
. To have the last we said not be a true good-bye.

But lonely as it is, I am not alone. Tybalt’s father left two children, Tybalt and pious Rosaline, to pray for him. Pietro suffered six sons lost. But still she is here. Our final, secret, stolen one. Kneeling beside me in this light-filled chamber before the Holy Mother that Pietro gave me, the two of us praying as we take one final taste of his honey on our tongues.

PART TWO

1374–1375

ELEVEN

I
keep my place beside the sala window as Lady Cappelletta, Juliet, and I sew. Purblind as I’ve grown, none begrudge my standing where the light is better. Nor do I mind being where the view is better as well, for my aging eyes are keener for what passes below than for the stitch my needle makes. Verona’s spring bustles with donkey-carts sloping off the bridge from the far side of the Adige, heading for the Piazza delle Erbe. Wine barrels are heaved into houses full, or hauled out empty. Veiled women and thick-bellied men hurry toward some urgent task, or stop to gossip in the street. The Via Cappello is like a river thick with barques and barges while I’m tethered in port, watching every thing and everyone that sails by.

But the top-gallant is here inside, Lord Cappelletto flapping as noisily within the sala as a high-masted sail in a blustery wind.
“We’ll serve ravioli of wild boar simmered in spring herbs, to start. Next, veal stuffed with saffroned pigeon, leek, and fava beans. Then chicken, sausage, and Lake Garda carp, layered with dates and almonds and laid inside a pie. It will be the finest wedding banquet Verona’s seen since our own.”

“My lord husband has forgotten,” Lady Cappelletta says, without bothering to raise her eyes to his, “the feasts we ate when Cansignorio was wed a decade past.”

“More sumptuous than ours, as is a prince’s due. But no better than a plowman’s meal before furrowing a barren field, as it turned out to be.” Lord Cappelletto takes a certain pleasure in pitying Cansignorio, who has neither sons nor daughters by his lawful wife. “This may not be a royal marriage, but we’ll reap plenty of delights when it comes to fig and pear compoted in rosemary and anise. And almond-porridged quince, and cherry-and-rose tarts. And peaches braised with gingered honey.” He smiles at Juliet. “I’ve not forgot who keeps a ready tooth for sweets. Do you not, my love?”

Nearly fourteen, and still Juliet blushes with full innocence. But Lady Cappelletta’s own innocence is long gone. She’s become well-practiced in disdain, and serves up her scorn in overly abundant portions. “We’ve much to do to get the trousseau finished,” she tells Lord Cappelletto. “Juliet is slow with a needle, and such distractions do not make her any quicker.”

Though Lord Cappelletto has all a man’s ignorance of needlework, he waves away her chiding. “A rushed stitch is like a rushed courtship,” he says. “What comes together overhastily is too easily undone.”

Courtship
and
come together
jolt Juliet. Her needle pierces a
finger, and she gives a startled cry as red drops fall upon the sheet she sews.

“That’s the only pricking there’ll be upon that bedsheet,” I say, to bring a laugh from Lord Cappelletto before worse comes from his wife. “Enough it must be for all the Holy Sisters of Santa Caterina.” I add that last to remind them that the convent trousseau we’re making for Rosaline’ll not be truly hers, every stitch of it to be held in common among the cloistered nuns.

These months we’ve spent sewing, and the long night of feasting to come—all of it to consecrate what none of us would wish for ourselves. Prince Cansignorio’s childless marriage is no more barren than Rosaline’s Christly one will be. But Tybalt tells me his devout sister wants nothing more than chastity. At her age I surely wanted chastity—though only in the sense I was in want of it, delighting as I did in my marriage bed. But those days are forever past, and what I am in want of now are delights Rosaline’ll never know. She long ago donned habit, and as soon as she was deemed of age she happily professed her vows. This season she is fain to consecrate them, and Santa Caterina is glad for it. The convent, like all the Holy Church, dearly loves its ceremonies, for every one of which Lord Cappelletto gives generous dotal alms.

I take the bloodied bedsheet from my blushing Juliet, rubbing comfort onto her injured finger with the soft of my thumb, and hand her a pillow-casing to finish instead. “Salted water will bring such a stain out,” I say, “as many a tearful bride learns the morning after her marriage is consummated.”

That brings a knowing smirk from Lady Cappelletta. It goes un
noticed by her husband, who busies himself with cataloguing the esteemed guests he’ll invite to feast in honor of the newly mendicanted Rosaline.

Juliet’s usually so heavy in her own sleep that I may drowse late as I could wish and still rise first from our long-shared bed. But she’s full awake before the prime-hour bells ring on the Sunday Rosaline is to be consecrated, kneeling before the statue of San Zeno while peering expectantly at me. As soon as I unlid my eyes, she asks, “Is my cousin a better girl than I am?”

To wake with such worries is to not know what true worry is. But my dearest lamb ever struggles to bear Lady Cappelletta’s carping. And it is no easy thing for even such a light as Juliet to dwell in the shade of the ever-pious Rosaline.

I pat the sheet beside me, waiting for Juliet to settle back in bed and proffer a good-morning kiss before I answer. “Rosaline is good at being good, but it is much better to be better at much.”

“Such riddles, honey nurse.” She snuggles against me. “Can you not tell me if I am the precious jewel that you and my lord father Cappelletto and my holy father Friar Lorenzo all say I am?”

Why does the age that in boys brings boastful confidence in girls bring only doubt? There’d been naught like this in all my years of raising sons, or in rearing Tybalt. But Juliet of late puts me in mind of a bud you need protect, lest a sudden storm tear loose its new-formed petals before it flowers to full bloom.

“Rosaline is a tambour, taut and well put to the task of giving
off a steady beat. You are more a well-stringed lute. Full of bright notes and pleasing melodies”—I lift a lock of her hair and dance its end along her neck—“so long as the right hand plays upon you. Now, out of bed we must both be, and readying ourselves to go to Santa Caterina.”

This is enough to satisfy her, though it’s no full part of all that I might say of what and who she is.

When my heart first seared with the pain of losing my Pietro, I ached to claim her for my own. But what would my word have been against Lord Cappelletto, who believes with all his own heart that she’s the sole fruit of his loveless marriage, the same girl the city’s finest midwife delivered of Lady Cappelletta? What more proof would he need than what lying Friar Lorenzo would gladly give to keep so rich and influential a patron satisfied? For that is what I puzzled out, in my grief-filled sleepless nights: who else but Friar Lorenzo could have managed it, and why else would he have done it? To preserve a wealthy, powerful family’s joy, for which they ever bestow gilded thanks upon the Church—even if it meant yet more grief for me and Pietro. With a single deceit he fooled us all, rich and poor alike. None would believe a brown-cloaked Franciscan of being so duplicitous, so what good would it have done me to accuse him? I’d not risk being sent away from her. Not hazard the tie I yet have to my daughter.

So I’ve forced myself to keep kneeling before my confessor, never letting the slightest sign of what I know flicker in my eye. With Pietro gone, I’ve need to be shriven only once or twice a year, and in those infrequent visits Friar Lorenzo’s not sensed anything
amiss. Harder is holding my secret from my own darling girl. Too young she was at first, to understand. Too young to keep such a confidence. And even now—how could I take her from so grand a house, and force on her a life without name and fortune? Each day her belly fills with the Cappelletti food, and their fabrics clothe her finely. Each night we sleep entwined on the Cappelletti linen. I’ve let that be enough, for now.

I could not love her more even if all the world knew how truly she is mine. And soon my bud will blossom to full bloom, and I’ll know the time is right to tell her.

It’s no easy thing to find a conveyance grand enough to suit Lord Cappelletto yet narrow enough to pass through Verona’s crowded streets. Once the convent dowry is packed inside the carriage, there’s barely room for four to sit within in any comfort, so it’s just as well that Tybalt insists on riding post. Though the weather’s warmed, he still wears his cloak trimmed in marten fur, for I’ve not had time to take the winter lining out and sew in this season’s taffeta instead. He carries himself with the confidence earned in years of daily practice with a master-at-arms, and Lady Cappelletta smiles and admires the handsome figure he cuts upon the horse. So handsome, so admirable, is Tybalt, she must turn immediately to Lord Cappelletto and make great show of forbidding him from trotting off beside his heir. This is the closest to kindness she comes, to keep her aged husband from mounting a steed and thrusting himself into the saddle, for which surely he’s grown as ill-suited as
all the other mounting and thrusting she long ago forbade him. And so Tybalt gallops ahead alone, as the rest of us wend more slowly out of the city and across the river, to where Santa Caterina nestles on a gentle hill above Verona.

Slow as we’ve come, still Lord Cappelletto insists there’s time to descend into the catacomb and clear the cobwebs from his family crypt before the convent ceremony. Juliet cannot bear the sight of bones and begs to walk the Stations of the cloister instead. Lady Cappelletta gives her leave to do so, though she relishes the visit to the tomb herself—I suppose to be sure Lord Cappelletto’s first, beloved wife remains quite dead.

I stay with my Juliet. In the near two years since she turned twelve, my girl’s not been allowed to leave Ca’ Cappelletti, save to make her shrift to Friar Lorenzo, or to walk behind Lord Cappelletto in a holy-day procession. A rich man’s marriageable daughter is like his wife’s dowry-jewels—a precious treasure to be kept under lock and key, shown only when he deems it to his family’s advantage. Soft as Juliet is, it’s not been hard on her to be penned in, her days filled with whatever sewing and singing I devise to divert her. But I’m glad to escape the confines of Ca’ Cappelletti, to be brought beyond the city walls, and walk among the cloister garden smelling its mint and thyme and fecund dirt. To breathe in their pungent promise, and know that spring is the season of possibility.

Even Juliet senses it, laughing and pointing at plant and peacock and every pretty view. All talk of tombs forgotten as she wanders along the venerative path, infused with as much awe for what
grows in the garden as for the Christly acts commemorated at each Station. I’m glad of it. Glad that even here, she is as full of love for this life as the encloistered Rosaline is for the holy hereafter. Surely God and saints’ll not favor less her liveliness.

After we make our prayer at the final Station, Juliet’s mouth curves into a sly smile. “I’ve a surprise to show you,” she says, bidding me close my eyes as she steers me along another of the convent’s paths. It is a contenting thing to be led by my near-grown Juliet, her gentle touch guiding me as she chitters to herself about which way she means for us to go. She stops us with a giggle, and opening my eyes I find myself facing a statue of Santa Caterina.

Towering over us, Caterina’s colors dazzle in the sun. Her cheeks flush pink, the red of her lips nearly as deep a ruby as her gown. The bright green robe held by two angels above her saintly gilded crown contrasts with the deeper green of the martyr’s palm she holds, which is dotted with golden dates. Her other hand clutches a dark brown torturer’s wheel. Mysterious gold letters are worked into the holy book that opens at her breast.

“I came here once, when I was a girl,” Juliet tells me, as though I could forget that day. “When I saw this statue, I thought that it was you.”

“Me? A virgin saint?”

“Do not tease me, Nurse, for what did I know of such things?” She points to Santa Caterina’s wheel. “This seemed so like your spindle, and her hair is fixed in braids like yours.”

“Most of the women in Verona wear their hair in braids.” Reaching beneath where Juliet’s unplaited locks fall from her Cappelletti
cap, I give the lobe of her ear a loving tweak. “And what I cradled at my breast was more precious than any book could be.”

Soft cooing sounds from behind the statue. “A songbird,” says Juliet, “and we’ve not a crust of bread to feed it.”