Juliet's Nurse (6 page)

My quick tongue is ready to tell the cook I’m not some common servant. But Juliet wriggles in my arms, and in the moment I take to soothe her, the cook turns his back to me to toss the garlic into a sizzling pot upon the fire. Then he bends to stir the parsley into a bubbling sauce, and a hole gapes in his breeches, revealing a hairy part of him that I’d just as soon not see.

What use is it to argue with such as him?

I carry Juliet out of the kitchen. Before I make my way back upstairs, I slip into the arbor. Though the trees are nearly bare, I hunt out the last three apples that’ve fallen from the branches. Closed up again in our chamber, I gobble the fruit so fast, my stomach twists in pain. But I’m not sorry to have eaten my fill, defying Lord Cappelletto despite the cook.

From the time I could first grasp my mother’s skirts, I’ve always done my part of a household’s work. I began as any girl does: mashing herbs, shelling beans, and kneading dough, though soon enough I was stirring ashes back to fire, drawing water by the bucketful, and tossing scraps to hens and hogs. By the time I was eight, I could lay a trap to kill the mouse that’d gotten into our grain, or tell with a single whiff when the cooking oil was near to turning rancid. I stank of manure when the fields were tilled, of lye when we did our laundering, and each night of whatever simmered in the pots I stirred. There was not a chair in my father’s house for anyone but him, so I stood even through the long hours when I spun and sewed.

Once Pietro and I were married, I’d barely finish one chore before I had to set my roughened hands to the next. To keep my husband and our growing army of ever-hungry sons fed took such hours of buying and storing and preparing food, there hardly seemed enough light left in the day for all the scrubbing and salting, sieving and weaving, sorting and mending a household requires.

I’d not imagined during any of those work-worn years that one day I would sit for hours in a high-backed chair within an ill-run
house with nothing to do but watch a single infant sleep. Would I have believed then that I could feel as dulled by it as I do now? But we are what our life makes us. Hard as I’ve always had to work, I’ve never been any good at being idle.

Besides, in the hole exposing the cook’s hind-part I glimpsed a portent of something I’ll not let come to pass. And so I plot my way into Lady Cappelletta’s chamber. Young as she is, younger than five of my six boys would be if they lived, still she is the lady of Ca’ Cappelletti. Whatever else the gulling, gadding, tippling, scratching servants do, or do not, to look after the larder and the cleaning and the grounds, the household linens are her responsibility. If she’ll not tend to them, by spring not a one of us will have a proper cloth to wipe withal when we relieve ourselves, nor hose or breeches to lace back up once we are done.

This does not occur to Lady Cappelletta until I come into her chamber carrying the spindle, needles, and hoops that Tybalt hunted up among his mother’s things. “We should begin while the light is still strong,” I say. She’s a-bed, eyes red above her lovely cheeks. She nods, barely, and I busy myself with lifting the lid of the nearest linen-chest and surveying its contents, while Tybalt carries his cousin’s cradle into the chamber.

Lady Cappelletta grows so distressed at Juliet’s presence, I mean to distract her with some comment about how much needs mending. But before I can, Tybalt plucks up her cap and puts it on his head. Letting it fall in front of one eye, he lifts Juliet from the cradle and dances her in her matching cap along the edge of the broad bed, warbling nothing-such words as Lady Cappelletta laughs. This
is Tybalt’s gift, to himself and to us. Hungry for a mother’s love, he mines affection from this aunt who shows none for her own child, just as easily as he does from me, bereft of every child of my own. By the time his tutor calls him to his lessons, Lady Cappelletta is, if not delighted to be left with Juliet and me, at least willing to abide us along with her household duties.

At first she and I speak only about the inventory of linens, what tasks we need to do. I’ve always liked to work the spindle, the certainty of the spinning, dropping, and catching as wool or flax turns to yarn. The weight and rhythm anchor me. She is more suited to the needle, her young eyes and slim hands working such delicate stitches as I’d never manage. We are ill-matched in many ways, Lady Cappelletta and I, but that is what makes us well-matched for our tasks.

As the weeks of autumn pass, the wool oil seeps into my hands, its sheepy smell staying with me even when I sleep. I begin to spin stories while I spin thread, stories of tending my family’s flock when I was a girl. I tell them as cradle-tales for Juliet. Lady Cappelletta shows no sign that she listens, until I soothe Juliet through one colicky suckling by recounting an early blizzard that caught me and my sheep the year I turned twelve. The storm was fierce as well as sudden, purpling the sky and turning the world so dizzying white I’d not believed we’d ever find our way back to my village. I was shivering as much with fear as cold, when a rowdy band of hunters happened across the hill where we’d been stranded. Three of them
eyed my plumpest sheep, debating which one to kill off for supper. But the fourth smiled kindly as he eyed me instead, and he convinced the others he’d lead the flock back to my family, for what he was sure would be ample reward.

“Reward it was, and he took it long before we reached my father’s house,” I say, shifting Juliet from my left breast to my right. Is it any wonder the scent of wool moves me to tell such tales, given how at Pietro’s gentle urging I bade my virtue fond farewell before an audience of baaing sheep? “We were married before the spring snowmelt, and soon enough I was at my own lambing.”

Lady Cappelletta looks up from her sewing as though she’s noticing me for the first time. “You’ve borne children?”

“Barren women cannot suckle.” Does she really need me to tell her such things? “And neither can virgins. Except for the Sainted Maria.”

She listens only for what she wants to hear. “Sons? You’ve been delivered of healthy sons?”

I tell her my children were all boys, and all born healthy. “Except the last, which was neither. God rest them, every one.” I mark the sign of the cross against my face and chest, before pretending to busy myself with unraveling Juliet’s soiled swaddling.

Hard as it is to speak of all my lost little ones, what pricks most is how Lady Cappelletta disregards their deaths. “How? How did you make sons? If I can bear just one . . .”

I made sons easily, without thinking of it. Made them with Pietro, in all the warmth and strength of his youth. Not a bit like Lady Cappelletta, with her repulsion over the getting and having of babies, nor like Lord Cappelletto, bulbous and spotty with age.

“I did not lie too long in bed,” is what I say, “either before my husband came to me, or after.” True enough, for each boy I bore only increased the load of my household work.

She nods at my words, though giving up the hours she spends under her bed’s rich, heavy covers’ll not come easily to her, even if all she does instead is sit robed in furs sewing before the fire. Still, she might as well stop wallowing about like a sow in the mud. So long as a wife loves her bed only when her husband is far from it, she’ll not help herself in the getting of a son.

“And I ate sparingly.” Again, the truth. We were often hungry, more with each mouth we had to feed. But that’s not why I say it.

Lord Cappelletto is a man whose opinions grow as his hair does, only where you’d least want to find them. Though I’d not dare raise a plaint with him about what the cook told me, I take some small pleasure in forbidding Lady Cappelletta from having her fill of all the foods that are forbidden me.

She gives another nod, though this one is slower, worry widening her amber-flecked eyes. “The apothecary sent balsam and peony seeds. Not to take by mouth, but to put inside me, there.” She gestures toward her lap. “Lord Cappelletto read a treatise by a very learned physick, which says that this will help.”

Apothecaries. Treatises. Reading. If people put their faith into these things, is it any wonder they never get around to the making of children? The only remedy I’ve ever known, ever needed, was simply doing what we without money always do, to take a little pleasure in our lives. We romp, and we rut, and we leave it to the saints to decide when the babies come.

“Plant salves? Flower seeds?”
I snort at the idea that those are what she needs inside her. And then I tell her things she’d never imagine, about how to draw a husband’s salve and seed into her. I let my eye catch bolster, carpet, pomander—whatever lies around the chamber. Imagining some copulatory use for every object, I describe these acrobatic feats as though they’re common practice to all but her. I do not know if any of the acts I describe make a womb more likely to form a boy. But seeing how she looks at me, like a veal-calf watching its fellow herd-mates being slaughtered and then eyeing the butcher as he turns, knife in hand, its way—that’s grand amusement to me.

“And if your husband, once he is in that position, can balance with his left leg up,” I say, “then you might reach across and slip your mouth about his—”

A small, horrid gurgle cuts me off.

Juliet, my dear babe, shudders in my lap.

She’s open-mouthed, her breathing stopped. Her face a ghastly blue.

Blue against the indigo of the cap that, unswaddled, she’s pulled from her head. The silk border of the cap is wet. The last two pearls that rowed its edge are missing.

I crook my littlest finger into her tiny mouth and pry out a pearl. Tossing the precious bead to the floor, I fish my finger in again. But in the small, wet cave of her mouth, I cannot feel the second pearl.

I lift her and turn her upside down, smacking the heel of my hand hard against her back. Nothing. Not a whimper, not a gasp. Not any sign of the deadly jewel.

Lady Cappelletta shrieks. But I’m too terrified to utter a sound.

I turn Juliet face up again and bend closer over her, opening my mouth to cover hers, and her nose as well. I suck in, as deep as I can. Deeper than I thought I could. My great, fat body fills with what I suck from her. A grim reversal of how her small, delicate body has grown these past months with all she’s sucked from me.

Suddenly something thumps against my gullet. The pearl, freed from her throat, hits so hard within my own I nearly gag into her mouth. Juliet begins to struggle, kicking and swatting, straining in her desperate will to breathe. But the air’s sucked so tight between us, I cannot lift my mouth from hers.

I work my tongue within my mouth, rolling the pearl forward as I pull fresh air in through my nose. Pinning the pearl between my tongue and teeth, I push this breath deep into her. Push myself in that one great breath away from her.

Juliet howls as I spit the pearl into my palm. She’s red-faced and wailing, inconsolable. I’m glad for it. I do not know how many nights the sight of her, blue and still, will haunt me. But for now, I relish this lively, angry red of her, proof that she’s not gone to join my other little ones.

“What have you done to Juliet?” Lord Cappelletto rushes in, shouting as though Ca’ Cappelletti is under sling-and-arrow siege.

“Saved her,” Tybalt says, vaulting into the chamber after Lord Cappelletto. “It was amazing, Uncle. My cousin could not breathe, so the nurse did it for her.”

Lord Cappelletto’s roiling anger boils off in a vapor of worry. “Could not breathe? Is she ill?”

“She choked on a jewel that came loose from her cap,” I answer, letting my gaze drop to the once elegant headpiece, crumpled and saliva-soaked at my feet. I want to make him feel that it’s his fault, for ordering that an infant wear such a thing.

“I was in the antecamera, practicing my lute, and I saw it all,” Tybalt says. “The nurse was giving lessons to my noble aunt, just as the tutor does to me. My cousin turned blue as a spring sky, and the nurse turned her back to the carmine of the prince’s pageant-robes.”

His half-lie hits me like a shaming slap. I’d not heard a single pluck of a lute string, and if he’d been practicing in the antecamera, how could he see Juliet turn veiny blue? Tybalt must have snuck close to listen to all the filthy things I told Lady Cappelletta. Filthy things I was so consumed with telling, I’d not noticed him—just as I’d not kept careful enough watch over Juliet.