Juliet's Nurse (14 page)

How could they be so impious? As if dying unshriven and unblessed, then being chewed through like some Alpine cheese, was not enough for Luigi to suffer. Though the sight and stench of him turned my stomach, I kept my sons in that room yet longer, ordering them all to kneel and pray for the poor man’s wandering soul.

But I could tell already it was too late. I did not yell, or strike, or chasten them. Neither did Pietro, when I told him that night what they’d done. We both knew that what punishment they’d suffer for their savage sport was one we could neither give nor relieve.

Two days passed before Berto began to swell. Within hours, four of his brothers did as well. We tried to keep Angelo apart from them, but where in our little rented rooms could he be hid? The pestilence took but another day to find him.

By the end of the week, every one of our dear boys was dead. Pietro bore them off on a single bier, while I cursed the saints that saw fit to let me outlive my sons.

So alive
, the grieving woman in San Fermo said. So alive—the worst thing to be, when you’ve lost all. But the best, now, as I hold Juliet and coo her calm again.

EIGHT

T
he dovecote stands one year, then two. Tybalt grows bored with chasing game hens, and Juliet, at nearly age three, squeals with pleasure while swooping after them herself. Lady Cappelletta has been fed innumerable eggs and a countless weight of poultry-flesh. Was it dove, or partridge, or sparrow that at last did it? None can say. Her madness quiets as her breath grows shallow, her face swelling like the pig bladder blown full of air that my boys used to bat back and forth between them. No one speaks of it. She is too fearful. And Lord Cappelletto is too superstitious.

He hires a donkey to carry her in this year’s Easter procession, while he walks before her beaming as he shows the whole city that he’s finally filled her belly again. Ridden by an ass so long, she now rides one—a merry joke, though I’ve no one to tell it to. But some jokes tell them
selves. During Mass, Lady Cappelletta lets slip such a passing of wind, it echoes against the arched ceiling of the cathedral. On the men’s side of the nave, Tybalt’s laugh breaks nearly as loud, setting Juliet giggling as well. I pinch a look at him and a thumb on her, until they hush.

Juliet’s so big, I cannot hold her as I kneel, and so she must kneel herself, though her body leans heavy into mine when she grows tired. As for Tybalt—even on his knees he’s now taller than his uncle. But he still mumbles during Mass, repeating by unsteady rote as I do, with none of Lord Cappelletto’s prideful mastery of Latin.

Once we are back in Ca’ Cappelletti, the Easter feast spread upon the sala table, Tybalt is the first to fill a trencher, and just as quickly fills his mouth. While Lady Cappelletta, elbows propped upon the dining table, falls into a doze, Tybalt’s new-long arms stretch for seconds and then thirds, emptying the serving bowls of the wild boar braised in rosemary, wine, and walnuts, and then the roasted kid stuffed with parsley, veal, and fig.

The Lenten fast is hard on growing boys, but Lord Cappelletto is harder on him still. Last month, Tybalt finally bested his uncle at chess. After all the years of losing, he was so proud he’d won, he ran to tell me and Juliet and Lady Cappelletta, and did not understand why I tried to shush him. I’d not expected Lord Cappelletto to take well to being bested, and in the days since, he’s seized every chance to needle Tybalt, insisting his nephew will do the Cappelletti more dishonor than five generations of Infangati or Uberti or Montecchi have.

“Your Latin is disgracing.” He jabs his dinner knife into Tybalt’s trencher to take back the last lamb-and-fennel sausage. “And your
tutor tells me your figures and tallying are even worse.”

Lord Cappelletto’s words hit Tybalt like gut punches, hunching him forward, singeing his ears with crimson shame. Juliet, frightened for her cousin, climbs onto my lap and searches out a breast for what is her comfort, and mine. I ought to carry her off, to nurse her far from Lord Cappelletto, but I’ll not abandon Tybalt.

“I try, Uncle.” Tybalt’s voice cracks under the effort of answering. “But words or sums upon a page dance before my eyes until I’m dizzy.”

“Dizzy?” Lord Cappelletto snorts the word back. “Lazy. A lazy princox, and I’ll not suffer it.”

I share, if not Lord Cappelletto’s severity, at least some worry over what will become of Tybalt. He does not fall in with the other boys his age, who roam the city looking for trouble. When he sneaks from his family compound, it is only to follow Pietro as he makes his circuit from one hive to another. And my husband says Tybalt’s enthusiasm wanes when it comes time to haggle with the chandler or coax raw honey into carefully spiced comfits.

But anyone with sense can see that Tybalt is not lazy. He dances, and prances, and tumbles, burning with more energy every passing year. He still dotes on Juliet, so that whenever he comes into a room, she smiles at him like a coquette at a wealthy suitor. And, like that wealthy suitor’s poorest and most desperate rival, Tybalt will do anything to please her. But these days, nothing he does seems to please his uncle.

I remember first Nunzio and then Nesto at thirteen, when a youth thinks he is too clever to be young, though truly he is too young to be clever. An age when he needs most what Tybalt’s father is not here to give.

Broadswords hang upon the sala walls, each as long as Tybalt is tall and all decorated with the gilded Cappelletti crest. Tybalt loves to play at swords, just as his uncle loves to tally the profits of his investments—and to outdo the Cappelletti’s rival families in currying favor with Verona’s ruler. “They say Prince Cansignorio has sent to Brandenburg, to hire the city’s finest master-at-arms to teach Count Paris and Count Mercutio.” I speak to no one in particular, though I make sure Lord Cappelletto hears.

“Who says this?” he asks.

I shrug, as if to show it’s on everyone’s tongue, though truly it’s only on my own. I’ve woven it out of thin air, and now I knot the loose strands into a tidy edge. “They may only be his nephews, but Prince Cansignorio rears them as though they’re his own sons.”

Lady Cappelletta jerks herself awake at the word
sons
. Lord Cappelletto makes careful survey of the low spread of her belly. “I will write my brother about securing a master-at-arms. It’s time someone disciplined Tybalt.”

Tybalt pulls himself up at the idea of training with a sword-master, Juliet hiccuping off my nipple to give him a milk-wet smile.

Lord Cappelletto’s mouth puckers over how Tybalt’s joy feeds Juliet’s. And it is from those puckered lips that I hear the words, “And also time for Juliet to be weaned.”

Weaned
. If Lord Cappelletto took my breasts into his stubby-fingered hands, twisting like Sant’Agata’s tormentors, it’d not pain me more than his uttering that word does. As though what flows
between milk-mother and milk-daughter can be cut off with a single word. As though I’ll let the dour cloister of Santa Caterina swallow all the light and joy of Juliet, just so he can bribe the saints into giving him a son.

I rouse Juliet early the next morning and tell her we must go see Friar Lorenzo. She knows the route as well as I. Grasping my hand, she leads me along the Via Cappello toward the Porta dei Leoni, turning south and east and south again through streets no wider than a donkey-cart. Although by night these tight passageways are so quiet you can hear the thrusting of a single vendetta-driven blade, at this hour they’re crowded with women and children hauling and haggling and hanging laundry, the street more filled with noise than light. Juliet stops every tenth step to gape and wonder, wearing my patience filigree thin by the time we emerge into the bright sun before San Fermo, cross the churchyard, and duck into the entrance to the friary.

Juliet is always delighted to enter the Franciscan’s cell. She raises her face, ready to hear him say how pretty she is, grown ever prettier since our last visit, though he’d not have thought it possible. Her little mouth loves to form the words
me fess
and share with him her childish misdeeds: how she’s cried herself exhausted while refusing all my efforts to console her, or plucked a flower after I’ve forbidden it. I always nod solemnly as she speaks, repeating her odd-formed words so he can understand them. By my troth, I believe she only does such little wrongs for the joy she finds in adding her play-shrift to my weightier one, and having Friar Lorenzo in a single breath forgive us both.

But today the truest sin I have to tell is neither hers nor mine, so I’ll not say it. How can I confess that Lord Cappelletto is ready to make sacrifice of Juliet? I claim impiety instead, for laughing with Tybalt and Juliet at Lady Cappelletta’s breaking wind.

I bow my head and Juliet, her lip trembling with regret, bows hers, as Friar Lorenzo absolves us. “Poor Lady Cappelletta, she suffers so,” I say, when he has done. “She’d do anything to be cured of such windiness. And Lord Cappelletto would give anything to have her cured.”

Friar Lorenzo’s great ears brighten to hear
Lord Cappelletto
paired with
would give anything
. I may not know a word of Latin, but I’ve long understood the mendicant order’s unspoken motto: do all you can for the poor—and take all you can from the rich. It’s the latter he’s at now, leaning his tonsured head over his stock of petals and powders, muttering about wild celery and cowbane, then mastic, cloves, and madder root, carefully mixing in drams of who knows what else. He grinds it all into a powder, pours the powder into a pouch, and affixes a tiny cross, so Lady Cappelletta and her lord husband will know it came from him. “Three scruples,” he instructs me, “to be given her with sweetened wine, whenever the windiness takes her.”

I accept the Franciscan’s
benedicte
along with the little pouch. When we leave his cell Juliet wants to tarry as we often do, stopping first to visit the bright saints in the lower church, and then, in the upper church, to twirl beneath the dim ones peering down from the dark ceiling. But I’ve no time for church and saints, when for once it’s Lady Cappelletta’s help I seek.

Juliet, long too big for the cradle yet still too small for a needle, has learned to make toy bird or clay horse her companion during the slow hours Tybalt is with his tutor while Lady Cappelletta and I sit sewing. But though I’ve told her a thousand times that what is said in Friar Lorenzo’s cell is a sacred confidence between penitent and priest, Juliet proves again this morning what I often say: two can keep counsel, putting one away.

“Ma’da,” she says, for the formal
madonna madre
is still too much for her little tongue to master. “Ma’da, me fess, and Nurse fess, and Friar make it go way.”

Proffering the pouch, I explain, “Friar Lorenzo sends a blessed remedy to soothe your suffering,” and instruct her to call for wine. Not the pale trebbiano Lord Cappelletto has her drink, but a foreign-made malmsey as red as the flush it will bring to her wan cheeks.

Three scruples, and wine, and honey to go with. One goblet and then another, and the mixture so sweet and good, she drinks down a third. All that tinctured wine calms her ill-winded humors, and soon Lady Cappelletta is giggling like a child of eight and not the woman of eighteen she’ll soon be. She says Juliet’s play horse reminds her of the steed that was the pride of her father’s stable, telling us how on holy-days the horse’s mane was woven with ribbons and pearls to match her sisters’ fair hair, and her own. She even sings a little song that they sang as all three girls rode upon its back. Juliet’s eyes puzzle at hearing the bright melody from such a usually so sour source.

“Happy days of childhood,” I say, though I know not whether
she had even a dozen such days before she was married off. But I need her to help me give my Juliet such happy days—and happy nights—as she deserves, not a one of which will come to her if she is sent off to Santa Caterina. “You should tell Lord Cappelletto to get so grand a horse, so that you and Juliet and the new babe might ride like that, when the second gets as big as Juliet is now.”

“I cannot tell my lord husband such a thing,” she says.

Even the wine is not enough to nerve her. So I add what ought nerve any wife. “I should think there’s much you’d like to tell him, for mousing after the pursemaker’s daughters instead of doing his dowry-duty to you.”

Though it’s not my proper place to speak so, what more have I to lose than if Juliet is sent off to the nuns? But my words are like a swift-winged wasp circling before Lady Cappelletta’s brow. Her eyes cross in confusion.

“A wife must catch the rat, when her husband’s on a mouse hunt.” I work the spindle quick, letting my words work her. “Even Prince Cansignorio keeps his natural spawn out of the castle, now that he’s got a proper wife. A husband must show public pride for his lawfully begot, church-blessed children, and send the bastards away.”

This is my pretty plan. If Lord Cappelletto is in want of a child to sacrifice, let the convent devour what children he’s made outside his marriage bed. Though for all I know, he’s had even less luck planting his seed among the pursemaker’s daughters than with his wife.

I bid Lady Cappelletta take more wine, hoping it will warm her to what I’d have her do. “Tybalt says the queen upon the chessboard uses knight and rook to keep herself protected. Just so a wife,
who keeps her children near to make her husband put his duty to her first.” I drop my voice to a conspiratorial whisper, though in truth there’s no one near enough to hear. “I knew of a woman once, whose husband became so overfond of his natural child he took it into their home, and sent his wife and lawful children off without returning her dowry-portion.”

I do not add that the home was a mere shack, the wife a shrew, the dowry-portion a near-dead billy goat, and even so, the village priest declared the husband wrong and gave the wife back her rightful place—where she was made to raise her husband’s bastard child along with their legitimate ones.

As we sew, I keep a steady pouring of wine into Lady Cappelletta’s goblet and vinegar into her ear. When the dining hour draws near, I urge her to put on her wedding bracelets. She wears them like Tybalt does his father’s castoff gorget-armor—believing it girds him for some imagined battle, though in truth it’s too big to fit him.