Juliet's Nurse (18 page)

This Mercutio, and Tybalt, too—they’re not much shy in years of those who brawl upon Verona’s streets. And while Lord Cappelletto has grown keen to take his nephew as his heir, Mercutio’s uncle may not be so kind. Prince Cansignorio killed his own brother to seize his place upon the throne. What chance is there that, once his sister’s son comes of age, Cansignorio will deal differently with him?

The sun is at its highest by the time I turn into the Via Cappello, the sext bells tolling as I enter Ca’ Cappelletti. Those sonorous tones resonate through my very bones as I wait for Juliet to come back to me.

If Juliet craves me like I crave her, she’s done well hiding it, delighting in the game I’ve made of what I give her instead of my own milk. Bread soaked in wine. Porridged chicken fat. Barley in beef broth. I bade her close her eyes and guess what each was as I put it into her ready mouth. Such tastes, such textures for her pink tongue to learn as we sow the pleasure nursing taught us into something new.

I steal early out of bed to find some fresh delight to feed her. The air is hot and thick with fruit. I shudder, thinking of the wet peach flesh Pietro rubbed me with, just four days past. Why not share such succulent fruit with Juliet?

I hurry down into the arbor. But I stop fast before I reach the peach-laden tree. The beehive’s been righted, its seal replaced. I smile and turn this way and that, dancing my skirts as I search for where Pietro waits for me. Behind a tree? Crouched by the ruins of the dovecote? Within the entry to the tower stair?

No, and no, and no again. He’s not anywhere. The twittering I hear is only the morning lark, not the whistling tease of my hiding husband.

Something thumps upon the kitchen roof. I look up expectantly, as though my great bear of a Pietro might be there. But of course it’s only Tybalt, sprung from his own rooms and calculating whether he can leap across the fallen archway onto the ledge that leads to Juliet’s window.

Catching sight of me, he bounds to the roof edge and jumps
down. He lands nimbly on those cat feet, dives into an elegant somersault, and brings himself up facing me.

“Have you seen Pietro?” I ask.

“Is he here?” Hope widens Tybalt’s eyes. Which tells me he’s not seen my husband since before going to Mantua.

Is this Pietro’s way of punishing me? To come before I’ve risen, or after I’ve gone to bed, and leave this sign that he’s been without bothering to see me.
I’ll not keep sneaking about,
stealing time with you like I’m a thief taking what is rightfully Lord Cappelletto’s
. But what greater sneaking is there, than for a husband to come so near yet not take his willing, wanting wife?

“The hive’s upright, and the lid is back in place.” I feel a fool for saying aloud what Tybalt can see with his own eyes.

Feel yet more foolish when he thumps a proud fist against his chest and says, “I righted it myself, and I put my ear to the trunk to check the hive-noise. I even swept the dead bees away and watched to be sure the rest were gathering pollen again. I did it all, without even being bid to.”

Tender Tybalt, ever hungry for my praise. Or better still, for Pietro’s.

“Pietro will be pleased with you.” I let the compliment settle like a richly woven mantle over his broadening shoulders. “He’s probably tending some of his other hives. Perhaps you can find him and let him know what you’ve done. Surely he’ll want to come and admire it himself.”

Tybalt’s never been a boy who’s easily put off, not by one so soft-hearted as Pietro. Let him convince my husband to come here,
and I’ll work my own greater persuasion once he arrives. For though I schemed to have Friar Lorenzo be the one to tell Pietro I’d not be returning home, there’s that which I saved to say myself.

No lord would risk his child’s wet-nurse tainting her milk by receiving her husband’s seed. But now that Juliet is weaned, what objections could Lord Cappelletto have to me fulfilling my conjugal duty to Pietro, so long as it does not interfere with my caring for Juliet? Pietro and I might even enlist Friar Lorenzo to write it into the new contract, such terms as say that Pietro may come to me here, or I go to him, openly. And with a frequency we’ve not had these three years past.

I pluck a blushing peach from one of the fruit-laden boughs and offer it to Tybalt, then pick another to bring upstairs to Juliet. I’ll ready the slices while she sleeps, so she can wake to the delicious promise of what I tasted when Pietro was last here.

Summer’s sun melts the hours. They pour one into another, and still Tybalt stays gone. As the day grows hot, then hotter, sweat streaks my face and neck, bathes my back and belly. Juliet’s unceasing chirruping makes my head ache. It’s no ease to me when, after I at last settle my little one into her nap, the house-page comes scraping and scratching to tell me Lady Cappelletta summons me to keep her company. I cut tooth against tongue to keep from telling him a wet-nurse is no lady’s waiting maid. Wet-nurse I no longer am, and to stay with Juliet, I must be whatever the Cappelletti will want of me.

Lady Cappelletta lies a-bed, still worn with the jaunce from Mantua. Or so I’d supposed, until I enter her chamber and see the vinegared way she waves me near, her wedding bracelets clattering. “Sing to me,” she commands. “And not the dull religious droning Lord Cappelletto favors. I want a pleasure-song.”

Surely she wants more pleasure than I can trill forth. “If you are sorrowful—”

She cuts me off with a quick snort. “What sorrows have I?”

What am I to answer?
You are wed to an old goat who’s not given you a living son, and for all your beauty, even in your youth you already look more misused than I at my age do.
“None, unless you say so,” is what I say aloud.

“None indeed, now that the learned physick tells my lord husband he must be done rutting with me.” A newfound contempt curls her mouth when she speaks the phrase
my lord husband
. Before I can puzzle over it, her ring-laden fingers drum a quick cadence against the wooden bedstead, demanding I match a bright-paced tune to it.

I sing, fast then faster still, my breath short and shallow as I struggle to keep pace with her hurried rhythm. When the song is done, she says, “The journey to Mantua was so rough, the infant fell from me, pulling my womb out with it. The midwife and physick made me soak all night in a bath of mugwort and fleabane, before that cursed womb could be shoved back inside. They stuffed a linen full of pennyroyal and spikenard into me, to keep it in place. I was more dead than not, and begged them to let what lingered of me go.”

“But by God’s grace, you survived.” As though she should need me to remind her of it.

“I survived because the esteemed physick did not wish to upset his Gonzaghe patrons by losing a patient whose husband is so close an ally to Prince Cansignorio.” All hint of the timid girl she’s been is gone, leaving instead a young woman who puts me in mind of a foal struggling to take to its legs for the first time: unsteady yet certain she’s mastering something she’ll make good use of. “I made the physick promise that if I lived, I’d need not suffer Lord Cappelletto to take his pleasures on me again.”

“A wife’s duty,” I begin, as though I might yet explain the pleasures Pietro and I take in each other, to one whose husband is so ill-matched as hers.

“My duty’s done. I delivered him his son. What fault of mine if it did not live beyond the hour I bore it?” It’s more than an ill-fated laboring that makes her face less soft than it once was. The calculating glint that’s come into her eyes gives her a newly hardened beauty. “He’s got Tybalt for his legal heir. That was my idea, though I took care my lord husband heard it from his dying brother’s mouth. The boy has no mother—he’ll not turn me out when I am widowed.”

Her conniving is no match for my own, for though she may feel her way upon a foal’s ready legs, she lacks the cunning of a mare that’s run as many courses as I have. “If Lord Cappelletto makes a son outside your marriage, he might yet change his will.” Might turn even against Juliet, if a canny mistress pushes him to it.

“Lord Cappelletto is firm only in his faith,” she says, “his eel
too slithery to seed even one of the pursemaker’s daughters. He beseeched every saint in heaven to send him an heir, not believing such piety could go unanswered, until his brother’s final confessor convinced him that his legitimate son’s death was punishment for breaking his church-made vows to me. He’ll do penance by giving dowries so the pursemaker can marry off every last daughter, and hew to his marriage vows henceforth.” She gives a smile that lets the sharpest of her teeth show. “Tybalt well earned his place, conveying to me all that was whispered at his father’s bedside.”

I’d not have thought that Lady Cappelletta and I could be so much alike. She young, and rich, and wanting only to keep her husband from her, and I at my age plotting to find a way to draw my husband back to me. But in our choice of go-between, we are the same. Faithful Tybalt. On who else can we rely?

Lady Cappelletta bids me sing another song. While I warble it out, she tells me, “I’ve not forgot it was by your urging that I went to Mantua.” Those calculating eyes shimmer with the same hard contempt they showed when she spoke of Lord Cappelletto. But this time, she lets me see it’s meant for me. “You convinced me to try what nearly killed me. If I’d stayed safely here, I’d not have suffered any of it.”

I’d not intended any harm to her. Not thought what toll my goading might take, so consumed was I with keeping Juliet from the convent. But what way have I to tell this to Lady Cappelletta?

Quick feet cross the antecamera, and in one great rush Tybalt enters the chamber. “Half the hives are harvested. But the—”

Lady Cappelletta cuts him off. “Is that a proper greeting for an heir to give his aunt?”

Tybalt drops his eyes from mine, bowing his head to kiss her hand. “God give you good-den, dear Aunt.”

“When did you last make your prayers?”

“Yesterday. When my uncle and my cousin and I took Rosaline to Santa Caterina, we joined the Holy Sisters at their Mass.”

“You must pray every day, as Rosaline does, for the souls of your departed parents.”

Why must she pester Tybalt about his prayers, making him dwell on what he’s lost, just when he has news to give to me?

“You’re to go once a week to Santa Caterina, to make memorial devotions with your sister,” she tells him. “And on the other days, pray here with Juliet. Rouse her now, and have her make
amens
with you.”

“Juliet is tired,” I say. “It’s best she rest through the hottest of the day.”

“My lord husband insists it’s not too soon for his adored daughter to learn how one day she will pray for him, and for me, when we are gone.”

Death sat so near to Lord Cappelletto the week past, he supposes its bony hand will soon reach for his wrinkled one. And so he wants to be assured of what is every parent’s due: a dutiful child whose prayers will ease his way to heaven when his time comes.

“I’ll make sure they do as Lord Cappelletto wishes.” I rise and nod for Tybalt to lead the way from the chamber. He is the heir now. It’d not do for him to follow behind me.

But as soon as we are in the sala, I lay a halting hand on his shoulder. “Half the hives are harvested,” I repeat, “but?”

“The rest are left heavy with wax and honey.” He tells me how he traced and retraced Pietro’s usual routes, surprised not to find him collecting from one hive or another, or making his way between them.

“Perhaps he’s bargaining with the chandler,” I say.

“A beekeeper cannot bargain until he knows how much wax his bees have made this season, Pietro’s told me that a dozen times. It will be weeks of separating honey from comb, before he sees the chandler.”

With all his heeling after Pietro, Tybalt knows my husband’s business better than I do. But I know my husband’s heart. I need Tybalt to bring him to me, or to discover where I might find him, so I can ease him to accept my staying at Ca’ Cappelletti. “There are many ways to move about Verona, and more than one bridge crossing the Adige. You must go out again—”

Scarlet tinges his ears, his shoulders hunching into the same curve as when Lord Cappelletto carps at him.