Juliet's Nurse (3 page)

Juliet has a ferocious hunger, rousing herself six or seven times during our first night to nurse. I do not bother to lace my blouse, keeping a breast ready so that she’ll not cry and wake the house. But to feed her, I must be fed. In some quiet hour, hungry from her hunger, I steal up to the table beside the parto bed, where remnants of Lady Cappelletta’s supper remain. A taper flickers beneath a portrait of Santa Margherita. Is it any wonder the saints favor the rich for offering up such extravagant devotions even while they sleep, when the rest of us can barely afford to keep a candle lit upon a work-table when we are full awake?

In the dancing light, I pick the darkest of the meat. Even cold, it is the finest I’ve ever eaten. I close my eyes, sucking poultry-flesh from bone, savoring the flavors until I feel another set of eyes upon me. Lady Cappelletta’s.

I slip the purloined bone inside my sleeve, so I’ll not be called a thief. But well-fed as Lady Cappelletta is, she does not seem to mark what I’ve taken.

She stares at my untrussed breasts. “Is that what they do to them? Suckle like piglets till they fall flab?”

Standing so close beside her parto bed, I see she is hardly more than a child herself, consumed by girlish fear at what her body is, what it will become. “Time will do what time will do,” I say. “No one stays”—I peer at her and make a careful guess—“fourteen forever.”

She looks down at the bumps that even after pregnancy barely bring a curve to her nightshirt. “I’m already turned fifteen.”

“An age when bud turns into bloom.” An age that is but a third of my own. Her face, her neck, are smooth as a statue, her bead- and braid-strung hair shining. Lady Cappelletta is that beauty the poets call a just-plucked rose, and gossiping old dowagers call a coin that’s not yet spent. Wondering that this is not enough to please her, I add, “And blessed that your child is healthy.” She cannot know what those words cost me.

“So what if it is?”

“Not it,” I say.
“
She. A beautiful daughter of a beautiful mother.”

Some hard emotion pulls at the edges of her pretty mouth. “Who should have borne a son.”

“You are young. There will be sons yet.”

“I am young, but my lord husband is not.” She shudders when she speaks of him. “Neither is he patient.”

Surely tonight all her husband’s thinking of is how much it costs to dower the daughter of so fine a house—that will shrivel more than a man’s impatience. But who am I to tell her so?

“He’ll climb right back upon me,” she says, “to make a son.”

Fear tinges her words. Perchance it’s more than age that makes them ill-matched. He must run hot, as men do, and she cold, as I for one do not. Although never having seen her husband, I cannot say whether there is anything in him that might please any woman. Especially one barely out of girlhood.

“The midwife will tell him he must wait, as all men do,” I say, thinking of how Pietro brought me here out of our marriage bed.

Her fingers, heavy with pearl rings, tug at the gold-and-garnet cross that hangs around her neck, then turn the coral bracelets upon either wrist. Extravagant talismans, doubtless from her husband’s family, which no one thought to unclasp at night so she might sleep in comfort.

She’s sorely in need of mothering herself, new mother though she is. I could sit upon this grand bed, stroking her hair and whispering soothing words until her hands lie calm. I might tell her that many a wife whose husband gives her no pleasure in the getting of babies still finds great joy in the children she’s borne. But Juliet begins to stir, and I turn my back to the parto bed to take up the child who is my charge.

TWO

F
or the first five weeks, I see nothing of the Cappelletti compound except the confinement room. But Lady Cappelletta is not wrong about Lord Cappelletto’s eagerness to make a son. The day after I arrive, her breasts are bound in squash leaves to dry their milk and keep her fertile. And at five weeks to the hour of when her labor ended, her husband—who’s not bothered to make a single visit to the confinement room—orders her brought back to their marriage bed. The fire in the confinement room is put out, the parto linens and sumptuous wall-hangings folded away for when she’ll bear again. The handsome walnut-and-ivory cradle, with its fine white Levantine silk and gold-fringed coverlet, is moved through the family apartments to what will ever after be Juliet’s room.

Her own room. Bigger than the one in which my whole family
slept, and hung with fabrics I cannot even name, fabrics so mysterious and beautiful I know they’re not from Verona or Mantua or any land where anyone I know has ever been. It has art like a grand parish church, paintings of the Blessed Maria and the Sainted Anna, and a niche as big as a man filled with a statue of San Zeno. All smile their holy approval onto a bed that’s wide enough for a bride, a groom, and half their wedding party. The headboard and footboard rise so high, it’s like a little fortress when the bed curtain closes around them. Outside the footboard sits a cassone-chest longer than I am tall, its sides and cover carved with chubby angels. When I open it, the woody scent of rosemary seeps from the dresses stored inside. Garments sized for a child of two, of four, of six, each more elegant than the next—a bishop’s ransom worth of clothing, waiting for my tiny Juliet to grow big enough to wear. And beside the massive bed, a narrow, low-slung truckle-bed for me.

Juliet’s chamber glows with light, a perfect setting for my little jewel. There is a window that stretches from below my knees to high above my head, broad as my open arms. My fingers are greedy to touch its thick, warbled panes. Real Venetian glass, nothing like the waxed-cloth windows on the Via Zancani. These panes are set within a heavy frame hinged to swing wide, to let in air from the Cappelletti’s private arbor. In all the years I’ve lived among the city’s crooked, crowded streets, I’ve never known that such trees grow within Verona’s walls, their ripe fruit so fragrant. This is what the rich have: the prettiest smells in all the world, and the means to close out even those whenever they want.

It is a bright September day, so I keep the window open while I
sit in a high-backed chair and sing to Juliet. I sing, she sleeps. Surely no harm if I sleep too, dreaming the golden sun is Pietro come to warm me, inside and out. It’s a dream so real, I wake certain I feel the very weight of him, and find a poperin pear lying in my lap.

I might believe Pietro is here withal, when I see that.
Pop-her-in
, he calls the bulging fruit, wagging a pear from his breech-lace whenever I bring some home from the market. But shut within the Cappelletti compound, it cannot be Pietro who pranks me.

A boy of nine or ten perches on the bottom of the window frame, watching me. His light brown hair falls in loose, soft curls to his chin. His face stretches long for a child’s, as if the man in him is already struggling to make his way out. His arms and legs are thin and strong, although not pinched by work like my sons’ were. He pulls his head high and announces, “I am the king of cats.”

I’ve not forgotten how to manage a playful boy. Picking up the pear by its round bottom, I wave the peaked tip at him. “A cat who hunts fruit instead of mice?”

“Cats climb,” he says with feline pride. “I heard whistling outside our wall. When I climbed over to see what it was, a man asked if I would bring that to you.”

I ask who the man was, as if I do not already know.

The boy describes my strong bull of a husband to the very mole above his left eyebrow, while I bite deep into the pear. “He said to tell you that if you like that, he has something even juicier for you to eat.”

Though I blush, the child seems ignorant of what charming filth Pietro bade him speak. “How did you know to bring this here, to me?”

He laughs, raising both knees and rolling back. Backward out the window. My heart goes cold, the pear-flesh stuck in my throat.

But in an instant two small hands appear on the bottom of the window-case. The child vaults himself into the chamber, turns a somersault, and leaps up. “I am Tybalt, king of cats. I climb, and I jump, and I know all that happens in Ca’ Cappelletti.” He struts back and forth like the Pope’s official messenger proclaiming the latest Bull. “That is my cousin, and you are her nurse, and tomorrow is the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, and before you go to be shriven the man will meet you, and he will give you three almond sweets to give to me, as long as you give your sweets to him.”

“Tybalt my king of cats,” I say, careful to hide my surprise that Pietro has trusted this strange boy to bear me these naughty tidings, “how clever you must be, to keep such delicious secrets.”

The mention of secrets sets off another round of acrobatics. “I know every hidden passageway in Ca’ Cappelletti, and which alcoves to stand in to overhear what somebody is saying.” He gives his narrow chest a proud thump. “I’ve climbed all the way to the top of our tower, as high as the campanile of Sant’Anastasia. The perch is filled with rocks I carried up myself, some as big as a man’s head, to throw on any enemies who pass below.”

“Any enemies?” I raise the pear to my mouth, to hide my smile.

“The Cappelletti have many enemies,” he says. “Because we are so brave and pious.”

A man makes more enemies being cruel and quick-tempered than brave or pious. But there’s time enough for this Tybalt to learn
such things, so I only nod and tell him I can see how gallant he is, and bid him finish off the pear as his reward.

He takes the knife from his belt, assaulting the pear as though it has offended his honor. He carves the pale fruit-flesh with the same coat-of-arms that is painted along the corbels and patterned in golden thread into the Cappelletti linens. Neither Pietro nor I were born to families who had so much as a surname, let alone a scroll-worked crest to herald that name to all the world. But the Cappelletti coat-of-arms is a bewildering thing. Unlike most shields one sees around Verona, which feature eagles or dragons or other formidable beasts, this one boasts only a peaked mitre-hat.

“Does your family make hats?” I ask, though I doubt that even the most gifted milliners could ever amass such a fortune as built Ca’ Cappelletti.

Tybalt scores the air with his dagger to correct me. “Not hats, chapels. Our family endowed so many of them with all we earn from our lands, Pope Innocent III himself decreed we should be named for them.”

“I see the joke,” I say, the word for the Pope’s mitre-hat sounding in our Veronese dialect almost the same as the word for chapel.

“It’s not a joke,” Tybalt insists. “It is a shibboleth.”

I do not know what a shibboleth is, cannot guess why Tybalt’s so proud that some long-dead Pope gifted his Cappelletti ancestors with one. But from the way he swaggers out the word, I know how best to answer. “A shibboleth. How clever.”

This brings another smile to the boy’s face, and he lists the names of a half dozen bygone emperors, telling me how they hated
the Popes and the Popes hated them. How this emperor warred against that Pope, and the next Pope plotted against the subsequent emperor. On and on for a hundred and fifty years, the Cappelletti always siding with the Pope, supplying knights and horses to capture whole towns from rival families named Uberti and Infangati and Montecchi. A catalogue of bloody conflicts this Tybalt’s been taught to recite like a poet singing a love-ballad.

How much easier it is to be poor than rich. We are too busy scrambling to find enough to eat each day to worry ourselves over the centuries’ worth of slaughtering that consumes a boy like Tybalt, who chews thick slices from the pear as he schools me about his esteemed relations. His father is Giaccomo, and Juliet’s is Leonardo, and they are brothers. Very cunning, very courageous, and very rich, ever plotting against anyone who dishonors their noble family. Just like all the Cappelletti who came before them. When I ask which man is the elder, Tybalt laughs and tells me they are too old for anyone to remember. From this I figure that his father must be the younger, for an older brother never fails to impress his son about his rightful place in the family line.

“And your mother?” I make my words sound light, so they’ll not betray my worry. Tybalt’s mother cannot be near so young as Juliet’s, to have a son of his age. If she is cruel or jealous, she will make life hard for her sister-in-law. And for Juliet, and me.

“My mother is with the angels.” Tybalt turns to throw the pear core out the window. He keeps his back to me, his voice unsteady as he tells how his mother passed just before Michaelmas, birthing his sister Rosaline.

Not yet a year gone. The air of death still lingering in the confinement room when young Lady Cappelletta was brought in for her own recent childbearing.

“You must love your sister very much,” I say, to ease any resentment Tybalt might have for the baby whose birth brought the death of their mother.

“I’ve never seen her. My father sent her away to be nursed, so that he’d not be reminded.”

Only a man could have such sentiment: to love a departed wife so much, he banishes the child she bore.

Juliet stirs in her cradle, giving a little cry as if to confirm the folly of men. Every wisp of her first golden hair has fallen out. But even bald as an ancient abbot, Juliet is still my beauty. I take her into my arms, telling myself I only want to check her swaddling, to be sure each limb is wrapped tight.

Tybalt sees how needy I am just for the feel of her. “My uncle thinks my father is a fool. He says not even a daughter should be sent off as a newborn.”

Much as I agree, I know better than to confirm aloud that his father is a fool. Instead, I motion the boy close and place his tiny cousin into his arms, hoping she’ll make up for the sister he does not know. He wiggles one of his small fingers before her face, and she smiles up at him. “You must protect your cousin Juliet, and your sister Rosaline.”

He nods, touching that same eager finger to where his knife hangs at his waist, as if he might need at any moment to ward off some grave threat. My Pietro was a motherless boy, and it was the love of his doting older sisters that taught him to love me. Why
should I not give this serious, tumbling Tybalt more to care about than almond candies and ancient feuds?

Juliet sleeps heavily our first night in her bedchamber, but I am wakeful, worrying over how I will contrive a way out of this room and away from Ca’ Cappelletti, to meet Pietro. How I miss my husband’s snores, the way even in sleep his great bear-paw of a hand cups my rump or hip or the soft curve of my belly. We’ve never been so long apart, even after my other lying-ins, for we have but one bed. When each of our sons was born, Pietro placed the newborn boy on the bolster above our heads, and entertained me by translating their gurglings into wild tales of where they’d been and what they’d seen before coming into this world, as one by one our older boys dropped off to sleep. He spun weeks and weeks of such stories, filling the nights until I was well again.

All that fills the night in this great chamber is the sound of Juliet’s small breath, and the church bells counting off the three hours between compline and matins, then the three between matins and lauds. And in between the tolling, the songs of the nightingales in the arbor. Their trillings have barely given way to the first morning lark’s insistent chirps when, without so much as a knock, a man strides into the chamber, the dangling ends of his broad silver belt clanging with each heavy footfall. He’s of great girth if no great height, and as anyone but a blind man can tell from every gilded stitch upon him, rich. With a rich man’s surety of all that is his due, he demands, “Where is my Juliet?”

My Juliet
. Hearing him say those words makes me despise him, detesting how his silvery hair grows thick from his ears and nose yet thin upon his head. Holding my milk-sodden nightdress closed, I fold back the coverlet and reveal my darling lamb, perfect in her sleep.

He lifts her up, away from me. I feel the warmth go out of the truckle-bed, the slight hollow where she lay chilling into an abyss as Lord Cappelletto cradles her in his arms. His liver-colored lips kiss her creamy cheek, those bristly nostrils widening to take in the precious scent of her.

His thick fingers draw a tiny cap from his doublet pocket. It is a deep indigo, worked with gold. A perfect miniature of the elegant headpiece Lady Cappelletta wears, though with fewer rows of pearls. Too delicate in its silk and jewels for an infant. But when he puts it on Juliet’s new-bald head, she strains against her swaddling as though she means to raise her own tiny hand to settle the cap in place.

“Juliet Cappelletta di Cappelletto,” he says to her. Not in some foolish cooing singsong, like my doting Pietro would. But Lord Cappelletto’s deep voice betrays an adoration that does not seem to fit a man who’d not bothered to make a single visit to his wife’s confinement room.