Juliet's Nurse (5 page)

I take the holy hint, telling him I hope I’ll not disappoint him, having only an hour’s worth of lovemaking with my husband to confess. He nods gravely, urging me to unburden myself of every copulatory detail. When I finish, he raises a single eyebrow and asks if that is all.

I bow my head like a dog caught helping himself to a cutlet while the cook’s back is turned. “I deceived Lord Cappelletto. I let him believe I only intended to take Juliet to join the procession for the Blessed Virgin. Which I have done. Before I did Pietro.”

“And what else?”

“Only Pietro.”

“No other bedmate, of course not. But what other sin, my child?” Friar Lorenzo would call even Methuselah himself
my child
, if they ever happened to meet. “Not only in deed, but in thought, we sin.”

He means my darling lamb. He can mean only her, for what
other secret do I carry? “Sometimes when we are closed up alone together, I imagine she is my own. My Susanna.”

Though he hunted for a sin, I mark from the way he pinches at his ear that he does not care to catch me at this one. It was Friar Lorenzo who baptized Susanna, and blessed her shroud. He’s the one who told my grief-struck Pietro of the Cappelletti being in need of a wet-nurse, then arranged the terms of my service with them. “Never question the wisdom of God, or of Church,” he tells me. “Do not deceive yourself or the child, about what she is and to which family she belongs.”

Wise though Friar Lorenzo is, at this moment I realize all he’ll never know. Whatever lusty pleasures I take with my husband, he finds forgivable. But my wishing my dead daughter alive, a mother’s most urgent desire—that the celibate cleric cannot possibly understand.

After I bow my head, bend my knee, and say my penance, I step from the friary into an afternoon grown gray. When the first fat drops of rain begin to fall, I stop beneath a narrow archway, steadying my back against the rough stones while I slip Juliet inside my dress to keep her dry. As we make our way through the crooking streets to Ca’ Cappelletti, she nestles into the warmth of my body. Nothing comes between us. Nothing.

THREE

E
very house has its rhythms, and the first I learn of Ca’ Cappelletti’s is this: Lord Cappelletto rises before the morning bells. He dresses and washes in the dawn’s first streaks of light, then breaks his night-fast in the sala beside Juliet’s chamber. By the time the prime-hour bells toll, he’s guttled himself full. He comes in and takes Juliet from me, holding her so long that when he hands her back she stinks of Lodi cheese and liver pie. Then he rushes downstairs to hear the first of the day’s news cried through the streets, before he disappears into some corner room on the ground floor.

“We’re free of him,” I tell Juliet, though by my mickled saints, I’m as bound as she is, as I wrap her in fresh swaddling. Shut up in this chamber hour upon hour, as two days, three days, four days have passed, all the same.

But as I rock Juliet in her cradle late in the morning on the fifth day, I see Tybalt crawling out the window opposite, on the far side of Ca’ Cappelletti. He slithers on his belly across the kitchen roof, then inches atop the arched entry to the arbor. Passing hand-over-hand along the ledge beneath Juliet’s chamber, he pulls himself in through her window.

He carries a toy bird in his mouth, which he drops at my feet. “The king of cats has brought a present for his cousin.”

“Even a cat can use a door,” I tell him.

“My tutor pushed a cassone against the door, to keep me at my lessons while he goes drinking at the tavern.”

Tybalt can escape a room. His tutor can escape the Cappelletti compound. All I can do is stare out the window at what grows within the walled-in arbor. “When your father learns you’ve disobeyed your tutor—”

“My father is in Mantua, serving at the court of the Gonzaghe. And my uncle is in his study buried in accounting books, except when he’s called away to some meeting of the prince’s council. And my aunt is in her bedchamber, always in her bedchamber.” He pounces on the bird-toy, tossing it into the air and catching it in his mouth. “But now you’re here to play with me.”

Though the bird’s feathers are real, its eyes are dull beads. Flightless, lifeless—like I feel, cabined here.

But I see what the bird-toy cannot: how to play Tybalt by letting him play with me.

“We could have a hide-and-go-a-seeking,” I say, “if we could find a place far from your uncle and your aunt.”

Tybalt puffs his chest like a blackcock grouse before a hen. “I know the best hidey-hole in Ca’ Cappelletti. No one will look for us there.”

He pulls back the wall-hanging beside the statue of San Zeno, straining under the weight of the thick weave. Underneath, where I expect bare wall, there’s a door with a bolted lock.

A whole world opens off this chamber, and I’d not known it. A world that surely must be full of wonder, if the door is hidden, and barred to me.

Tybalt bids me hold the wall-hanging while he draws his dagger. He works the pointed tip into the lock, twisting it this way and that until the metal working clicks into place.

The door swings open, revealing not gold or marble or any sumptuous thing, but only the interior of the Cappelletti tower. Dank and bare, and of no interest to me. But Tybalt snatches Juliet from her cradle, whisking her through the heavy-beamed doorway. Bounding up the stairs, he calls down to me to hurry.

Inside the tower it’s dark, the air a damp chill. The walls are thicker than my Pietro is tall, narrow lines of sunlight barely stealing through the sparse bow-slits. The winding steps are worn shallow in the middle, and the wooden landings groan beneath my weight. I keep my shoulder pressed against the rough stone wall to steady myself. But the stairs stretch on and on like nothing I’ve climbed. Not since I was Tybalt’s age, herding my family’s flock up and down mountainsides.

As I rise, my calves burn. And then my thighs. Hot pain twinges across my hips and up my back. I’m not caught halfway up to Tybalt, and already there’s no breath left in me.

“I cannot,” I call to him. Or try to, gasping out the words.

Not that it matters, as Tybalt pays me no mind. “I’m old enough to climb to the top,” he says, “and so are you.” As though age is only what makes us able to do, and not what steals the doing from us.

His footsteps grow fainter the farther I am left behind. I’ll not be stranded here, partway between unseen ground below and whatever lies above. Not stop to imagine what might happen to Juliet in this dark place, without me to protect her. And so I cross myself and snail up the steps after Tybalt.

My head is light by the time I reach the final landing. But the landing is light too, bathed by the sun pouring through the arched openings that crown the tower. I’m like a blind man startled to regain his sight, blinking at all the bright as I pick my way across the wooden platform. I gather Juliet from Tybalt’s thin arms, the tiny warmth of her spreading against my chest.

“Let me show you,” Tybalt says. He pulls me to the tower’s edge, where I see the city as I’ve never before seen it, stretching below as though Tybalt, Juliet, and I are angels looking down from heaven.

I know Verona as I do my own body. Every labyrinthed passage and each loose paving stone along my parish streets. The smell of tanneries, of public ovens, and of offal-piles. The snorting hogs upon the piazze, and the rush of the Adige beneath the bridges. But I’ve never imagined this: that I could stand as tall as the church campaniles, watching the city’s roof tiles glint in the sun, the people and animals moving between them as small as crawling insects. The world spreading beneath me glows with the sublime beauty you see in paintings of the Annunciation. And that same holy terror
that widens the Blessed Virgin’s eyes and flushes her cheeks beats sharp within my own awed breast.

A golden-bellied thrush soars by, so close I lose my footing. I grab at Tybalt to catch my balance, ripping his silken doublet. As he reaches out to steady me, sunlight catches the flesh beneath the tear. It’s raised in angry welts, his torso purpled with bruises.

“Who did this to you?”

“Did what?” He asks as though the beatings come so regularly, there is nothing astonishing about them.

My finger circles his discolored skin. Still child-soft, despite the ugly mark. “Who hits you, Tybalt?”

“My tutor, of course. He says that I am slow with Latin, and with the abacus. But he’s the one who’s slow, and dull. Why should I be bothered with book-lessons, when I can teach myself to jump and joust and parry like brave knights do?”

Pietro’s army was true enough to its name, our boys staging epic battles or wrestling like the gladiators of Ancient Rome. But not one of my unschooled sons ever earned a bruise in the way Tybalt has.

No matter how hungry we were, Pietro never put any of our boys to work for masters who beat them. “You cannot treat a boy like he’s a beast,” he’d say, “and expect he’ll grow up to be a man.” Having spent his childhood coddled by his sisters, Pietro saw no need to allow anyone to cuff and thrash his children. Having spent my childhood terrified by my father’s beatings, I agreed. But despite all of our indulgence, not one of our boys ever grew to be a man. Who knows what Tybalt, born to wealth and power yet marked with what my sons never had to bear, might come to be?

I tell Tybalt I must sit and nurse Juliet. I let him lead us back down the tower stairs and into our chamber, as I carry her wrapped within my careful arms. I’ll mend his doublet while she sleeps.

Lord Cappelletto dines in the sala just before sunset, offering barely a word to his wife, who sits on one side of him, and endlessly haranguing his nephew, who’s seated on the other. He speaks of ventures and profits, which bore the boy, and sieges and skirmishes, which thrill him. Lord Cappelletto tells Tybalt that he must learn to move the silver king upon the chessboard in the corner of the sala with cunning care, if he’s ever to understand how his uncle moves the young prince who sits upon Verona’s throne. Through all Lord Cappelletto’s endless lecturing, I’m made to stand beside the table holding Juliet, so that if he happens to look up from his meal, he may gaze upon her.

Though the aromas of the rich foods growl my stomach, I get not one bite of what the Cappelletti eat. When Lord Cappelletto lets out a belch to show he’s had his fill, the preening serving-man rushes forward to clear the trencher, and without a word I am dismissed. As soon as we’re outside the sala, the serving-man sneers at me, scooping through their leavings with his bare hand to gull whatever he can for himself. I carry Juliet back to our chamber, where I find my own meal: overly boiled farina that’s grown cold long before I dip my spoon to it, which I’m to wash down with a jug of wine that’s so diluted it tastes more of well-water than of grapes.

It’s no mystery what makes a rich man rich. They have what
we poor do not: money. This money of theirs is not like what we earn with honest sweat. It has its own magic, by which it is forever making them more of what they’ve already got. When Pietro and I first came to Verona and were in want of a place to sleep, we pawned everything we’d brought except a single cooking pot, yet had barely enough to rent a narrow little house from a man who was so wealthy he owned more buildings than all his relatives could ever inhabit. Every year since, the rent on our house has come so dear that the landlord grows richer and richer while we stay always poor.

Living within Ca’ Cappelletti, I realize a rich man’s food is not unlike his money, for I’d swear I can see Lord Cappelletto growing fatter while I am always famished.

So in the middle of a morning hour when he is gone from the compound, and Lady Cappelletta is yet in her bed, and poor Tybalt is at what no right-minded person would call the mercy of his tutor, I gather Juliet in my arms and steal down from our chamber. The autumn day is dry, and the air in the courtyard smells of the acrid odor of olives being pressed to fresh oil, mixed with the heavy must of strong wines aging in barrels in a nearby storeroom, and the fragrance of loaves baking in the Cappelletti oven. The bready scent draws me to such a kitchen as I’ve never imagined any house could have. Set in its own stone building, it has two open fires along with the oven, and pots of every size hanging from the ceiling and stacked along the walls. A table as big as an ox-cart sits in the center of the room ringed with mysterious jars and jugs, its top covered with sprigs of fresh-pulled herbs.

The man standing at the table does not glance up when I enter.
He’s got the drawn face of a hare, the skin beneath his eyes shaded from want of sleep. His quick-bladed mincing of parsley does not slow, even while I complain my food’s too bland.

“That’s no fault of mine,” he says, snorting in all the sharp, sweet, thick flavors of the meal he’s making. “Lord Cappelletto told me you’re not to have any sauce or spice, no hint of flavor that might taint your milk.”

This is how I’m spoken of, like I’m some cow being pastured. “I nursed six sons while eating savory dishes, and none of them—”

“None of them is Lord Cappelletto, who is the man who pays my wages.” He reaches for a head of garlic, and, sliding his thumb up the dull side of the blade, begins to peel it. “Meager wages they are, for everything I’m got to do to get his meals cooked, the arbor fruit and all the vegetables that are brought in from his country estates preserved, and a winter’s worth of meats cured. They do not keep a man-servant in this house I can trust to send to the market to buy a decent round of cheese, or a pantry-maid with sense enough to keep the mold from growing on it once it’s brought back here.”

Cribbed as I’ve been within Juliet’s chamber, still I know the truth of what he says. Tybalt’s tutor is not the only hireling seeking his own pleasures. The serving-man’d slurp the dregs out of a dead man’s cup, or so I suppose from how often his face is flushed with drink. The maid-servant is such a doltish thing she truckles more grime into a room than she ever manages to clean out of it. Tybalt tells me there’s no need to grumble over her, for she’ll doubtless be gone in a month or two, like all the other maids before her. And whenever I catch sight of the house-page, he’s scratching so furi
ously at himself that I’d not let him within twenty paces of Juliet, to keep whatever infests him away from her, and me. For all the poor are in want of good masters, it’s the wonder of Ca’ Cappelletti that the rich can be so in want of good servants. A fine riddle that proves for me to puzzle over whenever Juliet’s soiled swaddling needs washing, and I must haul up the water bucket from the courtyard well myself, balance the tub above the brazier fire in our chamber to heat it, scrub the strips of fabric clean, and lay them in the sun to dry, all before my babe cries once more to be fed.

“Lazy and insolent,” I say, to show him I agree. “It must be trying for so skilled a cook to have to rely on them.”

He pitches the peelings into the fire with a flourish, as if to confirm how worthy he is of my compliment.

“So skillful a cook,” I continue, “could easily prepare a bowl of hearty broth, and send it up to me with fresh bread and oil. And a bit of cheese, which after all is made from milk. Surely that would do no harm.”

For the first time, he raises his eyes to take me in. “Lazy and insolent,” he repeats. “And witless as well, if you think I take orders from a common servant.”