Juliet's Nurse (7 page)

The boy slips something from his sleeve, holds it above Juliet, and slowly lowers the end into her mouth. Her face puckers around it, and she gives suck with that same determined mouth-tugging that makes my nipples ache. She’s so pleased with what she tastes, she forgets her sobs. Her angry fists relax, and the red seeps from her face.

Tybalt shines with boyish pride. “I knew a candied orange peel would make my cousin happy. Candies always cheer me. That’s why the honey-man gave these to me.”

I understand who Tybalt means, but Lord Cappelletto does not. He asks if a honey-man is something like a straw-man.

Tybalt laughs and does a little straw-man dance, as though he has muscleless limbs propped up by poles. “The honey-man’s not made of honey,” he explains. “He’s a maker of it. Or he is a keeper
of the bees that make it, and then he makes it into this.” He shakes a rainbow of candied fruit pieces from his sleeve. He smiles at his own treasure-stock, but then his face wiggles into a frown. “The honey-man asked if he might keep a hive inside our arbor. May he, Uncle? He says our trees will bear better fruit, which he can candy for us.”

Lady Cappelletta’s tongue pinks out between her lips, as though she’s tasting first one and then another of the candied strips of fig and pear and lemon that sit in Tybalt’s hand. Knowing my husband offers more tempting treats than hers ever will, I say, “I heard once of a treatise that said children fed on honey grow both sweet and rich.” I keep my eyes on Tybalt and Juliet as I speak, though I mean the words for Lord Cappelletto.

They hit perfectly upon the mark. He waves a hand, the way a wealthy man does to show he spends money with no great consequence, and informs us he is having a dovecote built in the arbor, so Lady Cappelletta can be kept on a breeding diet of dove, and capon and gosling, and eggs and hens of every sort
. “
This honey-man shall come and place his hive beside the dovecote, in exchange for whatever delicacies please Juliet and Tybalt.” He wraps one wrinkled hand around Juliet’s tiny fist and with the other tousles his nephew’s long curls. Then he plucks up a ruby strip from the boy’s store of candied fruit, tossing it between those liver lips as he leaves the chamber.

The moment he’s gone, Lady Cappelletta gestures Tybalt to her, taking careful stock of the sweets that are left. She chooses one to eat right off, and three more to hoard beside her sewing things. Tybalt turns to offer me a share, but I busy myself with getting Juliet reswaddled. I bend my head low as I unravel the fresh winding strips,
to hide my worry about bees being kept so close, and my flush of anticipation for the visits of the man who’ll come to tend them.

But then I notice the army of tiny purple specks beginning to appear on the bottom half of Juliet’s face. They form a wine-colored version of the beard and mustache Prince Cansignorio wears. They say the Pope himself ordered the prince to grow the hair on his face, to make public penance for killing his hated older brother to become Verona’s ruler.

I do not need the Pope in far-off Avignon to tell me that what stains Juliet is not her guilt. It’s mine. I barely emptied my mouth of smutted words before I laid it onto her. Though Tybalt convinced Lord Cappelletto that I saved her, these marks across her face will ruin her, if they remain. What man would marry a beard-besmirched girl, no matter how large her dowry?

But I see still worse in those purple prickles. They are ghostly reminders of God’s tokens, the plaguey black specks that spread their way across the lean thighs and muscly arms of my boys, and of countless others like them that the pestilence stole away.

Not Juliet. Not so long as I breathe will I watch the breath seep from her. Tucking a blanket to cover her discolored cheeks, I place my gentlest kiss between Juliet’s puzzled eyes and ask Lady Cappelletta’s leave to take the infant to the Franciscans, to offer a prayer of thanks that she is saved.

I’m barely through the door of Friar Lorenzo’s cell before I am begging absolution for my soul, and some herbal remedy for Juliet’s
body. “I cannot absolve you,” he says, pressing the tips of his long fingers together, “until I know your sin.” Man of God and science that he is, he bids me repeat every filthy thing I said to Lady Cappelletta, making me admit which are things I’ve done myself with Pietro, and which were only my depraved imaginings.

When at last I finish, he asks, “And the bead, did you say it was, on which the child choked?”

Surely he knows what I said. Friar Lorenzo never forgets a detail that’s confessed to him. “Pearls, two of them.”

“Where are they now, these pearls?”

I picture where the crumpled cap dropped during my frantic effort to save Juliet. But I do not know what’s become of the jewels she sucked from it. “They must’ve fallen somewhere in Lord and Lady Cappelletti’s bedchamber.”

His nose twitches like he’s a hound scenting rabbit. “Can you find them?”

I cup a hand around the cradle blanket covering Juliet’s bare head. She feels so small. Even more fragile than she was on the day when I first met her. The day I lost Susanna. “Can you not offer her some cure without them?”

“A cure? Of course, of course.”
He does not even bother to examine her before going to his cache of petals, leaves, and seeds. He grinds up some sickly-sweet smelling remedy, which he spoons into a pouch, securing the drawstring with a tiny cross. He tells me to mix two pinches of the herbal with a thimble-full of still-warm goat’s milk and rub the paste onto Juliet’s chin and cheeks, first thing in the morning, again when the sun is at its highest, and fi
nally after it sinks entirely from the sky. Three times each day I am to pinch and mix and rub, until the guilt-rash goes away.

“Come back then, with the pearls. As a token of thanksgiving to the Holy Church that she is spared.”

This many pinches, that many times a day for who knows how many days, and all the while needing to hide Juliet’s besmirched face from even Tybalt’s curious eyes. My muddled brain is so occupied with trying to remember all of that, it’s only after I leave the friary that I stop to wonder where I can get warm goat’s milk. Though hogs and chickens, donkeys and wild dogs fill Verona’s streets, there’s not a goatherd within the city gates. And if Friar Lorenzo knows of some miracle that turns solid cheese back to flowing milk, he’s not shared it with me.

But I’ll not let Juliet bear that mark. Back in Ca’ Cappelletti, I lay her on her big bed. I loose the string that holds the tiny cross and drop two quick pinches of Friar Lorenzo’s powdery herbal into a thimble. Pushing off my dress, I squeeze myself like I’m a goat, catching my own warm stream of milk to mix the paste. I coat Juliet’s face with it, praying to Sant’Agata to leach the stain from her. I do the same come evening, working with an apothecary’s care.

The measuring and mixing vex me even in my sleep, and I wake early, urging Juliet through her suckling so I can begin to work my flow into the thimble.

A cart wheel thumps across the courtyard stones, and Tybalt calls from the far side of Ca’ Cappelletti, “The honey-man is here.”

I drop the thimble and hurry my lacings closed. Hugging Juliet against me to smother her startled cry, I hie through the sala and
down the stairs into the courtyard. But I stop short when Pietro, who’s pulling a handcart, turns to me.

I cannot kiss him, cannot even let on that I know him. Not here, where the pompous cook or the prickling page or any other member of the household might peer out and see us. Lord Cappelletto forbids the wet-nurse even a sprig of parsley. He would never tolerate any of her husband’s humors tainting her milk.

I nod toward Tybalt, who’s dancing with excitement atop the curved ledge of the courtyard well, and say, “You might have sense enough not to wake the whole house, banging about at this hour.”

Pietro answers my scolding by shaking a handful of honeyed walnuts out of his pocket and offering them to Tybalt. “Do you know what a swarm is?”

Swarm
. Such a soft-sounding word, to carry such threat of stinging.

Tybalt leaps to the ground, stretching himself before Pietro, eager to show off. And even more eager to earn the candy. “That’s when bees attack,” he says.

Pietro draws back the sweets, shaking his head. “There’s no danger in a swarm. They are how new hives are made, like the building of a new church when a parish gets too crowded. When a hive becomes too full, the queen leads some of the bees out to look for a new place to live. That’s when the honey-man husbands them. He must make sure they survive in their new home.” He pulls the canvas covering off the cart, revealing a log as long as his outstretched arms, capped on each end. “There was a queen whose hive was at my house. But now, she’s here.”

His words sting in a different way than any bee could. The sting’s made all the worse because I do not dare reply, not here.

“Show him where to set the hive in the arbor,” I tell Tybalt, “so you and Juliet can watch the bees from her window.” And I can see the beekeeper when he comes to tend them, without the rest of Ca’ Cappelletti knowing.

I lead the way, settling Juliet onto the bench beside the new-built dovecote while Tybalt and Pietro maneuver the cart through the narrow archway into the arbor. A person could stand within the Cappelletti courtyard all day and not suspect what lies on this side of the passage, hidden behind the kitchen and the chapel. Pietro surveys the copse of fruit trees, amazed, before lifting the hive-log from the cart. Broad-shouldered though he is, still he staggers under the weight of it, his face reddening as he sets it on the ground.

“The honey-man needs a cup of something,” I say to Tybalt. “Fetch him some trebbiano.”

Tybalt pouts. “I want to see the bees.”

“I’ll keep the bees sealed in the hive until you’re back,” Pietro promises.

Tybalt smiles and tumbles off. He’s barely out of the arbor before I’m in Pietro’s arms. I close my eyes, savoring the feel of his big hands on me, the taste of my mouth on his.

“Angelica, where can we—”

“The boy will be back in only a minute.”

Pietro pulls me tighter, as though he means to take me right here, in that single minute. By my troth, were I a younger woman, I might let him.

But age has made me one who savors more slowly. And now that I have Juliet—secluded though the arbor is, I’ll not risk having one of the feckless servants bumble in and discover us.

Juliet’s chamber is just above us, over the chapel. And beside it is the tower, its dark stair hidden to even the most curious eyes—but opening right into her chamber. “Come to me through there,” I say, pointing to the low arch at the bottom of the tower.

I press myself against him for one more kiss, then hurry to the bench and take up Juliet. Crossing back through the courtyard, I climb the stairs to the sala and spirit one of the dinner knives from the credenza. Back in our chamber, I set Juliet in her cradle, making a quick bow to San Zeno before I pull back the wall-hanging. I kneel before the tower door like a penitent before his priest, my lips moving not in prayer but in impatient oaths while I tilt the knife into the lock.

Once the metal working turns and the door heaves on its hinge, I turn back to the window. Pietro is crouching before the hive, Tybalt beside him. My husband points, explaining as he used to do with our boys. Tybalt nods, hungry with questions. But I’m hungry, too. I swing the window wide and wave at Pietro.

He twists a fat cork from a hole in the log. The first bees fly out, turning one loop in the air and then another. As Tybalt spins beneath them, following their paths, Pietro crosses to the tower, his feet quick on the worn stone steps. He is barely in the room before he’s inside me.

“Tybalt?” I ask, worried the boy might burst in on us.

“I told him he must count the bees.” Pietro runs kisses from
beneath my ear all down my neck. “That will occupy him, while I occupy something else.” He pulls himself nearly out of me, then plunges slowly in again. Over and over, working up his whetted rhythm, setting off the first tremors deep within me. But as I thrum with pleasure, the prime-hour bells ring.

“Lord Cappelletto.” I gasp out the name.

Pietro goes limp inside me. “Angelica, you’ve
let Lord Cappelletto—”

“No. Never.” I cannot find words fast enough. “He’s a shriveled old thing. But he’ll be coming here now, to see Juliet.”

I push my husband off me so fast, he rolls to the edge of the broad bed. I give him one more shove, sending poor Pietro tumbling to the floor, and whisper for him to stay there. Working my way back to the other side of the bed, I pull Juliet from her cradle just as the door from the sala opens and Lord Cappelletto stalks in for his morning visit.

I tip my head, making doe-eyes at Juliet in a grand show of my innocence. Only then am I reminded: the prickle marks still taint her.

“She’s just started to give suck.” I pull Juliet to me, rubbing my breast against the corner of her mouth. She burrows into me as though she is a rooting pig, and I work the folds of my nightdress to hide her face from Lord Cappelletto.

But he jabs a hairy-knuckled finger at something behind me. “What’s that?”