Juliet's Nurse (9 page)

Something jagged catches inside my cheek, and salty blood thicks into my mouth. I spit one molar and then another onto the bedsheet, as a crowd of gangly, coltish youth, some barely past their boyhood, swarm at us.

Pietro pushes Juliet into my arms, wrapping himself around us
as he tries to pull me to my feet. But it’s impossible to stay standing amidst the angry surge.

Hundreds of them, there suddenly seem to be. Some coming from the campo and others pouring out from the city gates. All of them swinging fists, clubs, whatever they can grab, while decent people struggle to shove their way clear.

I bend over Juliet, my body the only protection I can give her. Pushing my tongue against the bloodied gap on the side of my mouth, I hold to her like a half-drowned person clings to a floating log, as everything we have with us—our bedsheet, the scarf, and my lost teeth—are swallowed up in the press of bodies.

It’s impossible to see more than a few arms-lengths in the direction we last saw Tybalt run, away from the city toward where the race was meant to start. I realize there’s no way Pietro and I can keep Juliet safe if we try to go after him. And I’m too afraid, for her and for myself, to send Pietro off alone.

A mother of sons knows which boys have to be watched every waking moment—and some sleeping ones as well—to be kept from trouble, and which might wander off but will always return, none the worse for their adventures. Though cat-like Tybalt loves to leap, he always lands on his paws. Or so I’ve believed. But who knows what might become of such a trusting boy in the midst of a fist-ready mob.

Terrified families pour into the race course. The frenzied mob, hungry for more space in which to fight, follows. Pietro half-pulls, half-carries me in the other direction, into the sycamores edging the campo. The grove seethes with shrieking children, frightened
mothers, and uncertain fathers. Near us, a trembling girl of twelve or fourteen sobs. Her mother kneels before her, trying to work some tuck in the girl’s torn gown to cover her tiny breasts and belly, which have been badly pummeled in the fray. I turn away and seek the only comfort I can think of, leaning against a thick-branched sycamore to nurse Juliet.

My poor lamb must be half-starved, for she drinks me in as she’s not done in the weeks since her teething started, those new-sharp teeth shooting a delicious pain through my too-full breast.

Pietro watches her suck with eyes full of wonder, the way he did when I suckled our sons. When I curse the brawlers, he says, “They are just boys. Their blood is still so hot from the pleasure-filled nights of Carnival, they seek mischief even now that it is Lent.”

“Not all boys are so hot-blooded.” Our boys, I mean. They might have tussled with each other, but Nunzio and Nesto both had Pietro’s tender heart. They kept their younger brothers from any real harm. Except once, that once. It was Berto who led them to it. Or maybe Enzo. I was never sure, for none of them would tell me how it happened. And before I could wheedle or harangue it out of them, death stilled all their tongues. For months afterwards, I pleaded with the saints, cataloguing all I’d do if they would give me back my sons. Even just one or two, if I could not have them all. Who cares which was the first to lead the others into danger?

“It must have been a group of Florentines who started it.” I cannot understand what Pietro means, until I realize he’s talking not about our boys, but about the brawlers. He repeats what everyone
around us is saying, about a bridge in Florence where the young men gather by torchlight to fight. Not ten or twenty of them, as might come to blows in any God-fearing city, but eight or nine hundred at a time, some barely old enough to grow hair on their chins, or anywhere below. All punching and stabbing at once, until they cannot tell friend from enemy in the maddened fray.

“This is not Florence,” I say. Verona’s not suffered such fighting in years. Not since Prince Cangrande II put down a rebellion early in his reign, ordering every soul in the city into the Arena to watch as he hacked off the heads of a half dozen conspirators. I’d buried my face against Pietro as each condemned man was blindfolded. Like the kneeling, bare-necked culprits, I’d not known when the first axe blow would fall. Though my stomach leapt at each thwacking execution, what haunted me more were the scores of others Cangrande II tortured and left dangling from the old Roman bridge over the Adige. Their cries echoed through the city for three days and three nights as they begged Death to take them, while ravens plucked at their bloodied bodies.

But in the sound and sight and smell of their agony, the rest of Verona knew ourselves safe. After that, the only blood shed in our streets was what Cangrande II ordered to amuse himself. Ambushes followed by savage beatings, mostly. Or a quick-plunged blade of assassination. Such attacks were plentiful, to be sure, for he was a brutal man, but they were aimed only at whatever noblemen the prince deemed too powerful. A prudent mother could easily keep her children locked at home until each spurt of violence was over.

But Cangrande II is dead. And though no one mourned him, not even his widow nor either of his mistresses, as I shiver in the sycamore grove I realize no one knows if Prince Cansignorio is man enough to keep the city’s peace. Cansignorio, after all, has never killed anyone aside from his own brother. And after that, he fled to Padova until he was certain he’d be welcomed back as Verona’s new rightful ruler. What good is a prince who cannot keep a youthful mob—or the warring Milanese or wily Mantuans—at bay?

Bells ring from inside the city walls, one angry peal answering another. Word spreads through the sycamores that the Franciscans are making their way out to the campo. Walking bare-footed in brown-robed pairs and chanting in Latin, as though godly incantations can stop a fist or club midswing.

All at once, the earth itself begins to rumble. Worry rounds Juliet’s eyes as hundreds of horse-hooves thunder against the ground. The angry rhythm sets off a wave of anticipation throughout the grove. Prince Cansignorio must have sent his knights at last. Whether he rides at their head, as the older generations of Scaligeri did, or sits drinking from golden goblets with his wealthy guests, none of us in the grove can guess. But we listen with care to the crashing lances of a hundred mounted knights, and the tormented shrieks of whoever is in their path.

At last the sounds of fighting die away, and the brigade clatters off. Families all around us gather themselves, convincing one another they feel safe enough to leave the sycamores and make their way home. But I cannot take Juliet back to Ca’ Cappelletti. Not without Tybalt.

The barbera burns in my belly, my head aching from its vapors. Why did I bring him withal? Why, having brought him, did I not keep him near? Tybalt is neither my child nor my charge. But he’s a tender boy. And he is Juliet’s cousin, the only nephew of her powerful father. How could I risk not only his little neck but also every tie I have to her?

Juliet, squirming in my arms, begins to cry for Tybalt. By my heart, I know the half dozen ways she shares any unhappiness with me. She cries when she is hungry for my breast, and she cries when her swaddling becomes too full of piss and shit. Cries from colic, though not often, given what Lord Cappelletto lets me be fed. Cries from the cold or the heat or the aching in her gums. Cries when she is too long in her mother’s presence. And cries when she is too long from her cousin’s.

I somehow believe Juliet’s sobs will draw Tybalt to us. When they do not, my wine-soaked worry deepens. “What if—”

Before I can give voice to all I fear, Pietro cuts me off. “He strayed away before the fighting started. We’ll find him, and you’ll see he’s fine.”

Pietro is a hopeful man. But that can sometimes wear upon a wife. He knows I have no patience for being told everything is fine, when in truth neither of us can tell how well, or how awfully, something might turn out.

Walking out from among the trees, we pass brawlers and innocents alike, dragging their mauled selves from the campo. Those too hurt to walk howl for friend or stranger to take mercy on them. The gilded cages of the menagerie lie toppled on their sides, the whim
pers of the frightened animals inside swelling into the cacophony of human shouts and cries. But we see no sign of Tybalt and no trace of where we sat when he last left us.

“There’s no place for him to find his way back to.” I raise my voice to make myself heard above Juliet, whose wailing grows louder the longer she longs for her cousin, who could be halfway to Villafranca by now. Or drowned in the Adige. Or carried off by ransom-seekers. “And no way for us to know where to look for him.”

“So we will look in all directions,” Pietro says. He starts to walk in a circle. Not a perfect round, but an ever-widening curve that slowly grows to take in a greater and greater area.

I taught him this trick years ago. Whenever a sheep strayed off, I’d spiral farther and farther around my flock until I found it. But sometimes what was left to be found was only the mauled remains that a bloody-fanged wolf had left behind.

Pietro keeps walking, the distance between us growing as he circles away. I’m not the sort of wife who follows anywhere her husband leads. But then he begins to whistle. He knows I cannot stand him whistling when I’m worried. I cut in a sharp line across his curving path, scolding him to pray instead, or just to shut up entirely. Anything but that cheerful whistling, which does not seem right until we find Tybalt.

“Until,” he repeats, meaning to assure me the boy will be found. Pietro slips an arm around me, and we walk side by side. Curling our way beyond what was crushed in the brawl, we cross winter-bare fields, Juliet inconsolable in my arms. We’ve walked for who
knows how long, my throat aching from calling for the lost boy, when Pietro stops. He hears first what I, soaked in Juliet’s crying, miss: the matched cries of Tybalt, pitched as high as those of his baby cousin.

Tybalt is tucked in the crook of an olive tree. Pietro reaches up, murmuring gentle words until the boy crawls into his arms. His big hands run over the teary child, and he shrugs to let me know neither flesh nor bones seem broken.

“The brawl is over.” Pietro cradles Tybalt to his chest as I cradle Juliet to mine. “The mob is gone, it’s safe to come back with us now.”

Tybalt tips his head up. “What brawl? What mob?”

“Never mind about that,” I say. I pass a hand through the boy’s pretty curls, as much to reassure myself as to comfort him. “Why were you hiding?”

“The other boys said I could not win.”

My relief at finding Tybalt ebbs back into worry. “What other boys?”

“There were five of them. We had a contest to see who could piss the highest. I made an arc just like a fountain, I should’ve beat them all. But one of them, who was smaller than me but wore a fur-trimmed carmine cloak just like the prince’s, said I’d not win unless I could make myself into a statue the way he can.”

I work the edge of my tongue in and out of my fresh-cracked toothhole, trying to dull the throbbing edge of pain as I puzzle through what Tybalt means. The boy he met must be Cansignorio’s nephew, Count Mercutio, who’s been sent by the prince’s conniving sister and her calculating husband to Verona to serve in the
court of his ruling uncle. Everyone knows why, though no one dares say it out loud: if Cansignorio cannot make a legitimate heir, this Mercutio might one day rule our city. Unless he somehow provokes his living uncle, and thus meets the same fate as his murdered one. Such are the prospects of a royal boy.

“Even counts and princes cannot turn themselves into statues,” I say, thinking Tybalt is confused by the tombs of the Scaligeri, which rise high above the churchyard of Santa Maria Antica, each with a sculpted likeness of the man whose remains it covers. The sarcophagus of Cangrande I is topped with a statue of the prince astride his horse, his sword sticking up from his lap in such a way that Pietro snickers whenever he passes it, saying all of Verona can see in that extended member why Cangrande I was called the big dog.

“This one can,” Tybalt insists. “After he shook his last piss drops off, he turned like marble down there. I shook myself and tried to turn to stone, too. But I could not.”

I cannot help but smile at the idea of Mercutio swinging his little manhood at Tybalt like a miniature version of the rock-hard sword sported by the death-statue of Cangrande I. It’s welcome relief after all the terror of the brawl to laugh at the way small boys tease each other.

As we walk back to the city gates, Pietro provides the talk that Tybalt’s father is too far off to give. If only we could pass a ram tipping its ewe, or a mastiff mounting a bitch in heat. But you never happen upon those things when they are most convenient, and so Pietro gestures wildly to illustrate his explanations. Though I walk a little ways off in the hope Tybalt might forget that Juliet and I are
here at all, I mark the way he tilts his ear, struggling to understand what turns a man hard as stone, and softens him back up again.

To me, those things are far easier to grasp than what would bring youth not half a dozen years older than Tybalt and Mercutio to such bloody conflict, leaving the campo trampled, the palio-race unrun, and who knows how many innocents hurt or killed.

FIVE

S
had, eel, perch, carp, pike, trout. Pickled, salted, smoked, breaded and fried. In the forty meatless, milkless days of Lent, the cook dishes up so much fish for the Cappelletti, I swim the Adige in my dreams. I visit whole underwater kingdoms as I sleep, a twitch of what are no longer my human hips sending me gliding headlong through mysterious dark channels. My scales shimmer in the cool rush of river-water, and I want to stay weightless and submerged forever. Until the night between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, when a whole herd of gaping-eyed sea monsters chase me in my sleep, sinking fangs into my guts as I struggle to swim free. I wake gasping for air, beached on Juliet’s big bed.

I need to relieve myself. There is a filth bucket beside the bed, where I’m meant to empty my bladder and bowels. But I just
dumped and scrubbed the bucket after supper. Rather than soil it again so soon, I make my way through the dark sala to the privy closet in the antecamera outside Lord and Lady Cappelletti’s bedchamber. It’s the first private necessary I’ve ever seen, and I sneak into it whenever I can. Shutting myself inside I always feel, if not like a queen upon a throne, at least like a fat hen on her roost. It holds the cleanest waste pot in the house, the maid hauling off the contents three times a day. Which you’d think is often enough.

Yet as I approach the door, the stink wrenches my stomach halfway to my mouth. Lord Cappelletto must have filled the privy with who knows what ill-humorous excretions. Surely I’d do better to go back to my own bucket.

But then I hear the whimpers. Small, wounded sounds, more of fear than physical hurt. A noise I first heard from a neighbor’s puppy, not at the moment my father smacked it hard between the eyes for digging in our field but when, seeing the stick swung high once more, the animal sensed it was about to be struck again.

Pushing open the door, I realize the stench is not of piss or shit. It’s rot. The fetid rot of human flesh, which hung so heavy during the great pestilence that no one who lived then can ever forget it. It’s coming not from the high-sided privy pot, but from Lady Cappelletta, who lies curled into a sweat-soaked ball on the cold floor.

This is my luck, to escape sea monsters in my sleep only to wake to this.

I kneel in the doorway, one hand covering my nose and mouth, the other gently pulling free the thick locks of Lady Cappelletta’s hair, on which she’s sucking.

“I reek,” she says.

It is so true, I do not bother to disagree. “Where is the pain?”

“Gone. Since last week.”

“A week past, and you’ve not yet sent for the midwife?”

“Lord Cappelletto calls for the midwife, when it is my time.” Her eyes swim up, then down, uncertain. “Is it my time?”

Fifteen and lady of a grand house, yet she’s still more of a child than I ever had the chance to be. Already delivered of a daughter, she knows less of bodily things than I did even before my first babe quickened in me. I’d tended a herd. Watching my flocklings tup then lamb, I formed some vague understanding of the relationship between the two. Learned, from watching, all the troubles there were to worry over. I saw lambs come out feet first. Or two-headed. Or, twisted up within a bleating, terrified mother, not at all.

“If you’re in pain, the midwife should come.”

“But I’m not in pain, not since last week.”

“That is when she should have come. Now it may be too—” I catch myself. What use is there in lecturing? I lay a careful hand across the rise of her belly. “Has it moved since then?”

She shakes her head, keeping her eyes from mine.

It’s not that she does not know. It’s that she’ll not admit to herself what she knows.

“And the smell, when did that start?”

“Just the last day.”

“Have you bled?” I ask, and she nods. “But nothing else has come out?”

She cocks her head at me, like a slow-witted horse.

I try to make my words gentle, but what is the use? “It needs to come out of you.”

“They die if they come out too early, that is what my sister told me when she gave me my bridal-chamber instruction. I must keep it in me. Lord Cappelletto needs his heir.”

A privy closet is no place for prolonged debate, especially when its inhabitant is putrid. And too terrified to understand what’s happening to her. I brush Lady Cappelletta’s feverish cheek, wondering how long she’s hidden here trying to deny the death inside her. This is the difference between us. I lost an infant I’d not even known I carried. She carries an infant she’ll not admit is lost. The two of us, huddling with our separate griefs in this tight space.

“Lord Cappelletto waited this late to marry,” I say. “He can wait a little longer to make a son.”

“He did not wait. He had sons.” Her voice drops. “It is not his fault if I cannot make a healthy boy. His first wife gave him three sons, before she ever had a daughter, as he likes to remind me. He still calls for her in his sleep, thirteen years after the plague took them all.”

I slump onto my heels, feeling the weight of what Lord Cappelletto survived. To lose all one’s children, this most terrible grief I know too well. But to endure it alone—that I cannot imagine. I would have thrown myself into the same shallow grave that swallowed my sons if Pietro had not held so tight to me, his grief as great as mine. I can only pity Lord Cappelletto for whatever twisted curse of luck kept him alone alive. And Lady Cappelletta—though
she’d hardly been out of infant swaddling when the plague ravaged Verona, the ghost of it yet hovers over her marriage bed, festering its way inside her.

“The midwife must come, and maybe a surgeon, too.” What more can I say to make her understand? “It’s already dead, and must come out of you. To be buried, like his others.” I add the last part in the hope of convincing her that Lord Cappelletto will be moved to sympathy by this new loss. But we both know her dead issue cannot be buried in his family tomb, or any consecrated ground, its unbaptized soul condemned to who knows what eternal fate
.

She grabs my hand, crushing my fingers with a surprising fury. “She took it. I know she did.” She speaks with a lunatic’s urgency. “I hate her.”

“Who?”

“Juliet.”

What is she saying in her madness? “She’s just an infant.”

“Not the brat, the other one. The one he named her for. His dead wife. I hear it every night: Juliet, most cherished, departed mother. Even in his sleep he taunts me with it, to remind me of what I’m not.”

So this is why she loathes my Juliet. A treasured jewel named for a wife Lord Cappelletto may have truly loved, the mother of all he’d lost. All the things he’s given my dearest lamb—ivory-inlaid cradle, pearl-trimmed cap, grandly godfathered christening-day—such weak talismans against what he and I and everyone who lived through that awful time knows can so quickly snatch breath and life and joy away.

When death decides to come, neither wealth nor piety can stop it. We know this, and yet we bargain with our saints and ourselves, every moment of every day trying to deny the one great truth of life: loss. It is a fool’s bargain, but still we make it.

“You are his living wife,” I remind her, “and you’ve given him his only living child.” Given me my only living child as well. A child I need to protect. Protect even—especially—from Lady Cappelletta. “Let them take what stinks of him from you. As long as you survive, that is all that matters.”

She gives the slightest nod and eases her grip on me. I fold her fingers around the garnet-studded cross that hangs on a thick chain around her thin neck, to give her something to hold to once I leave her.

She slips the bejeweled cross-piece into her mouth, sucking like a child and rocking herself back and forth. Unsound body, unsound mind. You need not be a midwife or a physick to know which is the harder to salve. I unbend myself, my legs tingling and unsteady as I go to wake Lord Cappelletto.

When I part the curtain around their marriage bed, I see in his sleep-softened face some tender thing I’ve never before noticed in him. Not so gentle-hearted a man as my Pietro, but one more touched by sentiment than I’d thought Lord Cappelletto to be. A frescoed Virgin covers the wall beside the bed, watching over him like a doting mother over her own slumbering son.

But where care lodges, sleep cannot long lie. I shake him awake. As he makes out my face, he grunts with alarm. “Juliet?”

“Juliet is fine. But Lady Cappelletta—”

“Is it the child she is carrying?”

It’s true, this wife means no more to him than the pried-open oyster means to the man that seizes a pearl. Or the man who, seeking a pearl, finds none. “The child is already gone.”

The softness sags out of his face, and I recognize the same old man who was too superstitious to visit the confinement room.

Before I can say more, he slips from the bed and kneels beneath the painting of the Holy Madonna, grabbing my arm and pulling me down beside him. His insistence startles me, until I think of how many nights, and days, he must have knelt alone after losing his first Juliet and all their little ones. Word for word I match his prayers, taking comfort in our nearness as we implore the Blessed Maria to keep safe the soul of his never-to-be born babe, along with the many souls of those others taken from us. All our plague-dead children. His first, beloved wife. And Susanna, my terrible fresh loss. Almost too much to bear, such doubled and trebled grief, until I utter that one comfort, the name of our living love. The two of us entreat the Sainted Virgin to keep little Juliet with us and well. “And Lady Cappelletta, too,” I say, crossing myself and waiting for Lord Cappelletto to do the same.

He does, calling her Emiliana. It’s the first time I hear her Christian name. Those pretty syllables seem to shimmer from his stale-breathed mouth. He calls on Santa Margherita, and the Virgin Mother, on his own patron saint and on Lady Cappelletta’s too, praying she will prove fecund. I know that whether we fare well or ill, it’s only by the saints’ intervening grace, and even the apothecaries will tell you the Pater Noster and Ave Maria are the
surest cure. But how long ought a man keep beseeching the heavens to let his wife birth new life, while she lies alone and terrified within a privy closet? I give off a little cough, interrupting Lord Cappelletto long enough to squeeze in a quick
amen
and hoist myself to my feet.

“Amen,” he repeats, rising and calling for the page to fetch Verona’s most respected midwife, to rid Lady Cappelletta of what she’s lost.

Prince Cansignorio and his household ride on horseback at the head of the Easter procession, while all the rest of Verona walks. Or nearly all. Lord Cappelletto strides. Having maneuvered his way to a position right behind the prince’s family, Lord Cappelletto wears an expression I first caught sight of while peering out from behind my mother’s skirts when Luca Covoni, who owned our village, came to collect my father’s rent. A tightness around the jaw to convey impatience at being bothered with such petty matters, a tightness that barely masks what shows in the darting, bulging eyes: a deep sense of pleased possession, as though Covoni owned not just the land, but all of us who lived and labored on it. Striding in the wake of the Scaligeri horses, his vair-lined velvet robe secured by a broad silver belt that wraps twice around his great girth before dangling nearly to the street-stones, Lord Cappelletto exudes the same entitled air, but with an assurance that a man like Luca Covoni, whose hems remained caked with manure from the fields and dirt from our peasant floors, never had.

Tybalt and I follow like a pair of pack-donkeys, me bearing Juliet and Tybalt carrying the silver chalice that will be the Cappelletti’s paschal offering. Both held so high that every noble family who walks behind us, and all the less-than-nobles who line Verona’s streets to watch the grand procession, see them.

Lord Cappelletto’s tasseled hat has slid to one side, revealing his balding pate. Tybalt giggles at the way the glinting sun dances on the sweat that slicks that feeble, hairless spot. But no one else is close enough to notice. And if anyone wonders at the absence of Lady Cappelletta, surely they cannot imagine the state she’s in. From the time the midwife arrived with her hooks and pliers, not all the aqua vitae in the city could quiet Lady Cappelletta’s screams. I glugged back a good quantity myself in the hopes it might at least dull my hearing, but it’s been no help. I’ve kept Juliet and Tybalt as far from her as I can, though in truth there’s no place in all Ca’ Cappelletti where her maddened howls do not reach.

But passing outside the compound’s walls brings me no solace. A dozen brutal fights have bloodied Verona’s stone-paved streets since the palio-day riot. I’ve not left Ca’ Cappelletti during these deadly weeks, and now the slightest jostling from those behind us in the cortege, or the press of the crowd watching us pass, shimmers fear across my back. As the trumpets heralding the prince sound against the buildings that line our route, I’d swear I hear in their reverberations some echo of cursing and crossed swords. The silver chalice flashes like an upraised dagger, and with every turn we make, I wrap myself tighter around Juliet, certain the day’s uneasy peace is about to burst.