Juliet's Nurse (25 page)

I say naught of it to Juliet. Not yet. Handsome as he is, a meet match for my girl, I savor our last however long it will be, when she and I alone share such a love, a heart, a bed as we’ve enjoyed these near to fourteen years.

The household boils over with servants, the loutish staff familiars lording themselves over the score who’re hired on just for the days of frenzied preparations. Wine barrels are thumped up the stairs to edge the sala, plate burnished till it shines, unlighted torches positioned ready to be blazed. I’ve never gained a liking for the cook, who begrudges every bite I’ve eaten in all my years within Ca’ Cappelletti, and it pleases me to hear how he bellows at all hours for some inept hireling or other to fetch obscure ingredients, his kitchen fires smoking long into the night.

Even Juliet grows burdened before the week is done. Eager though she is to feel the swish of the zetani as it drips in long folds to the floor, she struggles through the hours spent holding herself statue-still as the city’s finest sempstresses huddle close around her, their hurried needles flashing.

I sit nearby, my back to them to keep my bruised face hidden as I work my own needle, securing jeweled birds and enameled stars and every sky-born wonder onto the headdress that will crown Juliet come Sunday night. Lady Cappelletta twins my task, adorning the ocean-green samite that will be her headdress with mermaids and dolphins and mysterious creatures of the sea. Her gown is of the same fabric, the thick gold ribboned into the cloth shimmering like sunlight beaming upon watery waves. It’s the dress she wore to Prince Cansignorio’s wedding banquet more than a decade past, seamed narrower now than it was then, when her belly swelled with one of her many ill-fated pregnancies.

The dress cost so dear, I’d have thought it’d have to be the Pope’s wedding banquet before Lord Cappelletto let her don it
again. But for this feast he spares nothing, showing off every connection he can to the Scaligeri. Flower-entwined ladders to match their crest are set against the courtyard walls, the banqueting table festooned with marzipanned dogs like those on the Scaligeri livery, each wearing a Cappelletti cap of jellied quince. The morning before the fête, he rouses Lady Cappelletta from their broad bed before the terce bells ring, insisting she accompany him to Mass at Santa Maria Antica so they can see the Holy Sacrament raised up by the Scaligeri’s priest’s own hand.

He’d have Juliet along as well, but if Paris is what I suppose, there’ll be time enough in years to come for her to kneel and open her mouth for regal communion. I bid her feign the heavy breath of sleep while I plead for Lord Cappelletto to let her lie in bed a while longer. “She’s overworn from standing so many hours,” I say. “She must rest, to look her best tonight.”

This brings an indulgent nod from Lord Cappelletto, and an envious glare from Lady Cappelletta, who must wish she’d been as clever in making the case to stay a-bed herself.

But once they’re gone, Juliet’ll not fall again to slumber, nor let me. “How can you sleep on such a day as this promises to be?”

“Like this,” I say, closing my eyes and gaping my mouth. I throw a clumsy arm atop her and make great mocking snores.

She laughs but wriggles free, waving aside my urging for another hour’s doze. “Do you not recall what it is to be young, and eager for a ball to start?”

“We had no balls when I was young.”

She gives one of my grayed locks a gentle tug. “Were you born
in days so ancient, they’d not yet invented feasting, and dancing, and masquerades?”

“There were feasts and dances and masquerades, but not for those so poor as I was.”

“Honey nurse.” Her voice is thick with pity. As though to not don a fine gown was the worst suffering there was to my girlhood. “What did you have instead?”

I’ve always been careful not to speak to her of men like my father. What does such a pretty, petted child need know of cruelty? Instead I spin a tale of my first spring with Pietro. He still carried his hunter’s bow, and we wandered together by day, and by night slept beneath the open sky. What more music did we need than his voice joining mine in song, what dancing beyond the hot rhythm of his hips against my own?

“But did you not want for company?” she asks.

“If I did, I’d fashion tiny cups of acorn caps and hazelnuts, and we’d have marmot, squirrel, and black-grouse to dine.”

“Did you, truly?” The hints of woman in her melt away into a girl’s delight. As though she’s still of such an age to believe in enchanted beasts.

I lay a solemn hand to my heart. “Pietro and I had marmot, and squirrel, and black-grouse, and we dined.” When I drop my hand and smile, she sees the joke, and we laugh at how easily I’ve pranked her. But before the girlish part of her fades away again, I ask, “What do you remember, of Pietro?”

“I remember a room, where I would play upon the floor. There was a man there, taller than my father, who always kept a sack of
sweets. He’d come here, too. You were happy when he was here, but he was happier when you were there. How do I know that, who was happy where, when it all seems more like a dream than some true thing? If I try to conjure the man’s face, it’s only Friar Lorenzo’s features that I see.”

“Your memory plays tricks on you. Often we’d visit them both in a single day, but there’s not much of Pietro in Friar Lorenzo.” Yet much of him in you.

I dare not tell her that. Not yet. Such privity it would be, and thus better kept until her future is secured, and neither she nor I must rely upon the Cappelletti.

“Sometimes what I think I remember of Pietro seems only what I’ve heard told by you, or Tybalt.” The name douses me like a hard rain, and she marks it. “Are you still cross with my cousin?”

Tybalt’s held himself from us all week, haunting the world beyond the Cappelletti walls. By my troth, though it’s been hard on her, I’ve not minded. He makes the injury done me solely what serves him—as though my bruised body is measured only by the insult to his honor. I know it’s what he’s learned during all the years he’s listened to Lord Cappelletto cataloguing ancient slights. But there’s deeper hurt in Tybalt treating me so than came from all the blows and kicks the brawlers gave me.

Perhaps I’ve been too soft with him these long years, believing the mother-love for my lost sons might find and fill in him the longing for his own lost mother. But all that soft has made him hard, and harsh, and ever more hot-headed. What love he’s got from me and Juliet, and even Lady Cappelletta, has kept him from seeking
what young men ought: the kind of love that might quell raging youth into courting, and settling to marriage.

“He’s like a horse too long unbroke,” I say, “that now’ll not be bridled, and would throw off any who try to ride him.” My pun’s too bawdy for Juliet to ken it, so I offer a more sober answer. “I’m cross with how Tybalt crosses—”

Bloodthirsty shouts cut me off. The sound of metal clashing metal echoes along the Via Cappello.

“Bend your knee, and clasp your hands.” I nod toward the Madonna as the alarm is rung. “Pray to the Holy Mother to keep the parish safe.”

My own knees bend, though only enough to carry me from the bedchamber into the sala. The common servants have already shucked their labors and got their heads stuck out the windows to get the better view. As I jostle my way among them, calls for clubs, hook-bladed bills, and spears rise from the street. A crowd is gathering below, accursing first against the Cappelletti, then at the Montecchi, for sparking the violence. On either side of me, servants cheer and jeer by turns, as though donning Cappelletti livery has made them take their master’s fight as their very own.

Blasts sound from unseen trumpets. Where the Via Cappello broadens into the Piazza delle Erbe, there’s a flash of carmine. The crash of fighting ceases, and Prince Cansignorio’s voice reverberates against the buildings, though by the time his words reach Ca’ Cappelletti, they’re too obscured for us to understand.

“Nurse? Are we safe?” Juliet has crept unseen into the sala. When I turn from the window to answer her, the servants surrounding me
turn too, elbowing each other and whispering at the sight of Juliet still in her nightdress, no cap on her head and her hair yet held in plaits.

“We are as we were,” I say. “Safe within the walls of Ca’ Cappelletti.”

“And my lord father, and my—”

“Safer still, within church walls.” I hie to answer, to hide the truth: the fighting may well have caught Lord and Lady Cappelletti as they passed through the Piazza delle Erbe. Would Lord Cappelletto call for a long-sword to join the fray? Or tremble and cower behind his wife? Either way, surely he and she remain unharmed. Whatever sparked was fast extinguished, and the alarm that tolled was not followed by any death knells. I take Juliet’s hand. “Come, we’ve much to do before tonight.”

I guide her back into our chamber, where we braid my hair and unbraid hers, arranging mine as I always have, and hers to hold new fullness around her face. “Is it not dull, to ever wear your hair the same way?” she asks, tying a length of morello velvet to the tails of the two long braids that hang upon my back.

“Saints, widows, and happily wedded matrons all plait their hair,” I say, though at nearly thirty Lady Cappelletta still wears her hair as a well-born maiden does, most locks loose, strung through with pearls and precious beads. That’s her vanity, and her husband’s, too. Although she’s not as just-plucked fresh as when I first came, still there are few faces so fair in all Verona, an artly work kept framed by flowing tresses and the jeweled Cappelletti cap. As though beauty might be mistook for happiness. “When you’re
wived to a worthy man, you’ll want no more fashion than to keep him faithful.”

“Wived?” She pulls at my shoulder, turning me to face that face so like the one to which I was once wived.

“To a worthy man,” I repeat. “Like Pietro.” My heart quickens. For all the times I’ve spoke of my lost husband to her, I’ve never till now breathed to her the thought of the husband who’ll be hers.

Her heart must ever match my own, for it raises a flush into her cheeks. “And where would I find such a worthy man? Shall I climb mountains and ford rivers and seek out unknown kingdoms, as would-be lovers do?”

“I’ve sung you too many fanciful troubadour songs, if you believe that’s what real lovers do.” What can I say, to ready her for what I suppose Paris will propose? For ready she must be to answer right, and too undesigning is she to imagine it herself. And yet, dare I speak of him, if I do not know his heart? But then, what heart would not want Juliet?

I’ll not speak the name, and raise her hopes, before he plights his troth. I draw her hand in mine, tracing my pinkie along her palm like some sooth-telling Egyptian. “There is one nobly born, pleasing of features and true of heart, who’ll see in you, and be to you, such spouse as any would be glad to get.”

She giggles, flushing deeper. “You tickle me.”

“And yet you’ve not drawn your hand away.” I kiss her palm, fold her fingers to hold the kiss in place, and lay that hand between my breasts. “You’ve had my heart for your whole life, and soon, I promise, you’ll have another. Do not forget mine, when you find his.”

“I’ll not. I cannot.” She flutters open her fist, her fingers trembling as she presses the kissed palm against me. “Will you not come with me, when I am married?” She bows her head, unsure. “If such a thing really is to be.”

“It is to be, though whether in this season or in one to come, I cannot say. You’re too sweet a fruit to go unpicked.” I give her cheek a gentle pinch. “And near enough to being ripe, you must be ready for it. But worry not, I’ll go with you. Always and wherever.” My talk of fruit sets my stomach grumbling. “We ought eat now.”

“Eat now? When there’s such a feast to be served in a few hours?”

This is how artless my girl is, that she would think she might eat her fill while she sits before the honored company, rather than pushing her portion around her plate without lifting a bite, to show herself dainty. I am a woman of many appetites and never connived like that myself, denying one fleshly pleasure in the hopes of garnering another. But I’ve watched Lady Cappelletta and the Cappelletti’s noblish guests long enough to know what’s expected at a so-called feast. “There’s still much I must teach you,” I tell Juliet, and bid her call the serving-maid to fetch from the cook a sampling so we can taste now what she’ll not swallow later.

THIRTEEN

N
urse
.
Nurse
.”

The urgent cry wakes me confused. In my dream, nurse I did. I was a six-teated creature, and each fed a mouth of ferocious hunger. An agony of pleasure, to feel those tugs upon my willing dugs. Until a seventh mouth opened onto me. Finding no nipple, it sucked against my very flesh. Sucked more than milk, for milk gives life, and this took life from me until I’d nothing left to give the other six, nothing left even to save myself. The pleasure turned to searing pain. A burn upon my skin that blazed to roast the very heart of me.

“
Nurse
.” Lady Cappelletta is as insistent as whatever tormented my sleep. As I rise to go to her, the twinned faces of comedy and tragedy fall from my lap to the floor. It’s the mask Juliet and I made to hide my marred face at the masquerade. I’d bade her find a stick
we might attach to it, so I could fan it back and forth when the sudden heat flushes over me. She went, and I waited, and in the afternoon’s great warmth I dozed just long enough to dream. And to wake to this shrieking.

I hurry from our chamber through the sala and the antecamera to Lady Cappelletta, who greets me with, “Where’s my daughter? Call her forth to me.”

She might well have called Juliet herself, as summoned me to summon her. But Lady Cappelletta likes having someone to do what she wills.

I trudge out, calling, “Juliet, my lamb, I bid you come.” But my dear lamb is like a ladybird, flitting about. My talk of courtship has given wing to her heart, and sent her fluttering to some corner of Ca’ Cappelletti. “Juliet? Juliet?”

By my lost maidenhead, I grow red repeating her name until, simple as you please, she steps out from behind the heavy curtain that hangs across the entry to Tybalt’s rooms. “How now? Who calls?”

“Your mother,” I say. As if in this moment when she stands celestial in that zeitani, Juliet might hear me claim her as my own. But remembering the impatience in Lady Cappelletta’s voice, I shake the thought from my head and follow wordless as Juliet presents herself in the antecamera to the Cappelletti’s bedchamber. “Madam, I am here. What is your will?”

Lady Cappelletta smiles. Not approvingly, as loving mothers do, but disapprovingly. One of Juliet’s sleeves has come loose. Her coral necklace is askew. There is a golden blush of pollen midway down her skirt. Lady Cappelletta takes silent stock of all these flaws.

I step between them. With a single swift motion, I hitch sleeve, straighten necklace, and sweep skirt clean.

Lady Cappelletta frowns at my now-yellowed hand, frowns deeper when the emerald upon Juliet’s finger catches her eye. “Nurse, give leave awhile. We must talk in secret.”

Secret
shoots a jolt through me. What secret can she have to share if not the one I’ve guessed already, which Lord Cappelletto must have bade her convey to Juliet?

I ought to turn and go. Let Lady Cappelletta tell what I anticipated. I’ll hear it soon enough. Juliet holds no secrets from her beloved bedmate. But it will be a long night, a lot of wine. Many guests, and jests. Hours of dancing, though I’ve too many corns upon my feet to join in. The house will be so thick with merriment, there’ll be no time between now and dawn for me to draw Juliet aside, draw out from her what Lady Cappelletta means to share in confidence. If I’m to be of use to my girl on this auspicious night, I must know now.

I wait in the doorway like a flipped card hanging in the air before it chooses which way to flutter and fall, while Juliet pouts at Lady Cappelletta.

Lady Cappelletta’ll not suffer anyone’s pouting but her own. She looks as if she might order me to close Juliet up in our chamber for trying her. But she’ll not. Not with the evening’s esteemed guests nearly to the door, where they’ll expect to find Lord Cappelletto’s family turned out to welcome them.

She waves her thin wrist as though she’s just remembered something. Which perhaps she has: remembered that if I’m gone
and she says something that fills Juliet with grief or fear or overjoyed exuberance, she’d have to be the one to soothe her. And Lady Cappelletta is too well-primped, too eager to make her own way to the sala, to risk that. “Nurse, come back and hear our counsel.”

All ears I am to hear it, but still she pretends there’s some reason of her own she’s kept me here. “You know my daughter’s of a pretty age,” she says. A pretty way for her to put it, when I know Juliet’s age to the hour. By my few remaining teeth, I know it better than I know my own. “She’s not fourteen.”

“She’s not fourteen,” I say, as though Lady Cappelletta has not just said it. But I say it looking at Juliet, while Lady Cappelletta spoke looking at her own reflection in the well-polished silver tray that hangs upon the wall. As if to be assured she’s not long past such years herself. “How long is it now to Lammastide?” I ask, though Juliet and I both know. We count the days each night, before we fall to sleep.

“A fortnight and odd days.” Lady Cappelletta does not keep the same exacting tally as we do.

“Even or odd, of all days in the year, come Lammas Eve at night, she’ll be fourteen.” To the day, to the hour, I know it. Those days and hours that I’ll not forget. They make me tell what once was my dearest truth, which I hold even dearer now that I know it for a lie. “Susanna and she—God rest all Christian souls—were of an age. Susanna is with God. She was too good for me.” As though Juliet is not too good for Lady Cappelletta.

“Eleven years it is,” I say, “since the ground quaked, the day that she was weaned.” As if the earth rended itself out of grief at seeing
Juliet put off my breast. “She could run and waddle all about, and fell, and broke her brow.”

Juliet has ever loved to hear my stories of when she was her littlest, so I tell the tale of that day. I do bear a brain for memories, and a tongue as well that loves to speak, and on I prate until Lady Cappelletta stamps a foot and says, “Enough of this. I pray you, hold your peace.”

What I hold is not my peace but a pretty piece of Juliet’s past, and I’m so keen to share it, I tell yet more of when she was a toddling thing, a falling girl, and Pietro saged how she one day would be a woman and fall as women do, for a man.

This brings a flush to Juliet, turning her face bright against the azure of her gown, like the reddened sun dawning into fresh sky. When I talked to her this morning of falling for a man, she hung eager on each word. But that was done between the two of us. Now, before Lady Cappelletta, she waves my words away. Dark eyes pleading above those blushing cheeks, she says, “Stint, I pray you, Nurse.”

Pray I do, with all my soul. “God mark you to His grace, you were the prettiest babe that ever I nursed,” I say, adding with great care to catch Lady Cappelletta’s ear, “If I might live to see you married once, I have my wish.”

My wish, and my felicity. We’ll make a handsome household with Count Paris. And soon enough there’ll be babes of my dear babe that, if I cannot suckle, I can at least succor, and raise. A lasting part of my Pietro, and a joy of my old age.

“Marry,” says Lady Cappelletta, taking to my hint like a shad swimming for some worm wriggled on a hook, “is the very theme I
care to talk of. Tell me, daughter Juliet, how stands your disposition to be married?”

She only calls Juliet
daughter
when there is some especial reason playing mother suits her, some praise or prize to seize herself. But Juliet slides her eyes to me and watches for my careful nod before she answers. “It is an honor that I dream not of.”

True enough. Too giddy a girl to sleep this day, and why should she save only for a dream what I’ve told her will be waking true? “An honor,” I repeat, with a wink to her. “Were I not your only nurse, I’d say you’d sucked wisdom from the teat.”

Lady Cappelletta smooths the seagreen samite over her own never-tasted breasts, reminds us how often ladies of esteem younger than Juliet are already made mothers. Recalls that she herself was delivered of a babe when she was not much older. And for once says the very words I hope to hear. “The valiant Paris seeks you for his love.”

“A man, young lady.” This is what I say? At such a moment, to sound such a thick-witted fool. But why not be a joyous fool, to know my Juliet’ll have so fine a match? Count Paris may not carry the spice-and-honey scent of my Pietro, but surely he can be something near to what my bee-sotted husband harvested. “Lady, such a man as all the world. Why, he’s a man of wax.”

My wax Lady Cappelletta must immediately outdo. “Verona’s summer has not such a flower,” she says.

A flower handsomer by far than the old shrub to which she’s wed. Mayhap that is her part in this, for I’d not expect her to delight in being made a grandame, and have all Verona reminded she’s
no longer any summer flower herself. But to gather such a flower to her by marrying Juliet to him—

“Nay, he’s a flower,” I say, to pluck what’s budding from Lady Cappelletta. “In faith, a very flower.” I rub one pollened hand against the other, and think of all that the bees take from such lovely flowers, to make the delicious drip of honey that Juliet so loves.

But Lady Cappelletta is done with flowery talk, and makes a bookish speech to Juliet, about pens and lines and what is writ along the margins of some dull tome or other. Books? Who cares what lays between the covers of a book? What matters is what lays between the covers of a bed. To remind them both of this, I place a loving hand upon Juliet’s taut belly, as if to warm her womb to what it will receive, and say, “Women grow by men.”

I might add that first men grow by women, for it’s time Juliet was taught how to play a pricksong so more than music swells. But better to save such talk for when we are far from Lady Cappelletta, who has no ear, no taste, for bedroom harmonies. My Juliet shall learn from me the lessons that I learned laying with Pietro, and know what pleasures a warm-humored wife can take, and give, within a marriage bed.

Footsteps sound from the compound’s entryway—not just the scuttering of servants but the first of the guests already arrived. “Speak briefly,” Lady Cappelletta says, “can you like of Paris’s love?”

Now her eyes, like mine, are on Juliet. I cannot say what Lady Cappelletta sees, but I see in this one moment all Juliet’s life. And all of mine. I see summation of all my joy, comfort for all my sorrows. I remember what it was to be such a creature, and have that
ram of a Pietro come tupping upon me. I want such years of pleasure for her. But I see too that she is still a tender lambkin, not sure even how to answer without first taking private counsel with me.

“I’ll look to like, if looking liking move.” She pauses, choosing her words with care. “But no more deep will I endart my eye, than your consent gives strength to make it fly.”

A clever rhyme, and I reward it with another wink, to show she’s a good girl for saying it so. Let Lady Cappelletta believe it’s her consent, and her lord husband’s, Juliet speaks of. My girl and I both know what we together can make fly.

But what flies now is one of the newly hired serving-men. He’s not been here a week, but already he’s as indolent and insolent as any who’ve ever served within Ca’ Cappelletti. Rushing in, he treads hard upon my foot before making a bootlicker’s bow to Lady Cappelletta. “Madam, the guests are come, supper served up, you called, my young lady asked for.” He slides his slithery eyes over Juliet. I’d have him out for that, but, catching my glare, he adds, “The nurse cursed in the pantry, and every thing in extremity.”

Cursed
—hearing that, I might name an extremity into which I’d put, if not everything, at least the serving-man and pantry-maid and any others who dare try tell me what’s my place. I’ve seen dozens like this one come and go in the nearly fourteen years I’ve been here. I’ll outlast him and his impertinence. Or if I’ll not, it’ll only be because I’ll go with Juliet when she’s wed to Count Paris and become mistress of her own house.

“I must hence to wait,” the servant says, as though he means to wait table, when by my holidame, I suspect what the wastrel waits
is only a chance to pinch some cups, and some choice meats, and the pantry-maid as well. “I beseech you follow straight.”

“We’ll follow.” Lady Cappelletta barely gives curt nod to dismiss him, before shooting one last judging squint at my dear girl. “Juliet, the count awaits.”

As soon as Lady Cappelletta passes out of the room, I grab Juliet about the waist and swing her round. Nose to nose, like a mama cat admiring her kitten’s whiskers, I say, “Go, girl, seek happy nights to happy days.”

The cook’s plucked a half dozen peacocks, stuffed them with fried oysters and spiced oranges, roasted all in belly lard, laid each upon a silver platter, and arranged the feathers back upon them. When they’re served, the forty guests who’ve come to dine stamp their feet in delight. Iridescent feathers shimmer as knives thrust and carve the birds.

All through the sala, young men make great show of sucking meat from quills and offering them as adornment to the loveliest ladies. Tybalt did as much for me, years past. A pretty bit of flattery to an old woman. But tonight he sits somber beside the sister whose features are so like his own, except that while his are edged with truculence, hers sit prim enough they might still every wavering feather. Rosaline wears a dun-colored habit, the crucifix about her neck as big as an assassin’s dagger. Though Lord Cappelletto and the other revelers raise goblet after goblet to drink her health, not a sip passes her pure lips.