Juliet's Nurse

by Lois Leveen

  What’s tomb is womb. That is what the holy friars preached when Death with his plaguey army robbed us of so much, more than a decade past. Worms will turn dead leaves, dead trees, dead men into new soil. But what can worms do for a living, grieving woman?

  Let the brown-frocked friars tremble with awe over how the tomb of earth sprouts seedlings. Such wonders are no comfort when you birth a babe who dies.

  When next I wake, the room is filled with golden light, and all Verona smells of yeasty bread. It is Lammas Day, a harvest feast. Sown seeds reaped as grain, then ground and baked to rounded loaves. Pietro, red-eyed and bewildered, kneels beside our bed, tearing small pieces of the blessed bread. Dipping some in honey, some in wine. Feeding each to me. Could anything be so sweet against the metallic taste of grief?

  A Lammas Day procession winds past, its drums and shouts and trumpets echoing against the tight-packed buildings, resonating across our floor and up our walls. After the noise passes away, Pietro slips his hands beneath me, his palms warm against the ache across my back. “Susanna is—”

  I shake my head, cutting him off. I will not let him say the word. Will not make myself listen to it.

  Why could we two not just be alone, like we’d been the seasons past, and happy? But there they are, the portrait of the Holy Madonna suckling sacred babe upon our wall, and some saint or other being newly born upon the parto tray that holds the honey, bread, and wine. Icons of what we cannot have, blessed mothers such as I’m reminded I’ll never again be. The plague that stole our other children laid half the city dead. But this fresh loss comes to us alone. This is grief’s great trick: you think you have faced the worst of it, not dreaming of all that is yet to come.

  Somewhere outside a lonely kitten mewls, and my milk begins to run. Pietro catches the first weak drops on his pinky finger, a too-delicate gesture for a lustful husband. He wets a cloth and washes me, dresses me, rebraids the great length of my hair, and covers it. Then he guides me to my feet, and leads me down the stairs and through Verona’s crooked streets. Sore and stiff, I move slowly. But what aches most drives me on, as I hold Pietro’s arm, repeating to myself the promise he whispered as he lifted me from our bed. There is a baby waiting. Needing me as much as I need her.

  We leave our familiar parish, Pietro guiding me past the towers and guild-halls and churches that mark the way to the Piazza delle Erbe. Even with the merchant stalls closed up for Lammas Day, the air hangs fragrant with basil, rosemary, and fennel, the last reminding me that I left my herb-filled eggshells behind. But I’ll not turn back. I need no remedies, no potions. I need only a child to draw out what is already thick in me.

  We cross below the Lamberti tower, to where the piazza narrows into the Via Cappello. This parish is not a place I ever come, for what have I to do with the Scaligeri princes and the wealthy families who guarantee their power? Nothing. Until today. This holy-day when, stopping midway along the Via Cappello, my husband raises a grand carved knocker and swings it hard against the wooden door. The door opens, and beneath an archway tall enough to admit a man on horseback, I enter Ca’ Cappelletti.

  The Cappelletti house does not smell of yeasty Lammas Day offerings, nor of the goods sold in the herb-market. There is no hint of the fetid waste that fills Verona’s streets or the hogs roaming loose to feed upon it. Those odors cannot breach these walls, thick as a cathedral’s. I breathe in the miracle of it, as a house-page no older than an altar boy nods a curt dismissal to Pietro, then leads me alone through the cool air of the ground floor, perfumed by the household’s stores of wine and grains, cured meats, hard cheeses, and infused oils. I follow him up stone stairs to a storey so full of wool carpets, fur robes, and lit perfumers, their rich smells settle as tastes on my tongue. The walls and even the wooden ceiling beams are painted with holy images here, and exotic beasts there, and everywhere repeating shapes and dancing patterns that dizzy me.

  We wind past the great sala and through the family’s private apartments to an intimate corner of the house. The page stops before a heavy pair of curtains, scraping agitated lines along his neck and stammering out that he’s not bidden to go any farther. I part the curtains and, passing between their woven scenes of hinds and hares frolicking in some imagined forest, I enter the confinement room.

  A maid-servant weaves through the room with trays of roasted capon and sweetmeats, serving a dozen gossiping women who circle around the new mother’s bed. Most of the guests wear jeweled overdresses heavily embroidered with the crests of the city’s finest families. The others have the full-skirted habits of Verona’s wealthiest convents. No one notices me enter, except a sharp-eyed midwife’s assistant, who slips a swaddled bundle into my arms, whispering, “Juliet.”

  Juliet—a little jewel. No ruby, no sapphire, no diamond could dazzle more. My little jewel and I are as eager for each other as young lovers. Settling upon an enormous pillow on the floor, I cradle her in one arm, loose my milk-soaked blouse, and offer up a breast. She takes it with such lively greed as makes me smile. When she’s sucked that, and then the other, to her satisfaction, I lay her down before me on the silken cushion. I snug her head between my calves, her swaddled feet tucking into my plump thighs, my thumbs tracing the soft smooth of her tiny cheeks. Sainted Maria, the very sight of her bursts my mother-heart.

  Juliet is my earth, and I am her moon, so caught in our celestial sphere we exist entirely apart from the rest of the bustling confinement room. Invisible even to the new mother lying in the parto bed, who lifts her slender arm, coral bracelets jangling down her wrists. With no more signal than that, silver goblets and flasks of trebbiano are brought out for the guests. Bright maiolica bowls appear, their lids hiding spiced stews. Trays come piled with sponge cakes and marzipans and fine salts. All eaten with a set of delicately worked silver forks brought by Prince Cansignorio’s aunt, who repeats to each woman who arrives how they were chosen from the Scaligeri inventories by the prince himself.

  I care nothing for the lavish confinement gifts, nor for any of the room’s fine furnishings, except the heavy silver tub in which I wash Juliet, and the iron brazier over which I warm the swaddling bands to wrap her. To tend, to touch so little a living delight. I lean close to smell the delicate baby scent of her, and know it is my milk on her breath, my kiss on her downy hair. Dearest lamb, I whisper with those kisses, do not worry or wonder what all those other noises are, who makes them and why. They do not matter, now that I am here. Here for you.

  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 bu
d 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

  For 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 th
at 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.