by Lois Leveen
At first she and I speak only about the inventory of linens, what tasks we need to do. I’ve always liked to work the spindle, the certainty of the spinning, dropping, and catching as wool or flax turns to yarn. The weight and rhythm anchor me. She is more suited to the needle, her young eyes and slim hands working such delicate stitches as I’d never manage. We are ill-matched in many ways, Lady Cappelletta and I, but that is what makes us well-matched for our tasks.
As the weeks of autumn pass, the wool oil seeps into my hands, its sheepy smell staying with me even when I sleep. I begin to spin stories while I spin thread, stories of tending my family’s flock when I was a girl. I tell them as cradle-tales for Juliet. Lady Cappelletta shows no sign that she listens, until I soothe Juliet through one colicky suckling by recounting an early blizzard that caught me and my sheep the year I turned twelve. The storm was fierce as well as sudden, purpling the sky and turning the world so dizzying white I’d not believed we’d ever find our way back to my village. I was shivering as much with fear as cold, when a rowdy band of hunters happened across the hill where we’d been stranded. Three of them eyed my plumpest sheep, debating which one to kill off for supper. But the fourth smiled kindly as he eyed me instead, and he convinced the others he’d lead the flock back to my family, for what he was sure would be ample reward.
“Reward it was, and he took it long before we reached my father’s house,” I say, shifting Juliet from my left breast to my right. Is it any wonder the scent of wool moves me to tell such tales, given how at Pietro’s gentle urging I bade my virtue fond farewell before an audience of baaing sheep? “We were married before the spring snowmelt, and soon enough I was at my own lambing.”
Lady Cappelletta looks up from her sewing as though she’s noticing me for the first time. “You’ve borne children?”
“Barren women cannot suckle.” Does she really need me to tell her such things? “And neither can virgins. Except for the Sainted Maria.”
She listens only for what she wants to hear. “Sons? You’ve been delivered of healthy sons?”
I tell her my children were all boys, and all born healthy. “Except the last, which was neither. God rest them, every one.” I mark the sign of the cross against my face and chest, before pretending to busy myself with unraveling Juliet’s soiled swaddling.
Hard as it is to speak of all my lost little ones, what pricks most is how Lady Cappelletta disregards their deaths. “How? How did you make sons? If I can bear just one …”
I made sons easily, without thinking of it. Made them with Pietro, in all the warmth and strength of his youth. Not a bit like Lady Cappelletta, with her repulsion over the getting and having of babies, nor like Lord Cappelletto, bulbous and spotty with age.
“I did not lie too long in bed,” is what I say, “either before my husband came to me, or after.” True enough, for each boy I bore only increased the load of my household work.
She nods at my words, though giving up the hours she spends under her bed’s rich, heavy covers’ll not come easily to her, even if all she does instead is sit robed in furs sewing before the fire. Still, she might as well stop wallowing about like a sow in the mud. So long as a wife loves her bed only when her husband is far from it, she’ll not help herself in the getting of a son.
“And I ate sparingly.” Again, the truth. We were often hungry, more with each mouth we had to feed. But that’s not why I say it.
Lord Cappelletto is a man whose opinions grow as his hair does, only where you’d least want to find them. Though I’d not dare raise a plaint with him about what the cook told me, I take some small pleasure in forbidding Lady Cappelletta from having her fill of all the foods that are forbidden me.
She gives another nod, though this one is slower, worry widening her amber-flecked eyes. “The apothecary sent balsam and peony seeds. Not to take by mouth, but to put inside me, there.” She gestures toward her lap. “Lord Cappelletto read a treatise by a very learned physick, which says that this will help.”
Apothecaries. Treatises. Reading. If people put their faith into these things, is it any wonder they never get around to the making of children? The only remedy I’ve ever known, ever needed, was simply doing what we without money always do, to take a little pleasure in our lives. We romp, and we rut, and we leave it to the saints to decide when the babies come.
“Plant salves? Flower seeds?” I snort at the idea that those are what she needs inside her. And then I tell her things she’d never imagine, about how to draw a husband’s salve and seed into her. I let my eye catch bolster, carpet, pomander—whatever lies around the chamber. Imagining some copulatory use for every object, I describe these acrobatic feats as though they’re common practice to all but her. I do not know if any of the acts I describe make a womb more likely to form a boy. But seeing how she looks at me, like a veal-calf watching its fellow herd-mates being slaughtered and then eyeing the butcher as he turns, knife in hand, its way—that’s grand amusement to me.
“And if your husband, once he is in that position, can balance with his left leg up,” I say, “then you might reach across and slip your mouth about his—”
A small, horrid gurgle cuts me off.
Juliet, my dear babe, shudders in my lap.
She’s open-mouthed, her breathing stopped. Her face a ghastly blue.
Blue against the indigo of the cap that, unswaddled, she’s pulled from her head. The silk border of the cap is wet. The last two pearls that rowed its edge are missing.
I crook my littlest finger into her tiny mouth and pry out a pearl. Tossing the precious bead to the floor, I fish my finger in again. But in the small, wet cave of her mouth, I cannot feel the second pearl.
I lift her and turn her upside down, smacking the heel of my hand hard against her back. Nothing. Not a whimper, not a gasp. Not any sign of the deadly jewel.
Lady Cappelletta shrieks. But I’m too terrified to utter a sound.
I turn Juliet face up again and bend closer over her, opening my mouth to cover hers, and her nose as well. I suck in, as deep as I can. Deeper than I thought I could. My great, fat body fills with what I suck from her. A grim reversal of how her small, delicate body has grown these past months with all she’s sucked from me.
Suddenly something thumps against my gullet. The pearl, freed from her throat, hits so hard within my own I nearly gag into her mouth. Juliet begins to struggle, kicking and swatting, straining in her desperate will to breathe. But the air’s sucked so tight between us, I cannot lift my mouth from hers.
I work my tongue within my mouth, rolling the pearl forward as I pull fresh air in through my nose. Pinning the pearl between my tongue and teeth, I push this breath deep into her. Push myself in that one great breath away from her.
Juliet howls as I spit the pearl into my palm. She’s red-faced and wailing, inconsolable. I’m glad for it. I do not know how many nights the sight of her, blue and still, will haunt me. But for now, I relish this lively, angry red of her, proof that she’s not gone to join my other little ones.
“What have you done to Juliet?” Lord Cappelletto rushes in, shouting as though Ca’ Cappelletti is under sling-and-arrow siege.
“Saved her,” Tybalt says, vaulting into the chamber after Lord Cappelletto. “It was amazing, Uncle. My cousin could not breathe, so the nurse did it for her.”
Lord Cappelletto’s roiling anger boils off in a vapor of worry. “Could not breathe? Is she ill?”
“She choked on a jewel that came loose from her cap,” I answer, letting my gaze drop to the once elegant headpiece, crumpled and saliva-soaked at my feet. I want to make him feel that it’s his fault, for ordering that an infant wear such a thing.
“I was in the antecamera, practicing my lute, and I saw it all,” Tybalt says. “The nurse was giving lessons to my noble aunt, just as the tutor does to me. My cousin turned blue as a spring sky, and the nurse turned her back to the carmine of the prince’s pageant-robes.”
His half-lie hits me like a
shaming slap. I’d not heard a single pluck of a lute string, and if he’d been practicing in the antecamera, how could he see Juliet turn veiny blue? Tybalt must have snuck close to listen to all the filthy things I told Lady Cappelletta. Filthy things I was so consumed with telling, I’d not noticed him—just as I’d not kept careful enough watch over Juliet.
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 finally 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.�
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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.”