Juliet's Nurse

by Lois Leveen

  Lord Cappelletto gives a quick nod to Tybalt to make haste as he follows the prince’s family through the massive cathedral doors. Tybalt looks longingly at me, but I give his shoulder a loving push. Shifting Juliet from one hip to the other, I make my way to the smaller northern door with the other women.

  In all my decades in Verona, I’ve never been inside the Duomo. I always offer my confession in Friar Lorenzo’s cell, Pietro and I going to full Mass no more than once or twice a year. And that we did at San Fermo Maggiore. Nesto insisted the communion wafers there tasted better than any others he ever had. We laughed when he said that, thinking it a sinless sacrilege for a child to believe such a thing. After he died, I took what small comfort I could in feeling the same circle on my tongue he’d been so adamant about having on his.

  If I were at San Fermo now, I would make my familiar way along the nave, slip through the side door in the upper church and down the stairs, passing the corridor that leads to Friar Lorenzo’s cell to head instead into the lower church. There, in the cool dark air, I could nestle Juliet to my breast and nurse her as I used to nurse my boys, under the watchful eyes of my most beloved saints. But the Duomo is as strange to me as a Mohammedan’s temple. Spread broader and rising taller than San Fermo, the grand cathedral does not make me feel like an angel ascending to heaven—more like a tiny churchmouse dizzily scurrying across its vast, patterned floor. Scores of candles burn upon the altar. Watching them glow, I try to feel Pietro near, to believe it is his bees who birthed the wax that drips, liquid hot, before the image of Our Lord and Savior.

  Though I know by rote my Ave Maria, Pater Noster, and Pax Domini, the rest of Mass remains a mystery to me. Not so Lord Cappelletto. Even from across the nave, I mark the proud way he intones in Latin along with the cathedral priests. He pulls sanctimoniously on Tybalt’s ear whenever the boy’s eyes start to wander to the sculpted swords that frame the rood screen, or the painted scenes along the side-walls of bloodied martyrs glorying in their righteous torments.

  Once the last prayer sounds against the cathedral walls and the congregation rises from our knees, the priest signals for the acting out of the Passion, which features a live lamb and three donkeys—a spectacle beyond anything the Franciscans over at San Fermo ever offered. The woman beside me strains to get a better view of every hollow between the would-be Christ’s ribs and the shimmering oil on his anointed feet. The Crucifixion is so realistic, I wonder if instead of pardoning a criminal in honor of the holy-day, Cansignorio means to start a new tradition by having this one sacrificed.

  But no, the pretend Savior survives long enough to be entombed and then rise up. For what inspiration would there be in death, common as that is? The miracle is in the Resurrection. Or ought to be, though in truth I notice Mercutio snickering and Tybalt slumping with disappointment when they see how the priests playing the Roman guard conspire to block the congregation’s view while the pretend-Christ clumsily replaces his brittle band of thorns with a golden crown. Holy chicanery it is, yet it impresses the thousands of Veronese pressing in behind us, whose rippling murmurs of awe fill the cathedral.

  After the congregation has gasped and oohed to the bishop’s satisfaction, he gives a final benediction and disappears into the sacristy. Cansignorio and the counts follow, Lord Cappelletto close on their heels. He hurries Tybalt along with him, the boy struggling to keep the chalice raised high as a score of men who are the most trusted of the prince’s allies swarm forward with the various treasures they are gifting to the church.

  The last of them is barely through the rood screen before the congregation begins to press its way from the cathedral, eager to trade piety for pleasure. But I must wait for Lord Cappelletto. Slipping a finger into Juliet’s needy mouth, I murmur, “Yes, dearest lamb,” matching my words to the familiar, urgent rhythm with which she sucks: three insistent squeezes, then a pause, and then three more. Kissing her dark hair, I smell not the delicate baby scent I crave, but the dank, spicy incense that fills the Duomo. At last the cathedral bell begins to ring, and the bells of all the churches across Verona answer, their high-and low-pitched peals dancing across the city’s tiled rooftops. Lord Cappelletto reappears, barely flicking his eyes to me to signal that I am to follow after Tybalt, who’s scurrying at his heel.

  As soon as we return to Ca’ Cappelletti, Lord Cappelletto orders every trencher in the house set out in the sala. There is cabbage loafed with eggs and garlic, savoried with marjoram, mint, and walnuts, baked heavy with Piacentine cheese. Mutton is served stuffed with pork bellies, parsley leaves laced through the meats. Next come liver pies and veal tortes, and platters of aspic shimmering with whole peppercorns and slivered cardamom seeds. Lord Cappelletto possesses the same gusto for breaking the Lenten fast that he’ll soon have for breaking wind.

  Although Lady Cappelletta still lies raving in the parto bed, he does not seem to mark her absence as he holds Juliet upon his lap and catechizes Tybalt about which men who knelt and worshipped nearest them in the cathedral are allies to the Cappelletti, and which are enemies. He talks full-mouthed of a seducer kidnapping a dowried girl away from her lawfully bound fiancé, or of a drunken insult shouted at a gambling table, quizzing Tybalt about what revenge should be exacted for each wrong, never mind that they were committed three generations past.

  The more Lord Cappelletto talks, the more he drinks, until he’s had wine enough to drown the Venetian fleet. He pushes first a goblet and then a trencher toward me, and orders me to drink and eat my fill.

  But for once, I’ve no appetite. I’m thinking of the lamb stew I always made for Easter, which my Berto especially loved. Donato teased him as we walked home from church one year, saying there’d not be enough for Berto, which made the younger boy cry. Nothing we said or did could calm him, until Nunzio hoisted him onto his shoulders and ran the whole way home, letting Berto dip a spoon into the cookpot before the rest of us had even turned into the Via Zancani. I’d not believed I could bear to taste that stew again after the pestilence stole our sons, but still I made it that first Easter and ladled out a bowl for Pietro. Pulling me onto his lap, my husband tore off a piece of bread, dipped it into the soup, and begged me to have it for Berto’s sake. Every Easter since, we’ve eaten it like that, with each mouthful recalling another memory of our lost boys. But this year Pietro must be having who knows what for his holy-day meal, alone in our house or out among strangers at some public tavern, his pocket full of honeyed sweets I cannot taste.

  Sometime during the week past, a splintered fish bone slipped beneath the tooth that sits beside the gaping hole left by those I lost in the brawl. I push my tongue at the stuck bone, letting the pain throb into my gum and flash along my jaw as I watch Lord Cappelletto giving Juliet tastes of this or that from his finger. When a pinkieful of lemon pottage makes her throw up—not the soft milkish spit she trails every day on me but thick gobs of undigested food—I reach fast for her, glad for the excuse to carry her back to our bedchamber.

  Tybalt follows after us. I wish he’d chirrup out some joke or song to cheer me despite myself. But he sinks onto a high-backed stool set against the far wall, plugging his nose with his fingers while I wash Juliet and replace her puke-covered swaddling with fresh bands. He watches like a cat outside a mouse hole until I nurse her to sleep.

  “What’s the Order of Santa Caterina?” A funny question, even for a boy as odd as Tybalt.

  “A convent.” The truth. But from the confusion that pulls at his curious eyes, I can see that like so many of life’s truths, it’s of no particular help. Not until I explain, “A place where nuns live.”

  This Tybalt understands. He clasps his hands against his chest, fluttering his eyelids and pulling his cheeks taut in mimicry of the dourest abbess, and parades around the room. Then he asks, “What does weaned mean?”

  I crook an elbow around Juliet’s head, to protect her from hearing such a word. “Weaned is when a child grows too big for nursing.”

  He nods like so
me great sage. “When they’re weaned, they go to the convent.”

  His words catch me cold. “When who’s weaned? Who’s going to a convent?”

  “It’s what the bishop said, when Uncle bade me give him the silver chalice.” He screws his voice into a perfect imitation of the bishop’s haughty tone: “We shall keep a place at the Cloister of Santa Caterina. Send her as soon as she is weaned.”

  Something sharp jags inside me. “You’re sure that’s what you heard?”

  Tybalt puts a hand to his heart, swearing on his most prized possessions: three marzipan wise men he’s been hoarding since Christmas.

  “Was he looking at your uncle, or at another man?”

  “He looked at the chalice. It was heavy, and I had to carry it for hours, until he took it from me.”

  I curse that chalice, which I mistook for a mere paschal offering, never guessing it was the first piece of a convent-dowry. Now I see that the silver goblet is like Juliet herself—a sacrifice Lord Cappelletto will gladly make, bargaining with God to give him a son.

  Tybalt’s words still turn in my head hours later, as I fall into a tormented sleep in which I dream I search all through Ca’ Cappelletti only to discover my girl gone, and Lord Cappelletto laughing over some swollen-headed boy who fills her cradle. This boy is so hideously deformed, his face cannot be called human. He has a spiderish number of arms and legs, which spill out of the cradle onto the floor. Even as I dream, I can hear Lady Cappelletta howling as she lies wakeful with wild-eyed fear that she’ll never deliver a living son. Or maybe she howls from the grim realization of all that it will take for her to bear one.

  During the next months, I lose more teeth. One into a thick cube of veal fat, another to such rotting that Lord Cappelletto pays his barber to pull it from me. I lose teeth, and Juliet gains them, two tight little rows rising from her gums. Tybalt and even Lord Cappelletto marvel when Juliet opens her mouth and the light flashes on those perfect teeth. Such marvels only taunt me, consumed as I am with what Tybalt never should have told.

  Friar Lorenzo, sensing I’m keeping some secret, presses me each time I return to be shriven. I make careful catalogue of every hour I snatch with Pietro, when I stop at the Via Zancani on my way to the friary and whenever he comes to tend the bees at Ca’ Cappelletti. I accumulate randy acts to repent, knowing that I’ll not confess to the friar what really burdens me. Not tell him how I hate the thought of Juliet being taken from me and sent to a convent, consigned to the same celibate life he lives. What use would it be to confide what is not my sin, when I know already how he will answer? I am only a wet-nurse. A woman who is not to question God or Church or Lord Cappelletto.

  So I’ll not question, not aloud. Only when I’m alone, with Juliet burrowing asleep against me, do I silently wonder how long we will be able to keep our precious milk bond—and what I will do to protect it.

  SIX

  Although Lord Cappelletto waited five weeks from when his wife was delivered of her first child before taking her again, she was brought back to their bed only five days after the midwife removed her second, dead one. I thought Lady Cappelletta would cower from him like a caged animal. But instead she shrilled out demands that he mount her once, twice, three times each night, which he was glad to oblige. In the days afterward, she’d remain in bed and rave for Tybalt, of all the household, to come and place a hand upon her stomach and say whether he felt anything stirring there.

  What could Tybalt feel at such moments but frightened? The boy who loves to stage bloody battles with toy soldiers, and who eagerly recites every gory detail of a dozen assassinations undertaken by long-dead Cappelletti to avenge their honor, yet who delights in making up songs and tumbling-shows to entertain me and Juliet—this same boy has learned to hide whenever he hears his aunt call. So, for his sake, I go to her instead.

  She’s not pleased when I come into her bedchamber carrying Juliet with me, as if it is the child’s fault, or mine, that she was born a girl. “Where is Tybalt? He is the only one in this whole household who cares for me.”

  I open my mouth to assure her that’s not so. But what good would such lying do her? She’s barely older than Tybalt. They might have whiled these last years of childhood as contented playmates if she were not married to his uncle, her lonely fate already settled.

  I balance Juliet on my hip while I open the window covering to let the newly warming spring into the room. “Lord Cappelletto chose you for his wife.”

  “He chose me in payment for a debt.”

  This seems to me more of Lady Cappelletta’s madness, for what man marries a debt-slave, instead of working her for what is owed? But when I turn back toward the bed to tell her so, she cuts me off.

  “Lord Cappelletto was visiting one of the Scaligeri castles on Lake Garda. He rode out upon a hunt, and one of the hounds got loose and killed a hind on my family’s lands. My sister loved that hind and wept to find it slaughtered, so when our cousin discovered the bloody-mouthed dog, he slit its throat, to please her. Not long afterward, a serving-man from the hunting party came near, calling to the dog. My cousin laughed and told him it was dead. But Lord Cappelletto, as a guest of the Scaligeri, demanded the life of whoever killed the hound. Our family priest advised my grandfather to send away my cousin, and offer Lord Cappelletto a wife instead.”

  She fingers the edge of the coverlet, as if she’s trying to pull loose the thread that binds her to her husband. “I thought he ought to have my sister, for if she’d not wept over the dead hind, the hound would never have been killed. But my father said she was promised to one of the lords in Padova, and he did not care to jeopard what he’d already given for her dowry. So I was delivered to Lord Cappelletto.”

  A deer, a dog, a daughter: are the rich so muddle-headed from all they possess that they think such things are equal, and ought to be traded one for another? Yet this must be what Lord Cappelletto believes, pledging Juliet like a sack of tithed coins to the Church to please the saints into giving him a son.

  When Pietro first made of me a wife, I’d stir myself awake in the smallest hours of the night, watch his sleeping face by whatever moonish sliver rose, and whisper out all the grateful love I felt. Whatever we might declare by day, only in the night, when slumber dulled his ears to me, did I dare show how desperate I’d been for anyone to care for me as he did. Not until Nunzio was delivered of me and exhaustion stole my strength and made me cling to any sleep I got, did I stop rousing myself like that. By then it mattered not. Cradling our first son, Pietro knew the full measure of the ferocious love I felt for him, and I knew he felt the same for me. Lady Cappelletta’s wakeful nights and red-eyed days offer no hint of such joy for her.

  I nestle my sleeping Juliet into a chair and bring the work basket to Lady Cappelletta’s bedside. “Your father must have thought it well to marry you to an ally of the Scaligeri,” I say, though such alliances are made only to serve men. If Lady Cappelletta’s gained anything by the match, it could only be in measure against how awfully her own family may have treated her.

  I search through the basket for a hoop from which emerald-green and ruby-red silk threads dangle. It’s the budding floral hedge she was embroidering before the child died in her. But when I hold it out to her, I see her hands are still too twitchy to work a needle.

  I sit beside the bed and begin to fasion the slow stitches myself. This is how we’ll pass the days. I can care for Juliet, and do the household’s sewing. The hare-faced cook will prepare the meals. The cleaning and tending will fall to whatever worthless servants wander in and out of employ within Ca’ Cappelletti. But there is one wifely duty that Lady Cappelletta alone must perform.

  Through the nights that follow, whenever I hear her desperate pleading for her husband to make his heir upon her, I wonder whether that hind was better off. At least its end came quick, and someone wept for it.

  It’s the height of summer, but Tybalt does not seem to notice the day’s thick heat as he chases a capon around the d
ovecote, trying to slip one of his outgrown stockings over its squawking head. His father’s most recent letter made mention of the expert falconry practiced by the Gonzaghe courtiers. Tybalt read the letter to Juliet and me over and over so many times I can recite it back like a traveling peddler calling out his wares. Tybalt’s convinced himself that if he can train a bird—any bird—to sit upon his arm, cast off, and return with some wormish kill, surely his father will come back to see such a feat, or send for Tybalt to go to Mantua to show off his prowess, such as the boy imagines it to be.

  I should rescue the stocking, and the dishcloth he cut up for jesses, and the ribbon he’s fashioned for a leash. Should consign them all to my work basket, which grows fuller every week. But how can I deny the self-sworn protector of Ca’ Cappelletti a chance to play at manhood?

  “Look at the castrated little cock,” I laugh to Pietro.

  “Tybalt may not have a falcon, but the bird runs, and flies, yet it will return.” Pietro pinches one of the scarlet-orange blooms on the pomegranate tree, pulling it free without losing a single delicate petal. He dangles the flower in front of Juliet, who opens her pretty pink lips and squeals “usss, usss.” It’s her first word, or will be once she learns to say it right. I let Tybalt believe it’s cousin, though I’m sure she’s really saying Nurse.

  Pietro lets the flower drop. “You hold too tight to her, Angelica. At that age, our boys—”

  “She is not like our boys.” Why must I even say it? Our boys never looked upon trees like these. Never knew their father to tend bees. Never saw him cut honeycomb from a hive, as he’s just done. As he did with not a single of his own half dozen sons to help, but only little Tybalt.