by Lois Leveen
He touches fingers to brow, to heart, to both sides of his chest. “Angelica, it is with a heavy heart but all Christ’s redeeming love that I tell you the man who died so nobly was your Pietro.”
“Tell him I will leave Juliet.” The words twist out of me, some unseen blade tearing them from my gut. “Tell Pietro I will come home before this very day is through.”
“It is too late for that, my child. Your husband is gone. I saw him for myself, afterwards.”
Pietro cannot be dead. That is the truth, the certainty, that cracks open my chest, jolts me into motion. Out of the cell, away from this lying Friar Lorenzo.
I must get Juliet and Tybalt. I’ll take them back to Ca’ Cappelletti, then go myself to find Pietro. The Via Zancani will be seeped in evening shade by the time I reach it, the door to our house swung wide to let fresh air flow in. I’ll coax the kitchen ashes into full fire, and Pietro will pour our wine, singing with me as I cook, as he always used to do. As he’s always meant to do again.
TEN
Nurse wake?”
Juliet buries a tear-streaked cheek against my neck. Beyond the curve of her head, I see Tybalt, crouching with a worried stare. Above him dark lines mark out a low-curved ceiling, the paint an eerily familiar hue. Too somber for Ca’ Cappelletti, and the hard stone digging flat against my back tells me I’m not in bed. Before I can ask where we are, why we are here, a hand reaches over from my other side.
“It is well you are awake, my child.” Friar Lorenzo’s touch is icy as he marks a cross upon me.
It all rushes back, every wretched thing the blessed faint let me forget. “Nothing can be well. Not without my husband.”
The Franciscan unfolds himself. Standing on the step above the landing to the lower church, he speaks down to me. “If Pietro is in a better place, we must be glad for that.”
“Po go way?” Juliet asks. “Like Rose-line?”
The friar tugs at one of his great ears. Waiting, wanting me to say it. But I’ll not.
“Pietro’s dead?” Tybalt’s two words explode against the arched ceiling. They shiver down the walls, rumble across the floor, and crawl up my spine, to pound between my eyes.
“Yes, my child,” Friar Lorenzo says. And then, because what holy man does not love to hear himself speak, he adds, “This life is but our bitter passage to the next.”
Juliet burrows tighter against me, though surely my little one cannot know what he means.
“Shall we pray for Pietro now, as I do my father? Or must we wait until the funeral?” Tybalt’s voice breaks, then settles into the careful rote that years of his tutor’s beatings have taught him. “My father’s funeral procession had eight horses, and wound through the city for an hour, and his Requiem Mass was said in the biggest church in Mantua.” He sits straighter in his mourning cloak. “How many horses will Pietro have, and how long will we walk?”
“Such processions are only for rich men,” I tell him. “The bishop does not open the Duomo doors to bury one as poor as my Pietro.”
Friar Lorenzo hisses at my sacrilege. “Rich or poor, every loss we suffer is God’s will. He gives us mortal life that we may pray, and do good, and earn our eternal place among the righteous.”
What place have I earned, refusing my husband what he begged of me: that I live with him as a loving wife should? Did he hold out hope that I was coming home? Or did he die knowing I’d determined to stay away?
Did Pietro rush at some swift-bladed ruffians because I’d left him, even left it to Friar Lorenzo to tell him I’d chosen Juliet over him?
I twist onto my side, my arms cocooning her against me. This is my comfort, and my curse: to choose this child, the single salve for all I’d lost. Not realizing I’d lose yet more.
Friar Lorenzo lays that icy hand upon the back I’ve turned to him. “What’s tomb is—”
“Doom.” I cut off his holy platitude with my hard-learned truth. I’ll not let the celibate speak to me of wombs. Not when I’ve left Pietro without a single living child to pray for him, as Tybalt does his father, and as Juliet one day will for Lord Cappelletto. “Bury him as you will,” I say. “I’ll have none of it.”
The cloister bell tolls, calling the Franciscans to vespers. Friar Lorenzo cannot bear to leave us without uttering a final, “May God have mercy on his soul, and on all of us.”
Once he’s gone, I let Tybalt lead me back to Ca’ Cappelletti, where I bury myself in my own tomb, built of my guilt and my grief, and of Juliet’s commiserating tears.
Hot as it is, even with the sun disappeared and the stars flung against the sweltering sky, lying restless through the night all I can think of is the rime-frosted day when Pietro and I first said farewell, and what followed from it. He’d returned to his village to give his family the news that we were to bind ourselves as married. While he was gone he sent me a love-gift. A handkerchief, of no fancy material. Just a little trifle to carry the scent of him. Or so I thought.
To a girl of twelve who has no more than chores for company, the fortnight a lover is away seems an eternity. I tucked the handkerchief into my dress so that I might always have it, have him, with me. On the day Pietro returned, he asked for it, and I slipped a hand to where I’d kept the kerchief close against me.
I did not find it. Did not even have sense enough to hide my surprise.
“What’s the matter, Angelica?” he asked.
“Nothing, now that you’re back.” I nuzzled his chest, knowing I could well take in the smell of him, and his taste and touch, without that bit of cloth.
But he pulled away. “There is something special in the kerchief’s weft I want to show you.”
“You sound like a fabric merchant, trying to prove his prices are fair.”
For once, he had no heart for teasing. “That kerchief is above any price. My mother wove it.” This was the first he spoke to me of her. “It was the last thing she made before she died.”
I saw then all it meant to him.
I bowed my head. “I’ve not got it.”
“Go fetch it, then.”
“I cannot.”
“You’ve thrown it away?”
“Of course not. I …”
As my words trickled off, Pietro’s voice rose. “You gave it to another?”
“Never.”
“Well then, where is it?”
In the month we’d known each other, I’d never seen Pietro angry. But I’d seen my father beat my mother many a time, knocking the very teeth from her head, for far less than losing such a precious thing.
Surely it was fright that made me answer as I did. By punching my fist hard at Pietro’s face.
In an instant, his much larger hand flew up. But not, as I feared, to hit me. Only to wrap my wrist in his broad palm, to keep me from hitting him again.
Whatever pain flashed along his jaw was nothing compared to the deeper hurt that showed in his eyes. My arm went slack in his tight grip.
He dropped his hold on me, turned, and left my parents’ house without another word.
My mother offered me no comfort, saying only she’d raised a fool, for even at twelve I should have known better than to raise a hand to a man, whether before we were wed or after. When my father came in from the fields, she bade me tell him what had happened. He beat us both, screaming that he’d not find another one so gullible as Pietro, to marry me to without a single denaro of dowry. For what had he got to give, even to be rid of such a stupid daughter? He threw me out of the house. Not for the night, for good.
The moon was three days shy of full, and I did what any herder does, when something is lost from the flock. I began circling slowly outward, seeking after it. Searching not with my eyes on the horizon for the low, wooly form of a sheep, but with my gaze to the cold ground, willing the handkerchief to appear.
It was no easy task. The moon was well on its descent when, crossing Agostino diMaso’s land, I glimpsed something in his pigsty. There, trudged deep into the half-froze mud, was Pietro
’s treasured handkerchief. How the pigs had gotten it, and why once they had it they did not chew it up entirely, I could not know. I worked the cloth free and carried it like a martyr’s relic to the icy creek edging Agostino’s fields. Though I scrubbed it against a rock until my fingers bled, the kerchief’d not come quite clean.
I brought it to Sant’Agnese, our village church, meaning to ask the priest to write a letter to send with it to Pietro’s parish. But there was no need for a letter. Pietro had gone straight to the church from my parents’ house, hoping to take holy council. Finding the priest gone, he’d slept all night before the barred church doors.
Though he’d always seemed man enough to me, at twenty he was still in truth a youth, and the softness in his sleeping face taunted me with all I’d lost in striking him. As I laid the folded kerchief on his chest, he grabbed my wrist. Full awake at once, he held me for a silent instant, as he had before stalking from my father’s house. But now he pulled my wrist, drawing me down onto him. Pressing my fingers against the intricate weave of the soiled kerchief, he told me of his gentle-hearted mother and how indulgently she loved him. He said he wanted to make such a mother of me, once I was his wife. Which, when the priest returned an hour later, I soon was.
Not a hand was raised between us after that. Nor was one ever raised to the son I bore that year, or any I bore after. Even in his hottest youth, Pietro never needed to prove himself by beating wife or child. There are few enough like that, and I never forgot it was my own foolishness that almost cost me my Pietro. I always swore I’d not take such risk again.
Why did I ever leave him? How could I have let myself lose him?
I could go now. Climb the tower steps once more. Dark as it is, I could find my way up, perch like Tybalt at the tower’s top, and look upon Verona. This city where Pietro and I came so young and full of hope, holding nothing but each other’s hands, to build a life. A life so filled with death—our sons, our daughter. But always, we held to each other. Now, with him gone, I’ll not hold on. I’ll look upon the world and let myself slip free. It would be so easy to let the heavy thing inside me have its way. Let loss be the weight that carries me down, down, down, until I’ll never have to bear this grief again.
I close my eyes, imagine swaying in the hot air, feeling myself fall. But something stabs sharp at my back. My eyes fly open, and I turn. The statue of San Zeno towers over me. The fishing saint of fair Verona, his unseen hook plunging deep into me. Pulling me back. Because it is forbidden to die this easy, longed-for way.
Pietro well earned his place among the righteous. And surely all our little ones are there as well. All my lost beloveds together, waiting. What would I be, to damn myself from them for all eternity? Hooked here, I’ll not let myself make that last climb up the tower steps and leave this mortal life. Though by my troth, it’s all I long to do.
“Eight comfits,” Tybalt says, climbing in through Juliet’s open chamber window sometime in the ripening morning hours before the terce bells toll, “as you promised.” He sets down a sack as big as a pillow-casing, casts off his mourning cloak, and slides one hand into the other tight-pulled sleeve of his dark doublet to draw out the candies. Softened from the heat, each is fragrant with some surprise of quince, or fig, or apio, and laced with cinnamon, ginger, or clove. And all of them emanating the unbearable sweetness of honey.
Juliet snatches one of the comfits. She runs to the far side of the bed, slipping it into her mouth before I can stop her.
“Where did you get these?” I ask Tybalt.
“I woke at dawn and went to the Via Zancani. I knew there would be comfits there.”
“You broke into a dead man’s house to steal candy?”
“Pietro always brought us sweets. He’d want us to have these.” He holds the candies out to me.
I cannot bear to taste what my husband made. I do not deserve to hum with delight in his handiwork, as Juliet does, working the sticky comfit with her tiny teeth. I nod at the sack. “What else have you thieved?”
Tybalt draws up the bag, reaching in and pulling out the Virgin’s portrait that hung upon our wall. The one Pietro gave me when we wed, trothing ourselves together until death forced us apart.
I tell Tybalt my cockly-eyed familiar has no place in this grand house, where fine images fresco the walls.
“My uncle says you may hang the Holy Mother here, and wishes she may bring you comfort,” he says. “And he gives his leave for you to take Juliet and me with you today, when you go to the Requiem Mass.”
Lord Cappelletto gives me leave to do what I’d not asked of him. I’ve never once spoken Pietro’s name to him, and I long ago forbade Tybalt to ever mention my husband before his uncle, to keep safe my place with Juliet. But what does that matter now?
Of all the house, Lord Cappelletto’s the one who might truly know my grief, because he knows his own, kneeling nightly before the Madonna in his chamber and praying for the cherished wife he lost. Yet I’d not share my most private hurt with him.
Tybalt entreated Lord Cappelletto from some belief my mourning must take the same shape as his does. It’s Tybalt who wants this. Tybalt who’s put on his finest garments, the seams strained from how fast he’s grown, to go to the Requiem Mass.
“Afterwards, I’ll finish harvesting the hives,” he says. “I’ll collect the wax and honey, and separate them out. I helped Pietro enough times, I’m sure I can do it on my own. But I’ve no way to make comfits. When the honey’s ready, I’ll sell it to an apothecary who’ll work with it himself, as the chandler does the beeswax.”
“Is this all you can think of, honey and candles and candy—even with Pietro gone?”
“Bees die each day, but the hive goes on,” Tybalt says. “That’s what Pietro taught me. He said the ones who gather pollen may never taste the honey it will make. He told me it’s why he loved the bees. The way they build, creating combs not for themselves but for the future brood. Like the men who lay a church’s marble cornerstone knowing they’ll not live long enough to pray within the finished nave.” He draws a deep, wavering breath, laying a hand on his mourning cape as if to touch his own great grief. “Pietro said this is why we must take care in tending them. The hive must live, and in its life we’ll find our hope.”
I’d not known such things about a hive—or about my husband. Never understood why the bees that afrighted me could so comfort him. What other things had I been too afraid to hear from him? What else about Pietro will I now never know?
Tybalt urges me to braid my hair and ready Juliet, so we’ll not be late. When I set my jaw and make no answer, he says, “I did not want to go to my father’s funeral, until my uncle said I must. He said that we must show everyone the strength of our piety, even when we are bereaved. But the friar says we go for God, to implore him to take my father’s soul, and now Pietro’s, into heaven.”
“Those are a nobleman’s reasons, or a clergyman’s,” I tell him. “Not a woman’s.” Not a widow’s.
My whole life I’ve seen them. You can tell which ones truly loved their husbands, some wailing and pulling hair and clawing at their own faces, and some still and stony silent as they kneel through the Requiem Mass. All listening from under their dark veils as though something in the priest’s impenetrable Latin might meliorate their grief.
But what could lessen my loss, what can console me, now that it’s too late to beg Pietro’s forgiveness and give myself wholly back to him?
I busy myself with calling Juliet to me, dabbing her face and untangling the knots sleep worked into her hair. “We’ll not go anywhere,” I tell Tybalt. “The streets have grown too dangerous.”
“I’m not afraid.” He pulls himself tall, widening his shoulders as broad as they’ll go. Which is not nearly broad enough to carry all he thinks he can.
“What good did a fool’s bravery do Pietro?” I lace my words with enough venom to sting us both. “A full-grown man, and the brace of murderers left him in the street to die.”
&nb
sp; Juliet whimpers. I’ve pulled her hair too hard, and made her hear such ugly things. Shrinking from me, she reaches for Tybalt. He bends to her, offering her kisses and a second comfit. Distracts her with her toy bird before he straightens up again and kisses me as well, the same tender way my sons did.
“I’ll go alone. I’m Tybalt, king of cats, and I’m not scared. I loved Pietro. And you said that he loved me. I’ll kneel and pray the Mass for him, even if you’ll not.”
This is how he leaves us, Juliet playing with that beady-eyed bird while I stand at the window staring out at the hive thrumming in the arbor. Wondering over what parts of Tybalt are yet boy, and what are already man, that make him able to face what I cannot.
Tybalt is the nimble king of cats, and the legal heir to Lord Cappelletto. But who am I? Not who I’ve been for more than thirty years. No longer Pietro’s adored wife. Nor Juliet’s wet-nurse. I gave up my husband for her—but what am I to her now? What will I be a year, a decade, hence, should God make me live so long without Pietro? What is a milk-mother to a child who’s been weaned?
I’ll not forget how she turned away from me, seeking solace from Tybalt instead. And worse than her turning away was the moment before, when she looked at me just as Pietro had when last I saw him—the last I’ll ever see him. The same accusing look almonding her eyes, the same surprised hurt stippling her still-bruised brow.