Juliet's Nurse (11 page)

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

A
lthough 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 bas
ket 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 dovecote, trying to slip one of his out-grown 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 trav
eling 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.

I’d watched the two of them from inside Juliet’s bedchamber. Even with the window pulled tight to keep the bees out, I could
not help but imagine the dizzying smell of ripe fruit going soft in the midday sun. And intermingled with the smell of fruit, a smudgy waggle of smoke, which tapered into the sky from the torch Pietro’d lit to keep the bees at bay. Through the wavering air, I saw how he unsealed the lid from the cut-log hive, deftly slicing and lifting out the combs. How he broke those combs into the deep-sided pot that Tybalt held for him, to begin the slow process in which the wax, which Pietro will trade to a chandler, rises, while the thick honey sinks.

Even with a cloth covering his face, Pietro sang while he worked, to show me he has no fear of bees. He is a barrel-chested basso, and his timbrous notes wavered against the panes as if they meant to steal their way into the room, as Pietro has stolen his way inside the half dozen times he’s come to Ca’ Cappelletti to check his bees.

After Pietro culled what he wanted from the hive, he replaced the cover on the hewn log. And then my husband dipped his broad thumb into the honeypot and pulled it back out glistening, closing his eyes as he sucked off the golden liquid. At last, he opened those beautiful eyes and dipped his thumb again. This time, he held it up, slowly waving it at me.

My mouth watered for that sun-colored honey, and so I disappeared from the window, carrying Juliet through the tower passageway and down into the arbor.

Pietro pulled me around the side of the dovecote, holding me close as he slipped that thumb into my mouth. But Juliet wriggled in my arms like a kitten wrapped in a drowning-sack, separating Pietro’s chest from mine.

I’d taken a half-step back from Pietro, tasting apple and pear and pomegranate, my tongue coated with all the fruits of the arbor condensed into the warm honey, as I commented on Tybalt and his capon.

But Tybalt’s not what my husband’s thinking of. “It’s been a year, Angelica. Time to loose the child’s swaddling.”

A year. A birth, a saint’s day, Christmas, Lent, Easter. Each was Juliet’s first. Each, aside from birth, is what Susanna never had. Every holy-day, every season, I feel it.

The first year is the hardest. That is what the black-veiled crones say, the ones who gather like sharp-beaked crows at a stranger’s graveside, cawing unasked-for advice at the mourners. The brown-frocked friars, if they bother to murmur any sort of comfort, will say as much as well. But no one says aloud what my mother-heart cannot unlearn: hard as the first year is, harder still is what happens in all the years that follow, when part of you forgets for a moment here or there what you’ve lost, even as the rest knows that in your deepest bones you can never for a day, an hour, an instant, forget.

I still catch sight of Donato or Enzo or any of my boys, out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes I see them at the age they were when death snatched them, and sometimes as the age they’d be now, every one of them grown tall. Sometimes they’re some age in between, so I’m not certain from the fleeting features which son I saw, those beautiful lost faces blending one into another.

But not Susanna. She stays ever a newborn babe, still covered in our shared blood, as she was in that too brief moment when first
and last I glimpsed her. If Juliet’s grown and gained this year past, it’s only in measure against Susanna. How can I be glad for that? Why wish this last child grown enough to be taken from me and sent off to live among cold-humored nuns? Swaddled, she is safe. Suckling, she is satisfied. And so am I.

“It is for Lord and Lady Cappelletti to decide when she is ready to be unswaddled.” Even as I say it, I know how Pietro might argue back. Lady Cappelletta has no notion what a child needs. And when have I been eager to obey Lord Cappelletto? Pietro might point out these things, or things much like them, and I ready myself to answer as soon as he does. But instead he says what I never expected to hear.

“We could have another.”

My tongue swells in my throat, too full for me to speak. All I can manage is to shake my head. Shake it as though to keep what he says from landing in my ears.

We’ve never spoken this way, uttering out-loud plans for making babies. There’d been no need for such talk during those first laughing days of lusty love when we made Nunzio. Nor in the fifteen years that followed, when our little house filled with growing boys. And after we lost our sons, I never dared say to Pietro, nor did he dare say to me, that we should make another. This was what the pestilence taught, a lesson too terrible to ever forget: it was not for us to decide what child we got, when they came, and when they were taken.

Month after month, I’d watched the moon grow full, wishing, hoping, my belly would grow with it, but all that swelled me was
time, and wine, and sweets. And then, long after I’d given up waiting: Susanna.

Did Pietro say anything to me, or I to him, to make her come? Could we have said anything to make her stay?

This past year, the year since she was lost, is the only time I ever let the getting or not getting of children govern how Pietro and I indulge ourselves. There are countless ways for a wife to please a husband, and a clever husband can match them one for one in the pleasing of his wife. Pietro’s not ever remarked on how careful I’ve become since entering Ca’ Cappelletti to keep his seed from landing where it might quicken in me. Not because I do not want his child, but because I cannot bear to lose the child I already have.

For this is what wealthy men dread most in a wet-nurse. I’ve seen women with smaller waists and faces far gaunter than mine standing in church doorways, milk soaking through their gowns while some sneering notary takes their testimony. But each woman and every notary and anyone who happens by—all know such a woman’s sworn-to-God statement will do no good when the court hears the suit her employer has brought against her. The merest suspicion of pregnancy is grounds enough to break a contract with a wet-nurse, no matter if it proves false or true. I’ll not take such a risk with Juliet.

I love Pietro. But with what foolishly deluded heart can my husband believe that he and I might yet see even one child raised and wed, when we have buried seven children dead?