Juliet's Nurse (34 page)

The answer shivers over me. Do I not know what it is to love so fiercely, to feel loss so keenly, that death seems a welcome respite? Could I not choose this very moment the metal-sharp edge
of a well-honed blade, the bitterest of poison draughts, a headlong plunge into the deep, wet well? Does each not promise a final relief from love’s greatest grief?

The sin of suicide. How strongly it seduces. Wherever Juliet’s soul has gone, mine could follow after. What hell could there be in an eternity with her? Whatever we’d suffer, we would be together.

But I cannot forget the others. Pietro. Nunzio. Nesto. Donato. Enzo. Berto. Angelo. My first love, and our six cherished sons. They are waiting, too—in a place Juliet now will never reach.

I’d have given my life to save her. But I’ll not take my life and lose them as well.

NINETEEN

I
pull the edge of my widow’s veil down over my neck and tuck the corners inside my dress. Then I pass my hands close to the torch so they’ll bear the scent of smoke. Unsheathing my newly purchased knife, I cut the first warm slice. It’s the day before Lammas Eve. Time to begin my harvest.

I’d not paid much heed when Pietro taught Tybalt about the working of a hive. Or, in the years afterward, when Tybalt repeated what he’d learned, eager to offer me something of my lost Pietro. But now I gather every memory, skimming all I can.

It’s the warmth that most surprises me. The heat from countless thousand bees clings to the sticky weight of what I take from them, as though something lives and breathes and beats within the golden liquid covering the comb. My thick hands have never been more
grateful, more careful, than cradling their warm honey-coated wax into the rounded pot.

I’d not anticipated how fast the pot would fill, or how heavy the full pot would be. How I’d struggle to lift it, and how careful I must be to bear it off upright. Each step chinks the sack of hidden coins against me. Though I’ll bruise purple from it before the harvesting is done, there’s solace in feeling the weight of my long-saved soldi and denari, an assurance there’ll be more to come. Pestilence snakes once more across Verona. No one can say for how long it will ravage, who’ll be lost before it’s done. In such times, the righteous will call for candles, and the wicked for bodily delights. Wax for one, honey for the other, and either way a well-earned sliver to keep me.

The harvesting takes longer than I expected. A half-day, and I’m still at the first hive, deciding how much comb to take, how much to leave. I must calculate what each family of bees will need to survive the winter, and what they can spare for me. To survive, to spare, to be spared. I’d not have thought such choices would be mine. But I labor with the same droning purpose as the bees. Relying on them as they rely on me.

While I work I imagine the weeks that’ll follow. I’ll skim and strain my many pots as what I’ve gathered slowly separates. I do not yet know who or where the chandler is that I might bargain with, how my long-past years of marketplace haggling will serve me now that I’m to sell instead of buy. Tybalt spent whole seasons clinging
close to Pietro, without either of them suspecting how soon he’d be left to carry on alone. None of us ever dreamt such tasks would one day fall to me.

I suppose the hives will need me less as the days cool to autumn, frost to winter. I’ll have time then to take my coins to the Piazza delle Erbe, or maybe all the way to Villafranca. I’ll trade for spices and teach myself to make comfits such as Pietro sold. For this, more than linen shirts or even our cockly-eyed Madonna, is what he’s left me.

I’ll never again be what I’ve been. Not wife, or nurse, or mother. But I’ll not be servant to such as the Cappelletti, nor shuttered away in a convent, either. I’ve my little buzzing livelihood, enough to keep me in my two rented rooms not far from the Via Zancani—and yet much further than I ever thought I’d come.

Thinking of comfits growls hunger into my stomach. I slip a slice of comb into my mouth and suck the honey off. Savoring the taste, I reach greedily for more comb. I sense too late that a bee is crawling there. In a startled flash, she sinks her only weapon in. The burn, the sting, the too-familiar pain shoots through my clumsy finger. For weeks it will ache me. But it’s worse for her, for in that angry instant she is dead.

Did I ever fear bees? Was I afraid of how a sting might hurt me?

I cradle the poor bee in my palm and weep for costing with my carelessness her life. A foolish sentiment, but I’ll not forgo it. What would Pietro think of me shedding tears over a bee? I imagine he might whistle, just to nettle me. But then he’d pinch the stinger out. Kiss the pain away. Rub honey where I hurt. Tell me how he
adores me, how glad he is to see how I’ve grown to love his bees. He’d remind me of what I already know: loving what’s in this life is our only remedy for death.

But I also know the more you love, the more you have to lose.

I weep for him. For her. For me. But then I press close my veil to dry my tears. I wave my swelling finger near to the smoky flame and heave myself back to my task. Whole hives still need my tending.

The days are short, the winter long. And on many of these darkened days, I hate her.

How could I not? She took everything. Everything I gave. Everything I had. Or thought I had.

Not just took. Killed. The bloodied violence of it, that is what maddens me. How she drove the dagger in. How she’d not cared who she hurt with that single stab.

Not cared for anything but Romeo. Not cared for me.

Who could love her more than I did? Who could lose more than in all my life I have?

The hate comes on quick, like the heat that’s flashed over me the year past. My face goes red, my body sweats with it. But then just as quick it’s gone, leaving me grief and guilt instead.

I raised six sons and then reared Tybalt. Watch boys turn to men, and you’ll learn how they’re drawn to danger. But I’d not known how fragile a girl can grow in the season she starts to ripen into a woman.

This is what shatters my heart, over and over again. That I’d
not known, not seen, not ever sensed how fragile she was. How she could be so unlike me.

My father’s beatings. The first great plague. Pietro’s sudden slaying. Bit by terrible bit, every awful thing that ever happened to me taught me to survive. Not like my girl, who never suffered aught. Never suffered because I was ever near to tend and cosset her. Never suffered and so could not bear the slightest sorrow, the hint of unfilled longing, the least glimmering of loss. And so was lost herself.

Should I have let her suffer? Would it have taught her to survive?

Or was it better to keep her short life always sweet? Sweet as a taste of honey on the tongue.

You cannot live long on only honey. You cannot survive without tasting much that’s bitter. Wormwood coats life’s dug, and that’s where we must suckle.

Slowly the days stretch and warm. Winter melts toward spring, and I wake half-thinking it’s already Pentecost, though we’re still in Lent. As the sun glows outside my waxed-cloth window, I rise from bed and ready myself to visit the hives.

The bees have roused themselves as well. They’re already soaring out, seeking the first of the year’s blooms. Pietro once said a hive was like a parish church, but to me each hive seems more like its own teeming city. The bees who guard the entryway, the others who fly far off to gather. Those that stay inside, turning collected pollen into precious nectar, and the ones deepest within who tend
their brood. By some miracle each knows what it must do to keep the whole thrumming hive alive. This is the beauty Pietro found in tending bees. This is what finally comforts me.

I feel my husband’s presence most here, near one of his hives. Tybalt’s presence, too. My boys I feel more whenever I carry my tithe of beeswax candles through the streets where they once played, to San Fermo where they prayed. But my last—my Susanna, my lamb, my Juliet. I feel her against me, always. Carried like fragrance on a rose, like mother’s milk on a baby’s breath, like pollen goldened on a soaring bee.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

J
uliet’s Nurse
isn’t a book I expected to write—it feels more like the book chose me. My focus has always been on intersections of American history and literature. But after I finished
The Secrets of Mary Bowser
, a novel based on the true story of a slave who became a Union spy in the Confederate White House, the title
Juliet’s Nurse
suddenly came to me. I pulled my copy of Shakespeare’s play (which I’d last read in high school) off the shelf, and reread it in a single sitting.

I was amazed and intrigued. Although the events in the play take place across just five days, it hints at loyalties, rivalries, jealousies, and losses that extend far back in time. Shakespeare places the young lovers squarely at the heart of his play: Romeo has by far the greatest number of lines, followed by Juliet. But the character who
speaks the next largest number of lines is not the head of either the Capulet or Montague households, nor the prince who rules Verona, nor the friar who first marries the lovers and later orchestrates Juliet’s feigned death. The person to whom Shakespeare gives more lines than all of these characters is Juliet’s wet-nurse—a woman whose very presence within the Capulet household seems curious, given that when the play begins Juliet has already been weaned for eleven years. What did Shakespeare see in her? What can we see only through her eyes?

Bawdy and clearly of a lower class, the nurse as Shakespeare presents her seems out of place among the cultured, wealthy Capulets. Her name, Angelica, is mentioned only once in the entire play. But in the very first scene in which she appears, the nurse reveals that she lost her virginity at age twelve, that she is the widow of “a merry man,” and that her own daughter was born on the exact same day as Juliet but did not live. Writing
Juliet’s Nurse
gave me a chance to explore this tantalizing, troubling backstory—while also offering a new, historically rich view onto the action at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Romeo and Juliet
is the best-known play in English literature and the world’s most cherished love story. Taking on such a popular literary work—a perennial high school reading assignment, a staple of theater companies around the world, and the source for powerful reimaginings from
West Side Story
to Franco Zeffirelli’s classic film to the electrifying
Romeo+Juliet
starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes—is no small task. When I traveled to Verona to conduct my research, I was astonished to learn that more than half
a million people come to the city each year to visit sites associated with
Romeo and Juliet
. This deep attachment to Shakespeare’s play convinced me there was an audience hungry for the story revealed in
Juliet’s Nurse
.

Focusing on the nurse forces us to ask one of the most terrifying questions any person can face: What would it be like to lose a child? Delving into the history of wet-nurses, I learned that the arrangement described in the play was quite common: wealthy families in this era preferred to employ a wet-nurse whose own infant had recently died, and who thus had “fresh” milk to devote to their child. Imagine the intensity of losing your newborn, and then, that same day, being given the chance to nurture another baby—yet always knowing your relationship with her is tenuous, subject to the whims of her parents.

Now imagine experiencing those things in a world so different from our own. Violence was a regular feature of city life in fourteenth-century Italy. Divided allegiances to the ruling prince, to the Pope, and to increasing their own power and property drew wealthy families into bitter, bloody rivalries. Though most households in Verona had fewer means than the Cappelletti or the Montecchi, in the steady rhythms of daily urban life, everyone—from the poorest of the poor to the merchants and artisans we would think of as the middle class to the richest nobles—was driven by forces of honor, piety, and myriad local alliances and rivalries as they struggled to survive.

Understanding this time and place was crucial to exploring Angelica’s story. Although Shakespeare tells us the season in which the
play’s tragic events take place—late July, just before the August 1 harvest holiday of Lammastide—the year is never mentioned. But important hints abound. The inclusion in the play of Prince Escalus (Shakespeare’s version of the Scaligeri family name) places the events before 1405, when the Scaligeri lost power and Verona became subject to Venetian rule. And in the pivotal scene in Shakespeare’s play in which Mercutio is killed, he exclaims not once, not twice, but three times to Romeo and Tybalt, “A plague o’ both your houses!”—perhaps the most dreadful curse for anyone alive at the time.

Plague first came to Italy in 1348, bringing unfathomable horror: in less than two years, between one third and one half of the entire population was dead. In some places, the death toll rose as high as 60 percent. Think of what your town would be like, what the nation would be like, with so much of the population suddenly gone.

Imagine the terror Mercutio’s dying words would have struck in the Veronese, who knew firsthand what plague meant, for those whose bodies rotted away, and for their bereft survivors. In Shakespeare’s play, Juliet has no sisters or brothers, and Lord Capulet tells Paris, “The earth hath swallow’d all my hopes but she.” Even the most wealthy and powerful families were vulnerable to the loss of their children, a tragic and haunting experience that in
Juliet’s Nurse
affects both the hired wet-nurse and the affluent family she serves.

What was it like to live in the wake of such devastation? How, without our modern understanding of the effects of emotional trauma, did individuals make sense of their experience and move
forward with their lives, despite all they’d lost? These are some of the questions
Juliet’s Nurse
answers.

Ultimately, Angelica’s experience parallels one of history’s great paradoxes: the horrors of the plague contributed to Europe advancing from the medieval era into the Renaissance. The death of large segments of the population created new opportunities for survivors. Peasants moved from the countryside to cities. Young men enjoyed professional prospects beyond their family’s original standing. The loss of so many spouses and betrotheds caused shifts in how marriages were contracted. New markets for luxury and everyday goods emerged, as international trade flourished—bringing with it advances in transportation and the intermingling of European, African, Asian, and eventually New World cultures. As Friar Laurence reminds us in his first speech in Shakespeare’s play, what’s tomb is womb. The Renaissance was the rebirth following the plague’s enormous death toll.

But the story also resonates in our own era.
Romeo and Juliet
ends with the suicides of the teenage lovers, following the violent deaths of other young men. Weaving Angelica’s story around these incidents from the play pushed me to think deeply about violence, despondence, and suicide. What would enable Angelica to withstand the anger and grief that destroy so many of the other characters? What larger lessons can we learn from her?

This became the overarching theme of the book.
Juliet’s Nurse
probes the relationship between loss and endurance, because in life, as in the novel, suffering exists not in opposition to, but as an inevitable experience of, survival.