Juliet's Nurse (19 page)

I’ll not treat Tybalt so, not add to what already grieves him. “Juliet will be glad to have you wake her,” I say instead. “She misses you when you are gone.”

The thought of her lifts his chest. Juliet never wants a thing from Tybalt but his companionship. Not Lord Cappelletto, nor Lady Cappelletta, nor even I can say the same.

Our chamber glows in the afternoon light as he shakes her softly from her sleep, lifts her from the bed. She kneels drowsily beside
him while he stumbles through his Latin and she mumbles her made-up imitation of his prayers. Another day, I might take joy in seeing them bow their heads together. But I can barely bide myself until they utter their
amens
. If Tybalt cannot find Pietro for me, I must plot some way to seek him out myself.

I don my veil and tell Juliet, “You say your prayers so well, perhaps we should go to Friar Lorenzo, so he can hear them for himself.”

“Me pray,” she says, greedy for the praise she knows he’ll give. “And me fess to Friar.”

But the name that brightens her face shadows worry onto Tybalt’s. “Friar Lorenzo bade me tell you to come see him. He told me I must not forget.”

Something catches deep inside me. “When? When did he tell you this?”

“This morning.” Tybalt pulls at where his doublet collar rubs tight against the fresh bump of his Adam’s apple. “He called to me as I passed the friary on my way to check the first of the hives.”

Friar Lorenzo must have spoken to Pietro. But if my husband leaves it to the Franciscan to give me his response, surely it cannot be a happy one.

“Fess to Friar,” Juliet repeats, sliding her sweat-damp hand into mine.

“Tomorrow,” I say. “Or the day after.” I’m in no hurry to hear Friar Lorenzo repeat whatever angry words Pietro has for me.

Juliet tugs my hand. “Fess now.”

“You said that you would go.” Tybalt’s voice cracks as he takes my other hand. “He’ll think that I forgot.”

Is this not why I hold myself from returning home to Pietro? To soothe and care for Juliet, and for Tybalt, when not another soul in all the world marks what each of them needs? With their doubly insistent grip upon me, I force myself into the Via Cappello.

Heat thrums from buildings, streets, every surface of the city, even with the sun slanting to the west. Though the cries and confusion caused by the quake have ebbed, something sinister hangs over Verona, the souls of those crushed beneath fallen buildings lingering in the heavy air. Tybalt and I hold Juliet between us, and for once I do not smile at how he keeps a ready hand upon his dagger hilt, as we seek out an unblocked route to San Fermo and the friary.

A dozen needy beings crowd the corridor outside Friar Lorenzo’s cell, and I worry how I’ll keep Juliet from growing tetchy until it is our turn. But I worry more when the Franciscan comes out to call the next expectant in and, seeing us, waves me ahead of those who’ve been here longer.

In the cool quiet of his cell, he dips his tonsured head to Juliet, keeping his eyes from meeting mine. He blesses her and takes the kiss she offers for his narrow cheek, then blesses Tybalt and tells him to take Juliet into the lower church to make their prayers.

“Me pray already. Me fess now.” Even pouting, Juliet is a pure and pretty thing.

“The lower church—” I begin, but find I’ve no words for what I’ve seen Mercutio at there, not ones that I would say before Tybalt and Juliet. And whatever Friar Lorenzo has to tell me weighs thick enough in this close space, I know it’s not meant for them to hear.

I join Juliet’s hand to Tybalt’s, and give his shoulder an easy
urging from the cell, promising a comfit for every pillared saint they pray to before I come to find them. Though how I’ll convince Pietro to spare me comfits to gift them when he’ll not even speak to me directly, I cannot fathom.

Once they’re gone, Friar Lorenzo tells me, “Hunger can turn even good men cruel. And terror brings out the very worst, or the very best, within us.”

If I were in need of homilies, I’d come to Sunday Mass. “What does Pietro say?”

The Franciscan rubs at where his eyelids droop from want of sleep. “Yesterday at dusk, a mother and daughter were making their way back from the public fountain, when a brace of rowdies laid hold of them. They had no riches, nothing to steal but the few worn garments they’d just scrubbed clean. This was no satisfaction to the ruffians, who tried instead to take from the daughter what no Christian girl wishes to give. The mother screamed for them to stop. Pushing herself before the child, she begged them to take their pleasure upon her instead, and leave her daughter be. A passing stranger, hearing her, swung at the two villains, and the mother snatched the child and ran off. They found shelter in Sant’Eufemia, where the priest gathered half a dozen clerics to take them home. By the light of the clerics’ torches, they came upon the man who’d been their savior. He’d been stabbed and left dead in the street.”

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

N
urse 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 mar
ried. 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.