Juliet's Nurse Read Online Free PDF Page A

Rosaline.”
    He nods, touching that same eager finger to where his knife hangs at his waist, as if he might need at any moment to ward off some grave threat. My Pietro was a motherless boy, and it was the love of his doting older sisters that taught him to love me. Whyshould I not give this serious, tumbling Tybalt more to care about than almond candies and ancient feuds?

    Juliet sleeps heavily our first night in her bedchamber, but I am wakeful, worrying over how I will contrive a way out of this room and away from Ca’ Cappelletti, to meet Pietro. How I miss my husband’s snores, the way even in sleep his great bear-paw of a hand cups my rump or hip or the soft curve of my belly. We’ve never been so long apart, even after my other lying-ins, for we have but one bed. When each of our sons was born, Pietro placed the newborn boy on the bolster above our heads, and entertained me by translating their gurglings into wild tales of where they’d been and what they’d seen before coming into this world, as one by one our older boys dropped off to sleep. He spun weeks and weeks of such stories, filling the nights until I was well again.
    All that fills the night in this great chamber is the sound of Juliet’s small breath, and the church bells counting off the three hours between compline and matins, then the three between matins and lauds. And in between the tolling, the songs of the nightingales in the arbor. Their trillings have barely given way to the first morning lark’s insistent chirps when, without so much as a knock, a man strides into the chamber, the dangling ends of his broad silver belt clanging with each heavy footfall. He’s of great girth if no great height, and as anyone but a blind man can tell from every gilded stitch upon him, rich. With a rich man’s surety of all that is his due, he demands, “Where is my Juliet?”
    My Juliet . Hearing him say those words makes me despise him, detesting how his silvery hair grows thick from his ears and nose yet thin upon his head. Holding my milk-sodden nightdress closed, I fold back the coverlet and reveal my darling lamb, perfect in her sleep.
    He lifts her up, away from me. I feel the warmth go out of the truckle-bed, the slight hollow where she lay chilling into an abyss as Lord Cappelletto cradles her in his arms. His liver-colored lips kiss her creamy cheek, those bristly nostrils widening to take in the precious scent of her.
    His thick fingers draw a tiny cap from his doublet pocket. It is a deep indigo, worked with gold. A perfect miniature of the elegant headpiece Lady Cappelletta wears, though with fewer rows of pearls. Too delicate in its silk and jewels for an infant. But when he puts it on Juliet’s new-bald head, she strains against her swaddling as though she means to raise her own tiny hand to settle the cap in place.
    “Juliet Cappelletta di Cappelletto,” he says to her. Not in some foolish cooing singsong, like my doting Pietro would. But Lord Cappelletto’s deep voice betrays an adoration that does not seem to fit a man who’d not bothered to make a single visit to his wife’s confinement room.
    “Your milk is fresh?” He asks me this the way a man fingering his coin purse might inquire about the strength of a plough-ox.
    “It came the same day she was born.” I turn my back to him as I lace my nightdress, to keep him from surveying me in the way I’ve surveyed him. Though in truth he’s not raised his gaze from Juliet.
    “You sent your own child off?”
    This is what he thinks of me. That I would pay some peasant in the hills to take my just-born child, so I could earn a few soldi more by nursing his. I turn to him with a stare that could vinegar whole casks of wine. “Susanna was not sent, she was taken.” I cross myself. “God rest all Christian souls.”
    He crosses himself, repeating my prayer before adding, “I christened Juliet for my most cherished, departed mother, God keep her in His rest.” This surprises me.