Juliet's Nurse Read Online Free PDF Page B

Lord Cappelletto will have to give her back to me. Only I can give her what she most wants. What she truly needs.

    When you make the circuit of a city’s churches following a kneeling supplicant, you move with God’s glory, but not with God-speed. The Nativity Day procession forms a snake of many parts, slithering slowly away from the Duomo, a thousand Ave Marias swallowingthe rhythmic slapping of the Adige against the city’s edge. Juliet begins to fuss as soon as the cortege turns south. By the time we reach the Chapel of the Sainted Apostles, her tiny lungs hit full howl.
    You might think the celebrants of the birth of the Holy Mother would greet an infant’s cry with alleleuia and amen . But we’re surrounded by a rivalry of mamas, each trying to push their little ones closer to the head of the procession in the hope of winning the Blessed Virgin’s favor. Or at least of having something to brag over, when they gather tomorrow at one or another of the city fountains to haul water home for their daily round of chores.
    Marking what tart looks and bitter murmurs we get for disturbing the solemn rite, I pinch Juliet’s swaddled bottom to be sure she’ll keep up her wailing, which I take as my excuse to steer us out of the piazza. Once we’re free of the crowd, I slip the jeweled cap from her head, hiding it in my sleeve so no one will know her for a Cappelletta as I carry her toward the Via Zancani. Toward home.
    Pietro meets us in the doorway, gathering me and Juliet together in his big arms, his thick chest absorbing the last of her howls. “How I’ve missed you, Angelica,” he says, guiding us inside. “These have been the loneliest weeks of all my life.”
    He’s kept house as best he can in my absence, which even in what little light steals through the waxed cloth that covers our window-holes, I see is terribly. This should please me, for what woman is not glad to know how helpless her husband is without her? But here in our dim little room, the loss of Susanna cuts even more sharply than it has during all the weeks I’ve been gone.
    In the familiar nest of our marriage bed, I bury myself againstPietro, and he buries himself inside me. As though we could lose our freshest grief in pleasure taking. This is the crudest comfort we can offer each other, and like beasts driven by their heat, we take it.
    After we are spent, I lie in Pietro’s arms with Juliet at my breast, breathing in the warm scent of the straw mattress. For a few precious moments, it is as if Susanna lived, and we are a family. Until the noise creeps into the room. A steady, droning buzz, coming from the opening to the roof, a sound I know in my bones.
    “You brought a hive here?”
    “It’s too quiet, all alone.” His voice tremolos against the hum of the bees. “Not in all the years of my army did I ever think this house could be so quiet.”
    Pietro’s army. That’s what he called our boys. Half a dozen sons, each a head taller than the next, from Angelo, not yet two years and squirming in one of his older brother’s arms, to Nunzio, at fifteen already of a height to look Pietro directly in the eye. These little rooms could hardly contain them all, and whichever way I turned I’d find one of the older boys tickling a younger one until both shrieked with joy, or one of the littler ones stomping and strutting in proud imitation of his bigger brothers. If Enzo began to sing, soon enough you’d hear a chorus, and if Berto let slip some wind, the others would join in to make a stinking cacophony. Once when I sent Donato to bring my loaves to the public oven, he passed a preacher who drew a crowd by imitating a tree-frog’s call, and for months afterward our home sounded with a pond’s worth of ribbiting. This little house was never still, never silent, with Pietro’s army. Until, within a single ugly week, every one of them was dead.
    I tell Pietro that all day the Cappelletti compound is noisy as a little village. “But at