Juliet's Nurse by Lois Leveen Read Free Book Online Page B

ready to tell the cook I’m not some common servant. But Juliet wriggles in my arms, and in the moment I take to soothe her, the cook turns his back to me to toss the garlic into a sizzling pot upon the fire. Then he bends to stir the parsley into a bubbling sauce, and a hole gapes in his breeches, revealing a hairy part of him that I’d just as soon not see.
    What use is it to argue with such as him?
    I carry Juliet out of the kitchen. Before I make my way back upstairs, I slip into the arbor. Though the trees are nearly bare, I hunt out the last three apples that’ve fallen from the branches. Closed up again in our chamber, I gobble the fruit so fast, my stomach twists in pain. But I’m not sorry to have eaten my fill, defying Lord Cappelletto despite the cook.

    From the time I could first grasp my mother’s skirts, I’ve always done my part of a household’s work. I began as any girl does: mashing herbs, shelling beans, and kneading dough, though soon enough I was stirring ashes back to fire, drawing water by the bucketful, and tossing scraps to hens and hogs. By the time I was eight, I could lay a trap to kill the mouse that’d gotten into our grain, or tell with a single whiff when the cooking oil was near to turning rancid. I stank of manure when the fields were tilled, of lye when we did our laundering, and each night of whatever simmered in the pots I stirred. There was not a chair in my father’s house for anyone but him, so I stood even through the long hours when I spun and sewed.
    Once Pietro and I were married, I’d barely finish one chore before I had to set my roughened hands to the next. To keep my husband and our growing army of ever-hungry sons fed took such hours of buying and storing and preparing food, there hardly seemed enough light left in the day for all the scrubbing and salting, sieving and weaving, sorting and mending a household requires.
    I’d not imagined during any of those work-worn years that one day I would sit for hours in a high-backed chair within an ill-runhouse with nothing to do but watch a single infant sleep. Would I have believed then that I could feel as dulled by it as I do now? But we are what our life makes us. Hard as I’ve always had to work, I’ve never been any good at being idle.
    Besides, in the hole exposing the cook’s hind-part I glimpsed a portent of something I’ll not let come to pass. And so I plot my way into Lady Cappelletta’s chamber. Young as she is, younger than five of my six boys would be if they lived, still she is the lady of Ca’ Cappelletti. Whatever else the gulling, gadding, tippling, scratching servants do, or do not, to look after the larder and the cleaning and the grounds, the household linens are her responsibility. If she’ll not tend to them, by spring not a one of us will have a proper cloth to wipe withal when we relieve ourselves, nor hose or breeches to lace back up once we are done.
    This does not occur to Lady Cappelletta until I come into her chamber carrying the spindle, needles, and hoops that Tybalt hunted up among his mother’s things. “We should begin while the light is still strong,” I say. She’s a-bed, eyes red above her lovely cheeks. She nods, barely, and I busy myself with lifting the lid of the nearest linen-chest and surveying its contents, while Tybalt carries his cousin’s cradle into the chamber.
    Lady Cappelletta grows so distressed at Juliet’s presence, I mean to distract her with some comment about how much needs mending. But before I can, Tybalt plucks up her cap and puts it on his head. Letting it fall in front of one eye, he lifts Juliet from the cradle and dances her in her matching cap along the edge of the broad bed, warbling nothing-such words as Lady Cappelletta laughs. Thisis Tybalt’s gift, to himself and to us. Hungry for a mother’s love, he mines affection from this aunt who shows none for her own child, just as easily as he does from me, bereft of every child of my own. By the