Free Juliet's Nurse by Lois Leveen Page A

imagining how much it might bring at one of the money-lender’s stalls. Who knows how far Pietro and I might travel on that sum, what of the wide world we could discover together. But precious as the pearl is, it is nothing compared to Juliet. No more than a small, hard sphere beside my warm, soft girl.
    I go early the next morning to make my shrift. Friar Lorenzo greets me with his familiar “God give you peace” as I pull the blanket from Juliet’s head to show him how the purply prickle has faded.
    “So dark.” His words confound me, until I realize that he does not mean her face. He means her new-sprouted hair.
    In place of the blonde down she was born with, this hair is as coarse and dark as mine. And her eyes—they’ve darkened too, so slowly I’ve not noticed, from their first pale gray, past Lady Cappelletta’s amber, to a deep brown that matches my own. “It must be your milk,” he says.
    I’m not a woman who blushes easily, not even in a friar’s cell. What use is such coyness before your holy confessor? Still, my cheeks redden as I wonder how he knows that I used my own milk to concoct his remedy for Juliet. “The hair came in before that,” I say.
    “Before? You’ve nursed her since she was born.”
    I realize too late that he’d not known. Not until I half-told what now he makes me tell in full. I silently beg forgiveness, not from my saints but from Juliet, as my guilty tongue betrays how I milked myself to heal her, a secret only she and I should share.
    Friar Lorenzo frowns and mutters something about seething the flesh of a kid in the milk of its mother. As if goat stew has anything to do with my darling girl. “Remember your place, Angelica. You are only her wet-nurse.”
    How could I forget my place when it’s with Juliet, always with Juliet? I’m the one, the only one, who wakes with her and sleeps holding her, the one who’s given up Pietro and my little house and my whole life for her. The one who suckles her, and saved her. “Only her wet-nurse,” I repeat, nodding. There’s much of Juliet’s heart that only her wet-nurse can know.
    I draw the pearl from my belt-purse and pass it to Friar Lorenzo.
    “Only one?” he asks. That same only . Always it is that same only , when he speaks of what I am, and what I do, and what I bring.
    With a quick tug of his purse string, Lord Cappelletto gives the Church far greater offerings than this lone pearl. Altar-gifts to celebrate Juliet’s birth. The cost of a month’s fresco painting to commemorate a saint’s day. A handsome sum of silver coins, that God might favor the commencement or completion of some business dealing in which Lord Cappelletto has an interest. He’d drop a diadem’s worth of pearls into Friar Lorenzo’s waiting palm, for he gladly tithes from his vast riches. And, eager to best every other noble family in Verona, even more gladly brags of it.
    But this thanksgiving gift for saving Juliet comes from me, alone.I searched and searched, and found the pearl. And if it was any sin to take it, surely it is absolution to give it over to the Church.
    “I prayed to the Holy Mother to help me find the pearl Juliet choked on, and she did,” I say. “Only one, so that must be what the Blessed Maria knows the Church should have.”
    Friar Lorenzo looks at me. Looks, I swear, into my very soul. Then he pockets his precious gem and sends us back to Ca’ Cappelletti.

FOUR
    D uring all the years I ran my own house, I never relished how I had to hurry my dough to the city ovens for baking, or bargain for every bent coin’s worth of household necessities I bought in the market. How I hefted dirty pots to the fountain, scrubbing them while I sweated under the sun’s heat or shivered with the winter’s cold or soaked to sodden in the rain that might come any time of year, then hauled them home filled with whatever water we’d need until I returned to the public fountain the next day with another load to clean. With so many