Juliet's Nurse Read Online Free Page A

sing, she sleeps. Surely no harm if I sleep too, dreaming the golden sun is Pietro come to warm me, inside and out. It’s a dream so real, I wake certain I feel the very weight of him, and find a poperin pear lying in my lap.
    I might believe Pietro is here withal, when I see that. Pop-her-in , he calls the bulging fruit, wagging a pear from his breech-lace whenever I bring some home from the market. But shut within the Cappelletti compound, it cannot be Pietro who pranks me.
    A boy of nine or ten perches on the bottom of the window frame, watching me. His light brown hair falls in loose, soft curls to his chin. His face stretches long for a child’s, as if the man in him is already struggling to make his way out. His arms and legs are thin and strong, although not pinched by work like my sons’ were. He pulls his head high and announces, “I am the king of cats.”
    I’ve not forgotten how to manage a playful boy. Picking up the pear by its round bottom, I wave the peaked tip at him. “A cat who hunts fruit instead of mice?”
    “Cats climb,” he says with feline pride. “I heard whistling outside our wall. When I climbed over to see what it was, a man asked if I would bring that to you.”
    I ask who the man was, as if I do not already know.
    The boy describes my strong bull of a husband to the very mole above his left eyebrow, while I bite deep into the pear. “He said to tell you that if you like that, he has something even juicier for you to eat.”
    Though I blush, the child seems ignorant of what charming filth Pietro bade him speak. “How did you know to bring this here, to me?”
    He laughs, raising both knees and rolling back. Backward out the window. My heart goes cold, the pear-flesh stuck in my throat.
    But in an instant two small hands appear on the bottom of the window-case. The child vaults himself into the chamber, turns a somersault, and leaps up. “I am Tybalt, king of cats. I climb, and I jump, and I know all that happens in Ca’ Cappelletti.” He struts back and forth like the Pope’s official messenger proclaiming the latest Bull. “That is my cousin, and you are her nurse, and tomorrow is the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, and before you go to be shriven the man will meet you, and he will give you three almond sweets to give to me, as long as you give your sweets to him.”
    “Tybalt my king of cats,” I say, careful to hide my surprise that Pietro has trusted this strange boy to bear me these naughty tidings, “how clever you must be, to keep such delicious secrets.”
    The mention of secrets sets off another round of acrobatics. “I know every hidden passageway in Ca’ Cappelletti, and which alcoves to stand in to overhear what somebody is saying.” He gives his narrow chest a proud thump. “I’ve climbed all the way to the top of our tower, as high as the campanile of Sant’Anastasia. The perch is filled with rocks I carried up myself, some as big as a man’s head, to throw on any enemies who pass below.”
    “Any enemies?” I raise the pear to my mouth, to hide my smile.
    “The Cappelletti have many enemies,” he says. “Because we are so brave and pious.”
    A man makes more enemies being cruel and quick-tempered than brave or pious. But there’s time enough for this Tybalt to learnsuch things, so I only nod and tell him I can see how gallant he is, and bid him finish off the pear as his reward.
    He takes the knife from his belt, assaulting the pear as though it has offended his honor. He carves the pale fruit-flesh with the same coat-of-arms that is painted along the corbels and patterned in golden thread into the Cappelletti linens. Neither Pietro nor I were born to families who had so much as a surname, let alone a scroll-worked crest to herald that name to all the world. But the Cappelletti coat-of-arms is a bewildering thing. Unlike most shields one sees around Verona, which feature eagles or dragons or other formidable beasts, this one boasts only a peaked