Juliet's Nurse by Lois Leveen

Author:Lois Leveen [Leveen, Lois]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical, Adult, Romance, Paid-For, Retail, Amazon
ISBN: 9781476757445
Amazon: 1476757445
Barnesnoble: 1476757445
Goodreads: 18773488
Publisher: Atria
Published: 2014-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

Nurse wake?”

Juliet buries a tear-streaked cheek against my neck. Beyond the curve of her head, I see Tybalt, crouching with a worried stare. Above him dark lines mark out a low-curved ceiling, the paint an eerily familiar hue. Too somber for Ca’ Cappelletti, and the hard stone digging flat against my back tells me I’m not in bed. Before I can ask where we are, why we are here, a hand reaches over from my other side.

“It is well you are awake, my child.” Friar Lorenzo’s touch is icy as he marks a cross upon me.

It all rushes back, every wretched thing the blessed faint let me forget. “Nothing can be well. Not without my husband.”

The Franciscan unfolds himself. Standing on the step above the landing to the lower church, he speaks down to me. “If Pietro is in a better place, we must be glad for that.”

“Po go way?” Juliet asks. “Like Rose-line?”

The friar tugs at one of his great ears. Waiting, wanting me to say it. But I’ll not.

“Pietro’s dead?” Tybalt’s two words explode against the arched ceiling. They shiver down the walls, rumble across the floor, and crawl up my spine, to pound between my eyes.

“Yes, my child,” Friar Lorenzo says. And then, because what holy man does not love to hear himself speak, he adds, “This life is but our bitter passage to the next.”

Juliet burrows tighter against me, though surely my little one cannot know what he means.

“Shall we pray for Pietro now, as I do my father? Or must we wait until the funeral?” Tybalt’s voice breaks, then settles into the careful rote that years of his tutor’s beatings have taught him. “My father’s funeral procession had eight horses, and wound through the city for an hour, and his Requiem Mass was said in the biggest church in Mantua.” He sits straighter in his mourning cloak. “How many horses will Pietro have, and how long will we walk?”

“Such processions are only for rich men,” I tell him. “The bishop does not open the Duomo doors to bury one as poor as my Pietro.”

Friar Lorenzo hisses at my sacrilege. “Rich or poor, every loss we suffer is God’s will. He gives us mortal life that we may pray, and do good, and earn our eternal place among the righteous.”

What place have I earned, refusing my husband what he begged of me: that I live with him as a loving wife should? Did he hold out hope that I was coming home? Or did he die knowing I’d determined to stay away?

Did Pietro rush at some swift-bladed ruffians because I’d left him, even left it to Friar Lorenzo to tell him I’d chosen Juliet over him?

I twist onto my side, my arms cocooning her against me. This is my comfort, and my curse: to choose this child, the single salve for all I’d lost. Not realizing I’d lose yet more.

Friar Lorenzo lays that icy hand upon the back I’ve turned to him. “What’s tomb is—”

“Doom.” I cut off his holy platitude with my hard-learned truth.

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