Page 18 of Much Ado About Mistletoe
“Where’s Baldissere?” I asked her.
“Marcellus said he went right to Casa Montague to reassure Susanna. Good man you pushed at your sister.”
I smiled the smile of a successful villainess. “My evil scheme is working!”
Nurse laughed at last.
When I looked up, Lysander had vanished.
CHAPTER TWELVE
When Cal and his men returned, Friar Laurence and I bandaged up their various injuries. That included two broken fingers for Dion, a burn on the back of Holofernes’s neck caused by an explosion of fiery embers, and Marcellus, whose ribs had been broken by a falling structural timber.
Cal, miraculously, had taken no harm, but Friar Laurence insisted he sit down and show the good monk the place on his breastbone where only a few weeks ago he’d received a sword thrust that could so easily have been fatal. To my chagrin, a crowd of women gathered to watch avariciously as Cal’s chest was revealed. Honestly, it was St. Lucy’s Eve! Didn’t these people have someplace else to be?
When Friar Laurence allowed his gaze to wander up and observe the avid faces, it seemed that indeed, they did have someplace else to be. Women suddenly remembered what needed to be done to feed their families, to clean their clothes for mass, to do all the duties they’d left undone while they helped save Verona.
The food ran low. The sun began to set. The square emptied as all Verona returned to their homes and churches for the first magical event of the Christmas season: the arrival of St. Lucy and her donkey with her gifts for the children.
Friar Laurence frowned at the small, deep wound on Cal’s breastbone over his heart. “It could have used another moon cycle of healing before you stepped in to fight a fire, but this won’t kill you.”
I craned my neck to see. After Cal’s fight on the battlement—to save my life—it was me who removed the small silver knife tip from his skin and placed the stitches in his wound, and I was curious to see the healing.
But Friar Laurence glared at me as if I were the same as the impious women who lusted after the prince of Verona. Sure, perhaps I’d had my moments of illicit passion (incited by Cal himself), but shouldn’t I be allowed to examine my own work? How wrong could it be to view the chest of the man with whom I would be bound in holy wedlock in a little more than a week? (St. Lucy’s Day is December 13, the marriage ceremony is the first day of winter, usually December 21…You do the math.) It’s not as if I got a licentious reaction to the magnificent and manly structure, to the muscles that rippled beneath the dark skin and sparce curling hair that dusted his…
Never mind.
The Montague family staff was packing up, and I went to help. We had an evening and a meal at home waiting for us.
I turned to tag along Evella. “Do you wish to come to stay with my family until the orphanage is livable again?”
“No.”
I blinked as she left me standing there while she ran into the crowd and disappeared!
Nurse huffed, “The ingratitude of the child!”
Evella reappeared holding the dirty, squirming three-year-old with blond hair and dark lashes. “Takehim.”She thrust Anton Maria at me.
Nurse grabbed him.
The boy wailed.
Evella scowled. “He’s Anton Maria. He’s sturdy and strong. He has teeth, he speaks well, he’s handsome, he takes orders most of the time, he’ll train up to be an obedient servant.”
The way he was struggling to go back into her arms, I doubted that. “I know he’s your charge.”
“Yeah. So?”
“You’ll have to come along to take care of him. We have too many in our household already and”— I glanced around at the number of children my family had herded like stray chicks into a flock—“already we’ve collected too many more.” I walked away and didn’t look to see whether she followed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Montagues made it home with only one small baby, a skinny, ugly, wailing newborn infant, found yesterday in a slops pail outside the orphanage door. Nobody wanted her, and between Mamma and our wet nurse, the child would be fed.
All the other babes from the orphanage were more than three months, plump and smiling, and the other citizens had been unable to resist. I wondered how many of those children would charm their way into a permanent home.
The Montagues had also acquired three four-year-olds (their primary word wasNay!) a five-year-old thumb-sucker, a six-year-old who stammered and, unsurprisingly, Evella and Anton Maria. They all needed to be fed, washed, clothed, fed again, and put to sleep somewhere.
