Page 6 of Much Ado About Mistletoe
He turned me to the right toward the booth where Ezio stood with his daughter in his arms. Little Valentina lived up to her name, a sweet charmer of two years who, at a word from her father, held out a small bouquet of dried flowers toward me.
I suffered a further moment of confusion before I smiled in return, stepped forward and accepted the gift. “Are these for me, Valentina?Grazie, bella!”So they were, if slightly crushed from her chubby grip, and not as beautiful as the child’s blossoming smile.
“Bow to the princess,” Ezio said to her. She bobbled her head, and her father bowed his head, also. “For our new princess.” He turned his attention to Cal. “We are delighted with your choice, my prince.Moglie a buoi dei paesi tuoi,eh?”
An adage repeated by many men, it meantWives and cattle from your own locality. As if women and cattle were one andthe same, valued for their familiarity and the ease with which they could be put to work.
I did not appreciate such a sentiment, and Cal must have known it, for his fingers tightened on my waist. “Lady Rosaline is as exotic and delightful as a breeze blown off the Adriatic.”
Ezio looked puzzled at either the words or Cal’s excessively pleasant tone.
A woman’s voice called, “Princess!”
This time I recognized someone was calling me. With a last touch to Valentina’s soft cheek, I turned to look to the left side of the aisle. Signora Ginevra, always a savvy merchant of odds and ends, stood beside her booth, holding a hammered silver tray bearing a mortar and pestle embossed with the insignia of a golden lion, a variety of colored pottery jars with stoppers, and weights and scales, all ideal for someone who works as an apothecary apprentice.
The crowd yielded to me as I made my way across to her booth.
“I found these in the market in Padua,” she said, “and on seeing the lion’s insignia immediately thought of your upcoming nuptials with Prince Escalus of the House of Leonardi.”
“Oh!” My hands hovered over the offering. “How lovely. How practical! Different colors for different herbs within. An easy way to inventory the concoctions Friar Laurence has taught me. The mortar and pestle—how thoughtful and representative of all of Verona. The weights and scales…”
You’re thinking…what is this woman babbling about? What gentle female cares more for a child’s smile than a bouquet of dried flowers, and grows ecstatic about a chemist’s tools?
Imagine, if you will, being a tonsured monk who in his lonely cell daily labors over parchment and ink, copying the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans, apostles and martyrs, and one day is shown into a shop full of bright and gilded paints, of minkbrushes and fine papers. All the parts of him that loved what he did…exalted in these riches.
That was so me. To tend the injured and sick was my avocation. I hid behind the ample expertise of Friar Laurence, and he depended on me because I learned quickly, because I was good at diagnosing and treating, and because he could shuffle off a lot of the day-to-day grind on me. And by grind, I meangrind. A lot of the work I did was boring; a girl can only pulverize so many herbs before she started planning mischief like pretending she forgot the delicious meal she’d packed for Friar Laurence.
So show me a pretty mortar and pestle, and my heart went pitter-pat. Add in color-coded jars that would gleam in the dim light of Friar Laurence’s shop and I was almost salivating.
From the stall beside us, Lazaro the gravestone carver, a man of rude strength and ruder words, honked with laughter. “Ginevra, you’re a fool. Lady Rosaline is going to be the princess of Verona. She’s not going to soil her pretty hands tending sick people anymore.”
Ginevra flushed.
I glared.
Before I could let fly with hasty words, Cal intervened. “What better person to heal the sick and comfort distressed women than the princess of Verona? Such compassion brings honor to the House of Leonardi.”
I did not say,Ha!to the obnoxious carver, but I thought it loudly.
“Of course, of course.” Lazaro shot me an irritated glance, as if I was the one to contradict him, but to the prince he bowed and scraped. “She shall do whatever she likes until the babes come, eh? That’ll settle her down. It always works. No man wants a feisty wife!”
Cal must have signaled his bodyguards, for suddenly Holofernes and Dion each took one of my arms and hustled me along to the end of the aisle at the far end of the Piazza dei Signori.
“You must give Prince Escalus a chance to bargain with Signora Ginevra. He’ll wish to give you a gift on St. Lucy’s Day.” Dion spoke in soothing tones.
But Holofernes chuckled, and when I glared, he chuckled more. “If you could have seen your face!” Eleven years ago, during the Acquasasso uprising, he’d been the companion of Escalus and therefore imprisoned in the deepest dungeon with him. While a trace of the darkness lingered in Cal’s self and soul, Holofernes had ostensibly rejected the painful past, and found laughter in all things. Especially me, it seemed.
I knew how to treat a mischievous cousin, so I socked him in the arm.
He flinched and stumbled sideways, and grinned at me as if I were indeed a mighty pugilist.
Cal and Marcellus caught up with us as we rounded the corner by the fountain. “You must be careful with Holofernes,” Cal told me. “He’s delicate and unused to violence.”
The four warriors guffawed in manly humor, and I realized I rather liked being a part of their unique confederation.
Beside us, a man bellowed, “Thief! Tramp! Heathen!”
CHAPTER FOUR
