Work Text:
She went there every Friday without fail. No stone marked the place, but she had no need of a stone. She could have found her way blindfolded in a snowstorm. Every Friday, she had been there, and the turned soil had grown over with daisies and the years had rolled past.
She never let herself think that the Almighty had granted her another daughter. That would have been a presumption too far. But it was no presumption to say that she loved her charge as if she had been her own daughter – and if she sometimes thought that she loved her ladybird Juliet better than the girl’s own parents did – well, that was a thought to be kept to herself, and that way it harmed nobody.
And nobody questioned her right to weep for the child, and weep she had.
But she had no words for this grief. Three days ago they had risen to her lips all too easily: dead, deceased, alack the day. Now it was as if she had squandered them needlessly and found herself a beggar, now, when they were true.
She had thought that Lady Juliet would have no stone: she would lie in the Capulet vault, beside poor Tybalt and all the Capulets dead and gone. That would be a place a body could visit; there was no difference between the cold stone mausoleum with all its angels and curlicues and the tiny square of grass and daisies where Susan lay.
Now it was not so simple. Oh, they would lay her body somewhere; next to her husband, certainly; outside the churchyard wall, surely, though the Lord knew that church and city owed the pair of them for far more benefit than any evil they’d committed… No, it was not that. It was shame that would keep her away, shame and anger, and the memory of a flat ‘Amen’ she’d told herself she hadn’t heard.
She could have flung herself upon the muttering fool of a priest and scratched his eyes out, the left eye for his clumsy fumbling, and the right for her own jealousy. Her lamb had never lied to her before. Never. She had told her nurse every one of her fears, her dreams, her childish stories. Her sweeting, her angel, had trusted him when she’d lied to the woman who had loved her since she was a baby.
The poor child! (But she was angry with the headstrong little goose, too.) If she’d only listened she’d be alive now, married to the County (the Friar would not have breathed a word, too scared for his own skin), away from her father and set up to be as happy a woman as any in Verona in a year or so, once she’d got used to it all, and forgotten her first husband, and why shouldn’t she? It still seemed the most sensible plan; but her lady would not have it. Oh, no, and nor would she tell her old nurse so, but would run off to that bald-pated text-dribbler and swallow every word of his tangled schemes of potions and vaults and rescues. Little snake that she was! There was gratefulness, sending her faithful nurse on her lying errands. Gone to make confession? Gone to make confusion! And what had it brought her to?
Her nurse did not like to think of that.
*
They put up golden statues in the square: Lady Juliet, and her lord. That was a proper thing to do; that was a fitting thing to do. That was something that you might visit, and look at, while you wept a little. It was not a bad likeness of either of them, though it could not capture his eagerness, nor her strong-mindedness.
And it was a proper place to go, a fitting place to go. Not like that grassy spot outside the wall, where two white stones lay alone and quietly under the blue heaven, alone but for each other; quiet for the hum of the bees and the crying of the hawks. That spot where she never went, not on Friday, nor on any other day.