The Wet Nurse's Tale (2 page)

Yesterday, Mr. Chandler brought his own mother up to see the babes. The boy was at the breast and the girl asleep in her cradle. The lady stood very straight and looked at the baby in the cradle without a smile and then came up to look at the one at my breast. She sniffed like there was a dirty nappy though there wasn’t. Then she fixed her eye on me, and if I’d been a shrinker, I’d have felt like a mouse in a field with a hawk overhead.

“And how do they do, Nurse?” she asked me.

“Rightly enough, ma’am,” I says. “The girl’s thirstier than the boy, but the boy cries off the breast.”

“Well, see that you don’t spoil him,” she said just as if we hadn’t been getting along fine without her for this week. “It’s good for him to cry. How long has he been on just now?”

“He’s not really suckling right now, ma’am,” I said, “he’s more dozing, the pet.”

“Well, take him off, then.”

We’re used to obeying straightaway, of course, but I’d been alone for all the day without a word to no one and forgot myself and so before I thought I said, “Oh, but this one needs the breast to help him . . .”

Well, didn’t she near rip that baby out of my arms, though his little mouth was still working at being roused by the talking, and there was my dug out and me hurrying to cover it and the baby wailing and Mrs. Chandler that was Mr. Chandler’s mother briskly putting him in his cradle, none too gently.

And where was Mrs. Chandler the wife, all this time? Just looking out the window as if maybe there was a horse downed in the street.

“There,” said the old Mrs. Chandler, “that’s how we do it in town.” And then to me, “Mind your place, girl.” And didn’t she just blow out of the room like a high wind with Mr. Chandler and Mrs. Chandler his wife right behind her. I waited for a moment, and then I walked outside my door like to stretch. When I heard nothing and saw nothing, I went back into the room and picked them both up and put them in my lap and rocked them til they slept again.

Later that night, Mrs. Chandler, and by her I mean the mother of the babies, this time, came up to my room to pretend to look at them, swishing around like, dipping a look into the cradle and then right back out.

“He’s asleep, I see,” about the one in the cradle, said she as if she didn’t much care, but neither did she leave. Instead, she walked around the room with her candle held high, not looking at the babies, though there wasn’t much else to see, was there? I asked myself what she could want, though I thought I knew, pretty well. Ladies’ll ask things of us milky-cows they couldn’t bear to broach with one of their own, see.

“Mistress,” I said to get her started, “this is a nice little family you have here now, isn’t it.”

“Yes,” she said, though she glared at me for talking first, “but it’s all I want for a while. It was difficult . . .”

“Aah,” I said. “Did you have a hard time of it, poor thing?”

Her face changed for just a flit. “Yes,” she said, “I thought I’d die . . .” but then, afore the sentence was even yet finished her lip got hard again. “That’s all I want for a while,” she repeated, and this time she looked at me like she wanted something, and right now.

I looked down at the head of the mite at my breast. “I’ve heard about lemons,” I said low, almost whispering.

“Lemons?” she said.

“Cut ’em in half, mash the pulp soft,” said I, carefully not looking at her, “and then, you know . . .”

It took her just one second, but then she understood. She didn’t thank me, nor did she cast another glance at the little boy in the cradle before she left.

My own mother is a little wisp of a thing, and for all that, she bore thirteen children, ten of whom lived to see two numbers in their years. I had a brother who died of being kicked to death by a horse, and I had a sister who died on the childbed with her first. Losing Ada was terrible on my mother and partly because she catched the baby herself, but it died too. My mother has seen many babies come into this world but never, she said, never had she seen as much blood as there was with Ada. It ruined the mattress, and soaked the floor under the bed, so that it had to be cut out and replaced. I loved my sister. Childbirth is a dangerous business and that’s why it’s such a joy when all goes well.

When we were young, our father was not a bad man. He would use what he made to pay the rent and buy us food and shoes, and he’d carry us about on his shoulders. The bottle led him astray, though, and he became a harder man than he might’ve otherwise been, though perhaps he’d have turned bad in any case. Tis hard to know for sure. At any rate, twas my mother kept us fed long after there was any of us at the breast.

And thus it was that there was always an extra babe in the cradle by the hearth, whereas my own brothers and sisters might sleep in a plain box like a kitten. Indeed, we older ones, especially us girls, made the paying babies our special pets as they had finer things than did we. I recall a sweet little lass all the way from Leeds, with the softest lawn bonnets you might wish for, and a funny little fellow whose own mother brought him to mine and wept when she laid him in her arms.

“Oh, Mrs. Rose,” the lady cried, “he’s the only one I’ve put out to nurse and I do regret it deeply, but it must be so. Please, watch him with care and by all means, do not let him fall into the fire!”

“I’ll watch him like he was mine,” soothed my mother, but it did not help the poor lady to hear it and she wept as her husband helped her into the coach. She left us with many prayers that we would love him, as well as a pudding of some sort, and I ate very much of it.

I was always a good girl. I am neither the youngest nor the eldest of the children in my family but stuck right in the middle, right between John, who grooms for Mr. Bonney at the Great House in Leighton, and Ada, who died. When I was very little, our father worked his own fields and did a bit of this and that on the side. But when it was no longer enough to keep us, he went to the Great House and worked there: in the stables and gardening about and also some in the fields hisself. He is a big man with a full head of black hair and the bluest eyes you could ever hope to see. I inherited his blue eyes but also his stout posture, my misfortune. Ada stood more like my mother, like a reed in the wind, she was. Once, when my brother Georgie teased me for the wideness of my leg, I grabbed him and nearly broke his nose before he screamed for his brothers to help him. Now, as I think of slim Ada in the ground with her babe in her arms, I understand what my body’s for. My bosom is as deep as all the oceans and my hips as wide as the fields and now, with no brothers around me to laugh, I sometimes feel pride, though I know it’s a sin.

When I walked into the Great House for the first time, the cook told me to close my mouth else I’d draw flies into it. I was that amazed. On her afternoon off, my sister Mary, who worked in the kitchen there, had told of the carpets and the silver and lace on the underdrawers. What I did not expect and Mary, the goose, did not recall to us, was the pictures on the wall. As I scrubbed the floor or did my scullery chores, ofttimes I’d sit back on my haunches and gaze up at a field with horses so real it looked like they’d pull a cart up a hill, or a lady with her hair dressed in the old way, with that same round eye as my mistress had, looking back down at me. When, one night, I praised the pictures to Mary, she swore I was making it all up. I thought not to tell her she was stupid; she seems to feel her witlessness and also, to be charitable, they’ve not exactly given her a grand tour of the house. She’s mostly peeling potatoes under the eye of the cook.

One day, as I polished the banister of the main staircase with a cloth finer than anything I’ve ever had against my own skin, I chanced to see a picture I’d never before spied. I polished my way close to it. The picture was small in size, really no larger than one of their table napkins that I’d ironed just that morning, unfolded. Twas a picture of a young woman with a baby, a fat baby, with cheeks as red as the lady’s sash. It was a dear picture, and though I know my place, I wondered how my mother might have felt about it if she had a picture of one of her poor dead ones, just to help her remember their little faces.

“That’s the thing of it, Susan,” she’d sobbed to me when little Nancy had just died not two days old, born too soon, “their features are so muddy yet, they’re hard to stick in my mind.”

Gazing away, I didn’t even hear the footsteps masked as they were by the rug’s pile. There was a sigh, I whirled.

“Beg pardon, sir,” said I, and bent right over my work once again. Invisibleness, Susan, that’s the key, I told myself, and, looking down, I scrubbed at that banister, til I saw his boot in my way. I knew he’d seen me looking. There wasn’t any hiding it. What was I to do but bob my curtsy? I hoped to keep my place and not be sent home in shame.

“You were looking at that picture?” he told me.

“Yes, sir, I’m sorry, sir. I . . .” and then I trailed my sentence off. I had no excuse for looking, I knew. I wondered what could be the harm of it, but I know my place.

“The lady’s my mother. The baby’s myself.”

I looked up at him in surprise. Why, Susan, I told myself, what’s he telling you things for?

He was not a pretty young man, Freddie Bonney, his beard all in patches and a nose like a box, too stout and a dandy in any case. I’d washed his underdrawers just that morning and wrinkled my nose: they were stitched small enough, but stank for all that.

I knew better than to give him any reply but I couldn’t help it that I smiled a bit; he gazed at the picture just as I had done, but with a wrinkle in his face, as if he were trying to find the unsightly thing he’d become in that innocent smile in the paint.

Here’s the thing of it: I knew his feelings for I’d felt ’em. I’ve told you: I’m plump and red myself, but as a lass I was as sprightly and sweet a thing as ever you could hope to see. And I sometimes wonder where she went, that girl, especially when I look down at my hands all wrinkled and red from the soap, or my legs, with their black hairs.

The master of the house was Freddie’s father, James Bonney. Mr. Bonney hunted a great deal, even in the roughest weather, and we servants would run to pack hampers and linens for the master’s picnics, as he called them. Once I heard a guest of his, a gentleman down from London, say to his lady, “Surely he doesn’t expect us to shoot in this weather?” She looked over at me clearing away their breakfast and nudged him none too kindly with her sharp little elbow. That let me know they’d not had money long: the ones born into it forever never cared what they said in front of us.

Mistress Bonney was planted on a settee, and if she could have never raised herself from her seat, she never would have. She’d been pretty, which you could see easily enough: her blond hair still curled and her step was small, but myself, I never preferred that weak look. I liked the young girls of the house, Freddie’s sisters, who laughed and ran, though their mother begged them to act like ladies. They did as they pleased though, and rode horses fast and stayed late at their entertainments, both summer and winter, escorted most often by a cousin of theirs, Miss Anne, when she could keep pace with them. I’m not sure Miss Anne was any older than Miss Maria Bonney and Miss Eliza, but her pursed lips and plain dress gave her situation away and some of the servants treated her slightly shabby. Not me. I felt for her, though for all that, she never cast a kind eye upon me.

As much as my master loved Miss Maria and Miss Eliza is as much as he disliked his own son. Twas too bad, really, because it wasn’t Master Freddie’s fault that he wasn’t born to the horse and that he couldn’t care a fig about a fox or a dove. He took after his mother: he liked a warm place, he liked a comfortable chair. She fed him sweetmeats when Mr. Bonney wasn’t looking.

Very early one morning, the master and Master Freddie walked into the breakfast room whilst I still set the fire, and by their leave, I continued with my work. The master snorted and then I heard him say in a voice that curled my toes in my shoes for fear I’d hear it aimed at me one day, “Don’t trouble yourself, Frederick. Your sisters will be happy to accompany me.” He laid hard on that word, “sisters.” Freddie said, “But, Father, I’ve been looking forward to it. I’m all dressed and ready, as you see.” I snuck a peek and catched the father look at the son all up and down. It is true that Master Freddie had chosen a strange, large plaid for his hunting clothes, but I knew from hearing his valet talk as he pressed the suit that it was perfectly in style.