The Wet Nurse's Tale (27 page)

Once in the night I was awakened by the door of our chamber opening very wide. I looked to see who might want me but there was no one there. When I went to close back the door, I could see nothing at all in the hallway, but of a sudden, the gaslight glinted on a puddle on the floor just outside my room. Tea perhaps? Water? Piss? I did not know what it might be, so I closed the door and went back to my bed.

In the morning, Davey awoke very early. I cooed at him and changed him and he looked at me very serious the way a tiny baby does and waved around his fists. The soft dark hair on his head grew in a swirl like the shell on a snail and one of the tops of his little ears was still folded from his sojourn inside my belly.

I looked out the window to see the weather and knew that the day would be fine. Twas autumn and very gold. I wondered about a pram and thought that it would be lovely to take Davey for a walk in the little park around the corner. He was wide awake, and I knew that he would fuss if I left him, but as I had had no dinner and not much in the way of tea, I was half-starved and wanted my breakfast. So, I swaddled him tight and carried him down the back stairs into the kitchen.

Nothing! No one up, no one getting the fire in the stove, no maid with a blacking can, no one washing last night’s dishes in the sink. Well, someone had eaten for there to be such dishes as there were, but it was not me and I did not think it was Mrs. Norval either, for the dishes were plain and very greasy with pork fat—not at all what a lady like Mrs. Norval would take in any event.

“Well, Davey,” said I quite loud, “what is this house about? Who does the work of it, is what I’d like to know?”

I bustled around, with my baby on my shoulder, getting a meal together. I laid him in a basket of soiled table linens and put that with him in it on the table so I could see him and he could see me. Then I lit the fire in the stove and then took him up out of the basket again. It felt just right to hold him as I did my work and as I could, I did. I made myself some eggs and found a piece of sausage which being very rough, I knew was not for the lady, so I took it for myself.

“First as comes is first as served, right, Davey?” said I as I fried it up. I sat at the table and ate my breakfast with him watching me from the laundry basket. I drank two glasses of ale for I was exceeding dry. Davey watched me down it. “Nursing’s a thirsty business,” I said and then I laughed for that’s what my mother would say every day when she drank her own mugful. I wondered for a minute what my father had done to her when he returned and found that I’d gone off to the Great House. Would he find out that I’d got as far as Mrs. Bonney? I did not know and neither did I care, but for her sake. I hoped again that he’d die and leave her finally in peace. When I recalled myself back to the present time, I saw that Davey was still watching me with his serious eyes and I laughed. I do not think that babies that small can see well enough to tell a pleasant thought on a face from a grim, but if they could, I would not disturb him for an instant with my own sour look.

“You are a darling, you are,” I said to him and blew him a kiss. A piece of gas or a wing of a fairy—again my mother’s voice in me—made his eyes open quite wide just as I tossed him off his kiss and that made me laugh all the more. I finished my meal with several slices of bread and butter, and then, for good measure and because there was no one there to stop me, I cut two more slices and buttered and sugared them and put them into my pocket. As I was cleaning up after myself, into the kitchen came the two maids I had seen yesterday, tying their aprons behind them. They started back when they saw me.

“What are you doing in here?” said the one named Lydia.

“I am the new nurse if you recall,” said I, still tidying up.

“You’re up early then, aren’t you?” said the scullery. “We’re just up ourselves.”

“Is it that early?” said I, for I thought that indeed it was not. “I have no clock and must use him as my timepiece.” I nodded over to the baby in the basket.

Well, didn’t they coo. “Isn’t he lovely this morning,” said Lydia.

“You brought him to the kitchen?” said the scullery, which seemed so obvious to me that I refrained from answering.

“If we’re to work together,” said I, “we should have each other’s names. Mine is Susan Rose.” Lydia told me hers, which I knew, and then the scullery told me hers, which was Carrie.

“Short for Caroline?” said I, and when she told me yes, I allowed as how my mother, who’d been a nurse herself, had once had a fancy baby called that very name. The scullery liked to hear “fancy” and her name together, and the rest of them liked to hear that piece about my past, as I’d thought they would, for it shewed them that I was not a secret-keeper, or so they thought. We became friendly right off.

Carrie thanked me for lighting the stove and Lydia asked me if I had breakfasted, which I said I had but would not say no to another piece of toast. She cut several slices and I toasted them for all of us til Davey started to whimper. I picked him out of his basket and gave him to nurse which he did very hungrily.

“Did the other nurse never bring him downstairs then?” I asked.

“No,” said Carrie, her eyes very wide. “We thought she was just shy but it turns out she was really a murderer!”

“My goodness,” I said, eyeing Lydia to see what she thought, as she was the sharper of the two. “How did you come to find out?”

“Mrs. Norval found it out! Oh, twas horrible! She had poisoned . . .”

Here, Lydia interrupted. “Now, now, Carrie,” she said, “no point in telling tales that might be true but mayn’t be.” And here she dropped her voice. “Mrs. Norval can think some strange things now and again.” She did not look at me as she said it.

As Carrie began to wash the dishes, and Lydia put together Mrs. Norval’s tray, the door to the cook’s room opened and in she came looking very mussed indeed. When she passed me on her way to the larder, I thought she smelled of brandy, but I pretended not to notice though it seemed right early for such a thing, unless she used it to wash her face in of a morning.

“Ready then?” said the cook to Lydia.

“I’d as soon get it over with,” said the maid. She looked a bit forlorn as she picked up Mrs. Norval’s tray.

“Shall I do it for you, then?” I said before I thought.

Lydia and Mrs. McCullough, as was the cook’s name, looked quick at each other. Mrs. McCullough quick stepped forward and took the tray from Lydia and gave it to me. Lydia thanked me very nicely and turned back to the baby.

“I’ll watch him for you,” she said. She picked him up and he smiled at her very broad, like indeed he did know her, so I felt that he was quite safe enough for the moment.

I wondered at Lydia and Mrs. McCullough as I climbed the stairs with Mrs. Norval’s tray. The mistress must be a right monster for them to act thus, but I had not seen it myself. Twas strange. The tray I carried had almost nothing on it, I saw: just a piece of toast and a cup of tea. No jam, nor even butter. I quick took one of the buttered sugared slices I’d taken for myself and put it on the plate and knocked on her door. At her answer, I walked in.

The lady was sitting in her bed when I carried in the tray. She made no mention that I was not Lydia but neither did she greet me. I set down the tray over her lap and poured her a cup. She picked it up and held it in her hands and then looked at the sugar-bread.

“What might this be?” she asked.

“That’s a treat for you,” said I.

“Did Cook prepare it?”

Wait a bit, I said to myself before I answered. What if she despised it for some reason and scolded the cook for my error? That would not do, for I was hard at work that the cook might take me into the circle and make me welcome.

“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” said I. “But I put it there. I thought perhaps you could do with a sweetie.”

She tilted her head at me like a bird and began to eat in very small nips. I bobbed her a curtsy and made to leave the room but then I stopped.

“Shall I send Lydia to make the fire?”

“No indeed,” said Mrs. Norval, glaring somewhat but still chewing, “it is far too warm a day as it is.”

Twas not warm, twas chilly. I bobbed and turned to leave but stopped once again. “Miss,” I said, “if you wouldn’t mind . . .”

“Yes?”

“Shall I just pick up a few of these things then?”

Mrs. Norval looked around her like as if her eyes had just been put into her head and she could finally see. She seemed surprised at the mess. “Why, yes,” she said, “thank you.”

I quick picked up the clothes from the floor and the chairs and the table and piled them onto a bench. Then I gathered the old trays and brought them into the hall. I could not imagine how many trays the house had; it seemed to me that Cook would have run out of cups and pots before now. Last, I tied back the curtains around the bed as the laces had come undone on one side and had loosened on the other.

I left her room and piled up as many of the trays as I could to take downstairs. When I brought them into the kitchen, I saw the cook and Lydia exchange a glance.

“You’re . . . all right then?” said Mrs. McCullough.

“Yes and why not?”

“She didna’ bark at you then?” said Carrie from the sink. “Once, when I brought her in her tray, she reached up and scratched my cheek til it . . .”

“Shush,” hissed Mrs. McCullough, “and back to your work.”

I wondered at their mystery, but just then Davey awoke with a wail, his face red as an apple. “How’s my little man?” said I and reached my finger down into his nappy. It was wet. The more he drinks, as my mother would say, the more he’ll piddle, and that’s a great thing for a little one, to make sure his innards are working proper. “Oh now,” I said to him, “let’s get you dry. Then we’ll see about a snack and that walk we were planning.” I nodded to them that was in the kitchen and took him back upstairs.

YOUNG GIRL’S REASON

Reader, I died. I was too young, and very slender, and my hips couldn’t stretch enough to let the baby out. It was, I daresay, as painful a death as could be. Twas a sea of pain, which I say though I’ve never seen the ocean. I had a brother as went to sea, but as he couldn’t write and none of us could read, we never did hear from him again. He may be dead and at the bottom resting with the fishes. I cannot say where I am, but it is pleasant enough—neither too warm, nor too cool, and I’m never hungry the way I was sometimes when I lived my days on earth. I was taken by a horrid man in a filthy alley in Leeds that smelled like piss and shit, and when I went to my mother and cried, she cried too and told me that the same had happened to her and that’s how she got me.

When the baby was being born, I shrieked for three days before I died. At the end, I felt as if I floated above my own cot and I could hear the strength of my screams weaken. It made me sad to think that I’d never see my mother again. I died with the baby still alive inside me and the midwife took her knife and slit my belly and took it out. I looked down and saw the top of the baby’s head: bruised almost black with the banging against those bones like they were a door fast shut and its head was knuckles.

After I died, my mother took it to the church and left it as she certainly had no love for it for having killed me. I wanted to follow her home and watch her while she wept for me, but somehow I could not leave the baby, though I cared nothing for it. I watched the reverend take it to a woman as already had a cradle in her kitchen and then I watched as that woman brought it, by public coach, to a woman she called Mrs. Rose.

The woman gave Mrs. Rose some coins, though not many, and then left the baby. Mrs. Rose seemed too old to me but as soon as the woman left, she sat in a chair and opened her shirt. I watched her suckle the babe a bit, but as it mattered little to me what happened to it, I left as soon as I was able and returned to my own mother.

Twelve

A
s I settled into a routine at Hampstead Street, two things became clear to me. The first was that Mrs. Norval was mad and the second was that I was trapped.

Here’s the second first. I had only planned as far as getting myself back to my baby, which I had done. Indeed, it made me proud that I had been able to do it, despite my terrible journey. Having done what I set myself to do made me feel like that Judith in the old book, like I would not shrink from any horrid thing at all in my mission. But now that I had my darling, I saw that I had acted in haste and left the next steps unconsidered.