The Wet Nurse's Tale (3 page)

“What’s that you’re wearing, for God’s sake?” said the master. “This is not a fashion ball, this is a hunt, man.” Freddie’s face fell—I did not dare to peep but I could guess it. The door opened and his sisters swept in. “We’re ready, we’re ready,” they cried and then, “Oh, Freddie, what a look!” Father and daughters laughed together. Master Freddie said nothing. I finished my chore and curtsied and left them.

Later that morning I went to clean the grate in the morning room. I knocked softly and waited; Mrs. Bonney often did her lying down in there. I heard nothing and so I walked in and then stopped short. There was Mrs. Bonney on her chaise, but sitting up for once, and there was Master Freddie, on the floor in front of her, with his head in her lap, and her stroking his hair like he was still in skirts and had bumped his knee. I watched them for a moment, how she looked down at him, how she murmured to him. I recalled to myself the portrait of the two of them together, she and he, he just a mite and she young herself. My mother had stroked my own head in that very way even up til I had left the house, especially if some one of my brothers had said a mean word.

“Ah, Susan, now,” she used to say, “you should try to mind your temper. You needn’t say nothing to them when they’re bad to you. They’re just boys. They mean no real harm.” And she’d smooth my coarse hair away from my forehead and whisper, “Don’t fret, lassie. You know you’re worth ten of any of the others. You’re my pride, Suzie, you’re my darling gal.”

And I’d think how lucky I was to be her favorite of all of the babes my mother’d borne. I’d feel my luck. I wasn’t the prettiest, nor yet the sweetest-tongued, nor yet the one that made her laugh the loudest, but for all that, she loved me best, though she loved us all. For my whole life, that had made up for being lumpy and angry. I’d only have to go to her and she’d pet my head and my tears would dry. So when I saw Mrs. Bonney and her son, I understood, see, what it was I was looking at.

Over the years, the Great House gave a right many of us Roses our employment. My brother John grooms there even now. My sister Mary worked in the kitchen for some years. I served there, in several positions. And finally my little sister Ellen, two years below me. Ellen had the prettiest look of all of us children. She had a red cheek and hair as curled as ever you could wish for and if you heard her laugh, why, you wouldn’t be able to help yourself, you’d laugh back.

Ellen and I came to the Great House at the same time due to the Brown sisters, both of whom worked there and who both left for Ireland to be with their mother after their father was sent to jail for drunken behavior.

Ellen expected to work for just a year, perhaps, and save enough to marry her sweetheart, Ned Loft. They’d been in love since they were tots and were biding their time til they could save enough to rent their own cottage. Ned had always said nothing was too good for her. He wanted them to start together in a nicer house than his father’s where they’d have to share a room, even as a married couple, with his old grandma. Thus, she was happy, her face all aglow at the thought of what the shillings would mean. Mary and I were glad for her, though it will not surprise you to hear that we were a bit jealous as well.

I suited a scullery job best, being strong. Ellen caught the eye of the mistress, who asked that she serve her her morning tray and be available to her when she wanted her. This excused Ellen from much of the great labor due to that she always must look presentable. So perhaps she’d polish silver with a white cloth or perhaps she’d do a bit of mending, but she wasn’t allowed to iron lest it make her sweat, and her hands must stay white, so laundry was out of the question. If she hadn’t been such a darling, if she’d smirked at me or teased me for the great load of work I had to do, I might have lost my temper and slapped her but instead, she knew my trials and gave me a sad little look when I’d walk past her with a dripping basket.

And certainly Ellen did not just sit on her backside. The mistress needed her constantly, it seemed, to bring a glass of lemon water or to find the lavender pillow, or to cut her toenails or, when she had a cold, rinse out her hankies by hand. “Full of green, they were,” giggled Ellen, as we gossiped for the moment we were in our bedroom before we slumbered. And when the mother of the French maid Minette died, and Minette went to see her buried, the mistress required Ellen to accompany her to a ball at a house twenty miles from ours and to stay there the whole night! Oh didn’t we quiz Ellen into the wee hours when she returned.

“Well, I dressed her hair, but that’s simple because you know it’s mostly a matter of pinning the fake stuff to what’s left of the real, and I’d watched Minette do it so many times. And I helped her with her stockings and laced her corset for her and clasped her necklace. And helped her with her shoes.” Then she smiled and looked as naughty as a child. “After her corset was tightened,” Ellen said, “she told me to ball some stockings and tuck them into her chemise, underneath her tit.”

“She’s flat?” Mary whispered.

“As a wet sheet,” Ellen whispered back and then we three, all of us who have plenty, laughed til the tears ran.

The trouble began when the master saw her which he would do, goddamn him to hell. There was but one thing that would take him off his horse and that was the prospect of a different sort of ride. Mary had warned us, even before we arrived, about him. She tried to be polite about it and caught me in her glance too, but it was clear to the three of us that Ellen would be the one of us he’d choose to bother. During the first months of our employment, Ellen laughed about it, she did, because looks is all he gave her, and looks don’t hurt, really. And Ellen always thought the very best of people, bless her. I used to snap at her about it.

“How can you be so sunny, all the damn time,” I said once, “when you watched your father be the sort of man he was?”

“Oh well, Susan,” she said gently, like she felt sorry for me, like I was the ruined one instead of the wise one, which is what I really was, “the master’s not so bad.”

“He is, Ellen,” said I. “And there’s plenty like him. You have to be careful and not smile at every Tom and Dick that shows you their teeth.”

But she just looked at me, with her eyes full of love for me and of course, I melted and quit scolding her and now I wish I hadn’t. Though to be honest, I don’t know how she could have withstood Mr. Bonney in any case. He was the master; she was a maid in his house.

She thought the mistress would help her. We’d lie in our beds, Mary and Ellen in one and me in the second, on account of they said I sweated when I slept, and she’d confess to us how he’d put his hand full on her bosom over her dress or some other such indecency. One night she was rosy and happy and when we asked why, she told us that the mistress had caught sight of one of his leers.

“Didn’t she just redden,” Ellen said happily. “Now that she sees it herself, it’ll stop I know it.”

I didn’t say anything because I didn’t believe it would stop, not for an instant, and what’s more, Mary, who usually agreed with everything anyone said, didn’t speak neither. And that scared me more than anything else.

“What do you know?” I hissed to Mary when we heard Ellen’s long breaths.

“I’m not as stupid as you say, Susan,” said Mary. “I know he’s bad, and I know it’s a boon to her not to have to worry about what’s between his legs.”

“To Ellie?” I said, confused.

“No, stupid. To the mistress.”

I caught my breath.

The next morning, I waited for Ellen to come out of her mistress’s room with the empty tray, and I pulled her into a spare bedroom.

“Just say you’re sick,” I told her. “Say you’re sorry, you can’t work here and must go home because you have woman problems or pains. Pretend to faint. Break something. Do what you must, but leave this house. You must, my love. Because he’s bad and she won’t help. She’s the mistress. You must learn your place, dear. You must.”

But she only smiled at me and hugged me around my neck and kissed my red hands.

“Don’t worry yourself, Susan,” she said. “Nothing will happen to me. All will be well.”

But of course it was not. When the bell rang for her later that afternoon, she didn’t answer it. Mary and I snatched a look at each other and for a second I could see into Mary’s mind: had Ellen run? But I knew better. I don’t know why I did, but I did. I’ve always had that talent, to understand how the thing’ll be, before the facts show themselves. I knew that little Nancy would die while others were still hoping. I knew that Isaac Cray, the baker’s son, would drown if he fished so far into the river. I knew that Annie Bowen, the wife of John Bowen, would die in childbirth and that the baby would live. My own mother suckled that infant, out of pity for Annie, and never got a farthing for it.

So when later that day, we looked for Ellen and then found her up in the hayloft shaking like a dying moth, with blood between her legs and two black eyes, I felt no surprise. The groom’s boy took the horse for the doctor, who said she’d be all right in a day, but I knew she wouldn’t.

As I laid the fire in the sitting room, I heard the mistress whisper to her niece that Ellen seemed to have been in love with one of the lower grooms and that they’d fought as lovers do. I gasped and they heard me, but I pretended like I was come over coughing. I cannot even be certain that the mistress knew that Ellen and I were sisters. There’s little resemblance, and why would anyone have told her?

My father came and carried Ellen off home. Mary and I cried together all night. She came into my bed smelling of yeast from the kitchen, like she always did, and yowled til I hushed her.

“We tried to tell her, we did,” she wept to me.

My teeth were gritted so hard my jaw ached. “Why did he have to beat her, the bastard,” said I. “She was so mild, she would have been far too fearful to yell. He beat her for the excitement of it.”

“Oh, Susan, mayn’t we leave this house? May we not? Let’s run.”

“What, and spoil the chances for our brothers and sisters below us? Do you care to see little Bob alone in the fields all the livelong day?” This affected Mary as I knew it would. We have a cousin of our age who is quick to smile, but slow to understand, and his mother has long blamed it on those days in the fields where he was set, from sunup to sundown, with a slice of bread but without so much as a dog for company. Twas his job to scare the crows from the fields but he was a small boy, just five years, and just learning to form his thoughts into his words.

“When he were tiny,” his mother would tell us, crying, “bright as a star, he were, and lovely. But the farmer will not allow the boys a mate when they work in the fields like that, not even for half an hour. My Jerry, he forgot how to form his words from having no one to use them on!”

“You do not want to see little Bob turn out like poor Jerry, do you?” I asked Mary. “No, you do not. So we are trapped here. We cannot leave this house and you know it. I’d like to kill the master though,” said I, “and watch his eyes turn red with his own blood. I’d like to hear him choke like as if he had a noose around his neck. Perhaps a horse will throw him and his ribs will poke right through the flesh or perhaps . . .”

But Mary began to cry again at my words so I stopped ’em, though I thought ’em in my head all the night long.

By the time Mary and I had our half-day, Ellen had already drowned herself in the farm pond near our house. When Ned heard what happened to her with the master, as he would of course, he turned his back on her. I didn’t know who to hate more, the man who spoiled her or the man who betrayed her.

I wept til I screamed, til my eyes were squeezed shut and my throat was hoarse, and I ached like I’d been gored. My mother, bowed with losing another child, smoothed my hair but it helped not at all, though I cried for her not to leave me. I always loved my sisters, but besides Ada, Ellen was my favorite.

We poor ones don’t get time for our mourning, though we might have a deal of it to do. The day after the funeral, my father, bleary still from the extra ale he’d drunk to help him through his tragedy, handed me a shilling as if I was a child and it would make a difference. “There’s no help for it,” said he, “you must go back, you and Mary.” My mother wiped her eyes on her apron and waved from the door. And so, sniveling in the cold and gray, Mary and I walked back over the fields to the Great House.