Cursed by a Witch, page 12
Surprisingly, it was only a few minutes of tedium before Richard was back, with old Adeline shuffling behind him, moving as fast as her old feet would take her. Adeline had been at the castle as long as I’d remembered. She worked in the kitchen, in the women’s bedchambers, cleaning the men’s bedchambers, doing the laundry--doing a little bit of everything--ever since I’d been a small child. She’d seemed ancient even back then, but the years didn’t seem to have slowed her down much. She walked with shorter steps now--so she just took them quicker.
“Bless you, child,” gushed Adeline in her high pitch quaver, “Bless you! We’ve been waiting so long for-- oh! You’re not the potter’s daughter!”
She drew up in surprise as she got close enough to see me with her rheumy eyes.
I curtsied to Adeline.
“No, I’m sorry. If there’s no job for a wet nurse, then I’ll be on my way.”
I turned to go. It sounded like the potter’s daughter had already filled the position. There might be others who would need my services--probably not as wealthy, but they could surely give me room and board in return, at least.
“Oh, no! Please stay, my dear!” Adeline snagged my sleeve with a bony hand. It was surprisingly strong for someone so old. “Our last one took terribly ill. I sent her away, since I was afraid for the baby. I’d heard that the potter’s daughter was still giving milk, so I sent for her--but that was yesterday!”
Adeline sounded slightly desperate. She pulled on my sleeve, half-dragging me into the castle. I had to drag myself back to snatch up my bag again.
“The babe has been weeping all day. I was about to send armed guards to find someone. I’m afraid the little Dukeling would have passed away had you not arrived!”
She had continued to drag me through the gatehouse and across the courtyard to the great doors at the entrance of the keep. A much smaller door, one much more appropriate to an old servant woman with a wet nurse, was placed to the side of the main door. She pushed me through it into the stony halls of the castle.
“Come quick!” she said, “There’s not a moment to tarry!”
I found I had to walk uncomfortably quickly to catch up with her. I tried to pretend I’d never been here before and had no idea where we were going, but it was quite obvious, regardless. We were going to the ladies’ bedchambers on the third floor.
I saw Edna as soon as the door came open. She was sitting in an enormous four-poster feather bed laid out with exquisite velvet and silk bedclothes. She was wearing a lily-white linen gown. Currently, one shoulder was dropped to show her left breast. She held a small pink baby in her arms, just a couple of months old. It was latched onto her breast. There was a look of pain and distraction on her face.
Edna started whining as soon as the door came open.
“Adeline!” she complained indignantly, “It’s been all day and there’s still nothing coming out! This is your fault for telling me about that tea. And what happened to that wet nurse? Is there no one in this poxy town who has had a baby die? How unlikely is that? And who is this… urchin you’ve brought me?”
With that last comment, Edna had seen me. She was now looking me up and down, her lips twisted in an expression of disgust. I was suddenly conscious of how I was dressed. These clothes had been selected to allow me to pass as a daughter of a poor farmer, so they were as rough and patchy as possible. And the hem was thoroughly soiled from walking on the dirty roads all day.
“Milady,” said Adeline proudly, “I’ve found you a new wet nurse.”
“This?” squealed Edna, somehow even more upset, “I wouldn’t let this one wash my clothes, let alone feed my baby!”
She raised her hand to her forehead in frustration.
“No, no. Baby needs food. Fine. Bring her over here.”
Adeline took my arm--as did another chambermaid coming from my other side. I hadn’t seen her there. I suppose she must have been sitting on the sofa to my side, and I just hadn’t paid her any attention.
They brought me over to the bed. I put down my bag and sat uncertainly on the edge. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do.
“Well?” said Edna, “Get your tits out.”
My face flushed red. I hadn’t expected it to be so impersonal and embarrassing. Nine tenths of me wanted to stand up and leave, but it was too late at this point. If they were as desperate as they sounded, they might well just lock me up in a room and just bring me out to feed the child. I had the wolf by the tail at this point.
I took a deep breath and slid the neck of my dress down. I had to work to get my arm out of the sleeve to get it low enough to expose my left breast.
“Ugh!” said Edna. “Can we clean that before my baby puts its mouth on it?”
“Of course, Lady Edna,” said Adeline. Her lips were pursed. She shot me a brief look of sympathy before stepping away. She came back with a clean wet rag and handed it to me.
Wiping down my breast with a rag so a bastard noble child could have a meal was a new low point in my life. I handed it back to Adeline. The other chambermaid gently picked up the baby and put it in my arms.
I looked down at the infant. It was… cute, I supposed. His fat cheeks were ruddy. His blue eyes were a little dull at the moment. He was enormously fussy. Holding him in my arms reminded me that my own baby had been taken. The depthless frustration at that gave me a sudden urge to chuck the baby across the room. I pushed that feeling down as quickly as possible.
I brought the child up to my nipple, propping up his head in my hand as I’d seen other women do. Was there some sort of trick? I’d never really done this before.
The child knew what it needed though. He opened his mouth and latched on without hesitation. It was tight, but not painful. He was sucking hard, though--it felt like he was trying to swallow my nipple. I felt a tingle in my breasts, and the milk started to flow. I curiously noted that the other breast was starting to feel a little damp as well. That was unexpected.
Adeline started beaming at me. With that, all the tension in the air relaxed. Even Edna’s arrogant face softened in relief.
It seemed like it would take a while. The baby was ravenous.
“What is the child’s name?” I asked.
“Wallerd the Second,” said Edna, twisting her face in distaste. “It was not much choice. It was my husband’s. He decided to name the child after himself.”
There was a silence for a moment. For the last nine months, I had not felt the urge to speak just to break the silence--Ethelwyn and I had gone entire days without speaking to each other, simply because nothing was needed to say. But silence in this castle, with rich tapestries hanging on the wall and busy servants everyone, seemed somehow intolerable.
“I’m sorry that your milk has run dry, milady,” I said.
“Well, I’m not.” Edna answered in a bratty voice. “I did it on purpose, of course. I can’t have my perfect breasts ruined at such a young age by a minion suckling on it at all hours. Everything was going fine until the last poxy wet nurse came down with that fever. A fever, of all things!”
Edna sounded genuinely angry. I wasn’t sure if she was angry at the fever or angry at the wet nurse.
Adeline was wringing the rag in her hands. It looked like she had something she wanted to say about that, but felt that she had to hold her tongue. I was a little surprised. Ordinarily, she spoke fairly openly. Everyone trusted her judgment in all sorts of household matters. Her long time in the castle had afforded her a great deal of respect for a servant. I’d seen her openly correct Wallis’ wife without a single word being said against her.
After a few minutes, Edna was satisfied enough to hire me.
“Go make sure that she gets new clothes and a place to sleep,” she instructed Adeline, “and have Morgan run her a bath right away. She’s filthy.”
“As it please you, milady,” said Adeline with a stiff-kneed curtsy. She shuffled off to have it done.
Edna had nothing more to say to me while her child fed. She just watched me with a slightly wary eye until young Wallerd had had his fill. After I had gingerly passed the child back to her, she waved her hand dismissively at me.
“I told them to draw a bath. It’ll be downstairs near the kitchen. Hopefully they’ll have clean clothes for you, too.”
I took my leave of her and guided myself downstairs. No one was following me around, so I did not bother pretending not to know the way.
Finally away from Edna, I was able to allow myself to react normally to the situation. I was a little upset that she had said I was ‘dirty.’ I had bathed nearly every day for the last nine months, even when the water felt cold enough to freeze me solid, and washed the dress every week in the creek.
The wooden bathtub was shaped like an extremely wide barrel. It was already most of the way full when I arrived. The air was heavy and humid. White steam rose gently from the water’s surface.
A dark, almost brown-skinned girl was pouring another hot, steamy bucket into the bath. I did not recognize her. She must have been one of the handmaidens that Edna had brought back with her. Her features were sharp and beautiful. She had straight auburn hair that fell all the way to the middle of her back, where it curled back up with a vivacious bounce. She was fairly young, as most of Edna’s maids were--about my own age, perhaps only a little older.
“Hello,” I said. “Are you Morgan?”
She glanced over at me with a wide smile.
“That’s me,” she said. Her voice was low for a woman, and smooth like dark glass. I recognized it from when I had visited the wagon with the rook. “You’re the, uh, wet nurse?”
I nodded. “Willa.”
“Good timing,” she said. “I was already drawing it for myself. Now I get to pretend not to be selfish.”
“You were going to take a hot bath by yourself?” I asked in surprise. It was an extravagant expense to heat up that much water just for one person.
She shrugged.
“Edna lets me get away with a lot. I know I should feel bad about being greedy. But I don’t.”
Morgan had a refreshingly straightforward way of speaking. I’d never heard a chambermaid be so frank before. Or anyone in the castle, for that matter. Social roles were fairly strict. Wallis had told me when I was very young that that was one of the reasons we lived in a castle to begin with, aside from the obvious occasional defense needs. We lived in a big stone fortress to show that we were a different class than people living in small wooden houses. And the way the people inside the castle treated nobility, and the way they treated each other, reinforced that we were at the top of the social pile.
One of a lady’s personal maids was definitely higher up in the social stratum than a wet nurse. And yet the way Morgan spoke--her tone of voice, her body language--all tended toward treating me like an equal. That was not how things were supposed to be done in castles. But I wasn’t going to complain. Not in my position.
“Just a couple of buckets more, if you don’t mind helping,” said Morgan, pointing through the doorway to the kitchen. I was glad to assist. I grabbed one of the large wooden buckets hanging next to the massive hearthfire. We each poured our own bucket in.
“Perfect,” said Morgan. She pulled her dress over her head unselfconsciously. As she folded it and placed it neatly on a nearby bench, I tugged hesitantly at my own rough dress. It didn’t make much sense for me to feel an overwhelming sense of modesty. I had spent at least six of the last nine months completely naked nearly all the time with Ethelwyn. But that had just been the two of us. After a while, it had been just like being naked on your own. This felt different. There were no real doors to the bathroom. Servants would be filtering in and out as they went through to the kitchen and back. This was always how baths had been inside these walls, and I had done it many times as a man. But I felt a little vulnerable.
“Don’t be shy,” said Morgan. She was standing completely naked now, her hands on her hips as she looked right at me. Her skin was equally dark all over her body, as if she had spent the entire summer naked underneath the sun. Even the skin underneath her breasts was tanned. She was curvy rather than skinny. I felt my face flush. This girl was gorgeous.
I must have been staring, because she grinned at me and wiggled her hips.
“Like what you see?” she said. She pulled her arms in to push her breasts together. It was very… distracting. “You can look as much as you want, as long as I get to see, too.”
“Oh! I’m sorry,” I said, dropping my eyes. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“Don’t be,” she said genuinely. She stepped forward and started helping me out of my dress. “I know I’m nice to look at.”
I raised my arms as she slipped the dress over my head. And there I was, standing naked in the castle myself. I instinctively covered my heavy breasts with my arms.
“Still shy, huh?” said Morgan. “That’s okay.”
She cocked her head as she looked me up and down.
“No wonder you got pregnant,” she said. “I bet you have to beat the boys off with a stick.”
“The boys beat off their own sticks just fine, in my experience,” I replied.
Her eyes widened an instant before she burst out with a very unladylike guffaw.
“Aye, that they do,” she giggled. “You’re a quick one, Willa.”
I shrugged. I had surprised myself with that joke. I realized that it was the first real joke I’d told in nine months. Something about this strange, dark-skinned girl was putting me at ease.
She placed her hands on my arms, still covering my breasts.
“Do you mind, Willa? I really would like to see.”
I nodded briefly. She lowered my arms and stared openly at my milk-heavy breasts. She stepped back and looked me over one more time from hair to feet. She gave a low whistle.
“You’re a rare beauty, did you know? Me and the other girls will have you look ravishing once we find you some clothes and work with that hair.”
I blushed and shook my head. I certainly didn’t know anything about being a beauty. I hadn’t exactly been spending time trying to make myself beautiful. I hardly knew how.
“Well, enough dawdling. The water won’t get any hotter,” she said.
Morgan lifted herself over the edge of the bath and hopped in with a splash. I followed her in. When my butt hit the bottom, the water came halfway up my chest.
“Christ’s body,” I sighed. I had forgotten how good a hot bath feels. Especially after tramping about in the dead of winter all day. It felt like a chill had set in my bones since the beginning of winter, and it was being thawed for the first time.
“I could do this every day,” said Morgan. She had a look of rapture on her face.
I nodded at her. My eyes were half closed as I basked in the pleasant heat.
“Say,” she said, “do you mind if I come around to your side? I like the feeling of sharing the tub with other people, and we just don’t have enough of a crowd yet.”
I hesitated a moment and nodded.
“Huzzah!” she smiled at me and leaned forward. She kicked off from her side of the tub. She kicked up a wall of water that slapped the top of my chest up to my shoulders, and I found a wriggling mess of girl in my lap.
“Oh, whoops,” she said, realizing that her hand had ended up on my breast. She gave it a quick squeeze before pulling away. I had the distinct impression that she wasn’t groping me by accident. She ended up resting her hand on my shoulder.
She arranged herself so that she was sitting up sideways in my lap. Her breasts were now far out of the water, almost even with my eyes.
“Do you mind?” she asked. She shot me a coy smile that made me giggle.
She wasn’t terribly heavy, so the weight didn’t bother me. Just about a minute ago, I had been shy about being naked in front of this girl, and now she was touching me and sitting on me and making me laugh. This was the kind of girl who would worm their way into your life, get you to pay for everything, and make you feel like she’d somehow done you a favor.
“I think I’m starting to see why Edna lets you get away with things,” I said.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” she winked back at me, before swiping her other hand through water and splashing me right in the face with a small tidal wave. I gasped as it broke over my head.
“You wench!” I cried out. I had to clear the water out of my eyes to see her covering her mouth and suppressing a giggle. I reached up and gave her a little push to tip her backwards, dunking her underneath the water.
She didn’t come up for a moment. She just laid with her back on the bottom of the washtub, her legs bent and sticking up over the surface of the water. For a moment, I was afraid she might have hit her head, but she then popped right back up, laughing as soon as she took her first breath.
The next few minutes were a tiny tempest of giggles and splashes as we dunked each other back and forth, wrestling around in the shallow water. I hadn’t played around in the tub like this since I was a small child. Finally, we decided to stop and catch our breath, by mutual unspoken decision. She gave me one last splash. I couldn’t help but giggle one more time.
“So,” she asked bluntly, “did your child die?”
It was a rude question, but this girl didn’t seem to care much for courtesy. I felt like I should have been upset that she had asked it like that, but I couldn’t bring myself to be made with her. She was just the kind of person who was like that.
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “But the other moth--the father decided to take him. Apparently, he had no more need of me.”
I couldn’t hide the bitterness in my voice.
“Ah,” she said with a faux worldly tone, “say no more. Married man gets a lass with child, takes it home to pretend his wife had twins. It’s a story I’ve heard a thousand times.”
“Really?” I asked. I had actually never heard of that happening before, though I was certainly happy to let her think that was the situation.
She shrugged. “It’s not unheard of.”
