Elizabeth nodded.
Mrs. Harrington said to Mrs. Fairhope, “That is why you should not feed the child from your own breast.”
“No, no! I could never have turned my own blood away. My darling boy, crying for his momma.”
“Hear, hear,” Lady Evelina said. “It has always been my opinion that there is something wrong with a mother who sends her child immediately to the wet nurse. Having a woman around to feed them at night so we can sleep is one thing, though I never did, but to simply not feed them at all, not in the way God intended. I cannot countenance it.”
Mrs. Harrington’s lips went thin, and she replied sharply, “You were not requested to countenance it. What matters is that the child is fed, and it does not matter if it is done by hand with gruel and boiled milk, if it is done by the wetnurse, or if you do it yourself.”
“It is at the breast that a child properly learns to love her mother,” Lady Evelina replied, “And without being fed at themother’s bosom, that sacred bond betwixt the mother and her beloved child will never form as it ought to have.”
“Fusty nonsense, and pernicious as well,” Lady Matlock said. “My children love me perfectly well, and I sent them all off to foster with a woman in the village from when they were old enough that we were sure they would not die. It was what we all did in my day. This recent notion that some have developed that a woman must feed the child from her own breast, lest she be accounted a poor mother, is an overturning of our old traditions.”
“That people have always raised children in a particular way,” Lady Evelina replied, “does not mean that it is the best manner in which to do so — surely you do not think that raising them by hand, as those Quakers do, is ever so good as the milk of a mother?”
“I have been told,” Lady Matlock replied precisely, “that if the milk is treated properly a child will grow just as strong and as healthy as they do from the breast. And I’ve heard of a great many children for whom a goat was used as a wetnurse. You are a devotee bowing deep before this modern cult of nature, within which if a thing is ‘natural’ it is superior. What is generally superior is the old traditions and ways of doing things, not ‘nature,’ look to the cannibals and the savages if you wish to see nature.”
“Besides,” Mrs. Harrington said, “you can have more children if you do not suppress the monthly bleedings by nursing. How else would I have nine darlings, all healthy, when I am not yet five and thirty?”
Most of the women turned to her and stared as though she’d said something most odd. “Why would youwish,” a woman whose name Elizabeth could not quite recall, but who was the youngest in the room except for Elizabeth herself, “to be exposed to the risk of birth on more occasions than necessary?”
“I love my children, and I like to have as many of the little creatures around as I might,” was Mrs. Harrington’s reply.
“Is it not more difficult to see them all established in the world?” Elizabeth asked. “My father had five daughters and an entailed estate, and preparing portions for us all was not a task he enjoyed.” She then flushed.
They all surely knew that her father had not in fact prepared a good portion for her.
Mrs. Harrington waved dismissively. “Things work out, they have a way of working out — besides, had your mother had nine children, likely one of them would have been a son to take the estate.”
“I still say,” Lady Evelina insisted, “that a woman, if she at all can, ought to feed her own child. Mrs. Darcy, for your own sake, and your children’s, promise me that you will put them to breast.”
“Ah,” Elizabeth said, a little unsure, and not quite happy at such a demand being made to her. “I have not thought on the subject, though my mother gave all of us to be suckled by a nurse in the village, like Lady Matlock said she did. We are five girls, all healthy, so whatever can be said against the use of a wet nurse, it will not harm the child if proper care to find a trustworthy woman is taken.”
“I do not speak of the healthfulness of their bodies, but of their souls,” Lady Evelina replied. “I am wholly convinced no child who is not given suck by her mother can love their mother as they ought.”
Lady Ravenswood said, “I did not nurse my first two daughters, as we hoped to have an heir quickly. But when my son arrived, I could not bear to not nurse him — he was ill you see, and I feared he would die — and in the end, my daughters love me twice as much as he does, though he was the one I gave suckle to.”
After she said that, and as Lady Evelina opened her mouth to argue again, Georgiana came into the room, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. As they greeted her there was an instant change in the conversation, and questions of child rearing, and even more of childbearing did not return to the conversation.
Elizabeth realized that had been the difference in the tone of conversation. All the women in the room had been married, and they talked as married women, referring to matters that unmarried maidens ought to know nothing about. She had now been initiated into the secrets of womanhood, and as a fellow devotee at the altar of marriage, they could speak of the secrets of the order.
Georgiana had not yet passed through that gate, and hence no one but her mother, or some other close female relation, was permitted to speak to her in any detail of the tribulations and joys that followed entry into holy matrimony.
Over the course of that day and the next few, as she presided over the table at the feast following the hunt, played duets with Georgiana, sang Christmas songs with everyone, Elizabeth noted something odd in herself.
She was happy, or at least busy in sufficiently pleasant ways for it to not make a difference.
Also, the morning nausea had not gone away, and her breasts were in fact more tender than she could ever recall, though fortunately she was not suffering, at least not yet, in the way Mrs. Fairhope had.
On the fifth day of their stay, at which point Elizabeth was wearing the same dress for the third time of their stay, Lady Susan and Lady Matlock looked at each other, and Lady Susan then asked Elizabeth quite seriously while they sat in the drawing room as the gentlemen were out riding, “It is odd to see you wearing the same dress so many times.”
“I like this dress.” And that was true.
Lady Matlock waved that away as an irrelevancy. “You will start rumors that Mr. Darcy has not given you any money. It is not a good policy.”
“What is not a good policy?”
“Your determination to use a cheap modiste, and to only have a tiny number of dresses for one in your station. You are no longer the daughter of a man with many children and limited money, you should not dress like you are.”
