Milk Fever Read online

  Milk Fever

  Milk Fever

  a novel

  Lissa M. Cowan

  DEMETER PRESS, BRADFORD, ONTARIO

  Copyright © 2013 Demeter Press

  Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

  Demeter Press logo based on the sculpture “Demeter”

  by Maria-Luise Bodirsky

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  Printed and Bound in Canada

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Cowan, Lissa–, author

  Milk fever / Lissa Cowan.

  ISBN 978-1-927335-20-8 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS8605.O92528M54 2013 C813’.6 C2013-902295-3

  Demeter Press

  140 Holland Street West

  P. O. Box 13022

  Bradford, ON L3Z 2Y5

  Tel: (905) 775-9089

  Email: [email protected]

  Website: www.demeterpress.org

  This is for my sister, Shannon

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  BOOKS

  SOPHIE

  KING’S LETTER

  STRANGER

  HANDKERCHIEF

  LESSON

  SIGN

  JACQUES

  DARKNESS

  PAINTER

  DIARY

  PART TWO

  DISAPPEARANCE

  HUNT

  PASSAGE

  GRIEF

  VISITOR

  LIE

  MILK

  INVITATION

  PART THREE

  CLUE

  HUMAN HEART

  BEES

  MANTUA-MAKER

  PRISON

  DOCTOR

  DISCOVERY

  PISTOL

  RUMOURS

  LOCKET

  PART FOUR

  FATHER

  GROWING

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Man, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who poses the question; you will not deprive her of that right at least. Tell me, what gives you sovereign empire to oppress my sex? Your strength? Your talents? Observe the Creator in his wisdom; survey in all her grandeur that nature with whom you seem to want to be in harmony, and give me, if you dare, an example of this tyrannical empire. Go back to animals, consult the elements, study plants, finally glance at all the modifications of organic matter, and surrender to the evidence when I offer you the means; search, probe, and distinguish, if you can, the sexes in the administration of nature. Everywhere you will find them mingled; everywhere they cooperate in harmonious togetherness in this immortal masterpiece.

  – Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman

  Prologue,1787

  A PEDDLER WALKED TOWARDS ME with a bulging sack on his shoulders. He was tall, hunched, and his large, watery eyes rested in the folds of his eyelids like two fresh-cracked eggs in their half shells. He swayed from side to side as he trudged along the road, his wiry legs bent at the knee, his burden high on his back.

  “What’s your name?” he asked. Like a saucy sparrow, his eyes lit on my yellow hair, unwomanly waist and thighs.

  “Céleste,” I told him, feeling faint and barely able to speak for hunger pangs. I wondered what he might make me do for food, as it was rare to find a man who did not want something for his trouble.

  “And what are you doing out here all alone?” He wore a three-cornered hat, had light-coloured hair and his red frock coat was worn at the shoulders.

  “I am sixteen,” I replied, thinking that was old enough to be walking by myself on a country road at midday.

  Truth was, I wished my mother paid mind about where I was or what I would become, but she didn’t and so I ran away and had wandered for days. My apron was soiled from sleeping on bare ground and my plain shawl in tatters. It was clear I was very poor, but my stomach hurt too much from lack of food to care about my appearance. I prayed the peddler would take pity on me. I did not know what he was selling yet reckoned there must be some food to be had in his oversized bundle of goods.

  “Please sir, something to eat,” I pleaded, waiting for him to strike a bargain with me.

  Then, as if by magic, on top of his open sack, he laid out breads made with roots and exotic fruits, encrusted with wild white poppy seeds, anise and fennel. I had never seen breads like these before. Surely this must be the food of kings and princes from far-off lands. My eyes feasted on the sight, and I had to stop myself from grabbing one and stuffing it down my throat, not remembering the last time I had a proper meal. Yet the peddler soon showed me these weren’t only fancy breads. He held one up in his bony fingers and broke it open. The yellow bread had a thick crust on one side that was adorned with fine gold lines and curlicues. The inside was made of delicate layers, like the finest pastry. I had never tasted such sweet delights, only desired after them in the village bakery. Like the other breads, it also had straight edges and looked as though it was baked in an oddly shaped pan.

  “This contains a tragic tale of a country girl who goes to Paris and becomes a courtesan, a favourite among all manner of clergy and marquis,” he said, his wide smile revealing a set of broken teeth.

  What was this talk about stories told in breads one eats? Running my fingers over one that lay on his sack, I felt a tingling sensation run up my arm as if the bread held a special secret. It was unlike any bread I had come across, yet what else could it be? This one was nicely browned at the edges, and when I drew nearer, I saw that it had designs of birds, trees and hillsides carved into it. The peddler held the bread in his hands closer to me and I grabbed it from him, gnawing its edges. It tasted terrible.

  He struck me on the back of the head causing me to spit out what was in my mouth. Then he took it from me and smoothed the edges with his fingers.

  “These aren’t food to eat,” he said, sternly enough to give me a fright. “Do you wish to put me out of business?”

  The peddler said there were tales inside, yet no tales came out of the thing in my hand. If they had, it would have been better buried in the ground, as it was a strange kind of magic to have a thing speak. He gave it back to me and said I could keep the object, as it was too scuffed for him to sell.

  Opening it up, I saw that he had not lied about it being full of tales. Pictures of animals dressed in the clothes of gentlemen and gentlewomen spilled out of the bread and began whirling before my eyes. A princess slept in a very high bed while, from behind a tree a wolf watched a little girl who wore a red cape, a basket over one arm. The pictures delighted me and I could not stop gazing on them, the characters’ expressions, voices and stories occupying my thoughts. Though somewhat afraid of it, I held the object close to me as I walked along the road.

  Part 1

  La Salle-les-Alpes, France

  1789

  Books

  ARMANDE VIVANT HAD SOFT CHESTNUT EYES. I considered my own eyes to be cold looking. At least my mother told me that my green eyes were cold, and so I always envied women with a softer gaze. Women with eyes like that were prettier and people trusted them more. Since childhood Armande read many books, and I supposed that was why her eyes were gentler.

  Margot the midwife had dark, yet pleasing eyes. She kne
w how to read but preferred to pen recipes for her tinctures or write in her diary about the stroll she took that afternoon and what floras she observed along the way. Our neighbour Nadine had eyes blue as a summer sky. I thought the woman’s eyes were not gentle though, because she had never picked up a book. I read but had only learned when I was older. By that time my eyes had already taken on the character of a weak, unschooled girl that would define me for life. Though Armande did not agree with my views on this subject. She told me that any woman could become educated, and would appear that way to others, if she was determined enough and thought enough of herself. She taught me to read after I began living with her and her father Monsieur Vivant at their home in the mountains. I felt a growing inside my mind each time I read a book. Sometimes I didn’t understand it all, but then whatever it was that entered me began to spring roots, and eventually become me.

  I met Armande at a country estate where I worked as a servant shortly after meeting the peddler on the road. She was wet nurse for the Master’s son. Her beauty struck me: dark curls piled atop her head, her eyes both stirring and comforting. Strangely to me, she spoke and walked like a gentle lady unlike most of her profession who were coarse as tree bark. When I asked the cook about her, she explained that while most wet nurses didn’t know how to read or have a care for it, she read while giving suck to infants. Just as a gentlewoman gobbled sweet breads, pies and puddings, Armande devoured poetry, philosophy, history and botany. This, she said, made her refined, and also made the infants in her care different from other children. Everybody knows, the cook told me, her hands resting on her plump middle, when a child sucks at a woman’s teats, the thoughts of that woman are impressed upon it. If a woman has vile thoughts and cusses morning until night, then any child she nurses will have the Devil for its friend. I realized then that books were a kind of food, and that reading was what made Armande’s milk different from other women.

  Determined to uncover the wet nurse’s secrets, I would follow her skirts as she passed through an open door. Dusting porcelain figurines in the drawing room, I watched her as she sat by the fire brushing her long, dark curls with a shining silver hairbrush. She fastened the curls on top of her head, three or four strands washing over her cheeks. I hooked my gaze to her every gesture. At night I would repeat these pleasing images of her in my mind as I fell to sleep. She looked on me with tenderness as no one had before. Between chores, I tiptoed into the nursery while she slept in the rocking chair beside the resting baby boy. Just to be there. The cook told me she saw a change in the boy since he began taking her milk, curls now thick as sailor’s rope, legs strong and wiry like a boy of six. Yet that wasn’t all. The boy’s eyes were pure and wise, the opposite of his father’s. But just as I felt closer to knowing her, I learned that her time there was ending. The Master’s child was weaned off Armande’s milk and she would soon be leaving. I grew used to the wet nurse’s kindness. Her singing, smiles in my direction, laughter, and her scent. I did not want it to end. Then a miracle came to pass. She asked the Master if she could take me with her.

  “She has always been more of a curse than a blessing,” he told her, speaking of me. And so it was settled.

  Shortly after we arrived at her house in the mountainous village of La Salle-les-Alpes, she brought me to her father’s library. Monsieur Vivant was away on business and bought and sold banned philosophical works in cities as far away as Bordeaux, Marseille and Lyon. Piles of books teetered on a table and replicas of Greek and Roman statues towered over me like giants from my wildest imaginings. Books covered the walls: brown spines with gold letters, green spines with red letters, dusty yellow with words surrounded by fanciful lines. A row of tall volumes rested on the first shelf behind an enormous oak table. These were encyclopedias and reference books, she told me. On the very top of the shelves were masks from Africa and beside that, a globe of the world.

  Armande handed me a book that felt clumsy and stiff in my hands. I pressed it with all the strength I could bring to bear. She said the pages of books were made from cotton and linen rags stamped into pulp, then pressed into paper and hung to dry. I laughed at her for telling such a lie because I thought maybe she was just like my father who told tall tales to make me behave. Rows and rows of lines she called words looked odd to me. Many times I searched hard within every letter, every sound to find meaning. The letters cut my tongue as thorns on a rose bush, each one sticking to me. I could not speak the next letter until the one before it came unstuck. Soon after the word was finally spoken, my lazy tongue quit my mouth.

  Months later, the wet nurse asked me to read a passage aloud. The first line was, Bodies gliding on morning’s cloak of dew, lit up as iridescent insect wings they flew. When I came to the word iridescent, Armande said to say it slowly, one letter at a time. She told me it was from the word iris for the flower, and escent for colours of the rainbow that change as a dragonfly in the sun. Finally, when my tongue began working with me and worrying less, she asked me to say other words like deliquescent, effervescence, and florescence. These newfound words were as rare gems dug up by the wet nurse solely for me. She wrote them out with big stokes that filled a whole page. I rubbed my eyes to make the words go away, yet they only stayed there waiting for me to say them.

  In the days and months that followed, I learned to read and write well, and I learned first-hand about the miraculous effects of Armande’s milk on babies. Before, I was a mere servant watching from afar as the wet nurse suckled. Then I was part of her life, holding and changing babies, burping them, and rocking them to sleep. Armande cared for three babies during this period yet not all at once. She would also tend to others from time to time, reassuring worried mothers in soothing tones as gentle and sweet as the milk itself. First there was Jacques who she still cared for. His mother died in childbirth and Armande stepped up to nurse him without a thought about payment. Caroline came after, then Héloïse. The first time I watched from up close as Jacques drank her milk was in the drawing room.

  Armande was on her favourite oak chair with the sagging blue leather seat and worn arms while I sat on the sofa. Suddenly Jacques stopped sucking, then gazed at me knowingly, his eyes full of light. In that instant, a slim ray of sun gleamed through a crack, lighting up the darkness inside me. My hands shook. Sweat ran down my cheeks and the back of my neck. Just as she said her father sometimes described it, we were entering a new age driven by light. And I, a peasant girl whose father and mother never held a book, would be there to witness the change.

  Sophie

  BABY NATHALIE WAS CRYING. I opened the curtain around my bed and wrapped myself in a blanket to fend off the winter chill. Floorboards creaked in the corridor as I stepped lightly on the cold wood floor. Armande’s bedroom was at the end of the hall nearest the stairs. Nathalie lay in her basket at the foot of the bed. Her face was red and stained with tears, yet as soon as she saw me, and I drew her near, she calmed and was content. Downstairs Armande was in the kitchen, the fire blazing. Usually I lit fires in the drawing room and kitchen before the house woke up. That morning, although my mind wished to rise, my body had other ideas. I sat at the table by the frosted window rocking Nathalie and watching as Armande added turnips and carrots to the pot for soup. A dried bouquet of herbs hung over my head, crumbling mint and sage leaves collecting on the sill. I had picked the bouquet in the summer from our garden when all was blooming colours and sweet aromas. Yet that day, the snow was up to the window and looked as though it might creep inside.

  “You slept long,” she said with a gentle smile.

  “The morning air was so cold,” I replied. “My fingers are like icicles.”

  Her shining eyes laughed at me. She wore a deep red wool gown, the shade of roses in her garden. It cheered me to see a summery colour with the ground outside so thickly covered in snow. Jacques ran into the kitchen trailing a ball of yarn. His blonde hair was curly on top and straight at the sides just like his front teeth. />
  “Time to eat.” She placed a bowl of boiled oatmeal on the table. He sat on his chair and didn’t even notice the food in front of him as he proceeded to unwind all the yarn into a muddled heap.

  “Jacques, put that away.” She reached over his head and scooped up the yarn. “You can play after.”

  She mussed up the boy’s hair and he grinned, picked up his spoon and began to shovel the food into his mouth. Nathalie was fidgeting and started to cry again as she was hungry. Soon Armande would nurse her and she would be content, yet until then it was my task to busy her. I began playing peek-a-boo using her knitted bonnet. Her eyes lit up, then she reached out to pull my nose. Next, she pulled my lower lip over to my ear. When she first came to us she would not swallow a single drop of Armande’s milk, and instead wound her pink body into an angry knot. Then, suddenly, as if caressed by an angel, she began to draw the milk in, her tight fists slowly opening, wrinkled brow smoothing. The kitchen warmed and the windows steamed up as Armande added another log to the fire. Then she stood by the soup pot and nursed Nathalie who could barely contain her joy as she sucked greedily.

  I hurried upstairs to change out of my bedgown and had just sat down to a plate of bread and stinky cheese when there was a loud knocking. That was often how it was at our house. Women came to ask Armande questions about their infants, or because they needed help with nursing. Why does my child make a noise when he drinks? How can I get my infant to latch on? Why does she not sleep through the night? Can you take him? There was never a moment’s peace.

  And, sure enough, there was a young woman at the front door holding a small bundle. She had freckles on her nose, cheeks and forehead, and her hair was the colour of butter.

  “I wish to see the wet nurse.” She entered the house and took the cloth from the baby’s face. Its head was no bigger than a potato and wrinkles covered its forehead, cheeks and chin.