Werewolf fairytales

What the baby needs

*Theo*

Fifteen minutes later, I’ve reached the far end of the gallery for the twentieth or perhaps fortieth time and am turning around to walk back the other way when the door opens and the nursemaid enters. My first thought is that she’s too young.

I sent a servant to Manchester with explicit instructions to find experienced nannies and doctors, at least two of each. The baby doesn’t need a pretty bosom to nestle against; he needs someone who can figure out what’s wrong with him.

But I walk back across the room, maintaining the same even stride with which I’ve lulled Jonas to sleep. The she-wolf doesn’t meet my eyes; she’s staring at the baby.

“Your name and your experience with children?” I ask briskly, thinking to get the whole thing over within two minutes. There are strands of bright hair peeking out from the she-wolf’s cap, and her eyes are moss green. Plus, she has an entirely delectable bosom… she would never do. She’d have the male servants at fisticuffs within the week.

She doesn’t seem to hear my inquiry. Instead, she comes straight up to me and peers at Jonas’s face. “He’s wanting water, that’s for certain.”

“Babies don’t drink water,” I say, and never mind the fact that I’ve never held a baby before this one. “Babies drink milk.” Her ignorance of this obvious truth is another strike against her employment.

She shakes her head, “If they have the collywobbles, they need water as well.”

“How much experience have you had with infants?” I can see the nape of her neck as she peeks more closely at my nephew. It’s delicate, pale, and translucent, like the finest porcelain. “Have you been a nursemaid for long?” Then, annoyed by the fact I’m looking at her neck, I add, “You’re far too young.”

“I don’t have much experience, but what I have is the right sort,” she says, looking up at me, finally. I mentally revise my assessment of her eyes: they are not the green of moss, after all, but the green of the sea on a stormy day.

I feel an altogether uncomfortable warmth in the area of my groin. I’d be damned if I would line up with the servants to ogle one of my fellow servants.

I’ve accepted long ago that she-wolves are not for me. True, I am the son of an Alpha King, albeit one in in far-off Marburg. But I was born on the wrong side of the blanket. Raised in a castle and yet a bastard… which means that I can’t marry anyone of respectable birth. And I am too educated to settle for a milkmaid who wouldn’t mind my questionable parentage.

“What sort of experience is the right experience?” I ask.

But she has bent near again and is studying the baby’s face. “I don’t like the look of him,” she says, pursing her lips. They are rose-colored, those lips.

I look past her lips to Jonas. “At least he’s sleeping,” I say. “He cried all night.”

“That’s because of the pain,” she says. “You’d better give him to me. We have to get some water in him, first thing, then we’ll deal with the milk.”

Before I know what’s happening, she slips her hands around the baby and lifts him deftly out of my arms. “Here! You can’t do that,” I say, alarmed at the very thought of Gabriel or, the Goddess forbid, Ella, knowing that I’ve allowed a stranger to take the baby.

But the she-wolf…

“What did you say your name was?” I ask.

She finishes tucking the fold of the blanket under Jonas’s face before she looks at me. “I didn’t,” she says. “I am Miss Paisley Silverheart.”

“Like the jam?” I ask. She is sweet as jam, and that part of her name suits her. I’d like to lick…

I wrench my mind away.

“Exactly like the jam,” she says, turning toward the door. “Now come along, Mr. Theodon. This baby needs water immediately.”

I stare after her for a moment.

At the door, she looks over her shoulder. “You have to show me to the kitchen.”

“Kitchen?” I echo, trying to figure out how to get Jonas from her arms without waking him. Gabriel will never forgive me. I don’t even want to think about how Ella will react. “Look, you must give the baby back to me. I promised His Highness that I, and I alone, would hold Jonas… that is, the young princeling.”

“He needs water,” Miss Paisley says. “Or he will die.” She looks down again. “I think there’s a chance he won’t live through the night, actually. Babies die awfully quickly if they don’t drink enough.”

I walk forward and push the door open before her. “Straight to the end of the corridor and down two flights.”

When we reach the kitchen, nine or ten heads swivel almost in unison. The castle’s kitchen is a vast space with a stone floor. Worktables are arrayed around the room, scrubbed to a fare-thee-well, and covered with copper pans of all sizes and shapes. It’s full of people, as always: the cook, three kitchen maids, a dairymaid, and a couple of scullery maids working at the sink to one side.

They all snap upright at the sight of me, except for Madame Troisgros the cook, who considers herself my equal, if not my better. The already complex hierarchy of castle staff is further complicated by my relationship to the prince. Even had Gabriel… who shows no such inclination… wished to keep our fraternity a secret, one of his elderly aunts regularly takes pleasure in shocking polite company by announcing that she prefers me to his brother Gabriel.

By rights, a young nursemaid would find herself quite far below the cook, though certainly above the dairymaid. And yet Paisley walks into that kitchen like the lady of the house. She unerringly puts her eye on the cook, a lady twice as broad and four times as fierce as anyone else in the room.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” snaps Madame Troisgros.

Without pausing for breath, Miss Paisley breaks into charming, if urgent, French. As all can see, she has the little prince in her arms. He needs water, but it must be special water, water boiled, then cooled. And she also needs a cloth, a clean linen cloth, to be boiled in a different pot of water, then cooled.

Madame Troisgros has the eyes, I think, of a rabid French weasel, if such a thing exists… small and rather crazed-looking. As she opens her mouth, undoubtedly to refuse, Miss Paisley walks across the kitchen to her.

“Regardez,” she says, drawing back the cover that protects the prince’s face.

Confronted by that tiny, exhausted face, Madame Troisgros flinches and points with her ladle to a chair. Miss Paisley obediently sits down. A few minutes later, an immaculate piece of linen is shown to Miss Paisley for her approval, then carefully placed in a pot of boiling water.

Even more servants begin drifting into the kitchen, although the room remains as silent as a church as everyone strives to keep Jonas asleep. The housekeeper appears and hovers in the background; two or three servants have apparently deserted their posts in the front hall as they now stand quietly against the walls. The knife boy has stopped sharpening his wares and is sitting on a three-legged stool, his mouth open.

“Stop hovering!” Miss Paisley orders me in a low voice. “Babies don’t like nervous influences.”

“Gabriel might have woken; he might be searching for us in the gallery,” I say, entirely forgetting that I generally refer to my brother as His Highness in public. Miss Paisley is that sort of she-wolf. She makes a man lose his head.

“Why not send a servant to stand outside the prince’s bedchamber so as to inform him of our location when he wakes? Meanwhile, you’ll have to take the baby while I wash my hands,” she says, and slips Jonas back into my arms with no more fuss than if she were transporting a pudding.

To me, Jonas looks worse than he did even an hour ago. The skin around his eyes is the deep blue of a bruise. His little nose stands out from his face, as if the skin has receded around it. He is an extraordinarily unattractive baby, which does nothing to assuage the feeling of pure grief and panic I feel at seeing my nephew in this state.

“It’s not too late, is it?” I hear myself saying. Everyone in the kitchen freezes.

Miss Paisley has washed her hands, and is now wringing out the cloth and dipping it in the pot of boiled, cooled water. “Absolutely not,” she says firmly. “Sit down.”

I think a bit dazedly about the fact that I never take orders except from my own brother, but I sit. She bends over and slips the corner of the wet cloth into the baby’s mouth. He sucks reflexively, realizes it isn’t milk, and lets out a pained cry. Quick as she can, she dips the cloth again, returns it to his lips. Over and over and over.

It’s a messy business. Within minutes the baby is wet, I am wet, and Miss Paisley’s dress is splashed with water. But Jonas keeps swallowing, and soon he is crying only between sucks.

“Do you know if he has had normal bowel movements?” Miss Paisley asks.

I blink. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

She turns to the housekeeper. “Mrs. Apple, could you perhaps help with my question?”

“Lily’s the one you want,” Mrs. Apple says. With a nod, she dispatches a servant to fetch the appropriate maid.

“You can’t mean that the baby merely needs water,” I say. “One of the nursemaids who was here last week said he had sciatic gout.”

“Gout? Most unlikely. I think it’s colic,” Miss Paisley says. “Surely a doctor has seen the child?”

“Yes, but he didn’t hold out much hope. He said Jonas was too ill for colic. First, he thought the baby had an intestine stone, then he suggested a quartan ague. Yesterday, he tried an emetic to clean out his guts, but it made Jonas vomit, and after that the princess ordered the doctor out of the castle.”

“She was absolutely right,” Miss Paisley observes. “The child needs more fluids, not less.”

“I sent off to Manchester for other doctors. Someone must have some medicine they can give him. The doctor planned to try Dalby Carmel next, something like that.”

“Dalby’s carminative,” Miss Paisley says with obvious disdain. “And I suppose castor oil as well.”

“His mother would be able to say more precisely. I believe he also suggested opium, but Her Highness disagreed.”

“No medicine will work,” she announces, dipping the cloth back in the pot once more.

There is a collective gasp from the kitchen staff. “No medicine,” I repeat, my heart speeding up. “But you said…”

“It’s simple colic,” Miss Paisley says. “I’ve seen it before. There’s something about his stomach that doesn’t like milk at the moment. But he won’t die of it, not unless he goes without water or milk too long.”

At that moment, the door to the kitchen bursts open and a wild-eyed apparition surges through. “How could you, Theo?” Ella cries, running to Jonas.

Miss Paisley plucks Jonas from my arms and turns to the princess, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She puts the baby straight into his mother’s arms. “Your son is going to be all right. You see? He’s not crying.”

Ella’s mouth is a tight line, and she glares as if this interloper were part of an invading army. “Just who are you?” she snaps.

“She’s your new nursemaid,” I intervene. I have already decided that Miss Paisley’s calm command of the situation is just what we need. “She gave Jonas water, Ella. And he drank it all up. I think he looks better already.”

“He’s wet,” Ella cries, horrified. “Now he’ll catch a cold. He’ll… he’ll…” Clutching her baby, she darts from the room without another word.

Miss Paisley looks unsurprised. Rather than running after her new mistress, she turns to Madame Troisgros and, in French, thanks her for her help. Then she switches to English and thanks everyone else in the kitchen. And, finally, she has a detailed discussion with Lily, the maid in charge of the nursery, about exactly what sort of deposits Jonas has been making in his nappies.

“Are they green?” she is asking. “And how do they smell?”

She doesn’t sound like someone who seems barely old enough to have her first position. I can’t stop looking at her, though: at the rose color of her lips and the way her gown, where it is wet, clings to her bosom. It’s a very nice bosom.

Very nice.

I glance around the room and discover that the servants… not to mention the gaping knife boy… have noticed the same fact. With a jerk of my head, I send them scurrying out of the kitchen.

Miss Paisley, meanwhile, is giving Lily instructions about taking boiled water to the nursery three times a day. She doesn’t sound like any nursemaid I’ve ever seen, not that I’ve seen many.

Maybe that’s what housekeepers sound like when they are young. But that idea doesn’t fit either.

She’s a she-wolf of quality, I think suddenly. Quality. I’m amazed I haven’t seen it immediately, but I know why: because I’m not English. I’d bet everything I own that she has the voice of a Luna except that I’m not quite good enough with the language to tell the difference.

But then I listen closely and I realize I can tell the difference. After all, Gabriel and I went to Oxford back when we were mere pups, before Gabriel took over this castle. I recognize the sound of her voice, the way it sounds at once sweet and a little sassy… that’s a future Luna’s voice, not a nursemaid’s voice.

I have a cuckoo in my kitchen.

In her agitated state, Ella hasn’t noticed anything untoward, obviously. And Madame Troisgros has been far too glad to find someone who speaks French to consider the nursemaid’s origins. With Lily dismissed, the cook is now regaling Miss Paisley with tales of the execrable vegetables she is forced to cook with, monstrous tubers fit only for pigs, or cochons. And Miss Paisley is nodding and sympathizing…

Like a ranked she-wolf. One who speaks French, who has undoubtedly been brought up to a good marriage.

I become aware that water is running down the inside of my calf into my shoes. There’s something about Miss Paisley that makes even a man with wet breeches hungry. Lustful. Those emotions that good servants can have only for each other… and never, ever, for the she-wolves they attend. I certainly never allow myself that sort of inconvenient desire.

Just like that, I decide not to say a thing to Miss Paisley about the question of her birth. If she’s a ranked she-wolf who is merely presenting herself as a nursemaid for some obscure reason…

well, then she isn’t for me, not for the bastard brother of a prince.

But perhaps, if I’m wrong, and she isn’t...

Not that I’m looking for a mate, of course. But during the last year I have noticed the way Gabriel likes to hold Ella’s hand, the way he sweeps his mate into his arms, the way he kisses her when he thinks no one is looking.

Back in Marburg, the king would have paired me off by now, given me to a third or fourth daughter of an Alpha, a she-wolf grateful to be connected in any way to the royal family, a she-wolf whose father would willingly overlook my ignoble birth. But here in England, I have volunteered to become my brother’s majordomo. I have chosen to run the castle, and I am damned good at it.

I’d known perfectly well what that choice meant for my future. As a servant, I am a servant, no matter how high in the hierarchy of service. I would never marry an Alpha’s daughter. And I’d accepted that, content with an occasional trip to London to meet cheerful she-wolves who are neither ranked nor servants but happy to share a bed for a time.

Content, at least, until my brother fell in love.

One night, before the baby was born, I was making my nightly rounds and recognized Gabriel’s laughter coming from the study. Thinking to find out the joke, I had my hand on the door when I heard my sister-in-law gasp in such a husky, pleading way that, disconcertingly, I realized my brother’s laughter was aroused by something rather different than a mere jest.

Needless to say, I did not go in.

Even so, I keep trying to tell myself that I have no use for a mate, given that my mate must necessarily be a servant. Ella, after all, is the granddaughter of an Alpha. She’s a perfect person to marry a prince. Gabriel is extraordinarily lucky to have met her.

There are few Ellas in the world, and none who end up paired with bastards.

But still... As I follow Miss Paisley’s admittedly delicious figure from the kitchen, I think, for the first time in my life, that perhaps I could marry a servant after all.

If the servant is like this one.