Free Signora Da Vinci by Robin Maxwell

palm to my milk-wet bodice. “These are my cries for him !”
    The two wives, far from understanding my womanly pleas, looked wholly scandalized. But Antonio’s overblown hubris had finally been pricked by my words.
    “You will live as the other servants,” he commanded me, not daring to meet his father’s eyes. “You will speak to no one in the family unless you are spoken to first.”
    I could see the older man spluttering, speechless with rage at his son’s decision.
    I swallowed hard. This was to be more demeaning than I had imagined.
    “You will—”
    “What if I need something for Leonardo, or if he is—”
    “Are you deaf, young woman!” Antonio thundered, clearly unused to a woman’s defiance. “I have told you never to speak first!”
    I remember feeling the stone floor under my slippers, and a kind of earthly strength that rose through my feet and legs and straightened my spine. I knew I was about to suffer a long and terrible indignity, but I would first have my say.
    “If all is well with my son,” I pressed on, “I will have nothing to say to you, signors.” I looked at Piero. “Or you.” I briefly lowered my eyes, acknowledging the women of the house, then went on. “But if he should take ill, or have need of this family in any way, I will speak to anyone I please about it.” I looked at Antonio again. “I am your grandson’s wetnurse now, a servant in your house. But I am not your slave.”
    Antonio looked indignant, ready to lash out at the impudent girl standing in his dining room.
    Before he could speak again, I added, “I want to see my boy. Please.”
    That was how it was decided.
    I was taken upstairs to a fine bedchamber, where Signora Lucchasi was rocking my red-faced, squalling infant in a wooden cradle. He looked drawn and miserable, so unlike the peaceful, beautiful newborn I’d held just a few days before.
    The woman, shocked as she was by my appearance, gratefully stood back and allowed me to lift Leonardo from the crib.
    It took only a moment for him to recognize my touch, my smell, the sound of my voice crooning his name. As I laid him on the great bed and loosened the tight swaddling blanket that imprisoned his tiny body, the choked sobs ceased. I touched his face, all of his limbs, and stroked his heaving chest with two fingers, making a tiny circle around his heart.
    I lifted him into my arms again and, finding a high-backed chair, sat down and opened my dress. He needed no help finding my breast, and weak as he was, began to suckle noisily and ferociously as he had done before. He blew a sigh of contentment through his nostrils and fed that way for some minutes. Finally I felt his tiny muscles relax into me, and he rolled away from the feeding. Then, like a miracle, he turned his head and opened his eyes. He saw me. Saw his mother for the first time. He never blinked, just took in the sight.
    I smiled quickly, determined that the first human expression he would ever know would be one of happiness. Then his hunger forced him back to the teat. I sighed, heavy with relief and joy, cradled down to kiss the top of his head and closed my eyes. It was only then that I felt his tiny, warm hand on my cheek, resting there light and comfortable and infinitely possessive.
    I thought my heart would burst with the grace and beauty of the gesture. Leonardo. He was mine again, and I was his . And I swore in that moment to every god that would listen and all the Fates I could defy, that nothing would ever hurt my child, and that we would never be parted again.

CHAPTER 4
    The time I spent as my son’s wetnurse in the home of Piero’s father and grandfather, with the man I had loved, and his wife, who treated me like the lowest of servants, was difficult in the extreme. Leonardo and I lived in a portion of the barn made into a crude residence, with the smell of cattle dung infusing everything around us every hour of the day and night. We were ignored, by and large, by the da Vincis,