The Earl's Wet Nurse

Imagine you’re looking for your wife. You’ve been gone for over a year, not quite two. You were shipwrecked and given up for lost at sea. You’ve been walking all over the English coastline trying to find her, showing her picture to everyone you see. When finally, weeks into your search, an old woman hobbling about on a cane, points up a hill. And you traipse up a winding road with renewed vigor and an eager step into an orchard in full bloom. Imagine discovering a woman lying atop a man, both asleep as if recently replete from a satisfying tryst, you smile—it’s a tender scene. Imagine the woman turns her blonde head that’s been resting on the man’s chest, and she sighs. It’s a familiar sound. A lock of her hair lifts in the breeze revealing her obscured face and you realize that woman is your wife. Imagine that after pulling her off him and having a raucous brawl with the partly naked man, his progeny making part swinging in the breeze, you learn he is her new husband. Imagine what goes through your mind when you learn that she was hired to nurse his newborn son after having lost yours. Well, one would imagine that you would have a lot of questions that needed to be answered. Find out what happens when Thomas returns as a wealthy ship captain and Catherine has to decide her future. What about the earl who loves her, as he’s never loved another woman? And the child she’s been nursing since the day he was born? With her marriage to the earl, she became his mother, how can she leave him? Yes, imagine the brouhaha that is in the making, the storm that is rising on the horizon. The old woman, trembling at the bottom of the hill knows their secret and can only begin to imagine Catherine’s dilemma.