Disclaimer: I own nothing. I just needed to get some feels out since we won't be getting The Miller's Daughter until a month from Sunday.
A wet nurse is brought in within an hour of the birth only to be sent away before she can lift the babe to her breast. The mother is told that noble ladies aren't expected to, nor usually deign to, nurse their own children. But she stubbornly insists that her daughter is going to drink no one's milk but her own and there are murmurs about the household that this is telling of her common lineage.
Rather than be displeased, her husband is indulgent of her wishes. He says it warms his heart to see her display such immediate maternal tendencies towards their child. To prove it, it is he who tucks the infant into her mother's arms when it comes time for the first feeding. That he is told to leave as soon as the babe is secure in her arms doesn't bother him in the least, and he leaves mother and daughter to have their first moment of bonding.
She loosens the neckline of her nightdress enough that she can pull out one milk-heavy breast. The infant's rose-bud mouth doesn't need guiding to the source of nourishment, instead closing around her mother's nipple out of instinct, and she begins sucking hungrily.
Her arms close around her child even more securely as the babe drinks her fill and, proper or not, she knows she was right in choosing to do this. To pass off her daughter to a wet nurse would mean surrendering her to another even before the Dark One came to collect his living payment. If she is to be truly forced into giving her child up, she is not going to do so without making sure that their connection is sealed in a way that cannot be undone by time.
She nuzzles her daughter's head, already covered with a soft, dark down, and kisses the tip of her nose. Already she regrets agreeing to sell this child who is a part of her for magic and security. Already she has begun to love her with a ferocious possessiveness.
She won't lose her, she decides right then and there. There has to be some way, some loophole, to get out of the bargain she had struck ten months prior. She will find it and her daughter will be hers to raise, to keep close, to guide.
"My Regina," she murmurs, verbally christening the child with the name she has not yet even told her husband she has chosen. "My perfect angel." Never will they be parted, she swears to herself, at least not for long. No matter what the future may bring, there would be no severing of the threads that tied their lives together. She would pity the poor soul who ever tried to come between them, pity and conquer-beginning with Rumplestiltskin