Hope - Lesley Pearse [0]
HOPE
Hope
LESLEY PEARSE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Michael Joseph 2006
Published in Penguin Books 2007
1
Copyright © Lesley Pearse, 2006
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
EISBN: 978–0–141–90094–0
To all my friends and neighbours in Compton Dando for
making me feel so welcome and happy here.
I hope you will enjoy this entirely fictitious story, and
forgive me for taking liberties with our real village history,
and for any mistakes or omissions.
Chapter One
Somerset, 1832
‘Screaming don’t help babbies into this world!’ Bridie snapped irritably, and forced the rope knotted to the bed-head into her mistress’s hands. ‘Jest pull on this and bear down.’
At the sound of the door opening behind her, she glanced over her shoulder to see Nell, the parlourmaid, coming in with a basin of hot water. ‘About time too! I thought you’d skedaddled,’ she barked.
Nell was not offended by old Bridie’s sharpness; she understood it was only because she was frightened. Bridie was not a midwife and it was only the horror of Lady Harvey being put to public shame that had induced her to deliver this baby herself. She looked all of her sixty years now, with her iron-grey hair escaping from her starched cap, her plump face drawn and yellowy in the candlelight, and her blue eyes, which normally twinkled with merriment, dull with exhaustion and anxiety.
‘Maybe we should get the doctor?’ Nell blurted out as she saw the angry distended veins which had popped up all over Lady Harvey’s face and neck. ‘It’s surely taking too long and she’s in such pain.’
Bridie glared, and Nell took that to mean she was not to offer any further opinions or suggestions. So she took the rag from the cold-water basin, wrung it out and wiped her mistress’s forehead. She just hoped Bridie knew what she was doing, for if her ladyship were to die, they’d both be in deep trouble.
The room was fetid and airless, hot as an oven even though the fire was almost out now. The heavy tapestry curtains around the bed and the highly polished dark furniture added to the claustrophobic atmosphere. Nell had seen the first rays of dawn coming into the sky as she fetched the hot water from the kitchen, and she was so tired she felt she might fall down where she stood.
Last year she’d helped at her baby brother’s birth, but it had been nothing like this. Mother had been walking around until minutes before, and then she lay down, gave a bit of a shout, and out came the baby as smooth as a greasy piglet. Until tonight Nell had thought that all babies arrived that way.
But Lady Harvey had started her yelling and carrying on at six yesterday evening and it had just got worse and worse through the night. Her lovely white nightgown was sodden with sweat, and beneath it her distended belly looked obscene in the flickering candlelight.
If this was what you got for going with a man, Nell thought, she’d sooner die a virgin.
‘Let me die and the baby with me!’ Lady Harvey yelled out. ‘God, haven’t you punished me enough for my wickedness?’
‘Push the baby out