Hope - Lesley Pearse [104]
What was he going to do?
Amy wanted him to ask her to leave. She said she’d had more than enough of this. But how could he show his own sister the door, knowing she had now here else to go?
Nell put the teapot on the table and then got the cups from the dresser. ‘I’ll take the eggs into Keynsham today, and while I’m there I’ll look for work,’ she said suddenly.
Matt nodded; he didn’t trust himself to speak. He doubted she’d find any work there, but it would save him the journey to sell the eggs, and while Nell was gone it would at least give Amy some respite.
‘If I can’t get anything there, I’ll go to Bath tomorrow and see Ruth.’
‘She’ll be pleased to see you,’ Matt managed to get out.
He had ridden into Bath shortly after Hope disappeared to tell Ruth and John about it. Although Ruth was surprised and concerned, she had pointed out that any young girl would want more life than there was at Briargate. In the New Year when Matt went back to tell them about Nell’s reaction and her conviction that Albert had killed Hope, Ruth was irritated by what she saw as melodrama. ‘What would he gain by killing her?’ she asked, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘Nell will end up in the asylum if she goes on this way.’
James, Toby and Alice had all reacted much the same way too. While none of them approved of Hope running off so recklessly, and were very concerned for her safety, they all felt she had been looking for some excitement, and that Nell should accept that.
Matt was pretty certain Ruth wouldn’t have much patience with her older sister, especially now she had a baby of her own. He just hoped she wouldn’t be too sharp with Nell and make her even more distraught.
When Nell left the farm around six-thirty with the basket of eggs on her arm, it had stopped raining and the first rays of daylight were creeping into the sky. She took the footpath across the fields to Compton Dando, and came out close to her childhood home.
Gerald Box, the gamekeeper’s brother, lived there now with his wife and three children. Nell stubbornly kept her eyes averted from the cottage as she didn’t want any reminders of her parents or Hope today.
She was very aware that Matt and Amy were losing patience with her. She knew too that she wasn’t holding together very well and everyone was horrified that she’d left Albert. Sometimes it was very tempting to tell them that it had been a marriage in name only, for if nothing else it would make Albert a laughing stock. Likewise, she’d like to shame Lady Harvey by telling the story of Hope’s birth. Perhaps then people would see how unquestioningly loyal she’d been to her mistress for all these years, and be shocked that a mother took her daughter’s disappearance so lightly.
But to tell these things now when people were already convinced she was going mad would only reinforce that belief. No one would believe her and she might well be put into an asylum to shut her up.
Reluctantly she’d come to see that the only solution to everything was to find work well away from here. She was tormented by memories of Hope everywhere she looked, creating friction at Matt’s, even though she tried to make herself useful. Lady Harvey had dressed up her real feelings about her former maid in her letter. She went to great pains to avoid saying anything about Hope, she even sympathized with Nell’s difficulties with Albert, and pointed out that she’d used Nell’s maiden name on the character to help her get another position. But Nell could sense the ice beneath the honeyed phrases about how hard she would be to replace, her loyalty and caring nature. Lady Harvey’s real feelings were clearly that she hoped Nell would go as far away as possible, and that she’d shut the door tightly on the maid she once claimed was her only real friend.
By the time Nell had got to the hamlet