Hope - Lesley Pearse [106]
The Captain put one finger under her chin and lifted her face up. ‘You look thin and deeply troubled, Nell. I am told that Lady Harvey looks the same. I think you two fell out about far more than Albert?’
Nell’s stomach lurched. ‘If she is thin and troubled too, then it will only be because she’s finding it hard to cope with all the things I used to do for her,’ she said tartly.
He half-smiled. ‘Another man might believe that to be the reason, but not me. However, I do admire your loyalty,’ he said. ‘So where are you off to with those eggs?’
‘To sell them to a shop in Keynsham, then I shall look for work.’
‘I shouldn’t imagine there’s much call for a lady’s maid there.’
Nell shrugged. ‘I’ll take anything, I can cook and clean. Beggars can’t be choosers. I’ll even work in an ale house if they give me a bed and food.’
He looked at her appraisingly for so long it made Nell nervous.
‘Would you consider being my housekeeper?’ he said eventually.
Nell’s eyes widened with surprise. ‘But you don’t have a house, sir,’ she exclaimed.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘I acquired it a year or two back. Nothing grand, you understand, just a place to spend my leave and retire to when I get too old for soldiering. I had been thinking of getting someone for some time, but there is so much that needs doing there before I could expect a stranger to cope with the inconvenience. However, it might suit you just now, and you’d certainly suit me.’
Nell’s first thought was that he saw her as a way back towards Lady Harvey. But whether that was his reason or not, it was an offer she was in no position to refuse. ‘Well, thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘I’m very grateful for your kindness.’
After giving her directions to the village of Saltford on the Bath road and suggesting she called after selling her eggs, the Captain rode off. Nell picked up her basket and walked on with a much lighter heart. She didn’t really care what his house was like, or that she’d be the only servant. He was a gentleman, he cared enough about her plight to help her, and it felt as though she’d been offered a lamp on a dark night.
Nell stood outside Willow End, the Captain’s house, for some little while before she opened the gate and walked up to the front door, a little puzzled as to why he’d chosen it. She would have expected a military gentleman to find a residence in either Bristol or Bath, not half-way between the two cities. While it was bigger than a cottage, with a stable and other outhouses, it was the kind of house a shopkeeper or a schoolmaster would live in.
It was one of a few houses straggling along the road into Bath, outside the village of Saltford, around half a mile before the crossroads of the lanes that led to the villages of Corston and Lewton St Loe. It was a pleasant enough spot, overlooking the fields which ran down to the river Avon, but the Great Western railway to London ran through those too.
Captain Pettigrew was right in saying it needed a lot doing to it. The roof and windows were sagging and the garden hadn’t been tended in years. She expected that the inside would be no better. But it would be a good place for her to work, far enough away from Albert and yet close enough to both Matt and Ruth to feel safe. She relished the amount of hard work she’d have to do; she didn’t want time on her hands.
‘So what do you think, Nell?’ the Captain asked as they returned to his drawing room after he’d taken her on a tour of his house. ‘Could you live here and look after me?’
Nell smiled; it was difficult not to do so for he had shown her round with boyish enthusiasm, vividly describing what he intended to do with each of the rooms. For a single gentleman he had a great many possessions – hundreds of books, many of them still in packing cases, some fine pieces of furniture, clocks, rugs and china – but most of them were still piled up in the downstairs rooms as