Hope - Lesley Pearse [109]
‘If you are alive, my sweet, write to me,’ she murmured.
Chapter Twelve
1849
Hope could see Betsy coming towards her along the crowded quayside, but even at a distance of some 300 yards it was clear something was badly wrong with her. She was staggering, bent over as if in pain, for once not stopping here and there as she usually did for a bit of light-hearted banter with sailors and dock workers.
It was late in the afternoon in midsummer and so hot you could probably fry an egg on the quay. During the bitterly cold winter Hope had longed for the heat of summer, but as the temperature had soared in the past weeks, with no rain to wash away the human and animal effluent, the smells had become so evil that it was hard to breathe.
By day Hope could escape up the hill to Clifton where it was clean and sweet-smelling and a breeze blew. People there had drains which took away their waste, they had water piped into their kitchens, and many of their gardens were beautiful. Lately she’d been very tempted to sleep out on the Downs rather than face another steamy night in Lamb Lane. But Betsy and Gussie would have seen that as a kind of defection.
It was while selling kindling during her first winter in Bristol that she managed to beg some work in Clifton. The housekeeper at number 5 Royal York Crescent paid her to scrub the front-door steps and polish the brass. It wasn’t until the next winter that the woman eventually trusted her enough to let her come inside occasionally to scrub floors and help with the laundry, but now eighteen months later Hope helped out there twice a week on a regular basis, for which she was paid three shillings.
Hope had to bite her tongue as she was always watched like a hawk for fear she was going to steal something. The other servants looked down their noses at her, and if she was given anything to eat while she was there, it was only ever scraps. But she had stuck it out, for she needed the three shillings to buy flowers from the market and make them into little posies which she sold on the streets for the rest of the week.
The terrible hardships she endured during her first winter in Bristol were just a distant memory now. Nothing, she felt, could ever be as bad as that again. How she had managed to go out each icy morning at daybreak, walk miles on blistered feet with an empty stomach, her fingers cracking open with the frost, she didn’t know. There had been days when every bone in her body screamed agonizingly for rest; the humiliation of people slamming their doors in her face, the torture of hunger and cold, all for just a few pennies a day, made her wish for death.
After that, cleaning and laundry work twice a week seemed like paradise, even if the other servants did treat her like vermin because her dress was ragged and her boots had holes in them.
But today at number 5, Mrs Toms the housekeeper had offered to take her on as maid of all work, living in, for which she would pay her five shillings a week, with a uniform and some new boots.
Hope knew she ought to feel overjoyed; after all, it was the kind of respectable job she’d wanted for so long. It would be bliss to sleep between sheets, never to wake as a rat ran over her, or suffer hunger pains again.
But Hope wasn’t joyful, she was torn. For by accepting the advantages of going into service, she knew she would also have to accept the restrictions that came with it, along with her reservations about the Edwards household.
Mr Edwards was a fat, pompous little alderman, and it was said he had made his money by taking bribes to get people contracts from the Corporation. His wife was a nervy wraith who liked to ape real gentry. That aside, they were in Hope’s eyes a fairly odious couple who also had