Hope - Lesley Pearse [11]
Meg reached out her hand and caressed her daughter’s cheek wordlessly. It appeared little Hope had had her fill, for she gave a contented little sigh and let go of the swollen nipple. Meg put her down on her knee and ran one finger affectionately around her chin as she studied her. ‘She’s a pretty little thing,’ she said at length, looking back at Nell. ‘I doubt she’ll be much trouble to me and your father. So you go off to bed, Nell, you look fair worn out. She’s mine now.’
Chapter Two
1838
‘Just because I’m a girl and smaller than you don’t mean I can’t climb trees just as good as you!’
Nell smiled to herself at the loud and indignant claim coming from the far side of the wood. At six years old, Hope had a reputation in the village of being an angel, but in fact she could be a little devil, especially when it came to proving to boys she was as daring as they were.
Nell was on her way home for her afternoon off, and guessed her youngest brothers Joe and Henry were getting the rough side of Hope’s tongue.
‘It ain’t because we don’t think you can’t climb the tree. It’s cos of your dress. You get it torn and there’ll be hell to pay.’
Nell chuckled at Joe’s diplomacy; he almost always found some way to divert his fiery sister.
‘Then I’ll take it off,’ Hope shouted back at him. ‘Henry! Undo the buttons!’
‘Hope!’ Nell yelled out, aware that hen-pecked Henry would do exactly as Hope ordered.
Nell imagined Hope’s dismayed expression on hearing her older sister’s voice coming from the wood, and it made her laugh aloud. She knew that by the time she got through the wood to the children, Hope would be sitting down as daintily as a duchess, eyes wide with pretend innocence.
She was the prettiest little girl Nell had ever seen. Hair as dark and shiny as black marble, with a curl to it too. Her eyes were like dark pools fringed by impossibly long lashes, and her skin was perfectly smooth and clear.
Everyone in the family had dark hair and eyes: folk in the village often described a person as ‘dark as a Renton’. Their looks were commonplace, though, their skin sallow and their hair coarse. Nothing fancy about any of them.
But Hope made folk turn their heads to look at her. She had a dazzling smile, a gaiety and enthusiasm that would make even the most sober of people laugh. She wanted to talk to everyone; when she was as young as four she’d stand at the gate greeting anyone that passed by. Even the Reverend Gosling, who was normally so aloof, always stopped to speak to her.
Meg and Silas had never once even momentarily regretted taking her on. She had been an easy, placid baby who would smile and gurgle all day long, and almost from her first week with them, the family’s fortunes did seem to improve.
Just as Nell had believed she was a fairy child, so did many others. They saw soon after her birth that the Rentons’ cottage roof was miraculously rethatched, and that Ruth got taken on as a laundry maid at Briargate, and James as the undergroom. Meg and Silas couldn’t tell anyone, not even their older children, that this change of fortune was the result of Bridie’s influence, and so, in the absence of any other explanation, people liked to think it was some kind of magic.
Nell was no longer so inclined to believe in fairies or magic. But then, the last six years had been eventful ones, and her horizons were no longer limited to the village. She had visited Bath, Bristol and London now, been to mansions four times the size of Briargate, and, prompted by Mr Baines, she read the newspaper most days.
She now understood why most working men felt aggrieved with the government. All the laws seemed to be made to protect the wealthy – only men of property could vote. The Corn Laws and the enclosing of common land squeezed the poor and forced many to leave the rural areas to go to the cities and try to find work. But the hardships these people had endured in their own villages were mild compared to the ones they found in cities. Overcrowding, filth, disease and desperate poverty forced men, women and children into crime,