Hope - Lesley Pearse [122]
Every ache or pain terrified her in case it was the onset of cholera. It was so tempting to give in to the exhaustion she felt and just wait for whatever fate had in store for her, be that sickness or starvation. But she’d forced herself to scour the woods for the right kind of supple branches she could weave into a shelter, to collect up dry bracken to make herself a bed and store wood for her fire. The meagre provisions she’d brought with her were gone on the first day, but on the third, hunger drove her to walk back down to Hotwells on the outskirts of the town and buy a few things from a stall there.
Nothing had ever tasted as good as those potatoes she baked in the fire, a lump of cheese melting inside them. She had some apples and a bunch of fresh watercress, and somehow she knew as she munched on those peppery leaves that she must be well or she couldn’t possibly enjoy it so much.
Yet bathing in the pond had lifted her spirits even more than the food. She had found the pond back in the spring and on many a hot day in the past couple of months she’d remembered it with longing. It took her some time to find it again for thick bushes hid it from sight. Only a faint gurgling of the spring which fed it had alerted her to where it was.
She had clawed her way through thick undergrowth, half-expecting to find it would have dried up to just a bed of damp mud. She almost shouted aloud with joy when she saw it was even prettier than she remembered: clean, fresh water, shining in the hot sun and completely surrounded by thick bushes. She waded in wearing her clothes, holding on to a thick branch for fear of getting out of her depth, and was thrilled to find it only came up to her waist.
She scrubbed her clothes with soap while still wearing them, then took them off, wrung them out and hung them on a bush to dry. She went back in naked then, washing every bit of herself, soaping her hair and revelling in the knowledge that she would finally be free of the stink and lice of Lewins Mead.
Holding on to a small log as a float, she found she could swim, and nothing in her life had ever felt as good as she floated in the cool, clear water, her limbs caressed and stimulated. She remained in the pond for so long that when she finally got out, her fingers and toes wrinkling from the water, her clothes were almost dry. She felt reborn then, her hair silky, her skin soothed yet glowing, and she vowed to herself that she would always live by water in future so she could bathe herself.
Back in her shelter later, she had studied herself in the small mirror Gussie had given her when she first arrived in Lewins Mead. Her hair shone and curled the way she remembered back at Briargate. Her cheeks were pink again and her eyes were bright. For a couple of hours she had even managed to think purely of her own future, rather than dwelling on the past, and it came to her then that Gussie and Betsy wouldn’t see that as a betrayal, but be glad for her.
Since that day she’d had new purpose. There were many times she found herself crying for her friends, and she knew it would be a very long time before memories of them stopped hurting. But she had stopped wishing she’d died with them, and resolved to let herself recover from what she’d been through with rest, fresh air and food. She had the idea that she’d be given a sign when the time had come to start out again.
As she lay there listening to the rain trickling from the leaves, she felt this was the sign. She hadn’t spoken to anyone other than the man she’d bought food from, and even then she’d only asked the price of his produce. She had glimpsed other people coming through the woods, but she’d kept well