Hope - Lesley Pearse [124]
All at once the front door of number 1 opened and a much older woman in lavender-coloured silk came out, almost running down the steps to greet the young ladies. It was obvious she was their mother by the joyful expression on her face and the way she held out her arms to embrace them.
Tears prickled in Hope’s eyes as she remembered her mother greeting Nell that way when she came home on her afternoon off. But it was rare to see the gentry display such affection in public.
The ladies disappeared into the house and Hope moved on, but the happy little scene triggered memories of Nell’s wedding day. She could see her mother and father and each of her brothers and sisters, all dressed in their best clothes, faces wreathed with smiles. She remembered hearing her father making a toast. He said that he believed that his eldest daughter’s wedding was the start of a golden era for the family.
Hope was too young then to understand what he meant by that. But she realized now that he hoped that one by one his sons and daughters would marry well and before long there would be grandchildren for him and Meg to love. But her parents were gone now, the entire family broken up and scattered far and wide. And she, the youngest and the one they had the highest hopes for, was a pauper, reduced to scrubbing floors to eat.
‘You were expected last Monday,’ Mrs Toms said, looking down her thin nose at Hope as she stood nervously outside the servants’ entrance in the basement.
Mary, the kitchenmaid, had fetched the housekeeper at Hope’s request, but the moment she saw Mrs Toms bustling down the passageway with that tight expression she remembered only too well, Hope knew she was on a fool’s errand.
‘The friends I lodge with were sick and I had to nurse them,’ Hope explained. ‘I didn’t feel I could come here until I was sure I hadn’t got it too.’
Mrs Toms backed away, eyes wide and her hands fluttering with agitation. ‘They had cholera?’
Hope’s heart sank right to her boots. She wanted to lie, but found she couldn’t. She nodded.
‘Get away from here!’ Mrs Toms flapped her arms like a startled goose. ‘How dare you bring that filthy disease to this door? Out, out and don’t come back!’
Hope felt she couldn’t be carrying the sickness if she was well, but there was no point in trying to explain further, she knew Mrs Toms wouldn’t listen. There was nothing for it but to turn and walk away.
‘You dirty minx, you and your sort are spreading this plague everywhere!’ Mrs Toms yelled after her in high-pitched hysteria. ‘You should be locked up!’
At that insult Hope could not hold back her tears, and almost blinded by them she ran up Regent Street, her bundle of belongings thumping against her legs. She didn’t slow down until she reached the Downs, the vast area of open space where she had so often gone to before when she felt the need for quiet and solitude. Under the shade of a large tree she sank down and covered her face with her hands as she sobbed out her pain.
It was as if all the injustices which had been piled on to her from the day Albert attacked her at the gatehouse until now had finally broken her. Images of all of them rushed through her mind: dragging herself through the rain away from Briargate, arriving in Bristol so weak that she scarcely knew where she was, waking next morning to the squalor and filth of Lamb Lane. She saw too all the many times she was refused work, the terrible hunger which forced her to steal the pork pie. Then there was the collecting and selling of kindling, her feet a mass of blisters, her skin so chapped and raw she cried with the pain. So much humiliation, the curt refusals and doors slammed in her face.
Even when she’d got work up here in Clifton, she’d always been treated with suspicion and scorn: no one was ever really willing to give her a chance to prove herself. Then finally the only good thing in her life was snatched from her, her two dear friends.
Why? What had she ever done to deserve such misery?
Other girls might have gone straight from