Hope - Lesley Pearse [155]
Six years on, Anne still blushed at the memory of how callous she must have appeared when Nell informed her that Hope was her daughter. Her only defence was that she’d been unable to believe that it could be true. Who would credit that a young maid would take a baby and bring it up as her own sister without any kind of reward, just to protect her mistress? And Nell’s insistence that Albert had killed Hope seemed like hysterical melodrama.
In the weeks that followed, Anne remained in a kind of denial that Hope was her child. She veered between rage that her maid had walked out on her, terror that she might spread her ridiculous story far and wide, and a sickening disgust in herself for not foreseeing that a servant who knew too much could be very dangerous.
But as the weeks passed without any scandalous gossip reaching her ears, and with time to reflect on everything Nell had told her, Anne came to see that she’d wronged her. Rumours reached her that Nell had gone mad with grief over her younger sister’s disappearance, yet it was clear she still hadn’t breathed a word about her former mistress. Even in deep distress Nell had remained loyal.
The Reverend Gosling came up to Briargate, incandescent with rage that Nell had brought shame on her family by breaking her marriage vows. He urged Anne to go and speak to her, to make her see sense and return to her husband, or to leave the village for good.
But Anne knew Nell would never return to Albert, and she couldn’t bring herself to suggest the other alternative, or even, if she was honest, face Nell. So she did what she always did when faced with a problem, be that William’s heavy drinking or their rapidly depleting wealth, and tried to pretend that it didn’t exist.
It was a relief when she heard Nell had left her brother’s farm for a new position near Bath. If anyone knew her new master’s name it didn’t reach Anne’s ears, and she did her best to forget Nell.
But Rufus wouldn’t let her forget Hope. Every time he came home on holiday from school his first question was always about her. He claimed that Hope had been his only real friend, admitting how they used to meet in the woods and play together. He took an almost fiendish delight in telling the story of how he was saved from drowning in the pond by her, and took his mother to task for her indifference when Meg and Silas Renton died, leaving the girl an orphan. Anne often wondered how he would react if he found out the girl was his half-sister. Just the thought of it made her tremble with fear.
But worse still was that Rufus seemed to have a much stronger attachment to the Rentons than he had to his own mother. Almost the moment he arrived home for the holidays, he’d rush off eagerly to Matt’s farm. Sometimes he was gone from sunup to sundown, returning filthy dirty with tales of milking cows, collecting eggs, ploughing and seeding.
Anne felt the tragic irony in the fact that the Rentons had taken in her firstborn and brought her up as their own and now Rufus wanted to join their family too.
Perhaps she should have forbidden him to go there, or at least insisted he went less often, but until quite recently his father’s behaviour had been so appalling that she felt her son was better off out of the way.
Shortly after Nell left, William’s drinking had grown much worse, to the point where he was rarely sober when at home. He would shut himself away in his study with a bottle, only to come lurching out later to abuse her and anyone else who tried to remonstrate with him.
Then, without any warning, he would disappear without a word about where he was going, and stay away for days. To her shame, Anne often found herself wishing he’d have a fatal accident so that she’d be set free to go home to her sisters. She knew it was wicked to think such things, but she was at the end of