Hope - Lesley Pearse [168]
‘You are forgetting I’ve got the letter from Captain Pettigrew,’ he snarled. ‘That’s evidence.’
William moved closer to Albert. ‘At times like this gentlemen stick together,’ he said, putting a snarl into his voice. ‘I grew up with the Captain, and he’ll say that letter is a forgery. What’s more, he’ll come over here and give you a good hiding for your trouble.’
‘I’ll go to law,’ Albert said wildly.
William laughed at him contemptuously. ‘Do you really think a gardener could challenge a member of the aristocracy and win? You’d be shipped off to Botany Bay. Now, away with you! Leave the gatehouse before Friday morning and you shall have a character. But if you are still there, I’ll have you thrown out without one.’
Anne’s hand slipped into William’s as they watched Albert slink off round the side of the house. ‘Will he go?’ she whispered.
‘I think so,’ William replied. He felt good about himself now, for he’d protected Anne, Rufus and Briargate. ‘He really has no choice. Even if he does slink down to the ale house and tell a few tales, no one will believe them. Now, we must go in before you catch cold. I think we’ll have a glass of sherry to celebrate.’
That night, in the dim light of a flickering candle, Albert sat at his table in the gatehouse with a large heap of money before him. As he counted it into piles, he took long swigs from a bottle of rum. Normally counting his money gave him immense pleasure, for he had enjoyed bleeding William dry for all these years. But tonight he was too full of rage to concentrate.
He had thought he was set up for life here; that he had William and Anne in the palm of his hand. His long-term plan was to wait until they were forced to sell Briargate, and he’d be waiting ready to buy it. He hadn’t anticipated that the worms would turn.
He had more than enough money to go anywhere; he had his health, strength and a keen enough mind to do anything he chose, but it was the garden at Briargate that he wanted. He had created it: every tree, shrub and flower was his. He’d toiled over it for sixteen years, nurtured it, dreamed and planned, and now they were snatching it from him.
He had always thought himself as sturdy as an oak, that nothing could shock or dismay him. When weak, pathetic William turned up at the woodshed this morning, his first thought had been that the man wanted him again, even if he was glowering.
When he told him to pack up and leave, Albert wanted to laugh. William had said that before, and he’d always backed down after a brief reminder of how things stood.
He would have bet all the money on the table that William would never tell his wife what he was. Yet he had, and she’d told him about the Captain. They’d stood there together, smug as you like, and the final body blow was that remark of William’s: ‘Do you really think a gardener could challenge a member of the aristocracy and win?’
That made him savage. He didn’t like reminders that he was a working man.
When he was a small boy he had hated his rough clothes, having to go barefoot and all that went with being born into a poor family. His mother used to say with scorn that he belonged in a palace.
At ten he was packed off to Hever Castle to work in the gardens there. Within just a few months he’d caught the eye of the head groom, and night after night he had to submit to the man using him like a woman.
He was fourteen when the head groom died suddenly of a heart attack, and Albert couldn’t have been happier. He wasn’t interested in girls, but he thought in the fullness of time the right one would come along and he would forget those acts which had shamed him for so long.
By the time he was sixteen, he was a strapping six feet tall, with glowing olive skin, black curly hair and smouldering dark eyes, and it wasn’t only the female servants who looked at him longingly, but many of the grand ladies