Hope - Lesley Pearse [172]
But Joe and Henry always reminded Matt of Hope for they’d been inseparable when they were all small. It seemed incredible to him that she’d kept her silence about where she was for six whole years. Sometimes he thought Albert must have killed her after all, or that she’d been carrying a child when she ran away and perhaps even died having it. But mostly he was concerned she’d got herself into such bad trouble she was afraid to come back.
Nell still believed Albert had killed her, but that didn’t stop her hoping for a miracle. Each time she came back to the farm the first thing she asked was if there was any news. Rufus was the same. Going off to that school for young gentlemen and then going away to university hadn’t stopped him caring about her. The minute he got back to Briargate he rushed down to the farm. Matt wished more than anything that one day he’d have something good to tell them both.
Matt was about ten feet from the stable yard, just about to go behind the wall to the stile and the footpath to the village, when he heard something.
It wasn’t a loud noise, just a clicking sound which might have been the wind moving something, but it could have been a key turning in a lock, so he dived out of sight behind the stable wall.
Straining his ears, he waited. The wind had become quite fierce and he could hear nothing above it, but a sixth sense told him someone was there. He was right; he heard a muffled cough, and then suddenly there was Albert.
Matt knew little about the routine at Briargate, but he couldn’t imagine any reason why a gardener would be in the house this late at night, unless of course he was bedding Lady Harvey.
That was improbable. Rufus claimed his mother hated the man, and in any case Sir William was always there these days – rumour had it he only rarely went out. But even stranger was how Albert was behaving. Instead of just walking down the drive he was climbing over the railings.
Matt pressed himself further against the wall and watched, wondering where on earth the man was going. But stranger still, Albert remained close to the railings, going back in the direction of the gatehouse. What’s more, he kept turning to look back over his shoulder at the big house.
‘He’s creeping on the grass so he won’t be heard!’ Matt muttered to himself. ‘I bet he’s been up to no good.’
Aware that if he was seen lurking around the house, he might be blamed for whatever Albert had done, Matt slunk away himself, over the stile and down the paddock that flanked the hedged garden of the house, towards the footpath that led across fields to Woolard.
As he got right to the bottom of the paddock and went to climb the stile, he turned slightly. To his surprise there was a faint orange glow in one of the ground-floor windows at Briargate.
His first thought was that someone might have heard something and lit a lamp to go down and investigate. But lamplight was yellow, and surely one lamp wouldn’t be that bright.
All at once he realized what it was. ‘Fire!’ he gasped. ‘So that’s what he was doing there!’
For a second he was undecided what to do. The first rule in the case of a fire was to raise the alarm, but Lady Harvey, Sir William and Mr Baines were in there, and by the time he raised men in Woolard, then got back to the house, all three of them could be burned to death.
Throwing off his heavy coat, Matt raced back up the paddock. He could smell the fire now, so he didn’t bother with the stile by the stables, but forced his way through the hedge into the garden.
He had only been inside Briargate once, the day he came to see Sir William after Nell left, but he remembered the drawing room he’d been shown into