Hope - Lesley Pearse [215]
‘You did the right thing,’ Nell said stoutly. ‘Our Matt reckons you were born to farm, and I don’t think Lady Harvey would have been any happier in Bath, not without fine clothes, a carriage and servants. At least she’s got friends in the village, people who care for her. If you were my son I’d be right proud of you.’
‘Funny how things turn out,’ he said with a wry grin. ‘When I was small I was so envious of the village children. It seemed to me they had so much more fun and freedom than I did. Now I’ve got to work for a living it looks very different.’
Nell finished her work on the cake and took it to the pantry. ‘All our lives have been turned upside down,’ she said as she returned. ‘I just wish the police could find Albert and hang him. It’s like having a bad tooth. You know that the pain will keep coming back until it’s been pulled out.’
‘He won’t dare come anywhere near here,’ Rufus said comfortingly. ‘Whatever else he is, he isn’t stupid.’
‘No, but he was obsessed with the garden at Briargate, and I think he’s likely to come back to look at what’s happened to it,’ Nell said in a small voice.
‘Then he’ll die of shock when he finds it gone,’ Rufus chuckled. ‘I ploughed up the bottom lawn back in November, and I’ve got pigs where the rose garden used to be. You must come up and take a look, Nell. Not just at the farm, but the gatehouse too. The curtains you made for us are lovely.’
Nell shook her head. ‘I couldn’t, Rufus, too many bad memories for me. Maybe when Hope and the Captain come home I’ll feel different, but I doubt it.’
Nell stirred the soup while Rufus read Hope’s letters. Now and again he’d chuckle at something amusing, and she’d glance round at him, wondering how he’d react if he was ever to find out that Hope was his half-sister.
Proud and happy as she was that Hope had done well for herself and married a doctor, the secret of her true parentage worried Nell almost as much as the prospect of Albert turning up one day.
Hope mentioned Captain Pettigrew a great deal in her letters. Nell hadn’t of course given Rufus the first one in which she explained how Albert had caught her with the letter from the Captain to Lady Harvey and made several references to their love affair. But it was clear from the subsequent letters that she’d formed an attachment to the Captain while nursing him.
Angus’s letters showed the attachment was mutual, and though common sense told Nell this was probably because of their respective links with her, it felt like more than that. On the one hand she told herself that maybe she should tell them the truth. Hope had no other father now, the Captain had no other children. They would be a comfort to each other.
But there was Rufus. He might very well be so delighted that his childhood friend was in fact his half-sister that he’d overlook his mother’s infidelity. But she doubted he’d appreciate discovering that Captain Pettigrew, a man he’d known all his life and looked up to, was the villain of the piece.
When Nell heard the wonderful news that the Captain had met Hope in Varna, she’d gone straight to Matt to share it with him. He had passed it on to Rufus, who in turn had told Lady Harvey.
Lady Harvey had found a man to bring her here in a trap the very next day and she was all of a twitter. It was difficult to tell what she really felt: whether it was joy that Hope was alive and well, terror that her guilty secret was about to be exposed, or just plain jealousy that