Hope - Lesley Pearse [22]
Nell sighed in agreement. She and all her brothers and sisters had been brought up knowing exactly what their position was in life, just as her mother and father had before them. They were all here to serve someone, whether that was her father ploughing, haymaking or milking cows for one of the rich farmers, or twelve-year-old Nell going into service at Briargate. Even as small children they were toughened up for what lay ahead, collecting wood, hauling up water from the well, even scooping up the horse droppings out in the lane to help the vegetables grow. At harvest time the whole family had to help their father in the fields; from the age of three Nell had been pressed into picking potatoes.
Before Nell went into service she had often been hungry and cold. The darned and patched clothes she’d worn were passed down to Ruth and then Alice; no one ever got anything new. Poor people like them could only scrape along, for if there was a good harvest one year, the following year it could fail. Labourers like her father could get laid off at any time, and they were never able to accumulate savings to help them through the bad times.
In the first month Nell worked at Briargate, her hands bled from continually scrubbing pots and pans, and she was so exhausted by the end of the day that she had a job to climb the stairs. But when she took her first wages home and handed them over to her mother, Meg’s smile of gratitude and pride in her daughter made it all worthwhile.
Nell couldn’t imagine Hope accepting that. She’d never once gone to bed hungry, she’d never been expected to mind babies, mend clothes or draw water from the well. She hadn’t been hardened up as the rest of them were. But if she wasn’t servant material, what else was there for her?
‘What do we do?’ Nell asked in a small voice.
‘I dunno,’ Silas said with a sigh. All three of them knew that it wasn’t wise to offend Lady Harvey by telling her they didn’t want Hope to go up to the big house any more.
‘Maybe we’d best just carry on then for now,’ Meg said despondently. ‘See how things go.’
It had been Nell’s intention to tell them today about Captain Pettigrew. But she couldn’t give them anything more to worry about now. She didn’t know for absolute certainty he was Hope’s father, and whether he was or wasn’t, it was probably something she ought to keep to herself.
Chapter Three
1840
‘If we got married, the master would let us have the gatehouse,’ Albert said, twisting his cap in his hands, his expression almost as tortured as the cap.
Nell looked at him in astonishment, hardly able to believe what Albert had said. For two years now they’d been keeping company, walking to church, chatting in the stable yard in the evenings, and, as today, Albert often waited for her by Lord’s Wood to escort her back to Briargate after her afternoon off. But in all this time there had been no real courtship. He hadn’t so much as held her hand, let alone kissed her. She’d begun to think he saw her only as a friend.
‘Married, Albert? You’re asking me to marry you?’
‘That’s about the size of it,’ he mumbled, eyes downcast. ‘Are you willing?’
It was a warm evening in June, rays of late sunshine slanting in through the canopy of leaves overhead. The cooing of wood pigeons and the sound of a stream trickling over stones in the undergrowth nearby should have made it a romantic spot for a proposal, but the lack of passion, or even warmth, from Albert spoiled it.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I mean, you’ve said nothing to make me think you felt like that about me. It’s so sudden.’
‘It’s been two years,’ he retorted, as if that made it completely understandable. ‘I earn enough to keep a wife now, and we’re suited.’
Nell would agree they were suited, in as much as they were both devoted to Briargate and the Harveys. Albert was passionate about the gardens; in the last two years he’d built rockeries, made many new flowerbeds and planted such a profusion of new shrubs and trees that it looked stunning. Nell approved of that passion, but she’d always expected that the man she