Hope - Lesley Pearse [238]
‘So you’ll be the Renton what ran off?’
Hope looked askance at Mr Tremble. He hadn’t said a word since she climbed on the cart beside him, and then had suddenly come out with this very pointed question. With his small head, long nose and no neck to speak of, just a thick muffler where it should have been, the man made her think of a mole.
‘Yes, I am,’ she admitted. ‘But I’d rather not talk about that.’
‘They said that Albert killed you,’ he said, totally ignoring her reply. ‘But my missus reckoned he done sommat else to you.’
Hope gulped. She could guess what that was!
‘Mr Tremble,’ she said in the stern voice she had always used with patients, ‘it was all a long time ago and I wish to forget I ever met Albert Scott. Now, that is all I’m going to say on the subject.’
The carter was quiet for some little while. ‘Rum do that they can’t find him though,’ he suddenly burst out. ‘’E could’ve joined the army, ’e might have been out where you was.’
‘Possibly,’ Hope agreed. Several people had put forward that same suggestion already, and she wondered what she would have done if he’d been brought into the hospital wounded. She quite liked the idea of strapping him down to have a limb amputated without chloroform.
‘When’s the little ’un due?’
Hope smiled, relieved to be asked something she didn’t mind talking about. ‘Two weeks or so,’ she said. ‘So don’t go hitting any ruts in the road or I might have it today.’
Strangely, that shut him up, and Hope was able to sit back and enjoy the ride.
She had almost forgotten how beautiful England was in September. The sun was no longer too hot, the harvest was in, and the leaves on the trees were just beginning to change colour. She loved the undulating quality of the landscape and the small fields surrounded by hedging, which from her view point high up on the cart looked like a plump patchwork quilt. How good it was to see cows and sheep grazing, and the neat rows of vegetables in gardens! She would have given a king’s ransom last winter for a carrot or a cabbage.
‘What’s the Crimea like then?’ Mr Tremble asked, almost as if he’d read her thoughts.
‘Barren and bleak,’ she said. ‘Nothing like this.’
He nodded, seemingly satisfied with that sparse description. ‘D’you want me to pick you up on me way back?’ he asked.
‘No, that won’t be necessary, but thank you for offering. I’ll walk down to my brother’s farm in Woolard and get him to take me home,’ she said.
Mr Tremble had barely helped her down from the cart before Rufus came haring down the drive to meet her. ‘Hope! How good to see you!’ he exclaimed, arms outstretched to hug her as he always did as a small boy. But he stopped short just a few feet from her, looking faintly embarrassed.
Hope understood. The last time she’d seen him he had been just a small boy several inches shorter than her. Now he towered over her, a grown man with a deep voice and broad shoulders.
‘I know there’s an awful lot of me to hug,’ she laughed. ‘Or are you shy because we’re all grown-up?’
He laughed and hugged her anyway, but the mere size of her belly made it difficult.
Hope took both his hands. ‘Let me look at you, Sir Rufus Harvey. My, but you’ve grown into a handsome chap.’
He still had the best of his parents’ blond, blue-eyed looks, but there was strength in his features that had been lacking in theirs. In plain workingmen’s clothes, he looked more like a farmer than a knight.
‘And you’ve grown from the prettiest girl in the village to the most beautiful woman in the county,’ he said.
‘You’ve spent too long on the farm,’ she joked. ‘Have you ever seen anyone other than a sow quite so huge?’
‘I think I have spent too long on a farm,’ he laughed. ‘Mother would be appalled that a gentleman even noticed such a “condition”.’
‘We’d better go in and see her,’ Hope said, glancing nervously at the small cottage that held so many bad memories. It looked less