Hope - Lesley Pearse [250]
‘Did you tell her I went mad for a while?’ Hope asked teasingly. ‘Maybe that made her feel we have something in common.’
Rufus chuckled. ‘No, I didn’t, and anyway you weren’t mad, just in the doldrums. And it was quite understandable given that you’d so recently given birth.’
Once at the stables, Hope decided to leave Betsy in the buggy while they looked around. Under the hood, bundled up in a rug, she would be warmer and safer than in her arms, and if she woke Hope would be only a few feet away.
So many memories came back for her as she looked at the green-painted stable doors, now blistered and blackened by the fire. When she was scouring pans at the scullery sink she overlooked the stables, and she’d watch James grooming the horses or mucking out. She could recall feeding Merlin and the other horses with Rufus, climbing up to sit astride Sir William’s saddle when James had slung it over the wall of one of the stalls, and playing hide-and-seek with Rufus up in the hay loft.
‘Remember that hot summer when mother was away in Sussex and just before I went away to school?’ Rufus asked. ‘We had a table and chairs out here in the yard because it was too hot in the kitchen and Martha made that raspberry cordial for us.’
Hope smiled. That summer was one of her best memories for the days were so long and languid and everyone so good-natured. Some nights they all sat out here in the stable yard till well past ten, and she and Rufus would look up at the stars above and try to count them.
Many of the cobblestones in the yard were broken and dislodged now, and all that remained of the big house was one layer of brick and stone. But the step up to the kitchen door where she’d so often sat that summer shelling peas or peeling potatoes was still there, like a monument to the good times.
‘Was nothing saved from the house?’ she asked, unable to take in that the drawing room had been where the chicken run was now, or that the magnificent staircase had been burned completely.
‘Pots and pans, that was all,’ Rufus said ruefully. ‘And the statues from the rosebed out the front. I sold those to a man in Bath, and much of the stone from the outside walls of the house I saved. But the furniture, books, paintings and china were all destroyed. But don’t let’s think on that, come on inside and I’ll showyou what I’ve got in mind.’
He was only using the first stable, for Flash and his plough horse. In the other two larger ones Rufus had already stripped out the stalls and made a vast space.
‘I’ll have the kitchen here,’ he said, pacing out an area some fourteen feet square. ‘Then a passageway with a staircase up to the bedrooms, and the parlour beyond that. I’ll build fireplaces and chimneys on the back wall.’
They had just climbed the old ladder inside the stable which led to the loft above, when they heard a bell ringing.
Rufus groaned. ‘That will be Mother. It’s the old bell on the gatehouse wall. I wish I’d never suggested she ring it if she needed me; on her bad days she can ring it three or four times a day.’
They went back down the ladder and looked down the drive; Lady Harvey had gone back inside the cottage.
‘Sometimes she rings just because she’s lost something,’ Rufus said, frowning with irritation. ‘But I’d better run down there and see what’s wrong. You wait here, I really need your opinion about the windows and whether I should have the front door going straight into the kitchen or the hall.’
‘I’ll give it some thought while you’re gone,’ Hope said. ‘And you’d better hurry, it might be something serious. Ring the bell again if you need me.’
As Rufus raced off down the drive, Hope went back inside the stable and imagined what she’d want if it was to be her house. The first thing that struck her was that there should be windows in the outside wall, to let in the morning sun. She thought too that Rufus should build the chimney and fireplaces up through the middle, with the kitchen stove on one side, the parlour fire on the