Hope - Lesley Pearse [30]
But the worst of it was that she knew this was how it would be until she went into service. And that would be even worse.
‘Come and sit beside me, Meg,’ Silas called out as he saw his wife looking out of the door to see where he was.
It was September, a beautiful evening with the sun just starting to set. Silas was sitting on the seat under the apple tree smoking his pipe, watching the sky turning pink. Down at the bottom of the field by the river bank he could see rabbits feeding. An owl was perched up on a fence post waiting to spot its supper. Everything was just as it should be, the chickens in their coop for the night, Hope, Joe and Henry already asleep up in the loft, and they’d had a good dinner tonight of chicken and apple dumplings. But Silas was unable to enjoy the peace or the view because he was worried.
Meg came over the grass towards him, a tankard of cider in her hand. She passed it to him and sat down beside him. ‘It’ll be a year tomorrow that our Nell got wed. Are you thinking we’ve lost her for good?’
Silas didn’t reply immediately, mainly because that wasn’t what he was thinking about. He had concerns that Nell never came home to visit any more, but a wife had to obey her husband’s wishes, and if Albert wanted Nell at their home in her spare time, then Silas supposed he had to accept that. But he knew Meg couldn’t see it that way.
‘I know you miss her,’ he said eventually. ‘But she chose Albert and they’ve got a life of their own to make now. At least we see her at church every Sunday.’
‘Maybe it will be different when she has a baby,’ Meg said hopefully.
‘Maybe.’ Silas sighed because he didn’t really believe that. ‘But it was Hope I was fretting about. She don’t seem herself.’
‘She’ll be fine, she’ll get used to work, we all had to,’ Meg said. ‘We should’ve broken her in more gently perhaps, stopped her going up to the big house a year ago. But what’s done is done. We do have to teach her that for folk like us there is no easy road.’
Silas turned to look at his wife and wondered, as he had so many times before, how she managed to be so accepting. When they fell in love they believed that one day they’d have a little farm of their own, but here they were twenty-six years on and they were still breaking their backs for a pittance. When he was too old to work and they couldn’t pay the rent, they’d be thrown on the parish.
But they were blessed, he knew that. They had each other, their children were healthy and strong, the five older ones were all in good positions, and two of them married off. He hoped he could get Joe and Henry apprenticed in good trades.
Hope was the only one he worried about for she was neither a Renton by blood nor by nature.
‘She ain’t never going to be right for service, nor for farm work,’ Silas burst out. ‘She’s got too much brain for either. I see her sometimes questioning everything; that spark in her will never let her obey blindly like we’ve always done. And she’s too pretty for her own good.’
‘Maybe with her reading, writing and the sums she can do, she’ll find work in Bristol or Bath in a shop,’ Meg said hopefully.
‘But there’s dangers in the city.’
‘There’s dangers everywhere.’ Meg took his hand in hers and stroked it lovingly. ‘But we’ve taught her right from wrong, loved her just as much as our own. We can’t do more.’
Silas drank the last of his cider as the sun slipped down behind the hill.
‘Maybe we could go to Lady Harvey,’ he burst out suddenly. ‘Tell her Hope is her own and get a pledge from her that she’ll help the girl when the time comes.’
Meg looked shocked. ‘Whatever are you thinking of, Silas?’ she exclaimed. ‘We can’t do that! She’d think we were trying to blackmail her. Nell, Albert, James and Ruth, they’d all lose their positions. You’d probably lose yours too.’
‘She wouldn’t do that! Not after all the good service our family has given her.’
‘Don’t count on it.’ Meg grimaced. ‘A woman with a guilty secret is a dangerous