Hope - Lesley Pearse [32]
Last winter, when the snow lay on the ground for weeks, the family lived on turnips and potatoes because there was no money to buy meat. The boys set traps for rabbits without any success, and night after night they all went to bed hungry. But if there was more snow again this winter, they wouldn’t even have vegetables to fall back on.
‘Will we go down to the Merchants’ farm tomorrow to see if the baby has been born?’ Hope asked, hoping to cheer her mother as she seemed rather glum.
Matt and Amy’s first child, Reuben, had been born the previous year. A second child was due any day now, but there was flooding around their farm.
‘I think we must wait for dry weather,’ Meg replied, but sighed because she was as anxious as Hope for news. ‘Amy’s got her mother with her, so she’ll be fine, and Matt would ride up here if he needed us.’
‘Why hasn’t Nell had a baby?’ Hope asked.
‘Questions, questions, questions, that’s all I get from you,’ Meg snapped. ‘The good Lord decides who is to have babies and those to leave without.’
Hope retreated into silence. She had sensed for some time that her parents were unhappy about Nell and Albert, for whenever Hope asked anything about them the reply was invariably a curt one. The family had only been invited to the gatehouse once, and that was some eighteen months ago on a Sunday. Nell had gone to a great deal of trouble, cooking roast lamb, several different vegetables and apple tart to follow, but the meal was overshadowed by Albert’s critical remarks about her cooking, and Nell’s nervousness.
Yet there had been suspicions that Albert was something of a bully even before that. Nell rarely came home to visit, and when she did, she never stayed longer than half an hour. On Sundays at church with Albert beside her she often looked drawn and anxious. Albert was polite enough, but standoffish, as if he thought his wife’s family were beneath him. Ruth reported that Nell never lingered in the servants’ hall after work for a chat any more, and even when the sisters were alone together Ruth claimed that Nell seemed unable to hold a real conversation, for she preceded every statement with ‘Albert says’, suggesting that she’d lost the ability to express any view of her own.
Just a couple of months ago Hope had called on Nell at her cottage and asked her outright if she was happy with Albert. ‘He’s a good husband,’ had been her sister’s reply, which wasn’t exactly an answer to the question.
Daylight was fading when Silas finally returned home. Hope was just lighting the candles when the click of the door latch made her turn to see her father in the doorway, rain cascading off him on to the floor.
Meg gasped, for it was clear by his strained expression that he was exhausted and chilled to the bone. ‘Thank heaven you’re back,’ she said, rushing to peel the sodden sack from his shoulders. ‘You must get out of those wet things this minute! Stir up the fire and make him some tea!’ she ordered Hope, stripping off her husband’s clothes as if he were a small child.
Once she had him in a chair by the fire with a blanket around him, a hot drink in his hand and his feet soaking in a mustard bath, she questioned him about his trip to Bristol.
‘The ship wasn’t unloaded so I had to stay in a lodging house. It were terrible.’
Meg got him into bed because he was shivering so violently, but he caught hold of her hand and tried to tell her how it had been for him. He wasn’t entirely coherent, he couldn’t even put whole sentences together, but the words he did use and the disgust in his voice painted a very vivid picture for both Meg and Hope about where he had stayed.
‘Twelve or more men in one filthy room. Dirty straw. Low, brutish types, stupid with drink. Habits that turned my stomach. Animals behave better.’
Meg washed his face and hands tenderly, wrapping the blankets tightly around him and soothing him with the reminder he was safely home at last. But although his voice was becoming little more than a croak he seemed desperate for