Hope - Lesley Pearse [37]
At least it was a fine day, with a stiff enough wind to dry everything. Once it was all hanging up, she got instructions from her mother to make some beef tea with a small piece of beef a neighbour had left by the gate. She was folding up the clean dry sheets when she smelled the foul smell again from her father, and once again she had to clean him up and change his bed before trying to spoon some of the beef tea into him.
‘You’re such a good girl,’ her mother said weakly as Hope helped her to sit up and drink some of the beef tea too. ‘Is your father any better?’
Young as she was, without any first-hand experience of sickness, Hope sensed he was dying. He hadn’t had one lucid moment today, and she’d only managed to make him swallow a few spoons of beef tea. It was as if the strong, hearty man she loved had already gone from the cottage.
‘He’s a bit better,’ she lied, knowing that if she said otherwise her mother would try to get up to see him. ‘He took some beef tea. He asked how you were.’
It was almost dark when Hope heard someone banging on the gate with a stick. She thought perhaps it was a neighbour, for there had been the piece of beef and other little offerings of pies, vegetables and jars of soup left on the doorstep in the last few days.
She ran out and to her relief it was Nell standing in the lane with a basket in her hand.
‘I daren’t come in,’ she called out. ‘Lady Harvey would never let me back into Briargate, and Albert will play merry hell. But I had to see you. How is Father?’
Hope wanted to run to her sister’s arms, but she knew she couldn’t. ‘He’s bad, and Mother’s got it now,’ she called out. ‘I’m scared, Nell, I don’t know what to do.’
Even in the dim light she could see her sister’s anguished expression and knew she wanted to come in and take over. Yet as much as she needed Nell, she couldn’t let that happen.
‘Just tell me what else I can do,’ Hope called out, quickly explaining how their parents were.
‘You are doing all there is to do,’ Nell said, her voice shaking. ‘But you shouldn’t have to be doing it, you are only a child. I should have disobeyed Albert right from the start and come here days ago.’
In that moment, Hope saw that Nell was afraid of Albert, and though it was too gloomy to see clearly she thought her sister’s cheek looked bruised.
‘We wouldn’t have let you in,’ Hope insisted. ‘But Mother will be glad you came tonight. Just leave the basket there. I can manage.’
Hope watched Nell walk away, constantly turning her head back as if torn between love for her parents and duty to her mistress and husband.
Tears ran down Hope’s face as Nell disappeared from sight for she understood her sister’s dilemma. Only yesterday her mother had said that if five years ago she’d known there was scarlet fever in the village she would have kept Violet and Prudence at home. She also said that if she’d known her husband had brought this sickness back from Bristol, she would immediately have sent Hope away too.
Meg called it ‘Ship Fever’; she said she’d seen it before when she was a girl. Her uncle, who was a sailor, caught it, and her mother had nursed him. But Meg didn’t say whether he got over it or died.
Later that night Hope got down on her knees and prayed. ‘Don’t let them die, please!’ she begged. ‘I’ll do anything, I’ll never complain about anything again. Just let them get better.’
As soon as she opened her eyes in the morning, Hope sensed something was wrong. She could hear the birds singing outside, and the sound of wind in the trees, but there was a strange stillness inside the cottage.
She had slept up in the loft to keep an eye on both her parents, and she was out of her bed and down the ladder as fast as her legs would carry her.
Going straight over to her father’s bed, she stopped suddenly, clamping her hand over her mouth in horror. She didn’t have to touch him to know he