Hope - Lesley Pearse [39]
Hope nodded.
‘That would be how she caught it,’ the Reverend Gosling said sadly. ‘But of course she wouldn’t have known what it was then. Now, let me come in and see her.’
Despite all the Reverend Gosling’s prayers, and getting Mrs Calway to come in and help nurse Meg, she died two days after Silas. She seemed to rally a little, enough perhaps to realize her husband was gone, but then she seemed to give up fighting the sickness and died during the night. When he called the following morning, the Reverend Gosling said that it was perhaps a blessing that she died quickly without the indignity Silas had suffered. Hope had to agree with that, for she knew her mother would have hated to have anyone clearing up her bodily wastes. But that didn’t soothe the pain of losing her.
Mrs Calway washed both Meg and Silas and laid them out. Her husband Geoffrey, the village carpenter, brought up the coffins, and Matt and James lifted them in.
The coffins stood on trestles, and Hope scoured the fields and woodland around the cottage for wild flowers to decorate them. However much everyone praised her for looking after their parents, she couldn’t help but feel there must have been something she could have done to prevent their deaths.
The morning of the funeral was a beautiful sunny day. There had been mist first thing, but it cleared quickly. Hope stood looking down at the river for a long time before her brothers and sisters arrived, remembering how much her father had always liked this time of year.
‘When the harvest is in, and the fields ploughed, I get the feeling the Lord likes to reward us all with a display of His greatness,’ he used to say. He would wave a hand at the trees in their autumn colouring, and his eyes would become damp with emotion.
Many of the trees had come down in the recent storms, and others had lost their leaves prematurely, yet the valley was still a patchwork of orange, yellow, russet, scarlet, green and brown. The river, half hidden all summer, was revealed in all its sparkling glory, squirrels scampered up and down trees searching for hazelnuts, and fluffy Old Man’s Beard scrambled over hedges. Hope remembered all the times she’d picked blackberries and elderberries with her mother, the way she used to laugh and hold Hope up in her arms to reach the high ones. It was unbearable to think she would never hear that laugh again and never see her parents sitting together on the bench under the apple tree on summer evenings, their hands entwined.
Later that morning as Matt screwed down the coffin lids, Hope looked around at her gathered family and wished she was in a third coffin.
Nell was sobbing, her face against Albert’s chest. Amy looked pale and anxious, as if afraid the disease was still lurking in the cottage and she might carry it home to her new baby and Reuben. Matt was grim-faced, struggling to control his emotions, and Ruth and Alice were clinging to each other while James and Toby stood by shuffling awkwardly, not knowing what to do or say.
Joe and Henry were stiff and white-faced. Though not yet men at thirteen and twelve, they were too old to cry, and perhaps they were remembering that one of the last things they said to their parents was that they would go to London for there was nothing for them here.
Hope felt like the odd one out. The other ten all had a close bond with someone else in the family; Matt had Amy and Nell had Albert. It was true that every one of them had put their arms around her and indeed promised she would be taken care of, but she still felt very alone.
The mattress on her parents’ bed had been burned, as had all the straw-filled sacks from the loft. She and Jane Calway had scrubbed the whole cottage from top to bottom with vinegar and water. Every piece of linen had been boiled, blankets washed, the chairs and table scrubbed. They had burned sweet-smelling herbs on the fire to rid the cottage of any lingering pestilence, but it would