Hope - Lesley Pearse [41]
She was utterly devastated at losing her parents, and she wished to God she’d defied both Albert and Lady Harvey and come to the cottage before it was too late. Maybe she couldn’t have done anything to save them, but at least she wouldn’t have this terrible guilt that she had done nothing.
Yet she was even more ashamed that she hadn’t been brave enough to put her foot down with Albert right from the first day they were married, and insisted on spending her afternoons off with her family. What right did he have to say her place was in their home and her parents weren’t important? In three years of marriage she’d only spent a total of perhaps five or six hours with them, and that was mostly on the way home from church with Albert. She got the family news second-hand through Ruth, and she hadn’t once been able to sit down and really talk to her mother and father and explain things.
But she supposed that if she had had that opportunity she might have revealed to her mother that she regretted marrying Albert and admitted that he often hit her.
She glanced out through the door, almost as if she believed he was capable of reading her thoughts. But she’d got so used to him ordering everything in her life, from what she cooked to how the furniture was arranged, how she swept the floor or did the washing, that she didn’t even feel her mind belonged to her any longer.
He was still deep in conversation with Mr Merchant. That was another thing about Albert; he would only talk to people who were successful or well-bred, and the Merchants qualified because they owned their own farm. He once remarked ‘how wise’ Matt had been to marry Amy! As if wisdom had come into it! Matt had acted on his heart, nothing else.
Sadly, Nell realized that Albert had only married her because she was so close to Lady Harvey. He didn’t want to live above the stables with the grooms, he wanted a house of his own and someone he could lord it over. He knew the mistress wouldn’t want to lose Nell, and the gatehouse cottage was empty.
How well it had worked out for him! A wife who obeyed him implicitly, a cottage furnished with castoffs from Briar-gate, and he could act the big man in the ale house in Chelwood because he was favoured by Sir William.
Nell often wondered what those same men would think of the ‘big man’ if they knew he had a marriage in name only. There was no married love: he slept in the bed with her, but nothing else ever took place. She felt he despised women, for when she’d tried to tempt him into it when they first got married, he’d slapped her and said she was a dirty whore. She’d never tried it again.
She could almost resign herself to a life without love, and to being less than his maid of all work, but she couldn’t accept that she would never have children of her own. That was too cruel.
Glancing out of the door, she saw Hope sitting alone under the apple tree, staring at the view as if trying to hold on to all the good memories it evoked. Nell’s tears began to flow again, for she loved Hope so much and couldn’t bear to see her so unhappy. She wanted and needed to take her home with her, but she was afraid to. Albert didn’t want her there.
He hadn’t said it in so many words. He couldn’t because everyone at Briargate, including Lady Harvey, expected him to welcome Hope. No one who knew the child would consider her a burden, and Albert would be thought at best uncharitable, at worst a brute, if he refused to take her in. Today, talking to Matt and James, he’d acted as if he welcomed the idea of a child about the house.
But Nell knew the truth. Albert thought only about Albert. He had no tenderness, no compassion. He wanted his life to be like one of his wretched flowerbeds. He dictated what was to go into it. He would whisk anything out that wasn’t exactly as he planned, cut back anything that threatened to dominate.
Hope wouldn’t fit in at all.
Chapter Five
1844
‘Hurry up, Hope,’ Nell whispered. ‘He’s getting cross.