Hope - Lesley Pearse [45]
Hope was brimming over with curiosity now; she had to take a look at this man who flustered Nell.
Unfortunately she had no excuse to go anywhere in the house. She was a kitchenmaid, and the kitchen was where she had to stay.
Cook always had a little rest between three and four in the afternoon. Mostly she just sat in her chair by the stove and dozed a little, but that afternoon her legs, which often troubled her, were very swollen and she said she was going to have a lie-down in her room.
‘If I’m not back here by four, put the kettle on for tea and come and get me,’ she said to Hope.
Baines was in his parlour busy with his accounts, Rose was in the dining room laying the table for supper, and Ruby had the afternoon off and had gone down to the village. With everyone gone, Hope got on with scrubbing the kitchen and scullery floor. When she came back in from tipping the dirty water away out in the yard, she was surprised to see it was almost four, and Cook wasn’t back.
This had never happened before. Cook always asked to be called, but it was never needed. While it was the excuse Hope had wanted to go beyond the kitchen, she was suddenly nervous. She put the kettle on, changed her apron, straightened her cap, and after a few minutes’ hesitation went out into the hall.
The backstairs on the east side of the house that led from beyond the servants’ hall right up to the attic rooms were the ones she was supposed to use, but she wouldn’t catch even a glimpse of the Captain that way. But if she took a chance on crossing the hall, going up the main staircase and then nipping along the landing past the master and mistress’s rooms, if anyone saw her before she reached the backstairs, she’d be in trouble.
Hearing Lady Harvey’s voice coming from the drawing room, which meant the door was open, she turned back. Maybe it would be better to watch for the Captain going round to the stables to get his horse – no one could tell her off for going out into the yard.
As she made her way up the backstairs, Hope reflected on their meanness. They were narrow and steep, and the plain whitewashed walls were marked and gouged from the passage of so many servants carrying heavy loads up and down them. It always seemed absurd to her that while servants had intimate knowledge of their master and mistress’s bodies, personal habits and every other aspect of their lives, they had to use a separate staircase.
Hope rapped on Cook’s door and called out that it was after four. When there was no reply she opened the door and peeped in.
But instead of finding Cook still fast asleep as she expected, she was lying face down on the floor.
‘Cook!’ she exclaimed in dismay, rushing to her and rolling her over.
To her horror the older woman’s face was chalky-white, with an angry red mark on the forehead, clearly the result of banging her head on the bed as she fell. Her skin was ice-cold, and when she didn’t respond in any way to Hope chafing her hands, the girl thought she was dead.
Hope rushed out of the room and clattered down the backstairs two at a time, then, because she was so panicked about Cook, she ran straight for Lady Harvey in the drawing room.
‘It’s Cook, m’lady,’ she blurted out as she charged in. ‘She’s fallen down in her room and I think she’s dead.’
‘You didn’t knock!’ Lady Harvey reproved her. ‘Whatever are you thinking of, Hope? It’s Baines who deals with the servants.’
Hope had not only forgotten her manners and Baines, but in her haste she’d forgotten about the Captain. He had jumped out of his chair by the fire as she rushed in, and she immediately recognized him as the same tall and slender man she’d seen in the front garden on her first visit to Briargate almost six years earlier.
‘She’s just a child,’ he said, looking askance at Lady Harvey. ‘Look how frightened she is!’
‘She’s all cold and stiff.’ Hope directed this at the Captain for he was clearly more sympathetic than her mistress. ‘I turned her over because she was on her face, but I couldn’t lift her on to the bed on