Hope - Lesley Pearse [72]
He grabbed her round the throat again and squeezed it slowly, grinning at her maniacally. ‘If you ever dare set foot in Briargate again, if you write a letter or even send a message by someone else, believe me, I’ll do what I said I’d do.’
Releasing her neck, he punched her hard in the belly and as she collapsed on the floor, howling in pain, he kicked at her head.
‘One last thing,’ he said, reaching down and hauling her up like a sack of potatoes, ‘you’re going to write a letter to Nell.’
It was an hour or more later, pitch dark and still raining hard, when Albert pushed Hope out through the front door. To be sure she didn’t run into anyone who knew her, he had ordered her to take the long way round through Chelwood to reach the Bristol road.
Her cloak had still been sodden when she put it back on, but he had allowed her to wear an old dress of Nell’s as her own was torn. She had seen herself in a mirror as she put the dress on; her eyes were mere slits in puffy flesh, and her lip was cut in two places. As for the rest of her, she was so bruised and battered that only her feet didn’t hurt. She guessed by the time she’d walked the ten miles or more to Bristol, they would hurt just as much too though.
She sobbed as she walked, her head down, but knowing how Nell would react to that letter he had made her write hurt worse than her injuries, grievous though they were.
Albert was smarter than she’d realized. He’d told her exactly what to write. That she’d met a young man, a soldier, and she was running off with him because she was tired of scrubbing pans and lighting fires. He made her apologize for taking Nell’s dress and said she could have all her things.
She guessed Albert was already on his way back to Briargate for his supper, and he’d listen to Baines, Rose and Martha asking where she was, and say he hadn’t seen her as he’d been in the woodshed all afternoon. Maybe he’d leave to go home, and return later with the letter saying he’d found it at the gatehouse.
Hope could even picture the scene in the servants’ hall, Baines sitting up at the top of the table, the two women either side of him. Baines would argue and insist he would have seen warning signs if she’d been slipping out to meet someone. Martha and Rose, like the silly geese they were, would reminisce about young men who’d made their hearts pound, and that they had always known Hope had someone tucked away.
By the time Nell got back from Sussex the story would be right round the village. And Nell would believe it and her heart would break.
Chapter Eight
A pricking sensation woke Hope with a start. For a moment she didn’t know where she was. But as she moved and felt a stab of pain, so the events of the previous evening came back, and how she came to be lying on straw in a barn.
Ironically she was less than two miles away from Matt’s farm. If she had disobeyed Albert and walked down to Woolard and then up the hill to reach the Bristol road, she might even have reached the city last night.
It had been the kind of evening you wouldn’t even put a cat out into, very cold with high wind and driving rain. By the time she reached Pensford she was in such pain and so despairing that she paused on the bridge and thought of throwing herself into the torrential river running beneath it. But she knew that when her body was found covered with bruises, Nell would believe that they had been inflicted by the soldier she’d said she loved and her grief would be twice as bad then.
Hope had looked longingly at the lit windows of the Rising Sun ale house too. She knew there would be friends of Matt in there, and they would want to help her. But she didn’t dare enlist their help; Pensford was far too close to Briargate, and by morning the story would have reached there. And Hope knew Albert would carry out his threat.
So she walked on up the steep hill,