Hope - Lesley Pearse [73]
The straw in the barn smelled sweet and it was a relief to be out of the rain and wind, but she was so wet she was unable to get warm. She lay there for what seemed like hours listening to the wind howling, and the events of the day kept churning over and over in her mind.
The image that remained clearest of all was that of Albert in bed with Sir William. She might only have seen them for a couple of seconds, yet the contrast between Albert’s bronzed back and dark hair, and blond Sir William beneath him with such white skin was unforgettable. Their shocked expressions at being discovered would be imprinted on her mind for ever.
Yet the act they were engaged in puzzled her as much as it disgusted her, for why would a man want another? Were they the only two men in England like that? Or was she just an ignorant country girl who knew nothing about anything?
Yet it did make new sense of certain things from the past: how Rufus had said his mother asked Sir William if he’d been at a whorehouse; and Nell’s claim that Albert often stayed out till the early hours of the morning. Were they together?
Then there was the way the old cook used to say Sir William was girlish, and how Albert insisted he walked from Wells to Briargate on the off-chance Sir William would take him on as gardener. Was that because he knew Sir William was the same as him?
But above all she wondered if Albert had known he could never love a woman when he married Nell.
Hope struggled to her feet as she heard a cock crow nearby. Her cloak and boots were just as wet as they had been last night, and it was still raining. Her hair was coming down and without a comb she could do nothing about it. Just the feel of her sore, puffy face told her that she must look as desperate as she felt.
She hobbled from the barn to the road, but each step was agony and she felt so weak and dizzy it was tempting to go back to the barn. Then a wave of nausea overtook her and she vomited into the bushes.
As she stood up she could see down into the valley through a gap in the bushes. It was too grey and misty to make out anything more than the steeple of the church at Publow, but that was enough to make her cry for it wasn’t far from Woolard and Matt.
She could imagine him in his kitchen, dark hair tousled from sleep, a shadow of bristles on his chin, perhaps with the baby on his knee while Amy made him tea. He would be furious when he heard about the letter. Gentle Amy would probably think it was romantic, and urge Matt and the boys not to be angry. But not one of them would ever consider that Hope might have been forced to write that letter, and that it wasn’t true.
She knew she couldn’t hope that Sir William would feel guilty and admit what really happened in the gatehouse. In truth he had probably ordered Albert to silence her and didn’t care how he achieved it.
Her disappearance would be the talk of the village for a few days, but once that had died down even her own family would put her out of their minds.
People disappeared all the time. They left the village to look for work in Bath or Bristol and never came back. Hope could remember her father talking about a man whose son had been gone for three years when he got a letter from a priest in America telling him his boy had died of smallpox. There was never any explanation about how or why the lad went there.
Toby and Alice hadn’t been back to the village for eighteen months; they had lost the incentive to take the long walk since their mother and father died. James would probably never come back again either, and once Ruth