Hope - Lesley Pearse [75]
She felt rather than saw them exchange meaningful glances. Assuming they were doubtful about her being taken on by anyone because of how she looked, she pushed back her hood. ‘If you could just lend me a comb and show me somewhere I could wash my face, I’ll be all right. I’ve been a kitchenmaid for over three years, and I can cook very well.’
When they remained silent, she took that to be disbelief and she finally broke down in tears. ‘I can do all kinds of work,’ she sobbed. ‘Please believe me!’
‘Well, you ain’t gonna be able to get any sorta work with yer face that way,’ the young woman said, and to Hope’s surprise she drew her into her arms and rocked her. ‘Now, don’t cry, love. You’s just weary and hurt. I reckon we’ll take you home with us and patch you up. God knows, we can’t leave you here like this.’
‘You ain’t thinking straight, Betsy,’ Gussie said in a whisper, glancing over his shoulder at the girl asleep on the pile of sacks which passed for a bed. ‘It’s hard enough lookin’ out fer ourselves. We can’t keep her an’ all.’
Betsy had bathed the girl’s face, given her some small beer to drink, then helped her out of her wet clothes and covered her in a blanket. Now she was asleep.
The room was in Lewins Mead, a rabbit warren of fetid alleys and ancient dilapidated wooden-framed houses close to the docks. It housed what someone in Parliament had recently dubbed ‘The Dangerous and Perishing Classes’, a stratum of life well below the working classes – thieves, whores, crossing sweepers, street vendors, cripples, deserters, the most desperate of the city’s poor.
A hundred years earlier when Bristol had been the second biggest city next to London, and the docks as busy as London’s and Liverpool’s, Lewins Mead had been a good address. Great fortunes had been made during the slave trade, for it was Bristol ships that sailed to Africa to pick up slaves, then on to the West Indies to sell them, finally returning to England laden with molasses and tobacco. But as the shipping trade boomed, the wealthy merchants, ships’ captains and professional men no longer wished to live close to the pestilence of the docks, and they moved to grand new houses up on the hills of Clifton and Kingsdown.
But the docks were no longer as busy as they had been a hundred years earlier. Exorbitant harbour dues, the tardiness of the Corporation in building the new floating harbour, and the fact that new, bigger ships were unable to get up and down the river Avon, meant that Bristol had lost out to Liverpool docks. The new railways meant that it had lost its place as the distribution centre for the whole of the West of England, Wales and the Midlands.
Once, Bristol had been proud of its many industries – sugar refining, glass, iron foundries and soap manufacture – but they were gone now, aside from four glass companies. That and the countrywide failing economy in recent years had created even more hardship in Bristol.
So now the old merchants’ houses were let out by the room, and the tenants sublet floor space to anyone who wanted it. Sometimes there were as many as twenty or thirty people sleeping in each room. The houses sagged and creaked with neglect; wind blew in through the cracks, and the upper windows which overhung the narrow alleyways were boarded up as the glass broke or fell out.
But Betsy and Gussie thought themselves fortunate to have this top-floor room in Lamb Lane. They might share it with four other people, but they were friends, not strangers. The roof didn’t leak too badly, they had glass in their small window and a fireplace too, and they’d stuffed up the holes in the walls with oiled rags. To them it was a home.
‘She’ll bring us luck,’ Betsy insisted. ‘There’s something about her.’
‘Aye, there’s something about her! Something that makes a man smash her face in,’ Gussie said gloomily. ‘And she’s real sick. What if we catch it?’
‘You can’t catch what ails her,’ Betsy said stoutly. She suspected the girl was carrying a child and her brother-in-law had been afraid she’d shame his family.
Betsy