Hope - Lesley Pearse [8]
‘What shall we call her?’ the older woman said eventually, taking the baby from Nell’s arms and this time looking at her almost fondly. ‘It wouldn’t be right not to give her a name.’
Joan Stott’s fairy child was called Faith, and it came to Nell immediately that another fairy child born so close should have a similar name.
‘Hope,’ she said without any hesitation.
Bridie pursed her lips as if she didn’t like it, but then as she looked down at the sleeping infant in her arms she began to smile. ‘Aye, Nell, that’s a good name. I hope your mother will come to love the poor little mite, I hope too that I can forget the wicked thing I was going to do earlier. She don’t look at all like our mistress, so maybe you’re right and she is a fairy child.’
That evening Nell paused at the edge of Lord’s Wood which marked the boundary between Briargate House and the Hunstrete land. She had the baby beneath her cloak, secured by a shawl to her chest. Putting down her basket, she turned to look back at the house, for there was a full moon and she could see as plain as if it were day.
Briargate was best viewed from its long tree-lined drive which came up from the road at Chelwood. It stood proudly on slightly higher ground and you could see the magnificent front porch, the elegant long windows and the large marble statues which stood in the circular rosebed before the house. In summer it was a picture with roses and wisteria scrambling right up to the bedroom windows.
But Nell was on the east side of the house, down at the bottom end of the paddock, for the quickest way to reach the village of Compton Dando was through the woods. Seen from this angle, in moonlight, the fir trees which had been planted around the boundaries of the grounds looked for all the world as if they were guarding Briargate. The moonlight glinted too on the marble statues at the front, and a tear trickled down Nell’s cheek as she realized that the sleeping baby in her arms was in fact losing its birthright along with its mother.
‘I’ll say goodbye to it for you,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry you can’t grow up in the fine nursery, that you won’t get silk gowns and servants to wait on you. But I reckons you’ll get more love in our cottage.’
The feeling she’d aged ten years when she’d looked in the mirror this morning had stayed with her. She was exhausted, but she felt even sleep wouldn’t bring her back to the carefree girl she’d been a couple of days ago. She had heard Lady Harvey crying pitifully this afternoon, and suddenly to Nell she wasn’t a beautiful, wealthy woman who had the world at her feet, but just another poor soul grieving over the child she had lost.
Hope had begun to cry around the same time, and all Nell could do was spoon sugar water into her tiny mouth to keep her going until later. Bridie had spent most of the afternoon going through the chest in Sir William’s old nursery to find baby nightgowns, bonnets and jackets. She had said how bleak it made her feel to have to put back the finer, beautifully embroidered ones and only take the plain ones, for it would raise eyebrows in the village if little Hope was dressed in finery.
Yet the napkins, blanket and other things packed in the basket were still far beyond anything Nell and her brothers and sisters had known. Hope would suck from the same breast all of them knew, know days of hunger just like them, and find out that working began for village folk at an early age. But wouldn’t she retain something of both her real parents too? Not just her looks, shape and size, but an inbred knowledge that she wasn’t truly one of the servant class?
Nell sighed and picked up her basket. She knew it was no good thinking on these things, and she had to pick her way carefully through the wood, taking care not to stumble in the dark.
Compton Dando lay in a wooded vale with the river Chew running through it. For a small village, the population being a little less than four hundred, it was a busy place, with an inn, a bakery, the church, a blacksmith