Hope - Lesley Pearse [81]
The docks were a hive of industry. Huge barrels of French and Spanish wine were being rolled along over the cobblestones, burly men were hauling great nets of goods on and off the ships, carts came and went carrying more goods, and she saw carriages arriving that looked grand enough for royalty.
The hammering from a ship-builder’s yard, sails flapping in the wind to dry, sailors scrubbing decks and the squawking sound of seagulls took Hope out of herself. It was thrilling to imagine the foreign countries the ships set sail for, and in their way, the docks were just as ordered as her life had been back at Briargate.
She thought she would like to work there, in some capacity, but when she voiced this thought to Betsy she cackled with laughter.
‘Oh, there’s work to be had here,’ she said, rolling her eyes at a gang of sailors. ‘There’s lead the drunks up an alley and rob them; there’s wait and watch for them to leave some goods unattended. You can even offer to clean the seagull shit off some fine lady’s shoes.’
That wasn’t what Hope had in mind at all. She was thinking more of sitting in one of the shipping offices writing things down in a big ledger. But she didn’t correct Betsy because she didn’t want her to get the idea that the girl she’d rescued thought she was too grand for Lewins Mead.
The days after that first one seemed endless for she elected to stay in alone while Gussie and Betsy went about their business. But there was nothing to do in the room, and she felt desolate whenever her mind slipped back to her family or Briargate. She felt white-hot hatred for Albert, and although she busied her mind plotting her revenge, she knew that in reality there was nothing she could do to him, even killing him, that wouldn’t adversely affect Nell.
She felt utterly hopeless. She couldn’t get a decent job without a character. She couldn’t leave here because she had no money. She couldn’t even pass the time cleaning, cooking or mending because there was none of the necessary equipment.
She’d worked since she was a child and although she’d often thought it would be nice to sit and do nothing, it wasn’t. Not in a squalid, dirty room anyway, when you were eaten up with hatred for someone and dependent on the kindness of strangers just to eat.
In the next couple of days, sometimes, when her boredom grew bigger than her fear, she ventured downstairs and explored Lamb Lane and the neighbouring alleyways. It was on these occasions that she observed that the kind of housekeeping skills she had were unknown here.
The residents bought food ready-cooked and ate it on the move; they didn’t wash or mend clothes, but wore them till they fell apart, or in Betsy’s case, until she could steal replacements. The family life Hope had known as a child didn’t exist either. Children were out on the streets from first light till after dark, and the man of the house who only went in to sleep wasn’t necessarily their father.
In a lesson once with the Rever-end Gosling he’d said that a huge proportion of babies born in the poorest areas of cities died in their first year, and for the survivors, life would continue to be an obstacle course. If they recovered from measles or scarlet fever, there were dozens more diseases which could easily carry them off.
Gussie had told her that by the time the children were seven or eight, almost all of them would be living on the streets,