Hope - Lesley Pearse [82]
Hygiene as Hope knew it was unknown. Neither bodies nor clothes were washed, and the latter were worn until they fell apart. The children had matted hair which had never known a comb or a brush, their scalps crawling with lice. She saw poor little mites with festering wounds, impetigo and hideous boils scrabbling after scraps of food thrown into the street. Hope knew that with no care, schooling or even anyone to set them a good example, those that survived to reach adulthood would perpetuate this appalling state of affairs by bringing still more neglected waifs into the world.
On her third day in Lamb Lane Hope could stand the dirt no more, and she picked up each of the sacks used for sleeping and shook them out of the window. Then she made a broom of sorts with some rags left in a corner. She bundled some together, tied a bit of string round it so it was like a mop, and swept the room. The rubbish and dust filled a box, and she took it out and deposited it in the street where everyone else put theirs.
With another rag she washed over the window and polished it up with some old newspaper she found under the sacks. With the sacks back in neat piles, each with a blanket on top, the room looked marginally better, but it got her thinking about her old room at Briargate, with its soft quilt, clean blankets and white cotton sheets, and that made her cry all over again.
Gussie and Betsy viewed the tidied room with a certain amount of admiration, but mostly amusement. ‘We can tell folks we’s going up in the world cos we’ve got ourselves a maid,’ Betsy chortled. She lay down on one of the piles of sacks and waved her hand at Hope.
‘Make me tea now, girl, and quick about it,’ she said in a grand voice. ‘Use the silver teapot of course, and once you’ve done that you can press my ballgown for tonight.’
Hope laughed, for it was impossible not to, Betsy was so warm and irreverent, but her laughter turned to consternation when Gussie pulled two candles out of the front of his coat.
‘Are they from a church?’ she asked in horror, recognizing them as the same thick, long kind they always had in St Mary’s back home.
‘Indeed they are,’ he said with a grin. ‘They last a goodly time too. So while her ladyship sups her tea, we can have light.’
Hope bit back her protest. She’d already observed they had no respect for the law, authority or gentry and teased her because she had. But stealing something from a church was so wicked.
‘Don’t look like that,’ Gussie reprimanded her. ‘They’ve got dozens of them, they won’t miss two. Besides, the Church is rich, they takes money from the poor and dresses up all those bishops in swanky folderols so they can live in palaces and lie around all day doing nothing.’
Gussie’s caustic remark about the Church was just one of many he made on various subjects, which challenged beliefs Hope had held since childhood. She was soon finding herself far less certain of what was right and what was wrong.
The Reverend Gosling had drummed into her ‘Blessed are the Meek.’ Gussie said that was put about by rich and powerful people to make sure there were always millions of meek people they could exploit. He pointed out that she had meekly laid fires and emptied chamber pots for the idle rich and that she’d been taught to be grateful for the few shillings a year she got. He said it was time she valued herself a bit more.
Betsy was even more controversial. She thought women should have equal rights to men. She said it was wrong that a woman’s property and money should become her husband’s when she married, that he could beat her whenever he liked, and take their children away from her if she finally got brave enough to try to leave him. She also thought women should be able to