Hope - Lesley Pearse [91]
‘We’re not supposed to have feelings, or even a private life of our own. You don’t care if we are tired, sick or distressed, you don’t even value our loyalty. I comforted you when your mother died, but who comforted me when my parents died? Not you! All you offered was an afternoon off for the funeral. You don’t even care that Albert’s hit me, even though I’ve worked for you for twenty years. What does it take to make you care, m’lady?’
Lady Harvey turned on her side and sobbed even louder, beating at her pillow with one hand. Nell stepped forward and rescued the tea tray from the bed, afraid that it would be spilled.
‘I do care, Nell,’ her mistress said after a few moments, but her words were almost lost in the pillows. ‘I do. I do.’
She rolled back over and looked at Nell with tears running down her cheeks. ‘I’ve often said I don’t know what I’d do without you. There have been so many times when I wanted to confide in you about how I felt when I was carrying Angus’s child, and indeed about the hopelessness of my situation, then and now. But I was afraid to, not because I didn’t trust you, but because I felt if I spoke of these things they would overwhelm me. Can you understand that?’
Nell thought back to the time Lady Harvey first admitted the Captain wrote to her. ‘Can I ask that you check the post each morning?’ she asked so sweetly. ‘Of course he is only a friend, but William is being so difficult these days and he might not like Angus writing to me.’
Like a fool, Nell had felt proud that her mistress trusted her so implicitly. She’d even been glad she got some small comfort from the Captain’s letters. But maybe it would have been better if she had spoken up then and informed her that the child of her union with her friend was down in the kitchen right now, scouring saucepans, and asked if it wasn’t time she did something for that child!
‘With all due respect, m’lady,’ Nell said sharply, ‘your feelings are not that important to me now. I only want to know what Albert has done with Hope.’
Lady Harvey looked at Nell with shocked eyes. She sat up and dried her tears on the sheet. ‘It’s Christmas Eve, Nell. Rufus is here too,’ she bleated. ‘And I don’t think my husband will believe for one moment that Albert killed Hope. He has a very high opinion of him.’
‘Are you trying to tell me Sir William won’t allow us to get the police?’
Lady Harvey began twisting her fingers together in agitation. ‘I don’t know. It’s very difficult for me to talk to him these days about anything. He’s not the man I married any more.’
Nell assumed she was referring to his heavy drinking. ‘Well, catch him when he comes back in for breakfast,’ she said. ‘He’ll be feeling fine then.’
‘He’s gone out already?’
‘Yes, Baines said he went out very early.’
Lady Harvey frowned. ‘I don’t know him any more. Why does he keep going out at strange times and getting annoyed if I ask where he’s been? He used not to be like that, Nell, once we used to do everything together, we talked and laughed so much.’
Nell nodded out of politeness.
‘I expect you wondered how I could have become involved with someone else?’
‘I thought you were very lonely when Sir William was away.’
‘It wasn’t just that,’ Lady Harvey protested. ‘You’ve been with me every day for sixteen years, Nell. You do everything for me, you know me better than anyone. Surely you’ve realized why I turned to Angus?’
Nell shrugged.
Lady Harvey sighed. ‘You don’t see it, do you? You think like everyone else, and how I thought too on my wedding day, that I was lucky to have a husband who was young, handsome and wealthy. Oh, I adored him, but I was so innocent then, Nell, I’d never even kissed a man. It was years later before I discovered passion, and it was only then that I realized there had been none of that between me and William, no urge, no spark. In truth we were like brother and sister.’
‘Are you saying he didn’t lie with you?’ Nell asked.
Lady Harvey blushed. ‘He did what was expected of him, at first. As I had no real idea what