Hope - Lesley Pearse [96]
In the two months she’d been with Gussie and Betsy they’d been to the public gallery of the magistrates’ court three times to watch someone they knew being tried. One friend got five years’ hard labour just for stealing a couple of candles.
Almost every time they went to the Grapes they’d hear about someone being publicly flogged for minor theft – even children as young as eight or nine could be sent to prison. Hope hadn’t expected that she would ever get used to the filth, squalor and brutality of life in Lamb Lane, but somehow she had. But many people had told her prison would make Lamb Lane seem like paradise, and she’d rather drown herself in the river than go there and find out.
She had a stitch in her side from running up one alley and down the next, but the man chased her relentlessly. She didn’t think it was Mr Slater, he’d probably offered this man a reward to catch her, and anyone doing it for money would be very determined.
But Hope was determined too. The pie was heavy, but she had no intention of dropping it, and even less intention of being caught. She continued to run, trying hard to go faster so she could throw the man off, but the heavy pie was slowing her down, hunger had made her weak and the man was gaining on her.
As she came down Tower Lane, which was close to where she started from the Pithay, she glanced back and saw her pursuer was a tall, thickset, bald-headed man who looked like a prize fighter. He was less than fifteen yards from her now, and she knew she must find a way to outwit him.
As she turned the next corner she looked frantically around her for somewhere to hide, and like a gift from heaven there was an open street door. She darted in and shut the door behind her, then stood behind it quaking as she heard his feet go thundering by. Her breath was rasping now and she felt faint and shaky, expecting that any moment the man would guess what she’d done and come banging at the door.
‘Is that you, Tilda?’ a feeble old voice called out from down the dark passage, startling her still further.
Hope couldn’t see anything with the door shut, but the clean smell of the place told her it was home to someone of the middling sort, and the name the old lady called out was probably that of her maid. But a maid would only leave the door open if she was close by.
She felt sick with fright now, her heart thumping like a steam engine, and she didn’t know what to do. For all she knew, the man who was chasing her might be standing out in the lane and might even enlist the help of the maid. She was trapped.
As her eyes got used to the gloom of the hall, she saw a staircase in front of her, and several other doors. One of these was open just a crack and she thought the old lady might be in that room. It seemed logical that the door directly ahead of her might lead to a backyard and another way out, so she tiptoed towards it.
It was bolted, and the bolt creaked as she drew it back. She waited a second, fully expecting the old lady to call out again. When there was no frantic cry or movement, she opened the door, and there to her delight was a tiny backyard with a gate in the eight-foot wall. She slipped out, closing the door quietly behind her, and slunk across the yard. But the gate was locked and there was no key.
For a second or two she thought the game was up. She wasn’t just trapped but she’d lost her bearings too and had no idea what might lie beyond the wall. Like most of Bristol, this area was a rabbit warren of narrow lanes and alleys, the upper part of the houses jutting out over the lanes, almost touching the houses on the other side. But she’d never been behind the houses before, and there was nothing familiar in sight to tell her exactly where she was.
After a few seconds she decided that climbing up the wall was the only option open to her. She tied the pie up in the cloth and tied that to the strings