Hope - Lesley Pearse [97]
If she hadn’t been desperate, one look at what lay behind the wall might have deterred her. It was an alley no wider than three feet which appeared to act as a drain, but she was beyond caring about jumping into human waste now.
When she finally got to St Nicholas’s steps she could see by the stiffness of Gussie and Betsy’s stance that they were sure she’d been caught.
‘Lookin’ for someone?’ she called out in an imitation of the foul-mouthed woman who lived in the room below them.
It was a treat to see their faces light up, and an even bigger one to wave her bundle under their noses so they could smell it.
‘We thought you was done for,’ Betsy said breathlessly. ‘We was that worried about you! I jist said to Gus we shouldn’t have let you do it.’
They slunk into St Nicholas’s church, and there on the same bench they’d led Hope to when they’d helped her on her arrival in Bristol, Gussie cut up the pie with a pocket knife.
Nothing had ever tasted that good as they gorged themselves, not even attempting to speak. The pie was still warm, the juices ran down their cheeks, and the rich pastry stuck to their teeth and gums.
‘I’m gonna eat one of those every day when I’ve made my pile,’ Gussie sighed when he’d eventually had enough. ‘It was the best thing I’ve ever eaten.’
Hope wrapped up what was left for them to eat next day. ‘Did it give you any ideas of how to make a pile?’ she asked teasingly. She felt faintly sick, she’d eaten so much, but she wasn’t going to voice that.
‘Not yet, but it’ll come,’ he laughed. ‘Now, tell us what happened.’
It felt so good to be the one that had provided for them, and as she told her tale she laughed merrily. ‘I was real lucky the ground was frozen in that alley,’ she finished up. ‘It don’t bear thinking about what was under the ice.’
During the afternoon, at Hope’s suggestion, the three of them set out towards Stapleton village to find some wood to burn. The pie had satisfied their hunger but they were all very aware they couldn’t spend another bitterly cold night without a fire.
All three of them were in high spirits when they set off with sacks to carry the wood home, but once the narrow streets of Bristol gave way to open countryside, Gussie and Betsy suddenly became oddly jittery.
‘The wind’s too strong and cold,’ Betsy complained, hugging her arms around her body. ‘And it smells funny!’
‘That smell is clean air,’ Hope said teasingly, aware her friends never normally ventured out of the town and suspecting that they were intimidated by the barren winter fields and skeletal trees. ‘Walk faster, you’ll soon get warm.’
‘They put me to work on a farm when I was eight,’ Gussie blurted out as they walked through a field of cows. ‘It were bad enough in the workhouse in Plymouth but it was a darn sight worse on the farm. I was so hungry I used to eat the pig swill.’
‘We aren’t going to stay out here,’ Hope reminded him. ‘Just think how good it will be to fill these sacks and go home and light a roaring fire. We might be able to find some potatoes too, and we can bake them on the fire.’
Betsy kept grumbling as if she was being taken to a place of execution and squealed with fright each time a cow walked towards them. Gussie was just silent, and Hope guessed that he was brooding on painful boyhood memories.
In an attempt to cheer her friends up, Hope told them about how she used to collect wood with Joe and Henry. She described the little cart their father had made them and how the boys used to let her ride in it when the ground was hard with frost like today.
‘I wonder what they are doing now,’ she mused, going on to explain that they’d been working in the foundry when she last saw them, but that they’d often boasted they were going off to London.
Hope rarely talked about her family; normally she avoided even thinking about them for fear of getting upset. But she was still glowing with pride at having got away with stealing the pie and was buoyed up with such new confidence that