Hope (22 page)

Yet the act they were engaged in puzzled her as much as it disgusted her, for why would a man want another? Were they the only two men in England like that? Or was she just an ignorant country girl who knew nothing about anything?

Yet it did make new sense of certain things from the past: how Rufus had said his mother asked Sir William if he’d been at a whorehouse; and Nell’s claim that Albert often stayed out till the early hours of the morning. Were they together?

Then there was the way the old cook used to say Sir William was girlish, and how Albert insisted he walked from Wells to Briargate on the off-chance Sir William would take him on as gardener. Was that because he knew Sir William was the same as him?

But above all she wondered if Albert had known he could never love a woman when he married Nell.

Hope struggled to her feet as she heard a cock crow nearby. Her cloak and boots were just as wet as they had been last night, and it was still raining. Her hair was coming down and without a comb she could do nothing about it. Just the feel of her sore, puffy face told her that she must look as desperate as she felt.

She hobbled from the barn to the road, but each step was agony and she felt so weak and dizzy it was tempting to go back to the barn. Then a wave of nausea overtook her and she vomited into the bushes.

As she stood up she could see down into the valley through a gap in the bushes. It was too grey and misty to make out anything more than the steeple of the church at Publow, but that was enough to make her cry for it wasn’t far from Woolard and Matt.

She could imagine him in his kitchen, dark hair tousled from sleep, a shadow of bristles on his chin, perhaps with the baby on his knee while Amy made him tea. He would be furious when he heard about the letter. Gentle Amy would probably think it was romantic, and urge Matt and the boys not to be angry. But not one of them would ever consider that Hope might have been forced to write that letter, and that it wasn’t true.

She knew she couldn’t hope that Sir William would feel guilty and admit what really happened in the gatehouse. In truth he had probably ordered Albert to silence her and didn’t care how he achieved it.

Her disappearance would be the talk of the village for a few days, but once that had died down even her own family would put her out of their minds.

People disappeared all the time. They left the village to look for work in Bath or Bristol and never came back. Hope could remember her father talking about a man whose son had been gone for three years when he got a letter from a priest in America telling him his boy had died of smallpox. There was never any explanation about how or why the lad went there.

Toby and Alice hadn’t been back to the village for eighteen months; they had lost the incentive to take the long walk since their mother and father died. James would probably never come back again either, and once Ruth had her baby she’d lose interest in her brothers and sisters too. That was just the way it was, their family was no different to countless others. But Hope knew Nell would grieve for her, she wouldn’t forget her youngest sister, not in a few weeks or even a few years. And she hadn’t even got a loving husband to comfort and reassure her.

The clock on St Nicholas’s church was striking twelve noon as Hope finally reached Bristol Bridge. It had taken some five hours or so to walk a distance that could be completed in two. It was almost miraculous that she’d got there at all, for she was dizzy with pain all the way and she was so weak now that she had to hang on to the bridge parapet to hold herself up.

Yet she felt no pleasure or relief that she’d made it, for the noise of rumbling carts and carriages and the shrill cries from street vendors was deafening and the river stank like a privy. People pushed and shoved past her; if they even noticed her they wouldn’t stop to offer any help to a girl who was soaking wet, swaying with exhaustion and clearly in pain. Her father had always said that city folk had no charity, and Hope had never felt so alone and abandoned in her entire life.

She thought if she could just have a drink of water she’d feel a lot better, but everyone knew you couldn’t drink Bristol water. How could she get a drink without money?

She hadn’t been to Bristol since her father died, and his description of how it was for him on that last fateful trip was ever present in her mind. She pulled her wet cloak around her more tightly, letting the hood hang over her face to hide her injuries, and shuffled painfully on.

As she stepped into the road to cross over to the church, she heard the driver of a carriage scream some abuse. It seemed to be directed at her, yet she didn’t know why. She felt so strange, as though her mind and body had separated. She could hear noise all around her, smell the horse droppings in the street, and even sensed someone’s face right up close to hers. But it was dream like, as though she were asleep.

‘You gotta get up,’ she heard a woman say. ‘You stay there and they’ll cart you off to the Bridewell or the infirmary.’

‘Look at her face!’ a man exclaimed. ‘She’s bin given a right good hiding.’

‘Who did this to you, love?’ the woman asked. ‘You nearly got yerself run over by that carriage! Maybe we should call a constable?’

The word ‘constable’ was almost like having smelling salts held beneath her nose. Hope came round sufficiently to know she was lying on the ground; that the voices she’d heard belonged to a young man and woman, and that there were other people standing around looking down at her. But she couldn’t seem to open her eyes wide enough to see them properly.

‘Don’t call a constable,’ she managed to croak out. ‘Just help me up!’

She felt them lifting her, but she swayed on her feet and the young woman held on to her. ‘Lawdy! You’re soaked through,’ she exclaimed. ‘You ain’t bin having a dip in the river, ’ave you?’

Hope knew that the woman was teasing, and that at least suggested she was kindly. ‘I like my water drinkable,’ she replied, and tried very hard to smile.

‘Lord love her,’ the woman exclaimed. ‘Well, whoever hit you ain’t quite dampened yer spirit, I’ll say that. Give us a ’and, Gussie, let’s get ’er in the church outa the rain.’

The church was very dark, but it was much warmer than out on the street and smelled of candlewax rather than human and animal waste. Once Hope was sitting on a bench near the door, she tried to thank the couple, but she still couldn’t open her eyes enough to see them properly.

‘I can’t see,’ she murmured.

‘Shouldn’t think you could, both yer eyes are swollen over,’ the young man said. ‘Who done this?’

‘My brother-in-law,’ Hope said.

‘Yer sister let him do that to yer?’ the woman asked indignantly.

‘She wasn’t there,’ Hope said. ‘He threw me out the house. I walked half the night, and then came on here this morning.’

‘Have you got folks in Bristol?’ the woman asked.

‘No, and I don’t have any money either,’ Hope said. ‘Do you know anywhere I could get work?’

She felt rather than saw them exchange meaningful glances. Assuming they were doubtful about her being taken on by anyone because of how she looked, she pushed back her hood. ‘If you could just lend me a comb and show me somewhere I could wash my face, I’ll be all right. I’ve been a kitchenmaid for over three years, and I can cook very well.’

When they remained silent, she took that to be disbelief and she finally broke down in tears. ‘I can do all kinds of work,’ she sobbed. ‘Please believe me!’

‘Well, you ain’t gonna be able to get any sorta work with yer face that way,’ the young woman said, and to Hope’s surprise she drew her into her arms and rocked her. ‘Now, don’t cry, love. You’s just weary and hurt. I reckon we’ll take you home with us and patch you up. God knows, we can’t leave you here like this.’

‘You ain’t thinking straight, Betsy,’ Gussie said in a whisper, glancing over his shoulder at the girl asleep on the pile of sacks which passed for a bed. ‘It’s hard enough lookin’ out fer ourselves. We can’t keep her an’ all.’

Betsy had bathed the girl’s face, given her some small beer to drink, then helped her out of her wet clothes and covered her in a blanket. Now she was asleep.

The room was in Lewins Mead, a rabbit warren of fetid alleys and ancient dilapidated wooden-framed houses close to the docks. It housed what someone in Parliament had recently dubbed ‘The Dangerous and Perishing Classes’, a stratum of life well below the working classes – thieves, whores, crossing sweepers, street vendors, cripples, deserters, the most desperate of the city’s poor.

A hundred years earlier when Bristol had been the second biggest city next to London, and the docks as busy as London’s and Liverpool’s, Lewins Mead had been a good address. Great fortunes had been made during the slave trade, for it was Bristol ships that sailed to Africa to pick up slaves, then on to the West Indies to sell them, finally returning to England laden with molasses and tobacco. But as the shipping trade boomed, the wealthy merchants, ships’ captains and professional men no longer wished to live close to the pestilence of the docks, and they moved to grand new houses up on the hills of Clifton and Kingsdown.

But the docks were no longer as busy as they had been a hundred years earlier. Exorbitant harbour dues, the tardiness of the Corporation in building the new floating harbour, and the fact that new, bigger ships were unable to get up and down the river Avon, meant that Bristol had lost out to Liverpool docks. The new railways meant that it had lost its place as the distribution centre for the whole of the West of England, Wales and the Midlands.

Once, Bristol had been proud of its many industries – sugar refining, glass, iron foundries and soap manufacture – but they were gone now, aside from four glass companies. That and the countrywide failing economy in recent years had created even more hardship in Bristol.

So now the old merchants’ houses were let out by the room, and the tenants sublet floor space to anyone who wanted it. Sometimes there were as many as twenty or thirty people sleeping in each room. The houses sagged and creaked with neglect; wind blew in through the cracks, and the upper windows which overhung the narrow alleyways were boarded up as the glass broke or fell out.

But Betsy and Gussie thought themselves fortunate to have this top-floor room in Lamb Lane. They might share it with four other people, but they were friends, not strangers. The roof didn’t leak too badly, they had glass in their small window and a fireplace too, and they’d stuffed up the holes in the walls with oiled rags. To them it was a home.

‘She’ll bring us luck,’ Betsy insisted. ‘There’s something about her.’

‘Aye, there’s something about her! Something that makes a man smash her face in,’ Gussie said gloomily. ‘And she’s real sick. What if we catch it?’

‘You can’t catch what ails her,’ Betsy said stoutly. She suspected the girl was carrying a child and her brother-in-law had been afraid she’d shame his family.

Betsy Archer was nineteen. She was five feet five and buxom, with long dark hair which she plaited and wound round her head like a crown, and her lustrous dark eyes and olive skin suggested she had Italian or Spanish blood. Although she was not a real beauty, people described her as ‘comely’, for she had an exotic, proud look about her and a vibrancy that even the harshness of her life hadn’t erased.

Born in Liverpool, Betsy was eight when her father, a cooper by trade, brought the family to Bristol. Three months later, both her parents and Sadie, her younger sister, died when the lodging house they were staying in caught fire. Her father had lifted Betsy through the upstairs window and dropped her into a man’s arms. He didn’t have time to do the same for Sadie.

Sometimes Betsy wished she’d died in that fire too. She had survived by mingling with the hundreds of other orphaned or abandoned children who hung around the docks and learned begging, stealing and scavenging from them. Home was wherever she could squeeze in for the night, and she was grateful if she was given a blanket, even if it was crawling with lice.

By the time she was ten many of the children she’d got to know when she was first orphaned were in prison. Some had died. Almost all the older girls had become whores. Betsy didn’t want to end up in prison or dead, and she didn’t intend to become a whore either.

Even at that tender age she had already learned that her only asset was her virginity. Twice she was foolish enough to be taken in by seemingly motherly women who offered her a home, new clothes and all the food she could eat. But she was lucky both times in being helped to escape before she was presented to a ‘gentleman’ who had a penchant for children.

She never ruled out using that one asset one day, providing she got big money for it. But until then she intended to stay alive and keep out of prison, so she kept her wits about her and didn’t take unnecessary risks.

The dank, stinking alleys and narrow lanes around the docks were her domain. She knew almost everyone who lived there and didn’t steal from them. She knew all the marine shops where she could get a few pennies for the wood, nails and metal she managed to scavenge. That paid the rent. When there was nothing left over for food, she would go up to the big houses in Clifton and find one where the cook had been foolish enough to leave the back door open while she was baking. It took only a few seconds to slip in and steal a pie or a cake – once she grabbed a whole leg of lamb straight from the oven.

The docks were a source of many free gifts for anyone prepared to watch and wait, patiently armed with a basket and a pot or jar. Betsy would check every morning which ships were being unloaded, and loiter in the hopes that a dropped crate would spill open. She would pounce on the fruit, sugar or tea and be off with it, often even before the dockers became aware that they’d damaged the crate.

There were also the foreign sailors she could charm into giving her a sixpence to buy a new dress so she could meet them later.

She never bought clothes, just as she never kept those appointments with foreign sailors. But up in the High Street there were second-hand clothes shops where she could whip a petticoat, dress or hat while the shopkeeper was distracted.