Hope (3 page)

To Nell, a butler, housekeeper and cook, four maids, plus gardeners and grooms, along with various other people who came in as they were needed, seemed to be an awful lot of servants to look after just one house and two people. But Bridie said it wasn’t a big staff, and pointed out that they only managed it so easily because of the design.

The main rooms were spacious, but not so big that they couldn’t be heated adequately. The dining room was close to the kitchen, so food arrived at the table hot. There was even a contraption in the kitchen where large pails of hot water could be sent upstairs for baths and washing just by pulling on a rope. Bridie laughingly called it ‘The Maid’s Saviour’ and pulled up her sleeve to show a burn on her forearm which she’d got as a young girl from hauling a pail of boiling water up the stairs.

Hearing the baby cry out as she neared the kitchen, Nell didn’t stop to put her boots on, but as she turned the corner of the hallway which led to the kitchen, she was horrified to see Bridie leaning over the baby’s basket with a cushion in her hands.

There was no doubt as to what she was intending to do for she was crying and muttering something through her tears that sounded to Nell like an apology or even a prayer.

‘No, Bridie!’ Nell called out, dropping her boots with a clatter and running towards the older woman. ‘You mustn’t – it’s wicked, and she’s a fairy child.’

Bridie wheeled round, her old face stricken with guilt. ‘But it’s the only way, Nell. If she lives it’ll be ruin for m’lady, she’ll be cast out of Briargate.’

Later that day it was to strike Nell that Bridie had watched indifferently as a maid was ordered out of the house because she was with child. If Lady Harvey was cast out she could go back to her own family, but that poor girl had nowhere to go but the workhouse.

But Nell didn’t think of that then – all she had on her mind was the prevention of murder. ‘You can’t kill a baby,’ she insisted, getting between Bridie and the makeshift cradle. ‘It ain’t right and you know it.’

For a second or two Nell thought Bridie would strike her and carry on with her plan, for she could see the desperation on her face. But instead she suddenly sagged, sank down on to a chair and covered her face with her hands. ‘Heaven knows I don’t want to hurt the babby, but what else is there to do?’ she asked imploringly.

‘I don’t know,’ Nell said, and put her hand on the older woman’s shoulder. ‘But it ain’t never right to kill her. It ain’t her fault she were born, and like I said she’s a fairy child. Just look at her!’

The baby had her eyes open now, and had stopped crying, almost as if she knew the danger had passed. Her eyes were not the usual blue of a new baby’s, but dark as night, looking up at Nell as if thanking her for the reprieve.

‘Maybe we could take her to the church and leave her there then?’ Bridie said in desperation. ‘Reverend Gosling would find a place for her.’

Nell shook her head. She knew infants left in the church went to the workhouse, and few of them survived beyond a few weeks. She snatched up the baby and cradled her protectively in her arms. ‘You know what that means,’ she reminded Bridie, and as the sweet smell of the newborn baby wafted up to her it triggered her own tears.

For some minutes neither woman spoke. Bridie remained with her head in her hands, sobbing, and Nell paced up and down the kitchen with the baby in her arms.

Nell felt a surge of anger that Lady Harvey should be sleeping peacefully now, while she and Bridie had somehow to find a solution for a problem which was none of their making. Lady Harvey had been born into wealth, she’d been pampered, dressed in the finest clothes, schooled by governesses, and then married at eighteen to a man who everyone had said was the finest catch in the West Country.

Nell could remember how as a little girl she’d stood with the other village children in St Mary the Virgin’s churchyard to throw rose petals at the couple. No queen could have looked more beautiful than Lady Harvey did that day, her golden hair tumbling around her shoulders. Her white silk dress with its twelve-foot train must have cost more than Nell’s father had earned in his whole life. And Sir William wasn’t just wealthy, he was handsome too, slender and tall with curly fair hair and bright blue eyes. Everyone said it was a love match, and a few years later when Nell came to work at Briargate, she’d seen the couple laughing and running around the grounds like two lovebirds, and that confirmed it for her.

So why did Lady Harvey lie with another man? Why shouldn’t she take the responsibility for her own sin, just as Nell and even Bridie would be expected to if they’d gone astray?

Yet even as these thoughts came to her, she knew she couldn’t bear to see Lady Harvey disgraced any more than Bridie could. She might be spoilt but she was mostly sweet-natured and generous. Nell couldn’t count the times she’d pressed a shilling into her hands to take home to her mother. She’d given her old clothes; let her sew little dresses and shirts for her brothers and sisters while she was supposed to be working. She had never struck her, never even grumbled when she was clumsy; just yesterday morning she’d thanked both Nell and Bridie for their loyalty and promised them that she’d always look after them.

The truth of the matter was that Lady Harvey was like a child in many ways. She had so much life and fun in her, but she was innocent too. This man, whoever he was, must have sweet-talked her when she was lonely. None of her family had visited since the master went away; she had no real friends of her own here in Somerset, only his friends. Nell could remember her crying when Sir William left for America; she’d wanted to go with him, but he wouldn’t let her. As Nell’s own mother so often said, ‘You have to walk a mile in someone else’s boots to know how it is for them.’

Thinking of her mother gave Nell an idea.

‘I could take baby home to my mother,’ she blurted out. ‘She’ll have milk to spare enough for this little one.’

‘She’s got too many of her own,’ Bridie said, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘Besides, it’s too close to here. How would she explain where she got another?’

Nell got a mental picture of the overcrowded cottage and her mother already so tired with too many children, yet she knew the moment this one was in her arms she wouldn’t refuse. ‘People don’t count how many she’s got,’ she said truthfully. ‘They’ve got so used to her always having a new one in her arms they wouldn’t notice.’

‘But your father?’

Nell half-smiled. Her father’s only real fault was that he was over-generous in every way: with his labour, time and affection. When he had money he was generous with that too. Her mother often said that if he worked only the hours he was paid for, didn’t love her so much and saved the little money he had, they wouldn’t be in a tumbledown cottage with so many children. But Nell didn’t think Mother would have him any different.

‘Father likes babies,’ she said. ‘He’ll say one more won’t make no difference.’

Bridie dried her tears on her apron, but her eyes were still full of anxiety.

‘You can trust them not to talk,’ Nell said firmly, knowing that was what was on Bridie’s mind. ‘Even the bigger ones won’t know the truth. If I take her to Mother tonight after they’ve gone to bed, they’ll believe it was born while they were asleep.’

Bridie looked doubtful about that.

‘Mother has ’em quick,’ Nell insisted. ‘When our Henry was born last year they knew nothing till they heard him cry. I was with her, I know, and her belly’s so big from so many babbies they half-expects another to pop out any day.’

‘But it’s a secret that’s got to be kept for ever,’ Bridie reminded her.

Nell nodded; she understood that well enough.

‘The mistress did say a while ago that if it lived she wanted it to be farmed out,’ Bridie said softly. ‘She asked me to make enquiries, and I did go to see a woman in Brislington village about it. I didn’t like the woman, she were hard-faced and the children she had there were sickly-looking and dirty. At least we know your mother would take proper care.’

Bridie lapsed into silence, clearly weighing up all she knew of Meg and Silas Renton, and whether they were trustworthy. Nell said nothing more because she knew her family was held in high esteem around here. She wouldn’t have got her position at Briargate if it wasn’t for that.

‘What shall we call her?’ the older woman said eventually, taking the baby from Nell’s arms and this time looking at her almost fondly. ‘It wouldn’t be right not to give her a name.’

Joan Stott’s fairy child was called Faith, and it came to Nell immediately that another fairy child born so close should have a similar name.

‘Hope,’ she said without any hesitation.

Bridie pursed her lips as if she didn’t like it, but then as she looked down at the sleeping infant in her arms she began to smile. ‘Aye, Nell, that’s a good name. I hope your mother will come to love the poor little mite, I hope too that I can forget the wicked thing I was going to do earlier. She don’t look at all like our mistress, so maybe you’re right and she is a fairy child.’

That evening Nell paused at the edge of Lord’s Wood which marked the boundary between Briargate House and the Hunstrete land. She had the baby beneath her cloak, secured by a shawl to her chest. Putting down her basket, she turned to look back at the house, for there was a full moon and she could see as plain as if it were day.

Briargate was best viewed from its long tree-lined drive which came up from the road at Chelwood. It stood proudly on slightly higher ground and you could see the magnificent front porch, the elegant long windows and the large marble statues which stood in the circular rosebed before the house. In summer it was a picture with roses and wisteria scrambling right up to the bedroom windows.

But Nell was on the east side of the house, down at the bottom end of the paddock, for the quickest way to reach the village of Compton Dando was through the woods. Seen from this angle, in moonlight, the fir trees which had been planted around the boundaries of the grounds looked for all the world as if they were guarding Briargate. The moonlight glinted too on the marble statues at the front, and a tear trickled down Nell’s cheek as she realized that the sleeping baby in her arms was in fact losing its birthright along with its mother.

‘I’ll say goodbye to it for you,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry you can’t grow up in the fine nursery, that you won’t get silk gowns and servants to wait on you. But I reckons you’ll get more love in our cottage.’

The feeling she’d aged ten years when she’d looked in the mirror this morning had stayed with her. She was exhausted, but she felt even sleep wouldn’t bring her back to the carefree girl she’d been a couple of days ago. She had heard Lady Harvey crying pitifully this afternoon, and suddenly to Nell she wasn’t a beautiful, wealthy woman who had the world at her feet, but just another poor soul grieving over the child she had lost.

Hope had begun to cry around the same time, and all Nell could do was spoon sugar water into her tiny mouth to keep her going until later. Bridie had spent most of the afternoon going through the chest in Sir William’s old nursery to find baby nightgowns, bonnets and jackets. She had said how bleak it made her feel to have to put back the finer, beautifully embroidered ones and only take the plain ones, for it would raise eyebrows in the village if little Hope was dressed in finery.

Yet the napkins, blanket and other things packed in the basket were still far beyond anything Nell and her brothers and sisters had known. Hope would suck from the same breast all of them knew, know days of hunger just like them, and find out that working began for village folk at an early age. But wouldn’t she retain something of both her real parents too? Not just her looks, shape and size, but an inbred knowledge that she wasn’t truly one of the servant class?

Nell sighed and picked up her basket. She knew it was no good thinking on these things, and she had to pick her way carefully through the wood, taking care not to stumble in the dark.

Compton Dando lay in a wooded vale with the river Chew running through it. For a small village, the population being a little less than four hundred, it was a busy place, with an inn, a bakery, the church, a blacksmith’s, a carpenter’s and a mill. By day there was an infernal racket from the copper mills at Publow and Woolard, the two closest villages along the river, and there were several small coal mines dotted all around the area. Although some of the local men worked at the mills or in the mines, most were farm workers like her father, and like him they supplemented their low wages by cultivating their own strips of land, keeping chickens and often pigs or a cow too.

Once through the woods, Nell made her way across the common. Fortunately the Rentons’ cottage was this side of the village; had it been right down by the church she might have been spotted by someone going into the Crown Inn.

An owl hooted from the big oak tree by the cottage, but that and the gurgling of the river down below were the only sounds.

‘Nell!’ Meg Renton exclaimed as she came through the door. ‘What brings you here so late?’

The tiny cottage was lit only by a single candle and the fire was just a dull red glow. A stranger coming in would assume Meg was all alone, but in fact it was full of sleeping bodies. Nell’s father was in the bed at the back of the room with Henry, the youngest child, in beside him. The other eight children were in the loft room above, reached by steep steps with a length of rope for a banister.

One of the things Nell had found hardest to adjust to when she first went to work at Briargate was that she couldn’t go to bed at sundown as she’d always done at home. Gentry stayed up late, but then they could afford dozens of candles and oil lamps, and they didn’t have to rise at dawn.

Yet her mother had never gone to bed with the rest of the family, even though she worked harder than anyone else. She would sit by the fire for an hour or two, with one candle. She said it was the only time she had a bit of peace.

Seeing her mother’s worn face in the candlelight, Nell felt a stab of remorse at burdening her with still more work. Meg was thirty-four, and ten children along with one stillbirth too had robbed her of the vitality and strength Nell remembered when she was small. Her hair was still thick and dark, but her once slender body had thickened and her face was becoming lined and saggy. The nightgown she wore was one of Bridie’s hand-me-downs, darned and patched flannel, so thin in places it looked as though with one more wash it would fall apart.