‘She ain’t never going to be right for service, nor for farm work,’ Silas burst out. ‘She’s got too much brain for either. I see her sometimes questioning everything; that spark in her will never let her obey blindly like we’ve always done. And she’s too pretty for her own good.’
‘Maybe with her reading, writing and the sums she can do, she’ll find work in Bristol or Bath in a shop,’ Meg said hopefully.
‘But there’s dangers in the city.’
‘There’s dangers everywhere.’ Meg took his hand in hers and stroked it lovingly. ‘But we’ve taught her right from wrong, loved her just as much as our own. We can’t do more.’
Silas drank the last of his cider as the sun slipped down behind the hill.
‘Maybe we could go to Lady Harvey,’ he burst out suddenly. ‘Tell her Hope is her own and get a pledge from her that she’ll help the girl when the time comes.’
Meg looked shocked. ‘Whatever are you thinking of, Silas?’ she exclaimed. ‘We can’t do that! She’d think we were trying to blackmail her. Nell, Albert, James and Ruth, they’d all lose their positions. You’d probably lose yours too.’
‘She wouldn’t do that! Not after all the good service our family has given her.’
‘Don’t count on it.’ Meg grimaced. ‘A woman with a guilty secret is a dangerous animal.’
Chapter Four
1843
‘Surely Father should be back by now!’ Hope remarked. She was looking out of the window at the pelting rain. Her father had left on a cart for Bristol to collect some goods from a ship at the docks three days ago and he had been expected to return the same night.
Her mother sighed, for it wasn’t the first time today that Hope had asked the same question. ‘Ships can’t be relied on if the weather’s bad,’ she explained. ‘But he won’t have liked staying in Bristol; he always says it’s a noisy, filthy place.’
‘And what can Joe and Henry be doing?’ Hope said peevishly. ‘Surely they can’t work in this rain?’
Hope’s brothers were thirteen and twelve now. Silas’s hope of getting them apprenticed to a trade had been dashed because he hadn’t been able to find the money for their indentures. The Reverend Gosling had done his best to find them positions as gardeners, grooms or footmen but without any luck. So until something better turned up they were doing casual work on farms, at present for Mr Francis of Woolard, who had sent Silas to Bristol.
‘Cows have to be milked whatever the weather,’ Meg replied a little sharply. ‘But maybe they’ve lost a few and had to go out looking for them.’
Autumn had come early this year with high winds, storms and such heavy and prolonged rain that the river Chew burst its banks. The mill in their village was flooded out, and much of the recently harvested grain was lost. At Woolard and Publow several cottages had five feet of water rushing through them. They had heard that a child fell into the floodwater at Pensford and drowned. Everyone had rallied round to move cattle and sheep to higher ground, but many perished before they could be reached.
At night, Hope could hear the river rushing through the valley below their cottage, and although she knew they were too high up to be flooded, it was still frightening. Bad weather made all the daily chores so much harder. They got soaked going out to feed the chickens, they brought thick mud back into the cottage which meant more work, and when the wood they brought in was wet it wouldn’t burn.
The vegetable garden had been laid to waste, apples and pears were knocked down before they were ripe and quickly rotted. Only a little hay had been cut before the rains came, and the rest was ruined. Down at the inn, old men sucked on their pipes and prophesied that a bitterly cold winter would follow and everyone would have to tighten their belts.
Hope knew what belt-tightening meant, for the last two years had been bleak for everyone. She no longer resented having to work so hard, especially on the farm with her father, because she understood the necessity of it now. It had always been expected that a farm worker’s wife and children would help him at crucial periods, and though there was no extra pay for this, there was often some kind of reward like a couple of laying hens, a sack of potatoes or a bag of flour. But the reward, however welcome, wasn’t as important as keeping the farmer’s goodwill.
Life was precarious for all farm workers: if they had no work they couldn’t pay their rent, and that could mean eviction, and ultimately the workhouse. The only way they could ensure they got work was to make themselves more valuable than any other man. A wife and several children ready to pitch in too helped to achieved this.
Hope had heard the chill in the word ‘workhouse’ or ‘Union’ even when she was too small to know what it was, or even where it was. But now she had seen the grim grey stone building in nearby Keynsham, and observed the misery etched into the faces of the destitute who finally had to resort to banging on its doors for shelter.
It was a very real threat for her family now. Last year’s harvest had been a poor one, and now this spell of terrible weather was a potential disaster.
It wasn’t only the Rentons’ winter vegetables that had been destroyed; most of the farmers had lost theirs too. With nothing to sell at the market, and no hay stored for their animals during the winter, they’d be forced to sell them or watch them die of starvation. They wouldn’t need farm workers then.
Last winter, when the snow lay on the ground for weeks, the family lived on turnips and potatoes because there was no money to buy meat. The boys set traps for rabbits without any success, and night after night they all went to bed hungry. But if there was more snow again this winter, they wouldn’t even have vegetables to fall back on.
‘Will we go down to the Merchants’ farm tomorrow to see if the baby has been born?’ Hope asked, hoping to cheer her mother as she seemed rather glum.
Matt and Amy’s first child, Reuben, had been born the previous year. A second child was due any day now, but there was flooding around their farm.
‘I think we must wait for dry weather,’ Meg replied, but sighed because she was as anxious as Hope for news. ‘Amy’s got her mother with her, so she’ll be fine, and Matt would ride up here if he needed us.’
‘Why hasn’t Nell had a baby?’ Hope asked.
‘Questions, questions, questions, that’s all I get from you,’ Meg snapped. ‘The good Lord decides who is to have babies and those to leave without.’
Hope retreated into silence. She had sensed for some time that her parents were unhappy about Nell and Albert, for whenever Hope asked anything about them the reply was invariably a curt one. The family had only been invited to the gatehouse once, and that was some eighteen months ago on a Sunday. Nell had gone to a great deal of trouble, cooking roast lamb, several different vegetables and apple tart to follow, but the meal was overshadowed by Albert’s critical remarks about her cooking, and Nell’s nervousness.
Yet there had been suspicions that Albert was something of a bully even before that. Nell rarely came home to visit, and when she did, she never stayed longer than half an hour. On Sundays at church with Albert beside her she often looked drawn and anxious. Albert was polite enough, but standoffish, as if he thought his wife’s family were beneath him. Ruth reported that Nell never lingered in the servants’ hall after work for a chat any more, and even when the sisters were alone together Ruth claimed that Nell seemed unable to hold a real conversation, for she preceded every statement with ‘
Albert says
’, suggesting that she’d lost the ability to express any view of her own.
Just a couple of months ago Hope had called on Nell at her cottage and asked her outright if she was happy with Albert. ‘
He’s a good husband
,’ had been her sister’s reply, which wasn’t exactly an answer to the question.
Daylight was fading when Silas finally returned home. Hope was just lighting the candles when the click of the door latch made her turn to see her father in the doorway, rain cascading off him on to the floor.
Meg gasped, for it was clear by his strained expression that he was exhausted and chilled to the bone. ‘Thank heaven you’re back,’ she said, rushing to peel the sodden sack from his shoulders. ‘You must get out of those wet things this minute! Stir up the fire and make him some tea!’ she ordered Hope, stripping off her husband’s clothes as if he were a small child.
Once she had him in a chair by the fire with a blanket around him, a hot drink in his hand and his feet soaking in a mustard bath, she questioned him about his trip to Bristol.
‘The ship wasn’t unloaded so I had to stay in a lodging house. It were terrible.’
Meg got him into bed because he was shivering so violently, but he caught hold of her hand and tried to tell her how it had been for him. He wasn’t entirely coherent, he couldn’t even put whole sentences together, but the words he did use and the disgust in his voice painted a very vivid picture for both Meg and Hope about where he had stayed.
‘Twelve or more men in one filthy room. Dirty straw. Low, brutish types, stupid with drink. Habits that turned my stomach. Animals behave better.’
Meg washed his face and hands tenderly, wrapping the blankets tightly around him and soothing him with the reminder he was safely home at last. But although his voice was becoming little more than a croak he seemed desperate for her to understand what he had been through.
Hope had been to Bristol twice, both times by day and in good weather, but however thrilling she’d found it, she hadn’t forgotten the hordes of beggars, the noise, evil smells and the daunting hurly-burly of the place. It wasn’t difficult to imagine how she would feel if she were alone, cold and soaked to the skin, compelled to hang around the docks for three days without anyone to turn to for help.
Her father spoke of ruffians who lay in wait for gullible country folk, of the ragged half-starved child beggars who plagued him after seeing him give a couple of pennies to one of their number. He said there were painted floozies on every corner who loudly belittled him when he ignored them. And all the time there was the fear that any one of the many brutalized drunken men would attack a simple countryman like him just for the few shillings in his pocket, and even for his cart and horse.
Someone at the rooming house picked his pockets during the night. In the morning another man attempted to run off with his boots, and he’d had to run after him on bare feet and fight to get them back. He said he would have turned tail and come home right then, but he knew that Mr Francis would stop giving him and the boys work if he did. So he waited to collect the goods from the ship, cold, wet, hungry and frightened almost out of his wits. He said he would never go there again.
Yet although he said how hungry he had been, he only managed half a bowl of stew before sinking back on to the pillow. He was still shivering, and he said his head and back ached, so Meg got other blankets to cover him and put a hot brick by his feet.
Joe and Henry came back a little later, equally wet and downhearted because Mr Francis had not paid them, or even given them anything to eat. ‘We’ve done a man’s work, so we should get paid a man’s wages,’ Joe said heatedly. ‘Mr Francis was grumbling all day because Father hadn’t come back. I reckon me and Henry will have to go to London to find work. There ain’t nothing fer us around here.’
The boys went to bed straight after their supper, but Hope stayed up with her mother, sensing that she was worried about her husband. Even by candlelight, Hope could see for herself he wasn’t right. He appeared to be asleep but he was shivering still, while beads of sweat glistened on his forehead.
‘He’s a strong man, he’ll be fine after a good night’s sleep,’ Meg said, but there was a hollow ring to her voice.
Hope woke in the night to the sound of her mother poking the fire and the smell of drying clothes. It was pitch dark and still raining hard.
‘Is Father any better?’ she whispered as she climbed down the loft ladder.
Meg shook her head. ‘He won’t be able to work for a day or two. He’s really poorly.’
Hope went over to the bed in the corner, and although the light of the candle didn’t reach that far, she fancied her father’s face was unusually gaunt. ‘Have you slept at all, Mother?’ she asked.
‘I lay down beside him for a while, but it was too hot in there for me.’ Meg sighed. ‘I couldn’t take off any covers for he was still shivering, so I sat in the chair.’
‘You go up and get into my bed,’ Hope said. ‘I’ll watch over him.’
‘Wake me at first light, and keep turning the boys’ clothes till they’re dry. I don’t want them catching a chill too,’ Meg said wearily. ‘If your father wakes, give him some water. I’ll go down to see Lizzie Brierley first thing and see if she can make me one of her mixtures.’
To Hope, that was confirmation of how frightened her mother really was, for she usually pooh-poohed the concoctions Lizzie made.
Over the next four days Hope watched her father grow sicker and sicker. He was feverish, holding his head in his hands because it hurt, and he could barely get up to relieve himself. Meg plied him with both the mixture she’d got from Lizzie and one of her own herbal infusions, good for fevers. She sponged him down when he was too hot, and put a hot brick in beside him when he shivered. Yet by the fourth morning he was muttering deliriously.
‘Shall I go and get Nell?’ Hope asked.
‘No, of course not,’ her mother snapped. ‘It ain’t right to ask anyone’s help when there’s sickness in the house.’
‘But Nell should know how ill Father is,’ Hope argued.
‘What she don’t know can’t hurt her. She’d only come rushing round here and make more trouble for herself with Albert.’
Only a few weeks back Ruth had claimed she thought Albert hit Nell, and Father had said if this proved to be right he’d go round and wring the man’s neck.
‘Well, shall I go and get the doctor then?’ Hope asked. She was frightened because Father didn’t seem to know her or her mother.
‘We’ve got no money for the doctor,’ Meg replied, her eyes bleak with anxiety. ‘You go into the bakery and see if they’ve got some work for you there, meanwhile I’ll build up the fire and try to get him to sweat out the fever.’