Meg called it ‘Ship Fever’; she said she’d seen it before when she was a girl. Her uncle, who was a sailor, caught it, and her mother had nursed him. But Meg didn’t say whether he got over it or died.
Later that night Hope got down on her knees and prayed. ‘Don’t let them die, please!’ she begged. ‘I’ll do anything, I’ll never complain about anything again. Just let them get better.’
As soon as she opened her eyes in the morning, Hope sensed something was wrong. She could hear the birds singing outside, and the sound of wind in the trees, but there was a strange stillness inside the cottage.
She had slept up in the loft to keep an eye on both her parents, and she was out of her bed and down the ladder as fast as her legs would carry her.
Going straight over to her father’s bed, she stopped suddenly, clamping her hand over her mouth in horror. She didn’t have to touch him to know he was dead. His fingers were not picking at the blankets as they had been all day yesterday. They were still, and his face had grown pale and calm.
Instinctively she turned to her mother for comfort, tears running down her cheeks, but saw immediately that she would get no comfort there. She had the mulberry rash now too, and although she appeared to be awake, her eyes open, there was the identical blankness her father had had.
Hope wanted to scream and stamp her feet, but instead all she did was stand there crying. For her entire eleven years she had been surrounded by older people who’d instructed her, admonished her, cared for her, but now she was alone, and it struck her that her childhood had come to an abrupt end.
She had to behave like an adult now. There was no one she could run screaming to as she’d so often done in the past over the most trivial of things. To call anyone in to help was to ask them to risk catching the disease and spreading it further. But she couldn’t leave her mother to seek help anyway.
Forcing herself to go through the usual early-morning chores seemed to be the only thing to do. She raked out the fire and took the ash outside, then relaid the fire and lit it. The kettle went on, and she got a basin of water to wash her mother’s face.
‘Is it morning?’ Meg murmured. ‘I must get the boys up!’
‘The boys aren’t here, Mother,’ Hope said, tears flowing again as she saw her mother was delirious just as her father had been. ‘They’re at work on the farm. It’s just me here.’
She managed to feed her mother some milk with an egg beaten into it, and then she tore a sheet of paper from a notebook.
‘Please help me,’ she wrote in large letters. ‘My father has died and my mother is very sick. I don’t want anyone to come in and risk catching it too. But can you get the doctor? Call out and I’ll speak to you from the door.’
She signed the note ‘Hope Renton’. Then, taking it outside, she nailed it to the gatepost so it could be seen by anyone passing by.
The Reverend Gosling called out to Hope later in the morning as she was once again sponging her mother down with cool water.
She put the basin down and raced outside. She had always been a little intimidated by the tall, stern parson who had taught her to read and write, but she was glad it was he who called for he knew everything.
‘My dear Hope,’ he said, taking off his broad-brimmed black hat and holding it to his chest. The top of his head was bald, but the white hair left lower down was long, lank and rather greasy-looking. ‘I am so sorry to hear your father has passed away. Are you alone with your mother?’ His pale blue eyes looked far more kindly than usual, and even his thin lips, which always seemed to sneer instead of smile, had a softer look.
‘Yes, Reverend.’ She explained the circumstances as best she could. ‘Mother insisted the others were to stay away until Father was better. She said it was Ship Fever. She made me stay in the outhouse too, but I saw she was sick yesterday so I came in. Father was dead this morning and Mother is very bad now too. I’ve been washing her and giving her drinks and broth, but I don’t know what to do about Father or how to make Mother well again.’
Hope was determined not to cry, but when she saw the Reverend Gosling move towards her, arms outstretched to embrace her, she couldn’t help herself. ‘You mustn’t touch me,’ she said weakly. But all at once his arms were round her anyway, and she leaned against his bony chest and sobbed.
‘You poor child,’ he said, his voice soft with sympathy. ‘If you are brave enough to nurse your mother, then I can be brave enough to hold you. Are you well?’ He took her two arms in his hands and holding her a little back from himself, studied her.
‘Yes, Reverend,’ she sobbed. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. And I washed my hands after touching Father as Mother said I must do. But the disease is in the air, isn’t it? We breathe it in.’
‘I cannot believe that, for if it were the case it would spread all across the country and no one would be spared. This disease flourishes only in crowded, unsanitary places, like ships and gaols. Did your mother sleep in the bed with your father when he got home from Bristol?’
Hope nodded.
‘That would be how she caught it,’ the Reverend Gosling said sadly. ‘But of course she wouldn’t have known what it was then. Now, let me come in and see her.’
Despite all the Reverend Gosling’s prayers, and getting Mrs Calway to come in and help nurse Meg, she died two days after Silas. She seemed to rally a little, enough perhaps to realize her husband was gone, but then she seemed to give up fighting the sickness and died during the night. When he called the following morning, the Reverend Gosling said that it was perhaps a blessing that she died quickly without the indignity Silas had suffered. Hope had to agree with that, for she knew her mother would have hated to have anyone clearing up her bodily wastes. But that didn’t soothe the pain of losing her.
Mrs Calway washed both Meg and Silas and laid them out. Her husband Geoffrey, the village carpenter, brought up the coffins, and Matt and James lifted them in.
The coffins stood on trestles, and Hope scoured the fields and woodland around the cottage for wild flowers to decorate them. However much everyone praised her for looking after their parents, she couldn’t help but feel there must have been something she could have done to prevent their deaths.
The morning of the funeral was a beautiful sunny day. There had been mist first thing, but it cleared quickly. Hope stood looking down at the river for a long time before her brothers and sisters arrived, remembering how much her father had always liked this time of year.
‘When the harvest is in, and the fields ploughed, I get the feeling the Lord likes to reward us all with a display of His greatness,’ he used to say. He would wave a hand at the trees in their autumn colouring, and his eyes would become damp with emotion.
Many of the trees had come down in the recent storms, and others had lost their leaves prematurely, yet the valley was still a patchwork of orange, yellow, russet, scarlet, green and brown. The river, half hidden all summer, was revealed in all its sparkling glory, squirrels scampered up and down trees searching for hazelnuts, and fluffy Old Man’s Beard scrambled over hedges. Hope remembered all the times she’d picked blackberries and elderberries with her mother, the way she used to laugh and hold Hope up in her arms to reach the high ones. It was unbearable to think she would never hear that laugh again and never see her parents sitting together on the bench under the apple tree on summer evenings, their hands entwined.
Later that morning as Matt screwed down the coffin lids, Hope looked around at her gathered family and wished she was in a third coffin.
Nell was sobbing, her face against Albert’s chest. Amy looked pale and anxious, as if afraid the disease was still lurking in the cottage and she might carry it home to her new baby and Reuben. Matt was grim-faced, struggling to control his emotions, and Ruth and Alice were clinging to each other while James and Toby stood by shuffling awkwardly, not knowing what to do or say.
Joe and Henry were stiff and white-faced. Though not yet men at thirteen and twelve, they were too old to cry, and perhaps they were remembering that one of the last things they said to their parents was that they would go to London for there was nothing for them here.
Hope felt like the odd one out. The other ten all had a close bond with someone else in the family; Matt had Amy and Nell had Albert. It was true that every one of them had put their arms around her and indeed promised she would be taken care of, but she still felt very alone.
The mattress on her parents’ bed had been burned, as had all the straw-filled sacks from the loft. She and Jane Calway had scrubbed the whole cottage from top to bottom with vinegar and water. Every piece of linen had been boiled, blankets washed, the chairs and table scrubbed. They had burned sweet-smelling herbs on the fire to rid the cottage of any lingering pestilence, but it would never be a home again.
As yet no one had dared talk about tomorrow, next week or next month. They must surely all realize that the cottage would go, and once it had there would be no place they would gather as a family. Hope could see by Albert’s coldness that he wasn’t likely to suggest the gatehouse became the Renton meeting place. Matt and Amy only had one room in her parents’ farmhouse, so how could they extend an invitation?
James and Ruth would go back to Briargate, Toby and Alice to Bath. Joe and Henry would possibly stay at Mr Francis’s place. All in twos, except for her.
Almost everyone in the village, and many from the neighbouring ones too, turned out for the funeral, a mark of their respect for Silas and Meg Renton. Mr Francis, Mr Warren, Mr Carpenter and Mr Miles, all farmers Silas had worked for many, many times, were there with their wives. Frank and Dorothy Nichols were there with their two daughters, Gareth Peregrine, the Boxes, big Nigel with the red hair from the blacksmith’s, and Fred Humphreys. Bunches of Michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums had been brought by everyone who grew flowers in their gardens, and Hope thought they were far more beautiful and meaningful than the hothouse roses and carnations sent by Sir William and Lady Harvey.
Nell, Ruth and Alice cried throughout the service. Even when Hope didn’t hear them, she sensed their shuddering shoulders and fingers clenched round sodden handkerchiefs. Her eyes prickled when Reverend Gosling spoke of how devoted Silas and Meg had been to each other, and that their children were a credit to their love and care. But she didn’t cry properly until her father’s coffin was lowered into the ground, beside Violet and Prudence’s small grave, and then her mother’s was put on top.
It wasn’t, as people said later, that she suddenly realized they were gone for good. She’d known that the minute her mother died. What made her sob was the knowledge that Meg gave up when she knew Silas was dead. She couldn’t live without him, not even for her children’s sake. She would rather be in the churchyard with him than back in the cottage watching her children grow up, marry and have children of their own. That seemed so selfish to Hope when she’d tried so hard to keep her alive; didn’t she realize that her youngest daughter still needed her?
‘You will come home with Albert and me,’ Nell murmured into Hope’s hair as she rocked her younger sister in her arms to comfort her.
They were all in the cottage garden, the family and a few neighbours. It was lucky the sun was so warm, for no one seemed to want to go inside. Toby and Alice would be leaving soon for the long walk back to Bath, and Mr Francis had offered Joe and Henry a room above his stables and a wage each if they would take over the work their father had always done.
‘Albert won’t want me there,’ Hope sobbed. She had seen him looking at her grimly several times since the funeral. He wouldn’t want anyone, not even a dog, cluttering up his extraordinarily tidy gatehouse.
‘Don’t be foolish,’ Nell said, stroking her hair. ‘Albert knows as well as anyone that you can’t stay here alone. I spoke to Lady Harvey yesterday and she said it would be fine, and she thought maybe you could help Cook out in the kitchen.’
Hope dried her eyes, not because she was satisfied she was really wanted, but because she knew there was no alternative. No one else had offered to take her in, and she loved Nell and liked the idea of helping Cook at Briargate. She would just have to put up with Albert.
Nell washed up the last of the cups and plates, wiped over the table and then sat down for a moment to rest. Albert was talking to Mr Merchant, Matt’s father-in-law, and he seemed to have forgotten he was anxious to get home just fifteen minutes ago.
Albert had no real idea how she felt. He seemed to be missing the part which enabled most people to understand another’s grief. She’d had more sympathy from Lady Harvey, Baines and Cook than she’d had from Albert. Only this morning he’d said, ‘You’ll feel better after the funeral.’ As if she could just forget twenty-seven years of memories the moment the earth was shovelled over the coffins!
She was utterly devastated at losing her parents, and she wished to God she’d defied both Albert and Lady Harvey and come to the cottage before it was too late. Maybe she couldn’t have done anything to save them, but at least she wouldn’t have this terrible guilt that she had done nothing.
Yet she was even more ashamed that she hadn’t been brave enough to put her foot down with Albert right from the first day they were married, and insisted on spending her afternoons off with her family. What right did he have to say her place was in their home and her parents weren’t important? In three years of marriage she’d only spent a total of perhaps five or six hours with them, and that was mostly on the way home from church with Albert. She got the family news second-hand through Ruth, and she hadn’t once been able to sit down and really talk to her mother and father and explain things.
But she supposed that if she had had that opportunity she might have revealed to her mother that she regretted marrying Albert and admitted that he often hit her.
She glanced out through the door, almost as if she believed he was capable of reading her thoughts. But she’d got so used to him ordering everything in her life, from what she cooked to how the furniture was arranged, how she swept the floor or did the washing, that she didn’t even feel her mind belonged to her any longer.