But her tears were for Hope too. They said she was a fairy child, and yet she’d had the hardest life of all. And Nell loved her so much that Hope’s pain was hers too.
Hope pretended to fall asleep again when Nell took Betsy from her arms after her night feed, but she was watching Nell from beneath her eyelashes.
Everything about her was neat. Her hair was always clean, shiny and pinned up with never a stray lock escaping, her collars and cuffs were always crisp and white, she kept an apron on for most of the day but it was never dirty. Her boots were polished, her nails neatly trimmed, even her face looked as if it had just been scrubbed. She moved so neatly too, and was never clumsy or noisy. She often described herself as plain, but in fact there was beauty in her simplicity, or maybe it was her honesty and integrity which shone through, making her so special.
Hope hadn’t felt able to tell her what Lady Harvey had revealed – Albert’s death was enough for one day. A secret that had been kept for nearly twenty-four years could wait another day.
As she watched Nell tenderly rocking Betsy in her arms she thought how astounding it was that a sixteen-year-old girl could have entered into a pact with an older maid just to protect her mistress from scandal and ruin. What selflessness that had taken, such loyalty and love! And that devotion had never faltered; not to Lady Harvey, nor to her. Hope had felt Nell’s love for her right from when she had been a small child. Albert had done his best to snuff it out, but it had been too strong for that.
Yet even more astounding was that when Lady Harvey failed to support her, Nell didn’t retaliate in any way, not even telling Angus that he had a child. She was a very remarkable woman in every way.
‘I love you, Nell,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Blood-sister or not, I am the lucky one to have you.’
It wasn’t until the evening of the following day that Hope finally managed to get Nell on her own to tell her what she knew.
Dora had been bustling around cleaning in the early part of the morning. Then a police sergeant had called to question Hope about Albert’s death. Fortunately he had taken part in the manhunt for Albert following the fire at Briargate, so agreed that Hope must have acted in self-defence and congratulated her on her bravery. He’d no sooner gone than a neighbour called, and after that Betsy kept crying and it just wasn’t possible to have a serious conversation while Nell was flapping around making the supper.
But once the supper things were washed up, Betsy bathed and asleep in her crib, and they were finally sitting beside the fire in the parlour, Hope told Nell how Lady Harvey had revealed she was her mother.
Nell turned very pale, and she looked frightened too.
‘I’m not angry, I’m not sitting in judgment on either you or Lady Harvey,’ Hope assured her. ‘I just want to understand how it all came about. So please tell me the whole story, right from the start.’
Nell spilled it out in fits and starts, stammering with nervousness at some points, at others showing indignation that at only sixteen she was forced to be party to something she knew to be very wrong.
‘It never crossed my mind that she could be carrying a child,’ she said as she explained how Lady Harvey had stayed up in her room for several weeks. ‘It was only when the other servants had gone to London, and Bridie and I were alone in the house with her, that Bridie told me.’
It was clear to Hope that Nell had relived that scene up in her mistress’s bedroom many, many times over the years for she described it all in great detail once she got going. As she related how she was taking what she thought was a dead baby down the backstairs and it moved, she began to cry.
‘I knew Bridie didn’t want it to live, but once I looked at you and sawyour little hands moving, I was done for,’ she said.
Hope winced at the part where Nell caught Bridie about to smother her. ‘Don’t judge her!’ Nell exclaimed. ‘She was frightened, she loved Lady Harvey and she couldn’t bear what would happen if this got out. That’s when I thought of taking you home to Mother.’
‘And she took me, just like that?’ Hope asked in astonishment as Nell described how Meg took her in her arms and fed her.
‘She loved babies,’ Nell said. ‘And she couldn’t bear to think of what would happen to you if she refused. She told me some time later that Father was angry the next morning to find she’d agreed. He went off to work grumbling and complaining about how little they’d already got without another mouth to feed. But that night he came home and picked you up and kissed you. He never said another word about it.’
Hope could remember sitting on her father’s knee, how he used to tell her stories and sing to her. She hadn’t once felt inferior to the older children, if anything she received more love and affection than any of them.
‘Wasn’t anyone suspicious?’ she asked. ‘What about Matt, James and Ruth? Surely they were old enough to know Mother hadn’t given birth to me?’
‘When there’s already ten children and they’ve grown used to another one arriving every couple of years, they don’t think beyond whether that means they’d have to help feed and change it,’ Nell said with a wry smile. ‘Matt did say once after his first was born that he didn’t know how Mother managed to stay so quiet having you, because Amy screamed the place down. But he wasn’t suspicious, he didn’t remember Mother making any fuss having any of the younger ones.’
‘What was Lady Harvey like after the birth?’
‘Very sad and weepy she was. But soon after she went up to London to join Sir William, and I stayed at Briargate. She was gone for three months, and I was glad about that because I could go home most afternoons and see you. You were the prettiest baby I’ve ever seen.’
‘Oh, Nell,’ Hope sighed. ‘That was such a big burden for you!’
‘You were never a burden,’ Nell said looking fondly at Hope. ‘I suppose I was at that age when some girls become mothers themselves. I was scared stiff though that day I took you up to Briargate and you ran into the Captain. Do you remember that?’
Hope nodded. ‘You knew he was my father even then?’
‘No! That was the day I realized. I just took one look at his face and sawyou in it. Bridie was dead by then; there was no one I could ask. But I knew. I wonder you haven’t noticed it too.’
‘I didn’t have any reason to be looking for such things,’ Hope said. ‘But will we tell him now?’
‘Well, of course you can.’ Nell smiled then, as if suddenly she had something to feel good about. ‘He’ll be father and grandfather all at once, won’t he?’
‘I sort of felt something with Angus almost from the first time I met him,’ Hope said pensively. ‘But it didn’t work that way with Lady Harvey. Why do you think that was?’
Nell shrugged. ‘She’s not one to think about other folk much. And of course I did my best to keep you in your place. Mother, Father and me, we weren’t too pleased when you used to go and play with Rufus. We didn’t want you getting ideas above your station, and neither did we want Lady Harvey to growfond of you. You see, we thought of you as ours. But sometimes I thought the whole world could see that you were born to gentry.’
They talked and talked until the small hours. There were shared memories of Meg and Silas to mull over, Nell’s viewpoint of her little sister’s childhood scrapes and triumphs, and there were new tales about the other siblings which Hope hadn’t heard before.
As one story after another was related, some with hilarity and some with sadness, Hope felt truly part of the Renton tribe, and if in the past, she had had the odd feeling she didn’t ‘belong’, she could see now that it was because of her position as youngest in the family, nothing else. Nell pointed out that being the eldest made her different too.
‘I had to help Mother when the little ones could play,’ she said. ‘I was washing and feeding babies when I was six or seven. I didn’t get to run about in the fields the way you all did. Matt had to be a man too, well before his time. That is just the way it is in a big family. But you, Hope, you were the little darling, everyone’s pet. We all made big allowances for you.’
Later, Nell went on to tell Hope about each and every time she was reminded of who her little sister’s real parents were. ‘You were never cowed by gentry. You’d stand out in the lane and talk to anyone who came riding by. You just couldn’t seem to understand that folk like us were supposed to be humble. And I was so frightened when you got older and you and Rufus became so close.’
‘But why?’ Hope asked with some amusement.
‘In case you became sweethearts later on,’ she admitted. ‘I can’t tell you how many nights I lay awake worrying about it. But I feel like a load has been taken off my shoulders now. If we hear Bennett is coming home tomorrow that will end all my worries.’
‘At least this has distracted me from thinking about him for a while,’ Hope sighed.
Nell got up stiffly from her chair, and held out her arms to Hope. ‘What will be, will be,’ she said as she embraced her. ‘I wish I could promise you he will come home, but I can’t. But whatever happens I’ll be right beside you.’
The autumn days went slowly by, each one a little colder, wetter or windier. It was dark by four in the afternoon, and mostly the weather was too bad to go out. Yet still no letters came from either Angus or Bennett.
Uncle Abel got word that post from both the Crimea and Turkey had gone astray. He also went to Winchester to the Rifle Brigade barracks, and was told that Bennett had not been reported dead. But by the same token they could offer no proof he was alive either for his name wasn’t on any of the lists of sick sent to Scutari. But from talking to a couple of soldiers who had been invalided home, it seemed their families hadn’t been informed either, and letters they’d written from hospital hadn’t turned up until after they’d got home.
Angus had definitely left the Crimea – there was evidence he’d boarded a steamer bound for Constantinople. Uncle Abel felt sure he had gone there to look for Bennett.
Hope’s anxiety had settled into a constant dull ache, but almost every day there was some distraction to take her mind off it. Two weeks after Albert’s death there was the inquest in Bristol, in which she and Rufus had to give their evidence. It lasted less than twenty minutes and the coroner pronounced it self-defence and complimented Hope on her courage.
Before they went home that day, Hope took Rufus to Lewins Mead to show him where she had lived. It was shocking to see the appalling conditions there again and Rufus thought it a miracle she’d survived it. But Uncle Abel told them later that plans were afoot for it to be pulled down, the river Frome covered over, roads widened and new houses with piped water and drains built.
Hope put some flowers in St James’s graveyard, for although she suspected that neither Gussie, Betsy, nor any of the cholera victims had actually been buried there, it was a place they had often walked through together. She even thought she heard Betsy’s laughter on the wind, and knew her friend would be thrilled to think she was accompanied by a titled gentleman and that she had given her name to her child.
The strangest thing about that visit was finding she was a target for beggars. Until then she’d imagined she could walk around there at any time without being troubled. She realized then it wasn’t only her neat dress, bonnet and fur-trimmed cloak which identified her as someone who might hand out a few pennies, she remembered how she too had once been able to sniff out sympathy and concern and play on it. She gave what little money she had to some ragged barefoot children, and then walked quickly away.
‘When Bennett comes back,’ she said thoughtfully on their way home, ‘we’ll have to find some way of really helping those children. A hot pie now and then does little. But education with a hot dinner thrown in could do such a lot.’
Aside from the day-to-day chores and making clothes for Betsy, who seemed to be growing at an alarming rate, there were many visits from all her brothers and sisters to keep Hope’s mind off Bennett. She also visited Matt’s farm, Ruth’s home in Bath and many of her old neighbours in Compton Dando. Sometimes during the family gatherings Hope felt an overwhelming desire to tell them that she wasn’t a true sister, especially when Ruth claimed that her daughter Prudence was just like her. But she refrained from the temptation; she needed to discuss that with both Lady Harvey and Angus first, for they would be the ones to suffer scandal, not her and Rufus.
Rufus kept saying that he would bring Lady Harvey over to see her and Nell just as soon as there was a mild, dry spell. But on 30 November she died in her sleep.
Matt brought the news to them. Leaving Betsy with Dora, Matt drove Hope and Nell over to see Rufus, and they arrived just after the doctor had left, confirming her heart had given out.
‘She was a little odd last night,’ Rufus explained distractedly. ‘She said she thought she saw Father on the drive and that he was waiting for her. But she went to bed as normal, and when I went in there early this morning, she was dead.’
Once Matt had gone home leaving Hope and Nell alone with Rufus, they all cried. ‘I should have come over again,’ Hope sobbed. ‘I might have known that she was too frail to live much longer. Now I can’t say any of the things to her that I wanted to.’
‘I wish too that I’d been kinder,’ Rufus admitted. ‘She was on her own so much, I used to get so impatient with her. But you’ve got nothing to reproach yourself for, Hope, you were kind to her.’
‘I could have said I understood how it was for her when she had me,’ Hope said. ‘I could have told her that none of that mattered any more.’
‘I think she knew that was how you felt,’ Rufus said, drying Hope’s eyes with his handkerchief. ‘A few days after you’d been here, she said that she was proud of you, that you had all the best of Angus in you and that the Rentons had made you strong and loving.’
Nell had listened to all this saying nothing. Then she got up from her chair and put an arm round each of them. ‘If I’d seen her one more time I would have pointed out how lucky she was to have you two and how fortunate it was that neither of you inherited her selfish nature.’
‘Nell!’ Hope exclaimed. ‘Don’t speak ill of the dead.’