Hope wanted to laugh at Rufus because he looked funny with his lower lip stuck out petulantly. She thought he was a bit of a sissy mostly, though that was partly because he was always dressed in a sailor suit and his white stockings never had a speck of dirt on them. She could see why he didn’t like the look of his new teacher. She looked mean with her straight back and her thin, unsmiling lips. She had no chin either; the bottom of her face disappeared into her neck.
‘Will she teach Hope too?’ Rufus asked.
‘No, she won’t,’ Lady Harvey said, and moved closer to him to ruffle his blond curls. ‘Your father thinks it’s time you mixed with some boys, so two afternoons a week Benjamin and Michael Chapel will be coming over here.’
Hope knew from Nell that the Chapels lived in a big house at Chelwood because they came to dine here sometimes. She’d never seen the boys herself but Nell had described them as little prigs.
‘I think you’d better run along home now, Hope,’ Lady Harvey said. ‘I’d like Miss Bird to talk to Rufus alone.’
While Rufus began to complain that they were in the middle of a game, Ruth fetched Hope’s shawl and bonnet and nudged her towards the door. It was quite clear to Hope that she was supposed to disappear permanently without a word, but that seemed unfair to her.
‘Won’t I be able to come to see Rufus any more?’ she asked at the door.
Lady Harvey frowned. ‘You’ll still see him at church,’ she said.
As Rufus let out a wail of protest, Hope slipped out of the room because she was afraid she might cry too. While it was true she was often bored with Rufus, she was fond of him and they’d been playing together for a long time. Yet what hurt most was that James had warned her just a couple of weeks ago that she would be dropped like a hot brick when Sir William decided it was no longer seemly for his son to be playing with a village child.
Hope hadn’t believed James; in fact she’d kicked him for being so nasty. But he was right after all.
She ran straight down to the kitchen. Cook looked up from rolling out some pastry. She was an odd-looking woman with crossed eyes and a small hump on her back, but Hope liked her. ‘Hello, my little dumpling,’ Cook said in her usual affectionate manner. ‘You’re early today. Or have you been sent down with a message for me?’
Hope blurted out the gist of what had happened. ‘So I’m to go,’ she finished up. ‘I’m not wanted any more.’
Saying it outright like that made her cry and Cook drew her to her bosom for a cuddle. ‘There, there,’ she said comfortingly. ‘They’ve got to make Master Rufus into a little man for when he goes away to school. But don’t take on, he’s going to miss you, and I don’t doubt he’ll play this new governess up because of it. Maybe Lady Harvey will call you back again then.’
‘I shan’t come back even if she does,’ Hope said proudly, sniffing back her tears. ‘Where’s Nell?’
‘Off home,’ Cook said, taking a newly baked biscuit off the cooling tray and handing it to Hope. ‘She’s had her afternoon off changed to Mondays now.’
Hope wanted to cry again at that news, but she bit back her tears, said goodbye to Cook and left.
The way home was over the stile behind the stables and across the paddock to the woods, but she changed her mind as she reached the stile and turned back to march round the side of the house and down the drive. Part of it was because she wanted to see Nell and her cottage was down that way, but the major part was an act of defiance as she knew she could be seen clearly from the house. She wasn’t going to skulk off through the woods. If she never set foot in Briargate again, at least the last time she left would be through the main entrance.
The drive was much longer than she’d expected, for she’d never walked down it before. Only a couple of weeks ago she’d overheard her parents talking when she was in bed up in the loft. Father had remarked that it was high time Nell and Albert invited them to their home. He said he understood they wanted to get it all straight before asking anyone there, but he thought six months was quite long enough for that.
The gatehouse, a rather severe-looking stone cottage with leaded window panes and a neat white picket fence around it, had been built long before Briargate. In Sir Roland Harvey’s time there had been someone there all day to open and shut gates when visitors came and went, but this had been abandoned some twenty years ago and the gates removed. Until Nell and Albert moved in, it had lain empty for many years.
Nell opened the door only a second after Hope knocked and looked stunned to see her sister standing there. ‘Why, Hope,’ she gasped, ‘whatever brings you here?’
‘M’lady doesn’t want me at Briargate any more,’ Hope blurted out and promptly burst into tears.
‘There now,’ Nell said, putting her arms around her and drawing her into the cottage. ‘Come and tell me all about it.’
Between hiccuping sobs Hope explained. ‘Now I’m pushed out, like I was a bit of rubbish,’ she finished up.
She was surprised to see Nell had tears in her eyes, and it helped to know her sister felt the injustice too.
‘I was afraid this might happen,’ Nell admitted. She went on to say that she and their parents had never been sure it was a good idea from the very start, then added that now Hope was nine she was too big to play with Rufus anyway.
She made a cup of tea, and it was only then that Hope began to look around.
It was the cleanest, tidiest cottage she had ever been in. The table was scrubbed almost white; the flagstone floor the same. The stove was like new, as though Nell had only just blackleaded it. Nothing was out of place or askew. The two chairs by the stove had cushions carefully placed; the rag rug in front of it hadn’t even been stepped on. The shelves that held dishes, pots and pans had a scalloped trimming of blue and white paper. Even the dishrag was folded neatly. There was a smell of something cooking in the oven, but no sign of any preparation. Even the tin knives, forks and spoons were laid out like a row of soldiers in a box. Every one of them gleaming.
‘You’ve got it looking very nice,’ Hope said, but in fact she found such neatness a bit chilling. ‘We thought you might still be in a muddle as you hadn’t invited us round.’
‘I don’t get any time,’ Nell replied, a little too quickly. ‘Besides, it’s too small for everyone to come.’
As far as Hope could see it was bigger than home, and Nell had a proper stove and a real sink. But she was eager to see the rest of the cottage and rushed off up the narrow stairs in the corner.
The upstairs wasn’t just a loft like at home; Nell’s room was a proper one with a door and windows. An iron bed, a washstand with a basin and ewer, and a wooden chest were the only furniture, and the walls were whitewashed the same as downstairs. But again, everything was so neat. The quilt on the bed didn’t have one pucker in it. The curtains hung in precise folds. The bare wooden floorboards had a faint sheen on them as if they had been polished. The second room upstairs had nothing at all in it, just curtains at the window.
‘Is that for your baby?’ Hope asked. ‘When you get one?’
‘If I get one,’ Nell said. ‘So what do you think of my new home?’
‘It’s very tidy,’ Hope replied for want of a real compliment.
‘Albert likes things just so,’ Nell replied, smoothing the already smooth quilt as if she was nervous. ‘But you must go home, Hope. It’s a long walk from here and Mother will get worried if you’re late.’
A few minutes later Hope was making her way home, cutting through the grounds of Hunstrete House rather than walking right up to Briargate again. Young as she was, she knew Nell wasn’t concerned about her being back late. She just didn’t want her there when Albert got home.
A few months after Hope’s last day at Briargate, she found herself counting that day as the one when everything changed for her. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t play with Rufus any more, or that she didn’t see Nell, Ruth and James so often, but because she had to work.
She had of course always had to pitch in and help her father on the farm when there were crops to be picked, seeds to be sown, or at haymaking time. Her older brothers and sisters had done it too; that was the way for the families of farm workers. But in the past Hope’s help had only been needed for the lightest of tasks; she went to lessons every day with the Reverend Gosling, and the rest of the time was her own.
But her lessons had ended suddenly, with no explanation as to why. Now she was expected to work as hard as Joe and Henry did, going off with them in the morning even when it was wet and cold. Then on days she was kept at home she had to do washing, clean the cottage and help with the cooking.
‘If you don’t work, you can’t eat,’ her mother said sharply when she complained. ‘That’s just the way it is, Hope, and the sooner you understand that, the happier you’ll be.’
Hope was well aware that money was tighter since Nell and Matt had got married and they didn’t tip up their wages any more. James and Ruth still gave Mother theirs, and Alice and Toby contributed what they could. But none of them earned very much, and Alice and Toby came home so infrequently that Meg had to wait weeks just for a couple of shillings.
Hope could also see for herself that her parents were getting old and tired. Neither of them had the strength they’d once had. The Reverend Gosling had pointed out to her that her mother was forty-five now, her father a couple of years older, and a lifetime of heavy work and hardship had taken its toll. He said rather sternly that many girls of nine and even far younger had to work as hard as adults, and she should thank God that she had been allowed a real childhood and been able to attend his little school for four years.
So she had to bear it without complaint, even when her back felt as though it was breaking from being bent over all day picking strawberries, or her arms felt as if they were being torn from the sockets as she hauled full sacks of potatoes the length of a field, just muttering a few oaths under her breath. Yet it wasn’t just the new hard labour that bothered her. It was her loss of position that really hurt.
‘Our baby’ was an expression she’d heard to describe her for as long as she could remember. Everyone in the family except Joe and Henry used it, a loving way of acknowledging that she had a special place in the family. They all took care that she was warm enough, had enough to eat, that she wasn’t tired. Her mother and Nell had made sure she had decent clothes and boots that fitted, her father and Matt had whittled her dolls out of wood, hung a swing for her on the apple tree. She had been quicker than any of the others to learn to read and write, and while none of them had more than two years with the Reverend Gosling, she’d had four. They asked her to read notices, or any newspapers that came their way, because she was far better than anyone else at it. Even being sent to play with Rufus made her feel that she’d been singled out, for Henry was only a year older.
For the whole two years she was visiting Briargate she was the focus of everyone’s attention. She had to be neatly dressed to go there, in the early days she had to be taken and collected, and everyone in the family wanted to know about what she did there and what Lady Harvey had said to her.
Now she was nothing. She had to wear her old frock to work, and no one had any need to ask about what she’d been doing because they knew. She hadn’t much liked going to the Reverend Gosling for lessons, but she’d learned things she could tell her parents about when she got home.
But the worst of it was that she knew this was how it would be until she went into service. And that would be even worse.
‘Come and sit beside me, Meg,’ Silas called out as he saw his wife looking out of the door to see where he was.
It was September, a beautiful evening with the sun just starting to set. Silas was sitting on the seat under the apple tree smoking his pipe, watching the sky turning pink. Down at the bottom of the field by the river bank he could see rabbits feeding. An owl was perched up on a fence post waiting to spot its supper. Everything was just as it should be, the chickens in their coop for the night, Hope, Joe and Henry already asleep up in the loft, and they’d had a good dinner tonight of chicken and apple dumplings. But Silas was unable to enjoy the peace or the view because he was worried.
Meg came over the grass towards him, a tankard of cider in her hand. She passed it to him and sat down beside him. ‘It’ll be a year tomorrow that our Nell got wed. Are you thinking we’ve lost her for good?’
Silas didn’t reply immediately, mainly because that wasn’t what he was thinking about. He had concerns that Nell never came home to visit any more, but a wife had to obey her husband’s wishes, and if Albert wanted Nell at their home in her spare time, then Silas supposed he had to accept that. But he knew Meg couldn’t see it that way.
‘I know you miss her,’ he said eventually. ‘But she chose Albert and they’ve got a life of their own to make now. At least we see her at church every Sunday.’
‘Maybe it will be different when she has a baby,’ Meg said hopefully.
‘Maybe.’ Silas sighed because he didn’t really believe that. ‘But it was Hope I was fretting about. She don’t seem herself.’
‘She’ll be fine, she’ll get used to work, we all had to,’ Meg said. ‘We should’ve broken her in more gently perhaps, stopped her going up to the big house a year ago. But what’s done is done. We do have to teach her that for folk like us there is no easy road.’
Silas turned to look at his wife and wondered, as he had so many times before, how she managed to be so accepting. When they fell in love they believed that one day they’d have a little farm of their own, but here they were twenty-six years on and they were still breaking their backs for a pittance. When he was too old to work and they couldn’t pay the rent, they’d be thrown on the parish.
But they were blessed, he knew that. They had each other, their children were healthy and strong, the five older ones were all in good positions, and two of them married off. He hoped he could get Joe and Henry apprenticed in good trades.
Hope was the only one he worried about for she was neither a Renton by blood nor by nature.