Read Online Hope by Lesley Pearse - Free Book Online

weren’t happy about it in the first place. But how can we put a stop to it without upsetting Master Rufus?’
    ‘How does Lady Harvey treat ’er?’ Silas asked, an anxious look in his dark eyes.
    ‘Very kindly, she really likes her. Everyone does at Briargate.’
    ‘She’s bound to like her, she’s her own flesh and blood after all, and that’s where the danger lies,’ Silas sighed.
    Nell was just about to say she couldn’t see any danger in someone liking a child, but then she had a sudden picture of the way Lady Harvey laughed with Hope, smoothed her hair and touched her cheeks.
    ‘You think she may get to like Hope too much?’
    Once again she saw her parents looking at each other. ‘Are you afraid she’ll take Hope from you?’ Nell asked incredulously. ‘She wouldn’t do that! She couldn’t.’
    ‘There’s more than one way to take your child from you,’ Meg said darkly. ‘There’s putting notions in her little head that she’s different, there’s making her want more than she’ll ever get. And we can’t be sure Bridie didn’t tell Lady Harvey her babby lived.’
    ‘No!’ Nell shook her head. ‘Bridie would never have done that.’
    ‘Everything Bridie did was for her mistress,’ Meg retorted. ‘She let you bring the babby here because she thought that was best for Lady Harvey, but maybe later when the woman was still grievin’ she told her the truth because she thought that was best too.’
    ‘I don’t believe that,’ Nell said stoutly. ‘If she had, Lady Harvey would have been asking me questions about us all, and she’s never done that.’
    ‘Gentry ain’t like us,’ Silas said contemptuously. ‘They’s born cunning. Anyways, she don’t have to ask you nothing, Ruth tells her plenty.’
    Nell was about to deny that, but all at once she realized her father was probably right, at least about Ruth. She had been with Rufus daily since he was born, her knowledge of caring for babies all based on watching and helping her mother with her younger brothers and sisters. What could be more natural than saying, ‘Mother did this with our Henry’, or ‘Mother did that with our Hope’? And Ruth had no reason to be suspicious of any questions that followed.
    ‘There in’t any way this can end happy,’ Silas said sadly. ‘Even if Lady Harvey knows the truth, she ain’t going to risk her secret getting out by giving our Hope a leg up in life. An’ if she don’t know, but she grows to care for our girl, she’ll jest turn her little head more by makin’ a fuss o’ her. Either way, Hope’s going to be the loser, cos she’ll be neither fish nor fowl.’
    Nell sighed in agreement. She and all her brothers and sisters had been brought up knowing exactly what their position was in life, just as her mother and father had before them. They were all here to serve someone, whether that was her father ploughing, haymaking or milking cows for one of the rich farmers, or twelve-year-old Nell going into service at Briargate. Even as small children they were toughened up for what lay ahead, collecting wood, hauling up water from the well, even scooping up the horse droppings out in the lane to help the vegetables grow. At harvest time the whole family had to help their father in the fields; from the age of three Nell had been pressed into picking potatoes.
    Before Nell went into service she had often been hungry and cold. The darned and patched clothes she’d worn were passed down to Ruth and then Alice; no one ever got anything new. Poor people like them could only scrape along, for if there was a good harvest one year, the following year it could fail. Labourers like her father could get laid off at any time, and they were never able to accumulate savings to help them through the bad times.
    In the first month Nell worked at Briargate, her hands bled from continually scrubbing pots and pans, and she was so exhausted by the end of the day that she had a job to climb the stairs. But when