Hope (76 page)

If Bennett did come home and set up a practice away from here she would probably be accepted as ‘the middling sort’, but she doubted her ability to accept the narrow confines of that kind of life either.

She had seen and done things few women could even imagine. How could she settle down in a neat little house with lace at the windows and a maid doing all the chores? She wasn’t cut out to spend her days doing embroidery and receiving visits from dull women who could only talk about the price of fish, or the latest fashion.

The walls seemed to close in on her then. She had been glad to leave the Crimea; being reunited with her brothers and sisters was everything she expected, and bringing Betsy into the world in a clean, safe place had been wonderful. But now it all seemed so empty.

She put Betsy down to sleep, and stood at the crib watching her. She wasn’t as dark as Hope now, nor yet as fair as Bennett. The slightly uptilted nose came from her, but she had a very solemn look most of the time, just like Bennett.

Icy fear gripped Hope as she contemplated that Betsy might never know her father. That year after year she would have to look at her daughter’s face and be reminded of all she’d lost.

This time last year she and Bennett had climbed up the slippery steep path to the Heights with baskets on their backs packed with dressings, bandages and medicines for the field hospital. She could remember how the icy wind had stung her face, that she was hungry and lice-ridden, but Bennett had kept turning to her, holding out his hand to help her over the worst places, telling her that it was imperative they made it up there because men were dying for want of these precious items.

It was the most wretched she’d ever felt in her entire life, but with Bennett leading the way, urging her onwards, she made it to the top. Later, when they’d finally staggered into the field hospital and seen the relief on those gaunt, pain-filled faces, she had felt it had all been worth the struggle.

She couldn’t have made it up there without him, and she couldn’t bring Betsy up without him either. Without him she was nothing and no use to anyone.

Unable to breathe because the room suddenly seemed so hot and stuffy, she knew she had to get out of the house immediately.

Hope’s second slipper disappeared into the mud unnoticed as she ran full tilt down the road in the direction of Bath, and she kept running blindly until she was down on the flat, past the last of the cottages.

Way over to her right and up on the hill was a big house, lamplight in the windows twinkling in the darkness. To her left were the meadows which the train from Bristol to London passed through, and beyond that the river Avon. By day, in the sunshine, it was beautiful, but seen in darkness it felt threatening.

She was almost at the crossroads by the Globe Inn when a stitch in her side forced her to slowdown, and at once total desolation washed over her.

Bennett was never coming home, she had just been fooling herself that he might. The only future ahead of her was that of a lonely widow, dependent on the charity of others. She began to sob, all the images of the life she and Bennett had planned together streaming through her head as if to mock her for ever believing they would come true.

They would never live in a cosy cottage with poorer patients paying Bennett with a chicken or a few eggs; they would never sit outside in the moonlight on warm summer nights, or pull their children on a sledge through the snow. Never again would she know the bliss of lovemaking, or wake to find Bennett holding her in his arms. It was all a foolish fantasy; in real life people didn’t get what they wanted.

Lady Harvey loved Angus but she had to live out her life with a man who wanted other men. She’d even died without knowing her daughter didn’t hate her for what she’d done. Rufus might marry Lily, but he’d have years when his crops would fail, chickens wouldn’t lay and they’d go hungry. Nell would never have a baby of her own. Matt would never be rich. Even dashing, handsome Angus had not got what he wanted. He might come home to find he had a daughter, but that wasn’t going to make up for Lady Harvey being dead.

She felt she was back to the night Albert had thrown her out of the gatehouse, the same feeling of despair overwhelming her, the same icy rain mingling with her tears. She’d forced herself to survive then, ever the optimist that things would get better. But she knew better now: life was just one long series of calamities until you died.

She couldn’t bear any more. She hadn’t the will, the strength or even the curiosity about what might lie ahead to go on. If she just climbed over the wall and went down through the meadow, she’d reach the river. The water would wash over her head, and all this pain would be gone.

But she felt confused when she looked down, for it seemed she was already in the river. It was black and shiny in the darkness, washing over her feet. The wind was pulling at her coat and her hair as if trying to drawher in deeper.

Above the noise of the wind she could hear something else, but she couldn’t identify what it was, only that it was coming towards her. She was frightened now, for the sound was filling her head and she didn’t know how to get away from it.

‘Shit my britches,’ the coachman exclaimed as he sawa flash of white up ahead and realized it was someone standing in the road. ‘Whoa!’ he yelled, pulling on the reins for all he was worth. ‘Whoa, boys, whoa.’

‘What is it, coachman?’ his passenger called from the carriage. ‘Is the road flooded?’

The coachman didn’t answer for he was intent on stopping his horses. Through the heavy rain he could see now it was a woman by the narrowness of her shoulders and the fullness of the clothes, and she was looking right at him, her eyes glinting in the reflection of his coach lights.

‘Move,’ he yelled, but she stayed right where she was. He grabbed the brake, and heard the grinding sound of wood against the metal-rimmed wheels, pulled tighter on the reins, and finally, only a few feet from her, his horses came to a halt.

The coachman leapt down from the carriage. ‘You crazy mare,’ he yelled, reaching her in two strides and catching hold of her arm. ‘I could have run you down. Ain’t you got nuffin’ better to do than stand in the highway?’

She just stared at him, her eyes wide and frightened.

‘Can’t you hear?’ he shouted over the noise of the rain. ‘Where you from?’

He heard the clatter of one of his gentlemen getting out of the carriage behind him. ‘What shall I do, sir?’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘She don’t seem like she’s got her wits about her.’

The coachman heard his gentleman gasp, and suddenly he was standing there beside him. ‘Hope!’ he exclaimed. ‘My God, it is Hope, what are you doing out here?’

‘You know her, sir?’ the coachman asked incredulously.

‘I do, coachman,’ he said, lifting the woman up into his arms. ‘We’ll take her home with us.’

Nell was beside herself with worry, looking at the clock, pulling back the curtains to look out of the window, then looking at the clock again. Hope had been gone for over an hour now, and even a stray dog wouldn’t stay out in rain like this.

She went to the front door and opened it, then shut it again when a gust of wind blew out the candle in the hall. She put on her cloak, then, remembering Betsy, took it off again.

‘Where can she be?’ she asked herself aloud. ‘I don’t like this one bit.’

Hope had been a little odd after Albert’s death; agitated, forgetful and often a bit vacant as if her mind was elsewhere. Yet that was to be expected. She had, after all, killed a man, and that would take some time to get over. But as she was nothing like as bad as she was after hearing about Bennett, Nell had ignored it, and it had passed. It started again after Lady Harvey’s death: there were several times when she began a job, then walked away without finishing it. Yesterday she had left Betsy on the floor in her bedroom wearing only a vest while she went downstairs for something, and forgot to go back and dress her.

But all day today she’d been most peculiar. She’d come down the stairs ready to leave for the funeral without her hat, she didn’t give Dora any instructions about Betsy, and when they’d reached the church she hadn’t kneeled to say a prayer, just stared around her as if she’d never been there before.

On the way back from the funeral she’d hardly said a word, and when she did it was to snap. Later she’d seemed so angry. Nell wished now that she’d taken all these pointers more seriously, for funerals had a way of disturbing folk and bringing back the past.

It was after eight now, but what could she do? She couldn’t leave Betsy alone in the house while she went to get help, but she couldn’t take her with her in rain like this.

‘Please come, Master Rufus,’ she prayed aloud. ‘I’m scared now.’

She put the kettle on to boil and filled up a large pan from the jug in the scullery.

Hearing a noise, she rushed to the front window, and through the rain she could just make out a carriage, and a man getting out.

‘Thank the Lord it’ll be Master Rufus,’ she sighed with relief, and dabbing her tears with her apron she rushed to the front door and flung it open.

She didn’t know the man standing there, but ducking under the big bush by the gate was a figure she knew very well. And he had Hope in his arms.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ve come like an answer to my prayers, Captain Pettigrew! I’ve been that worried. What’s wrong with her? Where did you find her?’

Nell’s wits came back sufficiently to direct the Captain to take Hope in by the parlour fire. She was white-faced, her eyes staring sightlessly, and not knowing what else to do, Nell ran upstairs to find towels, blankets and dry clothes. But she was all of a flutter that the Captain had come home to such a thing, with company too, and she hadn’t got anything for their supper.

But as she came back into the parlour the tall, slender, pale-faced man to whom she had opened the door was alone with Hope, kneeling beside her and stripping off her wet clothes.

‘I won’t have a stranger do that to my sister,’ she said sharply. ‘I’m surprised at you, sir.’

‘I’m her husband, Nell,’ he said without even looking round. ‘And I’m a doctor. So if you’d be so good as to see where Angus has got to with the brandy, I’ll just carry on.’

‘You are Bennett?’ Nell said stupidly.

‘The very same,’ he said, glancing round. ‘I expected to greet my sister-in-law for the first time under better circumstances, but we can’t help that now.’

Nell shot off to get the brandy, too stunned to say anything further.

By the time she came back Hope’s sodden clothes were on the floor and Bennett had wrapped her in a blanket and was cradling her in his arms.

‘Come on now, my darling,’ he was saying to her. ‘Speak to me, it’s Bennett, your husband. I’m home.’

Nell handed over the brandy and watched with her hands over her mouth, hardly daring to breathe as Bennett held the glass to Hope’s lips.

‘Good girl,’ he said softly as she sipped it. ‘You’re quite safe now, it’s only me, and you’ll soon be warm again. Now, drink a little more for me?’

She lifted her head a little, sipped and then coughed. ‘That’s better,’ Bennett said. ‘Now, you are going to sit right up and drink the rest. To think I believed I was coming home to be nursed by you!’

It was as if the sound of his voice, the touch of his hands suddenly broke through to her. ‘Bennett?’ she questioned cautiously. ‘Bennett!’ she repeated. ‘Is it really you?’

A hand on Nell’s shoulder drew her back out of the room. ‘Come on, Nell,’ Angus said. ‘Let’s leave them to it.’

Bennett wound a towel round Hope’s wet hair, then lay down on the rug beside her, propping himself up on one elbow so he could look at her. It was too soon to ask why she’d been in the road on such a night, and he certainly wasn’t going to tell her that he’d nearly died of fright when Angus carried her into the carriage and she didn’t know either of them.

For now it was just enough to look at her. To see those beautiful dark eyes gazing back at him, her plump lips curved into the sweetest smile, for it was all that he had dreamed of while he was so sick. He knew very well that he’d been a hair’sbreadth from death and he was sure it was only his will to see Hope and their baby that had kept him alive. None of the other men who had gone down with typhoid fever with him survived, and if Angus hadn’t come and rescued him from Scutari when he did, the chances were he’d be gone now too.

Bennett was still so weak he couldn’t have picked Hope up from the road, but now he was back with her, he felt his recovery would be speedy.

‘We have a little girl, I believe?’ he said. ‘Angus told me he had a letter from you as he was leaving Balaclava. She is well, I hope?’ He stopped, suddenly afraid that this wasn’t so and that was why Hope had been out in the rain.

‘She’s beautiful,’ Hope said, and suddenly her face lit up with a radiant smile. ‘Oh, Bennett, I was so afraid you’d never see her, that you weren’t coming back. So much has happened. Why didn’t you write?’

‘I asked a nurse to write for me when I first became ill,’ he said sadly. ‘But she had so many patients, maybe she forgot. I was so ill that for a while I hardly knew who I was, let alone being able to write myself. But I daresay the letters I wrote when I began to recover will turn up one day soon. I didn’t get any from you either, so maybe we’ll get those eventually too.’

‘Kiss me,’ she asked, wriggling her bare arms out of the blanket so she could hold him. ‘Then I’ll really believe it is you.’

This was the moment Bennett had waited for and dreamed of so often on the long voyage home. As they had sailed up the coast of Spain in a tremendous storm and he had been racked with seasickness, he’d clung on to the taste and feel of her to get him through it.

But as their lips met it was even sweeter than he had imagined. Firecrackers exploded in his head, he heard angels singing and bands playing. All of the hideousness of the Crimea and Scutari faded away. He was home, his beautiful Hope was in his arms, and all was right with the world.

Angus and Nell stayed in the kitchen while Hope and Bennett were in the parlour. Nell gave Angus some bread and cheese and of course he asked why Hope had been out in the rain and clearly not rational.