‘I’m not too young to know you need to be in bed,’ Hope argued, slipping in through the door before Meg managed to get it closed. ‘I’ll keep my distance from you if you like. But I’m not going to leave you two alone in here without anyone to help you.’
Meg was too weak to argue. Hope went up to the loft and dragged down one of the straw-filled sacks to make a bed for her mother by the fire, and the way she flopped down on it without another word proved to Hope she had caught whatever sickness it was that her father had.
Hope approached her father’s bed purposefully, but recoiled in horror at his appearance. The rash her mother had spoken of six days ago had given his face and body a mottled look, with small eruptions that looked like measles. His teeth and gums were covered in a brown substance, he was breathing too fast, almost like a dog panting, and he was picking at the bedcover like a madman.
There was an evil smell coming from him and Hope guessed he’d lost control of his bowels. For a moment she almost ran back out through the door, but she glanced at her mother on the mattress by the fire and realized that if she did run away, her mother would force herself to get up and deal with it. She couldn’t let her do that.
Washing her father and getting him back on to a clean sheet was the hardest thing she’d ever done. The smell made her retch, and he was so heavy to move. Yet somehow she managed it, and once he was covered up again she propped him up and made him drink some water.
She turned her attentions to her mother then, stripping off her clothes and washing her carefully. She was burning up, yet shivering the way Father had been in the early stages. Hope made her drink some water, then tucked the blankets around her tightly.
‘I’m taking care of Father now, you just go to sleep,’ she whispered.
There wasn’t just the one dirty sheet to wash but several piled in the corner, along with a couple of night shirts and undergarments. Remembering what the doctor had said about soiled linen, she went to the outhouse to light a fire under the copper.
Some of her earliest recollections were of her mother kneeling on the ground, blowing the flames and poking sticks in until she got a good blaze going. Hope had always helped her on washing day, rinsing the clothes in clean cold water, and then hanging the washing on the line. The one thing she’d always wanted to do, but was never allowed to, was stir the boiling washing. Mother always did that with the big copper stick, and once she was sure the clothes were clean, she fished the steaming garments out one by one into a big bowl.
It took eight buckets of water to fill the copper before she could start the fire, but that didn’t prove as easy as it had looked when Mother did it. Hope twisted up some paper and lit that, then added small dry sticks one by one, but the flame flickered and then died. She tried again and again, for over an hour, each time with a little more paper, but still it went out, however much she blew on it.
Hope felt like crying. The sheets had to be boiled up, and if she couldn’t do it there would be no clean ones if her father made another mess. The doctor had made a point about boiling them, so it stood to reason that dirty sheets were dangerous, perhaps carrying the sickness.
In her frustration she banged the copper with the poker, and it was only then that she noticed a little lever at the side of the fireplace. She pushed it, and to her surprise she saw it opened a small trap at the back, clearly to let in air, for she could feel a slight draught.
She tried to light it again, and to her delight at last the sticks began to burn. She added more and more, and only when she was absolutely certain she’d got it roaring did she turn her attention to grating up the soap.
That wasn’t so easy either. She sliced her fingers twice before she got the hang of it. But finally the soap was in the water, and she could put the washing in.
By late afternoon Hope was exhausted. Between running in and out of the cottage giving her parents water, washing their faces, feeding the chickens, collecting the eggs and milking the cow, she’d had constantly to feed the copper fire with more wood. It took some two hours before the water began to boil, and it was an awful lot harder to stir it with the copper stick than she’d expected.
Hooking the washing out of the copper was harder still, and she splashed herself with the hot water several times. More water for rinsing had to be drawn, and by the time she was through her hands were red and raw.
At least it was a fine day, with a stiff enough wind to dry everything. Once it was all hanging up, she got instructions from her mother to make some beef tea with a small piece of beef a neighbour had left by the gate. She was folding up the clean dry sheets when she smelled the foul smell again from her father, and once again she had to clean him up and change his bed before trying to spoon some of the beef tea into him.
‘You’re such a good girl,’ her mother said weakly as Hope helped her to sit up and drink some of the beef tea too. ‘Is your father any better?’
Young as she was, without any first-hand experience of sickness, Hope sensed he was dying. He hadn’t had one lucid moment today, and she’d only managed to make him swallow a few spoons of beef tea. It was as if the strong, hearty man she loved had already gone from the cottage.
‘He’s a bit better,’ she lied, knowing that if she said otherwise her mother would try to get up to see him. ‘He took some beef tea. He asked how you were.’
It was almost dark when Hope heard someone banging on the gate with a stick. She thought perhaps it was a neighbour, for there had been the piece of beef and other little offerings of pies, vegetables and jars of soup left on the doorstep in the last few days.
She ran out and to her relief it was Nell standing in the lane with a basket in her hand.
‘I daren’t come in,’ she called out. ‘Lady Harvey would never let me back into Briargate, and Albert will play merry hell. But I had to see you. How is Father?’
Hope wanted to run to her sister’s arms, but she knew she couldn’t. ‘He’s bad, and Mother’s got it now,’ she called out. ‘I’m scared, Nell, I don’t know what to do.’
Even in the dim light she could see her sister’s anguished expression and knew she wanted to come in and take over. Yet as much as she needed Nell, she couldn’t let that happen.
‘Just tell me what else I can do,’ Hope called out, quickly explaining how their parents were.
‘You are doing all there is to do,’ Nell said, her voice shaking. ‘But you shouldn’t have to be doing it, you are only a child. I should have disobeyed Albert right from the start and come here days ago.’
In that moment, Hope saw that Nell was afraid of Albert, and though it was too gloomy to see clearly she thought her sister’s cheek looked bruised.
‘We wouldn’t have let you in,’ Hope insisted. ‘But Mother will be glad you came tonight. Just leave the basket there. I can manage.’
Hope watched Nell walk away, constantly turning her head back as if torn between love for her parents and duty to her mistress and husband.
Tears ran down Hope’s face as Nell disappeared from sight for she understood her sister’s dilemma. Only yesterday her mother had said that if five years ago she’d known there was scarlet fever in the village she would have kept Violet and Prudence at home. She also said that if she’d known her husband had brought this sickness back from Bristol, she would immediately have sent Hope away too.
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 h
er 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 t
able 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?
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