Hope by Lesley Pearse Page A

off any covers for he was still shivering, so I sat in the chair.’
    ‘You go up and get into my bed,’ Hope said. ‘I’ll watch over him.’
    ‘Wake me at first light, and keep turning the boys’ clothes till they’re dry. I don’t want them catching a chill too,’ Meg said wearily. ‘If your father wakes, give him some water. I’ll go down to see Lizzie Brierley first thing and see if she can make me one of her mixtures.’
    To Hope, that was confirmation of how frightened her mother really was, for she usually pooh-poohed the concoctions Lizzie made.
    Over the next four days Hope watched her father grow sicker and sicker. He was feverish, holding his head in his hands because it hurt, and he could barely get up to relieve himself. Meg plied him with both the mixture she’d got from Lizzie and one of her own herbal infusions, good for fevers. She sponged him down when he was too hot, and put a hot brick in beside him when he shivered. Yet by the fourth morning he was muttering deliriously.
    ‘Shall I go and get Nell?’ Hope asked.
    ‘No, of course not,’ her mother snapped. ‘It ain’t right to ask anyone’s help when there’s sickness in the house.’
    ‘But Nell should know how ill Father is,’ Hope argued.
    ‘What she don’t know can’t hurt her. She’d only come rushing round here and make more trouble for herself with Albert.’
    Only a few weeks back Ruth had claimed she thought Albert hit Nell, and Father had said if this proved to be right he’d go round and wring the man’s neck.
    ‘Well, shall I go and get the doctor then?’ Hope asked. She was frightened because Father didn’t seem to know her or her mother.
    ‘We’ve got no money for the doctor,’ Meg replied, her eyes bleak with anxiety. ‘You go into the bakery and see if they’ve got some work for you there, meanwhile I’ll build up the fire and try to get him to sweat out the fever.’
    Hope knew that her mother must be desperate for money to send her in to beg for work at the bakery, for she disliked Mrs Scragg, the baker’s wife, as much as Hope did.
    Mrs Scragg questioned Hope closely about Silas’s sickness, clearly afraid it was something infectious, then set her to work outside, scouring out bread tins. By late afternoon Hope was more exhausted than if she’d been working all day in the fields. After the scouring of the bread tins she was made to clean out two storerooms, scrubbing the walls and floors. She’d drawn bucket after bucket of water from the well, mucked out the stable and washed a huge pile of aprons. For all this she was given a shilling and a loaf of bread.
    Her mother stopped Hope at the door when she went home. ‘Don’t come in,’ she said. ‘Your father has a rash now; you and the boys must sleep in the outhouse until he improves.’
    ‘Is it scarlet fever like with Violet and Prudence?’ Hope asked, tears springing to her eyes because she sensed her mother was afraid he was going to die.
    ‘I wish that’s all it was, grown men get over that,’ Meg said wearily. ‘Go to the doctor, Hope. Tell him how your father was when he came back from Bristol, but that he’s delirious now and the rash is a “mulberry” one. He’ll know what that means. I don’t expect he will call to see your father, but he might be able to give you some medicine for him if you give him that shilling.’
    Dr Langford lived in Chewton, a hamlet on the way to Keynsham, a distance of two miles. Hope was too young when Violet and Prudence died to remember the doctor calling then, but she often saw the short, rotund man in a stove-pipe hat driving through the village in his gig, and at church. Her mother had said that years ago he set her father’s arm when he broke it, and as they had no money to pay him they gave him a chicken instead. That gave Hope the idea he must be a kindly man, and as she hurried down through the village and up Fairy Hill, she wondered if he’d be kindly enough to give her a drink and