Hope by Lesley Pearse

Author:Lesley Pearse
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Fiction, Historical, General
Publisher: Penguin Publishing
Published: 2007-03-19T10:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Hope arrived at Harley Place at noon the following day. The front door was opened by a beaming Alice. ‘It’s so good to see you again,’ she said, ‘I’ve been that worried about you!’

She led Hope down to the kitchen in the basement, explaining that Bennett had popped out to see a patient but would be back soon. Between asking if Hope would like a cool drink and grumbling about the continuing hot weather and lack of rain, she also volunteered that she didn’t think St Peter’s was any place for a young girl.

Hope smilingly told the housekeeper that she liked working at the hospital and that the work wasn’t so hard now she was used to it. Although that wasn’t strictly true, hearing Alice’s anxiety had given her the same warm feeling inside that she used to get when Nell fussed around her.

Alice was rather like Nell in many ways. She was older, perhaps forty-five or thereabouts, taller, and her hair was grey, but she had a similar neat, well-scrubbed appearance and motherly nature. Bennett had told her his uncle had met Alice when her husband became ill. She was still a young woman then, and when her husband died, Dr Cunningham had offered her the position as his housekeeper. Bennett had said that he used to hope they might marry eventually for they were well suited and fond of each other, but he said they were both too stubborn and stuck in their ways even to consider the idea.

Here in Alice’s bright, gleaming kitchen, which smelled heavenly like roasting meat, all at once the hospital, cholera, dirt and misery seemed like nothing more than a nasty but only half-remembered dream. Hope was wearing the blue dress Alice had given her, with well-polished boots, her newly washed hair gleaming, and she couldn’t wait to see Bennett.

Despite all the bad things at St Peter’s, there were two bathrooms at the hospital, which she’d discovered on the first floor a few days after she arrived. They were the first she’d ever seen with piped water. Sister Martha told her they had been put in the previous year because a cold bath had a calming effect on the insane. There was only hot water in the winter when the boiler was lit and Sister said it was so erratic she preferred to use the small hip-bath down in the kitchen, but if Hope didn’t mind cold water she was welcome to use one of the bathrooms.

Hope had rushed up there eagerly the minute she left the ward yesterday. She was so hot and sticky that the cold water almost took her breath away at first, but within minutes she felt she had been transported back to the pond in Leigh Woods, luxuriating in the bliss of washing the hospital stink and grime from her body and hair.

As she lay back in the water, her hair floating around her, her heart seemed to be pumping faster with the excitement of going to Harley Place the following day.

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