Spring of Hope by Cora Harrison

Author:Cora Harrison [Harrison, Cora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2021-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

NINE

I would have liked, if little Carrie were older, to have entered into a conspiracy with her to keep the day’s events secret from her mother. If she had been about ten years old she might have been quite happy to enter in a conspiracy of ‘saving Mama from worrying’, and then I could have carried it off very easily, but, unfortunately, at her age it was impossible. In fact, as soon as we came through the front door, she blurted out, ‘Mama, I’ve been lost! A bad man pretended to be Mr Wilkie. He sounded just like Mr Wilkie, Mama! But he wasn’t. He was just like the bad man with the poker! He made me run and run and I nearly drowned.’ She threw herself, sobbing, into her mother’s arms.

This was the story she had told me as her reason for running off from Mrs Taylor’s house. Some evil man, pretending to be me, enticing her away from the house and then disappearing in the mist. The story came flooding out of her, embellished by an extra few inventions! It sounded horrendous. Out there in the hall, with me standing there, feeling like a criminal, unable to reassure her mother. There had been terrible danger and I could not deny that. Beneath her warm cape, the child was dressed in the clothes provided by the kind Mrs Taylor as her own clothes, sopping wet, were carried by me in a canvas bag. For even the most casual of mothers it would have been a frightening moment. For Caroline, still trembling with nerves at every raised voice from the street and at every knock upon my door, it was as if her most terrible fears had come to life again. It seemed as though her tormentor, the man who mesmerized her, had tried to kill her beloved little daughter.

Caroline did not ask any questions, but I knew that they were in her mind and I knew also that she had connected this mysterious voice with the man who had mesmerized her, and with the voice that little Carrie had heard at my dinner table. Her eyes were wide with fear and with suspicion. She shrank away from me. If the night had not fallen and if the streets had not worn their ghostly, lamp-lit aspect, she would, I think, have snatched the child and run out through the front door. As it was, she just lifted her little daughter in her arms and took her, without a word to me, right into the room that I had given to her. After the door had closed, I heard the key turn, locked securely with a loud click, and then the rattle of the bolt.

That night, Caroline did not come to my bed and I did not blame her. She and the child were tucked in together, sleeping peacefully, no doubt. I rose a few times in the night and listened at the door, my ear to the keyhole, and there was no sound from either.

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