Never Look Back Read online

  ‘That sounds dangerously like a pedlar knocking on the door,’ Lily laughed. ‘You’d be a great deal safer looking first at ones we know something about.’

  Despite Matilda’s protests, Lily and Giles went out of their way to find a suitable man for her all through the summer. There was Hans, the six-foot blond son of the Hoffmans who owned the town bakery. He was handsome enough to make most girls swoon, but he couldn’t string more than four words together at one time. Then came Johann, his parents were German too and he’d travelled down from Connecticut with the intention of sending for them when his farm was doing well. He could talk, but only about farming, and he was a tobacco chewer too, which made Matilda shudder. And Ernest, appropriately named for he was the most earnest man Matilda had ever met, explained the finer points of animal husbandry in such a stultifying manner that she almost fell asleep. After these three came Michael, Amos and Dieter, all of whom had some conversational skills, were quite presentable, and none of them chewed tobacco in her presence, but they all had that desperate look in their eyes which made Matilda think they would ask anyone to marry them so they could get a home-cooked meal and their washing done for them.

  ‘We’ll have to cast our net further afield,’ Lily said, when Dieter had been tactfully dismissed after he’d said he didn’t think girls should be educated as it just gave them grand ideas.

  ‘How far did you have in mind to cast it?’ Giles grinned as he rocked in the chair. ‘Shall I go out into the wilderness to search for Matty’s true love there? Or would you have me go to the cities and place advertisements in all the papers, listing her special requirements?’

  Matilda went into a spasm of helpless laughter. While Lily took all this match-making very seriously, Giles thought it was a huge joke. Often he would rush into the house announcing he’d seen a stranger on the road, and ask if he should interview him as a prospective suitor. The whole business had created so much laughter in the house.

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ Lily said reprovingly. ‘But you could contact your acquaintances in St Louis. Perhaps if you said we were intending to come for a little holiday they’d ask us to stay with them.’

  ‘Lily, not one of them is likely to have anyone I’d consider to be suitable for Matty tucked away,’ Giles said. ‘They are all either dirt poor, or slave owners. You know how I feel about the latter.’

  Giles had found his own way to deal with his conscience about slavery. To openly denounce it as evil from his pulpit would be to court disaster, for feelings ran high on the subject here. During the winter he had gone down river to St Louis and met up with a deeply committed group of Abolitionists who offered help and advice to get runaway slaves up the Missouri river to the Northern states and Canada. There were stiff punishments for helping runaways, but he was prepared to take that risk. Hardly a week passed now without him going off somewhere to arrange safe houses and passages, and to take the food, blankets and clothing other like-minded people passed on to him.

  Lily shrugged at Matilda. She supported her husband’s views, but she worried it would get him into trouble. The ruffian element of pro-slavers in Missouri were hard men, and they’d think nothing of shooting a man for helping in an escape, even if that man was a minister. The slave catchers were even more brutal, they stood to get as much as a hundred dollars for returning a slave to its rightful owner. They were known to not only torture and maim people who obstructed them, but burn their homes down too.

  ‘Well, I’ll just have to think of something else,’ she said. ‘I’m not giving up.’

  ‘I wish you would,’ Matilda laughed. During these summer months she’d often lent a hand when women friends in town had given birth to a new baby, and she’d come to see that marriage was almost never an equal partnership. The men did work hard, but when that work was done they came home for dinner, then went out again to the saloon, played cards with their friends, or slept. Women kept going from early morning till late at night, often survived on just a few hours’ sleep, and had the sole responsibility for all the children, the housekeeping and usually tending a vegetable patch and animals. If their husband was a farmer they were even worse off, expected to fit in all this and work alongside him in the fields too, often with a new baby every year. From what Matilda had observed there was precious little tenderness or appreciation either, so if that was marriage, she’d rather avoid it.

  ‘You’ll thank me one day,’ Lily said, waving a finger at her. ‘You’ll see!’

  During the early part of November Lily became sick. It came in waves, one moment she was fine, the next she was running out to the privy. As it didn’t come in the early mornings neither she nor Matilda suspected she could be having a baby. It was only after spending three or four nights constantly vomiting that Lily consulted the doctor and discovered she was three months pregnant.

  She was ecstatic but baffled as to why she hadn’t realized it sooner. ‘It must be that working so hard I hadn’t noticed my monthlies hadn’t come,’ she said. ‘Maybe old age makes you forgetful.’

  Matilda showed only delight and excitement to Lily but in secret she was very afraid for her in case she miscarried this one too and lost all the happiness she’d gained. On top of that Lily was thirty-seven. It was ordinary enough for women of that age and far older to have babies, but there was a commonly held theory that mature, less fertile women, who had large gaps between their children, were far more likely to have difficult births.

  Backed up by Giles, Matilda insisted she was not to do any more heavy work, and she was to rest every afternoon. The sickness stopped and Lily blossomed, her hair shone, her skin glowed, she was always hungry, and she just laughed at Matilda and Giles when they prevented her lifting a pail of water or logs for the stove. By Christmas her belly was already too big to hide, and though it was customary for ladies to stay indoors or camouflage their expanding shape with cloaks she took great pleasure in her size.

  ‘It’s going to be a boy, I know it is,’ she would say, her eyes shining with happiness. ‘A great big strapping one. It’s a good job you haven’t found a sweetheart, Matty, I’ll need your help with him.’

  Matilda stopped being apprehensive in the face of such joy. Not only was it a perfect excuse for giving no more thought to her own future, or her unmarried state, but she loved babies and she could think of nothing more wonderful than Giles and Lily finally getting the son they’d longed for.

  She got up extra early to do the chores which had been Lily’s, so she wouldn’t feel guilty and insist on doing something. She chopped wood with pleasure, scrubbed and polished the floors with new vigour, and constantly tried to think of more appetizing ways to cook the salted pork to please her friend. In the evenings they would sew together, making little flannel night-gowns, jackets and bonnets, and they hurried to finish the big patchwork quilt, just so they could start on a new small one for the baby.

  In early January the baby began to kick Lily, and she would often grab Matilda’s hand so she could share how it felt. Matilda would put her ear to Lily’s belly and listen to his heartbeat, both of them shedding a few emotional tears.

  ‘It wasn’t like this when I was carrying Tabitha,’ Lily admitted one day. ‘It was a lonely business because it wasn’t considered proper to mention such things. I was so scared most of the time. I didn’t have a friend like you then to talk about it to.’

  Giles was every bit as excited as the women, he called the baby Harry, and almost every evening when he came in from his ministry business he would pat Lily’s belly and ask how Harry was. Tabitha was thrilled. She made a baby gown for her rag-doll, and practised putting napkins on it, so she could do it for the real baby. But there were times when her endless questions embarrassed her mother.

  ‘How did the baby get in there?’ she asked one day.

  ‘God put him in there,’ Lily replied.

  ‘But it’s a silly place to put a baby, how will he get out?’

  It was Matilda who had to intervene and t
ry to explain to the little girl. ‘God put him in there when he was very tiny, and he stays in there in the warm until he’s big and strong enough to be born.’

  ‘Will he come out of Mama’s belly button?’ Tabitha asked, determined not to be side-tracked.

  ‘No, further down,’ Matilda said. ‘When it’s springtime I’ll take you to see some lambs being born, it’s just like that.’

  The lambs were born at the same time as the first of the travellers arrived in town to join the next wagon train. Giles drove Matilda and Tabitha out of town to one of the nearby farms and there in a meadow four or five ewes had already given birth to their lambs, and two more were about to. Tabitha watched in horrified fascination as the ewe lay down and slowly ejected her baby.

  ‘It doesn’t look like a lamb,’ Tabitha cried, seeing what looked to her like a bloody lump of meat emerging. But suddenly the lump was on the grass and the mother sheep began to lick away at the membrane surrounding it, little legs began to kick, and a weak plaintive bleat proved it was a lamb.

  ‘There now,’ Matilda said, half laughing, half crying to see the sweet tiny lamb trying to stand on wobbly legs. ‘Look, he’s already trying to get his mother’s milk, isn’t he clever?’

  Tabitha was only half satisfied, and on the way home she asked dozens more questions, all of which Matilda and Giles found almost impossible to answer honestly.

  ‘The doctor will come and help Mama,’ Matilda said finally. ‘Her baby will be born at home in her cosy bed. Sheep are different, they don’t need any help.’

  ‘I shall be a doctor then when I’m grown up,’ Tabitha said importantly. ‘I’d like to bring lots of babies out. Can I be a doctor?’

  Giles and Matilda looked at each other helplessly for a moment. Tabitha was extremely intelligent, her teacher had often said that it was remarkable that a child of seven was outstripping the twelve-year-olds in the class. She read every book she could get her hands on, and delighted in her papa setting her difficult mathematical problems to solve.

  ‘You can be anything you’ve a mind to,’ Giles said eventually. ‘Maybe even a doctor.’

  ‘Then I shall be,’ she said, folding her arms across her chest. ‘And when the doctor comes to help Mama I’ll watch, so I know what to do.’

  A few days later, while Giles was out and Tabitha at school, Lily and Matilda were doing some baking in the kitchen, when a knock came on the front door. Matilda wiped flour from her hands and went to open it. To her absolute amazement, Cissie and Sidney were standing there on the porch.

  ‘Cissie, Sidney!’ she exclaimed, reeling back in shock. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Going West to Oregon,’ Cissie said with the widest smile and stepped forward to hug Matilda. ‘I got your letters and I tried to get someone to write back for me, but the sort of things I wanted to say I couldn’t tell Miss Rowbottom.’

  ‘Where’s Peter? Oh Sidney, you look so grown up!’ Matilda turned to hug him too. There was so much she wanted to know, but the shock at seeing them on the porch drove every bit of sense out of her head.

  Lily came forward, smiling shyly. It was only on the trip to Independence that Matilda and Giles had told Lily the entire, unvarnished story of the rescues in Five Points, and the significance of these two leading characters. Telling her the worst of it had made her see how necessary it was. Since then she’d often brought up the subject and indeed said she hoped Cissie and Sidney would master writing well enough to keep in touch with Matilda. Her smile said she was as thrilled as Matilda to find them at her door.

  ‘Matty’s forgetting her manners,’ Lily said. ‘Do come in and perhaps over a cup of tea we can both hear all your news.’

  Half an hour later Matilda knew that a year ago Cissie had met John Duncan, a Scotsman who called in at the Waifs’ and Strays’ Home in New Jersey for help when his horse had grown lame. He was a carpenter, and he’d been on his way to a new house about twenty miles away where he was to build all the windows, staircases and closets. Miss Rowbottom gave him a bed and stabling for his horse for a few nights in return for doing a few odd jobs for her. Cissie and he were instantly attracted, and during the time he was working nearby, he came courting her and finally asked her to marry him.

  ‘He loved Peter right off,’ Cissie said, her eyes shining with happiness. ‘He don’t care about my past either. We got married quick because he got another job where there was a little cabin for us to live in. I carried on working at the Home too, ‘cos it weren’t that far away, and John used to come over with me to the Home on Sundays and help out. He got fond of Sidney too, and when we got to thinking about going to Oregon, we reckoned we’d better take him along, ‘cos he’s as sharp as needles, and real good with animals.’

  Sidney glowed at this. ‘I would have had to leave the Home soon anyway, ‘cos I’m twelve now,’ he said. ‘And John’s gonna teach me carpentry too.’

  Matilda was still finding it hard to believe that these two people whom she’d cared so much about were really here in the kitchen with her and Lily. Cissie, now eighteen, had grown into a real beauty, just as Matilda had often suspected she might; her long dark curly hair was unruly, escaping from its pins, her sun-bonnet shoved back round her neck as if it irritated her. Her green eyes sparkled mischievously, and her body was voluptuously curvy. Sidney was taller than her, his red hair looked as if he’d hacked it short himself. But aside from the hair-cut, he no longer looked like a waif, his shoulders were broad, his arms muscular, he was almost a man.

  ‘Peter’s three now, and a fine big boy,’ Cissie said. ‘He’s back at the wagon with John, we didn’t think it was polite for all of us to come at once. But how about you all, do you like it down here? How’s the Reverend, is he still rescuing orphans?’

  Matilda told them a little about their new life and how happy they all were. Cissie looked at Lily’s belly and smiled. ‘When’s your babby due?’

  ‘Next month,’ Lily replied. ‘About the second or third.’

  ‘I think I’ve got one on the way an’ all.’ Cissie grinned. ‘But I ain’t seen a doctor yet. I hope we get to Oregon before it comes, I know I had Peter in a cellar, so if I can cope with that, I can cope with anything. But I’d rather be in a proper bed.’

  Matilda was somewhat surprised when Lily invited Cissie and Sidney to bring Peter and John back for supper later. Her whole outlook had altered since they left New York, but even so Cissie was a little coarse for someone as genteel as Lily. But she meant it, she was smiling at both her and Sidney with real warmth. ‘Reverend Milson will be so pleased to see you both again,’ she said. ‘And we’ve all got to look at this new husband of yours, Cissie. Tabby will be delighted to have a new little friend in Peter to play with too.’

  ‘Well, bless you, ma’am,’ Cissie said. ‘We’d sure appreciate it. It’s so long since we ate a meal at a table, I’ll have to polish up me manners. We’d best go now, what with you doing the baking an’ all. Don’t want to be getting under your feet.’

  That evening was one of the best Matilda could remember. Cissie’s irreverent and often caustic observations on some of the people they would be joining on the wagon train had them laughing all evening. It was so good to see how articulate Sidney had become, he described things that had happened to them on the way here so vividly they could all see them. Little Peter, who was very like his mother with silky brown hair and the same mischievous look, took a great liking to Lily and climbed on to her lap for a cuddle, eventually dropping asleep there.

  But the best thing for Matilda was discovering that John was a truly good man and perfect for Cissie. He wasn’t handsome, his hair was thin and sandy and his skin was pock-marked, but he had an attractive ruggedness, strong features, pale blue eyes and a deep husky voice. He looked tough, with big shoulders and hands like hams, yet his gentleness with both Cissie and Peter revealed a soft centre and generous nature. He told them he was thirty, and that he had left Scotland when he was eighteen for Canada, whe
re he worked first in a logging camp, then for a carpenter where he learned his trade.

  ‘Finding Cissie was the best thing that ever happened to me,’ he said without any embarrassment. ‘I can get all the work I want, everyone needs a skilled carpenter. But it was an empty, lonely life till she came along. Now I’ve got a complete family.’

  Giles asked him what he intended to do in Oregon.

  ‘Set up a lumber business,’ he said. ‘I’ll build us a little cabin to start with, and maybe do carpentry jobs until we all get on our feet there, but the way I see it there’s a fortune to be made in timber, and out in Oregon there’s enough trees for the whole of America.’

  They had bought a wagon already and Cissie said John had fitted it out better than any one else’s. ‘We ain’t got a lot of stuff like some of those people,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘They’ll be dumping half of it when we gets up in the mountains. But then we don’t need much, just a warm bed and plenty of food. John can make everything else we need when we get there. We’ve hung on to our money for Oregon.’

  Giles agreed that this was a very sensible plan. ‘I’ve heard tell the trail is already littered with abandoned stoves, books and trunks of clothes,’ he said with a smile. ‘And people haven’t been using it for that many years either. Imagine what it will be like in another ten!’

  ‘They’ll probably have built real roads by then.’ John laughed. ‘Or there’ll be people going along there just for the pickings. That’s if the Indians haven’t taken it all.’

  ‘Are you scared about the Indians?’ Lily ventured. ‘I heard only last week that they killed some settlers out on the plains and carried off their two little girls.’

  ‘I heard that too,’ John agreed. ‘But I’m not going to let that panic me. We’ve got three Indian scouts on this train, and a leader who speaks a bit of their language, and I trust them to get us through. From what I hear more people die on the way to Oregon through accidents or diseases than from Indian attacks. I reckon the army makes up some of the stories just to justify the terrible things they do to them.’