Never Look Back Read online

  Her words were like hearing Giles speak, and immediately Matilda was shamed. She got to her feet and held out her hand to the child. ‘You’d better show me the Donniers’ wagon then. But mind you keep well away, just in case.’

  Even before she got to the wagon Matilda heard the tell-tale dry coughing of measles. Knowing that neither she nor Tabitha was likely to get it a second time made her feel somewhat easier. As the mother came towards her wringing her hands on her apron, Matilda’s heart went out to her.

  She had that same grey, defeated look that many of the women in Finders Court had, a combination of poverty, too many children, hard work and poor food. She was probably only twenty-four at most, but she looked far older, thin and stooped, with blackened teeth, and even her brown hair was lifeless, like dull wire.

  ‘I sure am beholden to you, Mrs Jennings,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have troubled your little girl to fetch you, but she said you might know what ails my children.’

  ‘Their coughing sounds like measles,’ Matilda said. ‘But let me see them.’

  There were five children lying huddled in the bed in the wagon, the youngest just about a year old, the eldest around seven. Matilda crawled in beside them and felt their heads. All of them felt far too hot, and their skin dry, just the way Tabitha had been when she had it. It was hard to see if they had a rash, for the canvas on the wagon made it dark.

  ‘I’m pretty certain it is measles,’ Matilda said as she crawled back out. ‘Give them plenty to drink. And sponge them down with cool water too, but you must protect their eyes from the light, so tie something round their eyes when you bring them outside.’

  She went on to explain about keeping their ears and eyes clean and using boiled salt water, but even as she spoke her heart was sinking. They had almost lost Tabitha, and she’d been in a real house with the doctor calling every day. Worse still, these children had probably had contact with many others in the past two or three weeks, so there would be more children and adults going down with it before long. She realized too that the child who had been sick soon after they set off from Independence had probably been the carrier, yet that mother hadn’t told anyone what her child was suffering from, and the two other child deaths that were put down as ‘ague’ by Captain Russell were most likely measles victims too. She resolved she would have a word with him about that later, but first she felt compelled to help sponge the children down, for their mother looked too exhausted to do it alone.

  Over two hours later Matilda went back to her wagon, but although she was tired from fetching water, lifting the children and helping their mother wash soiled covers on the bed, she was too angry to rest.

  Mr Donnier hadn’t lifted a finger to help. He’d sat in the shade with a group of other men playing cards, the only time he spoke was to ask when his supper would be ready.

  Marie Donnier was not the brightest of women, she reminded Matilda of the oxen, plodding along, unaware of anything except what was right in front of her. Like the oxen she would work until she dropped, and doubtless her brutish husband would only take notice when she failed to give him supper.

  Marie had said she was married at sixteen, and she’d lost two babies already. They’d lived in Indiana, Ohio and Missouri, she said her husband was never happy in one place for too long.

  Captain Russell was talking to a group of men who were rubbing salt into the hide of the elk. When he saw Matilda he broke off and came over to her, grinning fit to bust.

  ‘Howdy, heroine,’ he said. ‘You’ve gone from the hermit to the lady everyone wants to talk to, in just a few hours.’

  She ignored that remark and laid right into him, accusing him of covering up the two child deaths as ague when it was measles.

  ‘Well, I didn’t know,’ he said with a look of alarm. ‘I ain’t no doctor, ma’am. I took the mother’s word for it.’

  ‘I take it you know measles is highly infectious?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said, frowning with anxiety. ‘We’ll have to move the Donniers’ wagon right away from the circle.’

  ‘It’s too late for that now,’ she said. ‘Just as it’s too late for poor Marie Donnier to do anything about that useless lump of buffalo dung she’s married to.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Don’t you laugh at me,’ she snapped. ‘It’s bad enough every time we have a rest day seeing the women flogging themselves half to death while the men sit around like lords, but that man didn’t even get water to sponge his sick children down. He should be horse-whipped.’

  To her surprise he agreed with her. ‘You’re right, Mrs Jennings. Since taking out wagon trains I’ve surely seen how unfairly women get treated. There’s been many a man I wanted to horsewhip for neglecting his duty as a husband and father. But you tell me what we should do about this measles to prevent it spreading any further.’

  Her irritation at him vanished. He was honest enough to admit he didn’t know everything, and it felt good to be treated as his equal. ‘There isn’t much we can do except find out which children have been playing with the Donniers’ little ones, and tell those parents not to let them mix with anyone else until they are in the clear,’ she said.

  He nodded agreement. ‘I’ll do that now. But you take it easy, ma’am, I shouldn’t want to see you get sick too.’

  ‘I’ve already had measles,’ she said. ‘And nursed Tabitha through it. I’ll be fine. the person I’m worried about is Mrs Donnier. She’s worn out already and the chances are some of her children won’t survive. You could make that oaf of a man realize his wife needs some help, and some sleep.’

  Captain James Russell watched as Matilda walked away. He had been intrigued by her right from the first day she came to him asking to join the wagon train. He was always reluctant to take any woman travelling on her own, for that usually spelled trouble, especially if they were as pretty as Mrs Jennings. On top of that she was English, and the few English women he had taken out West were all a pain in the rump, always complaining or praying, and he didn’t know which was worse.

  All the time Matilda was making her preparations to leave, he watched her from a distance, and he couldn’t help but be impressed. He liked her firm but gentle way with both animals and children, and the way she didn’t flutter her eyelashes at any men to get their help, but did everything herself.

  Then on the final night in a saloon in Independence he’d heard the story about the English minister who’d first lost his wife in childbirth and then got himself shot. According to what he’d heard, the man was very special, caring for everyone like they were his own, standing up against slavery, supporting the Indians, taking folks into his own home after the flood.

  The local men spoke equally warmly of the woman who had come to Independence with him and his wife, and lived with them like a sister. They said she hadn’t sent the minister’s child back to England but was intending to bring her up herself.

  James guessed right away that this woman had to be the English Mrs Jennings he’d agreed to take to Oregon, and he assumed at first she had adopted the role of widow just to prevent anyone taking liberties with her.

  It was only a week into the trail that he began to suspect she was carrying a child. He watched her lifting two pails of water one evening, and just the careful way she straightened up reminded him of his wife’s movements when she was that way. Belle, like the minister’s wife, died in childbirth, while he was off soldiering, and a part of him died too then, because he should have been there.

  His initial view was that Mrs Jennings had to be a scheming trollop who had crept into the bed of a grieving man with the sole intention of moving up from poor relation to becoming the minister’s wife with all the benefits that would bring her. He thought he would have to watch her very closely to see she didn’t set her cap at someone else’s husband.

  Yet as he watched her, he began to doubt his original opinion. She was no trollop, she had too much dignity and reserve. It was patently clear she loved the little gir
l, and she was intelligent, very independent, and pretty enough to win any man’s heart without guile. When he finally got her to speak of her ‘husband’, her love for him shone out in the way she praised him.

  But yet another facet of her character had revealed itself today. First the shooting of the elk, as food for everyone, not for herself, for she hadn’t even demanded the best cuts or the hide, she’d just left the men to the butchering and the dividing up. Then helping Mrs Donnier with her sick children. That was an act of great kindness and courage, for the fear of infectious diseases was even greater on a wagon train than in towns and cities, and few people were prepared to put themselves or their own families at risk.

  She certainly wasn’t a trollop, he decided as he saw her filling a wash-basin with water by the side of her wagon to wash her hands. She was a woman who followed her heart rather than her head, and God help him, he was falling in love with her.

  James knew he created an impression that he was something of a ruffian. He’d found it was a way of hiding his true nature and his past. Being insolent, arrogant, callous and even at times brutish, spared him the attentions of gentlefolk who might wish to draw him into their family circle. There was a bitterness within him he knew he’d got to deal with before he could allow anyone to get close to him again.

  In fact James came from one of the best families in Virginia. If he’d married a girl from a similar notable family, his life would have been entirely different. But he had loved Belle, the overseer’s daughter on his family plantation since childhood, and when he graduated from West Point he married her.

  The entire Russell family turned against him. Belle was ‘white trash’, so far down the social scale it sent his mother into attacks of the vapours each time her name was mentioned. James was cast out, his old friends shunned him, but he didn’t care then, he loved Belle and he thought that would be enough.

  But James soon found that being a first-class soldier made no difference if he happened to have the wrong kind of wife. He got all the worst postings and there was no hope of promotion. Belle went with him wherever he was sent, even to the Mexican war, and from what James saw of the wives of the officers who had married the ‘right’ girl, it made him love Belle still more.

  He was glad in many ways that he’d been disowned, for the grim postings and the views of a much larger America all helped him to see that his family’s values were warped and that their wealth had been made through human suffering. He began to see how evil slavery really was, he learned to admire and respect the Indians, but these views didn’t endear him to his superiors either.

  When Belle died in childbirth, he contemplated leaving the army, but knowing he wasn’t qualified to do anything else, he stayed. What he excelled at was training enlisted men, and he might have continued along that path indefinitely, but for the Government suddenly deciding that the wagon trains going West needed officers with knowledge of the terrain and of the plains Indians to lead them.

  For the most part it suited James. The people who travelled out to Oregon were courageous, decent sorts with open minds, they needed leadership, he liked the adventure and the challenge of getting them there as quickly and safely as possible. For six months of the year he could be his own man without kowtowing to senior officers who for the most part were bumbling fools. He believed he was using his talents to help people, and his country. He had also believed up until now that he’d buried his heart down in Mexico along with Belle and his stillborn child. But a man couldn’t be right about everything.

  The first of the Donnier children died that night, the second youngest, a little girl called Clara. Yet even before the little grave could be dug in the morning, her younger brother Tobias passed away too.

  Captain Russell decided that they would stay another day at the creek, but as he was holding the simple funeral prayers and trying to find some words of comfort for the grieving Marie, Matilda was in the Donnier wagon minding the other three children.

  The sun was so hot that the inside of the wagon was like an oven. The straw-filled mattress was soaked right through, smelling of urine and vomit, and the children were burning up. Matilda knew, just as she had with Tabitha, that their only hope of survival was to get them out of there to somewhere cooler, and quickly. Without waiting for their mother to return she picked up the youngest one, wrapped a length of cotton round her head to protect her eyes, grabbed a quilt and carried her down to the stream. She immersed her in the cold water, holding her there for some five minutes, then tucked her into the quilt under the deep shade of a tree and went back for the next.

  She was returning for the third and last child as the Donniers came back. Marie just looked at her with pain-filled eyes, but her husband asked Matilda what she thought she was doing.

  ‘Cooling them down,’ she said curtly. He was a big, rough-looking type with unkempt fair hair and black teeth. ‘I’ve bathed the two younger ones and put them in the shade to sleep. I’m just going to take John too.’

  ‘No one takes my little’uns anywhere without my say-so,’ he said, blowing out his barrel chest and folding his muscular arms across it. ‘You leave them be, Marie will see to ‘em.’

  ‘Marie is in no fit state to do anything more,’ she said, putting a hand on to his chest to push her way past him. ‘If you care anything for your children you’ll help, or at least get out of the way.’

  ‘I don’t stand that sort of talk from any woman,’ he said. ‘Clear off out of it.’

  ‘Marie, run down and stay with the other children, give them some water,’ she said, looking fiercely at the woman and willing her to do as she was told.

  Marie made a timid yelp of fear and ran off.

  ‘Come back here, woman,’ Mr Donnier shouted at her, ‘or I’ll whup you.’

  Matilda could not hold back her anger at him any longer. ‘You pig,’ she hissed at him. ‘You have just returned from burying two of your children and you talk of whipping your wife! Have you anything inside that head of yours other than bone? You’ve lost two children, the other three are seriously ill, what does it take to stir you into some action?’

  He clenched his fist and took a step nearer her.

  ‘Hit me and I swear I’ll kill you,’ she said, and meant it. ‘Get into that wagon, get your son out and carry him down to the stream. Now!’

  She was aware a crowd was gathering to watch, but getting the child out was all that mattered to her, and he was too heavy for her to carry alone.

  ‘You’ll pay for this,’ he said through clenched teeth, but he got up into the wagon.

  ‘Cover his eyes before you bring him out,’ she shouted.

  The man did as he was told, but went to move off the second she was holding the boy in the water.

  ‘Not so fast,’ she yelled at him, up to her waist in water. ‘You’ll clear that filthy straw mattress out, burn it and wash the wagon with vinegar and water, and bring all the dirty covers down here to be washed.’

  He disappeared, and Matilda was left holding the coughing, struggling seven-year-old in the water. Marie was sitting beside the two younger ones on the grass, crying hard. The crowd had moved down to watch the proceedings but none of them were coming near for fear of catching the disease.

  ‘Someone help me!’ Matilda called out. She could hold John easily enough in the water, even though he was struggling, but she hadn’t got the strength to lift him out on to the bank.

  No one moved, and her anger rose up and spilled over.

  ‘You lily-livered bunch of arse-wipes!’ she screamed at them.

  Captain Russell came elbowing his way through the crowd, jumped down into the creek and waded out to her. ‘Arse-wipes!’ he whispered to her. ‘Now they’ll know you aren’t a real lady.’

  His tone was only teasing and it defused some of her anger. ‘I know worse things to call them than that,’ she whispered back.

  ‘I do believe you do, Mrs Jennings,’ he smiled.

  The stony bed of the creek was unev
en, and as she held out the child to the Captain her foot slipped, and she wobbled sideways. The Captain caught her with one arm, circling it round her waist. For a moment or two he just held her and the child close to him.

  ‘Are you going to take the boy, or are we going to stay here making a spectacle of ourselves?’ she said, only too aware of his hard body so close to hers, and the eyes on them from the bank.

  ‘Just steadying you,’ he said. Then, taking the child from her arms, he turned and waded away with him.

  The crowd of people began to move away almost as soon as he’d laid the boy beside his brother and sister, and the Captain followed quickly after saying something about getting a dry blanket for them all.

  He didn’t return with anything dry, so once Matilda had established that all three children were breathing more easily, she left Marie to mind them and made her way back through the middle of the circle of wagons.

  To her surprise a large crowd was gathered further along, and she guessed a fight was in progress. Pushing her way through the crowd, she saw it was Captain Russell and Donnier, both stripped to the waist and punching each other. It seemed to her that Donnier, who was heavier, had started out with the advantage, for the Captain had one eye almost closed and blood was trickling down his cheek. But although lighter and thinner he was a fancy mover, dancing around Donnier and hitting out with greater accuracy, and Donnier kept reeling back from the force of his blows.

  As she watched, the Captain caught Donnier by the shoulder and drove his fist into the man’s stomach like a sledge-hammer. Donnier staggered back and fell over, remaining motionless on the ground.

  The Captain calmly went over and picked up a bucket of water. Stopping for a moment to splash some on his own face, he then emptied the entire pail on to the prone man. ‘Get up, you dog,’ he growled at him. ‘Do what you were told, burn the mattress and clean the wagon out. I’ll be round later to make sure you’ve done it.’

  Tabitha was already in bed, and Matilda was sitting outside the wagon writing up her diary by the light of a candle in a jar, when the Captain came past, doing his rounds before turning in himself.