Never Look Back (49 page)

Here in Missouri it was even more commonplace. With so many people so far from medical help, perhaps too poor or ignorant to seek it, even a relatively minor accident or disease
could prove fatal. Many women didn’t even write to their relatives about a new baby until it was several months old, because they’d lost others in the first weeks and didn’t wish to tempt providence.

When Lucas died, Matilda had grieved silently, then put it aside, for that was the way. It wasn’t easy to accept Lily’s death, because of her close involvement and because of how it affected Giles and Tabitha, yet she had come to terms with it eventually. She had grieved too for all those people who died in the flood, yet once the dead were buried, the remaining relatives comforted and found homes, it too was put aside.

But Giles’s death was impossible to accept. Not because she loved him and had intended to spend the rest of her life at his side. Not because he had a daughter who needed him, however much both those reasons hurt her personally. But because he had lived his life for the good of others. Why should a man chosen by God to do his work be shot down by a bullet when his very nature had been a peaceable one, decrying guns and every other weapon of destruction?

As she sobbed into Mrs Treagar’s breast, her anger was as great as her sorrow. She cursed the man to hell and back who had taken his life, and she knew if he had been here in Independence she would have picked up the axe and gone to slaughter him too.

It was Mrs Treagar who broke the news to Tabitha when she came in from school, for Matilda couldn’t do it. Yet the moment she heard the child’s scream of anguish, she rallied herself to run to her and hold her and wept with her, holding nothing back.

‘It’s not fair!’ Tabitha shouted through her tears. ‘Mama’s gone and baby Harry, now Papa too, and he said you were going to be my new mama!’

‘I’ll still be your mama,’ Matilda said. ‘I promise you I’ll love you for ever and care for you.’ She wanted to say she would never leave her, but she couldn’t say that. Giles had said it, and less than two weeks later he was gone.

The pain did not lessen. By day it throbbed remorselessly, at night it became agony. Matilda got through the funeral, saw Giles tucked in beside Lily, comforted Tabitha and received the
many people who came to offer their condolences, but inside her was a raw place which showed no sign of healing. Just the mention of his name, touching his clothes, his Bible and his daughter was enough to break open the wound again.

It didn’t help knowing the man who had shot him would hang. She was a widow in her heart, but in the eyes of most people and the church Giles set such store by, she was just a family friend, and therefore they didn’t imagine her grief was any greater than their own. Dr and Mrs Treagar were the only people who knew of the intended marriage and they hadn’t spoken of it to anyone, believing it to be none of their business.

Christmas passed by barely noticed by either Matilda or Tabitha. They turned down the offer of dinner with the Treagars because Matilda knew they were both incapable of even trying to rise out of their grief for the occasion. They didn’t even go to church, for to see a visiting minister up in Giles’s place in the pulpit would have been too painful, so instead they went for a long walk well away from the town and only returned home when they were too tired to walk another step.

Matilda had never felt so isolated. She could walk down the crowded main street, but it felt as if she was entirely alone, and invisible too. She couldn’t sleep at night, she didn’t want to eat, look after the house or animals. She did of course, but it was just mechanical, her duties so ingrained in her that she hardly knew she was doing them.

Half-way through January of 1948 when she got a letter from the Dean in St Louis informing her the minister’s house must be vacated by the end of the month, fear jolted her enough to realize that the desperate grief she felt wasn’t her worst problem.

Suddenly reality hit her smack in the face. She had no money, except the twenty dollars which had been in Giles’s pocket at the time of his death, and another eighty dollars she’d found in a cash-box in his desk. Giles had never discussed his financial situation with her – if he had any savings, or an allowance from his family back in England, he’d never told her, and as she wasn’t his widow she wasn’t entitled to anything anyway. She had seen no will, and though Tabitha would inherit anything he owned, that wouldn’t come to her until she was of age. Yet how was she going to continue to look after Tabitha without any money or a home?

In the absence of anyone else to confide in she went to see Dr Treagar. He listened to what she had to say and read the letter from the Dean. His anxious expression didn’t give her any comfort.

‘Oh dear,’ he said, scratching his head. ‘How very heartless of the church. I can understand of course that they need the house for a new minister, but knowing Tabitha has lost her last remaining parent I would have expected them to be more sympathetic. I shall write to the Dean myself, Miss Jennings, and explain your situation. They must have some sort of fund for circumstances like this.’

‘I don’t want charity,’ Matilda insisted, trying to pull together some dignity. ‘Only a little patience until I can find a job. Could I be a school teacher?’

There had been a time when she imagined school teaching was way beyond her ability, but since moving to Missouri she’d found a great many teachers knew far less than she did. In some small towns the older girls taught the younger ones.

‘If we needed a school teacher here in Independence I’d certainly recommend you for the job,’ he said. ‘But we have a teacher, Matty.’

‘Well, in another town then. What about Westport, or Kansas City?’ she asked, though she had never been to either place.

The doctor sat back in his chair and studied Matilda for a moment. Both he and his wife were very fond of her, and in his view she would make an admirable teacher. But sadly there was a great deal of prejudice against young single women working for a living and she’d come up against it wherever she went. With an eight-year-old child in tow she was adding to her problems.

‘Wouldn’t it be wiser to send Tabitha back to her grandparents in England?’ he said after a few moments’ thought. ‘I know you have cared for her right from an infant, and that you love her, but she is going to be a terrible burden for you, my dear.’

‘But I promised Lily I would care for her,’ Matilda said indignantly. ‘You were there, you know that.’

‘So I was,’ he said. ‘But Lily hadn’t known Giles would die so soon after her, and she would want the best for her child.’

‘How can sending her back there to live with strangers be best for her?’ Matilda asked, her tone a little sharp. ‘Giles wrote to
Lily’s parents when she died and in their reply they didn’t offer any help, not even any real sympathy. I met them before we left England and they struck me as cold, mean people, Lily wouldn’t want them to take Tabitha on sufferance.’

The doctor nodded. Lily had implied as much in conversation with his wife. ‘But from what little I know of Giles’s family they wouldn’t be the same, would they?’ he asked.

‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘But they won’t have received my letter telling them about his death yet. It could be months, even a year before they reply. I have to make some provision for Tabitha now.’

Dr Treagar agreed this was so. ‘You can come and stay with us until then, Matty,’ he said. ‘We’d be very pleased to have you with us, I’m sure you know that both Mrs Treagar and I are very fond of you both.’

His kindness made Matilda’s eyes prickle. ‘That is so very kind of you, doctor,’ she said. ‘But I can’t even offer you any payment.’

‘Do you imagine we’d want any?’ he said, reaching to take her hand and squeezing it. ‘I would be a poor friend if I turned my back on you and Tabitha now when you most need a little help. So you just pack up all your belongings, and everything that was the Milsons’ we’ll store it somewhere for the time being.’

‘I am indebted to you,’ Matilda said in a low voice. ‘I promise you I will do everything I can to assist you and Mrs Treagar to help pay for our keep.’

The doctor smiled. He had always assumed Matilda had a similar background to Lily Milson, yet those few words had told him otherwise. Real ‘ladies’ didn’t concern themselves with paying their way, they took, and assumed this was their right.

‘I’ll write a letter to the Dean this afternoon,’ he said, now more determined than ever to get some help for this brave young woman. ‘You run along home and start packing.’

It was while packing up their belongings that Matilda found her diary from the previous year. She hadn’t touched it since 13 December, two days before she got the news Giles was dead. It made her cry again to read the last few happy entries.
‘Alice and the children left’
was underlined, she hadn’t dared even allude to what had occurred just after, but she had written that Giles prepared a celebration supper of fried chicken, and that they told Tabitha she was to become her new mama. She’d listed the items they bought at the store and drawn a little sketch of the dress she was going to marry him in, and mentioned her fears that Mrs Abernought wouldn’t be able to get it finished in time. Yet Mrs Abernought had worked night and day both on it and the dress for Tabitha, and they had been brought round just two days after Giles was buried. Matilda had never unwrapped the brown paper parcel, but paid the woman for her work and stuffed the parcel unchecked in the closet.

She leafed back through the diary at random, reading little snatches here and there. A bitter complaint about Alice’s oldest son Ruben breaking Lily’s china tea pot, further back her views on the scavengers who worked their way along the river bank just after the flood water subsided, stealing the remaining belongings of the victims.

Back in February, almost a whole year ago, she’d reported feeling the baby kicking in Lily’s belly. It was then that Giles began calling him Harry.

She read again her thoughts after Lily and the baby died. ‘I have never known such misery,’ she’d put. ‘How will I live without my dear friend? It seems like the sun has gone from the sky forever.’ She noted that her monthlies came on that day too, for she’d put the little squiggle by the date.

All at once she was jolted. She couldn’t remember when she last had a monthly and she began leafing through the diary looking for the tell-tale squiggles. July, August, September, October and November, twenty-eight or twenty-nine days apart each time, but after 21 November there were no more. It should have come again just before Christmas, but even though most of the events at that time were blurred, she knew that wasn’t something she would have forgotten, for the soaking and washing of the rags was always an unpleasant chore.

A sick feeling welled up inside her. Today’s date was 20 January, it should have come again by now!

‘You can’t be!’ she said aloud. ‘It was only twice, God couldn’t be that cruel to let a baby start, then kill its father.’

She began to shiver with fear. She pulled a shawl around her
and moved over to the stove, and sat hunched up by it, consumed with anxiety.

A month later, now living with the Treagars, Matilda knew for certain she was pregnant. Aside from the missing monthlies she felt sick in the mornings, she couldn’t abide the smell of coffee and her breasts were tender. She had worked out the baby would be due around 8 September, and she was terrified.

She couldn’t confide in anyone, not even the doctor, for a baby without marriage was a grievous sin and she would be thrown out of the town. She wasn’t so concerned about what would be said about her, but to sully people’s memory of Giles and Lily was unthinkable. Then there was Tabitha, she would be snatched from her, and if help didn’t arrive from her grandparents, she would be put in an orphanage.

Tabitha had adjusted to her father’s death. She was often pensive, she would still break into tears suddenly, but she did seem to have come to terms with it, and Matilda knew that was purely because of her. To Tabitha, life hadn’t changed so very much. She went to school each day as before, lived in a nice house, was well fed and cared for, cosseted in fact by the Treagars, but it was Matilda’s presence which gave her life stability. If that was snatched away it might be one blow too many. She couldn’t let that happen.

Cissie was the only person Matilda knew would help her, and the more she thought about her, and Oregon, the more she saw it was the only option open to her.

But could she survive that long, dangerous journey? What if the baby came before she got there? And if she didn’t make it, what would become of Tabitha? She couldn’t even write to Cissie because the mail only went out when the wagons left in spring. By the time the letter got to her, the baby would be ready to be born.

Yet as the weeks crawled past, and people began arriving in town to make the long journey in spring, Matilda became resolved. Land was free in Oregon, no one but Cissie knew her, and with her help she could pose as a widow and get some kind of work to bring up both the baby and Tabitha. She wasn’t going to think about the ‘what ifs’. She would make it there.

On 1 March, following a letter arriving from the Dean of St Louis
that morning and enclosing a bank draft for fifty dollars – what he called a ‘distress payment’ – she resolved to tell the Treagars her plans at supper.

The Treagars’ home was one of the best in Independence, a white frame house like the minister’s, but larger and with beautiful colonial-style furniture which they’d had made for them while living in Virginia. The dining-room was very elegant, with a highly polished oak table big enough for ten people and velvet drapes such as Matilda had only ever seen in Lily’s parents’ home in Bristol.

Even though Matilda had insisted she worked while she stayed there, Mrs Treagar had never allowed her to do more than sewing, for she had two maids who did all the housework and a cook who wouldn’t allow anyone in her kitchen.

The supper that evening was a particularly good one of roast duck. The doctor’s poorer patients usually paid him in kind, the duck being payment for setting a broken leg earlier in the week, and good food always made the doctor happy.