Never Look Back (36 page)

‘My darling one,’ he wrote. ‘I have a job now as an overseer on a cotton plantation, and a little house for us, so please come on the very next boat and don’t delay. The plantation is owned by Mr James Donnelly, another Irishman from Connemara, it’s about thirty miles from Charleston, and the most beautiful place you ever saw. Mrs Donnelly has an aunt in the town, and you can stay with her until we can be married which I hope will be just as soon as possible after your arrival. The house is the gate house for the plantation, it’s small and bare, but I know you will soon make it a real home for us.

‘You might think it strange knowing my opinion of slavery that I took a job on a plantation, but since being here in the South, some of my views that came from ignorance have altered. Mr Donnelly has some thirty slaves, but I assure you he treats them well. But you will see all this for yourself very soon. Write to me as soon as you’ve booked your passage. I shall be waiting at the dock for the boat to come in, and counting every hour until I can hold you in my arms. I have so much to tell you and show you. Our life together is going to be wonderful, you’ll see, your loving Flynn.’

She had to read it twice before she could really take it in. Her first reaction was wild excitement, but it was quickly doused by the knowledge she couldn’t possibly make arrangements to leave immediately. Putting the letter in her apron pocket, she went back indoors, but as she continued with the dusting her mind was in a turmoil.

Lily was in a very bad way. Physically she had recovered from the miscarriage, but her mental state was causing great concern to her husband, Matilda and the doctor. She no longer cried, just stayed in her bedroom staring at the ceiling, showing no interest in anything, not her daughter, husband, or even food. If Matilda didn’t haul her out of her bed at regular intervals to use the chamber-pot, and to wash her, she suspected the woman would just continue to lie there in her own mess. Dr Kupicha had no real answers, he said there was no medicine which would help, only time and patience.

Patience was something Matilda was running low on. Sad as it was to miscarry, as many as four out of ten babies died within a year of their birth, and amongst the poor the ratio was even higher. She personally knew women who had lost as many as
three or four babies, but they mourned, then accepted the tragedy with stoicism, accepting that it was the way things were. Lily hadn’t gone the full term with her child, she had been irrational even before this happened, and it seemed to Matilda that there was something more to this than plain grief, perhaps even insanity.

Giles was beside himself with anxiety. Tabitha continually asked why her mama didn’t like her any more, and they both looked to Matilda for comfort.

So how could she go to Giles and tell him she was leaving? He could get someone in to do the washing, cleaning and cooking, but would they mother Tabitha, support Giles and understand why Lily couldn’t pull herself out of the dark pit she’d slipped into?

She wanted so much to go to Flynn, to shed this heavy burden of responsibility. She wanted passion and love, adventure and fun, to be Mrs O’Reilly and have a little home of her own. She felt bitter that fate appeared to be conspiring against her to prevent it.

Late that afternoon, Giles was up in his study preparing a sermon for Sunday morning, and Matilda and Tabitha were in the kitchen playing their word game, when a thunderstorm began. There was no real warning, other than it had grown hotter and stickier all day – one moment the sun was shining, the next the sky suddenly turned black and down came the rain.

Matilda ran outside to the yard to bring in the washing from the line, and by the time she’d collected the last sheet she was soaked. The lightning came before they’d even closed the door, and it lit up the kitchen brighter than a dozen lamps. Tabitha screamed in terror.

‘It can’t hurt us,’ Matilda said, pulling her into her arms. ‘We’re quite safe in here.’ Then the thunder cracked, so loud it sounded like it was on top of the roof, and the rain lashed down in torrents, shaking the windows.

All at once Matilda remembered that Lily’s window was open, and scooping Tabitha up in her arms she ran up the stairs. ‘Go in with Papa for a moment,’ she said, once up on the landing, and patted the little girl’s bottom in the direction of his study. ‘I’ll just go and check on Mama’s window.’

The light in the bedroom was a curious grey-green, with the
rain lashing the open window and the curtains billowing in the wind. Lily was just lying there in bed staring into space – even when another flash of lightning came she didn’t so much as blink. Matilda shut the window and mopped up the rain on the floor with a cloth, then she turned back to Lily.

‘Don’t you hear that?’ she asked.

‘Hear what?’ Lily asked in the same curiously flat voice she’d used ever since the miscarriage.

‘The rain, the thunder and lightning,’ Matilda said. ‘Why don’t you get out of bed and come and look, the street’s like a river already.’

Lily didn’t move or reply, and something snapped inside Matilda. This woman had everything she wanted herself, a loving husband, a lovely child and a secure home. Less than a month ago Matilda had been blamed for bringing disease into the house, not a meal brought to her, or even a kind word, and Lily had even threatened to kill her if Tabitha died. Now she was wallowing in self-pity, frightening her husband and child and expecting Matilda to wait on her hand and foot. And because of this, Matilda was unable to go immediately to the man she loved.

‘Stay in that bed if that’s what you want to do,’ she snarled at her. ‘Lie there feeling sorry for yourself for as long as you like. But I’ll tell you now, Lily Milson, that if that’s what you choose to do, before long you’ll be carted off to the mad-house.’

The woman looked at her, her eyes widening in shock to hear Matilda speak so harshly to her. It was the first time she’d reacted to anything anyone had said to her.

‘Do you know what the mad-house is like?’ Matilda went on, her anger and frustration welling up and spilling over. ‘They chain you up, no one washes you or combs your hair, you’ll get lice and rats will come in at night and scamper over you. And all you’ll hear is the other mad people wailing. Do you like the sound of that?’

There was no reply from Lily, her grey eyes staring in bewilderment. Matilda leaned her forehead against the window and began to cry, for even though she’d spoken out in anger without thinking, she suddenly saw that in her pent-up rage she’d actually predicted what would happen. However much Giles Milson loved his wife, and however hard he tried to conceal that she was going mad, before long someone in his church would get to
hear of it, and he’d be forced to put her away. Rich people could find comfortable places with kind doctors, but he was just a poor minister.

She had felt every kind of emotion towards her mistress in the two years she’d worked for her. Admiration, scorn, amusement, envy, irritation, fondness, pity, but she saw now that she’d learnt to love her too, or why would she care what happened to her? She wished she could be detached, she was after all just her servant. But somewhere along the line the woman had got under her skin, and into her heart.

‘Don’t cry, Matty!’

Matilda spun round at the plaintive plea, and saw Lily was crying herself and holding out her arms to her, just the way Tabitha did. She ran to her, sweeping the small woman up into her arms as if she were a child.

‘I’m so sorry, Matty,’ Lily sobbed against her shoulder. ‘I know I’m behaving so badly. But I can’t help it.’

Matilda’s anger vanished as suddenly as it had erupted. ‘I know,’ she said, rocking her mistress backwards and forwards in her arms. ‘I wish I could take away the pain inside you and make you see how much you have to live for.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Lily whispered hoarsely.

‘Well, you have the finest husband in the world, he’s a good, kind man who wants to put the whole world to rights, and he could if you stood beside him. You have the most adorable child, she’s clever, loving and such a credit to you. Both of them love you so much. You have friends who admire your gentleness, and you have me who loves you too, and I’d do anything to make you better.’

‘You love me?’ she whispered. ‘After all the unkind things I’ve said and done?’

‘Yes, I love you,’ Matilda whispered back. ‘It’s because of that I said such dreadful things about the mad-house.’

‘I love you too,’ Lily croaked. ‘You’ve been my rock, my sister and my friend. You will always have a special place in my heart.’

Matilda had never, ever expected to hear such words from her mistress, and tears poured down her face because she sensed the sincerity in them. As she continued to hold and comfort the woman, she knew that she had truly crossed the line from
servant to friend, and that she would never step back over it again. But by crossing that line she also knew she couldn’t go and join Flynn just yet.

Chapter Ten

It was New Year of 1845, four months after Lily miscarried her baby, that Matilda finally received a reply from Flynn to her letter explaining why she couldn’t come to him immediately.

There had been several letters during the intervening months, happy, loving missives penned whenever he felt the need to pour out his feelings about her, his new position and his life in Charleston. Matilda had sent just as many back, never imagining he would see her delay as anything other than a minor setback. She told him how Lily was progressing, her hopes that by the spring she would be fully recovered, and she assured him she still loved him just as deeply. Yet as she read this angry, bitter letter, she knew all the others would probably be torn up unread, for he seemed to see her decision as an act of betrayal.

‘You are just their servant, not their daughter. I should be more important, if you loved me as you said you did,’
he wrote. ‘I
was counting on you, everything I have done was for you. Mr Donnelly wanted a married overseer and now that you haven’t arrived it appears to him that I took the position on false pretences. My work is hard, and I need the comfort of a wife to come home to at the end of the long days.’

She could barely bring herself to read the rest of the letter for he was revealing a side of himself she hadn’t known existed. There was no understanding that she had been compelled to stay out of love and compassion for the Milsons, or even sympathy for her mistress. He claimed that back in Ireland such events as losing a child were commonplace and put aside in a day or two, and that Mrs Milson should thank God she had enough to eat, a healthy child, and a roof over her head. When he went on to say that the slave women on the plantation had to work out in the fields with a baby slung on their back and that their children,
often younger than Tabitha, had to weed and hoe fields, she knew from his tone he’d not only accepted slavery, but now condoned it. That left her feeling sickened, for she feared he had become what she’d heard the Reverend Kirkbright refer to as ‘white trash’, one of those men who felt indignant that they were unable to rise in white society, so they took out their spite on the black man.

She could understand his disappointment that she hadn’t come. She felt for him that he had to work long hours and then go home to an empty, cold house with no comforts. But the Flynn she had fallen in love with had been a self-sufficient idealist. What had changed him enough to speak of a wife in terms of a housekeeper?

All day she dwelt on both this letter and the previous loving, excited ones in which he’d painted such a rosy picture of the life they were going to share. The more she compared them, the angrier she became, for she suddenly realized that it was this last one, written in rage, which was the true picture of him and his work. In the others he’d just been painting seductively pretty and almost certainly false pictures for her.

She saw too that she had allowed herself to be fooled right from the start. Why hadn’t he ever introduced her to anyone he knew? Or insisted that he met the Milsons? Wasn’t it most likely that he knew she would then get another slant to his character?

She had believed that by holding back from love-making he was purely protecting her. But now, when she thought about the practised way he’d undressed her and fondled her, she realized he was experienced with women, and knew how to get satisfaction himself without the risk of impregnating her.

All at once that took on sinister tones. He had fired her up, removed all doubt about him from her mind. Wasn’t it likely that he was already planning to leave, and knowing she was essential to his future plans, he’d made certain she would be willing to come to him the moment he gave the word?

‘He’s a confidence trickster, that’s what he is,’ she thought angrily, remembering the fine jacket with the silver buttons. ‘And he wanted to marry me to give him more plausibility.’

She was beyond tears now. When she reached for pen and paper that night she wanted to wound him as deeply as he had her. In a rage she pointed out that she knew what he was. That
she couldn’t possibly marry a man who had no sympathy for someone losing a child, or live in a cottage owned by a man who made children work in the fields. She said that if he’d written to say he had only a shack for them to live in and no money, but that he had joined one of the underground movements to help slaves escape to the North, she would have jumped on the first boat after Lily was better and worked alongside him. But the thought of him prancing about on a horse whipping Negroes to work harder made her sick to her stomach.

She pointed out that when she married she wanted an equal partnership, not just to be there to cook meals and wash a man’s shirts. She could never marry any man who didn’t speak the truth.

Folding the letter and sealing it helped her resolve. She wasn’t going to allow herself to read it the next day and then soften towards him.

In the days following posting her letter, Matilda found being brave and forthright didn’t give her much comfort. New York in January was a grim place, with icy winds sweeping in from the Atlantic, leaden skies and frequent falls of snow which soon turned to black, three-foot-high walls of ice on the sidewalks. The water pump often froze up, vegetables and fruit disappeared from the shops. The plight of the poor was even more noticeable as she trudged out to buy oil for the lamps or something more appetizing than salted pork to eat and saw their children with rags tied around their bare feet, begging just for bread.