Never Look Back (40 page)

Slavery was an inflammatory topic, and while Giles still detested the idea that men, women and children could be owned, and sold on like cattle, he’d also come to see that if he was to serve his new community well he had to calm hot-heads on both sides. By taking a cool, calm look at the situation, he could see for himself that the great majority of slave owners were decent people, and they treated their slaves well. Many of the slaves, fired up by the Abolitionists to run away, found only far greater misery than they’d ever experienced under their former owners.

What concerned Giles much more than the well-fed slaves on the outlying farms was the plight of the people living down by the Missouri river. They were desperately poor, living in conditions as bad as anything he’d seen in New York. They camped in shacks, unfit even for animals, some in holes in the ground covered with a crude roof of wood and sods, and even tents, at risk of being drowned when the river rose in a downpour.

Many of these were Negroes, escaped slaves and freemen, but just as many were white, and like the poor of New York they were considered inferior beings and ignored. They received no medical attention and their many, many children didn’t attend school. Most of the crimes committed in the area were hatched in this quarter, just as it was a breeding ground for disease and
every imaginable vice. But Giles was at a loss as to how to solve the problem. He had no Reverend Kirkbright or board of governors to back him up here, no funds from the church to alleviate the innocents’ suffering.

Most of his preaching on Sundays leaned towards trying to foster a little more Christian charity towards these people. Much of it fell on deaf ears – his parishioners were in the main kindly, but they had little enough themselves. But Giles kept chipping away, doing what he could, and hoped that in time his message would not only be heard, but acted upon.

All through that first summer Matilda looked in wonder at Giles, for happiness simply shone out of him. He let his dark hair grow longer, he didn’t care that his clothes were covered in dust, he smiled a great deal, and laughed even more. She found him showing Tabitha how to climb a tree one day, another time he came home late from a wedding and insisted he taught her and Lily the steps of a dance he’d learnt. They didn’t need a newspaper, he brought all the news and gossip home, and hardly a day went by without his praising Lily and Matilda for the hard work they did.

Matilda had been warned by many women that the first winter in Missouri was always a testing time for new arrivals, and as the leaves began to fall in October and Tabitha went back to school for the whole day, she watched Lily anxiously. She had come to love their outdoor life during the summer, and Matilda was concerned that now there was much less to do, and no visitors to the porch in the evenings, she might slip back to the way she’d been in New York.

Yet instead of becoming withdrawn when the rain came for days on end, turning the streets into a treacherous swamp of red mud, Lily seemed to grow even happier, turning to preserving fruit and vegetables, making new clothes for Tabitha and even drawing up plans for next year’s vegetable planting.

It was quiet in the evenings without visitors calling, but the pot-bellied stove in the parlour and the stove in the kitchen warmed the whole house and Giles would read aloud to the two women as they sewed. As Thanksgiving and Christmas drew nearer Lily made plans for special meals and decorations for the house and church. But even after Christmas when thick snow came and bitterly cold winds seemed to creep in through every
window and crack in the floorboards, she had new plans. Twice a week she tramped through the snow to the school-house to help the foreign children learn English, and one day a week she threw an open house for other women to come and sew quilts with her and Matilda.

It was through the quilt-making venture that Matilda finally discovered the root cause of Lily’s new contentment. One bitterly cold grey February day they were sitting huddled in front of the stove, both taking apart old dresses to use for patchwork squares. When Matilda saw Lily smiling as she looked at some red printed cotton, she asked about it.

‘I don’t remember seeing that before. Was it a dress of Tabitha’s?’

‘No, mine,’ Lily said and blushed. ‘I brought it all the way from England out of sentimentality.’

‘I can’t imagine you ever wearing red,’ Matilda said in surprise. Lily always wore subdued colours.

‘It was given to me by my Aunt Martha, the parson’s wife whose children I used to care for. She guessed I was falling for Giles, he was the curate then in their church in Bath and always coming to the parsonage. She had the opinion he was smitten with me too, and she insisted I wore this dress because she claimed the colour would be a signal for him to speak out. I felt very foolish in it, red was much too bold a colour for me, but it worked, he told me I looked beautiful that day and asked if he could court me. A short while after he asked me to marry him.’

Lily rarely spoke of her life before she married Giles, and having met her overbearing parents in Bristol, Matilda surmised that her childhood and girlhood weren’t something she wished to recall. But as Lily seemed in the mood for reminiscing, Matilda prompted her to talk about Giles’s courtship of her, about his proposal and their wedding.

Lily’s sharp comments about the speed with which her father arranged the marriage proved that she was very aware her family were only too glad to be rid of her.

‘Father said, “You aren’t much of a prize, Lily, you are as plain as a pike-staff, but then a poor curate can hardly be choosy.” Mama was just as cruel, she made me wear one of my sisters’ wedding dress, even though it was far too big for me. She said they weren’t prepared to waste any further money on
“frivolities” as whatever I wore I wouldn’t turn into a beauty.’

‘How horrid of them,’ Matilda exclaimed indignantly. Lily wasn’t eye-catching, but she had a dainty figure, her skin was good, and she had enviable grace and elegance.

‘I didn’t care what they said,’ Lily laughed. ‘I altered the dress myself and the cream satin was very becoming. Besides, Giles was much more handsome and a far nicer man than any of my sisters’ husbands. And he was marrying me for love, not money.’

She began to giggle when she moved on to the wedding, and told Matilda how they spent their wedding night in a coaching inn on the road to London. ‘I don’t know if I should really tell you this, but I wish someone had told me the truth as it would have saved me a great deal of embarrassment,’ she said, her pale face growing flushed. ‘I didn’t know anything about men, Matty, or about the business on the wedding night, and I made the mistake of listening to some advice from Mama. She told me it hurt terribly, and that if I moved around a great deal, it would be over very quickly.’

Matilda was astounded that Lily was prepared to speak of something so personal. She had never referred to sex before, not even obliquely.

‘But I misunderstood what she meant. Even before Giles took me in his arms I was moving. He asked me if there were bugs in the bed.’

Matilda laughed heartily. She had a very good idea now of what married love entailed, and she could imagine how disconcerting it would be to get into a bed with someone hopping around.

‘Well, you know how I am about such things, just the suggestion was enough to send me flying out of the bed. Giles stripped it all down, and there wasn’t one, and he persuaded me back in. But I started it again. Well, the upshot of it was that he eventually got me to explain myself, and when I told him what Mama had said, he laughed and laughed so loudly the people in the next room began banging on the wall.’

Both women went into spasms of helpless giggling, and emboldened by Lily’s candour, Matilda felt able to ask jokingly if it was as terrible as her mama had warned her.

‘Oh no, Mama was quite wrong,’ Lily said, her grey eyes
suddenly dreamy-looking. ‘It was the most thrilling thing which ever happened to me.’

Matilda had heard girls back in London say similar things, but they were common girls, not ladies. Lily, with her finicky nature, her slim body and tiny breasts, seemed a very unlikely candidate for passion.

‘It’s love that makes the difference, I think,’ Lily went on. ‘Mama only married father because he was wealthy. I suppose then it would be horrid. So mind you marry for love, Matty. Then you’ll find out how good it is.’

Matilda was unable to speak, she wasn’t exactly embarrassed, just stunned that Lily was being so open.

‘Oh dear, perhaps I shouldn’t have told you all that,’ Lily said, looking flustered by her silence. ‘But I thought with you having no mother I ought to pass on what little knowledge I have.’

‘I’d always wondered about it,’ Matilda said timidly. After her experience with Flynn, she wasn’t really one bit afraid of the idea of sex, but she couldn’t tell Lily that. ‘I’m glad you told me.’

‘It’s a very important part of married life,’ Lily said, keeping her eyes down. ‘It can bring such joy to you both. But sadly after Tabitha was born it ended for me. I don’t know why, but I became indifferent to that side of marriage for a long time, and it troubled me deeply for it made me a different person.’ She paused for a moment, a sudden look of shame on her small face. ‘You never knew what I was like before, Matty, you only saw me at my worst. You remember how fussy I was about the smallest things, always worried about dirt and disease? Well, that was all part of it, I suppose because I thought if I wasn’t being a proper wife in that way, I had to make up for it by being the best housekeeper, and the perfect parson’s wife. Then when Giles said we were going to America I felt pushed into a corner and I became even more troubled. I hated New York, you know, and I began to resent Giles for forcing me to be there. It just grew worse and worse, the only small good part was the time we went to Boston. For a brief time we were happy that way again, and then I found I was expecting another baby.’

She hesitated again, looking down at her lap. ‘But I couldn’t hold on to that happiness Matty, it slipped away again. You got measles, I found out that Giles had been into all those terrible places with you. Tabitha almost died, and I felt so guilty because
I blamed you. The final blow was when I lost the baby, because I’d pinned all my hopes on that pulling me round again.’

All at once Matilda realized that this intimate confidence went far deeper than just an older woman trying to give a younger woman a little advice. Lily needed to expose what she’d been through, perhaps because she knew it was the only way she could put it behind her for ever. But more than that, it made sense of all those horrible times back in New York. Matilda felt real sympathy now, and complete understanding.

‘I wish you’d been able to tell me some of this before,’ she said gently, reaching out and taking Lily’s hand. ‘It must have been so awful for you keeping it all to yourself.’

‘I couldn’t even speak of it to Giles,’ Lily said in a whisper. ‘I loved him, but I felt so unworthy of him because I no longer wanted him in that way. I was always afraid too that he would find someone else. I took a great deal of it out on you, Matty, I’m so sorry for that, but sometimes I was jealous of you. That day you told me I’d end up in a lunatic asylum was like having a mirror put up in front of me. I suddenly saw I
was
growing crazy and I knew I had to strive to prevent it.’

‘I was so cruel that day,’ Matilda said. ‘I’m so very ashamed of that.’

‘You have no reason to be, you spoke the truth.’ Lily shrugged. ‘And I can never thank you enough for not leaving me for I could never have got through it without you. Giles told me later about your sweetheart, and I think knowing you cared that much for us all was what helped me turn the corner. The real miracle came though when Giles said we were going to leave New York, somehow in all the excitement my old feelings for him returned.’

All at once Matilda saw what those tender moments she’d witnessed between Lily and Giles on the way here meant, why Lily had begun to laugh and forgot her revulsion at dirt and fear of poverty, why she was so happy and fulfilled now, and why Giles had such a spring in his step, and a sparkle in his eye.

She had often thought when she met poor women who had a baby every year that their husbands were brutes who should abstain from the act that made them. Yet now, after listening to Lily, she understood it wasn’t necessarily that way. Maybe they too had found that love-making was the thing which held their
marriages together, and gave them far more joy than wealth or possessions.

Matilda felt she ought to say something, for Lily had just bared her soul, but she had no words in her head, only understanding in her heart. She reached out and stroked Lily’s cheek. ‘I love you, Lily,’ she whispered.

Lily smiled and her grey eyes lit up, making her suddenly beautiful. ‘I love you too, Matty, far more than I ever loved my sisters. I hope one day you’ll meet a good man who will love you as I have been loved. Let’s make this quilt for your bottom drawer, shall we?’

Matilda smiled broadly. ‘Well, there’s no good man on the horizon yet. At least that gives us plenty of time to finish it.’

Lily picked up the red material and smiled. ‘We’ll put a great deal of this into it. For passion.’

During March people began to flock into Independence and suddenly the small town was a different place. The hotel and rooms above the saloon were soon all taken, and the square and the ground just outside the town were studded with tents and makeshift shelters while the travellers prepared for the trail. From morning till night they could hear Solomon and the other blacksmiths pounding away on their anvils. Hammering, sawing, the sound of horses’, oxen’s and mules’ hooves and hundreds of voices broke the stillness there had been all winter.

Matilda, Lily and Tabitha often broke off from their chores around the house and garden to watch the scouts ride into town. Many were Indians who broke away from their tribes out on the plains to come and offer their assistance to lead the travellers to Oregon and California. They were thrilling to watch, riding effortlessly without saddles, completely at one with their magnificent, spirited horses, their handsome, sculpted bronze faces, beaded buckskins and long black hair sending shivers of delight and fear in equal measure down the women’s spines. Other scouts were half-breeds, the offsprings of fur trappers who’d taken an Indian squaw for a wife, and then there were the white scouts, whiskered, tough men who’d spent their whole life adventuring, lone wolves who when they weren’t working drank away every penny they’d earned.