Never Look Back (41 page)

Stage-coaches rumbled into town bringing professional gamblers and their women, pedlars and a few ladies who were dressed as elegantly as New York society women but who soon revealed themselves to be anything but ladies. There were men who advertised themselves on their carts as Dr John, Professor Trueman and other such names, who set up stalls to sell their ‘miracle’ cure-alls. Travelling missionaries came too, often with a piano on the back of their carts, some intending to go all the way to Oregon or California, others intent on saving a few souls from damnation here in Independence.

It was like watching a circus – gentlemen in broad-brimmed hats, ruffled shirts, tailed coats and shiny boots, ladies tripping daintily through the still muddy street holding parasols, pedlars hawking their wares in loud voices, their merchandise as diverse as packets of seeds, hair ribbons and boot laces. Cattle were herded along, mooing dejectedly as if they sensed they had a long trek ahead of them. Carts lumbered in piled high with sacks of flour, sugar and other necessities, while others brought camping stoves, water bottles, blankets, tents and guns. These were mainly driven by men in loud check jackets smoking fat cigars and some said that to buy anything from them was folly.

Yet the travellers themselves were a sober lot, weary-looking women in calico, their men in flannel shirts and corduroy pants. Their tousle-headed children – and there were so many of them – peeped shyly from behind their mothers’ skirts.

Matilda, Lily and Tabitha often went into the square where the travellers were gathered after Tabitha had finished school for the afternoon. They watched the finished wagons being packed for the journey and chatted to the womenfolk.

Few of them really wanted to go, they were tearful when they described saying goodbye to their families and friends back where they’d come from. Yet like so many of the settlers here in Independence, this move was just one of a series they’d experienced over the years. They’d usually sold everything for this venture, and the wagon, oxen and provisions for the journey would eat up most of their money. They spoke of their sorrow at leaving a stove, piano or cherished table behind. But their men had insisted on going West, and it was their duty to obey them.

Matilda looked at the many women who were already heavy with child, and wondered how they could think of setting off on
such a hazardous journey at such a time. She had heard about the dangerous river crossings, the almost impenetrable mountains and barren deserts with no water or feed for the animals for forty or fifty miles, then there was the ever-present risk of cholera, smallpox and measles which could wipe out half a wagon train. She applauded their courage, and hoped they would find the paradise they expected at the end of the trail, yet she wondered how high a price they would be forced to pay in human life for what looked to her little more than a dream.

The pace of life grew ever more frantic and noisy as April approached. The first of the wagon trains would leave once the spring grass was high enough for grazing for their animals. There were over sixty wagons in just one train, and each day more gathered for later-leaving ones. The talk on the streets and in the stores was all of how high the rivers were, as spring flooding could bog down the wagons, how tall the grass, and how many sacks of flour, sugar and coffee would see the travellers through to their destination.

The missionaries stepped up their open-air services, fiercely insisting that those who hadn’t already been baptized should be now to ensure a place in heaven. The saloons grew more crowded nightly, and stories were passed around about men who had gambled away their wagon, oxen and livestock, and didn’t know how to tell their wives. Painted ladies no longer kept themselves tucked away, but insolently paraded up and down the main street to the consternation of the regular townfolk. Tobacco-chewing old-timers, some of whom had been at least part of the way along the trail, sat outside the mail office, only too willing to be tempted into telling their often wildly exaggerated tales of skirmishes with Indians, or how they almost faced death during a stampede of buffalo.

While Lily, Matilda and Tabitha grew more excited each day, Giles took it all very calmly. He visited each of the travelling families, prayed with them for their safe journey and blessed them. On many an evening he would do a round of the saloons and hastily set up gambling dens, reminding the men frittering their money away that they had families dependent on them.

On the final Sunday the church was packed to the doors, the local people outnumbered by the travellers, and his sermon was
one of admiration for their courage and hope that every one of them would find happiness and prosperity at the end of the trail. He urged them all to keep their faith in God, to be kind to one another and not to neglect their children’s education.

‘God go with you,’ he finished up. ‘The people of Independence will be praying for you all.’

Giles, Lily, Matilda and Tabitha all turned out early the next morning to see the wagon train move off. It was raining, and progress was slow as the inexperienced struggled to control their teams of oxen. The wagon-train leader, a heavily whiskered ex-soldier named Will Lessing who had used the trail several times before, rode round on his black horse supervising the departure.

Many of the women looked tearful, looking up at the leaden sky and perhaps seeing it as an omen of what was to come, but the children were excited, running through the rain to one another’s wagons, and waving goodbye to the on-lookers.

It was a brave sight to see those seventy or more wagons, mostly pulled by four, sometimes eight oxen, with a cow or mule tethered behind, slowly join the line one by one and set off. Some of the bigger children ran alongside, the smaller ones peeping out of the back of the wagon. Women sat up front with their husbands, often with a baby in their arms, the only protection from the rain a spare piece of canvas draped over their heads. A band of missionaries sang hymns, but their voices were almost drowned by the yelled farewells, the crack of whips, the rumbling of wheels and rain splashing on canvas.

‘Most of the wagons are very overloaded,’ Giles remarked. They could see cherished tables, chairs, and kitchen stoves on many of them. ‘I wonder how many of those well-loved possessions will end up abandoned on the trail.’

‘I wonder how those poor women are going to manage looking after their families with no home comforts,’ Lily said, wiping away tears from her eyes.

Matilda said nothing. She was too overwhelmed by the courage it took to set out into unknown territory never knowing what perils lay ahead.

Throughout April other smaller trains formed and left, but hurriedly, for unless they set off now in the spring they might get caught out by early autumn snow in the Rockies. But when the last wagon had finally rolled out of town, the itinerant
bands of pedlars, gamblers, prostitutes and missionaries left too, leaving Independence suddenly silent and deserted.

Life settled down again in May, and Matilda and Lily worked long hours in the vegetable patch and garden. The two pigs Cain and Abel had been slaughtered and eaten during the winter, and they bought two replacements, along with some more chickens. Lily’s roses flowered in June and finally one hot afternoon Matilda experienced having tea in the garden, where a small table had been laid with a pretty cloth and the best china.

‘Back home in Bristol Mama did this every warm afternoon,’ Lily said with a wide grin as she poured the tea from the dainty bone-china tea pot she’d brought all the way from England. ‘Of course the maid brought it out to her, the cakes were on a glass plate and the tea pot was silver. I expect she’d have the vapours if she had to be so near pigs and chickens. She certainly wouldn’t call this a lawn either.’

The grass was tough and spiky, not the soft, lush green of home. Wild flowers sprouted up in it, but it had its own kind of beauty, more meadow than lawn.

‘She doesn’t write to you very often,’ Matilda said. She didn’t remember Lily getting more than three letters since they left England. ‘Does that make you sad?’

‘Not really.’ Lily gave a little resigned sigh. ‘Both she and my father were always so distant, I didn’t really expect them to change once I’d gone away. But it would be nice to have news from home more often. You are fortunate that Dolly writes so often to you, Matty.’

‘She’s such a good woman,’ Matilda said with a fond smile. ‘She always tells me how much she misses my father, and mentions little things he did or said. And it’s a comfort to me to know she’s looking out for my brother George too, and to hear he still likes working for the carter. He never learned to read and write, you see, so if it wasn’t for Dolly I’d never hear from him.’

‘Do you ever want to go back to England?’ Lily asked.

‘I’d like to see Dolly and George,’ she said. ‘But there’s not really anything else there for me any more, is there?’ To her London was all tied up with Lucas, going home would only bring back sorrow that she hadn’t seen him one last time.

‘That’s how I feel now,’ Lily said, leaning back in her chair
contentedly. ‘To think how I used to yearn for England! Now I think I’d be very happy to end my days here.’

Matilda wasn’t exactly sure she agreed with that. She was so happy here, yet she was very aware that happiness rested entirely around the Milsons and at some stage she would have to make a life of her own. She was twenty-one now, and at that age most women would be actively looking for a husband, yet her mind wouldn’t seem to turn in that direction.

There were a great many more bachelors in the area than single women, and she was well aware that several of them admired her. In church on Sundays she noted their shy smiles, and quite often they used some pretence to call at the house. Two or three of them were nice enough, and if she hadn’t known what it was to fall desperately in love, she might well be encouraging them to come courting her. But Flynn had spoiled her for other men – unless they could start her heart racing the moment she saw them, somehow she knew they wouldn’t be right.

In truth marriage didn’t have the same appeal as it once had. Marrying a settler would mean living in a tiny cabin, working from dawn to dusk with none of the comforts or the stimulating company she had here with the Milsons.

Occasionally she day-dreamed of falling in love and marrying a tradesman or merchant in the town. This dream man looked like Flynn – he was intelligent, articulate, amusing, passionate and kind. She imagined living in a house just like this one, with the Milsons just across the street so she could see them at any time. But she knew that was fantasy. Merchants and tradesmen were invariably old, they treated their wives badly. Men with all the qualities she was looking for were rarer than hen’s teeth.

‘It’s high time you found a sweetheart,’ Lily said suddenly, as if she had tuned into her mind. ‘Most girls of your age are married with two or three children, and you are the prettiest girl for miles around.’ She went on to list every unmarried man she knew, and suggested they should look at them all more closely and invite the more suitable ones to supper.

‘Please don’t, Lily.’ Matilda was instantly alarmed. ‘If someone is meant for me, he’ll turn up all by himself.’

‘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.