Never Look Back (44 page)

Giles blanched. ‘There isn’t another doctor in a hundred miles,
and no, I haven’t seen him. But perhaps Mrs Treagar could give me a list of his patients and I can go and find him.’

But Mrs Treagar had no such list, she said her husband hadn’t even mentioned anyone by name that he was calling on. ‘He should be back soon as it’s getting dark,’ she said, picking up their extreme anxiety. ‘I’ll send him over at once.’

They rushed back to the house and into the bedroom. Mrs Van Buren was kneeling up on the bed, with Lily’s two feet pressed against her shoulders. She protested at Giles coming in for it was unheard of for husbands to be present at a birth, but Giles ignored her and took up a position on one side of the bed with Matilda at the other.

The midwife urged Lily to push harder. ‘Keep on pushing with each pain,’ she bellowed at her.

Matilda and Giles urged her too, but after several more agonized efforts Lily let go of the rope in her hands and clutched at her husband’s arm. ‘It’s not that I’m not trying as she seems to think,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘I just can’t make the baby come. Ask her if he’s moved down at all.’

Giles looked to the midwife. ‘Has it?’

Mrs Van Buren shook her head.

Almost all men considered childbirth and the rearing of children as an entirely feminine domain, but not Giles. As a clergyman ministering to both sexes he made it his business to find out about such subjects. He knew that the pushing stage of labour had to be completed within two hours, or the baby would die. Lily might be weak in some areas, but she wanted this baby desperately, and he knew if she said she couldn’t push it out, then she couldn’t.

‘What can we do?’ he asked, trying hard not to panic.

‘The doctor would cut her stomach, but I can’t do that, I don’t know how.’ Mrs Van Buren’s voice rose, showing she too was frightened. ‘But I could try using the instruments.’

Giles blanched. He knew she meant forceps, and he knew too that these often caused brain damage to the infant. But he moved closer to the woman, bending to whisper, ‘Is the baby still alive?’

She put a metal trumpet to Lily’s belly and listened. ‘Yes. I can hear his heart,’ she said, but just the way she said it suggested it was fading.

‘Then get him out however you can,’ Giles said in a low, urgent tone. ‘What do you need? I’ll get it.’

If it hadn’t been for the need to hold and comfort Lily, Matilda might have run from the room. She saw the ugly tong-like tool the midwife got from her bag, and the sharp knife needed to cut Lily’s flesh, and her stomach heaved. It was Giles who insisted on washing them in hot water, and he who tried to help as the midwife began to use them, Matilda held on to Lily’s two hands and urged her to hang on.

Dr Treagar arrived just as Mrs Van Buren had clamped the forceps around the baby’s head. From the message he’d got from his wife he must have anticipated what might be needed, because he let himself in, shouted out that he was here and that he was just washing his hands.

The doctor was a small man of nearly sixty, noted for his jovial nature and being a great raconteur, but as he came into the bedroom with his sleeves rolled up above his elbows and an apron over his clothes, he wasted no time on pleasantries and ordered both Giles and Matilda out, telling them to boil more water and get more clean linen. The last thing Matilda saw as she left the room was his grim expression as he took the tongs from the midwife’s hands.

Lily cried out only once more, then it went strangely quiet. Giles was praying aloud as he filled kettles and pans, his hands were shaking and his face as white as the clean linen Matilda got from the closet.

The bedroom door opened later and Mrs Van Buren came out. Her apron was soaked in blood and she almost stumbled as she made her way to the stove to get water. Giles lifted the pan for her. ‘What news?’ he asked.

She avoided his eyes. ‘We got the baby out,’ she whispered. ‘Doctor is just attending to your wife.’

Giles rushed into the bedroom and Matilda tried to follow, but her path was blocked by the midwife. Yet in the second before the door was shut in her face she saw enough to know just how bad things were. The baby had been placed unwrapped on the wash-stand, blue and lifeless. The whole bed was awash with blood, Lily unconscious.

No night had ever seemed so long and desolate. Mrs Van Buren slunk out an hour or so later, silently handing Matilda an
armful of bloody linen to put to soak, clearly too distraught even to attempt any kind of explanation. Giles stayed in the bedroom with the doctor.

Owls hooted outside, the wind flapped at the curtains, the wood in the stove spluttered and crackled, but though those were reassuring, normal sounds for the middle of the night, the silence from the bedroom was ominous.

Now and then she would hear the doctor speak in a low voice, and a rustle of covers as if he was checking Lily’s progress, then perhaps one or two words, equally low, from Giles, then silence again.

In her terror Matilda turned to prayer, apologizing to God for her lack of faith in Him in the past, but promising that if He spared Lily she would be his servant for ever. ‘Take me if you just want another soul,’ she begged. ‘I’m nothing, of no importance to anyone. But please spare Lily.’

It was five in the morning, dawn just breaking when Giles opened the bedroom door and beckoned her to come in. Right away Matilda knew her prayers had been futile, for his face had no light in it, his eyes dark pools of grief.

‘Lily has something to say to you,’ he whispered.

The baby was covered now, the blood cleaned up, and the bedlinen as spotless as Lily always insisted on, and although the room was far removed from the one in Finders Court, it held the same pall of approaching death that she remembered when her own mother died.

Lily opened her eyes and lifted one hand weakly as Matilda approached the bed to take hers. ‘Are you still my friend?’ she asked, her voice faint and croaky.

‘How can you ask? Of course I am,’ Matilda replied.

‘Then can I ask you to promise to take care of Tabitha and Giles for me?’ she said, her grey eyes searching Matilda’s face for hesitation.

‘I promise,’ Matilda agreed, her eyes filling with tears. ‘But you aren’t going anywhere. We’ll make you better.’

‘No, Matty,’ Lily whispered. ‘This is the end for me. Kiss Tabitha goodbye for me and try to explain so she’ll understand. You’ve been the best of friends to me. I love you.’

‘I love you too,’ Matilda said, but Lily’s eyes closed again before she could say anything more.

Matilda turned as she went to the door, taking one last look at Lily. She couldn’t believe it had come to this. Why Lily, who would have made such a perfect mother to that tiny body on the wash-stand?

It was another hour before Matilda heard Giles sobbing, and the doctor came out into the kitchen. He was grey with exhaustion, his narrow shoulders stooped. ‘I’m so very sorry, Miss Jennings, but she’s gone,’ he said. His brown eyes were bleak, the jovial look he was always noted for wiped out by deep sorrow. ‘Mrs Milson was such a fine woman. If only I’d got home sooner, maybe then I could have saved her and the baby with a Caesarean, but I was delivering another infant.’

Matilda could only stare at him blankly, too devastated to speak.

Dr Treagar looked back towards the bedroom at the sound of Giles’s sobs. ‘He’s going to need a great deal of support from all of us for a while. Try and get him to go to bed now. I’ll see to getting someone around later on this morning to help with the laying out.’

He left then, the door slamming behind him, and Matilda leaned her head on the table and sobbed. She wanted to keen like the Italian women did when someone died, to wake up the whole town and make them share in her and Giles’s grief. Yet she couldn’t do that, Lily was a private person and she would want to go quietly in death even as she had in life, a lady to the last.

She got up, wiped her eyes and went into the bedroom. Giles was kneeling on the floor still holding one of Lily’s hands. Her small face was at peace now, not a trace of the long and terrible ordeal showing on it. ‘I’m so sorry,’ Matilda whispered, laying one hand on Giles’s shoulder.

He turned on his knees and putting his arms around her waist, sobbed into her middle. Matilda stroked his hair and kept stroking it until his sobs abated.

‘You must go to bed,’ she said gently. ‘Come on, let me help you into Tabby’s room.’

He looked up at her, his tear-filled, red-rimmed eyes so pitiful. ‘What are we going to do without her, Matty?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know, Giles,’ she said truthfully.

*

Matilda washed and laid out both the baby and Lily herself. It was agonizing to find the little boy was every bit as big and sturdy-looking as Lily had always claimed he would be, and as she tenderly dressed him in the embroidered night-gown and bonnet his mother had made so lovingly for him, she felt her heart was breaking.

She dressed Lily in a white night-gown, brushed her hair and arranged it carefully around her shoulders, and tucked the baby into her arms. When she lit candles around the bed, in the soft golden light they looked as if they’d merely fallen asleep together.

Giles brought Tabitha home later after breaking the news to her at her friend’s home. She threw herself into Matilda’s arms and begged to be told it wasn’t true.

‘It can’t be,’ she said, her dark brown eyes wide with disbelief. ‘Mama told me that when I got back I could hold the baby.’

Matilda wondered then how Giles could possibly keep his faith in a God that robbed him of his wife and left a child motherless and bewildered. Or how she could hold what was left of this family together and find the words to comfort them.

She took Tabitha into her own bed that night and held the sobbing child in her arms until she fell asleep with exhaustion. Yet Matilda found no such relief, for the silence of the night only brought back vivid images of Lily in agony and the knowledge that the happy life they’d all shared was now shattered.

As there was no other clergyman available, Giles had to officiate at the funeral himself. He said that it would help him, that as minister he could detach himself from his private grief, but for much of the service his quavering voice proved this wasn’t so.

When he uttered the final words at the graveside, and tossed the first handful of soil down on to the coffin, his carefully controlled calm broke, and he roared out his pain like an angry animal. It was Solomon the blacksmith, ironically the first man Giles had spoken to when they arrived here two years ago, who led him away and comforted him.

Mrs Homberger had laid on refreshments back at the house for many of the people who came to pay their last respects had come a great distance. Matilda managed to hold her emotions in check long enough to make sure they had food and drink, but her mind was with Giles sitting out on the porch with Tabitha
on his lap. Everyone today had offered advice, along with their heart-felt condolences, and although most of them had been through tragedy too, Matilda knew Giles was too wrapped in his own pain to be aware of what they’d said.

A whole month passed slowly with the grief hanging in the air, dark and malevolent. Matilda busied herself with the usual household chores, Tabitha went back to school and on the face of it appeared to be accepting her loss. But Giles was neither accepting nor coping. He hardly went out of the house, he wouldn’t eat, and late at night Matilda often heard him crying and pacing the floor. Mostly he was silent, refusing even to talk about what had happened. He would stay slumped in a chair by the stove, his eyes blank and cold.

One evening after Tabitha had gone to bed, Matilda gently suggested he must try to prepare a sermon for the next Sunday’s service. His place had been temporarily taken at the church by another minister from St Joseph, a small town further north on the river, but he was anxious to return to his own parish.

‘How can I even walk through the church doors again?’ Giles shouted at her. ‘I don’t believe in God any more.’

‘That’s not true,’ she retorted. ‘You’ve been to the church several times and I’ve heard you praying.’

‘I have nothing in my heart but anger,’ he snapped at her. ‘You once said that you couldn’t believe in Him because he takes the good and lets the wicked flourish. I agree with you now. That woman Dr Treagar was helping the night Lily died has twelve children already and she’s neglected every one of them. So why not take her instead of Lily? Those other children would be better off away from her.’

Matilda was appalled to hear him say such a thing. ‘You don’t really mean that, Giles,’ she said. ‘You’d have been distraught if you knew another woman had died because the doctor was with Lily.’

‘I wouldn’t, I’d have rejoiced, and I’d gladly sell my soul to the Devil right now if I could have Lily back,’ he said.

‘Giles!’ she exclaimed in horror. ‘It sounds to me as if the Devil has already got you.’

‘I know you loved Lily,’ he said, looking at her sharply. ‘So don’t you wish someone else had died instead of her?’

Matilda put her hands on her hips and scowled at him. ‘Who would I choose? Someone we know? Or would it be a poor slave, a drunken wretch in New York, a Mexican, an Indian because there isn’t much value in their lives? There was a time when you cared about every sad and unfortunate soul as much as your own family. Has all that gone?’

‘Yes, it has, from now on they can all go to the Devil too,’ he retorted.

At this Matilda burst into tears.

‘Why cry?’ he said scornfully.

‘Because it sounds as if I’ve lost the Giles I admired,’ she sobbed, covering her face with her hands. ‘That’s bad enough, but how would Lily feel if she knew her death had robbed the world of a man who always fought for right, who embraced the whole world with his brotherly love?’

There was silence and after a few moments Matilda peeped through her fingers to see he was crying too, silent tears streaming down his face. ‘Oh Giles,’ she said, getting up from her chair and running over to him. ‘What is going to become of us?’

Giles locked his arms around her middle, leaned his head against her breasts and they cried together. All this time Matilda had suppressed her own grief, but bent over him, her face resting on his dark curls, his arms tightly round her, she let it loose, sobbing until the well of tears ran dry.