Never Look Back (67 page)

Her laugh was just a tinkle at first, but it gradually grew into a loud guffaw which she couldn’t stop. She rolled on the ground, holding her sides, and laughed until she began to cry.

‘She’s gone off her head. She swore at me, and hit me,’ she heard Cissie exclaim. ‘What’s up with her, Sid?’

‘I dunno,’ he replied. ‘But at least she’s got you speaking again, Cis. I reckon we’d better get her inside.’

Matilda veered between laughter and tears constantly as the pair of them took her in, sat her down and kept peering anxiously at her face. It was some time before she was able to voice what she was thinking.

‘I shouldn’t have sworn at you, Cissie,’ she said eventually. ‘And it was terrible that I hit you. I’m sorry for that. But at least
I seem to have stuck an arrow up your backside. It’s the first time you’ve shown the old Cissie is still at home.’

It was Sidney who laughed then, long and hard, as he made a pot of coffee.

Cissie looked round at the sleeping children and put a finger to her lips. ‘You’ll wake them, Sid. Stop laughing and tell me what’s so funny.’

That night Matilda was too exhausted to believe Cissie had really snapped out of it. When she woke the next morning to the sound of the stove being raked, and opened one eye to see it was Cissie in her night-gown, with a shawl around her shoulders, she could hardly believe her eyes.

She crept out of bed, for she didn’t want to wake the children yet, and slid her arm around Cissie. ‘How do you feel today?’ she asked.

‘Confused,’ Cissie said with a sigh, and laid her head on Matilda’s shoulder. ‘I know John is dead and buried. But I don’t understand how we came to be fighting. What was it about?’

‘Me losing patience,’ Matilda said. ‘Sit down and I’ll explain.’

Cissie smiled weakly as Matilda told her what had sparked off their fight. But as she went on to speak of the frustration she had felt, Cissie looked bewildered. ‘You mean I’ve been crazy? Not even looking after the children?’

Matilda made light of it. ‘You were shocked, you couldn’t help it, Cissie. Lily was like it for a time after she lost her baby. I was just as cruel to her too.’

‘It’s all kind of blank,’ Cissie whispered. ‘I remember Sidney and Bill Wilder coming back with John on the cart. I washed him and laid him out myself. I remember the minister coming out here too, and the funeral service at the church. But I can’t remember coming home afterwards, or anything else. When did you come back, then?’

Matilda told her a little about that. ‘None of that matters now,’ she said gently. ‘I guess you’ve been in a kind of sleep. But you’ve woken up now, and the children are going to be so very pleased.’

It wasn’t an instant recovery, Cissie was confused, sometimes weepy, sometimes silent, now and again talking so much Matilda
wished she’d shut up. But she gradually began picking up the pieces of her life, she cuddled the children, made bread, swept the cabin, and hoed down the weeds between the rows of vegetables.

Sometimes she wanted to talk about John all the time, at others she couldn’t bear to speak his name. She told Matilda one day that she felt she couldn’t live without him, the next she retracted that and said she had to for her children’s sake.

The day she finally asked about the sawmill, Matilda knew she really was recovering. At last she was able to speak about the orders for San Francisco, and her belief they should try to fill as many of them as possible.

‘But how can we?’ Cissie said, her green eyes wide with surprise and shock.

‘I’ll tell you,’ Matilda replied and launched into the plan she’d been working on in the last week.

Sidney had told her that several men had made inquiries about whether the sawmill would be coming up for sale. Clearly they thought they could get it at a very low price because they knew Cissie couldn’t run it herself.

‘But if we can hire someone to run it for you, and get those orders filled, it will be worth so much more,’ Matilda said.

Cissie looked doubtful. ‘Why not just sell it now? If you offered the buyer those orders they’d be bound to give me more money, and it would save us a lot of trouble.’

‘But John stood to make over four thousand dollars’ profit from them,’ Matilda replied. ‘That’s after deducting all the shipping costs and my commission too. I doubt if you’d even get a buyer to pay one thousand for the business, even with these orders, because they’d be scared they wouldn’t get paid for the timber.’

‘Well, we might not get paid either,’ Cissie said doubtfully.

‘Oh yes we will,’ Matilda assured her. ‘Leave that to me.’

‘But how am I going to pay a man to run it?’ Cissie asked. ‘I don’t know how much money John had in the bank, but it can’t be more than a couple of hundred dollars. Besides, one man couldn’t do the job alone.’

Matilda had already thought of this. ‘We go to the bank and tell them everything, then we’ll ask to borrow the money.’

‘No one lends money to women,’ Cissie said despondently.

Matilda grinned. ‘They will when they’ve heard me out!’

Jacob Weinburg, owner of Oregon City Bank, had anticipated that Mrs Duncan would call on him before long to discuss her late husband’s business affairs. But he hadn’t expected her to come accompanied by Mrs Jennings, who not only claimed to be Duncan’s agent, but had drawn up a plan to keep the business going.

Weinburg held the opinion that women had no place in business, but almost as soon as Mrs Jennings began speaking he had to concede that she was not only the most attractive woman he’d seen since he left Boston some years earlier, but remarkably intelligent, and very resourceful.

‘You say you went to San Francisco and placed all these orders yourself?’ he said, leafing through the order book she’d handed to him.

‘Of course,’ she said, looking him straight in the eye. ‘I’ve already told you, Mr Weinburg, I was acting as an agent for Mr Duncan. I was returning with these orders when he was killed, and I believe I have a duty to him and Mrs Duncan, to see them filled, delivered, and payment collected.’

Weinburg had been in banking all his life, just like his father before him. He was fifty-five, slightly built, with a sallow complexion and a rather prominent nose, and he knew that but for his wealth and position he might never have found a wife.

Yet as he looked at Mrs Jennings, and remembered he’d heard she too was a widow like her friend, and had come alone with her children to Oregon, he couldn’t help but wonder why such a lovely lady hadn’t remarried. She could surely have the pick of any man in the territory. Her eyes were the clearest blue he’d ever seen, and although much of her hair was tucked beneath her bonnet, it was pure blonde and very pretty.

He dragged his eyes away from her to look at Mrs Duncan. He’d met her on two or three occasions before, the last, sadly, at her husband’s funeral. She too was a pretty woman; and it saddened him to see how thin and gaunt she looked now. He had very much admired John Duncan, indeed he had expected the enterprising man to rise to become one of Oregon City’s leading citizens in a few years. Perhaps he shouldn’t dismiss his widow and her friend without a fair hearing.

Matilda sensed that this ugly little banker was taken by her looks rather than by what she’d said so far, but as she now had his attention, she launched first into how she’d taken the boat to San Francisco with the sole intention of making money, and then on to her plan to fill the orders.

‘If Mrs Duncan can offer high enough wages, we can get the orders shipped in time,’ she said firmly. ‘All we want from you is to meet that wages bill until I return from California with the money.’

As she expected, he brought up the possibility of people refusing to pay.

Matilda leaned forward on his desk and looked hard at him. ‘That town is absolutely desperate for every single commodity you can think of,’ she said. ‘Timber and other building materials are at the top of the list. If the men don’t collect the timber and pay me at the wharf, I shall get it auctioned then and there.’

She gave him a brief but vivid description of the auctions on the waterfront, and how men waited for ships to come in, ready to buy the entire cargo.

‘The real fortunes in that town aren’t made from mining gold,’ she said. ‘This order,’ she said, pulling out the one from Henry, ‘is from Alderman Slocum who is planning to build a new wharf. I lodged with him and his wife while I was there, and I can tell you, Mr Weinburg, men who are intent on building wharves, gambling halls and hotels are not going to pass up the chance of someone else snapping up the timber they ordered.’

Moving on then, she told him it was their plan to hire a man, offering him eighty dollars a week on the understanding he got the timber felled, sawn and delivered to the ship by 10 September. To make sure he did this they would offer him a bonus of 300 dollars on completion. She said that whoever took up the offer would have to take on men to help and pay them from his money.

Weinburg nodded. ‘That is an extremely good offer for anyone,’ he said. ‘But you couldn’t keep up those kinds of wages after this shipment is completed. How were you intending to manage the sawmill then?’

‘I haven’t decided about the future yet,’ Cissie said. Throughout all this she had remained silent, knowing Matilda could explain it far better than her. ‘We may offer it for sale, the
price would depend on the size of the orders Mrs Jennings brings back with her.’

‘So you were intending to get more?’ he exclaimed.

‘Of course,’ Matilda said. ‘And look around for any other business opportunity while I am there. We are both widows, Mr Weinburg, with small children dependent on us. We didn’t make that long hazardous journey here to Oregon to just hang up our sun-bonnets and grow a few vegetables.’

Jacob Weinburg was rarely amused by his customers, but Mrs Jennings made him want not only to laugh, but applaud her. She would go far, she had too much determination to fail.

He looked towards Cissie, addressing his remarks to her. ‘Well, Mrs Duncan, go ahead and hire your man. Your husband left a balance in his account of four hundred and twenty-three dollars, and when that is used up I will continue to let you make drawings each week until the shipment is made and the costs met. I shall need to draw up a document to this end. Perhaps you can come in again next week to sign it.’

Cissie and Matilda looked at each other and smiled.

‘Thank you so much, Mr Weinburg,’ Cissie said, her face suddenly flushed and animated.

‘It was a pleasure doing business with you,’ Matilda said, reaching out to shake his hand. ‘I hope we can do more in the future.’

Before leaving town, Matilda went into the office of the
Oregon Spectator
and placed an advertisement for a man experienced with timber. As they drove the cart home later, Cissie began chattering just the way she used to. ‘Wasn’t Weinburg ugly!’ she exclaimed. ‘Imagine having to share a bed with him!’

‘I’d rather not,’ Matilda said.

‘Did you notice he had hairs coming out of his ears?’ Cissie went on. ‘And his teeth were all brown – ugh.’

‘I kept looking at his hands, they were so white and smooth. Good job I kept my gloves on, he probably wouldn’t have wanted to shake my hand if he’d seen them.’ Matilda laughed. ‘But you must be getting better if you imagine sharing a bed with someone.’

‘That’s what I miss most,’ Cissie said sadly. ‘What do you miss most about Giles?’

Matilda thought for a moment. ‘His smile,’ she said. ‘Even
when I first went to work for him and Lily, I liked that most. His mouth used to kind of tremble slightly, his eyes would twinkle, then it spread right across his face. It always made me smile too.’

‘You don’t miss the you-know-what then?’

Matilda giggled. ‘We only did it twice, Cissie. Can you miss something you did so little of?’

‘We didn’t do it so much after Susanna,’ Cissie said thoughtfully. ‘We was scared to because we didn’t want another baby before we’d got on our feet, and anyway we were always too tired. I think the last time was that Sunday when he told me about you going to San Francisco.’

‘I wished I’d never gone, not when Sidney met me at Portland and told me he was dead,’ Matilda said.

‘It would have happened even if you’d been here,’ Cissie sighed. ‘John really liked you, Matty. He said he really missed you one night and I got jealous. Wasn’t that silly, because I missed you too.’

‘Not really.’ Matilda reached out and took her friend’s hand to squeeze it. ‘If I’d been living with Giles and you came to live there too, I expect I’d have got fed up sometimes. I think you were really remarkable that you took me in, and cared for my children.’

‘I love them as if they were mine, they never annoy me. But it’s going to be hard when you have to go back to San Francisco,’ Cissie said with a sigh. ‘Still, maybe it will be good for both of us. We can’t cling together for ever, can we?’

‘Maybe we can’t cling, but we’ll be friends for ever,’ Matilda said, feeling a lump come up in her throat. ‘I haven’t even told you all about San Francisco yet, maybe if you decide to sell the sawmill we could all move there. After the children are in bed tonight I’ll tell you all about it.’

The night sky was bright with stars, the warm breeze was scented with pine, and the moon hung over the huge oak tree like a lantern, lighting up the tinkling brook, when Matilda, Cissie and Sidney moved out on to the porch later that evening. From behind the cabin an owl hooted, everything was so peaceful and so very different to San Francisco, yet it was the perfect time and place for Matilda to tell them about it.

Their eyes widened as she described the scene on the
waterfront when she first arrived, they gasped about the casinos, grimaced at the canvas restaurants with bunks for a dollar a night, and the filth in the streets. But as she warmed up she found her stories about the dinner parties became very funny, and her spirited impersonation of the auctioneers, the rough drunken miners, and the prostitutes in the streets made them alternately gasp with amazement and roar with laughter.

It all seemed so long ago now, she could hardly remember the fear she’d felt on her arrival at the port, or that humiliating embarrassment at the Slocums’ dinner parties, only the good memories were really clear. By sharing it all with her friends, hearing their laughter and seeing their shining eyes, she felt she’d given them something to think on other than John and all the shattered dreams lying around them.