Never Look Back (87 page)

‘It isn’t eating too much, is it?’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘No, I vish it vere just that, Mrs Jennings. I fear it is cholera,’ he said in a strong accent.

She gasped, and clutched at the kitchen table for support. She knew only too well that this terrible disease rarely left any survivors. No one knew what caused it, and there was no treatment for it other than a few drops of laudanum and keeping the patient warm.

‘I am so sorry, Mrs Jennings,’ he said, his eyes soft with sympathy. ‘Have you any symptoms?’

She shook her head. ‘No, nor Peter, as yet. We stayed behind when Mr Bigglesworth and Mrs Duncan went to visit some friends. Maybe they caught this there? Have you heard if Mr Bigglesworth is ill too?’

‘No, but I vill investigate that. You must keep Peter veil away from the sick room,’ he said, dabbing at his perspiring face with a handkerchief.

‘What about Tabitha?’ she asked, fear clutching at her insides. ‘She’s been here too.’

Tabitha had been in and out on most days during her holiday, but mostly only for short periods because of her studies.

‘I vill call on the Glovers too, and ask that they keep her at home for the time being,’ he said. ‘I advise you move Mrs Duncan into the room with the children, please soak a sheet in vinegar and hang it over the door. You must take care yourself, Mrs Jennings. Vash your hands after touching the patients, all soiled bedding must be boiled and chamber-pots and other vessels scoured. Until this disease has run its course you and Peter must
not go out, and I vill place a sign on the front door to keep visitors away,’

Matilda suddenly felt very faint as the enormity of what he was saying slowly sank in. If he was right and this was cholera, then within a few days Amelia, Susanna and Cissie could all be dead.

She looked up at this big German for whom the whole city had the greatest respect, saw the deep concern in his eyes and knew he was unlikely to be wrong. She wanted to scream at him, tell him it was unfair, but she controlled herself and asked what she could do to try to save them.

‘Keep them warm, much to drink, brandy too is helpful, I will return with a bottle for you later and some laudanum. Give the children two or three drops, Mrs Duncan can have up to ten. I vill call again to see you.’

‘Come up here, Matty,’ Cissie called out after the doctor had gone. Matilda went up hesitantly, afraid her friend was going to read what was wrong in her eyes. Cissie looked so small in the big bed John had made so lovingly. Her hands were tweaking at the quilt, her face very white. ‘I know what it is,’ she said, her green eyes wide with fear. ‘I saw it on the wagon train. I could kill Arnold for taking us to that place. But I guess he couldn’t know we’d catch something like this.’

‘Of course he couldn’t, and you are all going to be all right,’ Matilda said, moving closer to her friend and taking her hand. ‘I’ll look after you,’

‘If you’ve got any sense you’ll clear off now,’ Cissie said sharply. ‘I’ve never known anyone survive cholera. The only good thing about it is that it’s usually a quick death.’

‘We’ll have no defeatist talk of dying,’ Matilda said fiercely. ‘I won’t have it. And neither am I going away, we can fight this, Cissie, but you have to work at it. First I’m going down to Peter to explain what’s wrong, then I’m coming back up here to move you in with the girls.’

She dragged Tabitha’s narrow bed into the girls’ room and made it up for Cissie, between the two children’s. An hour or two later Susanna was vomiting, just like Amelia, and both girls were crying out with pain.

Matilda barely noticed the sun come up again in the morning, for by then Cissie was vomiting, and between cries of pain the
three demanded water. But as fast as Matilda could get it down them, laced with brandy and laudanum, it was being ejected. She tore up sheets, pillow-cases and towels to use as napkins, but almost as quickly as she tucked a clean one round their bottoms, they were soaked again in that curiously white fluid like rice water.

At daybreak she ran downstairs to empty and scour the vomit bowls, and to put the napkins to boil on the stove, ordering Peter not to touch anything, but to keep the stove going with fuel. She didn’t know which was worse, to see the terror in his still healthy eyes, or the resignation in the ones upstairs.

Dr Shrieber called later that morning to say Arnold was ill too, and he’d moved him into isolation into an outhouse at the boarding-house where he lived. Matilda didn’t ask if anyone was nursing him, she knew only too well no one other than the doctor would dare go near him. It was terrible to think that a man who had been eagerly anticipating his marriage just a couple of days ago would die alone.

‘Did he send any message for Cissie?’ she asked.

The doctor nodded. ‘That he loves her, and is praying for her recovery. He said please do not tell her he is ill too.’

‘What about Tabitha?’ she asked.

‘She is very veil. She wanted to come and help you nurse Mrs Duncan and the children,’ he said with a faint smile. ‘Of course I said she couldn’t. She asked me to tell you she is praying for you all.’

All that day and again through the night Matilda slogged away, soothing, giving drinks, holding vomit bowls, washing and changing her patients, and running up and down stairs during the brief lulls to rinse the boiled napkins and set a newly filled pail to boil. Peter called out to her to ask what he could do, but hanging the washing on the line, chopping new wood for the stove and bringing in fresh water from the pump were the only things she could allow him to do.

But despite all her efforts and prayers, by the morning Amelia had sunk into the final stage of the illness that the doctor had described to her. She just lay there, almost lifeless, her face blue in colour, her eyes sunken, her breathing short and laborious, her skin cold and clammy and with almost no discernible pulse. Matilda knew then that the end would come very soon.

It was so hard to control her feelings. She felt utter rage that her only child was to be taken from her. Guilt that she’d gone away to make money. Such deep remorse that they’d had so little time together. But she had to control them, she couldn’t let her child sense anything more than her love for her in her last hours on earth.

Sitting by the child and whispering endearments, she saw Cissie watching her silently. Her face was drawn with the pain of her cramps, but she didn’t utter a sound, and Matilda knew her friend was grieving with her, for she’d been Amelia’s mother too.

Susanna was equally silent, it looked as if she too was fast approaching the last stage, for her eyes were beginning to sink like Amelia’s. In some strange way, the scene reminded Matilda of her first meeting with Cissie. There were no rats here, it was a warm, pleasant room, but perhaps it was that Cissie appeared to be guarding the two children, just as she had all those little ones in the cellar.

‘John and I will look after her,’ Cissie said, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘I’ll tell Lily and Giles too what a fine job you did with Tabby. We’ll all be looking down on you and watching over you.’

Matilda turned to her friend, wanting to say she was being maudlin, and she would hear no more of it, but Cissie’s expression prevented it. It was the same one she’d had that day in the cellar as she bravely fed baby Pearl at the expense of her own child. Noble, honest, and expecting nothing for herself.

Amelia died some ten minutes later. Her breathing got weaker and weaker and finally dwindled to a halt. Matilda stroked her little blue face, ran her fingers through her tousled curls, and wanted to scream out her pain, but she couldn’t. Susanna was sinking fast too, it wasn’t right to let her know her little playmate had slipped away.

So she silently shut Amelia’s eyes, got up and moved to Susanna’s bed. It was her turn to be comforted.

Susanna hung on for another three hours. Matilda moved her bed closer to her mother’s so she could hold her hand and just sat there, talking to them both as if this was any night when she tucked the children into bed.

She spoke of the cabin, of the animals and the fruit trees, of
bathing in the stream and walks in the woods. She told them that Tabitha would become a doctor, and that Peter would be a fine officer in the cavalry, and that all the happiest moments in her own life had been spent with them.

Cissie reared up as Susanna stopped breathing, and Matilda caught hold of her, afraid she was going to try to get out of bed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered, hugging her friend tightly.

They held each other for a few moments, wordlessly drawing comfort from their mutual loss. They had become friends through Matilda rescuing Cissie and Peter, but it was the two smallest children that had made them like sisters – both born in wagons, so close in age, permanent reminders of the two good men they’d loved and lost. And as the girls had played together, shared everything, both women had found solace in believing that they’d inherited all the talents of their two fathers and had golden futures ahead of them.

‘You shouldn’t be hugging me,’ Cissie said, slumping back down on the bed again. ‘If you catch up with me in heaven, I’ll have you for being so reckless.’

There was a ghost of her old impudent smile, but her face too was turning blue, and her eyes were sinking. ‘Can I ask you to take care of Peter?’ she whispered.

‘You don’t have to ask. Of course I will,’ Matilda replied, struggling to hold her tears back. ‘I’ll make sure he becomes everything you wanted in your son.’

‘Tell him all about me when he’s a man,’ she croaked. ‘Tell him how much I loved him.’

‘What will I do without you, Cissie?’ Matilda asked.

Cissie just looked at her and a tear trickled out from one eye.

‘Go and find other girls like me to save,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll be watching to see you do.’

Matilda lit a lamp as it grew dark and watched as Cissie’s face turned from blue to purple, and her hands became dark and sodden-looking like a washerwoman’s. She opened her eyes only once more and looked at Matilda. ‘Saddest thing is, I never found out what it would be like with Arnold,’ she croaked. ‘Tell him I love him, and I wished I’d let him do it just once.’

Her breathing gave up after that, as if she’d used her last air for that one last ribald remark. Matilda closed her eyes, kissed her forehead, then covered her face with the sheet.

‘I love you, Cissie Duncan,’ she whispered. ‘Go straight to John with a child in each hand. Don’t you worry none about Peter, he’ll be my boy now.’

She kissed the girls and covered them too. She lit a candle by each of their beds, then, taking the lamp, she pulled aside the vinegar-soaked curtain and went downstairs.

It was just on eleven at night, and Peter was curled up with Treacle on his blanket on the kitchen floor, fast asleep. Treacle looked up at her with mournful eyes, and his tail thumped on the floor in greeting.

‘Stay with him for now,’ she whispered to the dog. ‘I’ll see to you both in a minute.’

Taking the last pan of hot water from the stove, she took it outside, stripped off her clothes and scrubbed herself from head to foot with lye soap, until her skin was a deep red, before returning to the kitchen. Tomorrow after the bodies had been taken away she would have to boil her clothes. The bedding and the mattresses would all have to be burnt, the rooms scrubbed out. Yet she still had no way of knowing whether she and Peter might yet get the disease. Wrapping herself in a tablecloth, she went back upstairs to find a clean night-gown, and only then when she was certain she’d taken every conceivable precaution did she go back downstairs to wake Peter.

She sat looking at him sleeping for some time. There were tracks of tear stains on his honey-coloured cheeks, a sprinkling of freckles on his nose, and it brought home to her what he’d been through these last two days, imprisoned down here in solitude, apart from Treacle, listening to sounds of retching and groaning, and seeing countless piles of soiled napkins and sheets boiled up on the stove. He’d been a man, keeping the stove going, hanging out the washing, and looking after himself without complaint, but he was only twelve, still a child, and now she had to wake him and tell him his mother and sisters were dead.

Twice she’d had to give similar terrible news to Tabitha, but that wouldn’t make it any easier to find the right words for Peter. It seemed such a short while ago that John had been killed and she’d comforted him. She remembered how he used to wait in the lane still vainly hoping it was all a mistake and John would come riding home.

How could she possibly speak calmly when she was in so
much pain at her own child’s death? How could she tell him that they would find happiness again soon, when her heart felt it had been wrenched out of her and she wished for her own death?

Just the way he was lying curled up round Treacle suggested that he knew there was going to be no miraculous recovery. It was tempting to let him sleep a little longer, but she was dropping with exhaustion herself after two days and nights without rest, and she couldn’t take the risk that he might wake again in the night to come up and investigate why it was so quiet.

‘Peter,’ she called softly. ‘Peter, wake up!’

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. ‘Are they better?’ he said in little more than a whisper.

Matilda shook her head. ‘No, Peter, they died a little while ago, I’m afraid. I’m so sorry.’

She had vowed to herself she wouldn’t touch him just in case it was possible to pass the disease on that way. But she couldn’t help herself when his face crumpled, she had to go to him and hold him.

‘Your mama said I was to tell you she loved you, and that you must be my boy now,’ she said, holding him tightly against her chest and trying very hard not to cry herself. ‘She was so very brave, Peter, just like she always was, and Susanna and Amelia slipped away without knowing anything.’

Cissie had always been so proud that Peter never cried even as a small boy. She claimed that even when she smacked him he laughed. But he cried now, long and hard, burying his face in Matilda’s breast, sobbing out that he hoped he’d catch the disease too because he didn’t want to live without his mother and sisters.