Perhaps Tomorrow

by Jean Fullerton

  A vacant look spread over Amos’ face. With his hand outstretched and his heart thumping in his chest, Nathaniel took another step forward.

  ‘Give me the gun, Amos.’

  Amos raised the pistol. ‘Give my regards to Marjorie.’

  A shot cracked though the air and the baby inside Mattie jumped. A picture of Brian’s open coffin sitting on the table in the front parlour burst into Mattie’s mind, but instead of Brian lying in his best suit with his hands folded across his chest, it was Nathaniel.

  ‘No!’ she screamed.

  Ignoring the band of pain gripping her stomach again, she stumbled into the yard. The sharp tarry smell of a thousand tonnes of coal filled her nostrils and she choked on the fine dust that never quite settled.

  She stared into the two-acre yard with its mountains of coal rising all around them. She screwed up her eyes to see something, anything, in the dense blackness, but the fog and now the jagged nuggets of coal absorbed what little light there was, making the yard’s interior blacker than the street.

  Two other beat officers ran in and joined their colleagues and six beams of light frantically criss-crossed one and other. Mattie’s eyes darted back and forth as her panicked heart nearly burst through her chest. One beam landed on a ghostly movement and the other beams rapidly honed in on two men scrambling over the coal piles.

  ‘Blessed be sweet Mary,’ she sobbed, as she recognised Nathaniel’s tall figure silhouetted. A few yards in front of him, Amos Stebbins stumbled and lurched towards the peak but something seemed to be dragging him back. Buster barked and Mattie realised that the dog, too, was on Amos’ heels.

  Another belt of pain tightened around Mattie’s middle and she felt water spurt down the inside of her thigh. With some difficulty she held onto her rising fear. Even if it were the baby were coming, she’d taken six hours to birth Brian and surely must have a few hours yet to go . . . The contraction eased and she looked back at Nathaniel, still scaling after Amos with Buster hanging on with all his might. Nathaniel surged forward but the coal shifted under him and he slid down, flaying his arms to keep upright. Amos saw his advantage and renewed his push to the top.

  The police ran forward.

  ‘Come down,’ one of them shouted, his voice echoing around the black chasm.

  Amos redoubled his efforts but Nathaniel found his footing and closed the gap to just over an arm’s reach. Amos stumbled and Nathaniel threw himself onto him, dragging him down into the razor-sharp coal. The police were now climbing up the mound towards the two men. A low rumble began to shake the ground and large coal chucks started cascading down the heaps.

  ‘Stop!’ screamed Mattie.

  The rumble grew louder and two of the policemen fell sideways while their fellow officers struggled to stay upright. A sound like a thousand fingers clawing at a blackboard tore across the open space as the crest of the coal pile that Nathaniel and Amos were fighting on suddenly dipped. An ear-filling roar drowned out Mattie’s scream as a hundred tonnes of coal avalanched downwards.

  The officers jumped off in time as did Buster, but Mattie stared in stark horror as the coal surrounded, then engulfed, Nathaniel and Amos.

  ‘Nathaniel!’ she screamed, stumbling onto the dislodged coal.

  The police officers pulled her off. ‘Get back, madam. We’ll never find him under that lot,’ he spluttered unable to take in a full breath due to the billow of coal dust pluming up around them.

  ‘We have to,’ Mattie shouted, breaking free to tear at the coal.

  The police exchanged glances, then one of them caught her again while the others started digging as if their own lives depended on it.

  Another contraction tore through her body and she put her hands on her hardened stomach. Dear God! Would she deliver Nathaniel’s baby in the midst of Morris’s coal yard as they dragged his lifeless body to the surface? Buster darted over to her and ran around her skirts. She seized his collar.

  ‘Buster!’ she commanded. ‘Where’s Nathaniel?’

  Buster circled around her and then clambered over the coal with his nose close to the jagged edges. He worked his way back and forth and then shot off to the left. Stopping halfway up he began barking and scratching at the surface.

  ‘Over here!’ bellowed an officer.

  Grit scratched Nathaniel’s eyes as he tried to open them. He could see nothing. It was as if he were blind. He tried to cough but couldn’t expand his chest because of the weight of the coal pressing down on him. He strained to shift himself upwards but failed. He was buried alive.

  Frantically, he tried again to kick and claw his way out but the coal settled closer around him. Sweat sprang out on his forehead and between his shoulder blades and ran down the length of his spine in an icy stream. Suddenly the air was gone and his lungs were burning desperate for breath. Gritting his teeth until his jaw cracked, Nathaniel focused on Mattie, heavy with his child. Forcing himself to think methodically, he moved his fingers and checked that he could feel the rough coal on the tips of each one. Good. He tensed the muscle in his legs and arms. Pain screamed all over his body and he’d probably be the colour of a over-ripe plum from head to foot tomorrow, but nothing to indicate a broken bone anywhere. Better. Now to get myself out of here!

  He gripped a lump of coal near to his right hand and tried again to shift it aside. It clattered through the gaps between the nuggets. He grasped another and did the same. Yanking his left leg up a fraction he managed to push himself forward. The coal around him shifted slightly and he managed to slide to the right. Stretching his hand again he grasped at the coal but his fingers closed around a hand.

  Stebbins.

  Nathaniel crushed it but the well-manicured fingers remained flaccid. Stretching his arm until his shoulder ached, Nathaniel searched the wrist for a pulse but there was nothing.

  He let go.

  Pictures of Marjorie, Lily and Rose rolled across his mind, followed by Judge Tindel’s hard-bitten face, then the prisoners’ deck of the Comet, and the barracks in Botany Bay, the vicar’s letter . . . and then his passage back to England to take revenge on the man who had caused it all. The man who now lay dead an arm’s reach away. Amos Stebbins!

  It was over.

  In the darkness, he saw Mattie’s beautiful face and laughing eyes. Yes, the life that Amos Stebbins had forced him to live for the past seven years was over, but his new life with Mattie and their child had only just begun. When he got out of this choking hell, he vowed to live it to the full.

  The coal shifted around him and panic threatened to rise up and overwhelm him again. Hold steady, man. Hold Steady! Nathaniel told himself. You thought you were dead when the gun went off but Buster leapt at Stebbins to save you. Get a bloody grip now!

  Buster! Nathaniel forced spit into his mouth, took as good a breath as he could manage and let out a shrill whistle.

  Mattie cradled her rock-hard stomach with her hands as the officers grunted and cursed, struggling to heave Nathaniel to the surface. For a brief moment second Mattie thought the worst had happened – again – then Nathaniel moved, and found his footing on the uneven surface. Joy and relief swept through her.

  He was alive!

  A spasm of coughing overtook him, then he straightened up and tried again to open his eyes. Two unnaturally white slivers set off his blackened face. He closed them, coughed again then stumbled with his hands outstretched, towards her.

  Mattie rushed towards him and took his face between her hands. ‘When I heard the shot—’ She broke down, crying uncontrollably.

  ‘Shhh,’ he said, holding her to him.

  Nathaniel whistled to Buster, who dashed over, his tail wagging his hind quarters as he ran.

  ‘It was this fellow saved me,’ he said, his mouth cutting a gleaming crescent across his black face as he fussed over the dog. Buster fussed around their legs letting out little yelps.

  One of the policemen had found a broad spade and was digging deep into the coal. She shuddered and burie
d her head into Nathaniel’s chest, giving silent thanks that it wasn’t him the officers were still searching for. The officers slowly pulled Amos’s body to the surface. They hoisted him up and his head fell to one side. When they reached the bottom they lowered him to the floor and set his head square. Amos’s face was hardly recognisable. The coal had flattened his nose and both eyes were abnormally puffy, with a trickle of blood slowly leaking from the corner of the right one. His jaw sat at an awkward angle, his mouth gaped showing a splash of pink.

  Nathaniel stepped in front and blocked her view. ‘Don’t look, Mattie,’ he said, gathering her to him. ‘It’s over. Let’s go home.’

  ‘Yes, let—’

  A contraction gripped her with such intensity that she cried out and doubled over. ‘Mattie!’ Nathaniel cried.

  Her knees buckled. Time seemed to slow as Nathaniel’s strong arms caught her and scooped her up. Her head fell into the crook of his neck and stayed there as he bellowed orders she couldn’t quite understand until the blackness swallowed her.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Nathaniel shook the water from his hands, picked up the towel from the draining board beside him and dried the back of his neck. He turned and collected the clean shirt Emma had fetched for him before she disappeared upstairs to tend to Mattie.

  ‘You look a right mess,’ Patrick said.

  ‘I know,’ he said, running his hands tentatively over his face and feeling the criss-cross of fine cuts that covered his cheeks, forehead and chin. ‘The carbolic stung like buggery and I doubt I’ll be able to shave for a week. And my eye . . .’ He tried to stretch his left eye open a little but it remained closed. ‘But it could have been worse,’ he said, briefly thinking of Stebbins lying on a cold slab in the morgue.

  ‘You’ll mend,’ Patrick replied, offering him a mug of beer. ‘Get that down you.’

  Nathaniel thirstily drank half then put the mug on the table. He glanced up at the ceiling and thought of Mattie in the room above; he wished he could be there with her.

  He’d practically ripped the door off Morris’s office to provide a makeshift stretcher for her and although he hurt in places he never knew he had, he and three of the policemen carried her the half mile back to Maguire’s. The fourth officer ran to Patrick’s house to summon Sarah, leaving the remaining policeman to tend to the night watchman.

  By the time her mother and Patrick arrived in their commandeered hansom, Mattie was battling through wave after wave of contractions with very little space in between. Sarah had quizzed Mattie and pronounced confidently that everything was as it should be. The men were then promptly shooed away.

  While Patrick fetched the beer, Nathaniel had taken three buckets of water from the yard pump and stripped off behind the stable to wash himself down. Having cleaned the worst of it off, he came into the house and washed himself again with soap and a brush to get the dust from his ears and nails. That was an hour ago, in fact, the longest hour he’d ever lived through.

  ‘So Buster brought Stebbins down,’ Patrick patted the dog standing sentry by the hall door, his ears alert to each sound from the floor above.

  ‘Thank God. He pounced on Stebbins just before he pulled the trigger,’ Nathaniel said.

  Patrick whistled through his teeth. ‘Close!’

  ‘Very,’ Nathaniel replied, thinking of the tear in the shoulder of his coat where the bullet scored through.

  There was a flurry of activity upstairs. Footsteps scurried across the floorboards.

  What if the shock of the last few hours had brought on the baby before it was ready and the child came feet first or was wedged across. Women could struggle for days to birth awkward infants and then died of childbed fever. What if . . . what if . . ..

  ‘Nathaniel!’

  He looked back at his brother-in-law.

  ‘Will you calm yourself, man?’ Patrick said.

  ‘Mattie ran all the way to the yard, thought I’d been shot and she saw me buried alive. If that weren’t enough to bring on the babe, she saw Stebbins, who looked like a piece of beaten meat when they dragged him out.’ Guilt and fear gripped at his vitals. ‘I should have taken her away sooner.’

  Something that could have been a cry sounded above. Buster sprang to his feet and whined at the hall door. Nathaniel tucked his shirt in, dashed across the room and strode to the bottom of the stairs with Buster and Patrick at his heels. Both men and the dog stood motionless in the passageway.

  Suddenly a baby’s cry cut through the silence. Nathaniel grasped the balustrade and mounted the stairs two at a time.

  ‘There you go, me darling, here’s your new girly,’ Sarah said, as she handed Mattie her new daughter wrapped in a clean towel.

  The baby yawned and hiccupped, and love and gratitude welled up in Mattie.

  ‘Oh, Mattie, she’s so beautiful,’ Emma said, placing a pillow behind her.

  ‘You have the truth of it there,’ Sarah replied. ‘God love her and the saints preserve her.’ She crossed herself three times, then bent forward and pressed her lips on Mattie’s forehead. ‘Well done,’ she said, softly. ‘Now you and the wee’un get yourself acquainted. Me and Emma’ll set things right so I can call Nathaniel.’

  ‘Call him now,’ Mattie said, knowing that he would have been pacing the floor below ever since her mother shoved him out the door.

  ‘As soon as you’ve been sponged clean and have a new sheet under you,’ her mother replied, giving her the do-as-your-mam-says look.

  ‘Call him now please, Mam,’ Mattie pleaded.

  ‘As soon as—’

  But the door burst open and Nathaniel crashed into the room. There wasn’t more than an inch of his face that wasn’t etched with thin, bloody cuts. His top lip and right cheek had a deeper cut and his left eye was all but closed by a blood blister. But to Mattie’s mind, as he stood with love and relief blazing forth from him, he’d never looked so good.

  He stood motionless for a heartbeat, then crossed the room and sat on the bed beside her. ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. A bit weary perhaps after pushing this young lady into the world.’ She tilted their daughter so he could see her better. ‘But I’m grand.’

  Nathaniel’s gaze moved to their sleeping daughter. He reached out a finger, moved the towel aside and gazed down at the baby in Mattie’s arms.

  Sarah came over and stood at the other side of the bed. ‘We’ve not cleared away yet,’ she said, her face a picture of disapproval.

  Nathaniel smiled up at his mother-in-law. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Nolan, but I heard the cry and I just couldn’t wait.’

  ‘Well, why wouldn’t you?’ Sarah looked at Mattie and winked. ‘Your father never came nearer than the pub around the corner when I had you but I suppose we’ll just have to get used to these new ways won’t we, Emma?’

  ‘Indeed we will, it be the modern age, Sarah, and we ’ave to adapt to it,’ Emma replied, smoothing a lock of Nathaniel’s hair from his forehead as she must have done a hundred time when he was a boy.

  Nathaniel slid his little finger into his daughter’s hand. Her tiny little fingers closed around his and tears sprang into his eyes.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ he said, studying the sleeping baby. ‘And all that black hair.’

  ‘Just like yours,’ Mattie said, looking up into his face. ‘I think she has your eyes, too.’

  ‘Has she?’

  Mattie laughed and Nathaniel gathered her and their daughter into his embrace. He lowered his lips on hers and gave her a gentle kiss.

  ‘I love you,’ he whispered.

  ‘And I you,’ she replied. ‘I thought we might call her Elizabeth, after your mother.’

  ‘Yes, I’d like that.’ He stretched out his hands. ‘Let me hold her.’

  Mattie carefully placed her along his forearm with one of his large hands cupping her head and the other holding her tiny bottom. He raised her up. ‘Hello, Beth, he whispered, ‘I’m your pa.’

  Beth gave him
a hiccup and her parents laughed.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, in a voice heavy with emotion.

  Sarah bustled over. ‘Right, make yourself useful, son, by taking your young ’un to have a look out of the window so we can tend to her mam,’ she said, her eyes twinkling as she regarded the new family.

  Nathaniel grinned, stood up and took Beth to the chair in the corner, keeping his back to the three women in the room. Sarah and Emma made short work of washing Mattie and slipping a fresh nightgown on her. As her mother helped her back to bed, Beth cried out.

  ‘She needs her mam,’ Sarah said, putting the bolster and pillows behind Mattie.

  Nathaniel handed the baby to Mattie then sat back on the bed beside her. Sarah lowered the wick of the lamp and a warm hazy light filled the room.

  ‘We’ll be downstairs if you need us,’ said Sarah. She and Emma gathered up the pail of dirty linen, along with all the bowls and jugs, and crept out of the room, closing the door behind them.

  Mattie unbuttoned her nightdress and offered the baby her breast. After a little bit of fussing she latched on, her little jaws working up and down. Nathaniel took off his boots, swung his legs onto the bed and propped himself beside her. Mattie rested against his chest and his arm closed around her. With Beth nursing at her breast and Nathaniel embracing her, peace and contentment stole over her.

  Bliss, perfect bliss, she thought. Of course, she wasn’t so foolish to think that misfortune or ill luck would not pass their way again, perhaps even tomorrow. But if it did, then she and Nathaniel would face and conquer it together.

  Acknowledgements

  As with my first two books, No Cure for Love and A Glimpse at Happiness, I have used numerous sources to get the period setting and feel of Perhaps Tomorrow and would like to mention a few books and authors, to whom I am particularly indebted.

  As before, I have drawn on Henry Mayhew’s contemporary accounts of the poor in London Labour and the London Poor (edited by Neuburg, Penguin, 1985). His painstaking reporting of the worries, concerns and language of the people he interviewed and scenes he witnessed was invaluable. Millicent Rose’s out of print The East End of London (The Cresset Press, 1951) gives an account of East London before the slum clearances in the late 50s and early 60s as well as a tantalising glimpse into tight-knit communities clustered around the London docks. I again want to give credit to Ellen Ross for her study of the trials and tribulation of mothers living and raising children in squalor and poverty in Victorian London in Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London 1870–1918 (Oxford University Press, 1993). In addition, for Nathaniel’s time in Botany Bay I used Robert’s Hughes well-researched The Fatal Shore (Vintage, 1986) as my main guide. To plot the railways and station of the time I used Charles Klapper’s London’s Lost Railways (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976). I am grateful to Robert Beaumont’s The Railway King (Headline Review, 2002) for helping me make sense of Amos Stebbins’s financial machinations and to the Railway & Coal website http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/gansg/8-yards/y-coal.htm for invaluable information on coal merchants, wagons and coal grades.