Never Look Back

by Lesley Pearse

  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.

  ‘You’ve soaked my hair,’ Giles said a little later, touching it in surprise.

  She moved away and found the whole bodice of her dress was wet too. ‘You’ve soaked my dress,’ she retorted.

  Her first feeling was of embarrassment that she’d let herself go, but this was quickly replaced with unease, for to hold a man the way she’d held Giles wasn’t appropriate behaviour, not even under the tragic circumstances.

  ‘I think you chased the Devil out anyway, or maybe drowned him,’ he said with a half-smile.

  All at once Matilda didn’t care about how that smile had been teased out of him, because it was the first since Lily’s death. She wiped her eyes on her apron and smiled back.

  ‘Well, that’s a blessing,’ she said. ‘We’ve got enough to cope with, without Old Nick around.’

  As she made coffee for them both she told him in no uncertain manner that he must return to his ministry work for people were depending on him.

  ‘I must take Lily’s place at the school too,’ she added. ‘And we’ve both got to make this house a home again and a good place for Tabitha to grow up in.’

  He nodded in agreement, his eyes still bleak but the anger gone. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘But then of course you are about most things. I don’t really wish someone else died instead of Lily, I guess I just feel cheated that she and I couldn’t grow old together with our children.’

  Matilda sighed with relief. ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Now, about that sermon you have to write…’

  In the following weeks it became clear that Giles was slowly recovering. His tormented crying at night became less frequent and eventually stopped and he went back to his ministry work. He grew calm again, sometimes eating well, now and then even cheerful, but it was like sharing the house with a different man. He was indecisive, often brooding silently, and he searched Matilda out constantly, almost like a child. He wanted her opinion on everything, who he should visit, what he should say, his sermons, even if he needed to take a coat with him in case it rained, and she knew it wasn’t right to encourage this dependence on her.

  Yet however hard she tried to distance herself from him, she found she couldn’t. She did help him organize his time, read through his sermons and advised him on how to deal with parishioners’ problems. She made his favourite meals to make him eat more, and often touched him with too much familiarity. If he came in from the rain, she went to take his hat and coat, just as she always had, yet her hands seemed to linger on his shoulders. When he came down the garden to look at the growing vegetables, it was somehow impossible not to touch his arm or hand. If they sat side by side on the couch, she was too aware of his body next to hers.

  But it wasn’t all one-sided. He tweaked her cheek when he left the house; when he was sitting with Tabitha on his lap listening to her read, he always patted the seat beside them, wanting Matilda to join them. He often turned the handle of the mangle for her, and helped her bring in the washing.

  She told herself it was only because they were both so hungry for the affection Lily had given them, and in time they’d both adjust, but sometimes it felt as if there was something more in the air than just mutual grief and kindliness between them.

  In September, five months after Lily’s death, Tabitha was asked to sleep over at the Bradstocks, friends with several small children who had a small farm just a few miles out of town. Giles arranged to drop her off there in the morning while he was out on his visits, and he would collect her the following day.

  That day was terribly hot and sultry, by midday much too hot to work any longer in the garden. Matilda picked some flowers, made them into a little posy surrounded by leaves, just as she used to as a girl, then went over to the churchyard to visit Lily’s grave and see the new headstone which had only been erected the day before.

  Just the sight of the solidity of the white marble stone and the small stone wall which had been erected around her grave cheered her, for it seemed to say this was Lily’s permanent home now, its site under a tree making a fitting place to remember her.

  ‘Here lies Lily Amelia Milson, and her baby son, taken from her loving husband and daughter too soon,’ the inscription read.

  ‘GOD IN HIS WISDOM CHOSE HER.

  AN ENGLISH ROSE SO FAR FROM HOME.

  LET HER GENTLE NATURE TOUCH THE HEARTS

  OF ALL WHO SEE THIS STONE.

  BORN 1810 IN BRISTOL ENGLAND. DIED 1847

  INDEPENDENCE MISSOURI.’

  Matilda was surprised by the verse, she had expected Giles to choose something from the Bible. Yet it was so much more personal and touching, and she hoped that in many years to come people would stop and read it, and be as moved by the sentiment as she was.

  She sat down on the grass beside the grave, leaned back against the tree and let her mind drift to thoughts of her friend. She had tried this many times before, but she had never got past seeing her that last fateful night, her face contorted in agony, and that was too distressing an image. But this time, perhaps because of the inscription, she could imagine Lily in the garden, smiling as she tended her roses.

  She hung on to the comforting image, closing her eyes and remembering how Lily had maintained so many English customs. Tea in the garden, the table laid with an embroidered cloth and her dainty china. Boiled eggs for breakfast, starched napkins tucked into silver rings, and fruit preserve in a little glass pot with its own special spoon.

  ‘I miss you so much, Lily,’ she said softly. ‘The house seems so empty and bare without you. Remember how we used to laugh and chatter as we did the washing? How we used to inspect the garden every day together? I feel so lonesome without you, I don’t think I’ll ever find another friend like you.’

  She went on to talk about Tabitha and her school work, the animals and how Solomon had given them a little goat called Gertie to rear, but then gradually she moved on to the subject which had been troubling her for some little while.

  ‘I know I promised to look after Giles and Tabby,’ she whispered. ‘And I will never break that promise, but people are bound to start talking about us soon because I’m an unmarried woman living in his house. W
hat should we do?’

  It was so silent in the graveyard, not a breath of wind rustling the leaves, too hot for birds to sing, and the town beyond the fence sleepy in the sunshine.

  ‘Marry him!’

  Matilda was startled by this whispered answer. She turned her head to see who it came from. But there was no one there.

  She laughed then, assuming she’d imagined it.

  ‘I guess I’m getting a little crazy, hearing voices,’ she said aloud. ‘Of course that solution has occurred to me, but even if Giles were willing, I couldn’t possibly take your place, Lily. Imagine what a terrible minister’s wife I’d be, always wanting to interfere, thinking I knew best about everything!’

  She sat there for a moment longer and all at once she had the strangest feeling of a presence close by. ‘Are you there, Lily?’ she asked in a whisper. ‘Send me a sign if you are listening!’

  All at once she heard the rustle of leaves and she jumped up in shocked surprise. There was no wind to cause it, she couldn’t even feel a faint breeze on her cheeks, and the long grass around the edge of the graveyard was still.

  ‘Well, bugger me,’ she said, in her shock reverting back to her favourite swear-words from her early London days.

  ‘I should scrub out your mouth with soap and water.’ A gruff male voice she didn’t recognize came from behind the tree. To her further shock, Giles stepped out from behind it, a wide smile on his face.

  ‘Giles!’ she exclaimed, blushing from head to foot. ‘How dare you frighten me like that? How long have you been there?’ she asked indignantly.

  ‘A bit,’ he said, returning to his normal voice. ‘I just came to see the headstone before coming home. When I spotted you sitting there I didn’t like to interrupt your peace, so I stayed behind the tree. Don’t be embarrassed, I talk to her too.’

  Mortified that he’d not only listened to what she’d been saying, but tricked her into revealing her innermost thoughts too, Matilda picked up her skirts and fled, jumping over gravestones and rushing towards the gate of the churchyard as if the hounds of hell were after her.