Never Look Back (102 page)

He picked up her hands and looked at them.

‘Don’t,’ she said, trying to pull them back. ‘They look so ugly.’

‘I love these hands,’ he whispered, drawing them up to his lips. ‘For I know how they got that way. Every mark tells a story of a brave woman with a big heart. I can’t tell you how often I’ve dreamed of them in the last three years, they say more about you than your beautiful face.’

‘I look a fright,’ she said, looking down at her stained apron and drab brown dress.

‘You look like an angel to me,’ he whispered, clinging on to her hand. ‘I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep my promises.’

‘You gave me more happiness than a woman has a right to,’ she said. ‘What’s a few broken promises?’

She noted how different this ward was from the one she worked in. It was the same size, but here there were six beds, in hers sixteen. There were screens for privacy, the floor was waxed and polished, but for once she didn’t mind that a privileged few got special treatment. Not when James was one of them.

‘I’ve asked to be buried at Gettysburg, with my men,’ he said suddenly. ‘I couldn’t bear to be taken back to Fredericksburg.’

For just a second she wanted to protest, but she saw the look in his eyes and understood. It wasn’t just that his home town was sacked, or he had no allegiance to it or his people there any more. His men were what counted to him, and if they had to be buried in crude mass graves, then he wished to be there with them.

‘May I be there?’ she said, tears welling up in her eyes.

‘I was counting on you to be there,’ he whispered, clinging on to her hand. ‘And Tabby too. Your family always meant so much more to me than my own.’

‘If only,’ she started, then checked herself.

‘If only what?’

‘We’d had a child of our own, I guess,’ she said, and tried to smile.

He gave her a sad look. ‘I thought you believed in never looking back?’

‘It’s an easy thing to say, but not so easy to do,’ she whispered. ‘Not after all we’ve been to one another.’

He winced with sudden pain. The nurse came to say the doctor was on his way to examine the Brigadier, and as she wheeled the screen around the bed, her look was kindly, she even apologized for having to ask Matilda to wait outside.

The doctor was small and old and walked with a cane but he stayed a lot longer with James than the doctors at The Lodge spent with their patients. When he came out, he looked at Matilda with real sympathy. ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Russell,’ he said. ‘We’ve done all we can, but as a nurse you’ll know that serious stomach wounds like his are beyond help.’

She nodded, glad at least that he’d treated her as an equal. ‘How long does he have?’ she asked.

‘Only minutes, I fear,’ he said gently. ‘Go back to him, Mrs Russell, and God be with you both,’

James hung on for ten minutes, his eyes wide open, his hand squeezing hers, and at last she found the words she’d never been able to say before. ‘You gave me purpose, James, you’ve made me strong enough to withstand anything. Loving you has been everything I ever wanted. If I could go right back to the beginning, the only thing I’d change is that I’d have followed you everywhere, to the most distant, dirty fort, to the mountains and desert. I’ll carry you with me for always, in my heart, mind and body.’

Tears rained down her cheeks unchecked, she ran one finger round his lips, his nose, his chin and ears, impressing every small detail into her mind for all time.

His chest was making a rattling noise, and his hand squeezed hers. ‘Kiss me,’ he whispered.

His lips were dry and cracked, but she kept hers on them until she felt his last breath go and his hand in hers went limp. ‘Farewell, my love,’ she whispered.

She closed his eyes herself, sealing them with a kiss, then called the nurse.

‘Would you like to take his belongings with you now?’ the woman said gently. ‘I know that might sound a little hasty, but sometimes it helps to have something to hold on to.’

Even in her grief, Matilda sensed this stout, plain woman had suffered great loss recently too, and she embraced her silently for a moment.

‘There’s his sabre and pistol, and the things which were in the pockets of his uniform,’ the nurse said, her lips trembling.

Matilda nodded. Peter should have his sabre, and she’d keep the pistol.

She sat beside James’s bed while the nurse went away. He looked just the way he had that day on the beach at Santa Cruz, when he fell asleep on the sand beside her, and it was hard to imagine those eyes would never open again, or those lips smile at her. She’d met him fifteen years ago, been his mistress for ten, yet if she put all the time they’d actually spent together it would only amount to perhaps six months in all.

Death had become so commonplace to her that she had begun to imagine she’d lost some of her sensitivity. But that wasn’t so,
she felt mortally wounded, that her heart would give out at any moment. Amelia’s death had crushed her, yet it had been bearable in as much as she knew it was inevitable once the disease caught hold of her. She had the other children to think of then too. But ever since Amelia died, James had been her guiding star, he had promised they’d grow old together, and she had believed it.

He was her love, her life, nothing was worth anything without him.

The nurse returned just a few minutes later, with the sabre and pistol bundled together in a piece of cloth tied up with string and ‘Brigadier Russell’ written on a label.

‘There was this too,’ the nurse said, handing her a brown leather wallet. ‘He was holding it in his hands when they brought him in.’

A lock of Matilda’s hair fell out as she opened it. Inside was the picture of her that they’d had taken back in San Francisco seven years earlier. It was faded now, worn from constant handling. As she opened a small pocket, she saw the red garter he’d snatched from her that night in Santa Cruz. That too was faded, now just pale pink. She had the other one back home in a drawer, still bright red. She’d planned to wear it on their first night together when he came home.

Tears ran down her cheeks as she picked up the lock of hair, and tucked it back into the wallet with the picture and the garter, then handed it back to the nurse. ‘I think he’d like to take that with him,’ she said simply. ‘Will you make sure it stays with him?’

The nurse nodded, and put one hand on Matilda’s shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said in a soft voice. ‘He was a fine man and a brave soldier.’

‘The very finest,’ Matilda said, sniffing back her tears. Picking up the heavy parcel and cradling it in her arms, she looked once more into the nurse’s eyes. ‘I’m in Ward Al at The Lodge hospital. I am known as Nurse Jennings there. Will you ask that I’m told when his funeral will be?’

The streets were jammed with wagons, soldiers everywhere, and it was desperately hot and noisy. There was nowhere to go to be
alone but back to the boarding-house. She put the parcel away unopened in the closet, then sank down on the bed, so numb and desolate that she was beyond tears.

The clamour from the street outside, the rumbling wagon wheels and shouts of street vendors and newspaper boys was deafening, yet even above it she could hear a fly buzzing at the window, trying to get out.

So many memories flitted through her mind. The tough, often insolent wagon master. The friend who had cradled her new baby in his arms. She remembered the first time she danced with him at London Lil’s, the way her body had stirred as he held her close. His troubled face when he told her he was married to another woman. The frantic love-making in the rain up by the Presidio. So many unforgettable kisses, endless nights of passion, laughter, happiness and tears.

She had believed she knew everything about him, his past, dreams and aspirations. She knew every mark on his body, every line on his face, the shape of his toes, the little whistling noise he made as he fell asleep. Yet now he was gone she could see that the biggest part of him, his soldiering, was something she knew nothing of. She had never discovered if he was scared before a battle, if he prayed, drank or played cards. Did he wash and shave for it? When he leaped up on to his horse did he ever wonder if it would be for the last time? How did he feel after the battles, win or lose? Did he sometimes cry?

All she had of that part of him was a bundle of letters, and although they revealed his thoughts of her, his views about so many things, and his plans for the horse ranch, he’d never touched on how it felt to be ordered out to kill.

She would never get the answers to these questions now, but she did know that even in the thick of battle he’d kept his promise to her and looked out for Peter. She would keep the vivid picture in her mind of him sweeping her wounded boy up on to his horse. That was a far better image to hold on to than dwelling on how he got his own fatal wounds.

And he wanted to be buried with his men. That was perhaps the finest epitaph of all.

The tears came flooding out then, so hot they stung her face and soaked the pillow beneath her. They said she was the woman who never cried – well, she was crying now because her heart
was in pieces and she had nothing further to live for. What reason could she find to get up each day? Where could she call home with the knowledge he would never share it with her?

Let the two armies kill and go on killing till there’s no one left. They’d taken her man, her love, her future. There was no point to anything any more.

Chapter Twenty-six

The stage-coach lurched from side to side on the mountain road over the Sierra Nevada mountains. If the eight occupants hadn’t been so tightly packed together they would have been tossed around inside like apples in a basket.

Matilda, in a black gown, cape and bonnet, had the seat nearest to the window, facing the front of the coach. A cushion tucked down beside her hip shielded her from the worst of the jars, and the breeze from the open window kept her reasonably cool, but it was her numb state of mind which was her greatest protection from the discomfort of the long journey.

It was June 1865. General Lee had surrendered back in April and the war was over. Two whole years, all but one month, since Gettysburg, and James’s death, but for Matilda it could have been a week, several months or even many years ago.

Time and place had no real meaning for her any more. Since that summer’s day when James died all her responses had become automatic. She had gone back to the hospital to nurse the wounded beside Tabitha. Worked round the clock where she was needed, giving the sick and dying as much tender care as she had always done, just because she knew James would have wanted her too, but inside she felt cold and empty.

Tabitha had asked her on many an occasion to explain how she felt. She was extremely anxious because Matilda ate and slept very little and she couldn’t bear to see her so thin and gaunt. Matilda tried to describe how it was, but words failed her; to say she just felt empty didn’t quite cover it.

Nothing was the same any more now James was gone. The taste of food, the smell of flowers, the sound of birdsong, all less somehow. Extremes of temperature, seasons, comfort, discomfort, didn’t affect her. It was almost as if she were inside a bubble, seeing and hearing everything, but nothing quite touched her.

She observed the wild excitement in Washington when the
war ended as if from very far off, unable to understand why the joy and happiness all around her didn’t move her. She was very glad the soldiers could now go home to their wives and families, and so very relieved that there would be no further casualties, but how could she delight in a victory won at the expense of six million dead?

There was only one clear picture in her mind as the people of Washington cheered, hugged and kissed one another and celebrated. That of James’s funeral, and the long, long trenches, some already filled with bodies, others lying empty, waiting to be filled.

Because of James’s rank, someone had covered the mounds of waiting bodies with sacking. But that didn’t prevent Matilda and Tabitha smelling them, or seeing the black cloud of buzzing flies around them. She didn’t think she would ever get that smell out of her nostrils, or wipe the image from her mind.

Tabitha had gone back to Ohio now, to pick up her medical studies again, and as they had parted at Washington station some six weeks ago, Matilda pretended for Tabitha’s sake that she was excited to be going home to San Francisco. The truth of the matter was that she didn’t really care where she went; if she’d been ordered to go to nurse in another town, she would have gone willingly. It was easier to be with strangers than to face people who loved her.

As a series of trains carried her across America, and California became closer, she told herself she must snap out of this apathy and look forward. She was lucky that she had a home to go to, the whole South lay in ruins, people were starving, their homes sacked, crops destroyed, and so many women had lost not only their man, but their sons too.

Sidney had managed to get himself sent home because of his infected foot, and in the last letter she received from him he’d been joyfully anticipating Peter’s arrival. She knew she should be mentally making plans for the future, she had London Lil’s to open again, the Jennings Bureau, and the girls’ home in Folsom Street, but instead of planning she just stared out of the window, watching the miles go by without even noticing the scenery.

It was only when she boarded this stage-coach in Denver, and passed by the hotel where she once stayed with James, that she felt something. They had been so happy there, and she knew he
wouldn’t want her to go on mourning him this way. She could almost hear him whispering, ‘There will always be people who need your strength, Matty, you can’t let them down.’

Suddenly the stage-coach lurched sideways, making everyone inside it gasp. Matilda glanced round at them, all at once aware that she had been completely oblivious to her fellow passengers, despite travelling with them for several days.

There was nothing particularly unusual about any of them, they were just a bunch of quite ordinary people, such as you’d see on any street, in any town anywhere in America.