Never Look Back (26 page)

Matilda giggled. ‘Very well, thank you, Mr O’Reilly.’

His eyes were almost navy blue, fanned by long, thick, dark lashes, and his teeth were every bit as white and perfect as they’d appeared in the dark. She thought no man had a right to be so handsome, just looking at him made her feel light-headed.

‘Am I really to call you Miss Jennings?’ he said. ‘In the old country you can call a girl by her Christian name once you’ve kissed her.’

‘You can call me Matty, but you must forget you kissed me,’ she said, blushing furiously. ‘I wasn’t myself after what happened.’

‘So who was it I kissed then?’ He put his head on one side and made a comic face. ‘To be sure, that colleen looked like you.’

His soft Irish lilt, his gentle teasing were as appealing as his face and she had to smile.

‘It’s a touch cold for walking,’ he said, looking up at the grey sky. ‘Shall we go and find somewhere warm to have tea?’

She was very glad he didn’t suggest going into the Tontine coffee house, it was a place where merchants gathered to auction goods, and to buy and sell shares, and some of them might know the Milsons. She knew they wouldn’t approve of her meeting
any man on her afternoon off, not unless she’d met him through the church and they knew all about him. But she wasn’t going to spoil the day by thinking about such things.

Flynn led her speedily through the narrow streets over to the west side of the island, explaining as they went that he knew a little place with a nice view of the Hudson river. He asked too how long she’d been in America, and if the rest of her family were here too. When she told him that Reverend Milson was a minister at Trinity Church he looked a bit concerned. Imagining this was because he had similar views about clergymen to those she’d once held, she quickly told him Giles Milson wasn’t what she’d call a Bible-basher.

The place he took her to was little more than a wooden shack above a warehouse, furnished with rough wood tables and benches. A few men were eating meals, but in the main the clientele were people much like herself and Flynn, young women who could be maids or shop girls with a male companion, all drinking tea. As Flynn was greeted very warmly by a very fat black lady in a red turban, who immediately cleared the table down by the window for them, Matilda imagined he must be a regular visitor.

The view of the river with schooners in full sail, huge steamships, tugs, ferries and fishing boats was so evocative of her father and her childhood that for a moment or two she forgot all about Flynn and just drank it in with nostalgia. The Milsons had made her promise that she would keep well away from the wharves, as they considered them and the men who worked on them dangerous. She had abided by what they said, but at times when she felt homesick it was very tempting to disobey them. Lily could pretend she was back in England by going to church or tea parties with other English women; for Matilda, the docks were a bit of home, the sights, smells and sounds just like London.

Straight ahead across the river was New Jersey, but though she could just make out the ferry landing, the Waifs’ and Strays’ Home was too far inland to see.

‘Are you shy?’ Flynn’s question made her turn back to him. ‘Or are you thinking that this is a terrible place I’ve brought you to?’

She blushed furiously, suddenly aware she hadn’t spoken
since they sat down. ‘No, of course not. I’m so sorry to be so rude. I was just enjoying the view of the ships and thinking about some orphans Reverend Milson and I took to a Home in New Jersey last week.’

Tea and doughnuts were brought to them by a small black girl in a ragged dress. She smiled shyly at them, revealing a lack of front teeth, then scuttled away.

‘That’s just one of Sadie’s eleven children,’ Flynn said. ‘But tell me about these orphans.’

Matilda explained.

‘You went into Five Points and took kids out?’ He whistled between his teeth. ‘Bejesus Matty, that’s no place for a girl like you.’

‘It’s no place for an orphan child either,’ she said tartly. ‘I shall be going back there too, to round up some more.’

He looked at her in utter horror. ‘Does this Reverend Milson have anything between his two ears?’ he said, his voice raised in indignation. ‘He could be killed in there, and you with him. I once spent over two weeks in that fearful place, and I count myself lucky I got out alive.’

‘Reverend Milson has a better brain than any man I’ve ever met,’ she retorted. ‘And why should anyone kill us when we are trying to help?’

Flynn shook his head, his navy-blue eyes suddenly doleful. ‘Oh Matty,’ he sighed. ‘You can’t know how it is there. When word gets around you are taking babbies away they’ll be queuing up to offer you theirs, and demanding money for them too. Those aren’t just poor folk in there, they are animals. I know most of them are my countrymen, but Jesus save their souls, they are the scrapings of the barrel. I can’t begin to tell you how they live.’

‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘I came from one of the worst slums in London myself and I know exactly how the people live. It’s only luck and the kindness of Reverend Milson that I’m not still there.’

His mouth dropped open in shock. ‘But I took you for a country girl,’ he said in little more than a whisper.

Matilda wished she’d stopped to think before blurting that out. Even to her ears it sounded like she was a reformed whore. She was just about to rephrase it when she stopped herself. Why
should she justify herself to a man who called the poor the scrapings of the barrel?

‘I suppose you are descended from the Kings of Ireland?’ she said with some sarcasm. ‘Most of the Irish in London claim to be.’

‘You have a sharp tongue, Matty,’ he replied, but his eyes twinkled with amusement. ‘Maybe I
am
of royal blood, us Irish have more children than any other race I’ve ever met, but then there’s little else to do in Ireland but grow the potato, cut the peat for our fires and make love.’

She had heard many men use the cruder words for sex, but somehow ‘making love’ sounded so intimate that she blushed and lowered her eyes from his.

He laughed softly. ‘Drink your tea and eat your doughnut,’ he said. ‘I promise not to embarrass you again today. I come from a very poor family too, twelve of us, and me the third from eldest, with no hope of a shilling, let alone a fortune coming to me. We lived in a croft near Galway, and when the potato failed for two years running, it was hunger that made me walk all the way to Cork to try and find work.’

‘How old were you?’ she asked.

‘About twelve, with nothing in me head but dreams, and rags on me back. Luckily a fisherman there needed a lad to help him and I stayed with him and his wife for two years. He couldn’t pay me, but at least I didn’t starve. They say fish is good for the brain!’ He smiled. ‘It must have been, for I worked out for myself that Ireland was no good for me and left soon after.’

She had been wondering how old Flynn was all the way here. His quick, jerky movements, his slender body were all very boyish, but the adult way he spoke suggested he was far older than he looked.

‘You came straight to America at fourteen?’ she fished. Lily had said it was impolite to ask anyone’s age.

‘No, first I went to sea as a cabin boy, then I went to England to dig canals. Finally I signed on a ship as a deck hand and arrived here three years ago. I was twenty-two then. A whole ten years since I left Galway.’

Matilda digested this. She had established that he was twenty-five, and he seemed to have no trade. ‘And you went to live in Five Points?’

‘Not intentionally, few do that,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Me luck and me money ran out, that’s all. But in a way it did me a power of good. I saw what it was like to be right at the bottom of the heap, and I clawed me way out.’

‘So what do you work at?’ she asked warily. What she’d heard so far didn’t look too good. He was too old for her, a wanderer, and it was odd that a working man should have an afternoon free. ‘And where do you live?’

He hesitated for a moment as if considering telling a lie.

‘I work in a saloon on the Bowery,’ he said.’ And I live upstairs. I dare say you won’t want to tell your Reverend Milson that!’

Matilda’s heart sank. Although she hadn’t been to the Bowery she had heard it was a street full of low entertainment which respectable people kept well away from. Added to everything else he’d told her about himself it was patently obvious that he was the kind of man any sensible girl would steer clear of.

Yet he was so handsome and personable, and however poor he might be she could see he was fastidious. His shirt was very worn but it was snowy white, he had shaved, polished his boots, and his fingernails were very clean and cut tidily. He could of course have done this purely for her benefit, but somehow she didn’t think so.

‘I don’t think I can tell the Reverend anything about you,’ she said gently.

To her surprise he didn’t ask why. He didn’t even look hurt, but calmly went on eating his doughnut. ‘How old are you, Matty?’ he asked after a couple of minutes.

‘Seventeen, nearly eighteen.’

He nodded. ‘And what do you want from life?’ he asked.

The strange question threw her. ‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged. ‘So far I haven’t ever had any real choice, things have just happened.’

His smile was one of understanding. ‘It was like that for me too,’ he said. ‘But a coupla years ago I got to thinking that it was time I stopped just letting things happen. I was a builder’s labourer then, doing back-breaking work for a dollar a day and often sleeping rough on the job because it was better than paying ten cents a night in a flea-pit for a spot on the floor. I talked me way into this job, with the idea that when I’d got enough money to buy some fancy clothes I’d be off down South.’

Matilda had often heard Giles speak heatedly about the Southern states as he’d met many Abolitionists since he’d been in New York. From what she gathered the plantation owners were unspeakably cruel and decadent, and they were either whipping their slaves to death, auctioning off the slaves’ children, or throwing great lavish balls and parties that went on for days.

‘To do what?’ She gave a nervous laugh. ‘To buy a few slaves?’

‘I hate slavery of any kind,’ he said with a grimace. ‘But then us Irish have been enslaved by the English for centuries.’

She wasn’t sure what he meant by that and she felt it was better not to ask. ‘So what would you do there then? Pose as a gentleman?’

‘Why not?’ He grinned mischievously. ‘The greatest gift the Irish have is their blarney. I can ride a horse like a gentleman. I’ve picked up a few fancy manners in me travels. Dressed well, would anyone doubt me?’

She smiled. Aside from his clothes everything else suggested he had a gentle upbringing, his skin was pale and clear, his fingers were long and slender and his voice was like listening to music. ‘No, I don’t think they would. They’d take one glance at your handsome face and they’d look no further.’

‘So you’re thinking I’m handsome then?’ He leaned closer to her across the table, his eyes flashing suggestively.

‘You know you are,’ she grinned. ‘But can you read and write, do you know the things gentlemen do?’

‘I know more than that “gentleman” you ran into the other night,’ he said indignantly. ‘I can tell the difference between a nursemaid and a whore for a start. Yes, I can read and write. The priest down in Cork taught me and I have a fine hand.’

‘Then there’s nothing to stop you,’ she said. He sounded so sure of himself she couldn’t really doubt he was serious.

He sat back in his chair and looked at her through his long eyelashes. ‘You’re the first person I’ve ever told about my plan, Matty, I know most would laugh at me. But then it must be fate that we met, for you and I have a great deal in common. You sound like a lady, even though that coat is threadbare.’

Matty looked down at her coat in surprise. It was the one Dolly had given her the first time they met. She had always considered it very smart.

‘My step-mother gave it to me,’ she said. ‘She’s got a tea rooms on the river Thames.’

‘Mr Lewinsky sold me this suit off his barrow in Hester Street,’ he said, holding out his lapels. ‘I paid one dollar fifty cents for it, which was all the money I had at the time. But I don’t kid myself I look like a swell in it.’

Matilda was touched by his frankness. ‘It’s the first coat I ever had,’ she said. ‘Up till Dolly gave me this one I only had a shawl, even in the middle of winter.’

‘Shawls make me think of the women back home,’ he said, his eyes suddenly sad. ‘They wear them over their heads and somehow it shows they have submitted to poverty Hats tell a whole different story. I like your one, and what it tells me.’

Matilda giggled. ‘Tell me what it says?’ she asked.

‘I can guess it belonged to your mistress, and you changed the ribbon to a red one because you are a free spirit. Just the jaunty style of it says you have the guts and determination to rise above the station in life which you were born to.’

‘I’ve risen above that already,’ she said. ‘From flower-girl to nursemaid is a giant leap forward.’

‘Maybe, but do you want more than that?’ he asked raising one thick dark eyebrow. ‘You can’t stay a nursemaid, not unless your mistress has another child.’

‘But I’m not just a nursemaid, I’m housekeeper too, and I help Reverend Milson with orphaned children.’

He reflected on that for a moment. ‘It seems to me, Matty, that your life is just this family,’ he said eventually, looking right into her eyes. ‘Could it be they have become a replacement for one of your own? Do you ever have a thought which isn’t about them or connected with them and their happiness?’

‘Of course I do,’ she said tartly. Yet as she paused to think of something to put him in his place, she realized that her thoughts were always of the Milsons, it was only since meeting Flynn her mind had moved slightly away from them. ‘There’s those children in Five Points for one!’

‘That’s connected to the Reverend,’ he reproved her. ‘Have you been anywhere in New York aside from their church and messages for them? Have you met any Americans, or immigrants from other countries, and been to their homes? Have you made any friends other than that girl you were with the other night?’