Never Look Back

  He slept intermittently, yet each time he opened his eyes and saw her still there, he half smiled and closed his eyes again. At dawn his colour had improved slightly, and when she changed the dressing on his leg, she rejoiced to find no sign of infection.

  ‘Can you tell me about what happened now?’ she asked around six, knowing that soon a senior nurse would come to ask how he was, and perhaps move him to one of the other wards where the patients needed less attention than the men in here.

  ‘The rebels came up Cemetery Hill to us,’ he said in a whisper. ‘They were waving their flags, the sun was gleaming on their bayonets, it looked like a sloping forest of flashing steel. They came like they were one, silent and bold, it was the most beautiful, awesome sight. They looked invincible even though their uniforms were in rags and some had no boots. Then General Gibbon came down the line, cool and calm, and ordered us to hold our fire until they were real close.

  ‘He gave us a signal to fire when they were so close you could almost smell their breath. As we fired, so all the cannons went off at once. You wouldn’t believe it, Matty! Arms, heads, caps and knapsacks were thrown up into the clear air above the smoke,’ He paused, wincing at the memory. ‘But still the rebels came on. It was hand to hand, face to face after that. Men cutting with sabres, thrusting with bayonets, guns fired right into faces. So terrible!’

  He stopped, then gave a long-drawn-out sigh. ‘I got hit, but I kept on shooting and reloading because I knew if I fell I’d be bayoneted. Then out of nowhere James came roaring through on his horse. He was like an avenging angel, Matty, slashing out with his sabre. I didn’t think he’d even see me, but he’d come to get me, Matty, he grabbed hold of my arms and hauled me up on to his horse.’

  Matilda covered her mouth with her hands, eyes wide with shock.

  ‘I guess I must have passed out, ’cos next thing he was dropping me down on the grass, away from it all. He said I’d got to go to the field hospital,’ he said in an emotional croak. ‘He saved my life.’

  Matilda was reeling from the vivid and dramatic picture he’d painted for her.

  ‘Did he go back to the fighting?’ she asked weakly.

  ‘’Course he did, Matty,’ Peter retorted. ‘I saw him riding off swirling his sabre in one hand, shooting with his pistol from the other, clinging on to his horse with his knees, the way he said an Indian taught him.’

  He stopped suddenly, his face clouding over. ‘But he got hurt real bad later, Matty.’

  Matty felt as if her heart had just stopped. For a moment she could only stare at Peter in horror. ‘Are you sure?’ she whispered.

  ‘’Fraid so,’ he said, with pain in his eyes. ‘Captain Franklin, came to tell me. That’s why I got here so quick. Seems James gave instructions that I was to be brought right here, to this hospital, and you.’

  Matilda had already discovered the previous night that most of the wounded were still up there at Gettysburg, taken into people’s houses, and she thought it was just luck that brought Peter here. But there was no luck in it, just James looking after her boy for her, as he’d always promised he’d do.

  ‘So where is James?’ she asked, panic overwhelming her.

  ‘I guess he’s been taken wherever the officers go,’ Peter replied. ‘That’s if –’ He stopped short, but he didn’t have to finish the sentence, he’d said enough.

  ‘Would you mind if I go and find him?’ she said hurriedly. ‘Tabby will be on duty very soon, she’ll look out for you.’

  ‘You go and find him,’ Peter said. ‘Tell him.’ Again he stopped short and tears filled his eyes.

  ‘Tell him you love him?’ she whispered.

  He nodded, and swiped angrily at his tears. ‘And tell him he’s the bravest man I ever knew.’

  It took Matilda only minutes to discover that officers were taken to the Federal Hospital, and she took off, running like a hare. It was going to be another very hot day, the sun was climbing rapidly into the sky, and the sound of wagon wheels bringing more wounded was all around her.

  Only as she reached the doors of the Federal Hospital did she remember that her apron was stained with blood, and felt her hair coming loose under her cap, but it was too late to do anything about that now.

  She was told by a starchy lady on a desk that Brigadier James Russell had indeed been brought in late last night, but that she couldn’t possibly see him now.

  ‘I insist,’ she said, looking at the woman as if she might knock her down if she refused again. ‘I am his wife.’

  He was in a room at the end of a long corridor, with five other men, and as Matilda rushed in, a stout nurse tried to restrain her.

  ‘Let go of me,’ she said, pushing the woman to one side.

  James was in the bed nearest the window, and recognizing her voice he turned his head towards her. ‘Matty!’ he whispered.

  For a moment she thought whatever injuries he had were only minor ones, for his fair hair was gleaming in the early morning sun, his face was tanned, moustache trimmed, and his naked upper chest and arms rippled with muscle. He looked exactly the way he had three years ago, on the last night they spent together. But as she ran to him she saw it wasn’t a sheet pulled up over him, but a bandage around his middle, and his eyes had that dull, faraway look of approaching death she’d seen so often before.

  She felt as if she’d been hit by a mortar shell, her mouth went dry, her heart was thumping too loudly. Stomach wounds were always the worst. She’d never known one man survive them. It wasn’t fair, everything she’d planned and dreamed of was for him and with him, her life would be worth nothing without him.

  Yet somehow she managed to smile and kiss him, to say she’d run all the way here as soon as she heard he had been wounded. She wondered why she wasn’t crying, or even berating him for not keeping back from the action the way senior officers were supposed to, but all she did was continue to smile, stroke his hair back from his face and whisper that she loved him.

  ‘Is Peter going to make it?’ he asked, gripping her hands. His voice was so husky and weak it made her feel weak too.

  ‘Yes, thanks to you, my darling, he told me what you did,’

  ‘He turned out to be a fine soldier,’ James said softly. ‘He does you credit, Matty,’

  ‘He told me to tell you he loves you,’ she said, close to him and stroking his face. ‘He said you were the bravest man he ever knew. But even if he recovers enough to be sent back into the war, I’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent it.’

  James nodded in agreement. ‘Tell Tabitha she’s to go back to her studies after this, and nothing must stop her becoming a doctor, and tell Sidney I’m sorry I can’t be Elizabeth’s godfather, and to look after you for me.’

  She wanted to say he would get better, and he’d see Elizabeth soon for himself, and James too, the new baby who had been named after him, but she’d had too much experience of death now to stop a man saying the things he needed to say before he went.

  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 w
hen 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 s
oaked 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.