Never Look Back (96 page)

‘I’ll come down and tell you all his news in a while,’ Matilda said. ‘What’s Peter doing this morning?’

‘Still champing at the bit to enlist,’ Sidney said with a wide grin. ‘But I gave him a clout earlier, and said he was to clean out the cellar and not be such a fool.’

Matilda frowned. Peter had lost none of his enthusiasm for being a soldier, and he had been eagerly waiting to hear if he had been accepted at West Point. But the moment he’d heard about the war, he suddenly didn’t care about being an officer, he just wanted to go off and fight immediately.

Peter had always had a special place in Matilda’s heart, but since Cissie died he had become even dearer to her. While Sidney
had always felt like a younger brother, she thought of Peter as her son. She often felt that she had transferred all the love she felt for Amelia, Cissie and Susanna to him on their deaths; caring for him and watching him grow from boy to man had fulfilled a deep need in her. He had such a sunny disposition, all the warmth and fire Cissie had, but was so bright and quick. He was her clown when she needed cheering, her companion and helpmate. Since his schooling had ended last fall when he became eighteen, he had filled in the time waiting to hear from West Point by working for her. He did the book-keeping, painted the whole outside of London Lil’s, and ran messages for her in connection with her girls.

Apart from her reluctance for him to leave her, and the terrible fear he could be killed, Matilda hated the idea of him enlisting. She had done her best to bring him up as a gentleman, and the thought of him mixing with hard-drinking, uncouth desperadoes made her feel quite ill.

Sidney had no such desire to enlist. He wasn’t patriotic, he said his only allegiance was to those he loved, and he saw no sense in fighting for something he didn’t understand. He doted on Peter too, and he was every bit as anxious as Matilda to prevent him leaving home.

‘I guess we can’t chain him up to stop him going,’ Sidney said, his brow furrowed with a deep frown. ‘I’ll do my best to talk him out of it.’

‘Maybe James has said something about Peter in this letter,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t mind him going quite so much if he could join his regiment.’

‘I’ll leave you to read it then,’ Sidney replied. ‘Meanwhile I’ll keep him working in the cellar.’

Once Sidney had gone, Matilda settled down to read the letter.

Nothing had worked out as they had planned. After their brief holiday in Santa Cruz, James returned to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, and on his first leave went home to Virginia and asked Evelyn for a divorce, but she refused point-blank. She didn’t care that they had a marriage in name only, that there would never be children, or even that he said he was in love with another woman. All she cared about was that no scandal should touch her.

James told her that she must consider herself deserted in that
case, because he was never coming back to her, and this was something he’d stuck to. He would have resigned his commission there and then too, but the situation in Kansas was volatile, and the innocent settlers so desperately in need of protection, he felt he must hang on until it was resolved.

In the last five years, and despite the 2,000 miles between them, they had managed to spend some time together. Matilda had travelled to Denver to meet him three times. Last year she’d gone all the way to Ohio to see Tabitha when she started at Clevedon Medical College and met up with James there too. In all this time they had clung to the belief it would only be a few months before James could break free from the army and come to her, but once the news of the war reached Matilda, she knew he would never resign during a crisis.

My darling,’
she read. ‘
I write this letter with a heavy heart, knowing that in all probability, by the time you receive it, we will be at war. Over the years I have sent so many letters apologizing for letting you down, but in this one I cannot even offer words of hope for our shared future, because things look so terribly grave.

I haven’t even got the conviction that this is a war which has to be fought, for the forces bringing it about are as muddled as my own feelings. If it were simply a matter of the morality of slavery then I would be glad to gallop in rattling my sabre, for you know my long-held views on that. But in fact it is merely a clash of an elite minority.

Most Northern people are not wealthy or politically powerful, neither do they care enough about slavery to go to war over it. Likewise in the South most whites are poor farmers and not decision-makers. The Northern elites want economic expansion, free land, free labour, a free market, a high protective tariff for manufacturers and a Bank of the United States. The Southern elites oppose all that, they see Lincoln and the Republicans stopping their pleasant and prosperous way of life.

My feelings are torn in both directions. I am after all a Virginian, and even if I deplore some of the traditions, these are my people I am being asked to wage war against. Maybe if I could believe I was to fight on the side of right, I could put aside personal loyalties. But I know all too well that slavery isn’t the real issue and even if the war does finally set them all free, the problems won’t be over, for there is enormous prejudice against the black man, and there are very few who believe he should have the same rights as white men.

In truth Negroes often receive worse treatment in the North than they do in the South because of ignorance and fear. In New York a black man cannot vote unless he owns two hundred and fifty dollars in property. That rule doesn’t apply to whites. But then I do not need to tell you such things, dear Matty, for you have always been a champion of the poor and the oppressed regardless of the colour of their skin, gender, or religion.

It is being said that the Union Army can easily overthrow the Confederacy, they claim we have more wealth, weapons, roads and railways, and a strong navy, while the Southern states are almost bankrupt, and the cotton their only real asset. This is all very true. But I know that in any battle the strongest opponent is the one who truly believes in his cause. The South have strong leaders, and utter conviction that their cause is one of honour, and I believe they will fight to the death to uphold it.

Today I heard that young men are pouring in all over the country to recruit for the Union, just as they are here in Kansas. Few of them are really inspired by glory, the ideals, nor the flags and bugles, only the thirteen dollars a month, and perhaps the adventure. They firmly believe it will all be over in ninety days.

Knowing Southerners as I do, I doubt the rebels can be subdued so quickly. I wonder too how we can hope that our men will remain steadfast to a cause when they experience what war really means, they’ll find living conditions far worse than those they left behind in the slums of the cities, the rations poor and death a real possibility.

But enough of this my love, for you do not want to hear such pessimistic thoughts. One certainty has come out of this situation, and that is if I have to fight against my old neighbours and friends, I will never be able to return to Virginia again when this is over. I shall leave the army for good then, and come back to you for always. So pray as I do that it will be a short battle, with few casualties.

I have your picture close to my heart, I kiss it each night and morning. Write soon with all your cheering news of your girls, and tell Sidney I will be back to be godfather to his child as I promised, though I can’t say when just yet. I have a feeling young Peter will be desperate to join up, for he is as hot-blooded as I was at the same age. If you cannot persuade him out of it, at least make sure he comes here and joins my regiment, for perhaps then I can try and keep him safe for you.

Remember that I love you, my darling. My body might be here in Kansas and my mind on war, but my heart is with you and will be for ever.

Yours always, James.

Matilda wiped away the tears coursing down her cheeks, folded his letter and tucked it into the bodice of her dress. She bit into her bottom lip to prevent herself crying any more and tried to cheer herself as she had often done before by simply looking at the view from her window.

It was a beautiful May morning, with warm sunshine and the lightest of breezes, and the view of the bay over the rooftops was as beautiful and peaceful as ever, busy with ships and fishing boats. But even as she admired it, she was reminded that everything which was good about this city she’d come to love had only been achieved by long, hard battles to fight the evil within it.

She thought back to the days of the Vigilantes. Sam Brannan, the man who first proclaimed the gold in the American river, had organized a band of men to take the city’s lawlessness into their own hands. In the absence of a strong police force, they had targeted the gamblers, arsonists, street ruffians, ballot-box stuffers, crooked politicians and real and suspected criminals. Some they hanged, others got a good beating, and many more were banished from the city. In their heyday of the mid-’50s, they had 4,000 infantrymen armed with muskets and thirty cannons, and they operated with military discipline from Fort Gunnybags, their headquarters in Sacramento Street. Matilda could still vividly recall the excitement in the city in the summer of ’56 when the Vigilantes demanded that the authorities should hand over to them two murderers called Cora and Casey, and took them to Fort Gunnybags for trial. They were found guilty and hanged from the second-floor windows.

The Vigilantes had disbanded later that same year. Maybe their organization had been flawed, but they had moved the city out of the old boom-town era, shown the worst of the rascals that their presence would not be tolerated, and created the beginnings of a civilized, real city. Later, in ’59, silver strikes in the Comstock Lode brought welcome new prosperity to the city,
but there was none of the madness Matilda remembered in the times of the gold.

Yet there was still so much more that needed to be done. Maybe for the vast majority of its citizens San Francisco was becoming a clean and ordered place, with pleasant suburbs, good schools, colleges, theatres and libraries, yet the ‘Barbary Coast’ and all its obscenities were still thriving. It would remain that way too, for most people turned a blind eye as long as it didn’t touch their lives and brought extra revenue to the city.

Sometimes Matilda felt that the task she’d set herself to help girls escape from prostitution, and keep away from it, was like trying to empty a huge bath of water with only a thimble. Over the last five years she and Dolores had been instrumental in getting only five brothel keepers prosecuted for procuring underage girls. They had rescued a total of thirty-three children, and given temporary care and shelter to over 200 girls. But that was only skimming across the surface of a morass filled with unfortunates they could never reach.

Of the first eight girls to come to Folsom Street, Fern was still with her, acting as housekeeper in a working girls’ boarding-house Matilda had founded. Mai Ling had married the owner of a restaurant, Suzy was a maid for a wealthy family in Rincon Hill. Maria and Angelina worked as seamstresses, Dora and Bessie were both in service. All of them dropped in to see Matilda and Dolores from time to time, and offered friendship and encouragement to the new girls they found there.

Ruth was the only casualty of those first few girls. That haunted look had never left her, and shortly after taking a job as a kitchen maid, her body had been washed up on the beach. As the police could find no signs of violence it was believed she had taken her own life.

Of the other girls Matilda had given shelter to, around sixty per cent were still in the same employment she’d found them, thirty per cent had either married, flitted from job to job, become reunited with family, or moved away to another city. She believed that about five per cent of the total number might have been drawn back into prostitution, for she had never seen or heard from them since.

It wasn’t possible to keep track of the girls helped by the employment bureau. Unless they returned to her at some stage,
they had no real reason to keep in touch. But as they were mostly capable, smart girls who had friends and family she doubted many of them had fallen by the wayside.

The Jennings Bureau made a small profit now, but it was never intended as a money-making scheme anyway. She had found work for over 2,000 girls, and perhaps managed to influence some businessmen into thinking females had equal brainpower to men, and even treating employees fairly. But she couldn’t sit back now, war in its way was yet another opportunity, and if she didn’t use it, someone else would.

Thinking about this, she got a note-pad and pencil from her desk. What did an army need?

She made a list. Food, weapons, ammunition, uniforms, tents, horses, hospitals and nurses. She frowned at the images the last two threw up. She had no doubt that Tabitha would feel compelled to break off from her studies to nurse. Her desire to be a doctor had always been tempered by the need to help the sick rather than based on personal advancement or glory – in that she was very like her father. Should she write to her now and tell her she must stay at the college?

‘You’ll do no such thing,’ she said aloud. ‘She’s twenty-one, the same age you were when Lily died, and if she wants to help the wounded, then she should not be prevented.’

Tabitha had gone to England to visit her aunt and uncle when she finished at school. Matilda had held hopes that her relatives might be able to help her get into a university there to take a degree in medicine. But sadly the English medical profession was still firmly against women joining their ranks, and her doctor uncle had recommended she go to the medical college in Ohio because there was no such prejudice there. Yet the trip to England had given Tabitha a great deal, she had got to meet her remaining relatives and discovered a great deal more about her mother as a young girl. It had also made her see she was an American now, and it was to this country that she owed her allegiance.