Never Look Back by Lesley Pearse

Regent’s Park was an unfailing delight. Giles often reminded her sharply that just outside their parish there were terrible areas where two and even three families lived in one room, where life expectancy was seldom beyond thirty-five, and over half the babies died in infancy, butbecause Lily hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, it didn’t trouble her.
    Tabitha’s birth was Lily’s moment of triumph. At thirty-one, after four years of waiting and hoping, she had resigned herself to never becoming a mother. But fear was her joy’s uninvited companion. Suddenly Giles’s tales of infant deaths, of cholera, smallpox and all those other monstrous diseases took on terrifying proportions. Although she needed help, she refused to have any other servant than Aggie, the housekeeper they had inherited from the Reverend Hooper, for fear they might bring pestilence into her home.
    But now, as Lily looked across the cab at Matilda struggling to compose herself, all at once she realized that today’s near tragedy was a warning to her. There had been many times in the past year when she’d become fraught with trying to cope with a lively toddler alone. Today she’d only been distracted for a moment, yet that was all it took for Tabitha to get out of the shop and into danger. How ironic it was too that although Oxford Street was full of women much like herself, her child should be rescued by one of the class she feared.
    Deeply ashamed of herself, Lily reached across the cab and patted Matilda’s arm. ‘Shock makes us all cry,’ she said gently. ‘But you’ll feel better when you’ve had some food and I’ve got that wound cleaned up for you.’
    Matilda had been to Primrose Hill selling her flowers many times in the past, but it looked and felt quite different alighting from a cab. The big houses with their marble steps and gleaming brass on their front doors had always seemed threatening before, now they looked welcoming.
    Sometimes in her braver moments she had slunk down basement steps to try to sell her wares to the cook or housekeeper, and most times she was shouted at and told never to come back again. But now she was actually being asked in, not through a servants’ entrance either, but through the front door.
    It didn’t matter that it was the smallest house in the square, just a plain two-storey one tacked on to the churchyard. It was a real house, the first she’d ever been in.
    The front door was opened by an elderly, fat woman with bristles on her chin, wearing a snowy-white apron and ruffledcap, but her bright smile faded as she saw Matilda with her employers.
    ‘This is Matilda Jennings, Aggie,’ Giles said, ushering her in before him. ‘She saved Tabitha’s life this morning and got hurt, so we’ve brought her home. I know what a good nurse you can be, so perhaps you’ll take a look at her injuries and give her a meal.’
    ‘Yes sir,’ the woman replied, although her stiff expression remained. ‘But the dinner’s been waiting this last half-hour, it’s ready to serve.’
    Lily brushed past the older woman with Tabitha in her arms. ‘I can serve the dinner,’ she said in an impervious tone. ‘You see to the girl.’
    Perhaps it was as well Matilda was struck dumb by the kitchen she was led into, for Aggie’s disapproving scowl might well have made her utter some cheek.
    It was large and bright, full of sunshine, the cleanest room she’d ever seen. A large scrubbed table stood in the centre, and instead of just an open fire to cook on, it was inside a contraption fitted with doors. Matilda had seen advertisements for such things and knew it was called a ‘stove’ but she’d never seen one before. A dresser was full of dainty china, shelves trimmed with red and white checked scallops, even the cooking pots looked nice hanging from hooks.
    ‘So what happened to Miss Tabitha?’ Aggie almost spat at her, the minute she’d closed the door behind them. ‘And I don’t want no lies either. The