Читать книгу The Klondike Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - Vicki Delany - Страница 15

I poured canned milk onto my porridge and eyed my son. Angus was being unusually vague about his plans for the day.

Mrs. Mann, our landlady, fussed over him, as she always did. She was a wisp of a woman, with a mass of steel-grey hair scraped into a severe bun that weighed about as much as all the rest of her. Her accent was full of the memory of Germany, but she was justifiably proud of her English.

“I hear talk that a fellow’s arrived in Dawson with a real cow, Mrs. MacGillivray,” she said, ladling more porridge into Angus’s bowl. “Imagine. Milk.” Her tongue fondled the word as if she were dreaming of finding diamonds under her pillow. But she was thinking of something even greater than the Hope Diamond. For if she and I had learned one thing in the starvation winter of ’97—’98, it was that nothing, not gold nor diamonds nor banknotes, nor even one’s good name, mattered a damn when there was nothing to buy to eat.

“Wouldn’t milk be nice, Angus?” I said.

He grinned around a mouthful of grey porridge. “It sure would. I don’t even remember what fresh milk tastes like.”

“Like sunshine falling on the farms of Bavaria,” Mrs. Mann said, passing the sugar bowl.

“It would make a nice change. Buy some if you can. Never mind what it costs. I’ll have real milk in my coffee tomorrow, and Angus can have a glass to drink, and we’ll pour it over the porridge on Monday. Buy enough for yourselves as well. We had a profitable night last night.”

Angus pushed aside his scraped-empty bowl and rose to his feet. “Thanks for the breakfast, Mrs. Mann.” The kitchen was so cramped, he had to squeeze by her to get to the back door. “Please excuse me, Mother.” Something was up: his grammar was too perfect.

“Anything special happening today, Angus?” I asked.

“No, Mother. I thought I might go to the infirmary to check on Miss Vanderhaege.” He twisted his shirtfront in his hands.

“Who?”

“Miss Vanderhaege? From the bakery?”

“Oh, right.”

That the boy was lying, or at least not revealing the truth, was about as obvious as the fact that I wanted milk straight from a cow with no interference by factory nor can if I was ever to enjoy a cup of coffee again.

“Make sure you spend some time with that book of geography.”

“Yes, Mother.” He kissed me on the top of my head and said goodbye to Mrs. Mann. He took his coat from the peg and closed the door gently on the way out. Mrs. Mann’s husband had built the tiny wooden house himself. The walls were thin, and the floorboards loose, so that one always knew exactly what everyone else in the house was doing at any time of the day or night. One morning I couldn’t get to sleep and had lain awake listening to the Manns enjoying an intimate moment—a very long intimate moment—before they rose to begin the day.

At their age!

“Such a nice boy,” my landlady said, gathering Angus’s empty dishes. “But he doesn’t tell the whole truth. Perhaps he visits a young lady in town?”

I finished my coffee with a grimace. There were no signs of any young lady—he wasn’t mooning about, sighing heavily at inappropriate moments or searching for faint stars in the sun-touched night, all the while whispering words of poetry. Besides, Angus was only twelve. No, this was something worse. He was shutting me out, trying to become a man.

So concerned was I by Angus’s strange behaviour that I forgot to worry about Jack Ireland and what further trouble he might cause.