Читать книгу The Klondike Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - Vicki Delany - Страница 36

As I was up, dressed and mad as a rattlesnake, I might as well go to work. Today was Tuesday. Tomorrow I’d have to face Sergeant Lancaster and try not to laugh as I told him I wouldn’t marry him. I’d worry about that tomorrow. Today, all I could think about was my son and what he might get up to in the gold fields. Although, once I calmed down, I realized that the worst that was likely to happen was that he got gold fever and decided to become a miner. That would last about a week at the absolute outside. Richard Sterling would be as angry at Angus’s antics as I, but he’d keep my boy safe.

Until I could kill him! I arrived at the Savoy to find that Helen had all the chairs in the saloon piled on the tables in order to wash the floor. Sam Collins’s wife, Margaret, nursed a cup of tea on the single chair remaining upright, her feet resting on the table to let Helen mop around her. Her skirts were bunched up to her knees and I caught a glimpse of wellmended but spotlessly clean stockings and shoes with the soles almost worn through.

Seeing me, she dropped her feet to the floor. “Put your feet back up, Margaret,” I said. “Can’t interfere with Helen’s mopping.”

“Keep to the wall,” Helen said. “Can I go upstairs?”

“No, floor’s wet.”

“I want to get to my office. I won’t leave a mark.”

“You stay right there, Mrs. Mac,” Helen ordered. I wondered if she’d ever been housekeeper in a girl’s school.

“I’ve done washing these floors, and just ’cause you comes in early, don’t mean I want to do ’em again.”

“Sorry,” I said meekly.

“You wipe your shoes at the door, and you can come sit here.”

I did as instructed then crept, suitably chastized, into my own establishment. I flipped a chair off the table and sat across from Margaret Collins.

“How’s Sam doing?”

“Very well, thank you for asking, Mrs. MacGillivray.”

“He’s recovered from his brush with fame?”

I’d meant the comment as a joke, but Margaret’s eyes darkened. “Sam doesn’t want fame. He did what was right, what any decent man would have done. That’s all.”

I held up one hand. “I know, Margaret, and I’m sorry trouble came of it. But, well, Mr. Ireland isn’t around to cause any more of a disturbance, now is he?”

“And praise God for that,” Helen said in a firm voice.

She placed a cup of coffee in front of me and pulled up a chair to join in the conversation. “Ain’t right to speak ill of the dead, but that Mr. Ireland…”

“The Lord works in His own way. But I can’t pretend to be sorry Jack Ireland has gone to meet the devil,” Margaret said primly.

I stumbled around, searching for something to say. “You have a lovely accent, Margaret. Quite distinctive. Where are you from?”

She smiled. “Pennsylvania. God’s own country.” Her teeth were good for a woman of her age and class, and her smile took years off her work-lined face.

“Second only to Missouri,” Helen said.

An old argument between friends.

“Why did you leave God’s Country to come to the Yukon?” I asked. Not that I was particularly interested. But I had to pass the time somehow until the floor dried.

“I left Pennsylvania a very long time ago indeed,” Margaret said. “I haven’t been back since.” Something had always seemed out of place with Margaret, and now that I paid some attention to her, I understood what it was. She spoke much, much better than one would expect from a bartender’s wife.

I sipped my coffee. I would ask no further questions. Even in the Yukon we were capable of some degree of good manners.

“Tell Mrs. MacGillivray,” Helen said. She looked at me. “Margaret’s had ever such an interesting life.”

Mrs. Collins sighed, reluctant to repeat the story.

“Come on,” Helen urged.

“My family didn’t approve of Sam,” Margaret said. “We had a big farm, by far the largest in the county. My younger brother studied to become a doctor. Sam’s family were homesteaders. They dug themselves a hardscrabble farm out of rocks and dirt and had a mess of boys to split the land between one day. My father forbade me from having anything to do with the Collins family.”

“You disobeyed him.” Everyone of us in the Yukon has a story to tell; we wouldn’t be here otherwise.

The corners of Margaret’s stern mouth twitched as she savoured the memory. “Sam and I ran away. He had a cousin homesteading in North Carolina, who offered us a home if Sam would help around the farm. We arrived in March of ’61.” The smile faded.

“Wasn’t North Carolina nice?” I asked, wondering at the sense of doom with which Margaret had filled the last sentence.

“Spring of ’61. North Carolina,” she repeated. “Yes,” I said, smiling. What was I missing? Was North Carolina, wherever that might be, not a pleasant place in the spring? It couldn’t possibly have more mosquitoes than the Yukon, could it?

“War broke out just weeks after we got there. Lots of farming people in North Carolina quite sensibly, in my opinion, didn’t want to take sides or have anything to do with the war. But not Sam’s cousins. They were so dreadfully eager to go and fight for secession, and they got Sam all caught up in the excitement with their talk about freedom.”

“War,” I repeated. “Nasty business.” Was there a war in 1861? I hadn’t even been born yet, what did I know or care?

There was always a war going on somewhere. Seems to me that it never did anyone any good. So why do men keep having them? Because it must be doing someone some good, of course. Although not the poor men who have to fight or the poor women who stand to lose everything they hold dear.

Margaret fell silent, but Helen picked up her story. “Sam left for the war in May ’61, and he didn’t come back home till it was all over. Ain’t that right, Margaret?”

“I thought he was dead. Didn’t hear a word for months. Then we got a letter from Sam’s cousin Jake saying that Sam had been captured by the Yankees. Yankees. My own brothers were Yankees.”

I settled back into my chair. “Then it turned out all right then. Sam was safe, out of the war.”

Margaret looked at me.

“The Yankees weren’t nice to their prisoners, Mrs. Mac,” Helen Saunderson said.

“Oh,” I said.

“Sam came home in ’65,” Margaret said. “We’d been married for four years, and we hadn’t been together more than a couple of weeks in all that time.”

“That must have been difficult.” I knew I sounded about as shallow as the dregs of coffee left in the bottom of my cup. But what else could I say: You’ll get over it one day?

“Sam healed and fattened himself back up. He was a hero. He’d been captured because he refused to leave a wounded man behind. He tried to carry the soldier back to Confederate lines. He would have escaped, if he’d left the man to die. A man he’d never set eyes on before. But Sam couldn’t leave him. The fellow died in the prison camp because the Yankee soldiers wouldn’t send for a doctor to tend to him. When the war ended, the Confederacy was broken, and its heroes weren’t recognized. Not like the Union soldiers. They got medals for waking up in the morning.

“But despite all that happened to Sam, we were luckier than many. Sam’s cousin Jake never did make it home.

Then the carpetbaggers came.”

It didn’t take a genius to assume that the carpetbaggers were not nice people. I shook my head in disapproval at their actions. Whatever those actions might have been.

“They took the farm, so we left for California. But luck didn’t come with us, Mrs. MacGillivray. We’ve had a hard life. But I’m not sorry for a moment of it, except for what those Union bastards—excuse me, Mrs. MacGillivray, Helen—did to my Sam.”

“Did you ever hear from your family?” “Only once. I wrote to my mother, two years after Sam was taken prisoner. I told her all that had happened. I said I missed her. She never received the letter. My father sent it back, with ‘Confederate Traitor’ written in big black letters across the envelope.”

“And you never wrote to your mother again?”

“There didn’t seem to be much point.” I thought for a moment of Margaret’s mother, waiting anxiously for a letter, day after day, year after year, as more than thirty years passed. And her husband defacing and returning the one letter that did arrive.

“Floor’s dry, if’n you want to go upstairs, Mrs. Mac,” Helen announced.

“It’s been nice talking to you, Margaret,” I said as I stood up. Now there was a trite comment. In neither the overflowing streets of Seven Dials nor the drawing rooms of Belgravia—not even in the comfortable homes of Toronto —did one encounter such human emotion nakedly displayed. This really was the New World, and I didn’t quite know what to make of it. I’m much more comfortable hiding behind a civilized façade of good manners and polite indifference than being confronted by this strange American habit of revealing one’s innermost feelings to almost-perfect strangers.

As a nation, they won’t get anywhere as long as they continue to display such tolerance to the relaxation of common decency. Not compared to the fortitude of the peoples of the British Empire, for which I had not the slightest bit of affinity, but felt a certain not-quiteunderstood pride nevertheless.

As I trudged up the stairs to my office, it occurred to me that I had gone a whole half an hour without giving a thought to the whereabouts of my wayward son.

I worked on the books, making several mistakes when my mind wandered, and I found myself thinking more about Angus than the columns of figures I should be concentrating on.

It couldn’t be easy for Angus, being my son. We’d had a nice life, in Toronto. I’d rented a beautiful home in the best part of town. Angus had gone to a good Episcopal school, in the company of boys from the best families. The sons of bankers, lawyers, men of business and blue-blooded aristocrats who’d come to Canada when their bloodlines outlasted their family fortunes. His schoolmates invited Angus to skating and tennis parties; he spent weekends at near-palatial summer homes on Stony Lake. Then one day, I arrived at his school in the middle of the night, forced the night porter to rouse my son from his bed, informed the headmaster, still rubbing sleep out of his eyes and wearing a hastily tied dressing gown, that Angus was leaving, and ordered my driver to toss his trunk into the cab. We caught the next train out of Union Station heading west. The boy looked out the window and didn’t even complain that he hadn’t had a chance to bid his friends goodbye.

Finally, I decided the ledger was accurate enough and took our earnings to the bank. But despite the fact that I had enjoyed all of a half-an-hour’s sleep the previous night, I didn’t want to go back to Mrs. Mann’s boarding house for my usual nap. Not that Angus normally hung around during the day when I rested, but the place would be so lonely without him.

Mrs. Mann had promised to send word the minute he got home.

“Still here, Fee?” Ray stuck his head around the door.

“How long does it take to get to the Creeks, Ray?”

“I don’t know. Less than a day, maybe. Why?”

Less than a day. No doubt by the time they found this…whatever his name was…it would be too late to head straight back to Dawson. So I could expect Angus home tomorrow. Probably shortly after lunch. He’d have eaten all the food he took with him and would be ravenous. Angus could eat a prodigious amount.

“Everything all right, Fee?” Ray asked. “Angus has run off. Gone with Richard Sterling to the Creeks on some stupid police investigation. He didn’t even tell me was he was going.” At last I started to cry.

I never cry. Some women can cry with grace, so they still manage to look dewy-fresh and perfectly lovely. Not me. Crying makes my nose red and my eyes all puffy, and the skin on my face turns white and lumpy like a batch of bad dough.

Ray stared at me in horror, whether at the news of Angus or my tears, I didn’t know. “Is the man mad? Ta take a twelve-year-old lad on police business?”

“I’d guess Sterling didn’t have much to say about it.” Through my tears I told Ray the story. Dawson and the New World were having an effect on me: now I was the one pouring out my heart.

“They’ve gone looking for Johnny Stewart, my pal from Glasgow.”

I fumbled in the depths of my sleeve and brought out a handkerchief. It was well laundered and many times mended. Someone had embroidered JPD in perfect, tiny blue stitches in one corner. I didn’t remember knowing anyone with the initials JPD.

Ray came around the desk and patted me on the shoulder with as much awkwardness as if he were trying to soothe a rattlesnake. “There, there, Fee. If Angus is with Sterling, he’ll be okay.”

“But I don’t know if he found Sterling,” I blubbered shamelessly. “Maybe he went after Sterling but didn’t go in the right direction. Maybe he’s lost in the wilderness, set upon by Indian barbarians.”

“Now you’re letting your imagination run away, Fee. No one can get lost in the wilderness round here. The trail leading from Dawson to the Creeks is better marked than the road from Glasgow to Edinburgh, although a mite rougher in places, I hear. And as for Indians, they take one look at Angus, and they’ll be more than happy to bring him home, expecting a fat reward.”

I got to my feet and turned to look out the window. As usual, a horse was floundering in the mud: the mud too thick, the horse too ill fed, the cart too heavily loaded. And, as usual, the driver screamed until the veins in his neck were about to pop and flailed at the emaciated beast’s flanks as if that would do any good. Better if he got behind the cart and pushed, or better still, unloaded the cart. The Vanderhaege sisters’ bakery was back in full operation, the burnt-out shell torn down and a new one replaced in a day. Graham Donohue walked by, keeping to the far side of the street. He glanced at the Savoy but scurried away. Something was bothering him. If I’d been less worried about my son, I might have found time to worry about what had spooked our intrepid American newspaperman so much since the murder of Jack Ireland. But right now, Graham’s guilt, or innocence, was nothing more than a niggling thought in the back of my mind, sort of like thinking about a pesky mosquito when one is confronted by a hungry grizzly bear.

“You’re right, Ray,” I said. “But how can I not worry?”

“Did you speak to anyone?”

“No.”

“I’ll go ’round to the fort. Say I’m looking for Sterling. That he owes me money or some such. Ask when he’s due back.”

I turned and gave Ray a weak smile. “Thank you. I’d appreciate that.” I blew my nose in a completely unladylike manner into JPD’s handkerchief.

“Angus is a smart wee lad, Fiona. He won’t go far if he’s by himself. And if he’s caught up with Sterling, then the Constable’ll look after him. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, Ray. I do know all that.”

“I’ll see that the boys are ready for the day, then I’ll be off to the fort. Nose around a bit. Maybe someone saw Angus. Now you, Fee, you should go home and have your nap and tidy up. Won’t do yourself any good, not sleeping.”

“Yes, Ray.” We both looked up at the sound of footsteps in the hallway, followed by a discreet cough.

Sergeant Lancaster stood in the doorway, clutching his hat to his chest. I’d only left Lancaster a couple of hours ago. I could imagine him wandering through the darkened streets gazing at the moon like a love-struck fool.

I was not in any mood to pretend to be polite. “Yes, Sergeant. Can I help you with something?”

Of course, like a love-struck fool, he didn’t pick up anything in my voice or manner that he didn’t want to. “Is this man bothering you, Mrs. MacGillivray?”

Ray swallowed a laugh. “Certainly not. I am…distraught…and Mr. Walker is reminding me of my responsibilities.” I hated being caught in a naked display of emotion. Like an American. I glared at Lancaster.

Lancaster glared at Ray, and Ray could hardly hide his smirk. “Guess I’ll be off then, Fee,” my partner said. “Unless you need me to hang around. A chaperone, like.”

“Go away.” He left, still chuckling. Ray loved Angus. His belief in my son’s safety gave me a good deal of comfort. I turned to Lancaster. “Now that you’re here, Sergeant…”

“I don’t care for that man,” Lancaster said. “I don’t think his intentions towards you are entirely honourable, Mrs. MacGillivray.”

More honourable than yours. I sat down with a thud. Most unladylike, to make a sound when seating oneself.

“Mrs. MacGillivray.” Lancaster rounded the desk and stood looking down at me. His eyes were on fire, his breath rough and uneven. “Fiona. My dear. Surely you must understand that in this place your precious, God-given reputation is open to any man’s evil thoughts. Think of your late husband. He must be looking down from Heaven, so dreadfully worried about you.”

That did it. Time to get rid of the overbearing Sergeant Lancaster, even if I did myself and my business an injury. I opened my mouth.

“Think of your dear son.”

I closed it again. What if something did happen to Angus? Since Ray’s lecture, my fears were receding, but suppose Angus never caught up with Sterling. Or perhaps they were set upon by bandits. Although no one had reported bandits operating in the Yukon. If something terrible came to pass, I would need all possible assistance, and the good will, of every member of the NWMP. And, according to Sterling, Lancaster, useless as he might be, had the respect of his fellow officers. I cocked my head to one side.

“Please, Sergeant Lancaster. I appreciate your courtesy, but I need some time alone.” Taking a chance at appearing too theatrical, I touched my forehead with the back of my hand. “I am feeling quite unwell.”

Lancaster blushed, with considerably less charm than young McAllen had earlier. I had touched upon a feminine matter—a matter of some delicacy. Enough to have most men running for the hills (or the bars) in terror. I wondered if Lancaster had ever been married. If he had, he’d probably bored Mrs. Lancaster to death. I didn’t even know, nor did I care to find out, his first name.

“Pardon me, my dear. I apologize.” He stumbled backwards, bumping his fleshy hip on the corner of my desk. “When I saw you standing at the window, looking so lovely, I thought you might be in need of assistance.” He backed his way out of the room. I fluttered my fingers to say goodbye.

Once I heard the heavy tread of his boots on the stairs, I jumped up, slammed the office door shut, and burst into another round of tears.

I could take almost anything life could threaten me with—I’d proved I could. But I needed my son. If anything happened to Angus, it would be more than I could bear.