Forget-Me-Not Bride (9 page)

‘I don't have a taking against gambling,' Lilli said indignantly. ‘My father was Irish. I've been brought up with race-horse gambling. I just don't think children should be
encouraged
to gamble, that's all.'

‘I wasn't encouraging him to gamble.' There was a pained expression in the dark, rich voice. ‘I was merely offering to teach him a couple of card tricks.'

Lilli was well aware that under normal circumstances she would now have excused herself, removing Leo firmly from Mr Coolidge's company. The circumstances, however, were not normal. If her instincts of the previous evening were correct – and the way her heart had begun to slam and was continuing to slam indicated that they were – then Jack Coolidge was going to play a very large and important part in Leo's life. All that was necessary was that he be made to appreciate that six-year-old boys were dangerously impressionable and couldn't be spoken to as if they were adults. ‘Perhaps you could tell Leo about stampeders, Mr Coolidge,' she said, aware that the necessary conversation couldn't take place now, while Leo was present.

‘Stampeders?' He looked bemused as if, despite his nugget watch-chain, gold prospecting was something alien to him.

‘Are
you
a stampeder, Mr Coolidge?' Leo asked eagerly. ‘My Pa wanted to be a stampeder. He wanted to take the Chilkoot Trail with the first rush of gold-prospectors four years ago, but he was too sick.'

‘Pa died six months ago,' Lilli said quietly, before Jack Coolidge could ask after their father's present welfare.

‘I'm sorry.' The honey-dark voice was sincere. He hesitated for a moment, frowning slightly, and then he squatted down on his haunches so that he and Leo were eye to eye. ‘You want to know about stampeders, do you, young man?' he asked, tipping his Homburg to the back of his head. ‘Well, first of all I can tell you that I'm not a stampeder and never have been. Stampeders are far bigger gamblers than card-sharpers. Even when they're on to a sure thing, they'll leave it to follow a rumour. When news came through of the big beach-strike at Nome, way over in the west on the edge of the Bering Sea, men taking bucketfuls of gold from mines around Dawson abandoned them, staking all their new-found riches on the hope of even bigger strikes.'

‘But why would they do that, Mr Coolidge?' Leo asked, puzzled. ‘They might not be as lucky in Nome as they were in Dawson.'

‘I doubt if many of them have been,' Jack Coolidge said wryly, ‘but what you've got to understand, young Leo, is that stampeders are not sane men. It's not the gold itself that gets into their blood and bones, it's the
looking
for it that obsesses them. They are all convinced that somewhere, over the next mountain and across the next river, there are nuggets far bigger than the ones they already have in their hands. And so, no matter what the hardships, they hit the trail, abandoning certainties for dreams.'

It was now Lilli's turn to frown. If all gold-prospectors were so feckless they would make alarmingly bad husbands. She thought of her fellow Peabody brides. They deserved far better husband material than Jack Coolidge was describing. Then she remembered Daniel Berton, the gold-prospector photographed in the
Examiner
. Mr Berton hadn't behaved in such a heedless fashion. When he had struck it rich he hadn't squandered his new-found wealth looking for more. He had returned to San Francisco in order to sensibly invest it.

‘And so the moral is, don't emulate stampeders,' Jack Coolidge was saying to Leo. ‘They are men wasting their lives seeking for something that even when it's found will never content them.'

It was advice Lilli couldn't quarrel with. Happy that Jack Coolidge was proving to be a far more responsible person than he had at first seemed, she said, as he stood up straight once more, ‘Thank you for talking to Leo so sensibly about stampeders, Mr Coolidge. I've heard so much talk of gold aboard the
Senator
I was beginning to think everyone was gold-mad.'

He grinned down at her and in the sunlight his earring glistened and his flamboyant watch-chain glittered. ‘No point filling young heads with dreams likely to lead to disaster,' he said, enjoying the comedy of sounding like a pontificating schoolmaster. He was just about to return to the subject of exactly why she was travelling to Dawson and what she intended doing when she arrived there when he became aware of a young seaman hovering nearby, trying to catch his eye. ‘Yes?' he queried.

‘The Captain would like a word, Mr Coolidge. He's on the bridge, sir.'

Jack suppressed his impatience. He had been enjoying his conversation with the delightfully naive Miss Stullen. It had made a welcome change from the bantering, worldly conversations he usually enjoyed with the opposite sex. It was, however, only their first day at sea. He would have plenty of opportunity to talk to her again. ‘Excuse me,' he said to her with genuine regret. ‘Perhaps next time we meet on deck you'll allow me to tell you a little about Dawson.'

‘I'd like that, Mr Coolidge,' Lilli said demurely, her eyes sparkling, fit to beat the lustre of his watch-chain. ‘Goodbye.' She stood holding Leo's hand as Jack Coolidge strode off in the direction of the bridge. Groups of men both seated and standing paused in their conversation as he passed by them, renewing it with vigour the instant he was out of earshot. They were quite obviously talking about him and Lilli wondered what they were saying.

Before she could walk by them herself, and perhaps overhear, the young seaman said, an odd note in his voice, ‘I hadn't realised you were a friend of Mr Coolidge's, Miss Stullen.'

Lilli turned to face him. He may have been gallantly helpful when she had boarded the
Senator
, but that gave him no right to engage her in conversation as if she were a familiar acquaintance. ‘There's no reason why you should have,' she said coolly. Over his shoulder she could see Marietta approaching. She wondered where Edie and Lottie were and hoped Marietta hadn't carelessly left them in the company of one of the dance-hall girls they had gone in search of.

‘I'm surprised, that's all,' the seaman said, standing his ground. ‘I thought you were one of Mrs Peabody's girls not a dance-hall floo …'

Lilli wasn't listening to him. She was walking towards Marietta, saying anxiously, ‘Where are Edie and Lottie? You haven't lost them, have you?'

‘No.' Marietta eyed the young seaman with interest, well aware that he was severely disgruntled by her arrival and had clearly been hoping for a much longer tête-à-tête with Lilli. ‘They're playing quoits near the stern.'

The seaman, knowing full well he had lost an ideal chance of deepening his acquaintance with Lilli, gave her a long burning look and then reluctantly turned on his heel.

‘I think you've made a conquest,' Marietta said, bemused that a virile male had ignored her own presence so spectacularly.

For a second Lilli wondered if Marietta had seen her with Lucky Jack Coolidge and then Marietta said, ‘Was that a snake tattoed on your beau's arm?'

There was a slight flush on Lilli's cheeks as, still thinking of Jack Coolidge's promise to seek her out again, she said, ‘I don't know, Marietta. Probably. Don't all sailors have snake tattoos?'

Marietta's smile was so wide it nearly split her gamine like face in half. ‘Of course they do,' she said agreeably, certain Lilli's faint blush indicated a
tendresse
for the muscular young sailor. She tucked her hand familiarly into the crook of Lilli's arm, for all the world as if they had been friends since childhood. ‘Now tell me why you're going to Dawson as a Peabody bride when a girl with your looks could have snared a rich husband in ‘Frisco without even trying.'

There was something about Marietta's fizzing ebullience that encouraged confidences and as they strolled down the deck, skirting the many groups of men in close conversation, Lilli said starkly, ‘My mother died two years ago and my father passed away six months ago. My mother's sister and her husband gave Leo and Lottie and me a home, but because of my uncle's bad temper and rigidity it was a hateful home. No-one was happy in it, not even my aunt.' She paused, aware that she felt not the slightest twinge of regret for having swept Leo and Lottie so unceremoniously from beneath her uncle's roof.

‘And?' Marietta prompted, enthralled.

Lilli checked that Leo was not within hearing distance and then, seeing that he was completely immersed in an imaginary world, pretending to be a steam train, she said simply, ‘My uncle and aunt have no children of their own and I overheard my uncle saying he intended changing Leo's surname to his and rearing him as his own child. He would have known I would never have allowed him to carry out his plans and yesterday morning he created an excuse to turn me from the house.' Her vibrant blue eyes had darkened to near-black. ‘He would never have allowed me to return. If I hadn't removed Leo and Lottie from the house immediately I might never have got another chance to do so.'

‘And from'Frisco as well?'

‘I didn't
intend
leaving San Francisco. I intended getting a job, renting an apartment. I found it impossible to do either and then I walked into the Peabody Marriage Bureau …'

‘And up the gangplank of the
Senator
!'

Lilli laughed. ‘Yes. And so far I don't regret it.'

Marietta looked across at her. ‘You might,' she said shrewdly, ‘when we arrive.'

Ahead of them, near the stern, Lilli could see Lottie and Edie playing quoits. Lottie's sailor-hat was perched on the back of her head, its blue ribbon flying in the breeze. Edie, short and dumpy, was laughing uproariously, all shyness gone as, childlike, she happily played with someone her own mental age.

Lilli steered Marietta in the direction of the deckrail. The conversation they were having was one that would have to come to an abrupt end the minute they came within Lottie's hearing and she didn't want it to come to an end, not just yet.

‘You mean marrying one of the men waiting for Peabody brides?' she asked, her eyebrows drawing together in a slight frown of apprehension.

Marietta nodded, a frizz of fox-red hair tumbling low over her forehead. ‘Yes. The gents in question are rather a fly in the ointment, don't you think?'

Lilli didn't quite know how to answer. They certainly would be a fly in the ointment if she thought she was going to have to marry one of them, but she no longer did think she was going to have to marry one of them. She had never regarded herself as being fey but ever since the previous evening she had been convinced she had had a glimpse of the future. It was too much of a coincidence for the man of her dreams to be sailing to Dawson when her own footsteps had been led so extraordinarily to the same destination. Their accidental meeting in the street and the fact that they were now both aboard the
Senator
had to be Fate. Destiny.

She wondered how much she could tell Marietta. She couldn't tell her she had already met the Peabody client she wished to marry because it had become obvious to her the second she had laid eyes on Jack Coolidge again that he would never in a million years be a Peabody client. Such a mere detail wouldn't stand in the way of Fate though. She remembered the heat at the back of his laughing eyes when he had promised to seek her out again and tell her all about Dawson. When she told him she was travelling there as a Peabody bride she just knew what his response was going to be. She just
knew
. ‘I'm not sure I'll be fulfilling my contract when we arrive in Dawson,' she said, sensing she could trust Marietta not to divulge her secret. ‘I think I might very well be marrying elsewhere.'

Marietta's slightly bulging eyes widened until she looked like a marmoset. They hadn't been aboard the
Senator
twenty-four hours! Miss Lilli Stullen was either the fastest worker she had ever known or else she and her sailor had met elsewhere, some time ago. ‘Why, you dark horse! You look so prim and proper I would never have guessed!' Even as she said the words she realised they weren't true. Her new-found friend's generously curved mouth indicated hidden fires and from the moment they had first spoken to each other in the dining-saloon she had been aware of the look of daring in Lilli's black-lashed eyes; a recklessness she had instantly identified with and been drawn towards. She began to giggle. ‘I suppose I should make my confession now. Like you, I haven't the slightest intention of marrying an unshaven, grizzle-haired, woman-hungry gold-prospector. The minute I set foot in Dawson I'm heading for the nearest dance-hall.'

Lilli wasn't sure what appalled her more. The image Marietta had conjured up of the kind of men awaiting their arrival, or her declaration that she was going to seek out the first dance-hall she came to. ‘But why?' she asked, horribly afraid that she knew the answer but hoping she might be wrong.

‘To become a dance-hall girl, of course,' Marietta said, her voice full of sweet reason. ‘Dance-hall girls have to be the only sensible women in the Klondike. Do you remember what Susan Bumby said about them? They rarely marry because they're too busy having a good time, pocketing gold nuggets from men who've struck it rich? Well, having a good time and pocketing gold nuggets is going to suit me just fine.'

Looking at her, Lilli didn't doubt it for a moment. Whereas Kate Salway, Susan Bumby and Miss Nettlesham all dressed respectably in neat shirtwaists and formal skirts and even Lettie's and Edie's shabby dresses were properly sombre and plain, Marietta's clothes were vulgarly eyecatching. Yesterday she had been wearing raspberry-pink, a colour that had clashed searingly with her fiery hair. Today she was dressed in a heavily flounced mauve blouse, a deeply frilled turquoise skirt skimming beige high-button boots. ‘But if you become a dance-hall girl none of us will be able to even acknowledge you,' she protested, stating the indisputable.