Gold Fever (5 page)

Irene looked Mary up and down and turned up her nose. “Heard you had trouble upstairs, Mrs. MacGillivray,” she said with an unnecessary amount of relish.

“It was nothing I can't handle. Enjoy your breakfast. Come, Mary, mustn't keep Mrs. Mann waiting.”

I was half-afraid a bitter Chloe would be waiting for me outside. But fortunately—for her—she had taken her leave. I doubted I'd see her again. There were plenty of dance halls in Dawson, and she'd find employment in another one soon enough. If she kept on drinking, which it was almost certain she would, she would be fired from each one, gradually descending the ladder of what passes for respectability in the Dawson demi-monde, forgetting about me as new resentments crowded in.

The fancy gambler I'd been telling Graham about earlier was standing outside our front door. He was dressed in a crisp suit, diamond stick pin too large to be real, cravat as white as snow on the Ogilvie Mountains in February. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, and the ends of his heavily-waxed handlebar moustache pointed towards the sky. I gave him a second look and could see the signs of genteel wear: ground-in dirt on the edges of his white cuffs, a line of stitches holding together the knee of his right trouser leg, the strain around the waist as an ill-fitting shirt tried to stretch over his sizeable belly.

He'd had a good night in our gambling hall, bent over a hand of cards at the poker table, not pausing to watch the stage snow or joining in the dancing. All for the good— he'd be more than eager to return.

He tipped his hat to me. “Good morning, madam. May I compliment you on the quality of your establishment?” American. Very Boston Brahman. He spoke to me but watched Irene out of the corner of his small, dark eyes.

“You certainly may,” I replied. “We're closing temporarily, but I hope you'll do us the honour of a return visit this evening.”

“It would be my pleasure. Allow me to introduce myself. Tom Jannis, late of Boston, Massachusetts.”

“Mr. Jannis.” I stepped around him, my hand on Mary's arm.

“Lady Irenee,” he said. “If you would allow me a small indulgence, I'd like to offer you a small breakfast.”

Ray growled. I kept walking: let them sort it out.

“Thank you for the offer, sir,” Irene said, in a simpering voice, “but I'm having breakfast with my boss, Mr. Walker here.”

“Some other time perhaps,” Jannis said.

I didn't hear any more. Ray would not be pleased at being identified as Irene's boss, as if breakfast with him were an obligation.

Poor Ray. I suspected Irene had a secret lover. Almost certainly a married man, as she kept him so much under wraps that she'd been prepared to go to jail rather than use him as her alibi when she'd recently come under suspicion of a particularly heinous crime.

Ray continued to live in hope.

Don't we all?

Angus MacGillivray hated working at the hardware store. His mother had insisted that he spend every morning, six days a week, helping out in Mr. Mann's shop. The waterfront consisted of a sea of stores operated out of filthy canvas tents thrown up as soon as the spring floodwaters receded. They called the instant road Bowery Street. The floodplain beside the Yukon River was prime retail territory, catering to men who staggered off the boats, took one look at the town they'd given their all to reach and sold everything they owned at pennies on the dollar to raise enough money for the return journey south. Mr. Mann did a roaring trade buying hardware, mining equipment and personal items cheap before turning around and selling them at a handsome profit to men who'd come prospecting but somehow neglected to equip themselves with the proper equipment. The whisper of gold seduced a lot of foolish people, Angus's mother had told him, and there was no shame in taking advantage of their stupidity—as long as one remained within the boundaries of the law and common decency. Angus was only twelve years old, but he'd sometimes wondered about his mother's definition of legality. He had a clear memory of being roused out of his warm, comfortable bed in the dormitory of his exclusive boys' school in the early hours and bustled through ice-covered streets to catch the next train leaving Toronto's Union Station. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought he could remember England and making an equally rapid departure from his beloved nanny and their London townhouse for the ship that took them to Canada.

Right now he wished he could make a rapid departure from Mr. Mann's store. A huge mountain of a man had dumped a donkey cart full of crates at the entrance. He and Mr. Mann had negotiated a price, money was exchanged, and the man left. It was Angus's job to lug the crates into the side tent and unpack everything for Mr. Mann's inspection.

He'd rather be at school, but there wasn't a school in Dawson, although his mother hoped someone would open one soon. Over the winter, when everything moved slowly because no one had much of anything to eat and nothing much to do, his mother had attempted to teach him herself. She could speak a schoolgirl sort of French and Italian, could read classical Greek and Latin, and could paint amateurish watercolours and embroider a beautiful lace handkerchief. She could also play a simple tune on a piano. She knew nothing of mathematics, or science, or even geography. In short, she could teach Angus almost none of what he wanted to know.

Most of all, Angus MacGillivray wanted to be a Mountie some day. Mounties were not required to embroider or to translate the
Iliad
from the original Greek.

He hefted a particularly heavy crate and grinned at the sudden image of the police calling upon the only man they could think of, one Angus MacGillivray, to decipher a clue hidden in the writings of Virgil or of Homer.

“Yous a good boy, good worker,” Mr. Mann said from behind the wooden counter, mistaking the smile of a boy's daydreams for enjoyment of his work.

Mr. Mann's shop was so profitable that he owned two tents. The smaller one had an awning stretched between two poles driven into the mud on either side of a low wooden table where the best merchandise was displayed. Other goods were piled in the back of the tent, where the customers could see them and beckon to Mr. Mann or Angus to pull them out for a closer look. The larger tent, off to one side, mostly contained goods in great quantity— yesterday there had been case upon case of canned beef, all of it sold by this morning—and stuff waiting to be examined by Mr. Mann's bargain-hunting eye.

As Angus came out of the back tent for yet another crate, two ladies stepped hesitantly up to the wooden counter. A mother and daughter, he guessed. The younger one looked as if she hadn't had the sun touch her face in her lifetime. He knew a pale complexion was supposedly a sign of good breeding and great beauty, but as his mother was as dark, with black hair and black eyes, as he, Angus, was fair, he never associated paleness with beauty. This woman was as scrawny as a scarecrow on the cornfields back in Ontario, and her washed-out blue eyes flittered around the interior of the shabby shop like an exotic butterfly in a net trying to find its way to freedom. The overabundance of birds and feathers on her large hat had been tossed about by the wind so they now resembled a pair of crows building a nest. Her tiny, delicate shoes were caked with mud. Her dress was very fine, although Angus, who'd lived closer to a woman than most boys of his class ever would, recognized hasty stitches and mismatched patches on the sleeves and around the hem. But where the young one looked like she might blow away in a middling-strong wind, the older woman was bold and buxom, with a prominent nose that came to a sharp point. She was dressed in a travelling costume of practical tweed, a no-nonsense hat, and heavy boots.

“This looks quite the place, doesn't it, dear. How exciting; we're here at last! What an adventure that journey was. You, young man, we're in search of mining supplies and were told we could find them here.”

Angus gaped. “Mining supplies, ma'am?” The woman winked at him and dropped her voice to a theatrical whisper. “We're in search of people who are buying mining supplies. This looks like exactly the sort of place to locate them.”

Mr. Mann had finished serving one customer, having sold an old sourdough a pair of almost-white longjohns, and bowed slightly. “Ladies, I help?”

“I am sure you can, sir.” The woman's accent was middleclass English, and Angus imagined she might have been the sort of formidable governess his schoolmates told stories about. “I arrived in Dawson this very morning and am scouting out the town, as you might say. I am,” she announced after a heavy pause, “a writer.”

Unimpressed, Mr. Mann said, “Yous wanting to buys or sells?”

“My dear man, I want to observe. You go about your business,” she flicked her fingers at him, “and pretend we are not here.”

Mr. Mann shrugged and tucked the coin he'd received for the underwear into the cash box.

“Do you work here, young man?” the governess asked Angus.

He was somewhat ashamed to admit it but could think of no way to avoid the question. “Yes, ma'am.”

She carried a large straw bag, and from its depths she whipped out a small notebook and the stub of a pencil. Angus took a step back. An outside reporter had caused his mother a good deal of trouble recently, and Angus knew things about his mother's friend, the American newspaperman Mr. Donohue, that he could never tell her. He was not in the frame of mind to be friendly to newsmen—or women for that matter.

“I am Miss Witherspoon, and this is my companion, Miss Forester. Your name is?”

“Angus, you left before Mrs. Mann finished the baking.” Angus's mother bustled into the shop, looking like a pearl lost in a barnyard. She wore a light green day dress with a touch of lace the colour of sea froth circling the hem. Her straw hat was trimmed with matching ribbons, and sapphire teardrop earrings peeked out from beneath the brim.

She nodded to the two women. “Good morning. Don't let me interrupt your business, Angus. I'll put your treat here behind the counter, shall I? Mr. Mann, I've brought biscuits for you as well.”

Mr. Mann grunted and tried not to look pleased.

“Are these real gold pans?” While the older woman had been introducing herself, her companion had been poking about the goods with an air of mild disinterest. She spoke for the first time as she pulled the top pan off the pile and turned it over. It was brand-new, never used, as shiny as the day it was made. It had been purchased by some low-level bank clerk, diary farmer, or unemployed labourer who hadn't the slightest idea what real gold prospecting involved. And once he arrived in Dawson, discovered he had no desire to find out.

“Indeed they are,” Angus said, trying to look like a man of business and wishing his mother would leave. Constable Sterling's mother didn't follow him on his rounds.

“Did you bring these things all this way?” the lady asked. “It must have been quite a feat.”

“Gee, Ma, uh, Mother, Miss Forester sounds exactly like you,” Angus said. “The same accent, I mean. Maybe you're from the same town back in Scotland. Where did you grow up, Miss Forester? My mother is from Skye. That's an island.”

Miss Forester looked up from the gold pans. Fiona was staring at her quite strangely. Miss Witherspoon glanced from one woman to the other.

“Forester?” Fiona said. “Euila?”

“That is my name. Do I know you, madam?”

“I think you might. I'm Mrs…Miss…Mac…I'm Fiona.”

“Fiona.” Miss Forester exhaled the word in a long sigh. “Fiona. Good heavens…” She crumbled to the street in a dainty, although scrawny, heap.

I might have joined her in the dust of Bowery Street myself had I not been concerned for the condition of dress and hat. Euila Forester. I wouldn't have recognized her at all, had not Angus pointed out the similarity of our accents then called her by her surname. Euila Forester. Of all people. Here in Dawson, Yukon Territory, Canada.

Men ran from all over. So many eager hands reached out to help Euila to her feet, she was in danger of being trampled. Angus crouched beside her, unsure of what to do. Mr. Mann kept a wary eye on his property, and Euila's companion, a formidable lady of more advanced years, stood out of the way and scribbled in her notebook.

“Give her some air. Stand back, you fools!” Graham Donohue pushed his way to the front of the crowd. “Angus, unbutton the lady's collar,” he ordered.

Angus gasped. “I couldn't!” I looked around the crowd, hoping to find a female amongst the onlookers. None but Miss Witherspoon, still writing furiously. “For goodness sake, I'll do it.” I knelt beside Euila, cursing the dust as it settled into my skirts. At least it hadn't rained in a few days, nor had a horse recently left evidence of its passing.

Euila's dress was done up to her chin by a formidable row of tiny mother-of-pearl buttons. My fingers fumbled, and after seemingly endless effort, I managed to release one. Throwing propriety to the winds, I grabbed either side of the fabric and pulled. Mother-of-pearl flew in all directions. Euila moaned, and her eyes flickered.

“She's coming around,” a man shouted. “Fiona saved her.”

“Fiona?” Euila whispered.

Someone placed a cup of water in my hand, and I lifted Euila's head to help her take a cautious sip. She sat up, grabbed my hand and drained the cup.

She seemed to be in no danger of collapsing again, so I got to my feet. “Graham, Angus, help her up,” I ordered. The front of my dress was an absolute mess—streaked with dust and spotted with mud and I-hated-to-think-what from knee to hem. I made a few feeble swipes, hoping to wipe it all off, to no effect.

While I examined my garment, Angus and Graham each grabbed Euila by one arm. As she began to stagger upright, two other men got behind her and pushed, and the four of them managed to get the poor thing to her feet with about as much dignity as if they were unloading a reluctant cow from the belly of a steamship.