Gypsy (54 page)

‘I shouldn’t have taken up with a married man,’ she said sadly. ‘It
was
wrong.’

‘Now, don’t you come all holy on me.’ Jack laughed and got to his feet, pulling her out of her chair. ‘Let me show you what I’ve been doing before it gets dark, and tonight we’ll get blinding drunk to celebrate you finally making it to Bonanza.’

Jack led her up some fifty yards behind his cabin. He warned her to take care to walk carefully around any indentations in the snow as they were holes he’d dug. He explained what he was doing.

‘The ground is frozen two feet or so down, even in summer,’ he said. ‘So I dig down as far as I can, then light a fire in the hole. That melts the ice, and the next day I shovel out all the slushy dirt, which is what those piles are.’ He indicated huge snow-covered mounds and a fresh one that he’d been digging out when she arrived. ‘They are called dumps.’

He swept the snow off a long trough with crossbars running all along the bottom. ‘This is a sluice, and when the thaw comes, I’ll shovel the dump into the sluice, then wash it with water. All the gravel and dirt gets washed away, and if I’m lucky I’ll find some gold stuck at the bottom of the sluice.’

‘And you give it to Oz?’ she asked.

‘Not if I find it here. I’ve taken a “lay“on this bit of his claim. I didn’t pay him any money for it. Our arrangement is that I work for him down there for part of the day, and anything we find there belongs to him. In return I get this.’

Beth nodded. ‘So have you found any gold?’

‘Not yet, that will only be revealed when I start sluicing. Maybe I won’t ever find any. But Oz has found a lot in the last two years. He could, if he wanted, sell this claim for a fortune.’

Beth smiled. Ever since she arrived in Dawson she’d heard so many fantastic stories about claims along Bonanza and Eldorado changing hands for staggering amounts. Many of the men who originally staked the claim now owned the hotels and saloons in Dawson, or had gone back to the Outside very rich men.

Yet there were still many old Sourdoughs like Oz who would never sell up. They continued to live in their primitive cabins, going into town once in a while to blow a great chunk of their gold, then back they’d go to the cabin and start again.

‘Oz can’t dig much now,’ Jack explained. ‘He’s getting old, tired and achy. He don’t really need any more gold, but he don’t want to give up either. So with me here he’s got what he wants — help, company and the excitement that comes with finding more gold.’

They walked on then right up the hill to where it turned to woodland.

‘I come up here and shoot,’ Jack said. ‘I got a moose a couple of weeks ago and we’ve got enough meat to last till the thaw. It was so pretty last autumn, so many different berries growing and the leaves changing colour, not like down there,’ he said, thumbing in the direction of the view down towards the creek.

Beth turned to look at the snow-covered scene. ‘It’s pretty now,’ she replied. ‘But I suppose that’s because all the scars of holes, dumps and mining equipment are disguised by the snow. I bet it will look like a junkyard set in a slick of mud come the thaw.’

‘Worse. There’s huge ditches cut from the streams to wash out the sluices. It looks hideous.’

Jack had to light more fires in his holes, so Beth went back into the cabin as it was so cold.

She didn’t need to ask if he’d built it. His stamp was all over it, from the way he’d fitted the bed into an alcove to the carefully crafted shutters at the windows. She guessed he’d made most of the furniture during the worst weather when he couldn’t go outside. She ran her hand over the table legs, marvelling that he’d whittled the curves and rubbed them down till they were smooth.

Everything was so tidy too. Plates and dishes were stacked away on the shelves, a shirt hung drying on a rack by the stove, and he’d even made his bed.

It was while looking at the bed that she saw the pictures. They were pinned to the wall in the alcove and wouldn’t be seen by anyone just coming into the cabin for tea and a chat.

One was of Jack and herself when they first got to New York, which they’d had taken in a booth down by South Seaport. Beth’s copy was lost when they had to move so hastily out of the flat on Houston Street, and it was good to see it again. Another picture was of her playing her fiddle at the Bear in Philadelphia. She had no idea who had taken it or when, as she’d never seen it before.

There was one of Jack and her taken at Skagway. That one, she remembered, was taken by a man who was compiling a photographic journal of the Chilkoot Trail. She didn’t know how Jack had got a copy of it, for they never saw the man again. Finally, there was one of her playing on the opening night at the Golden Nugget. It was taken by the editor of Dawson’s newspaper,
The Nugget
, and it appeared in the paper along with an article about her, Jack and Theo, and how they’d lost Sam on the trail. Jack must have begged him for a copy of the picture.

She felt warm inside at him displaying pictures of her. She thought most miners would have pictures of pretty, scantily dressed ladies, not just an old friend.

‘Those pictures of yours brought back a few memories,’ she said later when he got back.

He looked a little sheepish. ‘It’s good to look at them when I go to bed,’ he said. ‘I had the one with the four of us taken in Skagway up there for a while too, but I took it down because Sam’s face made me sad, and Theo’s made me angry.’

Beth pointed to the one of them together in New York. ‘You look so young and skinny,’ she said. ‘And I look very prim. How we’ve changed!’

‘You wouldn’t even invite me up to your room in those days.’ He grinned. ‘And here we are all this time later, alone together miles from anywhere. That’s progress!’

In the days following her arrival at Jack’s, Beth felt like a tightly coiled spring gradually unwinding. The fire in Dawson, helping the homeless and the unpleasantness with John afterwards must have taken a lot out of her.

It was good to wake in the morning to absolute silence and to know the day ahead would make no demands on her. Sometimes Jack took her out for an exhilarating ride on the sledge, with Oz’s dogs, Flash and Silver, pulling them. But mostly she read a little, mended Jack’s torn clothes and took walks along the frozen creek or up through the woods, with the dogs happily accompanying her.

The temperature had risen, and when the sun came out it felt almost like spring. Jack was the easiest of people to live with, always calm, never complaining. His face broke into a wide smile when she took him coffee and cake while he was digging, and appreciated it when she’d heated hot water for him to wash when he came in. But he didn’t expect anything.

Yet the thing she liked best of all was that he made her laugh. She would be sitting reading and she’d suddenly look up to see his face pressed grotesquely at the window. Once she heard a growling and scraping at the door and took fright, thinking it was a bear, but it was only him playing the fool. Most of the laughter, however, came from light-hearted banter between them, shared memories or observations about people. She realized that she hadn’t really had that with Theo, nor long conversations either. She suspected that if they hadn’t always had Sam and Jack around them, they might have been very bored.

The days were growing longer now and sometimes they would go down to Oz’s cabin after supper, and Beth would play her fiddle for him. Some evenings men from nearby claims would hear her and come along too. They were the best of times, for some of the men would sing with her, they had good stories to tell and appreciated some feminine company.

There were a few women along Bonanza. In the main they were a tough, hard-bitten breed who dug holes in the frozen ground as efficiently as their men, and often did other jobs as well, like washing for other miners or baking bread and pies to earn badly needed extra money. They rebuffed Beth’s tentative overtures of friendship, and while Jack said this was because they didn’t want a pretty woman near their men, Beth felt it was more likely that they had heard the gossip about her.

While that didn’t matter here, Beth realized with a little alarm that once back on the Outside she was going to face more serious social disapproval.

A dance-hall girl, or even a whore, might get married, or become a nurse or a secretary, with little fear of anyone discovering what she had done here. But Beth knew she was up there with Klondike Kate, Diamond Tooth Gertie and other women who’d made a big splash in Dawson City, and the stories about them all had spread all over the world through newspaper articles about the Klondike.

So unless she gave up playing her fiddle in public, and never told a soul on the Outside that she’d been to Dawson City during the Gold Rush, the more scandalous parts of her time here in Dawson were going to get out.

Beth had been thinking about this problem one morning as she got washed and dressed. She had no solution as her fiddle-playing was the only way she had of making a living. But as the sun was shining, she thought she would stop worrying about her future and see if she could tempt Jack into leaving his digging to go for a walk with her.

She knew the temperature had risen the second she walked out of the cabin for her face didn’t tingle as it usually did. Then she heard dripping. It was all around her, coming from the snow-covered machinery, the roof of the cabin, the path down to Oz’s, everywhere.

The snow was melting!

Excitedly, she ran up behind the cabin and up the hill, calling to Jack. He paused in his digging as she approached him and leaned on his shovel with a wide grin on his face.

Beth stopped short, whatever she was going to say forgotten at the sight of him without his beard.

‘When did you do that?’ she asked.

‘Do what?’

‘You know! Your beard’s gone.’

‘Oh, that.’ He rubbed his chin as if he was surprised to find no hairy mass there. ‘I saw the thaw had come this morning, and I thought it was time the beard went too.’

‘You look much nicer,’ she said. In fact he looked very handsome, for his square jaw and wide mouth were two good features he never should have covered. ‘And much younger.’

‘I’m glad it meets with your approval,’ he said. ‘But what were you rushing up here to tell me? Is Queen Victoria dead?’

‘Not as far as I know.’ Beth laughed. ‘I was just excited because the snow is melting.’

‘Remember how it was last year?’ Jack mused. ‘Up to our knees in mud at Lake Bennett and you skipping off to look for spring flowers!’

‘Let’s go and do that again,’ she suggested.

‘There won’t be any flowers for a while,’ he reminded her.

‘But there might be in sheltered places. Let’s go and look?’

Jack stuck his shovel hard into the ground. ‘All right, just to please you.’

As they reached the woods at the top of the hill, the thaw was even more apparent, for the sound of snow plopping from the branches of trees was almost a symphony. Beth made a snowball and threw it at Jack, and he quickly retaliated. She ran for it, but each time she took shelter behind a tree, she made another snowball to hurl at him.

The game went on and on, both of them shrieking with laughter each time they were hit and jeering at each other when they missed.

They had gone further and further into the wood, and Beth found a very big tree to hide behind. Jack was suddenly silent, so she peeped round the tree trunk to see where he was.

Suddenly she felt his hand clamp on to her shoulder. ‘Boo!’ he shouted, making her nearly jump out of her skin as she hadn’t heard him creep up behind her.

She had a snowball ready in her hand, and she brought it up and pushed it into his face. ‘Boo to you too,’ she giggled.

He laughed and brushed the snow off his face, but there was still some on his nose. They were only a foot apart, and Beth took off her mitten and reached out to brush the snow away. But as her hand touched his cheek, she suddenly saw something in his eyes. It was the same look she’d seen the last night on the ship before they got to New York. She was so innocent then that she hadn’t known what it meant, except that it was special. But she knew what it was now.

Raw longing.

She couldn’t take her hand away from his cheek. She had a feeling welling up inside her that was so strong and sweet she felt she might cry. He took her hand and moved it to his mouth, kissing her palm. The warmth and softness of his lips sent an exquisite tingle down her spine.

It was she who moved closer, moving her hand to his cheeks to kiss him on the lips. For a moment or two he didn’t move, her lips on his, their bodies not quite touching, but then his hand came up to cup her face and he was kissing her back with such tenderness it made her feel she was an innocent seventeen-year-old again.

How long they stood there kissing she didn’t know, but she knew she didn’t want it to stop. Every part of her body was tingling with desire, wanting more than kissing but afraid to break away even for a second in case the spell broke.

Snow continued to plop from the trees all around them and the sun felt warm as it slanted across her cheek. In the distance she could hear the clank of a windlass as a miner hauled his bucket of mud out of a hole in the ground, and a bird chirruped on a nearby tree.

It was Jack who drew away first. His bare hands went back to cup her face and he looked deep into her eyes. ‘My beautiful Beth,’ he sighed. ‘I hope this isn’t just a dream and I wake up to find it didn’t really happen.’

Chapter Thirty-five

As they stopped outside the cabin to remove their boots, Beth felt awkward. The kissing had happened spontaneously up on the hill and it felt pure and right. But now they were going inside she was very aware that she had to decide whether or not they would move on to the next stage. She wanted to, but she wasn’t sure if it was wise.

Jack was her best and closest friend, the one person in the whole world who really knew her inside out. She was afraid of jeopardizing that friendship.

‘Scared?’ Jack asked as they stepped into the cabin.

‘No,’ she lied.

‘Well, I am,’ he admitted, kissing her nose as he took off her hat and ran his fingers through her hair. ‘But then I’ve been dreaming of making love to you ever since I first met you.’