Gypsy (58 page)

But there was no note, and she had to rush out of the dining room to be sick after just smelling the coffee.

Back in the room, she sat by the open window looking down at the men trooping past the hotel, and suddenly her heart contracted with fear. Could Jack have left for Nome?

That seemed an absurd thought, for he’d shown nothing more than amusement and curiosity about the gold strike. He’d even said that if prospecting for gold here was hard, it would be even worse there, for Nome was almost in the Arctic Circle.

Yet a cold chill ran down her spine, for this whole town wouldn’t exist but for the irrationality and greed which gold brought out in men. She couldn’t even say that there was only one kind who would succumb to the lure of it, for she knew they came from every walk of life, and honest, decent men were far more common than crooks and swindlers.

She also knew that how much money a man already had made no difference, for she’d seen men with fortunes lose it all at the turn of a card. Theo had his dream come true when he got the Golden Nugget, yet he’d sold it behind her back and disappeared with the money. Why should she think Jack was any different?

She turned from the window and looked at the bed. They’d put the money in a cloth bag under the mattress after they got it from the bank. Jack had only kept back about a thousand dollars, and five hundred of that he’d given to her. If the bag was gone, so was he, just like Theo.

Shaking with nerves, she gingerly approached the bed and lifted the mattress. She slid her hand under it, but could feel nothing. An involuntary cry of despair came from deep within her. She ran her hands right round the bed, and on finding nothing, grabbed the mattress and tossed it on to the floor. But there was nothing beneath it, just the thin horsehair padding above the springs.

The shock made her reel, for however much she had rationalized that Jack was no different to other men, in her heart she’d felt he could never do anything so low.

He’d claimed he didn’t come here for the gold, only to be near her, and she’d believed that.

The betrayal was too much to bear, far worse than what Theo had done, for she’d always known he was a wild card. But Honest Jack, the man she had trusted implicitly for so many years, her comforter, her friend, how could he do this to her?

Sobbing hysterically, she flung herself down on to the bedding. She remembered how he’d pressed those five hundred dollars into her hands and said she couldn’t arrive in Vancouver looking like a pauper.

The rat must have been planning his escape then, and only gave her that money to salve his conscience so she wouldn’t be utterly destitute.

How could he do that to her?

Chapter Thirty-seven

Beth lay crying on the heap of bedding for hours. As the tickets were still there on the dressing table it seemed obvious to her that Jack wanted her to leave on the boat in the morning. That way he’d be free to go with that deranged brotherhood of men who would rather spend their lives in stinking shacks in remote places, dreaming of finding gold, than have a wife and family who loved them.

She relived the past few weeks, trying to see if she’d ignored something which might have been a hint that Jack wasn’t as deeply committed to her as she’d believed him to be.

There was the moment when she said she loved him and he had stalled on saying he loved her too. Yet at the time she’d thought that was just teasing.

She knew he had been happy out in Bonanza, but perhaps she’d been presumptuous to think he could be happier still living with her in the Outside. Now she came to think of it, he hadn’t ever talked about how he intended to make a living when they left Dawson.

His silence on the boat trip to Dawson looked suspicious now too. She’d thought he was merely stunned by Oz giving him the money, but what if it was because he felt he was being drawn into a trap?

That seemed laughable, but maybe to a man who liked a simple life well away from others, the prospect of living in a real house, surrounded by staid, respectable people, was a living death.

Yet surely he knew he could voice such fears to her? So perhaps it was in the Monte Carlo that he began drawing back? When Percy Turnball spoke of her being a legend, perhaps Jack was afraid he would always be in her shadow? That he would be expected to mould himself around her playing, and never again be able to choose how he wanted to live?

But why would he think that? She thought she’d made it plain enough that she didn’t care about anything other than him. Even playing her fiddle was secondary; she was just as happy playing for him alone and no longer craved an audience.

Would he have gone if she’d told him she thought she was carrying his child?

In the early evening Beth’s pride roused her from the floor.

‘If he’d rather be scrabbling around in the Arctic with a bunch of half-wits than going off on the boat to Vancouver with me, then that’s his funeral,’ she said to herself.

She slung the mattress back on to the bed and threw the covers over it, washed her face in the basin and scowled at her swollen eyes.

‘You will not cry any more,’ she told her image in the mirror. ‘You’ll go down to the dining room, eat a good meal, then pack your things ready for tomorrow. You won’t let anyone see you care that he’s gone.’

‘I’d like someone to help me to the boat with my luggage, please,’ Beth asked the hotel manager as she paid the bill the following morning.

The lobby was full of people departing for Nome, and though hardly any of them looked capable of braving an Arctic winter, they appeared to be following like sheep because so many others were leaving.

‘Of course, Miss Bolton,’ the manager said, smiling slimily at her. ‘Mr Child will be meeting you there?’

‘Yes, he will. He’s been called away on business,’ she said, smarting because the weasel had made a point of calling her Miss Bolton to show he knew she wasn’t married to Jack.

She had packed Jack’s new clothes, for if she’d left them in the room that would make it obvious she’d been abandoned, but she thought the manager knew that already, and was relishing her distress.

The bellboy walked behind her along Front Street with the luggage on a small handcart. The street was packed with people departing Dawson, and she guessed the boat would be grossly overcrowded as captains were like everyone else, only too happy to make a fast buck. But at least all the extra people would only be going as far as St Michael before jumping off to find some other way of reaching their destination.

Beth kept her head up high as she walked along. She might have a broken heart, but she knew she looked good in her new costume, with her hair pinned up under her hat. Yet all the same she dreaded seeing anyone she knew, for they were bound to ask where Jack was.

The
Maybelline
was a small but sturdy-looking steamer and relatively new, unlike most of the boats that had been pressed into service during the previous year. One of the crew took Beth’s luggage and showed her to her cabin which was up on the top deck. It was tiny, with only a foot of floor space next to the bunks, but as she’d seen how crowded it was down on the lower two decks, she didn’t care. Putting her luggage on the bottom bunk, she climbed on to the upper one and lay there watching the scene on the wharf through the tiny porthole.

If she hadn’t felt so miserable, she might have laughed to see people fighting to reach the front of the queue for tickets, then trying to bribe the crew to get them aboard. She didn’t understand their desperation. Only people you loved were worth fighting for. She’d certainly have fought tooth and nail to save Sam, and turned her back on a fortune if it had meant Molly could stay alive and well back in England.

The boat was juddering with the sound of hobnailed boots stomping across its deck. Outside her cabin she could hear a man with a booming voice complaining that his cabin was too small, and the crew member responding by telling him in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t like it he could get off the boat and he’d sell his tickets to someone else for double.

A woman’s voice piped up then, saying it was a disgrace that the boat was so overcrowded. She got a similar reply to the one given to the male complainant.

Beth got down off the bunk when she heard the steam horn blast out to hurry the last stragglers on board. She felt she had to take one last look at the place which two years earlier she’d set off for with such excitement.

The window was only a square foot of glass and it didn’t open, so her view was limited only to what was directly in front of it: just a group of young men with kitbags, heavy coats and shovels, still hoping they might be allowed on at the last minute. Behind them was a saloon, the fancy carved decoration on its facade suggesting the interior would be equally lavish. But it was a false image; inside it was little better than a shed, and tears welled up in Beth’s eyes for it seemed to symbolize how she’d been suckered into believing Jack was the real thing. She had believed he had no false facade, no tricks or cons. Honest Jack, a man she could depend on, who could be her friend, her love, her everything.

She was certain now that his baby was growing inside her, for she’d felt that nausea again as soon as she smelled coffee this morning. She knew she would love the baby despite Jack’s betrayal. Perhaps in time she would even forgive him. But she also knew she would never trust another man, not for as long as she lived.

Her view was out of focus because her eyes were swimming. She saw a man running behind the men in the queue, and although she only saw him for a brief second, she had the fleeting impression that he was tall, with dark hair. Her heart leapt involuntarily, yet she turned away from the window, irritated that she could imagine it was Jack.

But then she heard shouting and she pricked up her ears, for the man yelling that his wife had his ticket sounded just like Jack.

She was out through the cabin door and running down the steps to the crowded lower deck like the wind. There were passengers and luggage taking up every inch of space, but beyond them she could see the crew had already pulled in the gangplank and cast off, and on the wharf, with the boat moving slowly away from it, was Jack, red-faced and furious.

‘That’s my husband,’ she shouted, jumping over cases and kitbags and pushing people aside. ‘Let him on, please!’

The crew looked round at her in surprise. Jack took a few steps back, then ran forward and leapt out to the boat.

There was a united gasp from all the passengers on the lower deck, for the gap between boat and wharf was widening fast.

Beth clamped her hand over her mouth, for it seemed that Jack was suspended in space and would surely land in the water. But he landed on the boat with less than an inch to spare, falling forward on to his knees.

He was filthy and unshaven, but to Beth he looked wonderful. She ran forward, arms outstretched to hug him.

‘Thank God I made it,’ he panted as she ran to him. ‘You would’ve thought I’d run out on you!’

Ten minutes later in their cabin, Jack was still breathless. ‘I had to go to see to Oz,’ he wheezed out. ‘He’d been attacked. Willy the Whistle couldn’t get him in his boat.’

It was some little time before he got his breath back to explain fully. He was on his way back to the hotel the night he’d left her to go for a wander, when Willy the Whistle (so named because he played a penny whistle), an old-timer who’d been panning for gold around Dawson for years before the stampede began, shouted for him to stop.

Earlier in the evening, Willy had been in his cabin in the woods, some four or five miles from Oz’s claim, when he heard dogs barking and scraping at the door. He recognized them immediately as Flash and Silver, and knowing that they’d come for help, he followed them through the woods. About a mile away he found Oz lying in the undergrowth, badly beaten up, barely conscious and bleeding from a knife wound in his chest.

Willy was only a small man, and though he managed to rig up a rough stretcher and, with the dogs pulling it, succeeded in getting Oz to his cabin, he knew he didn’t have the strength to get Oz down to his boat and into it. So he shoved an old towel into Oz’s wound, gave him some whisky, and leaving him with his dogs to guard him, rowed into Dawson to get help.

Jack explained that he came back to the hotel to change into his old clothes, but as he was in such a hurry and expected to be back by morning anyway, he didn’t think to leave a note or even wake Beth.

When he and Willy got back to the cabin it was still dark, but on examining Oz Jack felt that moving him into the boat to take him to hospital might kill him. So he patched him up as best he could, and sent Willy off again to get a doctor while he stayed there.

‘I told him to go and tell you where I was,’ Jack said. ‘But the idiot drank the best part of a bottle of whisky on the way, fell asleep and drifted past Dawson. I was stuck out at Willy’s cabin, with no boat to go for help, and I couldn’t leave Oz anyway. By the time Willy had woken up, nearly killed himself rowing back to Dawson against the current and got a doctor, it was late last night. The doctor came out in his own boat with another man at first light. I came back here with them. Once Oz was in the hospital, I ran round to the Fairview, but you’d already left.’

‘I thought you’d left me and gone to Nome,’ she blurted out. She was ashamed now that she’d doubted him, for the blood and dirt on his clothes and his exhaustion were ample evidence that he was telling her the truth.

‘How could you think that?’ he exclaimed, his eyes full of hurt. ‘Surely you know you are the most important thing in the world to me? I wouldn’t trade you for a ton of gold. I love you, Beth.’

‘But you’d taken your tool bag and the money,’ she said weakly. ‘What else was there to think?’

‘I took my tools in case I needed them,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t take the money. That was in the safe at the Fairview.’

He put his hand into his shirt and pulled out the money bag. ‘I put it in the safe after I gave you the money for your dress. Word had got around about Oz giving it to me. I was afraid we’d be robbed.’