Gypsy

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘So you intend to seduce me, do you?’ she said impishly.

  ‘I have been intending to do that from the first day you walked into my saloon.’ He grinned. ‘But I sense that you are giving me the signal to go ahead tonight. Am I right?’

  ‘Would a lady admit to that?’

  ‘One as honest as you would.’

  She got up, putting her glass down on his desk. ‘Then maybe you’d better kiss me,’ she said.

  Beth had studied his mouth a great deal recently. It was in fact his most attractive feature. His lips were well shaped and plump, turning up at the corners, almost as though he was constantly smiling. She hoped that meant he was good at kissing.

  He put his hands on her waist and drew her close, looking down at her in amusement. ‘I hope you aren’t being a tease!’

  She didn’t answer, for his lips came down on hers and his arms went round her.

  He was good at kissing, not too forceful nor yet too hesitant, and as the tip of his tongue insinuated itself between her lips, she felt dizzy with desire.

  The walls in the Monte Carlo were nothing more than thin wood partitions, and the sound of the various residents talking, laughing and going up and down the stairs was a little disconcerting. Beth was afraid they could hear her heavy breathing as John moved her back to recline on the couch and kissed her again and again. When he put his hand down the bodice of her gown and released her breasts, she had to stifle a gasp of delight as he kissed them.

  ‘Beautiful breasts,’ he murmured, licking at her nipples with the tip of his tongue. ‘I have dreamed of doing this for so long.’

  His hand stole up under her skirt, caressing the soft skin above her stockings, slowly working his way up under her drawers until his fingers found her sex. ‘So wet,’ he whispered. ‘I think you must really want me.’

  Beth forgot about the people who might overhear, for John was doing things to her with his fingers that made her want to scream out how good it was. But he was rude with her too, pushing her skirt up so he could look at her body, which made her feel so wicked and wanton.

  He took her there on the couch while they were both still dressed, thrusting into her with such force it both shocked and thrilled her.

  ‘I’m so sorry, that wasn’t very gallant of me,’ he said when he was spent. ‘Please forgive me.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologize,’ she said, for even if it hadn’t been entirely satisfying, it had been very good.

  ‘I’ve crumpled your gown too,’ he said, looking concerned.

  ‘It will recover.’ She laughed. ‘Now, are we going to get into your bed, or am I to go back to my own?’

  ‘Please stay with me,’ he said, kissing her again. ‘I want to prove I can be a sensitive lover.’

  Chapter Thirty-three

  ‘Wake up, John, something’s going on outside,’ Beth said, shaking his arm roughly.

  It was some six or seven weeks since she first went to bed with John, and she’d never had cause to regret it. John had proved he was capable of being not only a sensitive lover, but also an extremely demanding one. He would often search her out during the day while the bar downstairs was full of people, between her two sets in the evenings, and still be ready for more when he finally shut the saloon in the early hours of the morning.

  For Beth it was just what she needed. She hardly ever thought of Theo now, and when she did it was with faint amusement rather than hurt. She had made many new friends, she had money saved for the future, and because she only worked in the evenings, she had time to help out at the hospital during the day.

  She still missed Jack, but every couple of weeks someone coming in from Bonanza would bring a letter from him. He was working for Ed Osborne, an old Sourdough known affectionately as Ostrich or Oz because he so rarely left his claim. Beth could tell Jack was happy out there for his letters were full of funny little stories about miners he’d met.

  Beth was entirely content. Her relationship with John was built on mutual passion, but she didn’t feel the need to dress it up as love, or hope it had a future. John had a wife and three children back in Virginia, and he’d been honest enough to admit from the outset that it was his intention to sell the Monte Carlo by midsummer and return home.

  ‘There’s always something going on out there,’ John said sleepily, trying to draw her into his arms. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  Beth was just about to snuggle down again when she heard the cry of ‘Fire’ and she was instantly out of the bed and at the window.

  All she could see was a golden glow further along Front Street, but that was more than enough. This time she pounded John with her fists to wake him, for she’d seen how quickly fire could spread back at the end of ’98. That night the Greentree and Worden hotels and the post office had all burned down, and men had to chop down other structures to stop the fire spreading right through the town.

  John rushed off to wake everyone in the Monte Carlo while Beth pulled on her warmest clothes, for it was some 40 degrees below freezing outside.

  With a hammering heart, Beth ran beside John towards the fire. By now most of the residents and owners of property in Front Street were outside, men hastily organizing themselves to break the ice on the river to get water. Everyone was asking where the fire engine, bought only the previous year, was. But it seemed that the newly trained fire fighters had been in dispute about their wages and the boilers in the engines had not been kept alight.

  Beth looked on in horror as men built fires on the river ice to melt it and reach the water, but that was taking far too long, and the fire was jumping from building to building, devouring everything in its path.

  At last the fire fighters arrived with hoses and the pumps were started. Beth saw the hoses slowly begin to swell as they sucked up water, and like everyone else, thought the fire would soon be under control. But then a ripping sound burst out, and to the assembled crowd’s horror, the hoses split open, for the water within had frozen and expanded.

  Beth saw Tim Chisholm, owner of the Aurora, covering his face with his hands as the flames began to spread to his saloon. ‘What’s to be done?’ he cried.

  ‘Blow up the buildings in front of the fire,’ Captain Starnes of the Mounted Police commanded, and quickly ordered a dog team to race to get some explosive.

  Thousands of people turned out to try to help. Every cart or sledge was commandeered to carry away articles from the condemned buildings in the path of the fire. Men even rushed into places already ablaze to try to rescue as much as they could.

  ‘I’ll give a thousand dollars to save my bank,’ Beth heard David Doig, the manager of the Bank of British North America, pledge. But his plea was in vain, for it was soon gobbled up, along with scores of saloons and dance halls.

  The whole town shuddered under the force of the dynamite explosions, and Beth saw men she knew to be as hard as nails weep openly as their buildings crackled and burned.

  John was helping soak blankets in river water to try to save the Fairview, Dawson’s best hotel at the north end of the town, and she turned her attentions to the whores of Paradise Alley, as the flames approached their rickety shacks. Many of the girls came running out almost naked, screaming with fear, but then stupidly trying to rush back in to rescue their clothes and possessions.

  With some help from a few men, many of whom took off their coats to cover the girls, Beth managed to lead them all well away to safety.

  The night was so cold that many people watching the fire couldn’t feel the heat from the flames until their coats became singed. Hogsheads of whisky exploded in the flames and the contents ran out on to the snow, freezing instantly. And the gold in the bank safe, along with all the jewellery and other treasures put there for safe keeping, melted in the fierce heat.

  Finally, there was nothing more anyone could do but stand and watch the inferno, hoping that the fire breaks made by blowing up buildings would be enough to contain it.

  John came back to find Beth and t
hey stood as close as they dared to the Monte Carlo, which so far had only been scorched. With their faces red-hot from the blaze, backs freezing and lungs full of smoke, they couldn’t even speak of the disaster. Most of Front Street, including the Golden Nugget, with all its memories, was gone. Beth had fleetingly seen One Eye lurching around holding his head and sobbing out that he was ruined, and she even found it in her heart to feel sorry for him.

  When daylight eventually filtered through the fog of smoke they saw that the entire heart of the business part of Dawson had been destroyed. The Fairview Hotel was saved at the north end of town, and the scorched Monte Carlo at the north end. Between them, where once there had been gaiety, light and warmth, was a huge black gap. The odd burnt timber still stood erect in a thick bed of grey ash, and it was the most desolate sight Beth had ever seen.

  There was no joy that the Monte Carlo had been saved, for the scale of the disaster was too devastating, with thousands now homeless and ruined. John and Beth took in hundreds of people, letting them bed down wherever they could find room and providing coffee and whatever food they could rustle up.

  Down at the Fairview, hundreds more were camping out in the lobby. Later in the day it was said that one hundred and seventeen buildings were lost in the fire, their loss totalling more than a million dollars.

  But Dawson people were robust in spirit as well as body. Less than twelve hours later Tom Chisholm had erected a large tent where his old saloon had been and was back in business as the Aurora Saloon again, even before the ash had completely settled. That was the signal for everyone else to buckle to. Within a day or two the all too familiar sound of sawing wood and nails being hammered began again, and dray horses were out hauling lumber from the sawmills.

  Beth spent her time cooking up huge pans of soup and stew to feed the homeless and destitute. She dragged a sledge around the town begging for bread, meat and vegetables from those who had supplies, and organized a collection of donated clothes, boots and blankets too.

  John had been very active in the first day or two after the fire, and she thought nothing of it when he didn’t come to her bed at night, because with the saloon packed with distressed people sleeping on the floor, it clearly wasn’t an appropriate thing to do.

  But suddenly she became aware that he was acting strangely. She kept seeing him standing out on the singed boardwalk looking at the blackened gap in the town, and he wasn’t talking to anyone, least of all her.

  She was too busy with the food and clothes collections to concern herself with him at first. But as the days ticked past, and everyone else was pulling together to plan and rebuild the town, and still he stood for hours out there alone, she became puzzled and irritated.

  He hadn’t lost anything. Business was even brisker than before the fire, and now most of the refugees were gradually finding other places to stay and leaving the Monte Carlo, his staff needed direction.

  She was coming back from the hospital one afternoon eight days after the fire when once again she saw him outside on the boardwalk. She noticed how dishevelled he was, unshaven, still wearing the same trousers, shirt and jacket he’d changed into after the fire.

  As she got to the boardwalk he looked round at her but didn’t speak or even smile.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Are you sick?’

  ‘No, I’m not sick,’ he replied, but his eyes had no light in them.

  ‘Then come on inside with me, it’s very cold out here,’ she said, putting her hand on his arm.

  He shrugged off her hand as if it had burned him.

  ‘Tell me what I’ve done to offend you,’ she said in bewilderment. ‘Is it because I’ve been out in the town helping people? Do you think I’m neglecting you and the saloon?’

  ‘Not that,’ he said, giving her a look cold enough to freeze. ‘The fire. It was the Lord’s way of showing me how I’ve sinned.’

  ‘But you were spared,’ she said in puzzlement.

  ‘Precisely. That’s the Lord’s way of saying, “Sin no more.“Don’t you see that?’

  Beth suddenly saw what he was getting at. ‘You mean with me?’ she asked incredulously.

  He nodded. ‘I knew it was adultery, but I could not resist the temptation.’

  She wanted to laugh as all this Holy Joe stuff sounded like a joke; he had never told her he had any deep religious convictions. But she checked herself just in time as she remembered he’d begun praying out loud when the men were trying to light fires to melt the river ice. She had thought that odd then, but later almost everyone she’d spoken to said they’d been offering up frantic prayers, and she supposed she had done so silently too.

  ‘This town is just like Sodom and Gomorrah,’ he went on, his voice flat and dispirited. ‘Now the Lord has destroyed it to show us what wickedness dwelt here.’

  Beth had heard enough. She had always found him rather formal and pompous, not a man to make a woman laugh, or even a great conversationalist. What she’d liked about him was his lovemaking and his good manners, and now the lovemaking had clearly gone for good, and he was implying she was the serpent in the Garden of Eden, they’d obviously reached the end of the road.

  ‘So, like Lot and his wife, you are going to flee,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Mind you don’t look back while you’re fleeing or you might turn to a pillar of salt.’

  ‘You would do well to consider your sins too,’ he said reproachfully. ‘You seduce men with your Devil’s music.’

  Beth did laugh then. She wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a statement like that back in England, but it was ludicrous here in a Frontier town coming from the lips of a man who just a week ago couldn’t have his way with her often enough.

  ‘So why, if you were a religious man, did you come here and buy a saloon?’

  ‘I guess the Devil tempted me away from the Lord.’

  ‘Then you’d better get back in his good books by selling this place and giving the money to the deserving poor or the Church,’ Beth snapped. ‘But pardon me if I don’tdothe same. Your precious Lord tookmy parents, my brother and my little sister from me. I’ve learned to trust in no one but myself.’

  That night Beth sat up in her room. Downstairs the saloon was packed because there were so few places left for people to drink in, and their booming voices and laughter wafted up to her. John had said he didn’t want her to play tonight, and it was clear, even though he hadn’t actually said so, that he wanted her out of his saloon.

  She could see the funny side of it, for none of the dancers in his theatre or his saloon girls were pure as the driven snow. Gambling, drinking — it was all ungodly, so why single her out as the source of evil? She wished Jack was here, for he had always enjoyed a good joke.

  She could of course go to any one of the remaining saloons in Dawson and they’d welcome her playing for them with open arms. But the fire, and now John’s strange reaction, had put her off Dawson City.

  But it would be another month before the ice broke and she could get a steamer.

  She groped under her bed for her valise so she could count her savings. As she opened it, the first thing she saw was the photograph the four of them had had taken in Skagway, soon after they arrived. It was less than two years ago, but it seemed far longer. They all looked so young and fresh-faced, and the backdrop of mountains behind, painted on canvas, which at the time they’d thought marvellous, now looked so unrealistic. The boys had borrowed the rifles they carried on their shoulders — for Sam and Jack, the first guns they’d ever held. Beth was wearing a straw boater and a high-necked blue dress with a little bustle. At the time she’d been foolish enough to think that attire, with just a coat over it, would be suitable for the trail.

  She smiled and ran one finger over Sam’s stern, unsmiling face in the picture. He’d grown a beard soon after it was taken to make him look tougher, but it didn’t work; he’d still looked young and starry-eyed. Theo, in an embroidered waistcoat and well-tailored jacket, looked what he was: an ari
stocratic gambling man.

  Jack was the only one smiling, almost as if he knew even then what the mountains had in store for them. He had learned to shoot, just as he’d gone out of his way to learn everything about the trail, and to build cabins and a raft. How odd it was that he’d never had the lust for gold, yet he was the only one who finally got to the goldfields.

  Just looking at the picture made a thousand little memories pop up in her head. The terrible night squashed up in the hotel in Sheep Camp, and the ones where they nearly froze to death at the top of the Chilkoot Pass. So many people in Dawson had shared that hideous ordeal, yet they all took pride in having suffered it, like a badge of honour.

  Beth preferred to savour the good memories — speeding downhill on the sledge to Happy Camp, and the great evenings they’d had at Lake Lindemann and Lake Bennett. Sam was dead now, and Theo gone. Only she and Jack were left.

  She thought back to the second day on the immigrant ship to New York, and smiled at the memory of their first conversation. Who would have thought that skinny street urchin would become her dearest friend?

  All at once she knew what she wanted to do. Tomorrow she would ask someone to take her out to Bonanza Creek to see the goldfields and Jack.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The five-dog team were raring to go, barking and pawing impatiently at the snow-covered ice of the river.

  ‘Sitting comfortably?’ Cal Burgess asked Beth as he tucked the bearskin tighter around her.

  Beth nodded. With a wolf-fur hood, a coon-skin coat and several other layers of clothes beneath, she felt very cosy.

  At Cal’s signal the dogs leapt forward, and Beth’s head whipped to and fro alarmingly. But as the dogs got into their stride it was smoother, the fine snow on the ice rising up and sprinkling on her like icing sugar.

  She had packed her belongings the previous night. All the gowns she wore in the saloon and her daintier clothes, shoes and boots were packed into a box which this morning she’d left in safe keeping with friends who owned a restaurant. Her valise was packed with everything else, and before leaving she’d bought some luxuries for Jack — fruit cake, jam, chocolate, fruit, a quantity of lamb and bacon, cheese and several bottles of whisky. Her fiddle was wedged in the seat next to her and if it hadn’t been for her run-in with John that morning she would have been bubbling over with excitement at this trip to see Jack.