Forget-Me-Not Bride

by Margaret Pemberton

  Lettie regarded her pityingly. ‘You don’t really think that’s going to be the way of it, do you? Didn’t you listen to what Susan Bumby said to you at breakfast? She said she didn’t think anyone would choose you as a bride, not as you had two children in tow.’

  ‘Being chosen is a lot different to being auctioned! And Susan Bumby certainly wouldn’t allow herself to be auctioned. It would be far too dangerous for her. What if no-one made a bid?’ She shuddered at the very thought. ‘Susan certainly wouldn’t expose herself to that kind of humiliation. She’s far too intelligent.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ Lettie swung her legs off her bunk and sat on the edge of it, her hands clasped between her knees. ‘There are thousands of men roaming the Klondike hoping to strike it rich. Like men everywhere a lot of them would like the home comforts a wife provides, but north of British Columbia respectable woman are as rare as penguins in the Sahara. Which is why the Peabody Marriage Bureau is doing such a roaring trade supplying them with respectable women who can’t afford to be choosy. And when we arrive in Dawson it’s going to be the men who take their pick. Not us.’

  Lilli pushed herself up into a sitting position. ‘What do you mean by “women who can’t afford to be choosy”?’ she demanded indignantly. ‘I don’t fall in that category! Marietta couldn’t possibly fall into that category and neither could Kate …’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Lettie said again. ‘You don’t have to look like the back of a tram to be so desperate you become a Peabody bride. I bet you didn’t have much choice, did you? Little Edie certainly didn’t. I doubt if racy Miss Rivere even intends marrying anyone. Kate Salway never did tell us why she was going to Dawson to marry but you can bet your sweet life the alternatives must have been pretty horrendous. I know mine were.’

  There was thick bitterness in her voice and Lilli wanted to ask her just what those alternatives had been. Lettie gave her no opportunity.

  ‘And so when we get to Dawson Mr Nelson is going to be able to dispose of us as he thinks fit,’ she said savagely, ‘and that’s going to be in a way which is to his employer’s best financial advantage.’

  ‘It isn’t going to be with an auction.’ Lilli’s voice was firm. Even though she had already made up her mind that, like Marietta, she would not be marrying any of Mrs Peabody’s clients, it was horrific beyond belief to think that her new-found friends might be treated in such an undignified, abominable manner. And she didn’t believe it. Not for a minute.

  ‘Wait and see,’ Lilli said darkly. ‘We’re just cattle to market. Mrs Peabody is nothing but a white slave trader under a different guise.’

  Lilli abandoned trying to argue with her. Lettie would find out differently when they arrived. She closed her eyes. She had been up since the crack of dawn and she needed to sleep, if only for thirty minutes.

  Jack Coolidge’s image fizzed against the backs of her eyelids. He had been wonderfully kind to Leo. Not many men would have taken the time to talk to a six year old boy the way he had done. She was glad he wasn’t a gold-prospector, especially if they were all as unshaven and grizzle-haired as Marietta said they were. Initially she had been rather shocked to discover he was a professional gambler but remembering her father’s love of gambling had helped her to quickly come to terms with the discovery, especially as her father had never allowed his gambling to harm his family in any way.

  She smiled happily and then, just as sleep was about to claim her, another thought tugged at her muzzy brain. Hadn’t Marietta, or perhaps it had been Edie or Kate, mentioned a dance-hall girl in the same breath they had spoken of Jack? What was it they had said exactly? She couldn’t remember.

  ‘I don’t know how you endure it,’ Miss Nettlesham said to her that evening as she waylaid her near the stairs on the hurricane-deck. ‘Sharing a cabin with that Rivere creature or the retarded overgrown child she seems to have taken under her wing would be bad enough, but sharing it with a low-class, unclean …’

  Assuming rightly that Miss Nettlesham was referring to Lettie, Lilli said sharply, ‘Lettie is shabby, not unclean.’

  Miss Nettlesham adjusted the chiffon scarf securing her hat with a kid-gloved hand. ‘You must have very bad eye-sight, Miss Stullen, if you believe unwashed hair can be described as shabby.’

  It was a point difficult to argue and Lilli didn’t attempt to. She had left Leo and Lottie playing Halma with Susan Bumby and had been strolling the decks in the hope of accidentally-on-purpose meeting Lucky Jack Coolidge again. If she did so in Miss Nettlesham’s company the encounter would be a complete waste of time and she was eager for Miss Nettlesham to take her leave of her.

  ‘As for that Rivere woman!’ Miss Nettlesham shuddered and Lilli knew it wasn’t from cold, even though the evening breeze was decidedly chilly. ‘Being seen in the company of a woman like that is enough to damn all our reputations. Do you know that she actually engaged Kitty Dufresne in conversation this morning? And in public!’

  Lilli pulled the collar of her box-coat closer around her throat. There was no sign of a tall, broad-shouldered, Homburg-hatted figure, and good manners demanded Miss Nettlesham be endured. ‘Who is Kitty Dufresne?’ she asked politely, wondering how on earth Miss Nettlesham was going to accommodate herself to the hardship of life in a mining camp.

  Miss Nettlesham’s camel-like nostrils quivered. ‘In her day Kitty Dufresne was the most notorious dance-hall girl in Dawson. Now, on behalf of her paramour, she employs dance-hall girls for the Gold Nugget and all the other disreputable dance-halls and saloons and ‘gaming hells’he owns.’

  At the word ‘gaming’Lilli’s attention was caught. Although she had not the slightest doubt that Jack Coolidge’s gambling saloons would not be ‘hells’ but would be exceedingly well run establishments, it was quite possible that the owner of the Gold Nugget was a business rival of his. ‘How come you know so much about the personalities of Dawson, Miss Nettlesham?’ she asked, intrigued. ‘And who is this person who owns so many “gaming hells?”’

  Across the silk-grey Pacific the coastline of British Columbia was violet against the twilit sky. Miss Nettlesham made an abrupt about-turn, obliging Lilli to forego the sight and face the open ocean. ‘Really, Miss Stullen! I’m surprised you need to ask when he’s aboard ship! You must walk around with your eyes closed and your ears shut! He’s Lucky Jack Coolidge, of course. Though what’s lucky about a man no respectable person would pass the time of day with, I can’t begin to imagine!’

  Chapter Five

  Giddily, Lilli looked out beyond the hurricane-deck over the vast, velvet-dark expanse of the Pacific. Was Miss Nettlesham telling her the gospel truth or was she simply repeating malicious and untrue rumour and gossip? After all, Jack Coolidge had freely admitted to her that he was a professional gambler and that he owned many gambling saloons in Dawson. It was a fact she had already come to terms with and Miss Nettlesham’s describing them as ‘hells’was utterly meaningless. She was the kind of stiff and starchy young woman who would describe any gambling saloon as being a gambling ‘hell’. It was the coupling of his name with a woman’s, a woman apparently aboard the Senator, that made it feel as if the deck was tipping at her feet.

  ‘Did you say Miss Dufresne employs dance-hall girls for Mr Coolidge’s establishments?,’ she asked, trying to keep her voice cool and disinterested.

  ‘Procuring would be a better description,’ Miss Nettlesham retorted tartly. ‘No doubt she struck gold when she engaged Miss Rivere in conversation. I knew the instant I set eyes on that young woman she was destined for Klondike City.’

  ‘Then Miss Dufresne is an employee, of Mr Coolidge’s?’ Lilli persisted, the deck beginning to steady. ‘And where is Klondike City? I’ve never heard of it. Is it near Dawson?’

  The hurricane-deck was small and they had again been obliged to turn-about. In the pale Northern twilight Miss Nettlesham’s albino fairness gave her a look of almost ghostly transparency. She raised a gloved hand to her mouth, coughed discreetly behind it and said,
‘You won’t have heard of Klondike City, Miss Stullen, because under normal circumstances it would never be mentioned in polite conversation. Klondike City is the …’ she lowered her voice almost to a whisper, ‘the red-light district of Dawson.’

  Lilli’s eyes widened. Miss Nettlesham’s claims seemed to be growing wilder and wilder. She had obviously never set foot inside a gambling saloon and yet authoritively described Jack Coolidge’s gambling saloons as ‘hells’; she had assumed, on no other evidence apart from Miss Kitty Dufresne being employed by Lucky Jack, that Miss Dufresne was Jack’s ‘paramour’. And now, without ever having set foot in Dawson, she was quite categorically stating that part of it, known as Klondike City, was an area of ill repute.

  ‘But how can you possibly know?’ she demanded, putting her thoughts into words. ‘You’ve never been to Dawson. You …’

  ‘My brother is practically mayor of Dawson,’ Miss Nettlesham said loftily. ‘The gentleman I am to marry is a close friend of his. Dawson may have been a rough pioneer town three years ago but believe me, Miss Stullen, there is an aristocracy there now.’

  Lilli didn’t bother to ask if Miss Nettlesham’s brother was a leading light of Dawson’s so-called ‘aristocracy’. She knew what the answer would be. She knew also that she was wasting her time in hoping to have a moonlit encounter with Jack Coolidge. From beneath their feet, in the saloon, came raucous laughter as around crowded tables men played poker and rummy. No doubt Lucky Jack was also playing cards or shooting dice. It was time for her to abandon hope and go to bed. In the morning she would ask Susan Bumby what she knew about Jack Coolidge and his business enterprises. Susan would be a far more reliable source of information than Miss Nettlesham. Susan lived in Dawson. She was a sourdough.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said crisply, knowing that sourdoughs were the true aristocrats of Dawson and doubting if Miss know-all Nettlesham was even familiar with the term.

  When she slipped quietly into the cabin it was to find everyone,

  even Lettie, fast asleep. Gently she removed Leo’s thumb from his

  mouth and tucked Lottie’s blanket higher around her shoulders.

  Then she undressed, pulled a cambric nightdress over her head and climbed into the bunk above Lettie’s.

  Perhaps because of her nap earlier in the day, sleep refused to come. She wondered what was happening in the Mosely household. Her uncle would now be very well aware she had taken Leo and Lottie from the house. What would he have done? Employed someone to search for them? Reported them to the police as being missing? Engaged a lawyer in order to issue some kind of legal court order demanding their return? Knowing her uncle, he had probably taken all three courses of action. He would certainly have made it legally impossible for her to return to San Francisco and keep Leo and Lottie in her care.

  She turned on her side, queasily trying to ignore the Senator’s increasing pitch and roll. And what about Miss Nettlesham’s allegation that Kitty Dufresne was Lucky Jack’s paramour? What if it were correct? What if Kitty Dufresne weren’t simply a business associate or employee? She fisted her pillow, trying to break up its uncomfortable bulk. If all her intuitive feelings about Fate and Destiny were wrong, where would that leave her? The answer came with sickening certainty. It would leave her having to fulfil her obligation to the Peabody Marriage Bureau; marrying a man she did not know and would probably never want to know.

  She slept restlessly and by the time Leo woke her, demanding to be taken up on deck, she still hadn’t arrived at a solution to her dilemma. She could hardly follow Marietta’s example and renege on her obligation to the marriage bureau to become a dance-hall girl. And she couldn’t emulate Susan Bumby and apply for a position as a kindergarten-teacher. Teaching staff for Dawson’s small school were appointed by the superintendent of education for the Yukon. And the superintendent would hardly appoint someone as unqualified as herself.

  ‘Come on,’ Leo demanded impatiently, tugging at her hand. ‘It’s stuffy down here. I want to talk to Lucky Jack again. I want him to teach me some card-tricks. Please say you’ve changed your mind, Lilli, and that he can teach me some card-tricks!’

  At the thought of running into Jack Coolidge taking an early morning stroll Lilli began to fish through her carpet-bag for a clean shirtwaist. The one she retrieved was caramel-coloured with a high mandarin neck and long, full sleeves, cinched tightly at the wrist.

  ‘Come on,’ Leo demanded again in an agony of impatience as she tucked the blouse into her cream serge skirt. She ignored him, lacing up her meticulously polished brown boots, thinking with longing of Marietta’s beige boots. Beige was just the shade to tone with caramel and cream.

  ‘We might be able to go ashore today,’ Leo was saying, both hands tight around the cabin’s door-knob. ‘Miss Bumby says the Senator will be calling in at Seattle for more passengers and fuel. If we can go ashore, can I go ashore with Miss Bumby? She always has candy in her pockets and she tells wonderful stories of cheechakos and mushers and sourdoughs.’

  Lilli had no idea what a cheechako or a musher was. She brushed her thick, blue-black hair, anchoring it in a neat twist on top of her head with tortoiseshell pins. Ignoring his request that she allow Jack Coolidge to teach him card-tricks, she said instead, ‘Tell me what a cheechako is? Is it an Alaskan bird? An Alaskan Indian?’

  Leo giggled. ‘Silly,’ he said, as they left the cabin together and began to walk to the nearest companion-way. ‘A cheechako is a tenderfoot. Someone who’s never been to Alaska before. And a musher is an old hand who hasn’t yet struck it rich.’

  On deck the morning air was fresh and balmy, with already an undertone of summer heat.

  ‘That will be British Columbia,’ Leo said knowledgeably, pointing to the green, ragged coastline. ‘I know, ’ cos Miss Bumby told me we’d be sailing off the coast of British Columbia today. And soon we’ll be in the waters of the Inside Passage and in the real North! Miss Bumby says we’ll see Indian settlements and forts and …’

  Lilli stopped listening. She was glad Leo had formed an attachment to someone who was so educationally helpful to him, but she had more important things on her mind than scenery and sights. She needed to find out if she had been school-girlishly foolish in believing that Lucky Jack was her Destiny. And the only way she could do that was by telling him she was a Peabody bride. His reaction would either be all that her intuition assured her it would be, or it would be indifference. And if it were indifference … If it were indifference then she would have a lot of very hard thinking to do.

  ‘You can jaw on the deck all day, honey,’ Kitty Dufresne said, laying back against a mass of pillows far different in quality from the pillows Lilli and her friends endured. ‘I’m not moving from here until we reach Skagway. Ships and me have never seen eye to eye. They’re too damned unpredictable.’

  Jack grinned. He was sitting on the edge of Kitty’s bed wearing only his pants. As he reached for silk socks and London-made bespoke boots, the well-toned muscles in his shoulders rippled.

  Kitty gave a deep, contented sigh. She was glad to be going back to Dawson, for Dawson had become home, but their trip to London, Paris and Rome had been an eye-opener. The castles and chateaux and palazzi they had seen had been the real thing, some of them built three or even four hundred years ago; not imitations erected in a few crazy, goldrich weeks.

  As Jack began to pull on a snowy white shirt, the cuffs and front trimmed in hand-made lace, she reflected that, apart from a few minor incidents, Jack had behaved very well in Europe. They had had a minor fracas over the unladylike persistence of a true-blue lady in England. Why some women couldn’t just take ‘no’for an answer, Kitty had never been able to understand. As it was, twenty year old Lady Sarah Dunwoody had followed them from London to Paris, so certain of being lovingly welcomed by Jack it had really been quite pathetic. Remembering the incident, Kitty shook her head in disbelief. Maternally she had comforted the distraught girl, given her the kind of straight advice her mother shou
ld have given her, and sent her on her way a sadder but wiser young woman; as she had done for so many other girls so often before and would no doubt do many times again.

  ‘I was accosted by a girl wanting dance-hall work yesterday,’ she said, dismissing Lady Sarah Dunwoody from her thoughts and adjusting the fall of her ivory-silk negligée so that it set her creamy-fleshed, magnificent bosom off to even greater advantage. ‘Her name is Marietta Rivere and she’s very sparky. Quite classy too. The only snag is she’s travelling as a Peabody girl and so if I take her on you’ll have to pay off Josh Nelson.’ She pulled a face as she said Nelson’s name, giving a theatrical shudder. The negligée, slipping even further, revealed a perky rose-red nipple.

  Jack slipped his gold watch into his vest pocket as he looked across at her and grinned. For a woman of thirty-five Kitty was in magnificent shape. If she was thinking of engaging the Rivere girl for the Gold Nugget, the Rivere girl would have to be in good shape too. ‘I’ll be happy to save a female from Nelson’s greedy claws,’ he said, shrugging an exquisitely tailored jacket on, his shirt still open at his throat. ‘What does she look like? If I see her and recognise her I’ll be able to give you my opinion.’

  ‘Petite. A rather odd face, but attractively odd. Jungle-green eyes. Wide mouth. Foxy hair piled in an outré pompadour. Yesterday her blouse was mauve and her skirt turquoise. If she’s half the girl I think she is she’ll be dressed in something different today, equally cheap but equally sizzling.’

  ‘She doesn’t sound quite the usual Peabody bride,’ Jack said, amused by the description. ‘I wonder what Amy Peabody was thinking of? She should have known such an exotic bird would fly her coop.’

  Kitty shrugged. ‘She’s still going to get her dough, isn’t she?’ she said practically as he began to head for the state-room door.