‘Dear God in heaven!’ Lilli gasped, beginning to run for the companionway. ‘Can’t he see? Doesn’t he realise?’
Susan was hard on her heels. Lottie already ahead of her. Their agitation had alerted their fellow passengers to the awareness that something was amiss and as other eyes flew to the lifeboat and Leo’s small figure swinging on the davits there were shouts of, ‘Hoist that kid to safety for Christ’s sake!’
All the shouts came seconds too late. As Leo kicked himself off from the lifeboat for another dizzying swing his foot slipped and, in consternation, he let go of the davit.
There was a scream of terror. Shouts of alarm.
Lilli saw Leo’s body plunge down over the side of the boat and into the ocean and then she was running, running to the deck-rails.
There were cries of ‘Throw a rope! Lower a lifeboat! Bring the boat around!’
Lilli was heedless of them all. The Senator’s undertow would suck Leo down. He wouldn’t be able to surface. And even if he did so he was far too small to catch a rope even if one were thrown to him.
Before she could reach the rail and throw herself into the ocean, someone else did so. Only he didn’t throw himself in. He dived, straight and clean.
As Lilli hurled herself against the rail several pairs of masculine arms steadied and held her.
‘No use you takin’a swim as well, lady,’ someone said, their grip on her arm tightening. ‘The Scottie’s got him. And with shoulder muscles like his he’ll be able to keep afloat for as long as it takes to get a rope or a lifeboat to the pair of ‘em.’
Lilli felt as if her heart was going to burst. Far below and now far behind them in the heaving waves, the red-haired ex-prisoner was treading water, a terrified Leo held tightly in one arm while he helped keep the pair of them afloat with the other.
Through all the shouting and activity around her Lilli was aware only that Leo and his rescuer were growing smaller and smaller by the second as they were left further and further behind in the Senator’s wake. Then the lifeboat crashed into the water to the accompaniment of rousing cheers. One of the sailors manning it was the sailor who had carried her bags for her when she had boarded, but the fact barely impinged on her consciousness.
‘Please God let them stay afloat until it reaches them!’ she prayed aloud against her clenched knuckle. ‘Please God don’t let Leo drown! Please God! Please! Please!’
‘It’s nearly there,’ Susan said unsteadily. ‘It’s going to be all right, Lilli. Leo’s safe.’
Not until she saw Leo being hauled aboard the lifeboat like a little drowned rat did Lilli give herself up to relief. With tears streaming down her face she saw the Scotsman heave himself aboard and the sailors begin to pull on the oars.
Leo was safe. It was over. But if it hadn’t been for the Scotsman it would have been over in a very different way. Leo would have been drowned. Even if she had thrown herself in after him, she wouldn’t have had the strength to have swum against the Senator’s undertow and nor; she suspected, would anyone else. Ex-prisoner or not, he was a hero. And she would never, in a million years, be able to thank him enough.
Chapter Six
A rope ladder was thrown over the side. The young seaman who had shown such an interest in her when she had first boarded climbed nimbly up it, a white-faced Leo tucked under his arm.
‘Oh God!’ Lilli’s voice broke in a sob. ‘Oh, Leo! Leo!’
As the seaman set Leo down on the deck and Leo wobbled unsteadily on very shaky legs her arms flew round him, hugging him so tight he was again in danger of dying, this time by suffocation.
‘Thank Christ!’ A familiar male voice said with heartfelt relief. ‘One minute he was with me, the next …’ Lucky Jack’s sun-tanned face was drained of colour.
Little Leo Stullen had come within a hair’s breadth of drowning and if he had drowned, he would have been responsible.
‘It’s all right.’ Lilli didn’t need excuses or explanations. At least not now. Now all that mattered was that Leo was safe and sound.
‘I was being a trapeze artiste,’ Leo said, his head pressed close against her shoulder, his voice as wobbly as his legs. ‘Like the trapeze artistes in Wild Bill Hickock’s Wild West Show.’
Another sailor climbed the rope-ladder and heaved himself on to the deck and then a resounding cheer went up as he was followed by the Scotsman. He was still breathing heavily. His thick mass of curly hair, so dark with water it was no longer a fiery red but a rich mahogany, hung in dripping rats’tails. Water streamed from his eyebrows and his heavy moustache. His sodden plaid shirt and his britches clung to him like a second skin.
Gently Lilli released her hold of Leo and faced his rescuer. He had kicked off his boots before diving into the ocean and even without them he towered above her. If she hadn’t raised her head, her eyes would have been facing the centre of his chest.
‘I’m Miss Lilli Stullen. I don’t know how to thank you,’ she said unsteadily, tears of relief still glittering on her long, dark eyelashes. ‘If it hadn’t been for you …’
‘It was nothing,’ he said with embarrassed dismissiveness. ‘I was simply the first to react. If I hadna dived in, a dozen others would have.’
Though he didn’t speak with a heavy Scots accent, there was an attractive burr in his voice. His eyes were grey. A warm, deep grey. Beneath his rust-coloured, water-logged moustache she could see that his mouth was well-shaped, as was his strong-looking, straight nose and the blunt line of his jaw. He looked acutely discomfited.
‘It was a very brave thing to do,’ Lilli said simply, aware of the scores of listening ears and not wishing to embarrass him any further.
It was Lottie who did that. ‘You were a hero!’ she declared and, as even standing on tip-toe she couldn’t reach his cheek to give him a kiss, she seized hold of his wet hand and pressed a heartfelt kiss on the back of it.
There was another surge of whooping and cheering from the crowd of spectators.
‘There’s a swig of whiskey waiting for you here, Scottie,’ someone called out. Someone else called out, ‘If you’re as quick off the mark at finding gold we’ll all be right behind you!’
‘You’d better get the wee laddie dry and rested,’ Ringan said to Lilli, eager to get dry and rested himself and more than eager to escape from the unwelcome attention.
‘Yes.’ There were goose-bumps on his strongly muscled arms. She wondered what his profession had been before he had been imprisoned. A blacksmith perhaps, or a professional wrestler. ‘Before I do as you suggest Mr …’
A flush of colour touched her cheeks. He had saved Leo’s life and she didn’t even know his name!
‘Cameron. Ringan Cameron.’
‘Mr Cameron, Leo would like to thank you himself.’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ Leo said truthfully as she took his hand and gently positioned him in front of her. ‘No-one’s ever saved my life before.’ His teeth began to chatter as the breeze knifed through his sodden clothes and a pool of water began to collect at his feet. ‘Does it mean we’ll be special friends from now on?’ he asked, uncaring of the cold. ‘And if we’re special friends will you teach me to dive and swim and to swim underwater?’
Despite his acute discomfiture and his longing to escape to his cabin and change into dry duds Ringan felt a smile nudge his mouth. It changed his appearance drastically. No longer did he look broodingly forbidding. Instead he looked remarkably attractive.
‘I’d regard it an honour to be friends,’ he said, a far from manly lump in his throat. ‘But the swimming lessons will have to wait a wee while. The Pacific’s a mite too deep for swimming lessons.’
Over the top of Leo’s head Lilli smiled at him. Whatever he had been imprisoned for it couldn’t have been a serious offence. A hardened criminal would never have behaved in such a gallant way.
‘Goodbye, Mr Cameron,’ she said, aware that she was beginning to suffer from delayed shock and that she was in dire need of a mug of sweet
tea. ‘Come along, Leo. Let’s get you dry and warm.’
As they turned away from Mr Cameron, heading towards the stairs leading down to the cabins, Jack Coolidge swung Leo high up onto his shoulders, uncaring of the sea-water that immediately began seeping into his elegant suit. Lilli and Susan followed, Lottie holding Lilli’s hand.
‘I suppose really you should give Leo a spanking,’ she said sensibly to Lilli. ‘Pa would have. What if he had drowned? What if Mr Cameron had drowned trying to save him?’
Lilli shuddered, refusing to dwell on such horrors. ‘I’m not going to spank him,’ she said categorically as they reached the companionway. ‘I couldn’t. I haven’t the strength. I feel as weak as a kitten. I’m simply going to make him stay in his bunk for the rest of the day.’
‘Lilli! Lilli! We saw what happened! Was it the ex-convict who saved Leo?’
Like a flock of noisy starlings Marietta, Lettie, Edie and Kate surged towards them.
Jack slowed his pace. Miss Lilli Stullen certainly wasn’t backward when it came to making friends. And though the friend she had already introduced him to was dauntingly unfeminine, one of the girls now milling around them was passably attractive and another, all eyes and mouth and fox-red hair, was definitely eye-catching.
He grinned suddenly, recognising Kitty’s description of Miss Marietta Rivere. Marietta, as instantly aware of his identity as he was of hers, flashed him a dazzling smile. Jack felt a rising in his crotch. Miss Rivere was definitely Gold Nugget material. How Amy Peabody had imagined that in Miss Rivere she had a docile Peabody bride on her hands he couldn’t possibly imagine.
‘You certainly know how to attract attention, little Leo,’ Marietta said merrily. ‘There’s not a soul on board ship won’t know who you are now.’
‘And next time you go up on deck they’ll all be plying you with candy,’ Kate said, blushing rosily as she realised that the gentleman carrying Leo was quite outrageously handsome.
‘Leo needs drying and putting to bed,’ Susan said gruffly, terrified that at any moment Lilli was going to begin introducing everyone to Lucky Jack Coolidge and that all their reputations would then be jeopardised.
Leo sneezed, emphasising his need of towels, and the procession continued on its way. When they reached the section devoted to ladies only cabins, Jack swung Leo down from his shoulders.
‘You’ve given us all a very eventful morning,’ he said, his equilibrium fully recovered. ‘If I’d known a little earlier what you were going to do I’d have sold tickets for it.’
Marietta and Edie giggled. Kate and Lilli laughed. Only Lettie and Susan remained visibly unamused.
Aware that he’d got off lightly, without anyone demanding to know why he hadn’t kept a closer eye on young Leo, Jack made his way to the state-room he shared with Kitty. Kids! Thank Christ he wasn’t married with kids of his own! How could anyone keep an eye on them? They were like eels. Here, there and everywhere.
‘What in heck happened to you?’ Kitty asked, her eyes widening at the sight of the damp-stains on the shoulders of his jacket. ‘Have you had a dolphin on your back or have you been standing under a leaky faucet?’
‘So that was Lucky Jack Coolidge?’ Marietta was saying zestfully. ‘My, oh my, but isn’t he handsome?’
‘And kind,’ Kate said as she and Marietta and Lilli and Lottie squashed up on her bottom bunk and Edie and Susan and Lettie squeezed onto the opposite bunk. ‘Kind enough to carry an exhausted and dripping-wet child. It just goes to prove that you should never judge a book by its cover.’
Susan Bumby made a rude, snorting sound, tempted to disclose that Leo had been in Jack Coolidge’s care when he had begun swinging on the davits. To do that, however, would be to disclose that Lilli had struck up an acquaintanceship with Jack Coolidge and in her opinion, the fewer people who knew of that acquaintanceship, the better.
With Leo safely tucked up in his bunk in the next cabin and with her hands cupping a hot mug of tea, Lilli felt at peace with the entire world. The next time she spoke with Jack Coolidge he would no doubt tell her what the circumstances had been that had resulted in his not knowing where Leo was playing. Wryly she wondered if his dove-grey jacket would dry out satisfactorily. Even more wryly, she reflected that she still hadn’t told him she was a Peabody bride.
That evening, when she went for a solitary stroll on the deck, she didn’t do so with the express intention of again meeting with him. She did so because she wanted to be on her own for a little while. The friendship that had already been healthily burgeoning between all the Peabody brides, bar Miss Nettlesham, had been very firmly cemented after the drama of Leo’s near escape with death and, though she enjoyed the female camaraderie now surrounding her, she was unaccustomed to being with people of her own age for such long periods and needed a brief respite.
The Senator was no longer sailing on the open ocean but up the Inside Passage, an island-sheltered waterway close to the coast of Canada. Small shanty-like fishing villages clustered round pale slivers of beach and from each and every one came the pungent aroma of halibut and herring.
‘It’s fish-canning country,’ a by now dearly familiar voice said, strolling up to her from behind. ‘Pioneer country as well. Out there,’ he gave a nod towards the ragged coastline, ‘the frontier is being literally pushed back mile by mile, day by day.’
She turned towards him, one hand resting on the burnished deck-rail. ‘It’s exciting, isn’t it? You can almost feel the excitement in the air. My father was a pioneer at heart. He was certainly an adventurer. If he hadn’t already been ill in ‘97 he would have taken to the Chilkoot Trail with the other stampeders. And he would have taken us with him. He never left us behind. We went everywhere with him. Montana. Wyoming. Kansas.’
‘He wouldn’t have been able to take you on the Chilkoot Trail with him,’ Jack said, standing very close to her as he looked out to sea. ‘The Chilkoot was a nightmare. I know because I was one of the first to take it. A solid line of men, bent nearly double under the burden of their supplies, forming a human chain across the snow and ice of the face of the mountains. God only knows how so many of us made it. The final slope was so steep no animal could cross it.’
She looked at him, deeply intrigued. Lean and lithe though he was, he didn’t look like a man who would relish hardship. He looked too citified. Too sophisticated.
He turned his head towards her and saw the look in her eyes. Interpreting it correctly he shot her a flashing, down-slanting smile. ‘It was worth it. I knew exactly what I was going to do when I reached Dawson, and it wasn’t to grub-stake. All I had to do was build saloons and rake in gold that way.’
‘And was there no other way of reaching Dawson in ‘97?’ she asked, realising how deeply grateful she should be for the railway that now linked the coast of Alaska with the interior.
‘There was the White Pass, another narrow funnel through the mountains and equally treacherous and there was a way by sea and river, via the Bering Sea and the Yukon.’
She turned slightly, resting both her folded arms on the deck rail, completely at ease with him, feeling as if she had found a friend as well as a soon-to-be husband.
‘Surely the sea route would have been by far the easiest and most comfortable?’
He, too, leaned his weight on his arms as he rested them on the rails, his hands loosely clasped. ‘At that particular point in time it would have taken too long. By the time the Bering Sea had been crossed the Yukon would have been frozen up until the spring. And by the spring Dawson would have been established and I wouldn’t have had a monopoly on the saloon and dance-hall trade.’
It was a logical explanation. A businessman’s explanation. She said, not looking at him but staring out across the silk-dark water, ‘The friend I introduced you to, the friend who teaches in Dawson, told me that I shouldn’t be seen in conversation with you. She said Dawson saloons and dance halls were little better than … than …’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the word brot
hel. Well brought up young ladies weren’t supposed to know brothels existed.
‘I can quite well imagine the word your friend used,’ he said dryly, amused by her as always. ‘All I can say in defence is that not all saloons and dance-halls fall into the same category. The Gold Nugget is the slickest dance-hall in Dawson but it doesn’t have upstairs rooms. At least not of the kind Miss Bumby was thinking of.’ He was speaking the truth. It was the Mother Lode that had the monopoly on upstairs rooms.
Relief surged through her. He was being totally frank with her, making no apologies for the way he earned his living, because there was no need for such apologies.
She turned her head so that her eyes met his. ‘I have another friend,’ she said, hoping he would again set her mind at rest, ‘and Marietta isn’t very … conventional. She’s set her heart on becoming a dance-hall girl and naturally, after what Susan told me …’
‘You’re worried?’
She nodded.
In the Northern evening light her creamy skin was as pale as ivory and her blue-black hair had the sheen of satin. He wondered what it would be like unpinned. How long it would be. How thick. With an effort he forced his mind to the matter in hand. How the devil had she become friends, in such short a time, with the racy Miss Rivere? And what had her long-term friend, the ultra-respectable Miss Bumby, been thinking of to have allowed it to happen?
‘Dance-hall girls are a breed apart,’ he said at last, not wanting to damn them all as prostitutes, for he knew very well that many of them were not. ‘Once a girl enters a saloon or dance-hall she leaves her good name at the door. As I’m sure your friend Miss Bumby has already told you.’
‘Yes, but if a dance-hall girl isn’t also a lady of the … of the …’
‘Night,’ he finished for her helpfully.
Forget-Me-Not Bride Page 10
