“You’re still planning to travel down south?”
Roberta nodded. “This was an entertaining and rewarding detour, but we still have other adventuring business to attend to. Don’t worry – we’ll leave you with a sizeable share of the profits. I doubt you’ll ever have to auction off another of your family heirlooms to fund your studies ever again. Speaking of which…” She pulled the curlicue seahorse from her pocket and passed it to him. “I retrieved this from the submersible arm. I thought you might like it as a memento of your near-death experience.”
He took it from her tentatively, his expression uncertain.
“I was actually hoping I might be able to propose another venture. I wasn’t lying when I said this journal held many secrets. There are other treasures, other relics, to be found – other mysteries to be solved. I was hoping I might convince you to find them with me. I certainly can’t do it alone.”
“I will be needing to replace some of my crew. I suppose I could consider you if you’re willing to be trained to help run the Evangeline. You’d actually be interested in coming along? After all that just happened? What if next time we run into trouble and I can’t resuscitate you?”
“A chance I’m willing to take. Besides, you owe me.” Roberta still displayed her reluctance, so Briand continued. “Did you forget, you offered to marry me if you deflowered me? I won’t expect you to make good on that promise, but I’d at least expect you to oblige this whim – a partnership of a different sort.”
Roberta cocked an eyebrow. “Are you trying to have me believe I deflowered you? I mean, I know those close quarters left little to the imagination but…”
“You were my first – I am no longer a treasure hunt virgin.” He smiled with more vigour than he had shown since she had met him.
“And then there’s my father’s demand of a female-only crew.”
“You can tell him my name is Louise, if that’s what it takes, although I won’t wear a dress for his sake. It amazes me. I never anticipated enjoying this. Despite the near-death experience, I’ve never been quite so thrilled in my life. I’ve been missing out on that. I want more of those experiences. I want to follow through on my family’s legacy.” Briand tapped the journal’s cover.
“Let me think on it,” Roberta said, rising from her perch on the bed. “I’ll need time to decide.”
She smiled as she left the cabin, closing the door behind her. Truth was, she had already made up her mind. The idea of tracking down the other treasures in Briand’s journal excited her as much as it did him, a historical scavenger hunt. Plus the man of letters and his scholarly ways intrigued her. But he did not need to know that just yet.
As for a man on board for the trip, she would find a way around her father’s rules. She always had before, when so inclined.
“Back to the city,” Captain Rogers instructed her crew. It would not be a terribly long trip – just over a couple of hours. None of them seemed to mind. After the treasure find, all of them were in good spirits. Even Marguerite wasn’t her usual surly self. “We’ll need to cash out and settle up before we head out on our next venture. We’ll have repairs to make to the submersible too. And I’ll want to know who’s still with me on the Evangeline’s next outing by the time we make land again. The next course I’ll be plotting will demand full hands and a solid commitment. The curlicue seahorse was just a beginning.”
With that, Roberta strode over to the best vantage point of her ship and waited for the Evangeline to begin her ascent. The new thrill that ran through her veins matched the rush of the winds that met her as they climbed into the sky.
STRANGE THINGS DONE
MICHAL WOJCIK
Gold sings a strong song – led all these men up over the Chilkoot Pass with their bundles bound tight on their backs, sledges bound tight to their waists while they slogged through the snow. Women followed soon enough, some of them heading for the dance halls and opera houses and taverns. They were tough women, even tougher than the men, and a good many weren’t looking to sing songs or spread their legs. They smelled other opportunities: mills, hotels, public houses. Build a comfortable business in that wood-and-canvas town and let the gold come to you instead of burning and breaking your way through the permafrost.
Then there are some women, like me, who didn’t come for gold at all.
Sam Steele was strict about bringing guns into the Yukon. That is, none, if he could help it. But Mounties were a bit less discerning when it came to lone ladies, especially young things telling tales of husbands who’d abandoned them in Vancouver and sailed off clear to Hawaii. Meant the North-West Mounted Police didn’t go routing through my things, didn’t find the pistol there or the ammunition scattered all through my smallclothes. Not that it looked like any pistol they’d have ever seen. It was made special someplace in Germany, packed more bullets than any revolver and had lot more wallop too when it started spinning and spitting. Lady Sabina Amery gave it to me in Vancouver along with a knife, its handle all white and silver, a clutch of ferocient canisters (which meant the job was serious) and instructions to memorize good and well: find Jack Sheldon’s claim and take whatever the man found there. Maybe off him, if he got in the way, which he most likely would.
I don’t need to tell you Jack found no gold in that icy soil, though Sabina kept mum on what it truly was. “Rumours,” she’d said. “Just rumours.”
* * *
Before I ever got here, I was just one of many kids coming on the boats from Suffolk over to Montreal. Father was a soldier of the British Empire discharged and ready to make a new life for himself presiding over some vast estate in the new-formed Dominion; Mother was a gentry lady married below her station for love and maybe a bit of foolishness. Truth was, they weren’t cut out for frontier life. Father didn’t last so long trying to clear that plot by the Rockies. He just up and hanged himself when the crop failed that one year. Or maybe he was hanged – the French lord next to us wanted to expand his holdings and Father was in the way.
Mother did the best she could, but she wasn’t in any state for wilderness life and we ended up starving. We kept on starving even when we went to Calgary and she took on a job as a seamstress (she wasn’t a very good one). Oh, she tried to raise me and my sisters, but the youngest got some sickness where you puked your guts out and then Mom fell to it too. She was stuck in her bed while we had to go out in the dusty streets and beg, go out and find odd jobs just to stay alive. Not much of a life.
Lady Amery, she stepped off the train from who knew where – English, definitely, and I’m sure she wasn’t lying about the baroness part. She sure dressed like one: elegant promenade dress and shawl, a charming silk bonnet, purple-ribboned and frilled and feathered, blue-tinged spectacles to protect her eyes. It’s not like she prowled through the rundown tenements in the labourer’s part of Calgary looking for girls of twelve in desperate straits. She had others in her pay sent to seek us out. Find the ones with just enough hunger in their eyes, just enough cruelty. Survivors.
One of them found me.
I was in a scrap with some boy who’d tried to take the flowers I was hoping to sell. I was rangy and had a knife, and gave him a good cut that sent him running. When I wiped the blood clean with a rose a woman came to me – I don’t know how long she’d been waiting there – and asked about the book I had in my bag, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras by Jules Verne.
Did I like it? Did I often read Jules Verne? Where did I get it? I said it was a gift, which wasn’t true; I’d nicked it after I’d finished Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A gentleman left it on the bench while he was finding a place out of the wind to light his pipe.
“Your name, if I may take the liberty of asking?”
“Tessa Fitzpatrick,” I told her.
“You like adventure?”
Her voice was crisp as a school ma’am’s but she didn’t look like one, not one bit. She was in her thirties, I think, and she could break you if she wanted. Even under all t
hose layers and almost formless dress, you could see she was well-stocked with muscle. Her eyes were grey like cast iron, stern. Later, I’d find out her name was Annabelle, Annabelle Leigh, not a name that suited at all.
“Fantastic voyages, extraordinary encounters to lands undreamed of,” she finished.
I nodded. Those were the stories I liked best of all.
“How would you like to go on such adventures?”
I had my flowers crushed up against my chest with one hand, the book crushed there with the other. I admit I was afraid of her at first, thought she’d drag me to the constabulary for what I’d done to the boy, but when she asked the question, she was smiling with warmth I didn’t see from any but my mom.
“I’d like that,” I told her.
You’ll ask me how I could just up and leave my mom and sisters. Well, I didn’t, not quite. Annabelle took me to the quarters of Lady Amery first. Already told you how she dressed, and she had that sort of face as well, all hard corners. She interviewed me, trying to get a grip on how well I read, how much I knew, but mostly my sharpness and my strength.
“Hmm, not an orphan,” she said, “but I see why Annabelle brought you here.”
It was Annabelle who talked to Mother, saying I’d have a patron who’d taken it upon herself to educate young women across Canada. I’d visit Calgary every summer, and most of all, they’d give her money too, to support my sisters.
Mom, she didn’t want to let me go, but in the end she said it was my choice and I couldn’t pass. Not after what Sabina showed me that first day, like something out of Jules Verne – a brass hummingbird she let hang in the air, its wings cutting a blur. I wasn’t allowed to tell Mom about that. Part of the deal.
* * *
I took my valise into the Castle Hotel on Front Street. I had plenty of cash, enough to stay at the Fairview, but I didn’t want to make that sort of impression, like I was one of those well-kept proper ladies seeking a husband of suitable means.
Dawson City is a crooked place, buildings sinking and tilting like a jagged set of old men’s teeth. The streets are all mud-churned so thick you can barely pull a cart through. It has about as much chaos as you’d expect from a place built in a year. Houses and shops hammered together from black spruce logs, false fronts doing nothing to hide the crude cabins behind them. Still, mixed in all that were places like the Fairview, two stories and even sporting a portico.
There isn’t a lack of wealth in the place, that’s plain, but it’s the sort of wealth with foundations steady as permafrost. A constant bustle occupies the pilings by the river since the steamers come in regular, hauling in supplies or miners who’d spend a night watching Klondike Kate or sporting with the good-time gals. I wasn’t ready for how noisy it was, and because it’s light all night on account of the midnight sun, no one had reason to sleep. Not used to that after the quiet of the Yukon River, just the sound of the Indian pilot creaking the tiller and the slow sigh of the current. Dawson City, meanwhile, was like stepping into Calgary or Vancouver again. A ramshackle cobbled-up shadow of those places but wilder, so much wilder.
I had it in my head what to do, though, how to dress and where to go. I knew Lady Amery sent me here because I was the toughest of her girls, tough as Annabelle used to be. I could enter a tavern and stare down all the leering arses and make them turn away just like that, could swing a punch harder than Jem Mace, even made Soapy Smith break down crying back in Skagway. Meant I had no problem passing by the Dominion Saloon and Gambling Hall to more likely prospects. I started with the halfway respectable establishments and worked my way down till I came to Louse Town and a pub with no name, one of places that was just a shack with a few tables put in, some bottles of whiskey stuck behind the counter to keep company with the moonshine.
First I plunked down some gold but the bartender wasn’t impressed. City was filled with it. Then I offered to blow him a kiss and that got me somewhere. He started me off on a chain of men and women, mostly shopkeepers and pilots and prospectors, mostly poor, not the good-time girls I’d expected. Wisps of rumour became more and more solid, like smoke out of an opium pipe the more you puffed.
I gathered soon enough that Jack Sheldon had gone on his last trip to some place called Ogden Creek – I reckon it won’t have that name in a few years. Some of these places swap names three or four times a month. I found a spot on a flat-bottom going up the Klondike River and paid a Hän woman named Ruth to guide me.
* * *
We floated square in the middle of the river, away from the mosquitoes. It was almost pleasing just lounging there in the sun. On either side, broad shoals or cliffs topped with spruce passed us by. Camps sprang up where other rivers and creeks spilled in. Sometimes you’d see sluices and other machines set for separating ore or spilling stone. Plenty working, plenty broken and abandoned. Plenty of boat wrecks sticking up out of the water, too.
My guide took to whittling; she was short, broad, looked near ridiculous in her hat a size too big, brim so wide it stretched twice-length past her shoulders. Black hat, brown choker, vest rattling with beads. She sang in no language I knew, and normally that would get you dirty looks on a trip like this, but the tune fit so well with the water sounds that the others never told her to quit.
We kept on ploughing upstream, pulling alongside ragged docks or rocky spots to let others go. We turned up a tributary and then the tents started dwindling away. By the end, the boat was near empty, save for us and the boys at the oars. When most of the stampeders from the States hit the gold-fields the good claims were gone, so it took a special fool to go seeking this far up the North Fork.
What I’d gathered about Jack Sheldon, he’d come up in 1896, started even before news hit about gold in Bonanza Creek. Man out of Toronto, not much cut out for the Yukon. Abandoned his first claim, got in some squabble with Belinda Mulrooney over his second, had to give it up and went nosing around in unlikely places before he settled at Ogden. Something changed in him then; he wasn’t bringing back gold but he’d lost that look of foolish fancy he’d had before and just plain clammed up, like he’d found something big. But what it was, no one said because he hadn’t shown them. Then he’d just stopped coming to Dawson at all. Last time anyone checked on him they found his camp but no Jack. Not dead, though – fresh prints and cookery still around, and an Indian said he’d seen Jack hauling in scrap from downriver to some place in the hills. Old boilers, pistons and other things.
The pilot refused to go further, no matter how much I was paying him, and I had to head out off the bank with Ruth, on foot. The boat turned round and the pilot promised he’d be back this way in four days. Me, I had a pack slung over my shoulders and came wearing trousers and good solid boots for the walk. Ruth had a pack that looked maybe twice as heavy as mine did.
She looked round the hills before leading the way up alongside the North Fork. She didn’t ask any more questions than she had on the boat.
* * *
I didn’t see Lady Amery often after the meeting where she brought out the bird automaton. It was Annabelle, Pauline, Marguerite, and an older gentleman named Victor who did most of the teaching at a “special academy for young ladies.” They didn’t keep us together in some boarding house, though. We were mostly kept spread across the country, and there were only five of us. Not your typical class, not some typical classroom. I learned the usual geography and maths and history, learned some other things too: how to fight hand-to-hand, how to shoot, how to carry on in whatever part of society I found myself in.
I can act with proper manners if I have to, can talk like I’m from some rich family in London, only that’s not truly me and I prefer speaking like this. Reminds me where I came from.
Lady Amery wasn’t helping us from the pure goodness of her heart. Our benefactor provided our education and paid our families, and in return, when we finished up she expected us to work for her. Not that we minded that much. Me and the other girls all came from bad straits and preferred full be
llies and soft beds to our hard-bitten lives before. Besides, we were the sort who’d crave adventure and never thought we’d have the chance to get it.
See, she wanted women like that because we could be invisible when we wanted, could survive tough scrapes and come out on top. Sabina wanted us because we’d already seen far more than any child should and there was precious little that could rattle us. We’d gone through hard times, we’d be grateful, we’d be loyal enough not to spill secrets.
Sabina had plenty of secrets.
Like that flying metal bird, or the glass eyeball that followed you round in its wire chassis, or the twelve-stack machine she kept in Kingston – you fed it a run of cards punched with tiny holes and it could draw you a picture of whatever you wanted. Saying that, you’d think Sabina was some genius inventor, but truth was she was just building them from plans out of old books and scrolls or reconstructing them from dug-up remains. We girls went out to get these for her, from dusty libraries or dank caverns or unlit tombs.
Any place something odd was going on, talk of ghosts or marvellous phenomena, we girls were there to steal whatever was at the bottom of it. Lady Amery was a collector, and she said she was keeping these things safe, that the world wasn’t ready for them.
We believed her, more or less. That way we could see things no one else ever would, go places a lady wasn’t allowed to go unless she was an archaeologist, do things most women weren’t allowed to do.
That’s how I ended up in the Klondike, a place running low on women, trying to find Jack Sheldon: to see if he’d found a bauble my lady wanted. Though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to find out either. That’s what drove us all on, another reason why Sabina chose us. Because we wanted.
* * *
We spent a long while walking under close-packed spruce till we came to the cascading trickle Ruth said was Ogden Creek. Took a bit longer following the path uphill, wading through beds of bruised fireweed, before we reached Jack Sheldon’s camp. It wasn’t in any condition for living. The wall tent was rent apart, canvas flapping loose, frame splayed over the dirt, dishes and cups spread all around.
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