“Ray,” I said, patting his hand. “She isn’t worth the sweat on your brow.” I never did have a talent for metaphor.
He looked at me. “Christ, Fiona. Will you just mind your own business for once? No one appointed you Queen of Dawson, last I heard.”
Ray Walker was a good partner. His rough, communal Glasgow habits balanced my every-woman-for-herself East End and Belgravia Square instincts. I kept the punters and drinkers lining up for more, and Ray kept them in line. Together we’d turned the Savoy into the most profitable dance hall in Dawson, Yukon Territory.
I looked at my scrawny, rat-faced, angry partner, and I folded my pride into my petticoats. “Ray, sometimes I can’t understand a word you’re saying. And my family true Scots from long before the time of the Bonnie Prince himself. Sometime I’ll tell you the story of how the MacGillivray clan stood shoulder to shoulder with the Prince at Culloden. Every last one of them. And how we lost everything in the Greatest of All Battles. Oh, it was a hard time, I’m tellin’ ye. Why if the fight had gone t’other way, I might not be standin’ here. I might be sitting warm and snug, a grand lady in me own castle in the heart of the Highlands. And wouldn’t that be a sight?”
Ray cracked a smile. “I love you dearly, Fee. Time to close up.”
As I watched him go, I thought about what I’d said. I hadn’t even tried to put on the bad grammar and the accent. All I had to do was to think about my family: about the groundskeeper’s cottage where we had lived, my father’s fierce pride in our family’s legacy, and the memories were back again.
Such a sweet little thing I had been. Long ago.
Chapter Thirteen
I poured canned milk onto my porridge and eyed my son. Angus was being unusually vague about his plans for the day.
Mrs. Mann, our landlady, fussed over him, as she always did. She was a wisp of a woman, with a mass of steel-grey hair scraped into a severe bun that weighed about as much as all the rest of her. Her accent was full of the memory of Germany, but she was justifiably proud of her English.
“I hear talk that a fellow’s arrived in Dawson with a real cow, Mrs. MacGillivray,” she said, ladling more porridge into Angus’s bowl. “Imagine. Milk.” Her tongue fondled the word as if she were dreaming of finding diamonds under her pillow. But she was thinking of something even greater than the Hope Diamond. For if she and I had learned one thing in the starvation winter of ’97—’98, it was that nothing, not gold nor diamonds nor banknotes, nor even one’s good name, mattered a damn when there was nothing to buy to eat.
“Wouldn’t milk be nice, Angus?” I said.
He grinned around a mouthful of grey porridge. “It sure would. I don’t even remember what fresh milk tastes like.”
“Like sunshine falling on the farms of Bavaria,” Mrs. Mann said, passing the sugar bowl.
“It would make a nice change. Buy some if you can. Never mind what it costs. I’ll have real milk in my coffee tomorrow, and Angus can have a glass to drink, and we’ll pour it over the porridge on Monday. Buy enough for yourselves as well. We had a profitable night last night.”
Angus pushed aside his scraped-empty bowl and rose to his feet. “Thanks for the breakfast, Mrs. Mann.” The kitchen was so cramped, he had to squeeze by her to get to the back door. “Please excuse me, Mother.” Something was up: his grammar was too perfect.
“Anything special happening today, Angus?” I asked.
“No, Mother. I thought I might go to the infirmary to check on Miss Vanderhaege.” He twisted his shirtfront in his hands.
“Who?”
“Miss Vanderhaege? From the bakery?”
“Oh, right.”
That the boy was lying, or at least not revealing the truth, was about as obvious as the fact that I wanted milk straight from a cow with no interference by factory nor can if I was ever to enjoy a cup of coffee again.
“Make sure you spend some time with that book of geography.”
“Yes, Mother.” He kissed me on the top of my head and said goodbye to Mrs. Mann. He took his coat from the peg and closed the door gently on the way out. Mrs. Mann’s husband had built the tiny wooden house himself. The walls were thin, and the floorboards loose, so that one always knew exactly what everyone else in the house was doing at any time of the day or night. One morning I couldn’t get to sleep and had lain awake listening to the Manns enjoying an intimate moment—a very long intimate moment—before they rose to begin the day.
At their age!
“Such a nice boy,” my landlady said, gathering Angus’s empty dishes. “But he doesn’t tell the whole truth. Perhaps he visits a young lady in town?”
I finished my coffee with a grimace. There were no signs of any young lady—he wasn’t mooning about, sighing heavily at inappropriate moments or searching for faint stars in the sun-touched night, all the while whispering words of poetry. Besides, Angus was only twelve. No, this was something worse. He was shutting me out, trying to become a man.
So concerned was I by Angus’s strange behaviour that I forgot to worry about Jack Ireland and what further trouble he might cause.
Chapter Fourteen
“How’s the take?”
“Great. Our best night yet. Nothing like being next door to the most exciting event to happen in town all week, and to be the employers of ‘the Hero of the Yukon’ to boot, to have the crowds begging to be allowed through the door.”
On the morning of the eventful Saturday, when I was naïvely hoping I’d seen the last of Jack Ireland, Ray came into my office looking as if he hadn’t slept a wink. And he still wore the same shirt, rumpled and soiled, that he’d had on the previous night.
I put down my pen and tested my left wrist. Mrs. Mann had made up a poultice, which looked only slightly less disgusting than it smelled, and she’d wrapped the whole thing up in a soft, clean cloth. My wrist felt almost normal.
“I’ll go down and open up,” said Ray. “Not dressed like that, you won’t. Go home and wash up and put on a clean shirt.”
He looked at me, his eyes unreadable. “You’re not my boss, Fiona. Last I looked, we owned the Savoy together.”
“I’m not your mother either,” I snapped. “But if I were, I’d tell you to stop mooning over a common or garden, noaccount dance hall girl and pay attention to business. Because if you don’t, we won’t be partners for much longer.”
“Do you want to buy me out? I dunna think ye can afford it. But I might consider an offer.”
My head swam. How had this escalated so fast? Oh, right, I had insulted his ladylove and questioned his business sense.
“Look,” I said, shifting my sling and wincing slightly for effect. “Last night was a bad night for us all, except for the size of this bag of gold.” I nudged the loot with my foot. “You go and get a few hours sleep, and I’ll fetch one of the new fellows to watch the saloon. The blond one seems the brightest. Where’s he staying?”
“McKellen’s on Harper Street.”
“I’ll drag him out of bed and tell him to get to work.”
“I don’t need any sleep. Let Murray alone. I’ll change and be back in time.” He struggled out of the chair. “And, Fee, that perfume you’re wearing? Throw it out.”
* * *
By seven o’clock that evening, we were packed to the rafters. Sam Collins held court behind the bar, pouring drinks, taking money and weighing gold dust, trying to avoid repeating over and over the story of the rescue of the bakery sisters. Being Sam, he downplayed his