Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [135]
Sam and Jack knew Beth had gone back to Jeff Smith’s Parlour for a drink, and as they’d taken the trouble to bank up the stove before they left this morning, she felt they couldn’t be angry she’d spent the night with him. Yet all the same she felt awkward about it. It was fine for men to bed women, but a woman who succumbed to the same temptation was considered a trollop.
She had already bathed at Jefferson’s; he’d filled his bath for her and even washed her. Sitting down on the rocking chair he’d given her, she put her head back and closed her eyes, reliving the sensuality of it all, and decided she didn’t care if she was a trollop. She would brazen it out when the boys came home. Jack and Sam had romantic dalliances all the time, why shouldn’t she?
As for Theo, if he didn’t like it he could just go off and stay with Dolly the whore. Perhaps when he discovered she was only good for one thing, that she couldn’t cook, sew or wash his clothes, he’d realize how valuable his Gypsy Queen had been.
The door of the cabin crashed open late that afternoon, bringing with it an icy wind and a flurry of snow.
Beth had been dozing in the rocking chair. She woke with a start to see Theo in the doorway, purple in the face with anger.
‘How could you let that bastard fuck you?’ he shouted at her. ‘You’ve made me look like a prize idiot!’
Beth had intended to admit what she’d done, for she knew someone would eventually let it slip. But she hadn’t expected that word would reach Theo so fast.
For a second she just looked at him, shocked that he was more hurt by how others would react to the news than by her faithlessness.
‘You had it coming to you,’ she said defiantly. ‘You’ve been a pig to me for months, and you’ve been spending all your time with that whore in the Red Onion.’
‘I’ve been involved with business,’ he snarled. ‘A man’s business interests have to come first if he is to get anywhere.’
‘There’s only one kind of business going on in a brothel,’ she retorted, her voice rising in anger. ‘And I’m never going to play second fiddle to a whore, so get back there now and wait in line while she lets every other man in town fuck her.’
He looked at her in astonishment.
‘You are a lying, cheating louse,’ she continued. ‘Telling people you’re an earl! Robbing them blind with your marked cards! I might have been able to live with that. But I won’t live with a man who doesn’t value me. I’ve stood by you through everything, but not any more. Get out now and don’t come back.’
He faltered for only a moment, then snatched up his clothes from the shelf in the corner, bundled them into a bag and left, slamming the door behind him so hard, the whole cabin shook.
Beth cried then, bitter tears which were not for sorrow that she’d been with another man, but for love turned sour. She would have gone to the ends of the earth for Theo, and for all her harsh words she knew she loved him still.
A week later Beth and Sam were having a night in. It was so cold outside that eyelashes became covered in frost within seconds and lungs hurt just breathing in. They had banked up the stove with logs, and sat close to it, each of them wrapped in a warm quilt.
Jack had gone to see the Arnolds, a family with three children who had arrived in Skagway in early December. They had been ill equipped from the start, and what little money they’d brought with them had soon vanished. They were still living in a tent, like so many people here, and one of the children, nine-year-old Nancy, had died from pneumonia just after Christmas.
Jack had tried to get Sid Arnold, the father, some work. He had been a barber in Portland, but there was little call for barbers here where almost all the men favoured thick beards and moustaches. He lasted only one day in the sawmill — he just didn’t have the strength for heavy work — and he had proved to be something of a liability in every other job Jack had found for him. Now his wife and young son Robbie were sick, and Jack had made a collection around Skagway to send them home on the next ship. But Sid’s eyes were as bright with