Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [201]
She knew he had been happy out in Bonanza, but perhaps she’d been presumptuous to think he could be happier still living with her in the Outside. Now she came to think of it, he hadn’t ever talked about how he intended to make a living when they left Dawson.
His silence on the boat trip to Dawson looked suspicious now too. She’d thought he was merely stunned by Oz giving him the money, but what if it was because he felt he was being drawn into a trap?
That seemed laughable, but maybe to a man who liked a simple life well away from others, the prospect of living in a real house, surrounded by staid, respectable people, was a living death.
Yet surely he knew he could voice such fears to her? So perhaps it was in the Monte Carlo that he began drawing back? When Percy Turnball spoke of her being a legend, perhaps Jack was afraid he would always be in her shadow? That he would be expected to mould himself around her playing, and never again be able to choose how he wanted to live?
But why would he think that? She thought she’d made it plain enough that she didn’t care about anything other than him. Even playing her fiddle was secondary; she was just as happy playing for him alone and no longer craved an audience.
Would he have gone if she’d told him she thought she was carrying his child?
In the early evening Beth’s pride roused her from the floor.
‘If he’d rather be scrabbling around in the Arctic with a bunch of half-wits than going off on the boat to Vancouver with me, then that’s his funeral,’ she said to herself.
She slung the mattress back on to the bed and threw the covers over it, washed her face in the basin and scowled at her swollen eyes.
‘You will not cry any more,’ she told her image in the mirror. ‘You’ll go down to the dining room, eat a good meal, then pack your things ready for tomorrow. You won’t let anyone see you care that he’s gone.’
‘I’d like someone to help me to the boat with my luggage, please,’ Beth asked the hotel manager as she paid the bill the following morning.
The lobby was full of people departing for Nome, and though hardly any of them looked capable of braving an Arctic winter, they appeared to be following like sheep because so many others were leaving.
‘Of course, Miss Bolton,’ the manager said, smiling slimily at her. ‘Mr Child will be meeting you there?’
‘Yes, he will. He’s been called away on business,’ she said, smarting because the weasel had made a point of calling her Miss Bolton to show he knew she wasn’t married to Jack.
She had packed Jack’s new clothes, for if she’d left them in the room that would make it obvious she’d been abandoned, but she thought the manager knew that already, and was relishing her distress.
The bellboy walked behind her along Front Street with the luggage on a small handcart. The street was packed with people departing Dawson, and she guessed the boat would be grossly overcrowded as captains were like everyone else, only too happy to make a fast buck. But at least all the extra people would only be going as far as St Michael before jumping off to find some other way of reaching their destination.
Beth kept her head up high as she walked along. She might have a broken heart, but she knew she looked good in her new costume, with her hair pinned up under her hat. Yet all the same she dreaded seeing anyone she knew, for they were bound to ask where Jack was.
The Maybelline was a small but sturdy-looking steamer and relatively new, unlike most of the boats that had been pressed into service during the previous year. One of the crew took Beth’s luggage and showed her to her cabin which was up on the top deck. It was tiny, with only a foot of floor space next to the bunks, but as she’d seen how crowded it was down on the lower two decks, she didn’t care. Putting her luggage on the bottom bunk, she climbed on to the upper one and lay there watching the scene on the wharf through the tiny porthole.
If she hadn’t felt so miserable, she might have laughed to see people