Gypsy

Jack put Beth’s coat, boots and shawl into an oilskin bag, and led her down the ship’s ladder. The water was so icy it took her breath away for a moment, but Jack put his arms around her chest, urging her to hold the bag up to keep it dry, and swam on his back with her the few yards until she could touch bottom and wade ashore.

  ‘This is not a good start,’ she said between chattering teeth.

  ‘The sun’s warm, you’ll soon dry out,’ Jack said cheerfully. ‘You make your way to the beach and keep a place for our stuff. I’m going back to the ship.’

  Once Beth reached dry land, she surveyed the scene before her with trepidation. Skagway was just a huddle of shacks and tents on marshland which was already a slick of black mud. All around were mountains, some still snowcapped, but even more daunting was the desperate scene behind her in the sea.

  At least thirty boats lay at anchor, all trying to discharge their passengers and freight at once. The sea was studded with horses, goats, dogs, mules and oxen swimming to the shore, and their owners racing to keep up with them.

  The noise was deafening. Men who owned the dozens of scows and primitive rafts were touting for business by shouting at the tops of their voices. People on the boats yelled back even more stridently. If goods dropped from ships missed their mark and fell into the sea, the owners cursed and swore. Animals expressed their fear by whinnying or barking. There were screams for help from those floundering in the icy water. Some bags of goods had split wide open, and Beth saw a sack of flour whiten the sea around it.

  Someone shouted that the tide was turning and everyone should hurry. Fear for the boys made her wet clothes seem suddenly unimportant. Sam couldn’t swim, maybe Theo couldn’t either, and the Albany was too far away to spot them on the deck.

  Slipping off her petticoats, she secured them with pebbles to dry in the wind, then put her boots back on. She thought she would leave her coat until her dress was dry.

  Her anxiety continued to rise as the tide crept further in and she saw more people floundering in the sea and yet more sacks of goods splitting, their contents running out into the water. Her dress was nearly dry now, so she must have been waiting for nearly an hour. But she could see no sign of the boys anywhere.

  Just as she was on the verge of panic she suddenly spotted Jack standing up in shallow water. He was hauling in what looked like a string of big black sausages.

  Not for the first time since they left Montreal she was staggered by his ingenuity, for he’d tied all their oilskin sacks on to a rope. When she looked again she saw Sam clinging on to one of the sacks, and Theo was bringing up the rear.

  ‘Wish we’d never come, Beth?’ Jack asked later that evening.

  ‘No,’ she lied. ‘But it’s all a bit scary, nothing like we imagined.’

  It was eight in the evening. Swarms of men who were little more than thugs out to rob the naive had descended on them, trying to get them to pay for a space to erect their tent, for wood for a fire, and countless other things.

  The boys had stood their ground and refused to pay anything, and eventually they erected their tent among hundreds of others some half a mile from the shacks of Skagway. They had placed their sacks all around the tent walls, to add weight and some insulation when the autumn winds got up, and Jack had got a good fire going to dry off their clothes and cook some food.

  Beth was leaning against one sack now, wrapped in a blanket, trying very hard not to give in to total despondency.

  Sam had fallen asleep, and Theo had gone off to check out what the town had to offer. As they had been told Skagway was an entirely lawless place, overtaken by thugs, confidence tricksters, gamblers and prostitutes, Beth guessed he would be gone half the night.

  It was bad enough to find they had landed in a place full of thugs and thieves, but it was far more disappointing to discover they’d have to stay here until February.

  There were two trails over the mountains. White Pass, which started here in Skagway, was supposed to be the easier as pack animals could be taken on it, but it was longer than the Chilkoot Trail, which began at Dyea some twenty-odd miles away.

  People were going off on both trails right now, but Jack had spoken to an Indian who worked as a packer taking people’s goods up over the trail, and he’d advised him it would be folly to join them. The Indian explained the river Yukon would freeze over next month, long before they could reach it, and without a team of dogs to pull a sledge along it, they’d be trapped for the entire winter in the mountains and might die there.

  Jack was very disappointed, but Theo had been delighted at the prospect of staying here till February. He saw Skagway as the boom town he’d been looking for, ripe for exploitation. Without a trace of shame he’d pointed out that everyone on the ship was a gambler in as much as they’d abandoned their homes and jobs to come here, and therefore he saw them as ripe for fleecing.

  Sam didn’t seem to mind whether they went or stayed, and it had been left to Beth to make the final decision. While she thought Skagway was hell come to earth, the prospect of freezing to death in the mountains was even more daunting, so she’d opted for staying put.

  ‘It won’t be so bad here, I’ll build us a cabin,’ Jack said soothingly. ‘There’s plenty of wood for it. Maybe when I’ve done one for us I can make a few dollars building them for others too.’

  ‘Then I’ll get out my fiddle tomorrow,’ Beth said. It had been a huge relief to find it unharmed by the salt water. Their flour was damp, so was the sugar, but luckily there were no further casualties. ‘It’s going to cost us a fortune to stay here. Did you see the price of a meal?’

  People had already opened up tents as saloons and restaurants. She had seen a menu stuck up on one of them offering bacon and beans at one dollar. Back in Vancouver that would have only been a few cents.

  Jack nodded. ‘Theo’s going to get a shock at the price of whisky too. But you should make some money with that heap of ribbons you brought with you. Some of the girls in the saloons look like they need something to brighten themselves up.’

  ‘You’ve been in to see them then?’

  ‘Oh yes, and a sorry-looking sight they are too.’ Jack chuckled. ‘One is known as Dirty-neck Mary, another Pig-faced Sal! A man would need to be desperate to go with either of them.’

  ‘Then maybe Theo will be safe here.’ Beth smiled.

  ‘I think it might be you who gets lured away.’ Jack arched his eyebrows. ‘With less than thirty women to a couple of thousand men and more arriving daily, you are a great prize.’

  ‘Playing here tonight. The World Famous English Gypsy Queen!’

  Beth giggled when she saw the board which the Clancy Brothers had erected. To her it was as huge an exaggeration as the Clancys claiming that their large tent behind the board was a saloon.

  On her second day in town Beth had been told that the brothers Frank and John Clancy were the top men in Skagway and ran everything from their saloon, so she went straight to them.

  Knowing she was unique in being the only female fiddler in town and that they were charging exorbitant prices for drinks, she dared to ask for twenty-five dollars a night, plus whatever went into the hat. She expected them to agree only to what went into the hat, but to her astonishment they agreed to her nightly fee too.

  Her first night was an outstanding success, with over fifty dollars going into the hat, of which she handed ten to the barman to keep him sweet. As Theo hadn’t turned up to walk her back to their tent, when the Clancy brothers, two dark-haired, thick-set men with fierce-looking moustaches, asked her to stay and have a drink with them at the end of the evening, she accepted.

  Frank Clancy introduced her to a tall, smartly dressed man with a thick dark beard and black stetson hat. ‘This is Mr Jefferson Smith, but you’ll find he’s more commonly known as “Soapy“,’ he said.

  ‘I’m also known as Beth Bolton,’ she responded, unable to resist fluttering her eyelashes at him because he was a very handsome man with deep-set dark grey eyes. ‘But
why Soapy? Is that because you never wash, or do so to excess?’

  ‘Which would you prefer, mam?’ he asked, taking her hand and kissing it.

  Beth giggled because he had a Deep South accent which was as attractive as he was.

  ‘Somewhere around the middle,’ she said. ‘But Skagway has so few facilities I suspect I will have to get used to people who are strangers to soap.’

  She was despairing of being able to tolerate Skagway until February. The sea of mud, the constant noise of barking dogs and fights, the thieves and con men out to fleece anyone they could, and the lack of even the most basic of comforts made it an inhospitable place to be.

  ‘Ah, but I have plans,’ Smith said with a little smile at her joke. ‘For proper streets, a hotel, shops, lighting, a bath-house and even a church.’

  ‘Have you now?’ she said. ‘So are you to be mayor of Skagway?’

  ‘Something like that,’ he said, and his self-assurance confirmed to her that he did intend to control the town.

  They chatted for some time, mainly about her recent arrival. Smith himself had only been there for a week and he was in partnership with the Clancy brothers.

  ‘Is Earl Cadogan your husband?’ he asked.

  The title threw Beth off balance. She had pretended to be married to Theo ever since she arrived in Montreal with him, but now she’d found he’d given himself a title, she didn’t know whether that would make her Lady Cadogan, or a Countess. Unable to lie on such a grand scale, she replied that he was just a good friend and that she was with her brother and another old friend, Jack Child.

  ‘The Londoner?’ Smith asked. ‘I met him this afternoon; he seems a real capable man. You will have plenty of protection then?’

  ‘Do you think I need it, sir?’ she asked teasingly.

  ‘All ladies need protection, but someone as pretty and charming in this godforsaken town will need it by day and night.’

  Sam and Jack arrived then and whisked her off back to the tent. They had been with Captain Moore who owned the sawmill here, and had arranged to get some timber from him to build a cabin.

  ‘Did you know Theo has told people he’s an earl?’ Beth asked them as they picked their way through the thick mud back to their tent.

  ‘He called himself that back in Montreal too,’ Sam admitted. ‘It’s nothing, sis, it just greases a few wheels. Americans are impressed by it.’

  ‘Well, he’s just lost himself a wife,’ she said tartly. ‘But then, I don’t suppose he’ll care much about that.’

  There were times in the weeks that followed when Beth was tempted to catch the next boat back to Vancouver, even if she had to go alone. She woke in the mornings stiff with cold, and the prospect of yet another day tramping through mud, cooking over an open fire and never having any privacy or peace, seemed too much to bear.

  Every day new ships arrived, disgorging hundreds more people, horses, dogs and other animals. The rows of tents spread further and further, more and more trees were chopped down, and still more mud and filth were created.

  Ridiculously high prices for every basic commodity made Beth fear that all the money she earned at Clancy’s would be wiped out before they even left on the trail to the goldfields. Rats, thieves and bears spoiled or snatched provisions; disease was rife because of the unsanitary conditions, and hardly a night passed without outbreaks of gunfire and brawling.

  Beth did feel more secure once Jack and Sam had completed the cabin, for although only small, it was weatherproof and had a wood floor and a lock on the door. Jack staggered in one day with a cast-iron stove some foolish person had intended to take up over the trail, and Sam found Beth a hip bath too.

  Playing nightly at Clancy’s did lift her spirits, and as she saw the town improving almost overnight, with streets laid out and many new permanent buildings, she had hopes that by Christmas it would be more civilized. Clancy’s was built of wood now, and there was a hotel, several more fancy saloons, most of them with brothels upstairs, real shops and a raised sidewalk so people could walk without getting stuck in mud. Even a photographer had arrived and opened up a studio.

  There was much to be optimistic about in the town, but Beth was very unhappy at how Theo was behaving. He had found the boom town of his dreams, and suddenly nothing else mattered to him but making money.

  Skagway had attracted hundreds of men like him. Soapy Smith and the Clancy brothers were just the same; they knew they didn’t need to go to the Klondike to make their fortunes. They could do that right here. Soapy had his own saloon now, known as Jeff Smith’s Parlour, complete with potted palms and a mahogany bar shipped up from Portland. Both he and the Clancy brothers had a back door from their saloons which led to a row of cribs where their girls worked. They had had a finger in every pie in town, sending in their thugs to terrorize if they weren’t paid protection money.

  But these men treated Beth like a lady. No one in Skagway dared steal from her or insult her for she had their protection. Theo, however, used her as if she were his housekeeper and private whore.

  Beth couldn’t help but like Soapy, even though she knew most of the swindlers and bully boys in town were in his employ. He flirted with her, made her laugh, and cheered her up when she was feeling glum. He had got his nickname because he’d once run a racket in which he sold tablets of soap, many of which he claimed had a ten-dollar bill tucked in the wrapper. He would get a crowd around his stall and sell a marked tablet to a stooge amongst it, who would immediately shout out that he’d found a note. Everyone clamoured to buy soap then, but there were no more ten-dollar bills.

  Soapy ran a telegraph racket here. There were no telegraph lines to Alaska, but he had opened a little telegraph booth down on the shore, and had a cable running into the sea to make it look real. He would take several dollars from people sending a message home, and even fake replies from their wife or mother, begging them to send money home for a child or other family member who was sick.

  Beth thought this was pretty shabby, just as the soap con was, but Soapy made up for his badness by making sure the stray dogs in the town were fed, and he gave handouts to those who were penniless, the sick and the widows.

  Theo didn’t seem to have a good side any more. He pretended to be an earl and charmed people into trusting him implicitly, taking from anyone who sat down at a card game with him. She knew he cheated, but he was clever enough to make sure he only did this to real greenhorns. One morning Beth had seen a man crying as he tried to sell off his kit to pay for his passage home. Theo had taken every dime he had the night before.

  But it wasn’t just his gambling and tricking others that upset her, it was the way he seemed to have forgotten they were supposed to be a team of four. Sam and Jack had worked hard from the day they arrived here, at the sawmill and building a cabin for them all. Now they were building cabins for other people. Beth pulled her weight too by playing at night, cooking them all meals and doing the laundry.

  But Theo did nothing for the common good. He lay in bed most of the day, then demanded a clean shirt so he could swan off in style to whatever dive he hoped to find a new sucker in that evening. He rarely came into Clancy’s to listen to Beth play and he left it to Sam or Jack to escort her home. The ribbons she’d brought with her had disappeared, and then she saw Dirty-neck Mary with the green ones in her hair.

  But worst of all in her mind was that she was sure he was supplying girls to the brothels. The first time she saw him carrying the baggage of a couple of young women who had just got off a steamer, she thought he was just being gentlemanly. But later the same night she saw the girls in the newly built Red Onion Saloon, and it was clear from their painted faces that they had joined the prostitutes who worked upstairs there.

  Every day a ship brought in a couple of dozen young women among its passengers, and it was possible some of them had been whores back in the towns they came from. But not all — some were country girls who just wanted a bit of adventure. Theo met each boat, and it was always
the prettiest young women he made a beeline for to offer help and a place to live.

  It seemed he didn’t love Beth any more, and he’d forgotten all the plans the four of them had made back in Vancouver.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  ‘You really do have a gypsy in your soul,’ Jefferson murmured as he took Beth’s hand and raised it to his lips. ‘I could listen to you playing for ever and never tire of it.’

  ‘I would tire of it,’ she said with a smile, and picked up the glass of French champagne he’d just poured for her.

  It was the end of January and thick snow lay all around outside, but they were in Jeff Smith’s Parlour, his bar and gambling den for those in his immediate circle. The stove was blazing, Beth was a little drunk, and it felt good to have a handsome man trying to seduce her.

  Jefferson had been trying to woo her since December.

  He’d given her a rocking chair for her cabin, bought her candy and was always inviting her for a drink or a meal. But this was the first time she’d been entirely alone with him; usually, when he brought her to the saloon, most of his cronies were here too.

  They had been present earlier, but they had dispersed a while ago now, and even Nate Pollack, the bartender, had left after putting more logs on the stove.

  ‘Are you still planning to head for the goldfields next month?’ Jefferson asked, taking a strand of her hair and winding it round his finger.

  ‘Sam and Jack can’t wait to go,’ she replied. ‘So I guess I’ll go with them.’

  ‘It’s no trip for a lady,’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘I’m as strong as most men,’ she said with a smile. ‘Besides, Skagway will be a ghost town when everyone’s left. What would there be for me to do?’

  ‘As soon as the weather breaks there will be even more ships. People are making their way here from all over the world,’ he said with that sparkle in his grey eyes she’d come to like so much. ‘You’ll make a bigger fortune here than you ever will in Dawson City. You could die on that journey; even the Indians say how difficult it is.’