The temperature had risen, and when the sun came out it felt almost like spring. Jack was the easiest of people to live with, always calm, never complaining. His face broke into a wide smile when she took him coffee and cake while he was digging, and appreciated it when she’d heated hot water for him to wash when he came in. But he didn’t expect anything.
Yet the thing she liked best of all was that he made her laugh. She would be sitting reading and she’d suddenly look up to see his face pressed grotesquely at the window. Once she heard a growling and scraping at the door and took fright, thinking it was a bear, but it was only him playing the fool. Most of the laughter, however, came from light-hearted banter between them, shared memories or observations about people. She realized that she hadn’t really had that with Theo, nor long conversations either. She suspected that if they hadn’t always had Sam and Jack around them, they might have been very bored.
The days were growing longer now and sometimes they would go down to Oz’s cabin after supper, and Beth would play her fiddle for him. Some evenings men from nearby claims would hear her and come along too. They were the best of times, for some of the men would sing with her, they had good stories to tell and appreciated some feminine company.
There were a few women along Bonanza. In the main they were a tough, hard-bitten breed who dug holes in the frozen ground as efficiently as their men, and often did other jobs as well, like washing for other miners or baking bread and pies to earn badly needed extra money. They rebuffed Beth’s tentative overtures of friendship, and while Jack said this was because they didn’t want a pretty woman near their men, Beth felt it was more likely that they had heard the gossip about her.
While that didn’t matter here, Beth realized with a little alarm that once back on the Outside she was going to face more serious social disapproval.
A dance-hall girl, or even a whore, might get married, or become a nurse or a secretary, with little fear of anyone discovering what she had done here. But Beth knew she was up there with Klondike Kate, Diamond Tooth Gertie and other women who’d made a big splash in Dawson City, and the stories about them all had spread all over the world through newspaper articles about the Klondike.
So unless she gave up playing her fiddle in public, and never told a soul on the Outside that she’d been to Dawson City during the Gold Rush, the more scandalous parts of her time here in Dawson were going to get out.
Beth had been thinking about this problem one morning as she got washed and dressed. She had no solution as her fiddle-playing was the only way she had of making a living. But as the sun was shining, she thought she would stop worrying about her future and see if she could tempt Jack into leaving his digging to go for a walk with her.
She knew the temperature had risen the second she walked out of the cabin for her face didn’t tingle as it usually did. Then she heard dripping. It was all around her, coming from the snow-covered machinery, the roof of the cabin, the path down to Oz’s, everywhere.
The snow was melting!
Excitedly, she ran up behind the cabin and up the hill, calling to Jack. He paused in his digging as she approached him and leaned on his shovel with a wide grin on his face.
Beth stopped short, whatever she was going to say forgotten at the sight of him without his beard.
‘When did you do that?’ she asked.
‘Do what?’
‘You know! Your beard’s gone.’
‘Oh, that.’ He rubbed his chin as if he was surprised to find no hairy mass there. ‘I saw the thaw had come this morning, and I thought it was time the beard went too.’
‘You look much nicer,’ she said. In fact he looked very handsome, for his square jaw and wide mouth were two good features he never should have covered. ‘And much younger.’
‘I’m glad it meets with your approval,’ he said. ‘But what were you rushing up here to tell me? Is Queen Victoria dead?’
‘Not as far as I know.’ Beth laughed. ‘I was just excited because the snow is melting.’
‘Remember how it was last year?’ Jack mused. ‘Up to our knees in mud at Lake Bennett and you skipping off to look for spring flowers!’
‘Let’s go and do that again,’ she suggested.
‘There won’t be any flowers for a while,’ he reminded her.
‘But there might be in sheltered places. Let’s go and look?’
Jack stuck his shovel hard into the ground. ‘All right, just to please you.’
As they reached the woods at the top of the hill, the thaw was even more apparent, for the sound of snow plopping from the branches of trees was almost a symphony. Beth made a snowball and threw it at Jack, and he quickly retaliated. She ran for it, but each time she took shelter behind a tree, she made another snowball to hurl at him.
The game went on and on, both of them shrieking with laughter each time they were hit and jeering at each other when they missed.
They had gone further and further into the wood, and Beth found a very big tree to hide behind. Jack was suddenly silent, so she peeped round the tree trunk to see where he was.
Suddenly she felt his hand clamp on to her shoulder. ‘Boo!’ he shouted, making her nearly jump out of her skin as she hadn’t heard him creep up behind her.
She had a snowball ready in her hand, and she brought it up and pushed it into his face. ‘Boo to you too,’ she giggled.
He laughed and brushed the snow off his face, but there was still some on his nose. They were only a foot apart, and Beth took off her mitten and reached out to brush the snow away. But as her hand touched his cheek, she suddenly saw something in his eyes. It was the same look she’d seen the last night on the ship before they got to New York. She was so innocent then that she hadn’t known what it meant, except that it was special. But she knew what it was now.
Raw longing.
She couldn’t take her hand away from his cheek. She had a feeling welling up inside her that was so strong and sweet she felt she might cry. He took her hand and moved it to his mouth, kissing her palm. The warmth and softness of his lips sent an exquisite tingle down her spine.
It was she who moved closer, moving her hand to his cheeks to kiss him on the lips. For a moment or two he didn’t move, her lips on his, their bodies not quite touching, but then his hand came up to cup her face and he was kissing her back with such tenderness it made her feel she was an innocent seventeen-year-old again.
How long they stood there kissing she didn’t know, but she knew she didn’t want it to stop. Every part of her body was tingling with desire, wanting more than kissing but afraid to break away even for a second in case the spell broke.
Snow continued to plop from the trees all around them and the sun felt warm as it slanted across her cheek. In the distance she could hear the clank of a windlass as a miner hauled his bucket of mud out of a hole in the ground, and a bird chirruped on a nearby tree.
It was Jack who drew away first. His bare hands went back to cup her face and he looked deep into her eyes. ‘My beautiful Beth,’ he sighed. ‘I hope this isn’t just a dream and I wake up to find it didn’t really happen.’
Chapter Thirty-five
As they stopped outside the cabin to remove their boots, Beth felt awkward. The kissing had happened spontaneously up on the hill and it felt pure and right. But now they were going inside she was very aware that she had to decide whether or not they would move on to the next stage. She wanted to, but she wasn’t sure if it was wise.
Jack was her best and closest friend, the one person in the whole world who really knew her inside out. She was afraid of jeopardizing that friendship.
‘Scared?’ Jack asked as they stepped into the cabin.
‘No,’ she lied.
‘Well, I am,’ he admitted, kissing her nose as he took off her hat and ran his fingers through her hair. ‘But then I’ve been dreaming of making love to you ever since I first met you.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. If you could have read my
thoughts sometimes, you would’ve blushed.’
‘You’re teasing me?’
‘I’m not,’ he said, unbuttoning her coat. ‘Thoughts of you have kept me warm on many a cold night.’
He dropped her coat on the floor, drew her into his arms and kissed her again. As his tongue flickered against hers, Beth felt the tugging of desire inside her and she knew she was lost and couldn’t back away.
Still kissing her, he managed to remove all her clothes down to her chemise, then took her over to the bed and knelt beside it to peel off her stockings. ‘I always used to wonder what your legs were like,’ he said, running his hand up them while looking into her eyes. ‘I saw them as far as your knees once when we were on the raft, and I nearly fell in I was so excited.’
‘Oh, Jack,’ she said reprovingly.
‘You don’t like to think I was lusting after you all that time?’ he asked, his eyes glinting with mischief as his hands slid further up her thighs, stopping just an inch away from her sex.
Delicious waves of desire had rendered her speechless. All she could do was reach out for him.
He was out of his clothes in a couple of seconds, just long enough for her to pull the blankets back and get under them as the cabin was growing cold. But the moment he was in beside her, his arms around her, she forgot her anxiety, modesty and cold, for his warm, silky skin against hers felt so right.
She had thought Theo, Jefferson and John Fallon all to be good lovers, but they were only mediocre compared with Jack. He used his fingers with such sensitivity, stroking, probing and kissing in such an unhurried way that every nerve in her body came alive. Again and again she reached out to fondle his penis but he always stopped her. It was only when she felt something erupting inside her, and all sense of where she was and even who she was had left her, that he finally entered her, driving forcefully into her as tremendous shock waves engulfed her.
She heard herself cry out, felt tears course down her face, and she knew then that he had taken her to a place that none of her previous lovers had.
Jack propped himself up on one elbow and watched Beth as she lay sleeping next to him, his heart swelling with love for her. It was close to midnight, but there was enough light from the stove and the lantern hanging above it to see her clearly. It was midday when they came into the cabin, and since then he’d made love to her three times, along with making food, washing each other, drinking half a bottle of whisky between them and talking about anything and everything. He thought he ought to be exhausted, but he was too excited to sleep. She had been his first love, his only true love, and now she was finally his.
There had been many other girls during the six years since they first met on the ship. Straitlaced ones, wanton ones, kind girls, cruel girls, happy and sad ones. Some he’d tried to tell himself he loved, others he just made love to and hoped the pleasure he gave them made up for his lack of commitment. But inevitably he was always left with a sense of disappointment.
Beth had always been his lode star, even when he knew she had eyes for no one but Theo. But for her he would still be in New York; he’d never have gone to Montreal, travelled across Canada or come here. He had become her self-appointed guardian just to be near her. He would have done anything for her, even if she never saw him as anything more than a friend.
Now she was here, her slender body curled into his, deep in sleep, her face as soft as a child’s. He remembered how she’d looked when they rescued her from the cellar, frozen to the bone and her face haunted by the horror of her imprisonment. Her indignation when she discovered Pearl’s place in Philadelphia was a brothel. The night at the hospital in Montreal was etched on his mind too, when she’d cried out for Theo but had to settle for comfort from him.
Her courage on the Chilkoot Pass and her powers of endurance throughout that trail had astounded him. Then, in Dawson, having so recently lost Sam, she lost Molly too. Yet she gritted her teeth and played her heart out night after night in the Nugget. Many stampeders who had no money for drinks had told him they stood outside the saloon to listen to her play. They said she made them feel less hungry and thirsty, and that her music gave them hope they’d find a way to make their fortune.
Jack could understand how they felt, for he had fallen under the spell of her music the very first time he heard it on the ship.
Slipping out of bed, he put a little more wood on the stove to keep it going till morning, and blew out the lantern. In another couple of weeks the river ice would break up, and once again thousands of people would arrive in search of gold.
He smiled, for here in his little cabin he knew he had something far more precious than gold.
A loud whoop of excitement from Oz wafted up the hill to Jack and Beth who were busy at the sluice washing through stones and gravel.
‘What’s got into him?’ Jack said, standing up and moving to a place where he could see what was going on below.
‘Most likely he’s found a full bottle of whisky he’d forgotten about,’ Beth joked.
It was the middle of June. Two weeks earlier the ice had broken up on the creek and Oz’s claim had become a slick of glutinous mud. But constant warm sunshine since then had dried the worst of it, grass and wild flowers had sprung up around the cabin and birdsong filled the air.
Beth had never known such happiness. From the moment she opened her eyes in the morning to see Jack beside her, till they fell back into bed late at night, she was filled with the joy of knowing she’d made the right decision to come out here.
They hadn’t spoken of love or even of the future, for it seemed unnecessary when it was so clear that they were meant to be together for all time. Beth worked alongside Jack and Oz, shovelling and sluicing the dump piles cheerfully. She didn’t mind that it was hard, dirty work, or that at times it seemed pointless. It was enough to be beside Jack, to laugh and chat and feel utterly secure.
Sometimes in the afternoons he would take her fishing on the creek in Oz’s little rowing boat, and she would lie back, basking in the sunshine, and greedily contemplate making love when they got back to the cabin. Other times they would tramp up to the woods at the top of the claim and she’d pick flowers while he chopped wood for the stove. Lust often overtook them up there, for there was something deliciously wicked and dangerous about making love in the open air, especially when a bear or even a human could come along and surprise them.
‘Let’s go down and see what he’s up to,’ Jack said. ‘It’s time for something to eat anyway. Maybe a bit of canoodling later would be in order?’
Hand in hand, they ran down the hill to find Oz in a tattered checked shirt with his trousers held up with string, bent over his sluice.
As they approached he looked up, his wide smile revealing his blackened teeth. ‘Lookee here at what I’ve found!’ He picked up an old baking soda tin and handed it to them.
It contained four small gold nuggets. Jack shook them out into his palm. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he exclaimed. ‘You found them all together?’
‘Yup,’ Oz said. ‘I’ve sluiced through five dumps this morning and nothing, then on the sixth I was left with those.’
‘I’m so glad for you, Oz.’ Beth went over to him and gave him a hug. ‘How marvellous!’
‘Which hole did they come out of?’ Jack asked, looking around. All the ground to the side of his cabin was full of holes and dumps beside them.
‘That one there.’ Oz pointed to the one nearest his cabin. ‘That one was the last we did. Remember you was afeared I’d fall into it when I came out the cabin?’
Jack smiled and turned to Beth. ‘It was just before you came. When he asked me to dig it, I tried to put him off.’
‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to move the cabin now to dig underneath it?’ Beth asked.
Oz grinned. ‘Maybe. But first I had it in mind to get myself spruced up and go into town and spread the word around that old Ostrich has struck it rich again. There’s been folks laughing at me for a long time. This’ll stop ??
?em.’
‘You’ll get some eager to buy the claim off you,’ Jack reminded him.
‘If they offers me enough I just might take it,’ he retorted.
Beth looked at Jack in alarm, wondering where that would leave him, but to her surprise he was smiling at Oz. ‘You go on into town,’ he said. ‘We’ll do some sluicing down here while you’re gone, see if we can find more for you. But look after what you’ve got there, won’t you? That might be all there is!’
An hour later, Jack and Beth waved goodbye to Oz as he went off in the boat to Dawson. His sprucing up consisted only of trimming his beard and changing his clothes into slightly less tattered ones. Beth had made him put the nuggets into a poke around his neck and tucked inside his shirt. Jack had advised him to deposit them at the bank before he began drinking or playing cards.
‘What if he does sell the claim?’ Beth asked when they’d waved the older man out of sight. He had left Flash and Silver with them and they remained sitting on the creek bank looking towards where their master had gone.
‘I hope he does,’ Jack replied. ‘He won’t last another winter here.’
‘But what about you? The new owner won’t want you here.’
Jack shrugged. ‘I don’t mind. If you hadn’t turned up I’d have been on my way somewhere else by now.’
‘You would?’
He laughed at her surprised look and stroked her cheek. ‘I didn’t come here for gold, only to get away from Dawson. Now you’re with me I could be happy anywhere.’
That was exactly how she felt too, but hearing Jack voice her feelings was wonderful.
‘What will we do then?’ she asked. ‘If we’re chucked off.’
‘Whatever you want,’ he said, taking her in his arms. ‘My dream has already come true.’