Gold Mountain: A Klondike Mystery (12 page)

I made enough money for the family over the winter that come spring, they’d been able to buy a strong, healthy horse from a farmer, get rid of the sway-backed nag, and replace the cart with a handsome wagon for the adults and the girls to sleep in. The wagon was a real luxury in more ways than one: Jean and Mary no longer had to walk alongside the cart. They took turns riding in style beside Yuri as he clamped on his pipe and flicked the horse’s reins.

In the world of Travellers we were rich.

In spring, with the horse pulling the wagon containing most of our goods, we walked out of Scotland and headed south through England.

There was little point in setting up near farms and hoping for work in the fields — no English farmer would give me coins because I spoke well and told a sad story — so we camped near the larger towns and cities. While I begged on street corners and one of the boys guarded me, Jean and Mary and the girls would go hawking. Selling things door to door, flowers they’d collected from the fields, trinkets they’d picked up on our travels, objects they’d made, such as scourers for cleaning pots, colourful shawls, or painted wooden decorations. Sometimes they’d read palms or tell fortunes. Yuri and his sons would knock on doors asking for work, things to be fixed, trees to be cut down or trimmed.

At first I thought I would never get over the death of my parents, but as time went on and the seasons changed, and we left behind the harsh beautiful highlands I loved, I found hours could go by without thinking of them. I stopped dreaming every night of Alistair Forester drenched with my mother’s blood. After about a year, Moira told me I was no longer tossing and turning and crying out in fear in my dreams.

I never felt love from my new family. Jean was kind to me, and she fed me and ensured I had a place to sleep, but she never wrapped me in her arms or held me tight. Yuri was quick to discipline me for incidents of what he saw as disrespect or failure to do my job. I was as much a worker for his family as was the new horse, and I received just as much affection. Mary, the younger wife, disliked me intensely and was quick with a punch or kick if I didn’t move fast enough or she thought I was talking back. Only later did I understand she feared that when I got older I would be invited into Yuri’s tent.

Moira and I had little choice but to become friends. Girls of an age surrounded by adults, older boys, and younger girls. But I suspected she was jealous of me and never put my trust in her.

Davie and Donald pretty much ignored me, and I them.

Jock, however, watched me constantly. He was a small man, but he was strong. He’d slap my bottom or make a grab at my breasts, tiny as rosebuds, or grab me around the waist and ask for a kiss and not let go until Yuri growled at him. He pretended, in front of the others, it was all in fun, but I knew better. His laughter was forced and his smile did not reach his dark eyes.

One day he hid in the bushes while I was returning from the privy and jumped out as I passed. He wrapped his arms, strong from hard labour, around me and bent my head for a kiss. When I resisted, he knocked me to the ground with a growl. But he tripped and I was able to get to my feet and flee.

Jean gave me a long look when I came running out of the trees, the back of my dress covered in dead leaves and dirt, followed by a grinning, swaggering Jock.

We arrived in Oxford, and I was sent into town with Jock to do my job while the others made the rounds of hawking and seeking odd jobs. I did particularly well that day and had collected the incredible sum of ten pounds from an elderly don, who was almost brought to tears by my heartbreaking story of indescribable woe. Which I described at great length. I handed over all the money to Jock, as I was expected to, and we made our way out of town toward camp.

As we were passing a pub, Jock shoved me into an alley. I lost my footing and staggered backwards, falling into the dirty ground. Before I knew what was happening, he was on me, one hand reaching up my skirt, clawing at the delicate skin on the top of my legs. His mouth came down hard on mine and his thick tongue thrust between my lips. Something long and hard was pressed up against my thigh and I knew Jock was scrambling to undo his trouser buttons.

I bit down, hard, onto his tongue and felt blood spurt into my mouth. Jock yelled and punched me in the face. Once, twice, three times. Stars moved behind my eyes. I raked my fingers down his face and screamed.

“You there. What do you think you’re doing?”

The weight lifted off me as Jock lumbered to his feet. “Piss off,” he growled.

“I don’t care what you get up to with your whore, but you won’t be doing it next to my premises. Get off with you. Why, she’s just a child.”

The man was very large, red-faced and round-bellied, with enormous white whiskers. He turned to Jock and his face filled with anger. “I’ll have the police on you, lad.” He stepped toward me and held out his hand. “Are you all right, child?” He pulled me to my feet.

I straightened my dress, nodded, and wiped blood from my nose. I said in an accent that was pure crofter’s daughter. “Aye, sir. I thank ye for the kindness, sir.”

“She’s my sister,” Jock said with a growl, “and I don’t need the likes of you interfering if she needs disciplining.”

He grabbed my hand and we ran, the man’s shouts following us.

Once he was sure we were not being pursued, Jock dropped my hand. “Not a word o’ this, you hear?”

I stared into his eyes, black and hard as chips of coal. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“You should be. You will be.”

He left me standing alone on the street corner, my day’s earnings in his pocket.

I made my own way back to camp.

Jean cried out when she saw me. I must have made quite a sight with my face bruised and bloodied, my dress torn and dirty. I said something about a tough trying to take my money, and she dipped a clean rag into the can set to boil for tea and wiped at my face gently.

Yuri asked me where Jock had been while I was being assaulted, and I said I didn’t know. He studied me through milky eyes and a cloud of smoke and read the lie in my face.

I didn’t hear Jock return to camp, but he was at breakfast the following morning. Deep scratches ran down his right cheek, and he blustered about fighting off three men in a pub. An unlikely story, as even I was well aware Travellers were not welcome in pubs. If they did fancy a pint, they were expected to be out by three o’clock when the locals arrived. Yuri said I was to go hawking with the women today and ordered Jock to stay behind once the others had left to find work.

When we returned that evening, Jock’s eye was black and purple and almost swollen shut, and he walked as if his ribs were hurting him. The knuckles on Yuri’s right hand were bruised. Neither man said a word about what had happened, and no one asked.

I was off the street for a week while my bruises faded and the cuts healed over, and I knew Yuri was angrier with Jock at the signs of violence on my face than the attack itself.

From that day on, Jock regarded me with a smouldering anger, but he did not try to touch me again.

Jean took me aside after supper the night of the attack. We went around to the far side of the wagon. She pulled something out of the folds of her dress. It was a knife in a battered leather sheath. “Our Jock is not a good man. He’s my son and I’m sorry, but that’s the way of the world sometimes and there’s nae help for it. You need to watch out for yourself, Fiona. Take this.” She pressed the sheath into my hand. I gripped it, and pulled the knife out slowly. Firelight reflected off the blade. It was very sharp.

“Davie will show you how to use it. Keep it with you always.” Yuri called for tea, and she slipped away.

Davie was as opposite a man from his brother as two people could be. He was shy and spoke in a low voice with his bulging eyes fixed on the ground. He was always kind to me and seemed genuinely fond of his cousin and two half-sisters. He was the youngest and smallest of Jean’s three boys, and the two older ones treated him with a sort of casual contempt; it was not unknown for him to come to meals with a bloodied nose or blackening eye.

He taught me well. How to keep the knife concealed but available instantly when needed; to ensure the sheath was always smooth inside so the blade wouldn’t stick. He showed me how to thrust and how to parry, to stab deep and hard, and to use it to block an incoming blow. After the incident with Jock, Yuri assigned Davie to watch over me while I begged, and we usually stopped somewhere private on the way back for a lesson. The day I accidently cut his forearm, he laughed and said I needed a teacher no longer. I’m sure Yuri knew what was going on, but nothing was ever said between us.

Moira saw the knife when I laid it beside my head at night or took off my clothes to bathe in a summer stream. Like the rest of the family, she said nothing about it. I told the younger girls it was for peeling tatties and neeps.

We tramped the length and breadth of Scotland and England, and after two years we set up camp outside London for the first time. I was excited about seeing the great city. Euila’s governess, Miss Wheatley, had been a proud Englishwoman and had gone on at enormous length as to how London was the centre of the world. She’d described all the wonders to be found there: Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, High Park, Pall Mall. As much as I hated Miss Wheatley, her enthusiasm was so great I’d always wanted to see the city.

We set up our tents at the rim of a Travellers’ camp. There were about ten other families and we girls were very much looking forward to songs and talk and laugher around the communal fire.

Yuri puffed on his pipe and watched the boys erect the tent. It was late November, so the boys worked hard to protect the tent against harsh winter winds. It had been six months since that afternoon in Oxford when Jock tried to rape me — I had no doubt that had been his intent — and if anything, his anger at me was only growing. I was thirteen now, my body taking shape into curves, my long gangly limbs coming under some sort of control. Jock was over twenty. He was short and scrawny but hard-muscled after a life outdoors and days full of manual labour.

On occasion his mother tried to talk to him about marrying soon, and he would growl and tell her to shut her mouth. He watched me across the flames of the cooking fire, and if I happened to look up and catch his eye, he would draw the pad of his index finger very slowly across his thick lips and give me a slow wink that had my spine turning to ice.

Mary was always making comments and tossing out suggestions, actively encouraging Jock to court me. She told me Jock would be the head of the family one day, and if I was his proper acknowledged wife, I’d have status in the travelling community. They were hoping, she told me, to find a husband for Moira, and I would have to either marry Jock or leave. I didn’t think they were going to keep me on forever did I?

Considering that I made more money than all the rest of them put together, I did think they were going to keep me forever.

I didn’t know how I felt about that. It was probably just the way things were going to be.

Who knows what would have happened, how my life would have turned out, had Jock been a bit kinder, not so openly vicious when no one else was around. I was only thirteen years old, and although Yuri’s family fed me and housed me, I was emotionally alone in the world. I might have been persuaded by charm and good manners.

Instead, I feared him.

He had a cruel streak and directed it not only at me. Since the day he’d attacked me and had been punished by his father, he turned his hostility onto the younger ones. He tripped little May one day as she was passing the fire. She fell forward, hands outstretched to break her fall. Fortunately, Davey was there, and quick-witted, as he grabbed May’s arm and wrenched her away from the open flame.

We never did get to join the dancing and singing around the communal fire that night outside London. As Donald turned to pronounce the tent ready, Yuri gave a strangled cry and fell forward.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

When the funeral was over and the other travelling families had returned to their own camps, Jock got to his feet and stood before our fire. We sat silently, waiting for him to speak.

He looked everyone in the eye, one after another.

“I’m head of this family now.”

Murmurs of agreement.

“Mum and Mary, you’ll move into the tent with the girls.”

“Aye,” Mary said.

“And you,” he said to me, “will move into my tent. Tonight. Get your things.”

Moira studied her feet, May and Polly shifted. Donald laughed and Davie grumbled. “You got something ta say aboot that?” Jock asked him.

“No.”

“See ye don’t. What are you waiting for woman? I said now.”

I got to my feet, very slowly. I felt the weight of the knife in my belt. I looked at the faces around the fire. No one was looking at me.

“No,” I said.

I heard breath being sucked in. Jock approached me. He was not much taller than I, yet he was fully grown and I had several more inches to come. “You’ll do what I say, girl, or you’ll feel my fist.”

“What a charming proposal,” I said, exactly as Miss Wheatley would have addressed him. “Nevertheless, I am forced to decline. I will not be your wife. I will not sleep in your tent.”

He glanced at the faces around the fire. No one moved, no one said a word. Jock lifted his arm and swung his hand, palm open, at my face.

Jean yelled, “No,” and Moira screamed. One of the girls began to cry.

I read his intent long before he even began to move. I danced out of the way and the blow went wild. He cursed me. The knife was in my hand, blade out, without conscious thought. When Jock came at me again, I was ready. The blade gleamed in the firelight before it sliced into Jock’s arm.

He yelled in shock and stared at his arm. The cut wasn’t deep, but deep enough. Blood leaked through the cloth of his shirt.

I spoke to the women, but focused on Jock, his eyes wide with surprise and shock. “Time for me to be moving on, I believe. Ladies, I bid you a very good day.”