The Klondike Mysteries 4-Book Bundle. Vicki Delany
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said.
An old argument between friends.
“Why did you leave God’s Country to come to the Yukon?” I asked. Not that I was particularly interested. But I had to pass the time somehow until the floor dried.
“I left Pennsylvania a very long time ago indeed,” Margaret said. “I haven’t been back since.” Something had always seemed out of place with Margaret, and now that I paid some attention to her, I understood what it was. She spoke much, much better than one would expect from a bartender’s wife.
I sipped my coffee. I would ask no further questions. Even in the Yukon we were capable of some degree of good manners.
“Tell Mrs. MacGillivray,” Helen said. She looked at me. “Margaret’s had ever such an interesting life.”
Mrs. Collins sighed, reluctant to repeat the story.
“Come on,” Helen urged.
“My family didn’t approve of Sam,” Margaret said. “We had a big farm, by far the largest in the county. My younger brother studied to become a doctor. Sam’s family were homesteaders. They dug themselves a hardscrabble farm out of rocks and dirt and had a mess of boys to split the land between one day. My father forbade me from having anything to do with the Collins family.”
“You disobeyed him.” Everyone of us in the Yukon has a story to tell; we wouldn’t be here otherwise.
The corners of Margaret’s stern mouth twitched as she savoured the memory. “Sam and I ran away. He had a cousin homesteading in North Carolina, who offered us a home if Sam would help around the farm. We arrived in March of ’61.” The smile faded.
“Wasn’t North Carolina nice?” I asked, wondering at the sense of doom with which Margaret had filled the last sentence.
“Spring of ’61. North Carolina,” she repeated. “Yes,” I said, smiling. What was I missing? Was North Carolina, wherever that might be, not a pleasant place in the spring? It couldn’t possibly have more mosquitoes than the Yukon, could it?
“War broke out just weeks after we got there. Lots of farming people in North Carolina quite sensibly, in my opinion, didn’t want to take sides or have anything to do with the war. But not Sam’s cousins. They were so dreadfully eager to go and fight for secession, and they got Sam all caught up in the excitement with their talk about freedom.”
“War,” I repeated. “Nasty business.” Was there a war in 1861? I hadn’t even been born yet, what did I know or care?
There was always a war going on somewhere. Seems to me that it never did anyone any good. So why do men keep having them? Because it must be doing someone some good, of course. Although not the poor men who have to fight or the poor women who stand to lose everything they hold dear.
Margaret fell silent, but Helen picked up her story. “Sam left for the war in May ’61, and he didn’t come back home till it was all over. Ain’t that right, Margaret?”
“I thought he was dead. Didn’t hear a word for months. Then we got a letter from Sam’s cousin Jake saying that Sam had been captured by the Yankees. Yankees. My own brothers were Yankees.”
I settled back into my chair. “Then it turned out all right then. Sam was safe, out of the war.”
Margaret looked at me.
“The Yankees weren’t nice to their prisoners, Mrs. Mac,” Helen Saunderson said.
“Oh,” I said.
“Sam came home in ’65,” Margaret said. “We’d been married for four years, and we hadn’t been together more than a couple of weeks in all that time.”
“That must have been difficult.” I knew I sounded about as shallow as the dregs of coffee left in the bottom of my cup. But what else could I say: You’ll get over it one day?
“Sam healed and fattened himself back up. He was a hero. He’d been captured because he refused to leave a wounded man behind. He tried to carry the soldier back to Confederate lines. He would have escaped, if he’d left the man to die. A man he’d never set eyes on before. But Sam couldn’t leave him. The fellow died in the prison camp because the Yankee soldiers wouldn’t send for a doctor to tend to him. When the war ended, the Confederacy was broken, and its heroes weren’t recognized. Not like the Union soldiers. They got medals for waking up in the morning.
“But despite all that happened to Sam, we were luckier than many. Sam’s cousin Jake never did make it home.
Then the carpetbaggers came.”
It didn’t take a genius to assume that the carpetbaggers were not nice people. I shook my head in disapproval at their actions. Whatever those actions might have been.
“They took the farm, so we left for California. But luck didn’t come with us, Mrs. MacGillivray. We’ve had a hard life. But I’m not sorry for a moment of it, except for what those Union bastards—excuse me, Mrs. MacGillivray, Helen—did to my Sam.”
“Did you ever hear from your family?” “Only once. I wrote to my mother, two years after Sam was taken prisoner. I told her all that had happened. I said I missed her. She never received the letter. My father sent it back, with ‘Confederate Traitor’ written in big black letters across the envelope.”
“And you never wrote to your mother again?”
“There didn’t seem to be much point.” I thought for a moment of Margaret’s mother, waiting anxiously for a letter, day after day, year after year, as more than thirty years passed. And her husband defacing and returning the one letter that did arrive.
“Floor’s dry, if’n you want to go upstairs, Mrs. Mac,” Helen announced.
“It’s been nice talking to you, Margaret,” I said as I stood up. Now there was a trite comment. In neither the overflowing streets of Seven Dials nor the drawing rooms of Belgravia—not even in the comfortable homes of Toronto —did one encounter such human emotion nakedly displayed. This really was the New World, and I didn’t quite know what to make of it. I’m much more comfortable hiding behind a civilized façade of good manners and polite indifference than being confronted by this strange American habit of revealing one’s innermost feelings to almost-perfect strangers.
As a nation, they won’t get anywhere as long as they continue to display such tolerance to the relaxation of common decency. Not compared to the fortitude of the peoples of the British Empire, for which I had not the slightest bit of affinity, but felt a certain not-quiteunderstood pride nevertheless.
As I trudged up the stairs to my office, it occurred to me that I had gone a whole half an hour without giving a thought to the whereabouts of my wayward son.
I worked on the books, making several mistakes when my mind wandered, and I found myself thinking more about Angus than the columns of figures I should be concentrating on.
It couldn’t be easy for Angus, being my son. We’d had a nice life, in Toronto. I’d rented a beautiful home in the best part of town. Angus had gone to a good Episcopal school, in the company of boys from the best families. The sons of bankers, lawyers, men of business and blue-blooded aristocrats who’d come to Canada when their bloodlines outlasted their family fortunes. His schoolmates invited Angus to skating and tennis parties; he spent weekends at near-palatial summer homes on Stony Lake. Then one day, I arrived at his school in the middle of the night, forced the night porter to rouse my son from his bed, informed the headmaster, still rubbing sleep out of his eyes and wearing a hastily tied dressing gown, that Angus was leaving, and ordered my driver to toss his trunk into the cab. We caught the next train out of Union Station heading west. The boy looked out the window and didn’t even complain that he hadn’t had a chance to bid his friends goodbye.
Finally, I decided the ledger was accurate enough and took our earnings to the bank. But despite the fact that I had enjoyed all of a half-an-hour’s sleep the previous night, I didn’t want to go back to Mrs.