The Klondike Mysteries 4-Book Bundle. Vicki Delany

Ellie, the eldest, had helped Irene upstairs. I hurried to follow them and made the first two steps before Richard Sterling reached me.

      “Mrs. MacGillivray, one moment, please.”

      I turned and tried to appear as a woman with absolutely nothing in the world to hide. “Good evening, Constable.”

      His eyes passed over the front of my best dress, caressing my body from throat to knees and back up again. That was a first from the oh-so-proper constable.

      “I’m feeling somewhat unwell and need to go upstairs and lie down for a moment.” I cranked out a smile that had all the warmth of the last inch of a cheap tallow candle.

      “Is everything all right here, Mrs. MacGillivray? We, the NWMP I mean, are always ready to help, you know.”

      “And greatly appreciated you loyal servants of Her Majesty are, let me assure you,” I babbled inanely, reminding myself of my son talking too formally when trying to hide something. I took a deep breath. “Of course, everything’s perfectly fine. Doesn’t it look normal?” I waved a hand over the crowd. The customers, who had been listening to every word, smiled at us like the back row of a music hall chorus that was about to be booed off the stage.

      “If you say so, Mrs. MacGillivray.” Sterling touched the edge of his broad-brimmed hat. “Almost closing time.”

      “I’ll be down by then.” I climbed regally up the stairs, praying that he wouldn’t follow me. Sterling had never behaved at all improperly, and tonight of all nights I didn’t need the handsome officer of the law asking for favours in return for…what?

      Irene lay on the lumpy couch in my office, her eyes closed, her breathing ragged. Ellie crouched on the floor beside her, holding a cool, damp cloth to her forehead.

      “She don’t look at all well, Mrs. Fiona,” Ellie said. Being the oldest of the dancers, she was the only one permitted to call me by my first name. “Look at this.” She loosened Irene’s gown and pulled it away from the half-conscious woman’s shoulders. A mass of purple and yellow bruises streaked across her breasts. The remains of angry fingerprints ran across her upper arms.

      I sat on the edge of my desk. “Closing time in…” I checked my watch “…ten minutes. Get one of the other girls, Ruby I think, tell her to come up here. Never mind what she’s doing. She can sit with Irene. Then go for the doctor. Tell him I’ll pay. When Ruby gets here, I’ll go down for closing.”

      Ellie handed me the cloth. “Is she gonna be all right, Mrs. Fiona?”

      “Of course,” I said, with more optimism than I felt. “Those marks will heal.” No need to tell Ellie that I wanted the doctor to check for internal injuries. The other marks weren’t terribly serious, but the blow to the stomach that I witnessed might have done some real damage. When I was a child working the London slum of Seven Dials, a prostitute who rented rooms from my protector had been beaten up by a customer. Nothing but bruises, her pimp said, no lasting harm, as he pushed her back out on the street. She worked for one more night, then she died. Died right where she sat, they said, in a dark corner of the Bishop and Belfry Pub cradling a glass of gin and an eel pie before going outside again. Her life left her with a rush of blood that still stained the Bishop’s floor the day I left Seven Dials.

      If I caught sight of Jack Ireland again, I would tear him apart.

      Irene’s eyes opened. She tried to sit up, and I pressed her back down.

      “You rest,” I said.

      “I’m fine, Mrs. MacGillivray. I don’t know what came over me.” A cloud passed behind her eyes. “Jack?”

      “Escorted to the street. He won’t be back. Not if Ray Walker and Mouse O’Brien and every dancing man in Dawson has anything to say about it.”

      She half-smiled and tried to sit up again. “Back to work then. We don’t dance, we don’t get paid. Isn’t that so, Mrs. MacGillivray?”

      Again, I pressed her back into the couch. “My mother taught me another saying: You die, you most certainly don’t ever get paid again. I’ve called for the doctor. You wait right there until he arrives.”

      “I can’t afford the doctor!” Her legs beat a steady rhythm in the air as she struggled to get up. The couch was deep: broken springs and my firm hand kept her down.

      “I’m paying, Irene. The way things have been around here lately, I might hire him permanently.”

      Ruby slipped into the room.

      “She gonna be all right, Mrs. MacGillivray?”

      “Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here,” Irene said.

      “I’d say she’s going to be fine. I have to go downstairs for closing. I’ll make up the money you’re losing by not being on the floor.”

      Ruby cocked her head. “I don’t care about the money, Mrs. MacGillivray.”

      “Nevertheless, I’ll make it up.” Ruby didn’t care about the money. Tonight. But when it was time to pay her bills or count her savings, she would be cursing me for keeping her from closing-time tips.

      I stood in front of the mirror to give myself a quick appraisal before venturing back downstairs. For a moment, I didn’t recognize my reflection and wondered what that wild woman was doing in my office. Then I knew why Richard Sterling had been studying me: not in admiration of my beauty or appreciation of my feminine charms, but because I looked like a particularly dangerous escapee from a lunatic asylum.

      Chapter Seventeen

      Blood, drying to an ugly brown, splattered the front of my Worth gown, particularly noticeable against the excellent Belgian lace, which I had struggled so hard to keep a virginal white all these years. The dress hung by a thread at one shoulder, and the rip in the bodice was borderline illegal. My hair had been pulled out of its pins and stood up like stalks of corn in an Ontario field in August. The broken red feather stuck out sideways from my hair. A streak of blood bisected my left cheek like a bolt of devil’s lightning. I almost screamed at the sight of it and grabbed the damp cloth out of Ruby’s hands. I scrubbed frantically.

      “What am I going to do? I can’t go back down looking like this. But if I’m not there for closing, Sterling will know something’s wrong!”

      “You put that shawl around your shoulders,” Irene said. “And you wash your face and tuck your hair into its pins as best you can manage, and you wear that dress like battle armour.”

      I looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her colour was recovering, and her face was set into lines of fierce pride. I cleaned my face, and Ruby helped me arrange my hair into some semblance of order. I draped my heavy shawl over my shoulders, the orange, handmade woollen one that I kept behind my desk chair for protection from the cool northern nights. I could do nothing about the bloodstains. Tomorrow my best dress, a genuine Worth, presented to me by Lord Alveron in a suite of the Savoy Hotel, London, would be torn up for rags, but tonight I would wear it with pride. We’d been through a lot, this dress and I.

      “How do I look?” I stepped away from the mirror to face the two women. They smiled. “Like a winner,” Irene said with a chuckle. But she stifled a gasp, and her hand touched her stomach as she laughed.

      Footsteps, one pair light, cautious, one heavy, full of authority, sounded on the stairs. “That’s the doctor now,” Ruby said. “You go, Mrs. MacGillivray. I’ll stay with Irene.”

      “Good evening, Doctor. I have to close up now. I’ll settle your bill tomorrow.” I swept past him and out of the room.

      On a Saturday night in Dawson, Yukon Territory, everything shut down at two minutes to midnight for the Lord’s Day. Up and down Front Street, the gambling wheels slowed to a halt, hands of cards (no matter how good they were) landed face down on the green table, bottles of whisky were fastened shut, and dancing girls pulled off dancing shoes to release cramped toes with a contented sigh.