“I don’t want to hear them. If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.” I flashed my pen as evidence.
“Another time then. But here’s something you’d better hear, my dear.” He pulled a scrap of paper out of his waistcoat pocket.
“Graham, I don’t have time to listen to your copy. I haven’t yet been to the bank.”
He held up one hand. “This isn’t my copy, Fiona. Someone else sent it. Listen for a moment while I read you a few select sentences.”
I sighed and settled back into my chair. Easier to let him talk and get it over with, then I could get back to work. He was a good man, Graham Donohue, with a kind heart. For a newspaper reporter. And an American. He made no secret of the fact that he wanted, very much, to be more than my friend. But it was best to let things remain as they were. For now.
“Helen Saunderson. House of Ill Repute. Infamous Madam. Fee—spelt F-e-e—MacIntosh. White slavery. Seven starving children.”
“Let me see that.” I got to my feet, leaned across the desk, and snatched the paper out of his hands. The handwriting was indecipherable. I shoved it back at him and resumed my seat. “Gibberish. Nothing but gibberish.”
“Fiona, listen to me.” H leaned forward and placed his elbows on my desk. “Jack Ireland sent this story to San Francisco on the first steamboat out this morning. I’ll read it to you in its entirety if you want, but the gist is that Helen Saunderson, he mentions her by name, has been forced into prostitution by a whorehouse madam by the name of F-i-e MacIntosh. Who, in the only bit of truth in his whole story, he describes as a black-haired beauty with a voice and complexion fresh off an English country estate.”
I was so annoyed I didn’t even take time to savour the phrases “black-haired-beauty” and “fresh complexion”. “How the hell did you get this? Don’t tell me Ireland tossed his rough copy into the gutter, and you happened upon it?”
“Language, Fiona. My delicate ears.”
I almost said something stronger, but Graham held up one hand. “I’m telling you this in the strictest of confidence, of course.” When Graham flirted with me, his hazel eyes sparkled as if with traces of gold dust; now they were so dark and serious that I settled back into my chair.
“Go ahead.”
“I pay some of the men who hang around the docks a generous sum to let me know if they hear of anyone sending newspaper copy out, and still more if they open the envelope and copy the meat of the article.”
The regular mail leaves Dawson once every two weeks, most recently only the day before yesterday. Obviously, ambitious newspapermen aren’t prepared to wait two weeks to see their stories heading for print. Although if they want secrecy, perhaps they should.
“As I’m sure they’re paid to copy your notes, Graham. But I can’t see what harm this rubbish can do me. He didn’t even get my name right, although the description is good.” I picked up my pen once again. If the story spread further than San Francisco, so what? Everyone in Dawson knew that I wasn’t a madam, and if anyone from England was still looking for me, Fee MacIntosh isn’t even my name.
Graham’s expression was indecipherable. “He got Helen’s name correct, Fiona. It’s quite the slur on her reputation, don’t you think?”
I rolled my shoulders back to give them a welcome stretch. Graham must have been concerned indeed: he didn’t even glance as the fabric of my day-dress tightened across my bosom. “Really, Graham, I agree that it’s nasty of Mr. Ireland to be making up stories about us. And no doubt unethical. His facts are wrong, but this story paints Helen in a sympathetic light. Destitute widow struggling to support her starving children. That’s the sort of sentimental rubbish that sells newspapers.”
“I don’t think she’ll see it that way.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” Outside my window, a horse screamed in terror. Men began shouting, and the wanderers gathered round, hoping for a show. “She’ll never hear about it. By the time this letter gets to San Francisco and the paper is printed, provided they accept Ireland’s rubbish, and a copy makes its way back here, which is also an unlikely prospect, half the town will have moved on, and no one will even know who he’s talking about.”
“Fiona, for such an intelligent woman, you can be amazingly dense when you’re blinded by your own vanity and self-obsession.”
I blinked. Men never insult me. At least not the ones who want to impress me. The outbreak of trouble on the street below didn’t materialize. A man spoke to the horse in soothing tones, and the crowd drifted away, looking for excitement elsewhere.
“She’ll find out all about it any minute now. My acquaintance who copied the letter came over the pass with Helen and Jim. He won’t sit on this. He’ll tell her.”
“Oh, dear. Maybe he, your…whatever, will have told the messenger to lose the letter when he saw that it’s untruthful.”
“It’s not the messenger’s responsibility to check the mail for accuracy. If Ireland wrote that the Czar of Russia had arrived in Dawson to grow potatoes in a wicked plot to make enough vodka to inebriate the entire adult population of the United States, he’d still carry it. As long as Ireland paid. Anyway, it’s too late. Boat has sailed. With the letter.”
I stood up. “Honest people are sometimes more trouble than they’re worth. Helen should be downstairs. I’ll go and see to her.”
“Yes, Fiona. You’d better.”
If one was to judge by the look of the group gathered in the saloon, we might have walked into a funeral. Helen’s eyes were open as wide as her mouth, and she looked like a horse panicked by the sound of a gunshot too close to her head. Ray held her arm, his features dark and troubled. My son, Angus, sat at the bar, a piece of toast in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other. He turned at the sound of my footsteps, and his sweet face was filled with a look of such despair, I almost rushed over to gather him into my arms. But I held back, knowing that if I tried to hug him in public, in front of others, he’d push me aside.
A man I didn’t know stood beside them. He was dressed in a filthy flannel working man’s shirt under a jacket with one pocket hanging by a thread. His trousers were torn at both knees and badly mended. I had smelled him as I came down the stairs. He stared at me for a few seconds before shifting his attention back to the tableau in the saloon, twisting his dusty hat, missing half the brim, in his hands. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come. But I thought you’d want to know what this scoundrel says about you, Helen.”
My partner let out a stream of words.
Everyone in the saloon looked at him. Ray’s accent was so strong that something very bad must be happening.
I translated. “Ray says that it’s better to hear foul news in the open from a friend than to have it whispered into your ears by your enemies. Or words to that effect. Let me see that.” I snatched the paper out of Angus’s hand. It was written in a strong, educated script.
How many copies of this blasted newspaper story were there? The man must have made yet another copy to show to Helen before handing the rough one over to Graham, perhaps thinking that she’d be more likely to believe him if she saw the words written down on paper.
I looked up. They were all watching me. I crumpled the paper in my hand. “Lies. All lies. Of no consequence. You, sir. Are you Mr. Donohue’s friend? Did you copy this from a letter being carried to the Outside?”
The man nodded and twisted his hat. It would be even more of a mess by the end of this. “Yes, ma’am. Mrs. MacGillivray, ma’am. Joe Hamilton is my name.”
“Mr. Hamilton. Where is this…missive…directed?”
“Ma’am?” He gaped at me.
“She means the letter, you fool,” Donohue said. “What was the address on the envelope?”