Gypsy

by Lesley Pearse

  In the past few months Jack’s position at the Bear had altered from being just a barman. He muscled in when drunken brawls broke out: Beth had seen him in action many times when she was playing. He was never aggressive, but he had an instinct for sensing trouble before it turned nasty, and mostly he could defuse it just with diplomacy. But on the occasions this didn’t work, he wasn’t afraid to steam in, crack the two warring men’s heads together and throw them out. Frank Jasper prized Jack for this, often referring to him jokingly as ‘My Right Hook’.

  Because of Jack’s iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove talent, Frank got him in at most private card games, ostensibly to serve drinks but with security in mind. However, the last game wasn’t one run by Frank. It was organized by Rob Sheldon, a man Frank despised as he was a slum landlord and well-known racketeer. Theo and Sam had asked Jack to come along in case of trouble.

  The game was in a warehouse down by the docks. The other five players were not men who ever played at the Bear; Theo had met them at other card games and knew them to be high-rollers. But Sam and Jack had never met any of them before, not even Sheldon.

  Theo won the first couple of games but then began losing heavily, and when they stopped for a break around two in the morning, both Jack and Sam had advised him to cut his losses and go home, as two of the other players had done. But Theo refused, saying he felt his luck was about to change.

  The two remaining men who sat down to play with Sheldon and Theo went by their nicknames, Lively and Dixey. Theo won the first game, then lost on the second. But the third and fourth he won and the stakes had grown higher. He was up some five hundred bucks and had pocketed his winnings to leave, when Sheldon, who had been winning earlier in the evening, challenged him to one last game.

  Jack said he sensed trouble then. He said there was something in the air that wasn’t quite right. And he thought Theo seemed just a little too calm and confident as he sat down to play again.

  Sam dealt the cards and the game commenced. The money on the table was growing. Dixey folded and left, leaving Sheldon, Lively and Theo. Then Sheldon asked to see Theo’s cards.

  He had four kings, which beat Sheldon’s four of a kind.

  ‘I hadn’t been watching the cards played that closely,’ Jack admitted. ‘I was too busy keying an eye on Sheldon because I felt he might turn nasty if he lost. But I was sure that Dixey had one king when he folded. I guess Sheldon thought that too, for he leapt out of his chair, screaming that Theo had cheated and had another king up his sleeve. Before Theo could even get up, Sheldon was on him and pulled a knife out of his belt. He had it at Theo’s throat.’

  Jack demonstrated to Beth how Sheldon did this, with his right hand at her throat and his left arm holding her captive.

  ‘I was afraid to go round the table and break it up in case he slit Theo’s throat; he was savage enough to do it. And there was Lively too, not a big geezer, but the kind that would steam in if he believed Theo had cheated. So I tried to calm both him and Sheldon by talking, I even said if we found another card up Theo’s sleeve they could have all the winnings. But Sheldon was shouting and swearing, getting madder by the minute.

  ‘Then all at once Sam was there behind them, wresting the knife out of Sheldon’s hand. I sped round the table to help, Theo suddenly got free and the knife fell on the floor, but then Lively started muscling in. He punched me in the jaw, and Sam must have snatched up the knife from the floor at the same time, because as I went to punch Lively back, Sam was just standing there with the knife in his hand, like he didn’t know what to do.

  ‘But Sheldon lunged towards him to get it back. That’s when Sam stuck him.’

  Beth had tried to get Sam to give his version of what happened. While he couldn’t explain it as lucidly as Jack, it was basically the same, except he insisted he didn’t stab Sheldon. He said the man just ran straight into the knife.

  Theo’s laconic view was that it hardly mattered how the knife ended up in the man’s belly. After all, Sheldon was going to kill him and Sam stopped him.

  But it did matter to Beth. There was a world of difference between someone running into a knife and having it shoved into them. And she blamed Theo for creating the anger in Sheldon which turned her brother from a peace-loving card dealer into a killer.

  Lively ran off immediately he saw Sheldon was bleeding profusely. Jack said he believed he’d gone to get a doctor, but Theo said he was just saving his own skin.

  Jack tried to staunch Sheldon’s wound with his own shirt, but the man died as he was doing so. So they collected up all the money and cards from the table and left, leaving Sheldon there with the knife still embedded in his belly.

  Beth wished she could feel, as Jack and Theo did, that Sheldon was a vicious brute who had preyed on the weak and defenceless all his life, and that he’d finally got his just deserts. But he must have had a wife, and maybe children who loved him.

  Setting aside the crime, however, and the fact that the three people she loved most were on the run, Beth felt angry that the good life she’d had in Philadelphia was over.

  She’d been so happy there. People admired her fiddle-playing and liked her as a person. She had made good money, she’d bought nice new clothes, she could buy presents to send home for Molly, she had even managed to save some money too. Life had been fun, she really felt she was going places, but now she would have to start all over again without the support and affection she’d got from Frank Jasper and Pearl.

  Word would get around that Theo was cheating, and Frank might wonder how often he’d cheated at his games, and even whether the real reason Theo had to seek refuge in Philadelphia was for the same thing.

  He’d certainly start to wonder if he should have trusted any of them, and regret getting Pearl to give them lodgings. As for Pearl, Beth knew she would be very hurt that they’d run off without even leaving a note of explanation for her.

  Theo was supremely confident they wouldn’t pass on any information about them to the police, and he was probably right because that was the code they lived by. But Beth had built up a close relationship with Pearl, closer even than with her own mother, and she felt she had let her down.

  As Beth sat on the chair by the window in the dark, for the first time since she’d embarked on her love affair with Theo, she felt she hated him.

  He’d hurt her so many times by disappearing, then returning a week or two later without any explanation. She knew he wormed his way into the parties and soire´es of the most wealthy and influential people in the city, and only a fool would believe he wouldn’t abandon her if a beautiful heiress wanted him.

  But he could turn her tears to laughter and her sad moods to gay ones effortlessly with his abundant charm. He was generous with both his money and affection. He made her feel she was the most beautiful, talented woman in the world, and when he made love to her he took her to heaven and back, always thinking of her pleasure before his own.

  But all this had made her see another side of him, a darker one. She was absolutely certain he had cheated at that game. Why did he have to do that? Surely the whole point of gambling was taking the losing streaks with the winning ones?

  Was he a cheat at everything? Was he making love to other women besides her? He had put Sam and Jack at risk. Could he be trusted never to do that again?

  A rustling sound across the room alerted her that he was awake.

  ‘Beth!’ he said softly. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ she snapped. ‘Where else would I be in the middle of the night in a strange country?’

  ‘Come back to bed,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think I ever want to be in a bed with you again,’ she retorted.

  Theo struck a match and lit the candle. ‘Why are you so angry?’

  He was wearing his undershirt, and with his dark hair all tousled and a dark shadow on his chin he didn’t look the dapper gentleman he usually did.

  ‘Because you are responsible for this,’ she said, and
moved closer to the bed so she couldn’t be overheard by any other guests. ‘We all had a good life in Philly; you’ve ended that. Why did you have to cheat?’

  He didn’t answer for a moment and she waited for a further denial.

  ‘I know you did,’ she said. ‘Lie to the rest of the world if you must, Theo. But not to me.’

  ‘All right, I did cheat,’ he admitted with a little tremor in his voice. ‘I wasn’t going to see all my money vanish into Sheldon’s pocket.’

  ‘But cheating is wrong.’

  ‘I’ve been cheated too, lots of times.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make it right by you doing it as well.’ She was exasperated now. ‘You put my brother in danger. As it is, the police will be after him and if he’s caught he might be hanged, or whatever they do with murderers here.’

  ‘It wasn’t murder, it was an accident.’

  ‘Accident, murder, a man is still dead and my brother is on the run.’

  ‘I doubt the police will even attempt to find out who did it; they’ll just think it was gang warfare. Sheldon was a thug, not much different to Heaney in New York, no loss to the country. And even if they do find out it was Sam, they can’t get him back from here. A couple of years and it will all be forgotten.’

  ‘Not by me, and I doubt by Sam either,’ Beth said.

  Theo lay back against the headboard and just stared at her for some little while until Beth felt very uncomfortable.

  ‘Are you going to stay being mad with me for much longer?’ he said eventually. ‘Only it’s the first time we’ve had the chance to spend all night together without you rushing off to pretend you’ve been in your own bed all night. Can’t we enjoy you being Mrs Cadogan instead of you sitting out there freezing to death and looking like you hate me?’

  ‘This has all been a big shock to me,’ she said, wishing she could find the right words to make him see what he’d done to her. ‘I never wanted to go to Canada. As far as I know it’s all wilderness and frozen up half the year — what will we do here?’

  ‘There are bars and saloons in every corner of the world,’ he said with laughter in his voice. ‘And I’m sure almost every one of them would like to be entertained by you and your fiddle. Look on it as a new adventure, Beth. You’ve got your three musketeers with you to keep you safe. Now, come to bed and let me show you how much I love you.’

  ‘Do you?’ she asked. Her heart leapt because he’d never said that before.

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said, holding out a hand to her. ‘I felt something for you right from the night we met on the Majestic. You looked so cold and pinched, but I liked the way you answered me back. I tried to find you on the morning we disembarked. But I didn’t know your name, nothing about you. When I eventually came across you fiddling in Heaney’s I was so thrilled. You were much prettier than I remembered — and your music!’

  Beth had to smile then and she reached out to take his hand. ‘Promise you won’t ever cheat again?’ she said.

  ‘Not you anyway,’ he said. ‘Now, come back to bed.’

  Montreal was beautiful, a city of elegant new buildings, wide roads, gracious squares and parks. Beth and the boys particularly loved going to Mount Royal, the park laid out on a mountain with a splendid view of the city and the busy port.

  They marvelled at the Victoria Bridge built across the St Lawrence river, which people called the Eighth Wonder of the World, and admired the New York Life building where an elevator whizzed you up eight floors.

  There was the Golden Mile with huge and beautiful mansions where the rich lived. The Windsor Hotel was the grandest hotel Beth, Sam and Jack had ever seen, and the shops in St Catherine’s Street were every bit as smart as New York’s finest.

  As September came to an end and the leaves on the trees turned fiery red, russet, gold and brown, everywhere became still more beautiful. But however lovely a city Montreal was, they could sense they were never going to find success here. There were plenty of saloons, there were variety shows and dance halls, but Montreal wasn’t a liberal-minded city: the character of the majority of its residents was staid, sober and hard-working.

  Sam and Jack both found jobs as barmen within a few days of their arrival, but although they tried to persuade their respective employers to give Beth a chance to charm their customers, they refused. Without anyone actually coming out and saying what they thought, it was clear they believed any young woman prepared to step inside a saloon was a whore.

  Beth tramped round all the stores, hoping to be taken on in one of them. But it seemed they only employed men as sales clerks. If she saw a woman working in a shop, restaurant or coffee shop, she was invariably related to the owner.

  Theo found it almost impossible to get anyone even to admit there was any gambling in the city, let alone get himself invited to a game. For the first time in his life, his English gentleman persona seemed to be working against him. In Montreal it appeared the French liked to be seen as the aristocrats, and he found them looking down on him. Yet the ordinary working-class men, mainly first- and second-generation English and Scots, were suspicious of him too.

  He still had most of the winnings from his last poker game, but he wasn’t prepared to use it just on living expenses. He said he had to keep it for a stake when he eventually found a way into a big poker game. Jack and Sam had gone along with this at first, for they both wanted to work in gambling circles and they needed Theo to get them in. But as the weeks ticked by, while they worked long hours for low wages, they had become resentful that Theo spent his days sitting around drinking in smart places like the cocktail bar in the Windsor Hotel while they were keeping him and Beth.

  They moved from the hotel to a guest house, then on to a three-room flat, but even that was too expensive, bringing back to Beth memories of the difficulties she and Sam had when they first got to New York. Just as they had no choice then but to settle for one room in a tenement on the Lower East Side, now they had no alternative but to lower their sights and get a place to live in Point St Charles.

  Griffintown, or the Swamp as Point St Charles was often called, was a slum area to the west of the city, between the St Lawrence river and the Canadian Pacific railway tracks. It had none of the beauty of the rest of the city which was up on a hill, its skyline dotted with church spires. Down in the Swamp, it was factories and heavy industry, tall chimneys belching black smoke day and night.

  There weren’t the five-storey tenements that they’d grown so used to seeing in New York, only small terraces of two or three storeys, but it was a grim place and home to the very poorest in Montreal. They found a tiny two-up, two-down clapboard house in Canning Street, one of the roughest parts, with high unemployment and large families. Even those who did work probably brought home less than ten dollars a week.

  After living in comfort at Pearl’s with indoor sanitation it was miserable having to go back to an outside privy, especially as it was so cold. They managed to buy a few pieces of furniture from one of the hundreds of second-hand shops in the area, but Beth had yet to summon up enthusiasm to try to make the place a real home, for the boys just came home to sleep, and Theo only dropped in now and then.

  Josie, the Irishwoman who lived next door, got Beth a job in a shirt factory with her. It was tedious, repetitive work: she machined up the side seams of the shirts, someone else put the collar on and the sleeves in.

  As the autumn turned to winter and the first falls of snow, Beth was frozen all day in that factory. She saw herself becoming like the other women there, old before their time, with stooped backs and poor eyesight. They were nearly all Irish, and they had no choice but to accept the few dollars a week because they had children to feed and often feckless husbands who drank their wages away.

  But at least they did have a husband. Beth was calling herself Mrs Cadogan, and she washed Theo’s shirts, socks and underclothes so he could look smart, and cooked him meals when he deigned to come home — everything a wife would do. But it was Sam and Jac
k who appreciated her home-making skills, it was they who hauled home coal for the fire and comforted her when she felt everything was hopeless. And she couldn’t bring herself to tell them that she was carrying Theo’s child.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Beth pulled her fur hat down more firmly over her ears and stepped out into the thick snow with some trepidation for it was five in the morning and very dark. The fur-lined boots Jack had given her at Christmas kept her feet warm and dry, but her long coat, skirt and petticoats gathered up snow as she walked and hampered her movements.

  Beth had been laid off by the shirt factory in early December. She couldn’t say she was sorry, for she’d grown to hate the job. She found another one as a cook soon afterwards.

  Theo, Sam and Jack had been horrified, and tried very hard to talk her out of it as it was in a bunkhouse for itinerant workers in the construction business. She insisted she was going to take the job as there was nothing else on offer, but on her first day, when she was confronted by forty rough, tough, none too clean men of a dozen different nationalities, she almost turned tail and ran. But the pay was far better than at the shirt factory and it would be warm there too.

  The boys were afraid the men would take liberties with her, but she’d found them to be respectful, protective and appreciative. It was a very long day, from five in the morning till seven at night, but after the breakfast was cleared away and she’d done a few other tasks like sweeping out the dormitories and cleaning the dining room, she could go home for a couple of hours. But more often she stayed in the bunkhouse, read a book or dozed by the stove until it was time to prepare the evening meal.

  She could have been really happy if it hadn’t been for her anxiety about telling Theo and the boys she was pregnant. From early January, when it became harder to fasten her skirt, each day she resolved to speak to them that evening. But it was the end of February now, and she still hadn’t managed to do it.

  It wasn’t just cowardice because she feared the news would be greeted with alarm. Most days she didn’t even see the boys because she went to work when they were still asleep, and they were working when she got home. But even on Sundays, when they were all home together, the time was never right. One day Sam was excited about a pay rise, and she didn’t want to dampen his good mood; another time Jack had fallen in the snow and hurt his leg, and she didn’t want to add to his worries. As for Theo, he couldn’t be relied on to be there even on Sundays, for he had finally wormed his way into a group of wealthy men who liked to play poker.