With Love from Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #2) (18 page)

“Sweet intimacy—when he’s a thousand and more miles away and you’re here?” Kerry had all but exploded. But this was in the days before she learned to keep her thoughts to herself and to refrain from responses that hurt and sometimes aggravated her dear Franny.
But oh,
she gritted to herself,
that I could go and confront this deceiver!

That Franny’s heart was involved was never the question—it did indeed seem to be. The problem—to Kerry and to Aunt Charlotte, who of course had to be let in on the plans—was the trustworthiness of the stranger at the other end of the relationship.

“At least let me send Gladdy along with you,” Aunt Charlotte pleaded, but to no avail. “It’s not proper for a lady—particularly a young lady—to travel all alone.”

“No, Aunt Charlotte, though I thank you. This is my responsibility and mine alone. I’ve made the decision independently and will carry it out by myself. I plan to stay there, to live there, to make a life for myself there, and what would Gladdy do then? Come back, of course, but—by herself?”

And so the problem went round and round, and it was Aunt Charlotte, eventually, who gave in. Though not that exactly; Aunt Charlottte was stiff-armed, and by the sweet and tender person of the usually pliable, obedient Frances. Franny was obdurate, fixed, set in her determination, and no amount of persuasion or threat changed her mind.

Stubborn, Charlotte called it, and for perhaps the first time since Frances had come to live at Maxwell Manor, she found her instructions ignored. It was galling, to say the least; maddening in the extreme.

Together the girls were examining the bicycle suit and the bloomers, a subject of much dissention in the newspapers and at all female gatherings. That it was actually a reappearance for bloomers, some knew, recalling that they had first appeared in the 1860s. At that time, Mrs. Bloomer’s “bifurcated nether garment” caused great outrage on sight, and few women wore them twice. Now here they were again, a menace that would not go away. Perhaps, with the furor in the press and the denunciation from many pulpits, they would do just that, but to date they appeared to be doing the exact opposite, as women, like Franny, boldly declared their individualism and purchased them.

The bicycle, until now considered a boy’s or man’s possession, and for the reason of transportation, had dropped part of the frame so that women cyclists could be accommodated. In so doing it became a thing of evil. “It is undoubtedly the bicycle that is giving the nineties a reputation for gaiety,” one columnist wrote, which hurt its sale not a whit. There was no doubt about it—the two-wheeled monster challenged churches, contributed to the emancipation of women, and revolutionized manners. That her beloved Frances should lend her influence in that direction greatly grieved propriety-bound Charlotte.

Charlotte was out of the room, however, and Kerry, with the streak of fun that had always identified her, declared her intention of trying on the outrageous garment. She and Franny were in the midst of this distraction, laughing as they tugged the bloomers into place, when Gladdy appeared, holding aloft
the letter.

“Oh, do give it to me!” squealed the excited Franny, and the teasing Gladdy dropped it into her outstretched hands. Reluctantly Gladdy turned and left, having other things to do and catching on quickly that Miss Franny was not going to read the epistle while she was in the room.

Franny tore open the familiar envelope. Her eager eyes scanned the page in silence, a half-smile on her tenderly curved lips. The smile vanished, her eyes widened, her hand trembled. Her face blazed scarlet and waned to white. She staggered.

Kerry saw the transformation, her own thoughts going from interest to dismay. If it had not been for her outstretched hand, her arm quickly going around the sagging body, Franny would have crumpled into a heap on the floor.

Indeed, Franny was in a half-swoon; it seemed she was barely breathing, and what breath she had was ragged and shallow. Greatly alarmed, Kerry half carried, half dragged her to the bed, letting her fall across it. She removed Franny’s slippers, swung her feet up, and thrust a pillow under her head. From her nerveless fingers the letter fluttered to the floor. Kneeling, Kerry gathered it to her, her eyes swiftly scanning the brief paragraph.

Dear Miss Bentley: [How stilted, how impersonal! How revealing!]

It has been pleasant corresponding with you. I trust you have benefited from my descriptions of, and introductions to, the bush. Indeed it is a place of great attraction. But as a place to live, not so. You will be forever grateful that you have not experienced it firsthand. Indeed I do you a great favor by courteously but insistently discouraging you from any further thoughts westward.

If any words of mine have misled you, you may know it has been unintentional.

Wishing you the best, I remain,

yr. obdnt. servant,

Connor Dougal

R
eading material, in the bush, was treasured, passed from hand to hand, read and reread—especially during the long winter months—until it fell apart and was used to start someone’s morning fire, if the fire had by some misfortune gone out during the night.

Dudley never knew, nor did he care, where the old material on the Cariboo Trail came from; obviously someone had hoarded it and felt it was worthy of sharing. And so several newspaper copies—
The Cariboo Sentinel, British Columbian, Colonist,
and others, as well as R. Byron Johnson’s
Very Far West Indeed—
ended up in his possession, having made the rounds, stirring the heart of the adventurous, the dreamer, and the desperate.

Dudley was desperate, feeling as caught as a rabbit in a trap. That desperation had made him a dreamer. Seeing no way out of his present situation yet never settling for it, his plans became wilder and more unattainable as time passed. His dreams rarely touched on reality. There was—he sometimes felt with despair—no hope.

The Cariboo was the maddest, perhaps the biggest, gold hunt to convulse the West, and the sandbars and creeks along the Fraser River had yielded an estimated $50 million worth of gold before it panned out. But what gripped Dudley was more than the gold—it was the free lifestyle, the fever that gripped the hearts of those thousands who came. Surely, somewhere, there was a challenge for him! A challenge that would take him away from the farm, away from the routine of barn-cleaning, horse-currying, egg-gathering, cow-milking, manure-pitching that marked his winter days. Away from home . . . away from the sight of Matilda and Bert Felker together . . . away from Ma and her eternal guardianship of his every move.

Perhaps Della, knowing her son better than he realized, suspected the discontent, suspicioned the dreams, and supposed the inevitable—escape.

With the snow—soft but deadly—beating soundlessly against the windowpanes, with the fire in the heater roaring and Dudley seated across its width from her, Della’s sharp eyes noted her son’s fascination with what he was reading. Having glanced at the papers and being familiar with the contents, she followed his thoughts with remarkable accuracy.

“Gorges five thousand feet deep,” she said into the silence. “Box canyons of perpendicular red rock. Boiling with rapids and whirlpools. That’s the Fraser for you.”

Dudley started, his rapt attention interrupted by his mother’s grim words.

Cariboo country, which Dudley found fascinating—a twenty-two-mile-wide plateau slashed by the Fraser River, beginning its flow at Buffalo Dung Lake (a name Della chose to ignore)—was the source of the most vivid stories that ever came out of any venture of man. Dudley had been immersed in an account of the intrepid prospectors and with them “battled the currents in wooden bateaux lashed like pontoon rafts, six abreast to carry mules and Newfoundland dogs,” and with them removed his boots and attempted to climb the trench cliffs barefoot. Reading on, he forsook that group and aligned himself instead with the wiser men who strapped hundred-pound packs of “Cariboo turkey” (bacon) and “Cariboo strawberries” (beans) to their dogs and mules and took the Indian trails along the bank.

“Think of it, Ma . . . Mum! Billy Barker—you’ve heard of him, Barkerville is named after him—hit a lode that had nuggets as big as hen’s eggs!”

“And died a pauper in the Old Men’s Home in Victoria.”

“A baroness in England arranged with the Bishop of London to send over a ‘bride ship.’ Did you ever hear the like, Ma?” Dudley asked admiringly. “The
Colonist
identifies them as ‘sixty maidens meditating matrimony—ages from fourteen to uncertain.’ All of them found mates, Ma, after walking down that gangplank into the midst of all those whiskery, eager faces.” Dudley actually chortled at the picture this conjured up.

“Maybe one of them married ‘Cariboo’ Cameron,” Della said quenchingly. “His wife, you may recall, died, and ‘Cariboo’ paid big prices for men to help take her body to the coast. He pickled her in alcohol in a lead-lined box, put the box on a toboggan, and dragged it to New Westminster for shipment. He finally got her to Ontario all right and buried her there. And what happened to ‘Cariboo’ and his millions? Died penniless. No, my boy, you are better off with the farm, dying in your own bed—”

Della stopped abruptly with a sudden remembrance of Henley dying in a scarred school desk during a church service in a small schoolhouse in the bush. Dudley, also remembering, added silently,
yes, and he died penniless, and never had any adventure getting that way.

“Well,” he plunged ahead, “if the Cariboo Trail is out, there’s always the Peace River country.”

“Not open,” his mother said, and she dismissed the subject as being unworthy of discussion.

“Maybe not,” Dudley continued doggedly, “but it will be. As the prairies and the bush fill up, there’s going to be a spilling
out into these more rugged, remote areas. One of these days the government will open roads back in there—”

“The latitude is too high for farming.”

“No, it’s not, Ma! Gregor was there before he settled down here, and—”

“Why didn’t he stay there, the foreigner!”

Dudley explained patiently, “He thought about it. In fact, somewhere over there he did some trapping. But without the railway, you can’t get furs out that easily. I think he made arrangements with someone there to buy some land . . . he had cash, maybe still does, I don’t know. Anyway, he liked that country.”

“The more fool, he.”

The conversation languished there, as it always did when Dudley revealed any hint of his desire to get out . . . to get away.

The following afternoon, between dinner and supper, under a lowering sky and an ominous silence that often presaged a snowstorm, Dudley made his slow way, through snowbanks and along snow-rutted roads, to the quarter section that was Gregor Slovinski’s property.

“Hello-o-o!” he called, receiving no answer to his knock on the cabin door but noting the smoke from the stovepipe.

The door to the small log barn was thrust open, and Gregor’s palely pink hair, topped with a lopsided cap, appeared.

“Hello, yourself. Go on in and make yourself at home! I’m coming.”

Dudley waited on the small stoop, and soon Gregor was at his side, stamping the snow from his felt boots, sweeping the encrustation of ice and snow from Dudley’s legs and feet, smiling a white-toothed greeting, and urging his company into his home.

Gregor’s cabin was small and crowded but not offensively smelly or messy. The atmosphere, always closed in at this time of the year, was redolent with wood smoke, bacon grease, and a carbolic odor that could only come from medicated soap.

Gregor pulled off his cap, removed his gloves and coat, and invited Dudley to do likewise. He motioned his guest toward the one and only comfortable chair—a scarred wooden rocker; then he pulled an enamel coffeepot forward from the back of the range top and reached for a couple of cups. Flinching at the black brew, Dudley sipped cautiously.

“How iss eferyting going?” Gregor inquired when the man and the youth were seated at the side of the stove, the only reasonable spot in any busy home to relax and be comfortable.