Clockwork Gold Read online

  “Kalgoorlie has two churches, now. Three banks.” Becky climbed two steps to the raised wooden veranda outside a chemist shop. “Three doctors. They’re planning on opening a hospital. The sportsground has stands for spectators and there’s a new music hall.”

  “Impressive.” He held the door open for her.

  “They need a library,” she said.

  “A sure sign of civilisation.” He smiled at her, then stood back as she approached the counter.

  “Good morning, Miss Jones.” The chemist was a middle-aged man, his sparse hair oiled and combed across a pink scalp. “For Harry, you say? Well, this will be safe enough and reassure him. The difficulty with hypochondriacs is that they cry wolf so often, one can never be sure if they’re truly unwell. But I trust your judgement.” He flicked a curious glance over her shoulder at Nathan.

  Becky half-turned, following his gaze. “My foster brother, Nathan Burton.”

  Damn. Again with the brother business.

  The chemist’s eyes lit with interest. “Sam’s kid. The agent of the crown.” He extended a well-kept hand across the counter.

  Nathan perforce stepped forward to accept the introduction.

  “Miss Jones provides a valuable service,” the chemist said as he settled in for a gossip. “I know Sam’s proud of her. Keeps that dirigible flying smartly. Any number of men would buy it off her.

  “The Blue Wren is not for sale.”

  The chemist chuckled. “There, now, what did I say? Just as well. Men like Harry rely on you, my dear.” He turned and started pressing levers on the dispensing automaton behind him. Liquid started gurgling. “Mining is a hard life. Too much time underground. Not enough vegetables. Ah yes. Some ascorbic acid, I think.” He flicked another lever before turning back to his customers.

  “It’s a lonely life, too.” Becky handed over a shilling.

  “So are you on holiday, Mr Burton? or are you here on business?” The chemist popped the coin in the side of the dispensing machine, then gave her the change that tumbled out.

  “Becky offered me the chance to see the goldfields.” Her indignant glance challenged that “offered”, then slid away. Her evasion caught his attention, but he continued smoothly. “Things have changed.”

  “For the better, sir. For the better.” The tonic bottle emerged, was capped and wrapped in brown paper by the automaton.

  Reluctantly, the chemist handed it across. He obviously wanted to detain these interesting customers.

  Fortunately, another man entered, the red welts on his face proclaiming his problem. “I was chopping down a tree. I figured it was too early for wasps.”

  “You won’t make that mistake again.” The chemist chuckled, ignoring the evil look his customer shot him.

  Becky and Nathan escaped. He was thoughtful, though. It seemed she did have some supporters in town. Whatever suspicions Sergeant Poole had passed on to his superiors, they hadn’t coloured the chemist’s attitude to her.

  It was an encouraging sign, unlike the cold shoulder Becky presented to him.

  Chapter Six

  “I suppose you want lunch?” Rebecca winced at how ungracious she sounded. It was her nerves. She wasn’t accustomed to plotting to deceive. Her nerves were jangled. The chemist probably had a tonic for that. What did you take when you were planning to strand your foster brother, an agent of the Crown and a man who’d kissed you, in town?

  “Lunch would be good.” Nathan tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow. He automatically walked on her right, taking the polite position closest to the road. “I’m hungry. Where do you suggest we eat?”

  She had her answer prepared. The Dickens Hotel catered to the colony’s upper classes: the established farmers, merchants, bankers and professional men. Nathan was bound to meet men who knew him there. He had gone to school with them or with their sons. Despite the influx of miners, the non-mining residents tended to recognise one another. With luck, they’d distract him.

  “The Dickens Hotel does an excellent lamb roast and they have a ladies dining room.” Her nose wrinkled in scorn at the old-fashioned concept. The Dickens Hotel had the pretensions of a gentlemen’s club. Ladies were strictly corralled to the sidelines. But it was where the upper and genteel middle class women ate in Kalgoorlie. Its solid red brick walls and green tin roof, with verandas on both storeys, promised respectability.

  For herself, she usually ate at Miss Singh’s Tea Shop, like the other working women: teachers, nurses, shop assistants and seamstresses. The food was well cooked and cheap, and the conversation cheerful and interesting. Which was more than could be send for the standard of conversation in the Dickens Ladies Dining Room.

  In the dimly lit, tiled foyer of the hotel, she and Nathan paused a moment. Behind them, the rattling bead curtain settled back into place. Although too early in the year yet for blowflies, soon there would be black clouds of engulfing, buzzing misery.

  Rebecca took the opportunity to blink and let her eyes adjust to the changed lighting. In summer, when the streets and surrounding countryside were baking hot, the foyer would be an oasis of relative cool. Potted palm trees aided the illusion.

  A disapproving waiter eyed her modest divided skirt, but the arrogant tilt of Nathan’s eyebrow decided him against objecting. He ushered them through to the Ladies Dining Room.

  Blue velvet drapes hung at the windows, slowly turning orange from the prevailing dust. Ceiling fans were stationary, the fireplace cold and prettified with an arrangement of dried grasses. The tables were covered in crisp white cloths. Over half the tables were occupied, either with women dining together or accompanied by a male relative.

  The conversational hum dipped noticeably as she and Nathan were shown to a table in a corner. No window seat for them—for her.

  And sure enough, even as he walked through the room, Nathan was nodding to a couple of acquaintances. He didn’t allow them to detain him, though. He, rather than the waiter, seated her, then took his own seat.

  Avid eyes assessed him, then turned with disapproval and disbelief to her.

  She smiled faintly. As much as she hated agreeing with the over-dressed women lunching at the Dickens, in this instance they were right. Nathan didn’t look as if he’d camped overnight, but she did. She liked that he was clean-shaven, unlike the bushy-bearded men scattered through the room. One dropped a piece of potato in his beard, and fished it out, looking around in quick embarrassment. She averted her gaze.

  The women in the room were elegantly dressed. They had the money and inclination to waste time attempting to follow the latest Parisian fashions. Ribbons fluttered with their every movement and it was a wonder they could hold their heads up under the weight of gaudily bedecked hats. Since it was daytime, their dresses were of cotton or fine wool. Silks and satins were for evening.

  “I expect you go to Paris all the time,” Rebecca said, following her own train of thought.

  “Not that often. Mostly I work in the more far-flung corners of the Empire. But Paris is something special.” Nathan gave their orders to the waiter and turned his attention fully to her. He smiled. “You’d like Paris.”

  She sniffed. “I’m not that interested in fashion.”

  “Clothes?” He shook his head. “That’s only a small part of the fun. Political exiles and activists tend to gather in London. But Paris is where the intellectuals and artists work. I have a friend who lives on the Left Bank, he’d love you.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Marcel despises chocolate box prettiness.” Nathan glanced around the dining room. Women fluttered their lashes or ducked their heads coyly. “Painted china dolls. But you, you’re vibrant with life. He’d paint you shimmering with power. You should see his canvases. All colour and movement.”

  “He sounds like one of the Impressionists.”

  “He is.”

  The paintings on the walls of the Ladies Dining Room were copies from the romantic tradition. Languishing women and stylised inaction. The Lady of
Shallot drifted ineffectually, sighing and dying.

  Rebecca preferred to fight. Her spine straightened. Despite her hot cheeks, reddened with embarrassment from Nathan’s compliments and the even more explicit admiration in his eyes, she would act in control.

  The waiter set bowls of pumpkin soup in front of them.

  “You’d like the art in Paris, Becky, but more than that, you’d like the workshops. The inventors sit at the cafes in the evening and talk about submarines and dirigibles, automata and free energy devices. Some are even speculating about fusing machines to human bodies.”

  She grimaced.

  “It sounds gruesome, but…” His eyes went distant, his whole expression withdrawn. “When you see the consequences of war, the people damaged in explosions or in factory accidents, then you understand that there is a need.”

  “I would like to talk to someone about dragonflies,” she said and was relieved to find she’d been right to slightly change the subject.

  Nathan looked at her, his eyes focused, almost smiled, and he picked up his soup spoon. “What about dragonflies?”

  “They’re so aerodynamic.” She sketched the smooth, darting flight of the insects in the air. “I wonder how the principles of their design could influence a dirigible.”

  “That’s exactly the sort of conversation they’d love in a Left Bank café. You’d have artists sketching dragonflies and inventors stabbing the air with their cigarettes, the glowing ends flitting like fireflies.”

  She was caught up in the spell of his words and the enthusiasm in his face. Everything about him was an invitation. “Where else should I travel?”

  “Venice,” he said without hesitation. “On your first visit, you’ll think you’re dreaming. Then Constantinople.”

  She drew him out about his travels, and he shared them, light stories that told her of people and places, and adventures that made him seem inept and amiable, when she knew that as an agent of the Crown he was anything but.

  Their soup bowls were whisked away and replaced with the main meal. The roast lamb was good. The spring greens limp. But the cook had managed a decent mint sauce.

  Rebecca laughed as Nathan told her of tumbling out of a second story window in Buenos Aires, the wild grab for the trellis, how it tore, and then how he bounced from a street stall awning and landed before a very surprised donkey.

  “It turned around and kicked me.”

  “Thereby adding insult to injury.” She smiled at him.

  “A fitting reward for clumsiness.” The smile in his eyes was as intimate as a kiss, and they were leaning too close together.

  She jerked back.

  He’d beguiled her through the meal. Not just sharing his adventures and revealing himself as a man of action and compassion, willing to challenge authority, but never to surrender his honour, but also asking for her adventures.

  And he listened, apparently as enthralled by the mechanical devices she invented as she was intrigued by his adventures.

  They were learning each other anew—and liking what they learned.

  When the waiter interrupted to serve their apple pie and coffee, she looked around. The other diners watched them with envy, women and men both. She realised how rare it was to laugh and lose oneself in conversation.

  Her breath caught.

  It was like falling in love.

  She gulped some hot coffee and replaced the cup on its saucer with hands that barely shook. “Your stories are wonderful, Nathan. You should write a book.”

  “I am.”

  “You are?” It was the most unexpected of answers.

  A one-shouldered shrug acknowledged her surprise. “I’ve had a few short stories published in various magazines. Under a pseudonym, of course. An active agent of the Crown can’t have his name in print.”

  “But you never told us. Mum and Dad would be so proud.”

  He smiled crookedly. “Some dreams are private. Until I’ve finished the book and convinced a publisher to publish it, I’m staying silent.”

  “You told me.”

  “Yes.” No smile now, just intensity.

  It was like the river. You paddled in the shallows and suddenly a deep pool opened before you. She wanted to dive into the mingled promise and question in his eyes.

  She reminded herself that this was the same man she meant to strand in town. He might not forgive her. He had travelled a long way to save her.

  Temptation whispered. She could trust him. She should tell him about Annie, about Sergeant Poole. He would believe her.

  She hesitated and risked instead a delaying question. “Tell me about the book. Is it like Robert Louis Stevenson’s style? I liked ‘The Silverado Squatters’.”

  “It’s more like Rudyard Kipling. I write fiction, but with a moral code. I want the people who read my stories to know, to feel deep in their bones, that honour is worth fighting for. Convincing people of that is another way of fighting for the Empire.” He pushed aside his empty dessert plate and stared down into his cup of coffee. “My father was a liar and a cheat. I know how important a man’s personal honour is. It’s ironic in an agent, but I detest deceit.”

  Her heart clenched. “Nathan, I have to tell you—”

  But he was pushing back his chair and standing up.

  “Nathan, dear boy.” It was one of their fellow diners, a stout man in a flowered waistcoat with his giggling daughters in tow. “I thought it was you. May I present Emmeline and Angelica?”

  Rebecca drained her cup of coffee. There were gritty grounds in the last bitter mouthful.

  Chapter Seven

  Rebecca stood beside Nathan as they were hailed for the third time, and they’d yet to step off the Dickens Hotel’s veranda. Her polite smile was fraying at the edges with a mix of impatience, scorn and regret. She didn’t want to admit the regret.

  All the men who greeted Nathan and politely lifted their hat to her would ordinarily have accorded her no more than a civil nod. The women with them would not have acknowledged her at all. These were the self-proclaimed upper class of Western Australia and they counted Nathan as one of their own.

  Nathan belonged. She didn’t.

  “Of course you must drop in for tea, Miss Jones,” Miss Dryden said, simpering at Nathan as she clung to her brother’s arm. “Flying in that homemade dirigible, you must be glad to have Mr Burton with you. So much safer.”

  “On the contrary, in an emergency, it would be Becky’s flying and engineering talents that would save our lives. I would be so much useless cargo.”

  “Hardly useless.” Mr Dryden snorted a laugh. “Patrick Murphy was telling me some of your exploits. You have quite a reputation.”

  “Exaggerated.” Nathan tipped his hat. “If you’ll excuse us. We mustn’t waste good flying weather.”

  “The Blue Wren can fly in any weather,” Rebecca said as they descended the veranda steps. She’d built it to withstand anything.

  “The Drydens don’t know that.” The laughter in his eyes linked the two of them against the world.

  She smiled back, forgetting everything as her heart gave a little jump. The noise of the busy street faded. There was only Nathan, watching her, laughter stilling to something even more potent.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Jones.”

  Her smile vanished as she recognised the voice. The clatter of horses’ hooves, the rumble of a steam engine and the shouts of schoolchildren let out to play all rushed back as reality intruded. “Sergeant Poole.”

  The man was big and beefy, running to fat but still a threat. His face was red beneath his police hat. His faded blue eyes were as opaque as ever. If you looked beyond the smiles and laughter that he showed the world, then you saw there was never any emotion in his eyes.

  Those eyes had travelled past her and were assessing Nathan.

  The sergeant thrust out a large hand. “How do you do, sir? I’m Sergeant Poole.”

  “Nathan Burton.”

  “Seems I’ve heard of you.” Serge
ant Poole tipped his hat back, thin-lipped mouth smiling. “Sam Tanner brags on you. Clever lad, he says. Works for the Crown?” There was a hint of question in the last statement.

  “I keep myself busy.”

  “I bet you do, sir. I bet you do. I can say the same myself. Always work in a gold town. Lots of hell raisers…begging your pardon, miss.”

  “You needn’t beg my pardon, sergeant.” Rebecca showed her teeth, more snarl than smile. Nathan raised an eyebrow as she took his arm. “We were just leaving.”

  “No, we weren’t.” He resisted her tug.

  She stared at him in disbelief. Couldn’t he take a hint when it hit him like a pick axe?

  “It’s been a while since I was last here,” Nathan continued casually. “This is your town, Sergeant Poole, where would you suggest I visit?”

  A hint of male chumminess hung on the air.

  “Well now, we’ve the new sporting ground, and I’m sure the little lady’s told you of the church’s new bell.”

  Rebecca rolled her eyes.

  “A fine sound that bell has. Father Martin is that pleased with it. I organised the fundraising drive. In a town like this, the moral tone is important.”

  Rebecca snorted, then blinked indignantly as Nathan’s slight movement blocked her view of Sergeant Poole. Instead, all she saw was a broad, expensively clad shoulder.

  “And for the sinners?”

  She hadn’t heard that worldly tone from Nathan before. Mum would have disapproved mightily. He would have gotten a sharp tap with her wooden spoon, adult though he was. Rebecca stood on tiptoe in time to see the sergeant wink.

  “Ah sinners don’t need much encouragement, but those that do…the Pelican Pub is where I drink.”

  “Good beer?” Nathan drawled. “And the entertainment?”

  “Top class.” Sergeant Poole laughed. “You’ll have to see for yourself.” He touched his hat in salute and strode away.