Clockwork Gold by Jenny Schwartz
Author:Jenny Schwartz [Schwartz, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jenny Schwartz
Published: 2014-12-03T06:00:00+00:00
Chapter Eight
From the window of his room in the Dickens Hotel, Nathan watched the Blue Wren’s smooth ascent. He hated letting Becky fly off alone, but she was safer away from town. There was a lot more than professional suspicion in the way Sergeant Poole looked at her. There was a sly and vicious desire to hurt. Nathan had encountered bullies before, and the hail-fellow-well-met variety were the most insidious. They could turn a community rotten.
Just how deep was the rot in Kalgoorlie?
The constable who’d too casually joined him on his walk back into town had been Nathan’s age. Old enough to have made sergeant, if he’d cared to. Instead the man mooched along, with little sense of the dignity of his uniform. The brass buttons were unpolished, the boots dusty. Nathan had left him at the entrance to the hotel. The constable would report his presence to Sergeant Poole.
The hotel room was bare but clean. A single bed, wash basin, wooden chair and rail on which to hang one’s clothes. Thin curtains covered the windows.
The Blue Wren vanished, heading south east, returning to Harry’s mining claim and then on to the Tiger Snake Mine. He let the curtains fall. As much as he wished he was with Becky, he needed to be here.
His years in service to the Crown had honed his instincts, not merely for lies, but for that extra something that indicated trouble with a capital T—and this time, Becky was in the middle of it.
He dug through his valise.
The empty hotel room had the dreariness of its kind. He was familiar with them in all their manifestations: tidy, dirty, safe, deadly. He’d cleaned and bandaged knife wounds in hotel rooms from London to Singapore.
His was a transient life. The only steady point had been the Tanners’ home here in Western Australia, and even then, without Becky, it wouldn’t have been home.
The pistol slipped into his hand with the comfort of familiarity. He buckled on the holster and closed the valise. With his wallet in an inside pocket and his knife in the boot sheath, an inquisitive thief would find nothing of value left behind in the room.
The letters he’d written from around the world to Aunt Louise had been for Becky—a way of keeping a tie between them, of saying “remember me”. But now he had the promise of more than memories, he had the chance of a future with Becky, and he was damned if Sergeant Poole or the devil himself, would take that from him.
Not that he was going to underestimate the sergeant.
Isolated communities—and the Goldfields, indeed all of Western Australia, definitely qualified as isolated—could develop a strange twist. Without outside influences, their oddness could build on itself. Wrong could become right.
It was interesting that the chemist showed respect for Becky. How much could her disparagement of Sergeant Poole influence the town? If she was a challenge to the bully’s power, Poole would act against her.
Nathan closed the door quietly behind him and walked down the uncarpeted corridor to the stairs.
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