Outwardly, she remained the same Amanda Kent: full-figured, with a deliciously wide mouth, lovely dark eyes—and yet the fury in those eyes produced a subtle distortion; the total effect was spoiled.
“I’ll make him sell. No matter what I have to do.”
“Then you’re just as crazy as you claim he is!”
“Thank you.”
“Amanda—”
“Thank you very much, Captain McGill!”
Jamming the parcel of books under her arm, she whirled and hurried away.
“Amanda, come back here! I didn’t mean to make you fly off—”
She didn’t stop or look around. He swore a few blistering words, then followed her slowly across the sunlit square.
iii
She dashed straight in the front door of Kent’s and slammed it after her. He noticed the closed sign Israel had mentioned. Puzzlingly, similar signs hung on the door of Sam Brannan’s store, and on the door of the small, jerry-built office of the Star immediately adjoining. Brannan owned the paper as well as the mercantile establishment.
But Captain Bart McGill had things to worry about besides the curious absence of the town’s most industrious citizen. The visit to Yerba Buena had gotten off to a catastrophic start. All he’d wanted to do today was spend a while enjoying Amanda’s company—talking with her of inconsequential things, laughing with her, touching her. And then, at an appropriate hour when Louis was bedded down and Israel had retired to his shanty behind the tavern, he would have climbed into her bed and loved her—
Instead, he’d wrecked her customary composure with the one thing capable of doing that—the past, the past she constantly picked over so the wound could never heal.
Goddamn, why had he ever spent so much time and energy on those inquiries? Why hadn’t he refused to discuss the contents of the parcel, or what he’d learned last autumn, until later? Until it was dark and calm and they’d taken their sweet fill of one another—?
He knew why. He’d questioned the reporters in New York, and answered her promptly this morning, because she asked—because he liked to please her.
But she was getting too old for silly notions about bringing the Kents back to the position of eminence she claimed they’d once enjoyed. Forty was an average life- time; five years beyond that, she was lucky to be in such astonishingly good health. She should be enjoying what was left of her life, not dedicating it to some fool scheme that soured her disposition and didn’t stand a chance of succeeding. Wealthy or not, she’d be no match for a powerful man like Hamilton Stovall—who logically couldn’t be expected to hand over Kent and Son to a member of the family he despised.
Yet Amanda was a determined woman—that he knew very well. Maybe she could succeed if she tried hard enough, and had a touch of luck. What upset him was the fact that her ambition was so closely tied to an almost fanatic hatred of Stovall. And as he’d tried to tell her, hate was a costly, destructive emotion—
Except when some shipboard crisis sparked him to a fury and drove him to action, Captain Barton McGill was a calm, detached sort of man. He’d been raised in a Charleston home where two aristocratic people of high temper had clashed often. Among his most vivid memories of childhood were the sounds of argument—
Cursing.
Crying.
Crockery smashing—
He’d been fortunate to discover the haven offered by a career at sea. His parents—both dead now—hadn’t objected to his leaving home when he was quite young. He felt they had little interest in him, and suspected they were glad to be rid of him. But he’d married unwisely, married a woman who had much the same disposition as his mother and father. Her anger, easily roused, had driven him deeper within himself. He developed a kind of spiritual kinship with the spotted turtle he’d kept as a pet when he was eight or nine—
Kept, that is, until one of the stormiest of the arguments between his parents. His father snatched the turtle from its box on the porch and hurled it at his mother. She dodged and the spotted turtle hit the house, its carapace cracked even though it had frantically withdrawn its legs and head—
The turtle died that same night. Bart never forgot. Over the years he concluded that those who indulged their tempers for any but the most practical and pressing reasons were fools doomed to destroy others, and be destroyed. Even turtles weren’t perfectly protected from the wrath of such fools, but at least they had some armor. His was intellectual.
He abhorred, and took no part in, the venomous debate the slave question produced in the north and south. He jeered at the hysterical abolitionists and their bombastic, foully slanted pamphlets and newspapers. But his contempt was nearly as strong for those cotton-kingdom demagogues who puffed out clouds of gas about states’ rights and offered sly threats of separation—secession—to scare those northern bastards—
No matter what the motive, hate bred hate and, in the end, chaos. He had long ago weaned himself away from such damaging passions. He preferred the steady, soothing beat of the ocean against a clipper’s hull, the spirited but essentially civilized bargaining in the Chinese hongs. In the Far East trade, a man could do his task, take pride in it, and make a little money without staking his life on worthless angers and woolly ideas—such as Amanda’s notion that Kent and Son was supposed to do more than bring in a profit, that it had some higher responsibility to inform and inspire the people who bought the books bearing its imprint. Ideas like that—turned into crusades—only brought people to grief—
Damnation! He should have lied about the questions she’d put to him on his last visit. Lied outright:
“Kent’s isn’t owned by Stovall any longer. No one’s heard of Walpole in years—”
As he stared glumly at the closed front door where she’d vanished, he realized that if he’d thought things through a little more—or if he cared for her a little less—he would have lied.
Now it was too late.
iv
Whittling, Louis Kent looked up as Bart McGill approached the shadowed rear stoop of the sun-bleached frame building. Out back, Israel was pottering in the garden next to his shanty.
Bart wanted to go on inside, into the building’s rear room, a large, square chamber partitioned into sleeping space for Louis, and a second somewhat bigger alcove for Amanda. He could see the room’s furnishings—the piano he’d brought on one voyage, the walnut dining table and chairs that had come on another. Amanda and her son entertained visitors at the table, and took meals there. Food came from the tavern’s small kitchen, located between the rear living room and the more spacious public room in front. Kent’s didn’t waste money on fancy fixtures. A plank bar and several cheap tables and chairs satisfied the diners and drinkers of Yerba Buena—
He saw it all, fondly, but he didn’t go in because he suspected Amanda was probably still upset. She’d let him know when she was composed enough to see him again.
He sat down beside the boy on the splintery step. “Louis, I’ve been wondering something.”
“What is it, sir?”
“Have I got my days mixed up? I swear last night, my log read Tuesday. But places around here are closed tight, just like it’s Sunday.”
“You mean Mr. Brannan’s store?”
“And his paper.” Bart nodded. “Where is the old money-grubber, off palavering with brother Brigham?”
“Oh, no, Captain Bart, Mr. Brannan’s given up the Mormon faith.”
“He has! Why?”
“He and Young fell out over the place those Latter-day Saints were going to settle after they got run out of Missouri. Mr. Brannan brought some families to Yerba Buena by ship, you know—”
“Yes.”
“—and he tried to persuade Young this was the promised land. I guess old Mr. Young saw it differently, back at that salty lake they say lies east of the Sierras. Young threw Brannan out of their church—”
“Good God! I beg your pardon, Louis. Continue.”
“—and he said he wanted all the money Bran
nan had collected in tithes, too. Ma said Mr. Young claimed it was the Lord’s money, so Mr. Brannan said he’d return it as soon as Young sent him a receipt in the Lord’s handwriting. That Mr. Brannan’s pretty good at turning a dollar—”
“Almost as good as your mother,” Bart observed with a wry smile. “But you haven’t told me where he is.”
“I think he must have gone up to Captain Sutter’s mill.”
Bart blinked. “You mean the fort on the Sacramento? New Helvetia?”
“No, I mean Captain Sutter’s sawmill. I guess it’s been built since you were here last. About forty or fifty miles beyond the fort, on the American River. Mr. Brannan probably went up to see about the gold—along with Mr. Kemble, the editor of the Star.”
“What gold are you talking about, Louis?”
The boy shrugged. “Probably isn’t real. Probably just pyrites.”
“Found in the river?”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Marshall, who was putting up the mill, spied it first.” Louis fished in his pocket, produced a crumpled clipping. “This was in the other paper last month. I tore it out—I got pretty excited. But Ma calmed me down quick enough. She said a lot of the yellow stuff had showed up around here before—and all of it busted apart the minute someone laid it on an anvil and hammered it. That’s one way you tell fool’s gold, they say.”
Bart scanned the story from Yerba Buena’s other occasional newspaper, The Californian. The item was dated the fifteenth of March:
GOLD MINE FOUND—In the newly made raceway of the Saw Mill recently erected by Captain Sutter on the American Fork, gold has been found in considerable quantities. One person brought thirty dollars’ worth to New Helvetia, gathered there in a short time. California, no doubt, is rich in mineral wealth; great chances here for scientific capitalists.
He didn’t read the final sentence, because Louis interrupted. “Nobody believes that now.”
“But a few still went to look for themselves?”
“Yes. Mr. Brannan even fetched along some aqua fortis. I don’t know what that is, but he said if you poured it on gold, nothing would happen, and that’s another way you tell real gold from pyrites.”
“Explains why the town’s so quiet, anyway. Strikes me that if there were gold up along those rivers, someone would have made certain by now. It’s April already—”
“Does seem funny, doesn’t it?”
Bart changed the subject. “How are you coming along with your studies?”
“Pretty well. Ma helps me three nights a week. I’m good with sums—I can make change fast in the tavern. My handwriting’s only fair. And I don’t like all that poetry and those stories she makes me read—”
“Well”—he tousled the boy’s dark, curly hair; in the blue shadow of the stoop, Louis might have passed for a Mexican, so coppery were his cheeks—“you’ll have to suffer. Reading’s the mark of a cultured man. I brought a new batch of books. Maybe you’ll like that Poe fellow’s eerie concoctions—”
The door opened behind them. Bart rose. But even before he swung and saw Amanda’s smiling face, he was gratified by her calm voice.
“Come in, Bart. And forgive me for carrying on a while ago—?”
Her smile was so warm, he promptly forgot the worry and turmoil caused by her reaction to the Kent books.
“Nothing to forgive, sweet—’less you refuse to pour me a good strong drink.”
v
The remainder of the day was merry and satisfying. Amanda cooked up some beef brought in a few days earlier from the fort of the somewhat bizarre European, Captain John Sutter. The fort lay beyond the central valley, where the Sacramento and American Rivers flowed together.
While Amanda worked, Bart told her all the news he could remember from the previous fall—old news, to be sure, but she welcomed it. There were some newer tidbits as well, the most recent concerning the failing health of the famous Mr. Astor.
He was dying at eighty-four, so enfeebled he could take no nourishment except milk from the breast of a woman hired for that purpose. To provide him with exercise, his household servants laid him on a blanket and lined and lowered him. But sick as he was, the legendary millionaire still kept track of payments made by individual renters of his various real estate properties—and demanded his agents collect a small amount of money owed him by a widow who had fallen on hard times. The gossips said Astor’s son had taken the sum from his own pocket, and sent it to his father by special messenger. The dying man was well pleased, Bart said.
He and Amanda exchanged eastern and western perspectives on the war just concluded under the leadership of two Whig generals, the military commander of the southwest, Zachary Taylor, and the commander of all United States forces, Winfield Scott—both avowed political opponents of President Polk.
Though both men were Virginians, a greater personal contrast could hardly have been found. Scott’s preoccupation with protocol and proper dress had earned him a national nickname—Old Fuss and Feathers. Taylor, unassuming and unspectacular, seldom wore a uniform, preferring farmer’s clothing, with only a cap carrying a general’s emblem identifying his rank. While cogitating, scanning dispatches or issuing orders, he usually sat with both legs hanging down one side of the old white nag he rode. His style won him a nickname too—Old Rough and Ready—and Bart said some in the east were already calling him presidential material.
Like previous American wars, the one against Mexico had been unpopular in certain quarters. Many northerners saw it as a means of guaranteeing the presence of a huge slave state, Texas, in the Union. Bart spoke with some derision about a rustic philosopher of Massachusetts, a chap named Thoreau, who had actually refused to pay a poll tax to protest the “immoral” war. He had gone to Concord jail instead.
Amanda had a somewhat more personal, less political interest in the outcome of the war. She’d had firsthand experience with the Mexican president, Santa Anna, back in Texas in the thirties. Bart knew the story; he knew who had sired young Louis, and under what circumstances.
With relish, Amanda described Santa Anna’s abdication after the capture of Mexico City in September of ’47. “I only hope they’ve gotten the treacherous son of a bitch out of office for good this time!”
She said conditions in California were settling down now that Mexico had renounced claim to the land. The territory was currently being governed by a garrison at Monterey under the command of one Colonel Mason. Exactly as Louis had said, she dismissed the rumor of gold at Sutter’s mill as just that.
She served supper in the late afternoon, while the sunlight began to diffuse behind the fog gathering out on the Pacific. At Amanda’s request, Louis pronounced the grace. Then the boy asked, “Isn’t Israel going to eat with us, Ma?”
“No, he has a touch of the stomach complaint.”
She and Bart both knew it was an excuse. Israel didn’t enjoy the captain’s company. Bart was glad the former slave wasn’t around.
He ate and ate, complimenting the cook frequently. After the meal he lit a Cuban cigar and moved to the room’s most cherished object, the small, compact piano he had freighted from New York.
Before going to sea as a cabin boy in the Far East trade, he had been forced to study music. Despite his youthful dislike of practice, he was accomplished. Music had become a companion for his adult years—a companion who never argued over damn fool ideas, or got net up, except as the composition and the performer dictated—
He ran through the popular song he’d mentioned in the morning, a lively novelty called “Oh, Susannah!” that everyone in the east was whistling. Louis and Amanda quickly learned the words. The trio sang the song four times through, with foot-stomping and hand-clapping to hide the flaws in their voices.
Next Bart played some Chopin for Amanda, finishing with a fiery yet somehow melancholy fantasy—Opus 66 in C sharp minor—whose central passage seemed to speak of unfulfilled hopes and dreams. Amanda rocked in the rocker, her eyes closed, her sun-burnished face golden in the
light of the lamp.
Bart finished the piece and looked around. Louis had slipped out, not caring for “fancy” music. He watched Amanda rocking for a moment.
“Amanda.”
“Mm.”
“What are you thinking about?”
She opened her eyes. “Gold.”
“You said there wasn’t any.”
“I know. If there were, Captain Sutter would certainly have made more of the fact by now.”
“Unless he’s afraid the gold might bring a lot of people tramping over his ground.”
“You know, I never thought of it that way. You’re right. He’s a farmer at heart—”
“A farmer who pretends he was once a soldier.”
She smiled. “Everybody calls him captain out of respect. No one really believes he served in the Swiss Guards in France—any more than they believe in the gold. Still, it’s a lovely dream—”
“What is?”
“Owning a piece of ground with a lot of gold in it.”
He didn’t like the brief, predatory expression in her eyes. He puffed on his cigar, rose and stretched. “Who does own this country? One of the men on the lighter sounded like nobody’s sure.”
“That’s true. Anyone who wants land around here can claim it, except in town.”
“Let’s hope they don’t want it. Changing the name of this place is too much change already. I prefer Yerba Buena just like it is. Quiet—”
He walked to her side, bent and kissed her forehead.
“With you always here.”
She reached up to touch his face, her fingertips warm against his skin. How soft and beautiful she looked in the lamplight. The predatory quality was gone. He stroked her hair. “You’re an amazing woman, Amanda.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I want another free meal tomorrow.”
They laughed together. Then he went on. “I say it because most females would have tried to lash me up legally long before this.”