California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1)

by Daniel Knapp

  If she managed to stay alive.

  "I will not die!" she shouted for the hundredth time. "I WILL NOT DIE!"

  When the ringing of the words faded, she heard the crunching of snow crust again and turned toward the sound. The creatures had returned. They were greater in number now, and some of the animals were larger than the first two. Larger than any deer Elizabeth had ever seen. They could not be deer. They were all walking on their hind legs. One of them dropped to a crouching position, but to Elizabeth the animal seemed to have gone down on all fours. Now they did not move. Only the wind and the muted rush of water beneath the thick ice at her feet broke the stillness. Then the two smaller ones pointed their claws at her. Bears, she thought. Bears. The largest of them was enormous, and now he took a step toward her. Somehow, the absurdity of it amused her. After all that had gone before, a family of bears. For a moment, before she fainted, she shrieked hysterical laughter as a slowly melting, nonsensical picture of them sitting around a campfire and tearing the baby and her to pieces floated erratically across her mind.

  Even to Miwokan, the head of this Indian village, Elizabeth was at first a forbidding sight. Her long hair blew wildly off to one side in back and lay tangled and matted down over her ghostly white face. From a distance of ten yards there was no demarcation between her deep brown eyes and the dark circles around them. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were caked with soot. Even the whites of her eyes, almost enveloped by dull-red blood vessels, blended into what looked to Miwokan and his wife, Solana, like enormous, eyeless sockets in a bone-white skull.

  When she began shrieking, even Miwokan flinched involuntarily and took a step backward. But after she crumpled onto the ice and the pale blue object slid out of her grasp, he collected himself and sifted what he saw. He took several steps toward her. She wore a puffed-sleeve blue dress and cape that had seemed something else when the slitted skirts and untied leather thongs attached to them had flapped in the wind. He motioned to the rest of them to stay where they were and moved out onto the ice cautiously, spear in hand. He looked down at her. Two fingers tightly gripping the strap of a pouch slung over her shoulder were a greenish black. Blood was crusted around her mouth and smeared faintly across one cheek. A curious shell-color encircled the tip of her nose. She wore a white man's work boots. He saw now that the strange, scalloped shape that had danced along the side of her head was only a blue bonnet similar to ones he had seen worn by white women at the Mission Santa Clara.

  Reason and wit quickly overcame his apprehension. He crouched and held his ear to her breast. The heartbeat was barely discernible and fluttering wildly like a bird's. She was breathing, but so rapidly, so shallowly that he knew she was near death. He was about to call two men to carry her to the village when he remembered the pale blue object. Walking to where it lay several yards off, he stared down at it for a full minute before motioning the warriors to do his bidding. He called his wife to his side. Standing there, Solana struggled to hold back a moan. Staring up at her were the open, lifeless eyes of a fifteen-month-old male child. Wisps of sandy blond hair curled over his tiny ears. His arms and legs were frozen in a fetal tuck. His skin was almost the color of an early evening sky.

  Miwokan bent down and picked up the rigid little body. Only then did he and Solana see the diminutive arm that had been pressed against the ice. It was charred down to the bone from shoulder to wrist.

  She was first conscious of a sudden, strange, tingling pain in the last two fingers of her left hand. The dream about talking and screaming at the bears, strange bears that knew how to build fires and tried to feed her clear liquid that tasted like fish, was over. But she could remember the moment, lying prone in their strangely symmetrical den, when the notion that they were bears was confirmed to her. Blurred as they were, standing and crouching over her, the nearest one, lying perpendicular to her on the floor of the den, was clearly visible. She remembered screaming at the sight of his bared fangs and then laughing when he did not open his eyes and she became aware that he was magically capable of flattening his entire body to a breadth of an inch when he slept. She laughed again, and wondered why the bear who climbed under the fur with her and wrapped her in his arms had felt as smooth as silk.

  The tingling sensation in her fingers returned as she felt her left arm lifted. She heard two quick sizzling sounds and the aroma of something akin to beef frying in a skillet filled her nostrils for a moment. The nature of the pain in her fingers changed from stinging to burning. Oddly, the sensation was up inside toward the knuckles and not on the surface.

  She opened her eyes and was certain she was staring at God's face. She forgot the dull pain, absorbed with Him. Strange. He was not the way she had always pictured Him. He looked more like Father Christmas. Without a beard. Perhaps God shaves His beard off in the summertime, leaving only those marvelous muttonchop sideburns and glorious moustache. It did not matter. It was warm, almost too warm here in heaven, but she was not about to complain. God was smiling and holding her hand tightly, the one that did not tingle. It was marvelous, the way He made you feel as though you were floating when He held your hand. And it was positively magical the way He made Himself appear, disappear and reappear so quickly and yet so gently, so slowly. For a moment she was conscious of the sun behind Him. It was small, so they must be far from earth, she calculated. God and the sun began to spin wildly before her. She closed her eyes again and realized that she was now a graceful white bird, floating, circling, warmed from above by that same sun and from below by warm columns of air rising from a luminously blue ocean.

  Captain John Augustus Sutter turned to Doctor John Marsh and nodded. "Neatly done," he said. He motioned to the two Kanakas who had been holding Elizabeth down. They removed the butcher's cleaver, the chopping block, and the two blackened fingers and left the room on the main floor of the fort. When they were gone, he turned back to Marsh, who had moved the lantern away and set the white-hot hunting knife in a pail of cool water. He wanted Marsh's silence about this woman. He did not know why, but he did, and he had long since begun listening to what instinct told him. He knew exactly how to keep Marsh from revealing to anyone the circumstances, even the fact that the woman was here.

  "John—"

  "Do you suppose she's one of the Donner Party?" Marsh interrupted.

  "I seriously doubt it. A lone woman crossing the Sierras in midwinter?"

  "It does seem unlikely—"

  "Be that as it may. I want you to listen to me and listen carefully. I have sent many patients your way, have I not? I have always called you in medical emergencies here at the fort."

  "Yes, but—"

  "Hear me out. I have for some time known that you are not really a doctor. That you have never had a day of actual schooling..."

  "You don't know what you're talking about!" Marsh snapped.

  "I do, but I do not mean to prove it—ever—to anyone. You perform with greater skill than most physicians, surgeons it has been my misfortune to come across."

  "Then what...?"

  "I simply ask a favor of you. One I do not fully understand myself as yet."

  "What favor?"

  "I want you to speak to no one of what you have seen here today. This woman, her condition, anything."

  Marsh looked at Elizabeth. "What do you know about her? What are you concealing?"

  "Nothing," Sutter lied. "No more than you do."

  "Then why...?'

  "I want to wait at least until she is conscious and capable of telling me who she is and where she came from."

  "You think she may be running from someone, some thing?"

  "I told you, I don't know. But the circumstances are so extraordinary that I wish to allow this woman, who has gone through so much, to have a voice in what happens to her when she is well..."

  "If she gets well, you mean. I don't like the looks of that nose. And she's very weak from the continuing fever."

  "You have told me what to watch for. If there are signs of it worse
ning, I will call you immediately."

  "It will get worse. It should be done now."

  "Try to imagine, Doctor Marsh, what it would be like to walk the rest of your days if your nose was taken from you."

  "Amputated."

  "Amputated, then. Do you understand?"

  "I suppose I'd rather be dead."

  "Exactly."

  "All right, we'll wait and see."

  "And I have your word no one, I mean no one, will hear of this?"

  "Not from me." Reluctantly, but with no choice, Marsh shook hands on it with Sutter. "What about the others here at the fort? The Indians?"

  "Only a few of the white men are here. I sent Big-ham, the blacksmith, to Sonoma. Vallejo needed some horses shod. None of the others know of her arrival. As for the rest, I expect they will soon tire of celebrating their one-sided victory over the Mexicans at Santa Clara and return by the end of the week. I doubt they will think anything of it.

  "The Indians?" Sutter went on, thinking for a moment. "Only a handful of Miwokan's people know anything, and they understand none of it. I will speak to Miwokan, and word of it among them will cease."

  Marsh nodded. He glanced at Elizabeth again. Under the laudanum he had given her she would sleep at least twenty-four hours. "Cleaned, without those fingers missing and that nose, she'd be a beauty."

  "Yes," Sutter said, ushering Marsh to the front door and saying good-bye as he pressed several gold coins into his hand. Someone's beauty, he thought. He closed the door, walked to his study, opened a chest, and took Elizabeth's satchel bag out, spreading the contents on his writing table. Once again he thought of the dead child as he fingered the thin gold wedding band he had removed from her finger when Marsh was ready. Then he sat down, opened the leatherbound journal beside the money belt containing nearly three hundred dollars, and read the handwritten pages a second time.

  When the whites returned to the fort, they paid little attention to the fact that Manaiki, one of Sutter's two Hawaiian common-law wives, was tending to a sick woman in his quarters. They assumed she was a settler. It was not unlike Sutter. During the seven years he had been here, he had established himself as the veritable baron of thousands of acres of rich valley land granted to him by the Mexican authorities in Alta California. He had not only wooed settlers from Oregon and east of the Sierras, he had gone out of his way to help them. No one was turned away from the fort. When he learned of emigrants in trouble or short of provisions on the trails, he invariably sent several of his men and mules laden with enough food and supplies to get them through. When they arrived, he showered them with hospitality. If they did not wish to settle and farm on his lands—for a percentage of their crops—he helped them find homesteads and work elsewhere.

  The fort bustled with activity. High-walled observation towers rose at two corners. Cannon bought from the departed Russian colonists at Fort Ross flanked the main gate. Practically impregnable, the fort was also self-sufficient. Aside from a central, two-story house, the wood, brick, and mortar fort contained living rooms along its walls, a huge kitchen, a tannery, a cooperage, a dining hall, a blacksmith's shed, corrals, a storehouse, a kiln, a still, and a small granary. Three dozen Americans, Europeans, and Mexicans lived in either single rooms or additional houses inside the huge enclosure. Scores of Wappo, Maidu, and Miwok Indians tilled the rich land around the fort.

  In the six years before he set foot in California, Sutter's drive to find a place where he could accomplish enough to erase memories of failure and disgrace in Switzerland had taken him to New York, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Santa Fe, the Russian colony of Sitka, and Honolulu. Here, finally, with the profits of a shipload of goods and credit he had charmed out of merchants in Yerba Buena and Monterey, Sutter had ripped a small empire out of a verdant, game-rich wilderness. Through guile, diplomacy, sheer will and a silken, often cagily generous manner, he had tamed even the wisest and fiercest of the subtribal chiefs and shamans. Here he was master, and in a way, although he did not own anyone as a slave, not even the eight unswervingly loyal Kanakas who formed his own Praetorian Guard, he had almost absolute control over the lives of everyone associated with him.

  Sutter had felt genuine compassion for Elizabeth when the Indians had brought her in, strapped to a crude travois, the night before. And he had momentarily placed himself in her boots, wondering whether he would want anything known about his whereabouts and condition in a parallel circumstance. But that was not all that moved him to play his trump card with Marsh.

  Sooner or later he would have played it anyway, simply to gain a peg on someone who had arrived before him in this rich valley and therefore possessed some vague claim to precedence or superiority. But more than that, more than the sympathy that filled him when he heard Miwokan's recounting of her appearance on the river, it was the simple fact that for the moment, he controlled the destiny of yet another human being. He liked that, in fact, loved it, and not for a moment did he wonder why he needed that control so much. Instead, he searched his mind for something else—that as yet undefined additional reason that made him actually care deeply about the fate of this young woman. Something about her...

  Sutter was standing now, watching the Indians scooping up a mix of grain, vegetables, and meat scraps with their hands, at the troughs set on one side of the fort's open quadrangle, when Wetler, the German cabinetmaker who was stouter even than he, walked up and brought him out of his thoughts about Elizabeth.

  "Die armoire you hef asked vor, she iz vinish."

  "Good," Sutter said absently. "Have—no, never mind. I'll send someone for it tomorrow."

  "Yez zir, Keptin." Wetler did not move away.

  "What is it?" Sutter asked sharply. He suddenly realized how impatient he was for Elizabeth to recover enough to answer questions.

  "Die Amerikin lady, she iz feeling bedder?"

  Sutter did not like to lie outright. His conscience had bothered him when he had misled Marsh. He knew Elizabeth's fever had broken, and that with a few more days' rest she would be well enough to sit up, eat solid food—and talk. "No," he said finally. "I do not think she will recover. And she is not an American. She is a Californio."

  Thirteen

  Wearing a simple, Indian-made sack-dress of light yarn, Elizabeth looked down from a second-floor room in Sutter's main building. Wisps of sour-smelling steam from a still chimney rising above the rear wall of the fort came in through a cracked window. Below her, in buckskins, store-bought clothing, even a sailor's outfit, white men and Indians moved ceaselessly, loading furs and hides onto a wagon, tending to horses and cattle, repairing a corral fence, rolling newly made kegs, and carrying crates from one enclosure or another to a storehouse. She picked up the sound of at least a half dozen accents. Captain Sutter stood talking to an Indian who towered over him and the other men, both dark and light. The Indian was dressed more elaborately than his tribesmen. His buckskins were intricately beaded. A necklace of bear claws hung around his neck, and additional claws studded the fur cap on his head. A deerskin cape hung from his shoulders. There was something vaguely familiar about the Indian's powerful build and angularly handsome features, she thought, watching as Sutter glanced up, quickly concluded his conversation, and strode toward the house.

  She walked unsteadily to the bed and stopped to slip off the moccasins she had found beside it. The motion and the sight of the pale fabric wrapped around her left wrist and hand made her dizzy. She fell back to a sitting position on the bed until the spots in front of her eyes disappeared, then pushed the moccasins off with her toes. She had just pulled the covers up to her neck when Sutter knocked on the door. She closed her eyes and didn't answer. Sutter knocked lightly again and then opened the door and peeked in. When he saw she was in bed, he walked to a chair, pulled it over almost noiselessly, and sat down.

  Manaiki one of Sutter’s Hawaian women, had brushed out Elizabeth's hair. Her face was washed, and she showed signs of natural color now, the pale tint of life in her porcelain-fair
skin. It was then, when she gave up hoping he would leave and opened her eyes, that Sutter realized what it was about her that drew out of him an almost paternal protectiveness. Her eyes clear now, her hair lustrous in the sunlit room, Elizabeth looked, Sutter was certain, as he had pictured his youngest daughter in Switzerland would look when she reached this girl's age. His impression was false. The daughter he had not seen for more than a dozen years would never be so fortunate. But there was enough similarity in bone structure, deepness of the eyes, complexion, and fullness of lips to convince Sutter completely. Elizabeth's words startled him.

  "I know the baby is dead. I feel it."

  Sutter shifted uncomfortably. He is overweight, jowly, Elizabeth thought, detached at once from her statement about John Alexander. But she could see vestiges of a handsome face.

  "There isn't any need to think about that until you are well."

  "It is quite all right to speak of it now. I have accepted it." She could hear herself speaking, feel herself lying there, watching Sutter's face, but it seemed as though she were also somehow outside herself, watching and listening to both Elizabeth Purdy Todd and Sutter at the same time, through some sort of transparent enclosure that cut off contact with normal emotions.

  "Yes," Sutter whispered. "The child—"

  "Where is it? The body? Has he been buried?"

  "It is in safe hands."

  "I want to know!"

  "There are other things for us to discuss if you feel well enough."

  She glared at him, tears brimming, biting her lip.

  "All right," he said.

  Elizabeth relaxed for a moment, suddenly conscious of her rudeness. "I'm sorry. You have been so kind..."

  "No one could have done less for one who has endured so much."

  "I do so wish to know about the baby."

  "The Indians who found you have... preserved him and kept him for you."

  "Kept him for me?"

  "Until you are able and well enough to be present at his funeral. Their beliefs are strong. They were afraid their gods would be enraged if they went ahead without you. It seemed to me that no matter which decision was made, you would not be pleased. So Miwokan's notion that you should be present seemed the better of two difficult choices."