California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1)

by Daniel Knapp

  "Miwokan?"

  "The tribal chief who brought you here."

  Elizabeth still felt nothing. "How many days has it been?"

  "Four."

  "Good Lord!"

  "You were extremely fevered. And it was necessary to administer much laudanum. You slept for two days."

  "How... how are they, they... preserving the body?"

  "The women of the village have tended to him." He did not want to say more.

  "In what way? It has been four days."

  Sutter sighed. "With ice from the river," he said finally. "They have wrapped him in a quilt of rabbit skins filled with ice. One of them, the chief's wife, is always with him."

  Elizabeth fainted.

  When she awoke again, it was dark, and Manaiki, the Hawaiian woman, sat watching over her in the chair. She got up, and Manaiki gave her some broth, gently brushed the hair off her forehead, and wiped her face with a cool, wet cloth. When Elizabeth laid the small, handmade, short-handled wooden bowl on a roughhewn night table beside the bed, Manaiki left her. In a few moments Sutter entered the room. Elizabeth could not help but smile at the sight of him. The fort was quiet, but he was still in his quasi-military outfit of boots, gold-striped maroon trousers tucked in below the knee, and a dark blue jacket bearing frilled gold epaulets. The room was warmed by heat held in the stones of a chimney that rose to the roof. Sutter took off his jacket, and Elizabeth absently noted the fine quality of the silk shirt with ruffled sleeves.

  "You are feeling better?" he asked gently, enfolding her right hand in his. He had no idea her smile reflected the absurdity of his outlandish costume. Manaiki had rubbed her hands and feet with soothing coconut oil. For a moment the thought of having her here with him permanently accompanied the sensation he felt when he touched her soft skin. But that is absurd, he thought. At least absurd until the facts are sorted out. And even then...

  Elizabeth interpreted his tenderness as fatherly, kind, which for the most part it was. She thought of her own father and his words from the pulpit— "death is not an end, but a beginning"—at the funeral service for old Miss Cable. Images of her mother and her younger sister, Esther, left so far behind, flashed across her mind.

  "It is important, if you feel well enough, to discuss some matters," Sutter pressed, still holding her hand.

  "Yes, of course," she said, already thinking ahead, already knowing in a vague, undefined way what he would ask and what she would have to say.

  "First, I would like to know your name."

  She had not thought of that, only of what she could not reveal. Yet obviously her name was pivotal. She stared at him silently for a moment, annoyed with herself for overlooking such a simple trap. She looked away. After the silence between them grew uncomfortable, she said quietly, "Esther."

  "I see," he said, betraying nothing. "Esther." He looked away from her. "And your married name?"

  "Cable," she said. "Esther Cable."

  "Where is your husband?"

  "Dead. He was lost at... lost at sea... when his whaling ship went down."

  "And where was that?"

  "Vermont. No, New England." She began to realize the extent to which her mind was not working at a normal pace. Falling back on that fact, she said, "I don't remember exactly where. I'm a bit confused."

  "Yes, I can see that." He excused himself for a moment, then returned with her bag. "It is all here. Your ring, your money—we, Manaiki, removed the money belt from beneath your bosom when she undressed you the first night. Manaiki has washed and ironed your clothing."

  "Thank you." She was unable to conceptualize the steps she might now take to conceal her identity. "As long as I had to live... thank... goodness I was delivered into the hands of such a kind and honest man."

  "And, of course, your journal... Mrs. Todd."

  She sighed and gave up then, certain Sutter had read all the entries in the diary, and that there was no way she could prevent the news of her survival from reaching Alexander Todd at Larkin's Store in Monterey. "Did any of the others get through?"

  "No. It is almost certain they all perished in the last storm."

  "Those poor people at the lake. Dear God, they will all die."

  "It is impossible to reach them now, but relief parties are being organized to make an attempt as soon as it is feasible. Perhaps we will be lucky. In any case, now that we are being honest with one another—"

  "I'm sorry," she interrupted. "There was a reason for—"

  "I can fully understand." Surprising her even more, he added: "No one knows who you really are but I. And if it is your wish, after careful consideration, no one else has to. Not even your husband."

  Elizabeth could not believe her ears. She gazed out through the window toward the river just north of the fort. Manaiki had told her it ran into another, larger river, which in turn snaked south and then west to the great waters of an enormous bay and the village of Yerba Buena. Down the coast from it lay Monterey. For an instant Elizabeth felt herself pulled by the thought of continuing down the river she had walked on, in one of Sutter's several boats, sailing farther to the village on the bay, and then continuing on to Monterey and Alexander Todd. But then a thought of Mosby and the texture of the rough bandage on her left hand snapped her back to the reality she had formed for herself during the near-lucid, waking moments of the last two days.

  "Is that possible?" she asked.

  "I think it can be arranged. Although word of the Donner misfortune has traveled widely since James Reed, then McCutchen and Stanton stopped here, no one connects you with it. It is rumored already that you are a Californio woman." He beamed. "I have seen to that."

  Elizabeth visualized Stanton again, propped against the tree, frozen solid, pale blue and enveloped in a thin womb of ice. She shuddered, realized now that his boots over hers had probably saved all her toes.

  "Stanton is dead," she said, sounding to Sutter like someone speaking in her sleep.

  "You can tell me about that later, when you are stronger." It did not matter to Sutter now. He was quite sure all of them, including his two Indians, everyone he had read about in her diary, were dead.

  Elizabeth shut the memory of Stanton from her mind. She was alive, and this man was offering her the one opportunity she'd hoped for. She didn't know, had not had the time to think through, what she would do about Mosby. But she knew she would do something. And whatever she decided, she was certain that establishing the impression that she was dead would be to her advantage. "It would be a godsend if no one found out that I am alive. It... it is... very important to me now."

  "You feel shame and guilt about your child, even though you make a superhuman effort. No one could hold you responsible."

  She let him think the dead child was the main reason behind her desire to change her identity. "But I am responsible... For many things."

  "In time you will come to understand that is not true."

  "You do not know all of it."

  "No need to. And until you are better, I do not wish to."

  "There is another reason I want to remain... dead."

  "You cannot bear for your husband to see you... now."

  It was true, but again, it was only part of the truth. "I have seen myself in the mirror. I can see what is left of my hand."

  "As bad as your nose looks now, the scarring effect will fade in time. And it should not matter to someone who truly loves you."

  "He does love me! It would not matter to him, I'm sure. But I love him, and it matters to me! I want to spare him the sight of me. I want him to remember me as I was. There is no Elizabeth Todd anymore."

  Sutter drifted back for a moment into his own past. Caught in it, he rocked side to side in sympathy and she thought he was shaking his head.

  "You don't understand," she cried, miserable.

  "But I do," he whispered, taking hold of her chin gently and turning her face back toward his. "I can understand it more than most would. I have been in a similar circumstance.
Not nearly so tragic, but just as final for me. Long ago. It will never be long enough. I can never go back to that first life I had."

  Elizabeth could scarcely feel her relief and gratitude as another wave of numbness caught her up and drained away her emotions again. Watching herself from a point somewhere outside her own body, she saw the tears flowing involuntarily down her cheeks. "I will... somehow, some day I will repay you."

  "Don't trouble your mind about that. If you become that most valuable of all things, a friend, that will be repayment enough." He dabbed a lace handkerchief at her eyes. "All you need consider now—Esther—is what you want to do. Rest. Tomorrow we will put our heads together and I will then make whatever arrangements are necessary."

  Fourteen

  When Sutter first learned on January 17 that two male and five female Donner snowshoers had staggered down out of the mountains near Johnson's ranch, north of the fort, he quickly arranged for the woman who now called herself Esther Cable to be temporarily housed at Miwokan's village.

  "Until the cabin is built," he said, fingering her wedding ring as he sat next to her bed.

  "I want you to keep that, as payment for having the Indians build the cabin."

  He smiled. "I will hold the ring for you, if you like, but I would rather make other arrangements about the cabin—and the land."

  "I have money."

  "That won't be necessary now. The land is two miles from Miwokan's village. If you need anything, the Indians will be ready to help you. This quarter-mile-square piece of land straddles the South Fork of the American River. It is wild country. You will essentially be alone. Are you sure that is what you want?"

  "Yes."

  He sighed. "Then I suggest the following financial arrangement: A total price of one hundred dollars for the land and the cabin. That is fair. Four annual payments of twenty-five dollars, commencing twelve months hence. If you decide to stay. If you do not, you simply sign title to the property back to me. Agreed?"

  "It is more than a bargain."

  "I will have Custot, my secretary, write it all down with his quill pen in triplicate. One copy for you, one for me, and one to be filed with Consul Larkin in Monterey, so it is official."

  "My God, my husband works for Larkin!"

  "How would he, or anyone else, know who 'E. Cable' is?"

  "That will be the only name on the deed?"

  "That—and mine, of course."

  "But suppose someone asks who—?"

  "I will simply tell them 'E. Cable' is a settler. Come north from the Pueblo de Los Angeles after arriving there a year ago by way of the Santa Fe Trail."

  "I will need furniture."

  "The Indians are already making it."

  "I want to pay for it."

  "Ten dollars—for the furniture and enough seeds, coffee, flour, sugar, salt, bacon, and dried beans to last a year. Is that agreeable?"

  "It is too little. I should pay you more than that."

  "All right. For another ten dollars you may have the use of a milk cow, a horse, and a saddle."

  "You are being more than fair. Unreasonably so. I will find a way to repay you."

  Sutter clucked, waving it off, then took her downstairs to show her the handsome armoire his cabinet-maker, Wetler, had recently built.

  "It is a housewarming gift—for you, Esther."

  Although she had chosen the name herself, the sound of it was somehow uncomfortable. It would take time to get used to, as would everything else in this new life she was beginning. Tears filled her eyes. "You have been like a—father to me. I... I will never forget this. Ever."

  She was apprehensive about being alone even briefly in an Indian village, but Sutter explained that the cabin was a few days from completion, reminded her of the need for secrecy, and told her a number of things about Miwokan and his relatively small, familial subtribe that reassured her. Still, Sutter accompanied her when Miwokan, his wife, Solana, and several other Miwoks left with "Esther" for the village before dawn on January 19. Since he would be traveling back from the village that night, Sutter took two armed Kanakas with him.

  "She needs rest and quiet," Sutter told Miwokan, after Elizabeth was settled in comfortably. Lying covered with furs on the same bearskin that had terrified her the last time she was in Miwokan's sunken, beamed, earth- and barkslab-covered hut, she listened groggily as Sutter went on. "There is simply too much activity too much bustle and racket at the fort. The cabin will be ready soon, so she will not be here long."

  "She may stay as long as it is needed," Miwokan answered, glancing at her. "My people are happy for her to be here. She... is not only a white woman to them. But more."

  Sutter did not pursue the meaning of what Miwokan had said. "You have an empty hut?"

  "She will stay in mine—Solana and I will move to another until she is well."

  Sutter's eyebrows rose. "In the chief's hut?"

  "It is only right. She came over the mountains when there was deep snow. By herself. It tells us that she is a great woman, a daughter of the sun."

  Sutter let Miwokan think whatever he wanted to. As far as he was concerned, if their beliefs protected Esther Cable, it didn't matter to him whether those beliefs were childish or not. Riding back to the fort with his two Kanakas, he felt an enormous sense of relief. Fitfully asleep now, with Solana watching over her, Esther was out of the fort not a day too soon, he was sure. For already the place was alive with a mixture of half-fact, half-rumor about the seven Donner survivors and those they had left behind in the snow.

  William Eddy was starving, emaciated, too exhausted to speak, when Miwoks from another tribelet brought him to the emigrants who lived in and around Johnson's ranch. William C. Foster—in the same condition after the thirty-three-day trek through the snowbound wilderness between Donner Lake and the Johnson place—was so crazed he could not speak coherently.

  Amazingly, all the women who had begun the trip—except Elizabeth Todd—had survived. Mrs. McCutchen, Mrs. Foster, Mrs. Pike, Mrs. Fosdick, and Mary Graves, all in their early twenties, were severely debilitated, but they were not nearly so badly off as the men. They, at least, could sit up, eat, and talk. This much Sutter knew for certain from the rider who brought the news to the fort. The rest: indications that all seven had had to cannibalize the dead to survive; that someone had threatened the lives of Sutter's two Indians, Luis and Salvador; that the Indians had subsequently fled without snowshoes; that Foster had come upon the two pale brown men lying exhausted and near death in the snow and had then killed them and eaten parts of the bodies; these things Sutter could not be certain of until he spoke to Eddy and the women himself.

  However exaggerated, he thought some of it was probably true. And even some of it was enough to chill a man's blood. Sutter shivered now, thinking about it as the hooting of an owl added a primeval note to the moonlit shapes and stillness of the foothill pine forest. He was glad the two Kanakas had accompanied him—for reasons beyond the protection they afforded from living things. Just their company was soothing. Not enough, but a balm nonetheless. Sutter was not a man to entertain even the vaguest thought of supernatural interference in the lives of men under normal circumstances. But this night, filled with speculation about primitive, perhaps even subhuman acts in the mountains, his sensibilities chilled and shaken, surrounded by a cold, pale light that seemed suffused with the eeriness of the unknown, even Sutter found himself as disquieted as a young child awakened by a strange sound in the dark.

  He was glad Esther had heard none of the news, the rumors. She was in no condition to deal with or discuss them. The sexual stirrings, aroused in him by his first sight of her extraordinarily formed naked body were gone now. He felt again a strong surge of paternal protectiveness. He did not know how much of the horror she had seen, had engaged in herself, and he hoped it was as little as possible. But her words echoed in his mind:

  "I am responsible, for many things... You do not know all of it."

  As Sutter and the
two Kanakas finally rode across the open fields toward the hushed fort just before dawn, he resisted conjecturing about what Esther had been forced to do up there in the snow. Sooner or later, he thought wearily, it is almost certain that I will find out.

  Miwokan was standing in the doorway of the conical hut, watching Esther, when she woke up. Alert now, she immediately experienced the first of many surprises that would fill the next several days.

  "Good morning," he said with perfect pronunciation. "Was your sleep a good one?"

  "Yes," she said, aware that she felt more rested than at any time since Fort Bridger.

  "The forest is a good place for healing." Miwokan moved aside, and Solana entered with a bowl of steaming black acorn and oat mush laced with wild honey and seeds. She was not wearing the fur cape she had on the day before, and Esther saw that she was at least five months pregnant. "When you have finished eating," Miwokan went on, "you should walk. Each day walk a little more and strength will return. Until you are strong enough, use one of my spears to lean on when it is necessary, but do not lean on it until you believe you will fall."

  He left then. As she ate the crude cereal, she could see him through the entranceway with a gathering of young Indian boys carrying intricately handwrought snares and traps. She realized now that he had seemed familiar in the fort enclosure because he had hovered closest to her when she lay thrashing and screaming deliriously in this same hut after they had found her on the river. She had a vague recollection that he had also lain next to her in the furs to keep her warm.

  "He goes to teach the younger ones how to trap the rabbit, deer, and fox," Solana said, startling her.

  "You do not use bows and arrows?"

  "Yes. But it is at the same time less work and more, more..." She could not find the words and tapped her head. "More challenging," Solana said slowly, examining the word. "More hard putting of pictures together in the head this way," she added, pointing at the small group leaving the village.