California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1)

by Daniel Knapp

  They picked their way across a street reduced to a quagmire by heavy rain two days earlier. The lids of a score of submerged cast-iron stoves served as stepping stones.

  "Mind you, don't snap one of them open," Kelsey said, taking Esther's hand. "It was a fine idea to set them in the mud. They were going to waste. But yesterday one of the lids flew up and cracked a man's shinbone."

  They reached the wooden sidewalk in front of a hardware store.

  "Can't anything be done about this coin and currency business?" Esther asked.

  "Until the government establishes a mint here," Barnett said, "I doubt things will get any better."

  "Mebbe they will if we become a state," Kelsey said, nudging Esther and winking. They passed a man throwing brush and branches under the rear wheels of a buckboard stalled in the mud. "Myself, I'd just as soon see us get some cobblestones first."

  "If we become a state?" Barnett said defensively. "There's no question about it. You can bet the matter will be settled in Monterey."

  "Monterey is one thing," Kelsey said, "but Washington is another."

  "Oh, come on, William," Barnett went on. "Polk is for it. The Congress can't ignore us. We're too rich, there's too much gold flowing eastward for statehood to be delayed very long."

  So much gold and not enough coins, Esther thought, as an idea struck her.

  "And in the meantime," Barnett continued, "if I judge the temper of those headed for Monterey correctly, we will function as a state with or without the government's blessing."

  "With or without coin of the realm," Esther mused out loud.

  Barnett turned to her, puzzled. For a moment Esther stared at several men unearthing a carriage that had sunk up to its windows into the mire on Kearny Street. In front of it, the head of a dead mule protruded from the surface of the street.

  Esther shuddered and turned back to Barnett. "Is there any law against coining gold privately?"

  "Why, I don't know," Barnett said, a bit flustered. He prided himself on his self-taught knowledge of the law.

  "I'm sure you can find out," Esther said. "You run an assay office, through which a formidable amount of gold passes. For the price of some machinery, which could be made at the foundry I saw from my hotel-room window, you could turn out coins from that gold. Would there be any profit in it?"

  "Why, I'd never thought of it," Barnett said.

  "What did I tell you about this little lady?" Kelsey nudged Barnett in the ribs, enjoying every minute of the big man's being caught off balance.

  "Yes. Yes," Barnett said, thinking. "She has a fine mind for business."

  "It was just a thought," Esther said, smiling knowingly at Kelsey. "I don't know if it could be turned to advantage."

  "Easy," Kelsey said. "Just start turning out coins."

  "That wouldn't sit well with the Mercantile," Barnett said.

  "The Mercantile be damned!" Embarrassed, Esther sucked in a breath and put her hand to her mouth.

  Barnett's jaw dropped open. Kelsey roared.

  "If they don't like it," Kelsey said, "tell them we'll just have to pull our account out of the bank."

  Barnett suddenly enjoyed the prospect of it all. "Why, it would be simple. You must add another metal to a gold coin to keep it from bending, breaking up with use. If a five-dollar gold piece, for which a minter received five dollars in nuggets or dust, contained only four dollars' worth of gold, there would be a dollar's profit in each coin."

  "Less the cost of the additional metal," Kelsey said.

  "Minimal. Minimal," Barnett responded, his mind racing as they started downhill toward Montgomery Street and the Blue Star offices.

  "If you stayed within a reasonable proximity of what the government puts into its coins, that would be fair, would it not?" Esther asked.

  "Honest. Honest. Couldn't be fairer than that," Barnett answered.

  "Why don't the three of us go into the mint business?" Esther wondered out loud. "At least until the government takes it upon itself to remedy the situation."

  "It would be a natural outgrowth of the assay office," Kelsey said.

  "A third each for the equipment," Esther suggested.

  "And a three-way split of the profits," Kelsey added.

  "Less a shared expenditure for additional space and the men you will have to hire," Esther said.

  Barnett was beaming like a child with a new toy. "Why, we might get rich on this."

  "Richer," Esther said.

  "Richer is right." Kelsey laughed, putting his arm around Esther and giving her a fatherly squeeze. "Now, will you pack up your things and come stay with Connie and me? You're too valuable an asset to be left alone at night in a hotel on Portsmouth Square, fancy Parker House or not."

  Forty-one

  Esther put off accepting the Kelseys' invitation to stay in their guest room for several days. She wanted to be alone, have time to think. But then she gave in. She had grown tired of the noise and bustle around the Parker House. Barnett had left for Monterey. She could not join him until the end of the week, and she realized that no amount of planning would guarantee the Frémonts would not be curious about questions concerning Mosby. She would simply have to wait and improvise her approach.

  Bill Kelsey offered to pick her up at the hotel, but Esther declined. Not wanting to impose, she hired a buckboard and driver for a late afternoon departure. It was well past supper when the apologetic driver arrived, explaining that he had broken an axle shortly after noon. Disgruntled because she was keeping the Kelseys waiting, Esther had the driver load her bags on the buckboard while she crossed Portsmouth Square to a small shop. She hoped to find an appropriate gift for Connie Kelsey as a token of her gratitude.

  The wrapped porcelain figure of a child under her arm, she started back toward the buckboard. Guitar, banjo, and violin sounds wafted out onto the plaza from the Aguila de Oro and other gambling houses amid a loud murmur of voices and occasional peals of laughter. As she glanced into the Verandah gaming tent, the sound and sight of a dextrous musician drew her attention. She stopped and watched as the man alternately sang hoarsely and blew through a set of penny whistles on a makeshift brace around his neck. Simultaneously, he clapped a pair of miniature cymbals together and beat out a tattoo with sticks attached at his elbows on a drum hanging down his back.

  She smiled and started to turn, but then she saw the mustachioed player sitting at a monte table directly in front of the one-man band. Esther had only a three-quarter view of the gambler's face because of the angle of his chair. From where she stood, he looked like Mosby. It cannot be, she thought. My mind is playing tricks. She moved to the left for a better view of the man. The profile matched Mosby's perfectly, right down to the aquiline nose. The man laughed as he drew in a winning pot, and the sound electrified her. She was certain it was Mosby.

  She felt the certainty take on the color and temperature of cold rage. Her heart pounded, her hands grew clammy, her breath came in short, deep gasps. Suddenly past examining danger, weighing consequences, she was overwhelmed by the urge for vengeance. Recrossing the square, Esther took a small pouch of gold out of one of her bags and directed the driver to wait for her behind the hotel.

  She walked back across the corner of the plaza and turned into the Bella Union. Three steps into the smoky, crowded gaming room, she saw a man wearing a holstered pistol. Ignoring the cool glances of several prostitutes, Esther beckoned the man outside.

  "Is that pistol serviceable?"

  The man, half-drunk, laughed, spraying her with liquor-sweetened saliva and sickening her with his breath. "Shoot the eye out'a Digger fifty yards away."

  "Is it loaded?"

  "Shore is, ma'am."

  "How much will you take for it?"

  "Won't take nothin' fer it. Need it. Can't get to sleep without it. This here's a crazy town."

  Esther held out the gold pouch. "Will you take one hundred dollars in dust for it?"

  "A hunnert dollars? You crazy? You kin buy one in'a
mornin' fer less'n half that over't Folsom Hardware on Sagra… Sagramendo Street."

  "I have to travel a ways tonight—without my husband. I need a weapon for protection."

  "Can't do it, ma'am."

  "One hundred twenty-five?"

  "You say a hunnert twenty-five?"

  "It's all I have."

  "Can't pass that up," he said, unbuckling his gun-belt.

  "I just want the pistol." She handed him the pouch and extracted the weapon from its leather holster.

  "Here. You might as well take these." He fumbled with the bullets, trying to thumb them out of the snug pockets stitched into the black belt. When he looked up, she was already walking away.

  She circled the Verandah once, holding the pistol in her open purse and noting the exits from the building. At the doorway, she glanced at the men hanging onto the bar and the half-dozen women in frilled corsets and high, colored stockings. The entire room blurred for a moment. She stopped and closed her eyes for several seconds until the faintness passed. Coldly, without thought, she eased her way through a cluster of bearded miners intently watching a game, then sidled past three Mexicans pleading for seats at one of the crowded tables. Above the din, the one-man band fought to be heard, but this time Esther scarcely noticed him.

  She stopped a yard or so behind the rangy man with the moustache and looked around. No one was paying any attention to her. She scanned the table: a polyglot mix of bearded miners and more neatly dressed businessmen, all of them absorbed by the cards they had been dealt. Crouching as if to pick up something she had dropped, she slipped the pistol out of her purse. She could hear the man with the moustache say, "You're gonna lose this one, too," and then laugh again. It sounded exactly like the laugh she'd heard from Mosby as she lay semiconscious, face down in the snow. She struggled to keep from tearing at the back of his head with her hands.

  Rising, she reached out and rapped the comb-back of the man's chair with the gun barrel. "Excuse me," she said, steeling herself for the noise the gun would make, the sight of him with his face torn apart, flying backward over the table.

  The players looked up and paled. An old miner dropped his cards. Another gambler involuntarily put his hands up, palms out. A third with a plump Latin face pushed back from the table, his eyes bulging with fear.

  The man with the moustache turned and froze in his seat when he saw the muzzle of the pistol pointing straight at his forehead.

  Something is wrong, Esther thought. "Now hold on a minute… please," she heard the man say as her vision blurred again. The room was suddenly silent.

  One of the professional dealers, wearing a stovepipe hat, evening clothes, and a red sash around his waist, moved at the far end of the table. Retrieving the derringer he had strapped to his ankle, he pointed it at Esther and pulled the hammer back.

  Esther's vision cleared. The man with the moustache, the man she was about to kill, had one cast-eye and a cleft chin. In full view, he looked nothing at all like Mosby. Paralyzed, Esther stared at the derringer pointing at her, the hand holding it flexing slightly. Realization that she was a woman had slowed the dealer's reaction; now her innocent, curious expression stopped his trigger finger in midsqueeze.

  Esther lowered the barrel of her pistol. Her voice breaking with fast-draining emotion and embarrassment, she asked the gambler with the moustache: "Is this yours, sir? I… I stumbled on it as I was passing your table."

  Ashen, the gambler wiped a hand across his mouth. "No, ma'am. I think…" He looked down at his own holstered weapon. "I think this here's mine… right here." He glanced up and saw the pistol Esther held was now pointed at his groin. He winced. "Would you please aim that thing someplace else? You're makin' me awful nervous."

  Esther looked down at the pistol in her hand as though this were the first time she'd realized what it was. "Oh," she said, summoning as much innocence as she could muster. "Please forgive me. I know nothing about firearms."

  There was a collective exhaling of breath around the table as the man with the moustache reached out very slowly and eased the barrel aside with the back of his hand. "Whoooooeeee," he said, as the dealer behind him put the derringer down. "Will someone buy this nice lady a drink? And count me out of the next few hands. I need a little air."

  Lying in bed later that night at the Kelseys', Esther waited for the emotions she thought she had held in check to envelope her. Delayed fear, shame, guilt, embarrassment, anger—something. None came. After thinking about it vaguely, generally, disjointedly for more than a year, she had wanted to kill Mosby. That truth did not bother her. She wondered briefly if she were no better than Mosby in her hatred, her wanting revenge. She decided that was foolish. They had reasons for their behavior as different as fire and lightning. What did bother her was that such intense emotion and desire could rob her of common sense and reason. Any one of those men could have killed me on the spot, she thought. It is a wonder I am still alive. Again.

  She got out of bed and stared through the window at the sea of lamp-lit canvas rectangles washing over the hills and hummocks below the Kelsey house. I mustn't ever let my feelings overcome my wits again, she thought. In that direction lies nothing but failure. And even if she had killed him, she wouldn't have survived the event herself. No, a way would present itself wherein she could have her revenge and live, kill him and still survive. Undetected. It would take time, and luck, and it would all begin with the knowledge she obtained from the Frémonts. And then, no matter how long it took her, she would do it properly, in a way that was foolproof. Letting her mind rule, rather than her passions.

  Long after midnight she lay imagining the possible ways it might happen, savoring with each new setting the remembered feel and heft of the gun in her hand, the silken smoothness of the trigger under the soft flesh of her finger.

  Forty-two

  In Monterey, Esther could not at first believe her good fortune. Within an hour of her arrival, Barnett had given her Larkin's assurance that there would be no problem in acquiring land in the Mariposa region. Then, not only did Barnett arrange for an introduction to the Frémonts, he somehow managed to have Esther invited to stay at the spacious hacienda they had rented that summer after Jessie Benton Fremont's arrival in California. She was ecstatic.

  But Esther's hopes for an unforced, early conversation with Frémont about Mosby were quickly dampened. She found herself almost isolated, not easily in the presence of the "Pathfinder" or his wife, situated as she was in a guest room on the far end of a newly constructed wing. Not that it would have been a simple matter to gain their attention had she been given a room closer to the main portion of the house. Frémont was consumed by the convention, which had begun in early September. He was absent most of the time Esther was there. His wife was just as preoccupied. She had opened her home to forty-eight delegates from every district in California.

  Cordial and hospitable, Jessie Benton Frémont nonetheless hurried on about her business each time Esther encountered her. Frémont himself scarcely noticed her after their first introduction. It was obvious that one thing was uppermost in both their minds: securing John Charles Frémont's senatorial nomination. Esther found herself with nothing to do. She began taking long walks through the quaint town, enjoying the look of the Spanish-tile roofs on the low, sprawling haciendas and the port's picturesque setting near the southern lip of an enormous half-moon bay.

  Four days slipped by, and the most Esther got out of Jessie Frémont was a passing: "Isn't it wonderful? They have signed into law a bill allowing women to control all property in their possession before marriage." Esther tried to engage Jessie in further conversation then, but the eyes of her attractive, indefatigable hostess drifted immediately to a group of delegates' wives who had just arrived for tea.

  "We will talk another time," Esther said.

  "Yes, forgive me," Jessie answered, her mind already on how she could win the new guests—and indirectly, their husbands—over to Fremont's cause. "You do understand? I will
make it a point to spend time with you later this week."

  Esther waited, read, for the most part avoided the endless gatherings in the patio and the hacienda's huge dining room, and walked—for hours. One afternoon, as she passed the general store Alex had run for Larkin, nostalgia and a painful sense of loss rocked her. Shutting it from her mind, she hurried on. Approaching the sandstone schoolhouse where the delegates were meeting, she saw John Sutter step out through the doorway of the building. He sat down on a bench, as though exhausted. He had aged drastically, his clothes were shabby and mended. And now, as he rested his head against the wall of the building, his eyes suddenly brimmed with tears.

  Esther walked toward him. Unaware of her presence, he drew out a handkerchief, wiped at his eyes, blew his nose, and took a deep breath. She stopped several yards away, saw him try to shake off whatever was bothering him and pull himself together before going back in to the convention. As he stood up, he finally saw her.

  "My child, my child," he said, beaming. "What a wonderful surprise."

  She moved toward him, and they put their arms around one another. "You look well," she said.

  "You flatter me. I look like something the dogs dragged in."

  "I was watching you. What's the matter? Are you not feeling well?"

  "Tired, my child," he said unconvincingly. "Just very tired."

  "You are not telling me everything."

  "Such a woman. You see through me so easily." He sighed. "It is just that…" He could not go on. The tears were brimming again.

  "Please tell me. Perhaps I can help."

  "I will not go into all of it, but I will say that it saddens me to be here."

  "But you've aways wanted statehood for California."

  "It is not that."

  "Then why… Are things going well with your family—your wife?"

  "She is an angel of patience and understanding. She has never once spoken harshly of my leaving Europe. We could not be getting along better."