The Lost Baroness

by Judith B. Glad

  Mrs. Leong nodded vigorously. "Li Ching very smart man. Find much gold."

  "Well, I'll be damned," the man said, a peculiar smile on his face. He put on his hat and left.

  Siri waited until he was out of sight before setting down the empty cup and rising. She'd wasted enough time sitting here, yet she hadn't wanted to leave until after he did. If she didn't get to her room soon, she'd be too sleepy to finish the christening gown. She set her cup and bowl on the counter. "Thank you, Mrs. Leong. I'll see you soon."

  "New ship in. You hurry home before sailors come ashore."

  "I know. I saw it at anchor. Good night." She stepped into the rain. She'd noticed the newest arrival. It was one that had not been in the harbor for nearly a year, and its captain would have no answers for her. None of the Dewitt ships traded along the Coast or went upriver.

  Head down against the fine drizzle, she walked toward the hotel she called home now. The tiny room in the attic was cramped and comfortless, but it was dry and warmer than a tent. She had been fortunate to be hired as a maid in one of Astoria's two respectable hotels, even more fortunate the hotel provided room and board to its maids. There weren't many other jobs for a decent woman without family.

  But she had a family. She did!

  Ah, Gud! Why? Why did You let her take my babies away?

  Blinded by sudden tears, she ran into a solid wall. One with hands. Instinctively Siri fought the grasp of the man she'd collided with, but found herself held securely. "Nej! Släpp mig!"

  "Stand still! I won't harm you." The hands held her fast. "Did you hurt yourself?"

  His voice was deep, warming her from within. And familiar. She sagged within his grasp a moment, grateful for the support. Then she set her feet solidly on the ground and straightened her spine. "Nej...No... I'm fine... Let me go!"

  The last word died on her tongue as she stared into sea-green eyes. His face was narrow and tanned, his head haloed with gold.

  He let her go.

  "Excuse me," she said, the words sounding faint and weak to her ears. "I'm sorry. Please. I must--" She dodged around him and all but ran up the street, forgetting her fatigue, intent on reaching the refuge of her tiny, cold room.

  Buff stared after her, curious. Something about the woman... He almost felt he'd seen her before, somewhere.

  But why would he remember her? And from where? There was nothing remarkable about her except, perhaps, her height. She had scarcely had to lift her chin to look straight into his face. But the tired eyes, the bracketed mouth, and the drab clothing--none of them were memorable. She looked like a servant. Or a poor man's wife.

  Shaking his head, he resettled his pack on his shoulders and strode in the same direction she'd gone. Somewhere up this hill was the hotel Captain Hanks had recommended.

  * * *

  This room would be adequate until he knew what his next step would be. Jaeger detested the shabby, usually filthy lodgings one found at every waterfront in the world, but sometimes they served his purpose. No one paid attention to the transients who stayed a few hours or days.

  He cleaned the lamp's chimney, wondering when soot had last been wiped from the scratched glass. So. Now he could see himself in the small mirror.

  The eyebrows must go. They were distinctive, the first feature someone noticed when meeting him. He winced as he peeled the adhesive loose.

  Now, what persona would he assume for his stay in Astoria?

  * * *

  The wind and rain forecast by Mrs. Leong had come with a vengeance. Storm warning flags had gone up the night before, and were snapping like rifle shots in the wind when Buff made his way to the Deep Six the next morning. Rain fell almost horizontally, beating against his borrowed oilskins like half-spent shot.

  The saloon was crowded. He wasn't surprised. Any skipper who launched in this gale was crazy.

  He told the bartender, "I've got an appointment with Abner Longstreet. Lachlan's the name."

  The man nodded. "He's expectin' you. Through that door at the back. Go to the end of the hall. It's the door on the left."

  As he threaded his way among the tables, one of the faces in the crowd caught his eye. I've seen him before. But where?

  A bar girl caught at his arm. "Looking for company, mister?"

  "Let him be, Yolanda. He's here to see the boss," the bartender called.

  The girl turned him loose, but her carmined lips puckered in an airy kiss. "When you're through with your business, honey...." she said, leaving nothing to Buff's imagination.

  He smiled, vowing silently to take the back way out. That chancre on her neck told him more about her than her profession.

  Abner Longstreet was a big man, tall, wide, but not fat. He looked as if he'd made a living in the woods or before the mast before he became a saloonkeeper. A street brawler, if Buff had ever seen one, but now doing his best to disguise his past in well-tailored worsted and fine linen.

  After the usual polite greetings, Buff said, "This isn't the best of times..."

  "Nor is it the worst of times, my friend," Longstreet replied. "But you're a far, far better man than I have met before."

  "Then perhaps we shall see the spring of hope." Buff chuckled. "I always feel like an idiot, mouthing those words."

  "They're for your own good," Longstreet replied as he leaned forward. "You have a message for me?"

  Buff recited the message he'd carried from Honolulu. "I don't suppose you can tell me what it's about?"

  "Better you don't know. We're still not certain there's anything to this latest alarm, but if there is..."

  Buff nodded. In the seven years he'd worked for the Coalition, he'd discovered that couriers were rarely told anything about the messages they carried, and infiltrators often gathered information with no idea of why.

  "Well, then, perhaps you can tell me something else, you being the Boss hereabouts."

  Longstreet's smile held something more than humor. "Sometimes things are not what they seem." He offered Buff a cigar from the humidor on his desk. Neither spoke as they went through the rituals of snipping and lighting. Soon aromatic smoke drifted about their heads.

  "And what would you like me to tell you?" Longstreet said, once they were comfortable.

  Buff took a leisurely draw, let the smoke out slowly. "I'm looking for a lost child. A little girl."

  Longstreet's eyebrow twitched.

  "Well, if she's still alive, she's a woman now." Buff had asked these same questions a hundred times over the past two years, but now they held a new urgency. If the answers existed, they were here, somewhere along the Pacific Coast.

  "Back in 1859," he said, "a girl child was stolen from a diplomat's family outside of Batavia, in the Dutch East Indies. They were on holiday at the beach. She was playing in the sand with her twin brother. The boy wandered off for a spell. When he came back, she wasn't where he'd left her. She was never seen again."

  "You're sure she didn't go into the water and drown?"

  "The sand was torn up where she'd been playing, and there were marks where a small boat had been run ashore. A man's footprints." Buff remembered what Anders had told him. "Her favorite dolly was lying in the sand, one arm ripped off." He looked Longstreet straight in the eye. "She never went anywhere without that dolly."

  "Ah! I see." Another long inspection of his cigar. "White slavers?" he said at last.

  "Slavers, anyhow. In that part of the world, they take any color of girl they can get."

  "So are you the twin brother?" There was more than curiosity in that question. Skepticism and opportunism were there too.

  "No, but he was...he is my friend. I'm doing a favor for him." No need to tell more. "The family never knew for sure what happened to the girl. Her brother believes she's still alive."

  "Seems to me they waited a long time to start a search for her."

  "Oh, they searched. For years. Rewards were posted all around the Pacific. Even after the family went back to Denmark, the rewards held." He pau
sed for effect. "A thousand dollars for information leading to her recovery or proof of her death."

  "A thousand? Pah! Chicken feed!" Longstreet waved his hand, as if to dismiss such a paltry sum. "No wonder they're still looking."

  "Not all diplomats are wealthy," Buff said, although he secretly agreed with Longstreet. Baron Thor Mogensen could have offered ten times the reward, had he chosen. Why he hadn't was still a mystery to Buff. Anders had believed his father hadn't really wanted Astrid back, because he believed she had been ruined.

  Having met the baron, Buff was inclined to agree with Anders. Respectability had seemed almost as important to him as holding on to his fortune. His will must have come as a surprise to everyone, especially to his surviving son.

  "You're following a cold trail," Longstreet said. "What makes you think you'll ever find her?"

  Since he had often asked himself the same question, the answer came readily to Buff. "I don't. All I want to do is find out what happened to her, to clear up the mystery. If she's being held against her will, I'll see she gets free. I doubt if her family would want her back, if she's spent all these years in a brothel."

  Longstreet nodded. "I doubt if she'd go. Not after so long." He sat back again, drew on his cigar. After a moment he said, "So you think she might be in Astoria?"

  "I don't know. It's where I'll start. If I can't find anything out here, I'll have to try elsewhere. I can't give up until I'm sure she can't be found."

  "The reward is still good?"

  Knowing Piers Thorssen wouldn't lay out a penny for word of his sister, Buff shrugged. "I don't know. Her father died last year, and her twin brother... hasn't any money. Like I said, I'm doing this as a favor, not for the reward."

  After a bit, the saloonkeeper set his cigar aside. "I'll put the word out. Now, what else do you know?"

  For the next quarter hour, Buff filled him in on what little he'd been able to discover, both proven fact and supposition.

  Chapter Two

  The next morning, Buff went to the portmaster's office, full of questions. He introduced himself to the young man behind the tall counter. "Do you keep records of shipwrecks?"

  "When there's survivors to tell about them. Too often we don't hear about the ships until the wreckage washes ashore." The young man scratched behind his ear.

  "I'm not asking you to dig the information out yourself," Buff said, letting the clerk see the golden eagle in his hand. "I can do that. All I need from you is a place to work and access to whatever records you have."

  "Sure, Mr. Lachlan. Just let me clear a space."

  Within a few minutes, Buff was seated at the table, facing a stack of old and new journals. The older ones were water-stained, their covers rough with mildew.

  "We had a leak in the roof," the clerk said, by way of apology. "Didn't notice it until everything in the cupboard got soaked."

  "As long as I can read them, that's all I care about." Buff opened the first book, scanned its first page. The spidery handwriting was almost obscured by a dark stain, but he was pretty sure he saw 1855 in the title. Many of the entries were perfectly readable, and the last one was dated December 1857. He closed it and picked up the next one.

  For two hours, he went through the journals, daily recordings of port activities. At last he closed the last journal, the one in which the arrival of the Chinese Duchess had been recorded only the day before. "There's a gap here," he said, when he'd caught the clerk's attention. He tapped one of the journals. "This book ends in early '59, and the next one starts in September of 1861. Any idea what happened to the missing ones? Two or three, most likely."

  "Oh, golly, Mr. Lachlan, I don't know. We've got some records stored in a warehouse down by the docks. Maybe they're down there."

  "I'll be happy to pay someone to see if they can be found. I'm sure you're busy--"

  "Oh, I'll be happy to look. It might take me a day or two, but I can go down after work and dig around."

  "Fine," Buff told him. "No hurry. I'll be hereabouts a week or two." He told the clerk where he was staying. "Let me know as soon as you can, will you?" He handed the young man the coin. "And thanks."

  A man could get his daily exercise in Astoria, just walking to town and back, Buff decided later that afternoon, as he turned up the steep street toward the Pacific Western Hotel. The level ground along the waterfront wasn't much more than a couple of hundred yards wide at the main dock. So narrow, in fact, that the lowest row of buildings sat on pilings, with boardwalks connecting them to land. Everything else perched on the slopes above, where many of the buildings looked as if they could slide into the river at any time.

  The hotel was up the hill a quarter mile or so, a tall, narrow building of four stories. It was not as grand as the Occident nor as large. The hotel was really a boarding house that catered to maritime men and permanent residents more than to ordinary travelers. It was known for its comfortable rooms and plain but tasty cooking. Like so many of the buildings in Astoria, the front door and the back door opened at different levels, so that the lobby was a flight up from the dining room and kitchen, yet from both one stepped out onto solid ground.

  The other good thing about the Pacific Western was the maid service. He'd learned to appreciate how comfortable life could be when there was someone to do the laundry, make the bed, and polish the boots. Idly he wondered if the maids also warmed the beds, given the clientele of the hotel, ships' captains, retired seamen, and prosperous local bachelors.

  The drizzle hadn't let up all day. Buff wondered how long it would take him to grow mold. Even Copenhagen hadn't been this wet. Shoulders hunched against the damp that seemed to creep into his very bones, he turned the corner and entered the narrow front yard of the hotel. Behind the unpainted board fence, a few shrubs and a small patch of grass showed that someone cared enough to pretty the place up.

  No one was behind the counter in the lobby, but he heard voices from the billiards room. Perhaps some of the other guests might have information he'd find useful to his quest. In his experience, many a fact came to light over brandy and billiards.

  He watched the game in progress for a while, a hard-fought contest between a white-whiskered man with the weathered skin of an old salt, and a younger fellow with a fancy waistcoat and fancier necktie. When the older man sank the last ball, he gave a bark of laughter and said, "There now, Caleb, I told you I haven't lost the touch!"

  "No, indeed you haven't, Captain." Racking his cue, Caleb winked at the spectators. "That makes the third bottle of good brandy you've won off me this year. At this rate I'll have to spend more time selling and less relaxing in your fair city. I can't afford to stop over here long if I'm going to lose all my profits to you."

  After the general laughter had died, the old salt said, "Get some glasses, George. I don't want to be selfish with my winnings." He regarded Buff for a moment. "You're not a seaman, young feller. What brings you to Astoria?"

  "Just passing through, sir, on my way to visit my family over in Boise City. I'm looking for some information." He accepted a glass of brandy from George Welkins, then saluted the other men before sipping.

  "There was a ship bound for either here or San Francisco..." He spun out the story he'd decided upon, made up of a bit of the truth and a bit of imagination.

  "Well, I've been here goin' on eleven years now, and I never heard of a ship full of women going down," George Welkins said after Buff had spun his usual tale.

  "It would have been before then. Closer to '59 or '60. I'm not sure."

  "It appears to me," the traveling man said, "that a man looking for a lost ship would at least know her name."

  "As for that, there are half a dozen ships she could have been, according to the port records in Honolulu." He knew for sure that two of those ships had reached San Francisco safely. He had seen no mention of any of the others after 1859, not in any of the ports he'd visited.

  The conversation detoured into a discussion of what constituted proof of a ship's lo
ss. From what he heard, Buff concluded such proof was seldom found in the dangerous waters off the Columbia's mouth. He sat quietly and listened to the talk. A man could learn a lot by keeping his mouth shut and his ears open.

  When the conversation veered to politics, he rose from his seat and went to the desk in the parlor. Since he'd been out of the country throughout Grant's first term as president, he only knew what he'd read in the occasional European newspaper. The man was a disgrace, no doubt about it. And now he was in office for another four years.

  Buff smiled. For all their pious condemnation of corrupt European and Asian governments, Americans seemed to have just as many scandals and as much vice. He pulled a sheet of paper to him and dipped the pen. His folks weren't expecting him home any time soon, but he should let them know he'd made the crossing safely.

  * * *

  Men! Although many of the lodgers were tidy creatures, such as one would expect from a man who spent most of his time in a compact ship's cabin, some were terrible slovens. Siri started picking up the clothing scattered about the room. How any man who could afford such fine linen shirts and handkerchiefs and such elegant silk cravats could care so little for them, she did not understand. She stroked her cheek with one of the cravats, a red-and-gray striped one, and wondered if this was how a silken gown would feel against her skin.

  With a sigh, she folded the cravat and laid it on the dresser with the handkerchiefs. Quickly she picked up the rest of the clothing and made a tidy pile of it on the chair. A dirty boot print darkened one of the shirts. Seeing it, she shook her head. What a shame.

  When she'd finished with the scattered garments, she stripped the bed, an easy task, since the sheets were pulled loose and the blanket tossed onto the floor. Even the pillow had been abused, its slip half off and ripped. A person would think there had been a riot in this room, instead of a man who'd only slept here. Mrs. Welkins will have a fit about the pillowslip. She'll probably add it to his bill.

  Soon the room was tidy again, and everything was in place. She wiped the dustcloth across the windowsill once more for good measure. It was a caution how soot from the kitchen fires crept in through every crack and cranny. For a moment she paused, staring up into the woods beyond the street, wondering, as always, if there would be news today.