The Spoils of Sin

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘I thought you changed,’ murmured Fanny. ‘But I see now I was wrong.’

  ‘I am older and have a deeper understanding of these matters – but the priority of my values remains the same. Moses has made me happy, Fanny, in ways I could never have guessed. Can you look at me and tell me with any candour that you are happy?’

  Fanny swallowed and flapped the banknotes feebly.

  ‘I see that you cannot. Then I pity you, and because of that I will take your money. I will do good with it, and redeem the taint that is upon it.’

  ‘You talk like a ranter, a Quaker, a prating Mormon,’ Fanny choked, unable to find anything bad enough to liken to her sister.

  She was rescued by Nam, their small sister, running out of the house in search of them. ‘Fanny! Your dog has pushed Ellie onto Walter, and woken him. Mother says you must tie him up out of doors, and such a beast ought never to be allowed in a civilised home.’

  ‘He does no harm,’ Fanny argued. ‘I suppose he was trying to play.’

  They processed back to the house, where Mrs Collins was standing on the deck holding Hugo by a rope around his neck. The dog was slumped in passive dejection, while Walter’s indignant howls echoed all around. At the sight of Fanny Hugo raised his ears hopefully.

  ‘Oh, Hugo – what have you done?’ she said sweetly, making it clear to everyone that she had no intention of actually chastising her pet.

  ‘Nothing so very bad,’ chimed Nam. ‘Not like when Melchior bit my hand almost in two.’ There were still scars on her fingers and the back of her hand, and movement was slightly impeded as a result of a dog bite almost three years earlier.

  Order was restored, with Walter pacified and Hugo forgiven. Fanny sought out Carola and invited her to take a stroll. ‘You are inordinately restless, are you not?’ said her friend. ‘First you go walking with your sister, and now me. What are you trying to avoid?’

  ‘My family,’ said Fanny shortly. ‘Now come along and admire the scenery with me.’

  Carola made no further demur, and was soon listening with sympathy to Fanny’s account of her exchange with Charity. ‘She despises me,’ she finished miserably.

  ‘As would your other sisters and mother if they knew the truth,’ Carola pointed out. ‘We have elected to be universally despised, and you knew it from the start. What is so special about Charity’s opinion?’

  Fanny shook herself exaggeratedly, and gave a strange low trill of frustration. A sound like a skylark with something wedged in its throat, or a growling dog with a strangely high-pitched voice. Carola laughed and said, ‘I wager you could not do that a second time!’

  Fanny took a steadying breath. ‘I see no possibility of enduring this for another three weeks,’ she confided. ‘Would it distress you greatly to leave sooner than we planned?’

  ‘It would,’ said Carola, more seriously than Fanny had ever seen her. ‘I will have no truck with your silliness in the matter. Charity and her family will depart again tomorrow, leaving you no cause whatsoever for running away. The air is good, the change in our daily lives a tonic. Your people need the assistance of two extra pairs of hands, and I for one am eager to help. You and I could manage a saw between us, and cut logs enough for a year of fuel, if we set to right away.’

  ‘I think not,’ Fanny contradicted. ‘It is scarcely milder here than in Providence, and there we consumed a mountain of firewood every winter.’ She held out her hands, palms uppermost. ‘And the blisters it would cause make me shudder.’

  ‘Then you might milk the cows while Lizzie cuts the logs. There are a thousand tasks, Fanny, and your father is hard pressed with it all.’

  ‘He appears quite content to me. He has what he always wished for, and I see little cause for complaint.’

  Carola gave her a cold look. ‘Then put it down to my peculiar bump of benevolence, because I wish most passionately to be of use to your parents. They did not expect their son to lose the use of an arm, nor their eldest daughters to leave them so quickly. If we partake of their food, we must repay them with out labours.’

  ‘If we return to town, we will not be partaking of their food.’

  ‘We shall not leave here one hour before the appointed day. The date now is the tenth. We shall depart on the first day of April and hope there will be at least enough returned gold-diggers to warrant our presence.’

  ‘I could leave without you,’ muttered Fanny.

  Carola treated this idle threat with the contempt it deserved. ‘Calm yourself,’ she advised. ‘I dare say, if the roles were reversed, I might chafe a little at the unaccustomed attentions of my relatives, but it is a natural curiosity they feel, and quite easily satisfied.’

  ‘With untruths,’ flashed Fanny. ‘I have to watch my tongue every moment of the day. And my powers of invention are a feeble shadow of yours.’

  ‘Then leave me to speak, and keep your own lips sealed.’ Carola sighed impatiently. ‘The questions will all run out in another day or so. We will be absorbed into the work, as if we had always lived here.’ She folded her arms. ‘We remain here until the first of April, and that’s an end to it.’

  Chapter Ten

  Two days later, Fanny had an inkling as to the cause of her friend’s insistence on remaining at the homestead. Not a simple wish to abide by the original plan, but a fascination, it seemed, with Fanny’s brother Reuben. The first suspicions arose one evening, when Carola and Lizzie came in from the barn, rosy-cheeked and chattering animatedly about a new foal just born.

  ‘No time for a plate of bread and meat, then?’ asked Mrs Collins, with enough snap in her voice to warn them. ‘Did the mare require your assistance for two hours and more, before she could deliver her young one?’

  ‘Not so long as that, Ma,’ said Lizzie. ‘The mare had no difficulty. We merely spent ten minutes admiring the little one. He has a crooked blaze and two white feet.’

  ‘Then what else was so important it kept you from your meal?’

  Lizzie rolled her eyes. ‘I cannot speak for Miss Beaumont, Mam, but for myself, I have been pitching out the mildewed hay, turning the midden and mending a tear in one of the corn sacks.’ She pushed back a sleeve of her shabby woollen dress. ‘See these muscles – I am more like a boy than a girl, with the work I must do.’

  Nam wrinkled her nose. ‘And you smell like a midden,’ she said.

  Everyone but Fanny was diverted by this. She was watching her friend’s face as it became likely that she would be called on to account for her own activities. The absence of Reuben was increasingly noteworthy as Mrs Collins slammed pewter plates onto the plain board table, while muttering irritably about the impossibility of keeping everybody fed if they stayed outside until all hours.

  ‘Where might your brother be?’ she finally demanded of Lizzie.

  ‘Ask Miss Beaumont,’ was the careless reply.

  All eyes turned to Carola, who was washing her hands in the stone trough which stood in a small area at the very back of the room. For a second too long, she pretended not to notice. Then, eyes wide with innocence, she replied, ‘I believe he is collecting timber with the workhorse. Something of the kind, at any rate. I cannot be sure.’

  Fanny watched the easily satisfied nods and shrugs at this, and marvelled. Carola had not blushed or stammered, and yet it was as clear as day what had been taking place. If not a full seduction, then the preliminaries to it, she was certain. A wholly disproportionate horror flooded through her. Reuben was in her eyes a victim in every way. It could be nothing more than pity that motivated the experienced young woman in her attentions. Pity for a young man with a painful disability, who would never find himself a wife amongst so much competition. Even if Carola regarded herself as a benefactor, offering him relief from enforced celibacy, she would be playing havoc with his feelings. Reuben was no Abel Tennant, handsome and carefree and utterly irresponsible as that lad had been. Reuben had always been slower and more serious, sharing many characteristics with his full sister, Charity. Fann
y had wondered, now and then, what sort of a Puritan their mother must have been.

  In their room that night, she challenged her friend. ‘Have you seduced my brother?’ she demanded, in a soft hiss. ‘Is that where you were at supper time?’

  Carola turned to face her full on. ‘Seduced?’ she echoed. ‘Does that word carry any meaning for the likes of us, think you?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t it?’

  ‘Does it not hold implications of virtue lost and innocence despoiled?’

  ‘Reuben has both virtue and innocence.’

  ‘Perhaps so,’ said Carola with a little nod. ‘And you regard me as a corrupting influence on him, it seems.’

  ‘I can see no advantage to him.’ Fanny was faltering a little, suspecting flaws in her own logic. ‘He is my brother,’ she finished weakly. ‘Have some care, if for that reason alone.’

  ‘You have no cause for concern, in any case. There has been no impropriety between us. I enjoy his company, and nothing more than that. He has a dry wit that I fancy remains concealed from his sisters.’

  ‘Wit? Reuben?’

  ‘You have perhaps not heard his tales of a soldier’s life?’

  ‘I have heard a few. None of the telling struck me as unduly witty.’

  ‘He has perhaps felt some shame at his failure to fight. He has put all his strength into the homestead tasks, in recompense. There is a nobility to him, Fanny, that I find admirable.’

  Fanny took from this exchange a reassurance that her friend was at least not planning the seduction that she had feared. Indeed, she began to see her alarm as ludicrous. Carola, as much as Fanny herself, had relished a break from the demands of the bedchamber. The wholesome activities of the homestead had come as a welcome change to them both. Hugo ran delightedly across the wide open acres, digging for rabbits and groundhogs, chasing exuberantly after squirrels. Their horse, too, was enjoying its idleness. Fanny’s panicked urge to return prematurely to Chemeketa, had evaporated as Carola had predicted, once Charity took her leave.

  And then the snow came. Patrick Collins stood out in his beaver coat and stared at the swirling flakes. At first, Fanny had assumed he was either angry or alarmed at its implications, but it soon became apparent that he was neither. ‘’Twill not stick for long,’ he predicted. ‘And see how pretty it makes everything.’

  His wife was less sanguine. ‘Ye’ll never make a farmer,’ she told him. ‘As I recall, it was every man’s dread, for the sake of the beasts and the impossibility of moving far.’

  Even Granny insisted on being brought downstairs to share in the excitement caused by the unseasonable weather. ‘Did they not tell us it never snowed in Oregon?’ she demanded.

  ‘They told us it was like the western coast of Ireland,’ Patrick said. ‘More liable to rain than to snow. But the weather makes no promises. Think of those poor souls in ’46, with twenty feet of the stuff on their heads.’

  ‘That was in the mountains, a long way from here.’ Grandma had taken a keen interest in the unfolding drama of the lost Donner Party comprised of people she had met on their wagon train. News-sheets had made much of it once the facts had become known, embellishing the details with flourishes that caught the imagination of Americans everywhere. ‘But if it’s like this down in California, ’twill annoy all those gold prospectors, sure enough.’

  ‘And what might you know about that?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘More than you, that’s for sure.’

  In truth, she had learned a good deal from Fanny, who had taken to spending an hour or more upstairs with her grandmother each evening, describing the life of Chemeketa and the recent mass movement down to the California goldfields. More than any others in the family, the old woman thrilled to the implications of untold wealth in the pockets of ordinary uneducated men. ‘A clever gambler could relieve them of much of it,’ she said. ‘And a clever girl, likewise.’

  ‘That is the intention, Grandma,’ Fanny had whispered. ‘But you’re not to say a word of it to my parents, mark you.’

  ‘All the greater their surprise, when you return here later in the year, with your bags full of gold, then,’ the old woman teased. ‘Your father has a treat in store, and no mistake.’

  Fanny permitted the dreams to blossom, thinking it was all too likely that her grandmother would not live to see another visit from her, whether carrying gold or not.

  The snow kept them huddled inside the house for much of each day. The livestock gathered close to the homestead, calling for victuals and water. Reuben and Carola undertook to throw hay to them, while Patrick took a pick and a spade and made a drinking place from a small streamlet that ran close by. Lizzie’s dogs went crazy in the unfamiliar white world, joined by Hugo, who bowled them over until their shaggy coats were covered in icy balls of gathered snow.

  It lasted three days, the novelty fading even for Patrick, who yet persisted in finding it both nostalgic and aesthetically pleasing, while admittedly inconvenient. ‘I should be off to Oregon City by this time,’ he chafed. ‘The works will not run themselves, and there’s likely to be many more settlers here this year, with the lure of the gold. All wanting new saddles and harness, for sure.’

  ‘Will they not be heading for territory south of here?’ asked Fanny. ‘Will they not be building a better road over the desert, on the Mormon Trail? Why would anyone come to Oregon when the wealth is to be had in California?’

  ‘California will not offer them the land and the good life we have here. Those with better sense will maybe spend a time in the goldfields, while sending their women and little’uns here to claim their acres.’

  ‘And soon the whole country will be filled with riff-raff,’ said Mrs Collins with a sniff. ‘Rushing westwards with no proper preparation and no notion of what to do when they get here.’

  It was true, Fanny realised. Assuming there were continuing discoveries in the goldfields, the word spreading all around the world, the western coast of America would soon be as populous as the east – and with no better quality of person.

  Nobody came by with fresher news, even after the snow was gone. And yet somehow the very air seemed full of the growing excitement of the presence of gold not so far away. Fanny discovered her father one day, shovelling grit and mud from the bed of the stream where he’d made a watering hole. He was shaking it carefully onto a growing heap between two trees. ‘Dadda? What is it you’re doing?’

  He laughed self-consciously. ‘Naught but a little prospecting,’ he said. ‘Who’s to say we haven’t some deposits of our own, here in Oregon?’

  ‘Have you found anything?’

  ‘Silt, dead leaves and a leather bucket I fancy belonged to an Indian fifty years ago or more. The bottom is long gone.’

  By the twenty-fifth of the month, Fanny was again hankering to leave. Her clothes were stale and much marked with the mud of the tracks and yards. Washing them was a lengthy process, which her mother bore with ill-concealed impatience, having so much to do for the others. Hanging space for drying was insufficient, with damp garments slapping into everyone’s faces whenever they moved.

  Carola was quiet. Reuben was absent – doing his best to create new ditches to take water away from the pastures, but finding it slow and difficult with one arm. The snow had delayed the necessary ploughing, and in any case, only one ox was fit for the task. The other had a swollen knee and could scarcely set his foot down for the pain of it. Lizzie made poultices and pleaded with her father to be patient with him.

  Naomi – or Nam as she was always called – was as quiet as Carola, which was highly unusual. Eleven and a half years old, she continued to be treated like a baby. When it became evident, in the small crowded house, that her courses had begun at a painfully young age, Fanny felt a strange sense of regret for the end of that innocent childhood that seemed so additionally precious in a girl.

  Mrs Collins was increasingly distracted by the imminent birth of Charity’s new baby. ‘By rights, I should be with her,’ she worried.
‘It isn’t right that she should manage it alone.’

  ‘She has Ellie,’ said Fanny. ‘The girl is old enough to provide all the necessary help.’

  ‘You might go yourself,’ snapped her mother. ‘Instead of idling your time away here.’

  It was the last straw. ‘I cannot do that, Mam. I have to return to the business in a few days’ time. It cannot remain closed for much longer.’

  ‘You and your precious business,’ was all the reply she got to that.

  ‘We leave in two days,’ Fanny announced to Carola that evening. ‘Just a little sooner than we planned. I am sick for my real home.’

  Carola laughed, but made no objection. ‘It is perhaps for the best,’ she agreed. ‘A visit ought not to outlast its welcome.’

  ‘You agree?’ Fanny was surprised.

  ‘I am neutral on the matter. It is your project, in essence, with me a mere accompaniment to it. I have enjoyed making the acquaintance of your family, but I confess to a curiosity and impatience to know how things stand in town. Out here, one feels starved of connection and information.’

  ‘I fear we might miss the benefits of the returning gold-diggers, if we tarry much longer.’

  ‘No need,’ Carola assured her. ‘They will not return for some time yet, if I know men. Those who make a find will be greedy for more, and those who fail will keep on trying in new spots. As the numbers increase, the pickings will dwindle, and then we will know how such as we might benefit.’

  Fanny looked at her. ‘Are we foolish to remain in Chemeketa, then? Ought we to travel south, where the men and their money are?’

  ‘We would then become downgraded, as camp followers, with no finer touches. We might relieve them of their gold, but we would find ourselves coarsened and useless in no time. For myself, I prefer to maintain my dignity and to live in a degree of comfort.’