by Poppy
"It would be better if you did not come here every day. You only distress yourself."
"It can't be that flashy gambler. You wouldn't stoop that low."
"Maurice? He has been a good friend."
"As long as you don't gamble with him," Jeremiah sneered. "An Ingot."
"Don't call him that to his face."
"Exactly. This is a dangerous town. No woman is safe alone."
"I am content." Anger made her voice shrill. "Well content."
''When you could have so much more? I could give you everything."
"I have everything I want."
"Beautiful child, this next election is only the beginning. The first step. Once I'm in Sacramento, I'll stay there a while. Build a name, a reputation. A strong man is needed, wanted. The right people know what I stand for, the public will learn. The voting public, the sheep that know they need someone to lead and protect them. Your position as my wife, you can't dream how great it will be."
Something in his eyes, a fanatic gleam, frightened Poppy. She sprang to her feet. "I don't want to be your wife. I don't want you to come here any more. I don't want to see you."
"I know what you want and should have. I'll see you as usual in the morning."
Poppy stood, fists clenched, her bodice straining with her heaving breath. Then she turned and ran to the bar. She stood beside it until Pete worked his way down the gleaming mahogany and stood beside her.
"I should have slapped his face," she whispered, not knowing whether she was more furious or frightened. "I should have jammed those stupid words right down his throat."
"What did he do? Or say?"
Poppy's glance wavered. Jeremiah had simply promised, quite honestly and sincerely, that she would have a fine position if she married him. She knew he would persist in seeking her out, pursue her with unwanted attentions, and set spies on her, but those were causes for anger, not fear. He could not force her to stand in front of a minister and say the words that would make her his wife. He was not a threat, only an embarrassment.
That she had taken him in strong aversion did not matter to the owner of the Palace. She was here to be pleasant to the customers. If Jeremiah had behaved offensively, said something obnoxious, done anything people could see would make him distasteful, she could have complained, and he would have been warned that only gentlemanly behavior was tolerated here. His demeanor had been perfect and his spending generous. He was a prominent man and a good customer who would be valuable to the Palace five years from now and ten. She was only another pretty girl, and some girls lasted five months at the Palace, and few stayed more than ten.
The owner would not lift a finger to help her.She wished to be free of Jeremiah's attention, she must handle it herself and so pleasantly the Palace did not lose his good will. If she did anything else, she could lose her job, become known as a troublemaker, and have difficulty finding any other place.
She felt wild as an animal in a trap. Once she was with Dex again, had made him realize he must have her, that no other woman could be to him what she was, she would not need this job or anything else. She would have Dex, Until then she must stay steady, be available.
She said quietly, "I don't like him, Pete. I 'have a feeling he could cause me trouble."
"He has his enemies. And powerful friends."
"I'd better move around and make a few friends myself."
As she circled gracefully around the tables, smiling, laughing, and making murmuring answers to whatever was said to her, her determination solidified. With so much at stake, now when every thought, move, and emotion must be concentrated on Dex, she would not risk having Jeremiah do something that would put her in a false position in Dex's eyes.
She did not doubt Jeremiah would try to do something. He did not know about Dex, but he did know she did not intend to let this situation continue. He would be thinking, scheming. He would have no scruples about trying to force her into a situation from which she could not retreat, could do nothing but marry him. She could only try to act before he did.
Everybody in the Palace had seen her rush away from Jeremiah, skirts flouncing, eyes flashing, fists clenched. Maurice's eyes never seemed to leave the cards in his hand, but he missed little that went on around him. When he rose to turn his table over to another dealer while he went out to dinner, he glanced at Poppy and nodded toward the doors. She met him there.
To stand just outside, in the full glare of the lamps, so people could see them and be enticed to the pleasures inside, was permissible if they did not do it too often or for too long.
"I'm not going to give you a gun," he announced immediately. "Shooting is one way of discouraging a man permanently, but I won't encourage it."
"Would you believe me if I promise the gun is not for Jeremiah?"
"I'd believe you mean it now, when you're not in a temper."
"He's going to try something worse than that attack on the carriage. If I won't marry him for love, and he knows I won't, he'll try to force me to marry him for protection."
"I think so," Maurice agreed and tried to joke. "He's a very fine gentleman according to his lights, but his lights are a little dim."
"I can't walk straight into a trap with no way to protect myself."
"They hanged one woman in this state. If you shot somebody, he would be the only person who could protect you."
"Do you think I'd put myself in that position? That's what I'm trying to prevent. You do have another gun?"
Maurice nodded reluctantly. "A lady's gun, yes. Tiny but it could be lethal."
"Where did you get that?"
"Madame gave it to me. I go to see Amalie now and again. By the way, Madame is shocked at what it costs to outfit her girls. She might as well have gone to Paris, she says."
Poppy was instantly sympathetic. ''You mean she won't get her little place in the country?"
"If she can last a few more years, it should be a large place. She serves only champagne. At a five-hundred-percent profit, I believe she said. Just lately she has expanded and installed a fine chef. Nice little dinners do not run over a hundred a plate, I'm sure."
"The Palace doesn't do that well."
"The Palace has eight gambling tables. No, the girls are a heavy expense but necessary. The first necessity. Madame is a businesswoman. She has already bought one house and is considering building an addition."
"So why did she give you a gun?"
Maurice grimaced. Plainly he had hoped to distract her so she would forget that. "One of her girls had it and made an ugly scene. Madame is a wise woman. She distrusts guns in the hands of females. She did not even want it in her house. So she gave it to me."
"Why did any girl have it in the first place?"
"Perhaps it is as well you know," Maurice decided. "She took it from Josie. Before she finally had to tell her she must leave."
"What happened? Where is Josie?"
"I have never understood fully what happened when you landed, and you need not explain. I observed several oddities on the ship and more about that disaster on the waterfront. From those, I assume Josie and the First Mate were involved. I know he sailed with his ship. Before he left, he and Josie had some trouble. He left her broke, took even her little trinkets, and he marked her.
Permanently. Madame tells me that that has a certain appeal, rare, but it pays well, and Josie has special talents. After the First Mate left her, however, she was no longer pleasant to have in the house. Not at all pleasant."
Maurice was only hinting but at something so dark and morbid Poppy was glad he did not inflict the telling on her. "So she left, too?"
"Madame tried to be patient, but after she was forced to take the gun, she placed Josie in a house in Sacramento. For old times'sake, since they came out from France together. From Sacramento, if she continues to be not pleasant, it will be the gold fields. A hard life."
"I intend to have a good life, and I don't intend to hang. But I need a gun, Maurice. If you don't give it
to me, I'll find one elsewhere."
"I make the bargain," Maurice said with a gesture that admitted defeat. "If you have the gun, you must know how to use it. Without that, it is worse than nothing. I show you how to use it, some morning when no one is observing, out in the back yard. But I do not give it to you unless I think you really need it."
"I'll have my first lesson tomorrow, please," Poppy said.
Chapter Twenty-nine
THE next morning Poppy could not look without pain at the round table in the living room where Andy always left a lamp burning. Last night she had hurried inside, certain she would find something there beside the lamp, and the table had been bare. A gentleman always sent some small token, if only a note, after he called on a lady, even if he had stopped for nothing more than a cup of tea. Dex had sent nothing. He could not hold her in contempt, so he must have another thought in his mind. He must be planning to see her.
She had her first shooting lesson with Maurice, using only a small practice load, and found it as fussy as the elaborate ritual of a ballet dancer's makeup. The girls had shown her every little nicety, and now she paid as strict attention to this new ritual with brushes and oils and cleaning cloths as she had then.
Afterwards, she selected a gown she had never worn and never even considered for the Palace before. When she had ordered this pale green with the tiny lavender and white sprigs, banded in lavender velvet, she had dreamed of strolling through a Paris park on a summer evening to listen to a concert, with her white-gloved hand on Dex's arm. She vowed the dress was exactly to his taste, and when he saw her in it, he surely must think of Paris and spring.
Paris, spring, youth, and love-every line and flutter of the dress fairly sang of those things. He had never seen her in anything quite so sweet or with a bunch of silk violets tucked in her bright curls. He would see her thus and remember and regret. He would not hesitate one moment longer in deciding to take her back where she belonged with him.
That terrible accident in the Vendee was long ago and far away. It would be forgotten by now. When he landed here, Dex might have thought he, too, had forgotten her. Now he knew he had not forgotten and could not.
Deliberately, she did not reach the Palace until mid-afternoon. She would not risk his walking in while she was with Jeremiah. She shuddered as she pictured his fastidious recoil if Jeremiah made a jealous scene.
By the time she strolled in, she was certain Jeremiah would be gone, and he was. She knew the pattern of his days. He lived in an elite boardinghouse that catered to prosperous single men. He had breakfast there before he came to the Palace. He spent his afternoons at the Firehouse clubroom with his close cronies, and he was never seen in the evenings. She assumed those were spent in business and political conferences.
Yesterday Dex could not have had a free minute even to write the note she had expected. By today, he could reasonably be expected to want to stroll around and see the local sights. He could drop in at the Palace, and nobody would raise an eyebrow.
Pete said nothing about her being late. He only slipped a small box into her hand and whispered, "Mr. Dunbar was sorry he couldn't wait, but he left this for you."
Poppy cupped the box unobtrusively in her palm and slipped off the lid. Then she gulped and barely bit back a shriek. Each diamond earring dangled two inches long, from the round diamond at the lobe through a string of small stones to a large pear-shaped one at the end. She had never seen anything so shockingly tawdry. A woman who wore them might as well hang out a sign she had been bought and paid for.
"Sparkle, don't they?" Pete said.
He knew they were in atrocious taste. Perhaps he did not know what she had learned from the ballet girls, who were shrewd judges of the value of the gifts they received, that diamonds of the first water did not have that yellow tinge or a certain dinginess in the depths that meant flawed stones.
"I cannot accept them, of course," Poppy said instantly and then added demurely, "They are much too valuable."
"That's between you and him."
Poppy hurried over to the chest-high table-desk where paper and pens were kept so gentlemen could write bank drafts or other business papers without wasting time to sit down. She wrote quickly, then went back to Pete and showed him the note. "These are too beautiful and valuable. You must keep them for your wife.Poppy."
"You always know the right word," Pete said.
Poppy nodded. She thought she did, too. Jeremiah could understand he was to keep the earrings until they were married if he chose to take it that way. "Keep them in your safe to give to him the minute you see him next," Poppy begged. "I can't draw an easy breath with them on me." Because she was suspicious. If she wore those and was robbed, would Jeremiah claim she was indebted and must marry him? If he chose to misread her note, that was better than making him angry.
Pete took them. "Four boats unloaded yesterday, and three more are unloading today."
Poppy understood. She had been hours late, and now that she was here, there was work to do. She looked around and recognized the Australian who had landed yesterday. He had come straight to the Palace and immediately bought her a champagne cocktail. He had expounded so long on the tens of thousands of acres in his station, by which she assumed he meant his ranch, and the thousands of sheep he ran, and she thought that meant fed, that she had wondered if women were as scarce in Australia as in California and as valued. But he had seemed shy too, as well as unwilling to go on buying cocktails at Palace prices, so she had not had a chance to ask him.
Now he was standing with a group of others who must have come over on the same boat. They had been joined by more, who, judging by their heavy shirts" boots, and unshaved faces, had been out in the gold fields. They were all clumped together at the far end of the bar, filling the whole corner, and were talking only to each other, apparently interested only in themselves, as if they had never left Australia and come to explore a new land full of different and interesting people.
Nobody needed to tell Poppy these men were of a different breed than the notorious Sydney Ducks. Those were the convicts who originally had been sent to populate Australia, had come from there to San Francisco, and now infested the gutters of the town like a creeping pestilence, robbing, killing, and burning.
From their manner and dress, these were men of good family. They were handsome men, and even the ones from the diggings were wearing rough clothes of good quality. All had a vigorous outdoor look about them. Their accents were only a little stranger than most. One of them was drawling, with a smile, that he had ridden over his station just before he left and realized that, with the new settlers coming in, from his highest hill he now could see land that did not belong to him. While it was friendly for a man to know he had neighbors, the country was getting crowded.
Another said the better class of new arrivals, as was also true here, was turning away from the diggings to trade or set up their own stations. A third pointed out he had always told them there was more gold at home than here, the same kind of country but more of it, and they knew how to keep their mining communities decent and law-abiding, but the real gains to both countries would be in the miners who turned to other pursuits.
Poppy stiffened indignantly. Those men were claiming they had gold fields and a gold rush, too. And bigger than California's. And bigger ranches. Did they know how big some of the old Spanish ranchos were? And people thought Americans bragged!
Now they were talking about the Sydney Ducks. One older man was saying he wished Americans would remember there was at least one Australian state where no convict or ex-convict had ever been allowed to settle. Another started talking again about the lack of law officers here, the terrible living conditions in the diggings, and comparing them with conditions at home.
One of the men noticed her hovering and smiled. "Another all around here, young lady," he said genially.
Poppy's mouth rounded with shock. He thought she was here to serve him. That was what these Australians thought of wom
en. They thought women did not belong in a place like this except as servants. They did not realize that the hostesses were one of the reasons the Palace was so successful. Now she noticed the nice young man who had bought her a cocktail was acting as if he had never seen her before, looking half frightened she would speak to him, as if he had done something shameful.
These Australians were certainly different, talking and looking around so superior to everything, when they did not have the least idea how to behave in a place like the Palace. She had noticed they were not playing at the tables at all, except to toss on a dollar or two in passing. Men most certainly did not come to the Palace to stand and talk to other men they could see at any time and any other place, as these were doing. They came to get drunk, gamble, or look at the girls. Of course they could also eat or glance at the papers. If they did want a word with some man, they met, had a quick drink, and went on. Men streamed through here all day doing exactly that.
