by Poppy
"My wine cellar, m'sieur. Do you wish to inspect it?"
"I think I'll have a look." He went half down the stairs, stood looking around for a long minute while Poppy and Andy held their breaths, and then climbed back up. But the door stayed open. ''So you two are old friends? You must have arrived on the same boat. With the Smith boy and his sister. Of course. Maurice even rents from her."
"Naturally," Maurice said.
"So this would be a natural place for them to come for protection."
Madame laughed magnificently. "Here, m'sieur? Here? Miss Poppy is a most discreet young lady. She would not come to a house like this."
"I know all the young lady's virtues," Jeremiah said curtly. "If you had her good at heart as I do, you would give me any assistance you can to find her. As long as she is alone with that boy and people are as angry as they are over this arson, she is in danger. I too want to protect her."
Poppy held her breath. Maurice would not believe that. But would Madame?
"We all wish only her good, may Heaven help the poor child," Madame said piously.
"What's this?" Jeremiah snapped, and his voice rose triumphantly.
"I see three plates. You had three breakfasts in here. Now do you still claim that pair isn't in this house?"
"Three breakfasts certainly," Maurice said. "You do not understand lives less-shall we say-less well regulated than yours. I have a little friend here. We were friends on the boat. Unfortunately for me, she is very lovely and very popular. So by the time I leave the Palace, she is seldom free. But Madame understands. I am permitted, I only, to call in the mornings when I am free and also Amalie is free. We three old friends breakfast together, and then I take up the champagne, and Amalie and I have our little comfort together. If you will excuse me, Madame, I will take this to the kitchen to be iced. Amalie and I will be in her room."
"You're a gambler, a bluffer by trade," Jeremiah snapped.
"My game is monte, seldom poker. A bientot."
Madame waited until the door closed and then said coldly, "I assure you gentlemen I have nothing here in my private rooms that could interest any of you. However, if you would be interested in seeing the rest of the house, I would be glad to have you inspect. Everything is of the finest, the best to be found in town, of an elegance,a convenience unmatched. The piano, rosewood no less with painted panels, so dainty, so genteel. The stemware, the linens, the china of the finest. The champagne buckets, silver naturally, and the candle-sticks of an exquisite silver gilt. In the parlors, the spittoons of brass because that is expected. But in the bedrooms, au contraire, the finest porcelain to match the other accommodations. The curtains, the best imported lace, with the embroidery-no, you should see for yourselves."
Feet shuffled on the floor; Somebody muttered, "Ah, the girls are jest crawling out of bed, and in the kitchen, they're washing up. I looked when we came through the hall. There's nothing to see."
"Poppy and the boy went somewhere, and to a place they could walk," Jeremiah growled. "Not a carriage or a stagecoach carried them out of town. We're still checking the hotels, but I'm sure I'd have heard. They dived into some rathole they knew."
"I would not presume to offer you refreshment in a rathole," Madame said.
"A walk around, including your attics, will be quite sufficient."
Poppy and Andy did not dare stir. The chill and damp of the cellar seemed to seep into their very bones. Time dragged in ominous silence. Someone entered the room above and removed the dishes. They could hear the footsteps and the rattle. Someone else came in and stamped around the bed, making it, and then swept both rooms, brought in wood for the fireplace, and opened the windows wide. The morning moved through its daily routine as if they did not exist or had been forgotten.
Then men's heavy footsteps shuflled overhead again, and Madame said, "If you gentlemen are satisfied, I have business matters waiting here. The butcher is in the kitchen. I want only the best for my customers, but so far only his bills are of the best. His chops, an abomination. The steaks, for soling shoes. The roast beef-perhaps I could forgive him that."
"Have you put a watch on the steamers?" a man asked.
"Of course. At least I know she's still in town and can't get out." With a heavy attempt at courtesy, Jeremiah added, "My apologies for this intrusion, Madame. As you promised, your appointments are of the handsomest."
"Not to mention the girls," someone said, sounding loud with relief. "That's a pretty little brunette you have there. I'll remember her."
"Florette. She's only lately arrived, a pretty child and talented. Bella, the gentlemen are ready to leave. I will be in the kitchen with the butcher."
Poppy and Andy pressed close together, numbed with chill, not daring to speak or move, but tense with dismay. Madame and Maurice could not have forgotten them. For some good reason, they were continuing to ignore the cellar. They had a reason, Poppy argued with 'herself. No matter how their teeth chattered, how their legs cramped, and the darkness threatened them, they must stay where they were. If they went bursting upstairs, they could run into a trap. Time dragged, while creakings and gratings that promised crawling things surrounded them. People had fingers and ears eaten off by rats, Poppy recalled with horror. She only hoped Andy did not know that. There were live things in the cellar all around them, and her flesh crawled in fear of an attack.
Distantly in the quiet, she could hear a clock striking upstairs. The quarter chimed. Then an hour passed. Another quarter chimed. Could Jeremiah have left a guard with orders to stay literally around the clock? Could they be trapped here until night? Or longer?
Then the door slammed wide open, and light flooded down on them. At the head of the steps, Madame swore. "Pigs, animals from a swill pen, diseased rat-tailed skunks, misbegotten mongrels born in a sewer, filth of scab-ridden fleas," and she got better as her imagination took hold.
Poppy stumbled up the stairs, dragging Andy behind her. She stumbled over to the fire and huddled down in front of it, teeth chattering uncontrollably. Andy crouched close beside her, and though he had not made a sound all that long time, his dirty face showed betraying streaks of tears.
Madame threw a log on the small flickering flames and poked them into a blaze before she slammed down the windows and caught her breath to fume again. "So cold, so damp, so abandoned, but I could do nothing. One of those-those animals had to stay. With poor little Lorene, so busy last night, so tired, so deserving of a little rest, but that animal stayed. He would not leave. I must remain in the kitchen, berate the butcher, make the complaint with the bread. I dared not even send Bella to you."
"We thought somebody must have stayed behind," Poppy said. "To guard, I thought."
Madame snorted dramatically and demanded, ''Then what? When he came to leave, the great gentleman? With thanks. Oh, no. I charged him, which he did not expect, he thought the powerful man was his free ticket. I charged him well, but it was no satisfaction. If I could have emptied the chamber pot-but, no, I am a businesswoman. I only charged him double."
Someone knocked briskly on the door, and Maurice stuck his head in. "May I?"
"Why not?" Madame threw up her hands. "A terrible morning. Terrible. In this business, the people I must permit in a house of the most elegant! The people-" she was beginning to warm up again.
"And I had to drink so much champagne I do not know bow I will be able to sit in my game," Maurice interrupted gloomily. "Add to this I do not like champagne, but Amalie adores it. I thought I had my hand on the good dry wine you keep for yourself, but it was champagne and when Amalie saw the bottles!" He shook his head.
Madame made a wide, generous gesture. "I will bill only for what you have actually drunk."
"I'm sorry to have caused so much trouble," Poppy said miserably. "If you have one idea of where we dare go, we'll be out of here in two minutes."
"I must go to the Palace because I must not in any way act as if this is not the usual day," Maurice said. "I am almost late now."<
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"Thank. you for everything, Maurice," Poppy said unsteadily.
"You did not hear," Madame said. "You were upstairs when we discovered the stagecoaches, the carriages, the steamers, the hotels, everything-is watched. Now as you know how to make the spot disappear from the cards, do you know how to make Poppy and Andy disappear?"
"I am an honest gambler, Madame," Maurice said. "The table percentages give me all the advantage I need. And other men's stupidities."
"You think Jeremiah stupid?" Poppy gasped.
"Very," Maurice said absently, frowning. "Where do you want to go, Poppy?"
She had thought of that in the long, cold time in the cellar. ''To Jack. He's kept moving so nobody here has any idea where he is, if anybody ever knew, and he's just moved on again, to the Injun Creek diggings."
"He is well located?"
''No. He sounds discouraged and half sick. But we won't be a burden to him."
"He probably needs you," Maurice said. "You want a stagecoach then."
"Madame told you. They're watched."
"Watched leaving town. Not watched for passengers who get on later, outside town." Maurice frowned, debating. "Now which coach, where, when?"
"I have the schedules of all the coaches." Madame nodded approval of herself. "Some men, they think it enough if they bring to town once a week their vegetables, their fruits. No, no, no. For my customers, the freshest, the most delicate, the fruit still with the bloom, straight from the tree, the little peas so dainty, so fragrant, the oysters just from the water, all the specialties my house offers, I arrange for the stagecoaches to bring daily." She sighed ecstatically. "Yes, for my customers, the best."
"All you have to do is get to the first or second stop outside town," Maurice said. "Do you know the schedules out of town, Madame?"
"Of course, again my customers." Madame made her eyes very wide. "Sometimes gentlemen like to entertain in private. I do not approve. I do not like it when gentlemen come here, and I have in my parlor only three or four girls to entertain. I will not take the scuffings from the streets, but the best girls, so demanding, so expensive to dress. So I select, select, discard, select. But still sometimes when I must send five or six for some private entertainment and we are busy upstairs also, I have in my parlor only two or three." Madame wagged her head sadly.
"How do the gentlemen entertain privately?" Maurice probed.
"In the small lodges, for the hunting, the fishing, they say, outside town. Sometimes they ask for the girls to come in the stagecoach, and they meet with their carriage. Sometimes I send my girls, four, five, six in my own carriage. And I charge-oh, how I charge."
"In your own carriage," Maurice said thoughtfully. "Then people are used to seeing your girls drive out of town."
"I have just told you that."
''What would your driver think if you changed the program around a little, if he drove two girls out of town and then they got on a stagecoach?"
"He thinks only that some man has a reason to pay well for that special arrangement. He knows I plan, arrange everything always of the best, so he is not surprised when I tell him to leave in time to meet the stagecoach. Yes, I must consult the schedule, yes, to meet the stagecoach at the second stop." Madame nodded vigorous approval of herself. "Poppy and Andy, yes, Andy he will be a very small girl but, yes, in large capes with hoods, two of my girls leave in my carriage for an evening out of town. Under the capes, they can be quite presentable for the stagecoach."
"Jeremiah is suspicious," Poppy said. "He's not apt to forget you have a carriage and to have a lookout to see if it leaves town."
"I have good horses."
"Let's hope they're good enough," Maurice said.
Part Five
The Diggings
Fall 1852
Chapter Thirty-two
SOMETIMES, up on the small hill under the old oak, languid in the sun-speckled shade while Jack and Andy worked knee-deep in the water of Injun Creek, when she had finished reading the newspapers the miners brought back from town each week, Poppy put away thoughts of the world she had left so completely and made lists of things she would never understand. She mused while she mended their ragged clothes or tried to brush the scent of wood smoke from her hair or worked a bit of bacon fat into her water-reddened hands to keep them from cracking.
Gold fever was the first thing she could not understand. Sometimes, though she never would hint so to any man here at the diggings, she thought it was literally a fever, a kind of sickness and a madness, too. She strove to think and feel as they did, to understand. She could not. Her mind could comprehend only the facts she had learned, so she turned those over and over in her mind.
Though now the season was edging into autumn and Injun Creek ran slow and shallow, she pictured how it would look next spring. On the horizon, the mountains loomed like an intimidating presence, cupping this long, narrow valley and all the others on each side in a circle of dark and towering strength. Up there, the snows would soon begin to fall and pack. The snow would mount all winter until men who had seen it said the whole range glinted blindingly bright in the sunlight. Sometimes, under a brilliant sunset, the peaks reflected pink, blue, green, and purple like scooped-up heaps of party ices on a giant's table. Then in the spring, the sun would melt the snow, and the little creeks and wider rivers would run fast and full as the icy water came surging down, leaping and springing, bounding from rock to rock with a spray like rainbow-tinted lace filling the air. The gentle tinkle of the little falls would deepen to thunder. As the water roared down, it would tear at the earth and the rocks, loosening gold that had been waiting there for centuries, carrying it down to the streams running through the valleys. The streams, too, running fast and full, would give up their deep-buried hoards of gold left there in the soil by former spring runoffs, and bring it to the surface for the taking.
Then all the men working up and down the streams like Injun Creek, sifting their pans and cradles from sunup to sundown, standing patiently in the water, who now this late in the season were lucky if they made a dollar a day, might become rich with a dozen lucky pans. They might find even greater Wealth. Probing and digging in the valleys that had been flooded over in centuries past, they might find soil so deeply permeated with gold that hands and ,shovels could not bring up all the deep-buried veins of metal. With such a great strike, mere surface scraping might bring a man enough in a day to live like a king, but machines were needed to 'bring the tons of gold-drenched earth to the surface. A man who made a find like that and got his claim recognized was as rich as a king for life.
That was the stuff of fairy tales, the dream of fools or madmen, yet it was true. Hundreds of sober, decent men, alive now in this California, had found their gold and lived like kings to prove it true. Anyone could see and talk to them and know it could happen. So every man here at Injun Creek and all the places like it believed that dream and was betting his life on it.
Poppy, too, knew it was true, as she knew night followed day, but she could not believe it in her heart. An orange was round and gold, and she could hold it in her hand. That she believed. Great fortune by chance, she could not believe. Men claimed such a failure to comprehend was the proof of the weakness of a woman's mind.
If ever she saw a man bring up a king's wealth in a day, and she did not think she would, she still would feel she was seeing some fanciful tale acted out on a theater stage. She would believe it when it brought her an orange to eat every day. That was wealth she understood and yearned to have.
She did not understand and knew she never would. She wished she could. The men here sustained their hard life cheerfully because they had their fever, their dreams. She was too sane and had no dream to soften the hard reality of the days and nights for her.
Her second musing was a mere trinket to dangle before her curiosity. When her mind was escaping the dreary monotonous present by picking up and looking at pictures of the past, she remembered and wondered about something that had h
appened on the stagecoach ride. She accepted she would never know the answer.
Madame, ever practical, had produced two confiscated hooded capes she had highhandedly told their owners were shabby past public wearing and had wrapped Poppy and Andy in them. With them well wrapped and installed in the carriage, portmanteaus at their feet, the driver had set off with strict orders about where and when he was to meet the stagecoach and put them on it. The Concords ran to smooth and exact schedules, and Madame had schemed so there was bare. ly time to make connections. They set off at a brisk pace to meet the midday coach, twenty miles out of town.
Just inside the city limits, Poppy saw three mounted men waiting under a clump of trees on a side lane. As the carriage drew abreast, she saw that they were wearing the black broadcloth of businessmen and were mounted on good horses. They were watching every vehicle that rolled along the highway. At the sight of their carriage, the men kicked their horses into a rearing start to race out and intercept them. Poppy gasped, caught Andy's hand in hers, and huddled down into the seat. The three men reached and circled them, one on each side and one reaching toward their horses' heads. Suddenly. five vaqueros on their quick, rough little horses galloped up from nowhere, whooping and shouting, jostling the men away from the carriage into the streams of traffic on each side. Drivers cursed and pulled up or lashed their horses away from the scene of the trouble. By the time the tangle unsnarled, their carriage was rolling ahead of the disruption, while the three men were left fighting their horses to get them off the crowded road. Their driver whipped up his horses, and they swept past the market carts ahead. Poppy kept looking back, peering through the cloud of dust rolling behind them, but no mounted men came pounding up from the rear. They were barely in time to make their stagecoach, and as they tumbled from their carriage into it, Poppy thought she saw one of the vaqueros riding like a guard on the edge of the road behind.
