Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  Seth climbed up onto his wagon and reached for the reins. One thing prison had taught him was that life wasn’t fair. It had also taught him that smart men kept out of other people’s business. Besides, the woman already belonged to Boggs. She knew what she was getting into.

  But as he started to get his horses going, something made him stop. He looked back at the woman. The purser had left her for a moment to settle a fight that had broken out between two customers. Boggs, Seth thought. He knew the man. Cyrus Boggs had come out as a preacher two years ago but had found a more lucrative enterprise. He currently owned a brothel on Clay Street and was known to lure unsuspecting women to San Francisco with newspaper ads for teachers and nursemaids, offering to pay their fare when they arrived, and then imprisoning them in his cribs— small, windowless rooms where the helpless women were expected to service up to thirty men a day.

  With a sigh, Seth dropped the reins, jumped down to the ground, and went back to the ropes. “Pardon me, lady, did I hear you say Boggs?”

  “Sí,” she said as she dug into her purse. Her hands were small, he noticed, her gloves made of soft kid. “After my husband dies,” she explained, “the government takes our farm for taxes. I have little left. But then I see this.” She handed a newspaper clipping to him.

  “Sorry, I don’t know Spanish. What does it say?”

  “It is, how do you say, anuncio. This man says he wishes for teachers of young ladies. Here is his name and address. I write him a letter.” She produced a folded sheet of paper. Seth read the false promises it contained.

  He handed them back. “This letter and advertisement are a fraud. Boggs got you here under false pretenses.”

  She gave him a puzzled look. He saw dark lashes framing dark eyes, black curls escaping from under the bonnet.

  He cleared his throat. He didn’t know how to put it delicately. “Boggs is a criminal. He isn’t going to help you. Did I hear you say your father is here?”

  “Sí! He is why I come. He is wealthy. He will pay my fare.”

  Seth saw how the men were eyeing her, and then he remembered that just last week a vigilante group, mostly disbanded American soldiers with nothing to do now that the war with Mexico was over, had raided a tent community on Telegraph Hill called Little Chile, and raped and murdered a mother and daughter. People of Spanish descent were not safe in San Francisco at the moment, especially a Spanishwoman on her own. If the woman’s father didn’t show soon, then Boggs surely would, and if not Boggs, then one of these men would pay for this D’Arcy woman and enslave her God knew where.

  “Hey, you!” the purser shouted, coming back. “Get away from there!”

  Despite his hard-and-fast rule not to get involved, Seth couldn’t stand by while an injustice was being done.

  He offered to pay the fare, reaching into his pocket for a roll of banknotes. When another man immediately raised the bid, the purser accepted it. Seth grabbed his arm and said close to his face, “Friend, I don’t want trouble. But you asked for the price of the lady’s passage, and I offered to pay it.”

  The purser looked down at the fingers digging painfully into his arm, then into the unblinking eyes of the tall stranger. He pulled away. “Awright, settle with the captain over there.”

  “Thank you, Señor,” Angelique said as Seth moved her trunk from behind the ropes. “I am in your debt. How do I pay you?”

  He squinted up at the sun. He was anxious to get going. “I’m at Devil’s Bar, north of Sacramento. When you find your father, you can pay me back.” Touching the brim of his hat, he started for his wagon.

  As he started to climb up, he looked back. She remained standing beside her trunk, looking lost. Men were starting to crowd around her, saying, “You really French? You need a place to stay? I can guarantee you’ll make lots of money here.”

  Seth went back, pushing his way through the protesting men. “Do you really have nowhere to go?”

  “Only Señor Boggs…”

  “Now see here—” began one man.

  “And you have no idea where your father is?”

  “I come to look. This is why I answer Mr. Boggs’s anuncio. I come to California to look for my father. And while I look, I work as a teacher, you see?”

  “Your father a forty-niner?”

  When they recognized the stranger’s proprietary manner with the woman, the men drifted back to the auction, where a woman with a baby was being offered for thirty dollars.

  “No, no,” Angelique explained to Seth Hopkins. “After my mother dies my father goes to New Orleans, to his brother there. They come to California, he says in a letter, for the fur trapping.” She produced another folded piece of paper. Seth squinted at it then handed it back. “I don’t know French either. You say he’s a trapper? He’d be up north, then. Unless he’s gone for the gold. In which case he could be in one of a thousand mining camps.” He rubbed his jaw. “Look, you’ll probably have a better chance of finding him if you go to Sacramento.” He sighed, wondering why he was getting himself into this. The heat must have addled his brain. “I can take you there.”

  “Oh! You have already been too kind, Señor. These men will help me.”

  “These men—” he began. “Never mind. Sacramento is what you want, believe me, it’s closer to gold country. You can put the word out on your father. The camps get traveling preachers, circuit judges, entertainers, trappers, miners, and all sorts of assorted folk passing through. Word of mouth travels very quickly among the mining camps. Your father’ll soon hear you’re looking for him. What’s his name?”

  “Jacques D’Arcy. He is a Count,” she added proudly.

  Seth would have liked two bits for every “Count,” “Baron” and “Prince” there was in San Francisco, and phonies the lot of them. He doubted half the men on this wharf were even going by their real names.

  “Oh,” she said when she saw the wagon. “Is Sacramento far?”

  “We aren’t taking the wagon to Sacramento. Just along to the terminal to pick up the steamboat to take us upriver.”

  * * *

  As Seth guided the wagon up and down the streets of Sacramento in search of a respectable place where Miss D’Arcy could stay, Angelique was thankful to be off the steamboat. When Mr. Hopkins had said they were to take an overnight steamer upriver, she had pictured a cabin and the opportunity to loosen her corset and perhaps bathe, have tea brought. The trip from Mexico had been horrendous. Boarding the Betsy Lain at Acapulco, Angelique had found the Boston ship already overcrowded with passengers. But the overnight passage on the steamboat had been an even more appalling experience. Because the cabins were all taken, she and Mr. Hopkins had had to sleep on the deck among their belongings, along with hundreds of other people— most of whom had been men— even with horses, donkeys, and pigs! Thoughts of finding her father had sustained her. Papá was going to make everything all right. He had always taken care of her, and he would take care of her again.

  Sacramento was a new town, sprouting up at the convergence of two rivers. Angelique, who had been born in a three-hundred-year-old city that was itself built upon the ruins of a city far older, marveled that only the year before Sacramento had been a tent city, and before that an Indian village. Now there were brick buildings, wooden houses, church spires, and properly laid out streets. But finding a hotel or boardinghouse where she could stay was turning out to be a challenge.

  After riding around for an hour in the rented wagon, finding fault with each boardinghouse and hotel he found, Seth began to realize that he could no more leave Miss D’Arcy on her own here than he could in San Francisco. Signs in windows read NO MEXICANS OR FOREIGNERS NEED APPLY. And people stared openly and rather rudely, Seth noticed, at the highly mismatched pair— he in homespun shirt and blue jeans, the lady at his side in a shimmering blue-green gown that couldn’t make up its mind on a color. He had a good idea what was on people’s minds, and he suspected that Angelique’s respectability, an attractive young woman on her own, would c
ome under question. He couldn’t just abandon her, any more than he could have back in San Francisco. Even though it was she who owed him, he felt responsible for her. There was only one solution. She would be safer at Devil’s Bar, and, after all, he told himself, she would be closer to the word-of-mouth grapevine that would lead her to her father.

  “There are several decent ladies at the camp,” he offered. “I’m sure one of them will gladly take you in.”

  Angelique graciously accepted and as she rode primly at Seth Hopkins’s side, looking forward to a hot bath at last, a proper meal, and a good night’s sleep between clean sheets, she peered anxiously into the face of every man they passed, anticipating the joyous reunion with her father. She thought about the birthday parties when she was little, and Papá had made a crown for her to wear and a special throne to sit on. And when she had grown up he had even chosen her husband for her, as no ordinary man would do. A D’Arcy, a distant cousin, who had had to promise that he would continue to treat Angelique in the manner she was accustomed to. Pierre had done just that, right up until the day he had died at the hands of American soldiers.

  “Will you go to your family in Los Angeles?” Father Gomez had asked the day she left Mexico City.

  But Angelique had no intention of looking up her mother’s family. She had heard so many times when she was growing up how shabbily Grandfather Navarro had treated her father that she wanted nothing to do with them. It had felt strange when the Betsy Lain stopped at Los Angeles and she had looked out at the smoky plain and wondered if the family was even still there. She only vaguely recalled her last visit to Rancho Paloma, twenty years before, when she was six years old. There was to have been a wedding, and then something happened— Auntie Marina disappeared and everyone was sent home. There had been no communication with her mother’s family after that.

  As the wagon carried them through countryside that was flat and park-like and dotted with oaks, Angelique sneaked surreptitious looks at the man at her side. Mr. Hopkins had an interesting face, she thought. Sunburnt and creased, with a large straight nose and deep-set thoughtful eyes. When he removed his hat to mop his forehead, she saw thick, wavy hair, warmed by the sun to a golden brown. She liked the sound of his voice, it possessed a mellow quality, and he always spoke carefully, with measured words. There was something solid and sincere about him. She decided she felt safe with Seth Hopkins.

  Seth, on the other hand, was entertaining thoughts of a different nature. As they rode in silence through the sunshine, their road gradually diminishing as they left the settled areas behind, he tried not to stare at his unexpected traveling companion. She sat on the wagon seat like a queen, her back straight, her parasol perfectly angled against the sun. In all his thirty-two years he had never beheld a sight so exotic. She also baffled him. It was hard to believe she was as naive as she had appeared back at the Port of San Francisco. He placed her age around twenty-five, and she had been married, so she must know something of the ways of the world. Yet her response to her situation had seemed almost childlike.

  But this woman was no child, he reminded himself as he tried not to take too long a look at the small waist flaring into feminine hips, and the breasts that strained against the green-blue silk. There must be a hundred petticoats under that frilly skirt. A light sheen of moisture had appeared across her brow and above her pink lips. And she smelled faintly of roses. He tried to identify her coloring. She wasn’t Anglo so her complexion wasn’t white. But she wasn’t brown either, or dusky like a gypsy. Honey-colored, he decided, and it brought bile to his throat to think of how the “Reverend” Cyrus Boggs had intended to use her.

  When he saw her produce a small medicine phial from her purse and take a delicate drink, he gave her a questioning look. She slipped the phial back into her purse and said, “It is a medicine that is my great grandmother’s recipe. A chemist in Mexico City mixes it for me for the journey. When I feel a headache coming, I drink and I am fine.”

  “And if you don’t drink it?”

  “Do not be worried, Señor, I am fine.” She wasn’t going to tell him about the visions or the voices she experienced during her spells. He would think she was a lunatic, or worse.

  “Listen,” he said in a lowered voice, even though they were on a lonely road with only the horses to hear. “You’d better drop the ‘Señor.’ Folks around here don’t cotton to Mexicans. The war is still fresh in people’s minds.”

  It was still fresh in Angelique’s as well. Her husband had been killed in the battle at Chepultepec, and she would never forget the fear she had felt when American troops had marched triumphantly into Mexico City. “But I am Spanish,” she said. “My family on my mother’s side is Californio. My family in Los Angeles were the first here.” She reached into her purse and brought out a daguerreotype in an oval frame. “My mother was a beautiful lady, as you can see.”

  Seth took in Carlotta Navarro D’Arcy’s high cheekbones, the leafshaped eyes, the sensuous lips and olive complexion. There was more than just Spanish blood there. It would take a blind man not to see. And the daughter took after the mother. He wordlessly handed the picture back, understanding something now about her exotic features that maybe the girl herself didn’t realize— something to do with her family coming to California when there were only Indians here.

  Finally, they entered a land of tall pines, deep ravines, and high mountain ridges, the air sharp and pure. They reached Devil’s Bar just before nightfall.

  Angelique leaned forward on the seat, anxious to see this town in the mountains. During the long ride she had composed a mental image of what it would look like— brick homes and shops lining cobblestoned streets, with a church facing the plaza, a fountain in the center, paved sidewalks, private courtyards shaded by trees. Since gold miners— rich men! —lived here, it might even be more splendid than she could imagine.

  The wagon rounded the bend and the forest gave way to a hillside cleared of trees. And covering the hillside were—

  Angelique’s jaw dropped.

  Tents.

  Rows of canvas tents with an occasional log cabin or wooden structure in between. The streets, if they could be called such, were dirt with garbage strewn about, dogs scavenging, flies buzzing in the heat. There were no sidewalks. No fountain or church. No shady courtyards where a lady could retire for tea. Not a brick or adobe structure in sight.

  And the people! Men in dusty work clothes with battered hats pulled over their eyes, and women in plain cotton dresses dragging in the dirt. Everyone, including the women, seemed to be carrying something— heavy sacks, or shovels and picks, buckets of water, armloads of firewood. If they were so rich, why did they live so poorly? She saw men hammering boards together to make a coffin. And up the slope of the hill, an area cleared of trees and dotted with wooden crosses and grave markers.

  Her spirits sank as she took in the vista that was painted in tones of gray and brown, the bare hillsides dotted with tree stumps, the patches of yellow grass, the scrawny wildflowers. The smell was almost as bad as the heat. A pall of thick smoke hung over the little valley. Angelique drew a perfumed handkerchief from her purse and held it to her nose.

  A couple of men on horseback suddenly came galloping through, shouting “Eureka!” and shooting pistols into the air, horses’ hooves sending up clods of dirt, one of which landed in Angelique’s lap. “Oh!” she said in alarm. “They are banditos?”

  Seth laughed. “Just a couple of forty-niners who made a lucky strike. There’ll be free drinks at the saloon tonight!”

  At the sound of a wagon entering the camp, people came out of their tents to see. “Hoy there, Seth Hopkins! Back are you then?”

  As Seth brought the wagon to a halt in front of a wooden, two-story structure with a sign that said DEVIL’S BAR HOTEL, ELIZA GIBBONS, PROPRIETOR, a crowd quickly materialized, eyes going wide at the sight of the young woman at Seth’s side. Angelique remained seated while he unloaded crates and boxes, and people came up to claim purcha
ses he had made for them in San Francisco. They happily took their goods and told Seth they were glad he was home. No one said a word to Angelique as they gawked at her.

  A woman emerged from the small hotel, smiling broadly as she dried her hands on a towel. She went up to Seth and said something Angelique couldn’t hear. Seth laughed, and Angelique saw how the woman beamed. Medium-sized and around thirty, the woman wore her hair parted and drawn severely back in a bun. Her dress was plain and she wore what looked like men’s boots. There was something familiar about the way she touched Seth’s arm.

  When the last of the goods was claimed, Seth brought the woman around to introduce her as Eliza Gibbons, owner of the hotel. Eliza nodded curtly, and although she smiled, Angelique saw a hardness in the look that startled her.

  “I was hoping,” Seth began, and then stopped. He suddenly saw how the men were eyeing Miss D’Arcy, no different from the way they had in San Francisco, and he realized she wasn’t going to be any safer here after all. He hadn’t thought it through, back in Sacramento when he had decided to bring her to Devil’s Bar. He had reckoned he could find a place for her with one of the women, but he realized now his plan had been poorly conceived. None of the married women would take her in, not the way their husbands were looking her over. And she couldn’t be on her own, not with the way the men were devouring her with their eyes. So that left the single women. But the only unmarried females were the ladies who lived above the saloon, and Eliza Gibbons, owner of the four-room hotel. And if Seth knew Eliza, she would take one look at Miss D’Arcy’s expensive gowns and triple her usual rent. Which Seth would have to pay until Miss D’Arcy found her father. It suddenly occurred to him that rescuing a lady in distress was not as simple as he had thought.

  There was only one place in all of Devil’s Bar where he could be sure she would be safe— in his own cabin. Waving good-bye to his friends, he climbed up onto the seat, picked up the reins, and said to Angelique, “Listen, I work my claim from morning till night and have no time to keep house, so I pay a woman to help. Do you think you could keep house for me? I would pay you the same as I’ve been paying Eliza Gibbons for one of her maids.”