‘She’s a wife, all right. But she’s not mine. Her husband runs a store in San Francisco.’
‘Is this your first time out?’ asked the man.
Collis nodded, his eyes screwed up against the shimmering reflections from the sea.
‘Well, allow me to introduce myself,’ said the man. ‘My name is Andrew Jackson Hunt. Named for General Andrew Jackson, of course. I’m off to San Francisco to start up a wholesale food business, and maybe open a restaurant, too.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Collis. ‘Edmonds, out of New York.’
Andrew Hunt, on closer inspection, had a sunburned look about his narrow, foxlike face that you never saw on New Yorkers. The fluffy hairs on his cheekbones had been bleached white by the sun, and there were creases around his eyes from squinting into bright skies. He didn’t hold himself like a city man, either. He sat with his legs sprawled across the deck, and if anybody wanted to pass, he would withdraw them, and tip his hat, and say, ‘Beg pardon.’
‘You don’t want to expect too much out of San Francisco,’ he told Collis. ‘You can make money there, sure enough, if you’re sharp, and ready to work hard. But you have to remember that it ain’t all that civilised. All that anybody ever does there is get drunk and run up and down the hills. Why, I remember the time when John Frémont built his first house there. It was wooden, and it came from China in pieces, and everyone sat around and laughed their butts off while he tried to figure out how it all went together.’
‘I’m looking forward to meeting John Frémont,’ said Collis. ‘I’ve heard he’s a very powerful personality.’
‘Oh, he’s not too bad a fellow,’ observed Andrew Hunt. ‘A mite peevish at times, and not so much of a great hero as everybody tried to make him out. But I guess he passes the Hunt humanity test, and that’s good enough.’
‘What’s the Hunt humanity test?’ asked Collis, amused.
‘It’s real simple. If a man makes two dumb mistakes for every one thing he gets right, and if he marries a pretty woman, and he don’t hold with James Buchanan for President, then he’s a human being, and that’s all right by me. I guess John Frémont’s managed all of those things, except he’s probably made just a mite too many dumb mistakes.’
‘He doesn’t still live in his Chinese wooden house?’
‘No, sir. He’s got a grand place out on the Bay now, and Jessie put up a glass verandah around it, overlooking the ocean. You’d do yourself well to get in with John and Jessie. If you’re able. In fact, if you’re able, you’d do well to get yourself in with any of The San Francisco Chivalry, because that’s the quickest way to make yourself influential.’
‘What is the Chivalry?’ asked Collis.
‘Mary Bell Gwin is the chief buzzard. She’s the wife of Senator Gwin, and if she says you’re acceptable, then acceptable you are. But there’s Eleanor Martin and Mrs Peter Donahue, too, they’re twin sisters, and then there’s the Parrotts and the Melfords and the Lathams and the Selbys. If you ain’t on any of their invitation lists, then you ain’t Chivalry.’
‘How about you?’ asked Collis. ‘Are you on the invitation lists?’
‘Me? You have to be joking. I wouldn’t even turn up at their goddam breakfasts and balls and picnics and whatnot if you paid me to. They spend more time fretting about their oyster suppers and their eggnog soirées than they do about the things that matter in life.’
‘I see,’ said Collis. ‘And what do you think are the things that matter in life?’
‘Work, and friendship, and outwitting the other fellow whenever you can, on top of all of which is sleeping peaceful.’
Collis laughed. But Andrew said seriously, ‘What are yours?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘What are the things that matter to you?’
Collis looked at him for a moment, opened his mouth, but couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘I’m not sure,’ he told him, after a while. ‘I’ve never thought about it.’
Andrew crossed his legs and raised one bony, suntanned finger. ‘In San Francisco,’ he said, ‘you’d better have your priorities sorted out real straight, because it ain’t the venue for tenderfeet. If you spend so much as a half-minute sitting on your travelling trunk on the Embarcadero, trying to figure out what to do next, then the next thing you know you’re going to be perched on air, because someone’s whipped your trunk out from under you and sold it off as the latest import from the East. It’s a city where dogs eat dogs, and cats eat mice, and merchants sell them all off for sausage meat before they’ve even quit squawking.’
‘I was hoping for some sort of financial position, as a matter of fact,’ said Collis, feeling very Eastern and very uncertain.
Andrew took out a silver snuffbox and flicked the lid with long, clawlike fingernails. ‘The only financial position worth adopting is bent over double under the weight of a sack of gold dust. That’s in my opinion, anyway. But you’re a gentleman, ain’t you, and you shouldn’t have no trouble in making your way, not unless you’re especially green. If you can get yourself introduced into society, and accepted as an aristocrat, whether you’re genuine or fraudulent, then you should be able to pick whatever position you want.’
The Virginia was paddling out into open ocean now, and beginning to tilt and sway. Seagulls followed her into the Atlantic, circling silently around her wake. Andrew, shielding his snuffbox from the breeze, took out a pinch of snuff and dipped it into his sharp-pointed nose. He snorted once, and then took out a large clean white handkerchief and sneezed into it six or seven times.
‘Confounded damned habit,’ he complained, tucking the handkerchief away again, up his sleeve. ‘Still, I guess it’s more sociable than chewing tobacco. All that nyoing, nyoing, p-too.’
‘Tell me more about the Chivalry,’ Collis said. ‘Who’s the most influential man in town?’
Andrew grimaced. ‘It might have changed since I was last there, but I guess the richest man in town is John Parrott, who owns the New Almaden Quicksilver Mine. He and Mrs Parrott live up on Rincon Hill in a place that looks like a bank vault that someone stuck a front porch on and decided to live in. But I guess that when it comes to influence, Laurence Melford’s your man.’
‘Laurence Melford? Don’t I know that name?’
‘You should do,’ said Andrew. ‘He’s what you call your living legend.’
‘Didn’t he help General Kearny to form the first California government?’
‘That’s right.’ Andrew nodded. ‘And John Frémont has never forgiven him for it, although these days they’re back on speaking terms. Still, you can’t hardly blame a man for understanding which side his bread’s buttered, now can you, and that’s always been Laurence Melford’s main talent.’
‘Melford made his fortune in beef, didn’t he?’ Collis asked. ‘I remember my father talking about him.’
‘Beef, whisky, gold, you name it, he’s made his fortune in it. He was only a raggedy-assed settler to start with, back in the ’40s, but he was clever enough to make a friend out of General Vallejo, who was in charge of Northern California in those days, and Vallejo paid him back for his friendship by giving him land, and livestock, and enough sweet wine to drown a boatful of bishops. That was way back when San Francisco was still called Yerba Buena, and it wasn’t no more than a row of adobe huts and a post stuck in the ground to tie up your donkey.’
Andrew paused, sneezed hard, and then turned back to Collis with an oddly surprised expression.
‘I’ll be damned if that stuff isn’t overdoing itself.’
‘It sounds like it,’ said Collis. ‘But what about Laurence Melford? Is he a hard man to get to know?’
‘These days, sure,’ said Andrew. ‘He’s one of the pioneers, you see, and that makes him first-class, tested-with-the-teeth Chivalry. One of the best lessons he learned from Mariano Vallejo was how to save his hide and hang on to his money, and he learned it good. When John Frémont marched into Sonoma in ’46 to liberate it from the
Mexicans, Melford was there with open arms and a ten-page speech of welcome. And when John Frémont was picked by the settlers to be the top dog of Yerba Buena, Melford was there too, clapping with the best of them. But, by golly, he was there again when General Kearny came marching along and kicked Frémont out, and the way I heard it, he gave General Kearny the same ten-page speech of welcome he’d given to Frémont with only the names changed. So when General Kearny went off home, and Frémont was packed off in irons because he’d refused to stand down, who was left on the top of the sandpile but Laurence Melford, and he made himself a whole heap of profit selling beef and provisions in San Francisco and all around, and even acquired himself the San Gabriel gold mine, by means that nobody ever did get around to making plain.’
‘He sounds like a fascinating man,’ said Collis. ‘Is he a gambler?’
‘Name me one man in San Francisco who isn’t.’
‘Where does he live? Have you ever been to his house?’
‘I’ve seen the outside of it, sure. It’s in South Park, which is up on Rincon Hill where the Parrotts live. There’s some pretty fancy addresses up there, I can tell you. They’ve even got themselves a windmill up there, just to pump water for the lawns.’
‘I’ll have to pay it a visit.’
Andrew shrugged. ‘I guess you could try. But I warn you they’re standoffish folks, the Chivalry, even worse than any society you could find in New York or Memphis. When you’re trying to show that you’re class in New York or Memphis, it ain’t so difficult, because you’ve got yourself a fine civilised city to do it in. But when you’re trying to show that you’re class in a shantytown like San Francisco, where any building that ain’t made of wood is made of canvas, well, you tend to be three times as covetous of what you’ve got, and what you think you are.’
The gong struck for lunch, and a bearded steward banged open the door to the dining-saloon and shouted: ‘Boiled rockfish, Swedish meatballs, and sharp Wisconsin cheese! Come and get it!’
‘Oh, well,’ said Collis, getting to his feet, ‘I suppose we’re in for another culinary adventure.’
Andrew Hunt grinned. ‘It does me good to see you young society fellows come out here and cut your teeth on some rough-edged pioneer life,’ he said. ‘It’ll make a man out of you, so long as it don’t kill you first.’
‘Come on, it can’t be that bad,’ Collis chided him.
‘Oh, no? Well, there’s plenty of fog and fever in San Francisco, apart from thieves, and rats, and Mexicans, and winter rain. And the Chivalry will do their darnedest to kill you off, if they don’t like the look of you. And if you go sniffing around Laurence Melford’s daughter, that’ll be sudden death.’
‘You didn’t tell me he had a daughter.’
‘Oh, sure he does,’ said Andrew, tipping back his wide-brimmed hat and looking up at Collis with cynical amusement. ‘Laurence Melford has the tallest, most toothsome young daughter you’ve ever seen in your life. She looks like her mother, you see, Althea Melford, and she’s a rare beauty, only the general opinion is that Sarah Melford’s even finer. But old man Laurence don’t like the idea of anything but the cream of the cream for Sarah, as far as a husband’s concerned, so the suitors get kicked out of the front door just about as fast as they try to get in. That’s just a warning, if you ever get as far as meeting the Melfords.’
‘I’ll take it in the spirit it was given,’ said Collis. ‘Now, will you join me for lunch?’
Andrew Jackson Hunt shook his head and stretched out his legs even further. ‘Round about noonish I’ll have myself a measure of bourbon and a dry cookie,’ he said. ‘That’s all that a man needs.’
‘Please yourself,’ said Collis, setting his hat straight.
Andrew nodded. ‘I generally do. Be seeing you.’
In the week that followed, the Virginia steamed slowly down the coast of Georgia and Florida, with the sun hot and high overhead during the day and the passengers sleeping under awnings on the decks or fanning themselves in their cabins. Gradually, the coastline of Florida broke into fragmented keys, rafts of palms and grass on a remote, sapphire-blue sea, and then they were alone on the Gulf of Mexico, under a faultless sky, and an ocean that was marked only by the wide white wash of the Virginia’s paddles and the shadow of the smoke that trailed from her funnel.
Collis, after shaving in the confines of his shared cabin and breakfasting on oranges and fruit pasties taken aboard at Jacksonville, would walk the promenade deck with Hannah West until it was time for midmorning coffee. In her white and lemon-coloured summer dresses, under the shade of her white tasselled parasol, she looked even more desirable, and Collis found it increasingly difficult to talk to her in remote and gentlemanly terms. But since she had told him what she really felt about Walter West on the afterdeck at Charleston, she seemed to have become increasingly withdrawn, and now she spoke only of her childhood in Wakefield, and of what she had learned at school, and how she hoped to prosper in San Francisco. Collis found his attention wandering to a sluttish-looking half-breed girl who had come aboard with the oranges, or maybe the fruit pasties, and who had taken to sitting on the foredeck smoking thin cheroots, her long black hair blown in the wind, her toes brown and bare and her blouse loose and low.
Sometimes Hannah West would stand by the lifeboats and gaze out across the Gulf for an hour at a time, while Collis rested himself on a deck chair and drank tall tumblers of dry sherry with ice. At those times, they spoke very little, although Hannah would immediately come out of her reverie if Collis made any move to leave her, and she would smile at him so entreatingly that he would shrug and stay. The days grew hotter, and longer, and in the evenings they sat in the dining-saloon in the red feverish light of heated sunsets, their conversation murmured and polite, as their knives and forks clattered on their plates, as the day died in a flurry of moths and a bitter waft of coffee. At night, Collis would lie on his upper berth, feeling the sea breeze flowing through the open porthole close to his face, listening to the snores of his Latvian cabinmate, as yet another cord of slumbering firewood was sawn up, and he would think about Delphine, and her astonishing sensuality, and then about Hannah’s strange and compelling profile, and her distracted way of talking, and then he would close his eyes and think for a moment about the big dusky breasts of the half-breed girl. He wasn’t at all sure what it was that he felt for Hannah. She wasn’t as blatantly provocative as the half-breed girl, and her sexual manners certainly weren’t as forward as Delphine’s. Yet she had an alluring way of standing, and looking, and talking; and when the wind blew her hair, it was all Collis could do not to reach out and curl its fine blondeness around his fingers. For some reason that he couldn’t understand, he wanted very much to possess her, not simply sexually, but in every other way. He wanted to possess her childhood, all those images of cold winters in Wakefield, with the frost on the trees, and the sun dull and sullen behind the colonial houses. He wanted to possess her moments of happiness, the day she had married, the night she had lain in her lace-trimmed nightgown and first felt the heaviness of her husband on top of her, the squeezed-closed eyes, the breathing, the sighs of pleasure or of pain. He wanted to possess her now, on the deck of this steamer in the dark wide warmth of the Gulf of Mexico, to touch her cheeks, her nose, her mouth, her ribboned underwear. More than any other woman he had ever met, he wanted to own her, to be as intimate with her as she was with herself. He wanted her as a mistress and as a friend, but even more than that, he seemed to want her as a means of escaping from his own past and his own memories, by taking on hers instead. She had married a Protestant and was stricken with guilt. She had suffered over her mother’s deathbed. Now, she was uncertain of her love for the man she had sacrificed everything for. To take on this arcane, religious, and romantic guilt in place of his own remorse for Kathleen Mary and the sordid family squabbles that had led him to leave New York would be an intriguing relief. It would make his life mysterious and adventurous instead of cheap and embarrassing; and
it would draw him into another world like a man drawn through a secret door. He almost relished the prospect of confronting Walter West, with Hannah swooning in the crook of his arm and declaring, ‘She is mine now! You must set her free!’
He was thinking this way on a hot Thursday night, when they weren’t more than a hundred miles from Cayos Miskito, off the coast of Nicaragua, and less than 350 miles from Aspinwall, on the isthmus of Panama. The ship’s sails were up, because there was a light easterly wind, and they were rippling in the darkness, while beneath the decks the steam-powered engines were pumping and pounding as they turned the paddles around. Collis lay awake for a half-hour, and then he gradually eased himself off his bunk, dressed in nothing but his sweaty striped nightshirt, and climbed to the floor.
The Latvian was fast asleep, breathing out slivovitz fumes through his tousled beard. Collis stepped carefully over his parcels and packages and unbolted the cabin door. In the dining-saloon outside, the lamps had been turned low, so that they glowed dim and orange, and the passengers lay wrapped up in their blankets in different exaggerated postures of sleep, mouths open, hair tangled, necks at awkward angles. Collis passed by them all and padded down the saloon to the door which led out on to the deck. Someone snorted and turned over.
It was dark and windy outside. There was no moon yet. Collis’s nightshirt flapped around his legs as he closed the saloon door behind him and stepped out on to the deck. The ship’s paddles churned up an odd luminescence in the water, dark blue and shimmering, and there was a sharp smell of smoke on the breeze.
He made his way forward, along the promenade deck, until he reached the rail where the flag of the Atlantic Mail Line rumbled and snapped. He stood there for a while, breathing in the warm wind, and then he made his way back to the door that led to the women’s cabins. There was nobody looking, and on the deck above him, in his wheelhouse, the helmsman was crouched over his lamp writing a letter; so Collis quickly opened the door and stepped into the shadowy passageway inside.
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