The Flame

by Jane Toombs

  "Hip, hip,” someone called.

  "Hooray!” the crowd answered.

  With the cheers ringing in her ears, Monique reached the boarding house, entered and climbed the stairs to her room. She opened the unlocked door, closed and bolted it. The first thing she saw was the knife on the table. Someone had cleaned the blade, but left the knife that had killed Philippe. She shuddered and turned to look at the bed. The landlady had laid fresh linen on what looked to be a clean mattress. As quickly as she could, Monique made up the bed and collapsed onto it. In the distance she heard faint cheering and the crack of guns fired in celebration, even the clang of a bell. All for The Flame. For her.

  She was smiling when sleep claimed her. When she woke, it was dark. The street outside was noisy, though no more than usual for early evening. Monique stared up in the darkness for a time, her initial joy at being accepted by the miners fading until she felt a great emptiness. Philippe was dead. She'd never see him in this life again.

  And Jeremy? His loss pained her almost as much as Philippe's. Jeremy might still be alive, but she never wanted to see him again. Almost certainly he felt the same about her.

  Confronted by the knife again when she rose, her first impulse was to toss it out. But then, remembering what had almost happened to her at Alex Campbell's hands, she thrust it under the mattress, out of sight, but available should she ever have need of it.

  * * * *

  In the weeks that followed, she learned Jeremy had returned to San Francisco. Let him go back to his bland, blond fiancée. Good riddance. But she did begin to wonder if Jeremy hadn't been right when he told her there was no place for her in Virginia City. When she'd left her old name behind, she'd vowed never to do a servant's work again and she'd meant it. Nor had she forgotten Philippe's warning against working in the hurdy-gurdy palace or the gambling halls.

  Yet, if she wasn't married, what else was there for a woman to do here? Monique felt completely accepted by all the miners, saluted by them in passing, all of them treating her with respect bordering on awe. Yet, as one day followed another she felt her life narrowing, as though she was passing through a Devil's Gate of her own into an endless cul-de-sac.

  This bothered her, though she had no idea how to escape the feeling. Walking out one afternoon along C Street on her way back from the bank where she'd deposited the bulk of Philippe's money, she had what she first thought of as an unsettling experience. A man approached her, blocking her path. Before she could skirt around him, he raised his black hat and spoke.

  "Allow me to introduce myself, Miss Vaudreuil. I'm Van Allen Reid, at your service. Perhaps you've heard of me."

  She had. None of it particularly complimentary. She noted his new black broadcloth frock coat and ruffled silk shirt, which, she had to admit, he wore with flair. A tall man, pale-skinned, his hair was as black as her own, through edged with gray.

  She decided no response was best.

  "I want you to know, he continued, “that if you ever need assistance, you have only to come to me. I've been an admirer of yours since the day you arrived in our city."

  Unlikely, since when I arrived I was a boy named Martin, she thought. Though he was polite, even respectful, something about him unnerved her.

  "I don't need your help,” she said coldly. “Yours or anyone else's."

  "The time may come when you'll think differently.” Van Allen's eyes never left her face. Was he reading her internal thoughts? Impossible!

  "Thank you, but you're quite wrong.” She swept past him without another word, feeling his gaze on her back.

  After reaching the boarding house, the door bolted, sitting in a chair with her hands clasped in her lap, she realized the encounter had been more than unsettling, it had been frightening. She shivered. Not that she was afraid of Van Allen Reid. She wasn't. Nor did she like him, resenting his boldness, his insinuating manner and his cocksureness.

  She feared not Reid, but something within herself, some darkness that had inexplicably responded to something within him. It was almost as though a part of her felt a kinship with the man. Which was ridiculous. She did not intend to dwell on it.

  The next day she woke to bright sunlight streaming into her room from the two windows overlooking the street. The early morning breeze brought the refreshing tang of sage. Despite this, an almost overwhelming sense of despair hung over her. As though the world was closing in around her. As though life itself was slowly smothering her. She tried to tell herself she was merely lonely. Women in town were few, either wives, servants, hurdy-gurdy girls or worse. She had little in common with any of them, though she often longed to talk to another woman, to confide in her.

  She lay in bed for a long time, staring at nothing, too dispirited to get up and start another empty day. At last she swung her legs from the bed. Why shouldn't she return to San Francisco, at least for a visit?

  You want to go to Jeremy, she accused herself. After all he's done to you. Oh, but hadn't he come to her when she'd needed him? She was the one who rushed away from the cabin, not him. She'd been the quarrelsome one, not him.

  He doesn't love you the way you love him. If he did, he wouldn't cling to the idea of marrying Laura McAllister. I can be as much of a lady as she is, and I'll show him I can.

  You don't have a rich daddy.

  But Philippe said McAllister's money wasn't good for Jeremy. If he was with me, he'd be free to be his own man.

  I can take a stage to California, she told herself. Travel upriver from Sacramento to San Francisco. I can at least buy a few new gowns there, whether I see Jeremy or not. But in her heart she knew he was the real reason for going, foolish though it may be.

  She dressed and set off for the depot. As she approached it, the incoming stage passed her. Through the billows of dust raised by the horses, she glimpsed a man's face in the stage window.

  Jeremy! He'd come back to Virginia City. For her? Never mind, it was enough he was here. She hurried along the sidewalk, running the last fifty feet to arrive as the passengers were starting to descend from the coach.

  Jeremy climbed down. She called his name, starting toward him. He caught sight of her and shook his head, then turned to face the open door of the stagecoach once more. He held up his hands and Laura McAllister lowered herself into them, laughing. He gripped her around the waist and swung her to the ground.

  Monique watched numbly. Jeremy looked at her, removed his hat and bowed. “Laura,” he said, “this is Monique Vaudreuil, a friend of Philippe Manigault's. Monique, this is my wife, Laura."

  His wife. Monique mumbled meaningless words, while Laura smiled at her until she could bear it no longer. Turning, she fled along C Street. As she reached Hahn's Dance Hall, the door opened, allowing a gust of music and laughter to escape from inside as a miner stepped out. He saluted Monique and skirted around her, while she stood staring at the now-closed door.

  Following her impulse to escape, she marched up the steps and pushed open the dance hall door. Through a haze of smoke, she saw an upright piano and gaily dressed women in short, ankle-revealing skirts, dancing with bearded miners. She heard the scrape of a fiddle, a woman's voice singing off-key and a man laughing.

  Escape to here? Monique gritted her teeth. Why not? Spying Hans Hahn, the owner, standing to one side with his thumbs hooked beneath his striped suspenders, Monique headed toward him without giving herself a chance to change her mind.

  "I'd like to be a dancer,” she told him.

  "The Flame one of our hurdy-gurdy girls?” he asked in a guttural accent. “No question you'd attract business."

  Monique nodded.

  "Gut. A dollar a dance—fifty cents for you, fifty for me. Agreed?"

  "When can I begin?"

  He shrugged. “Now."

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  CHAPTER 15

  The Comstock was changing. To start, the riches of the lode had been taken from the surface by prospectors wielding picks and shovels. The rock was broken up
first by sledgehammers, then by huge grinding stones powered by mules plodding in endless circles.

  The veins of silver and gold, though, refused to stay on the surface. Instead, they plunged deep into the mountains, sometimes narrowing and petering out; other times widening into rich bonanzas.

  The miners followed the trail of the veins, laboriously tunneling into the sides of the hills and sending shafts probing down from the slopes above. Deeper and deeper they burrowed, reaching depths of a hundred feet, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand, the air growing hot and foul, the timbers creaking under the weight of untold tons of dirt and rock.

  As they tunneled into the lode, the men, accustomed to surface mining, learned to overcome the hazards of the depths through trial and error, from textbook engineers or from experienced miners lured to the Comstock by wages of four dollars a day. They came from Mexico, South America, the Cornish mines of England and from the gold diggings of California.

  They built not one great city in the Washoe, but two. Virginia City rose on the flank of Mount Davidson, while below its streets and buildings a second city of stopes and winzes, or tunnels and shafts, grew in the bowels of the earth.

  Above, a city of searing sun, below a city of darkness, broken only by the flicker of lamps and candles. The city below was as hot as the one above and, at the lower levels, hotter. On the surface, a city of dwindling water, below a city of unexpected floods, where the bite of a miner's pick at a tunnel's face could bring a cascade of water flooding into the mine.

  To combat the water, Adolph Sutro, a man who'd fought the Paiutes at Pyramid Lake, proposed to build a great forty-mile-long tunnel two thousand feet below the surface to drain the mines. The miners scoffed, unable to believe men could work at such depths. Sutro, tenacious, vowed to fight on until his dream became reality.

  Machine power gradually replaced manpower and horsepower in the mines. Elevators did the work of hand-drawn buckets, blowers were freighted across the Sierras to force air into ventilating shafts and giant stamping machines at the mills made mule-power obsolete. Ice hauled from the Sierra lakes sustained miners who, bare to the waist, could work only ten or fifteen minutes at a time in the lower depths before they were forced to retreat from the searing hot faces of the tunnels.

  Men died. They fell hundreds of feet down open shafts, had their guts blown out when black powder exploded prematurely, were crushed in cave-ins, scalded by steaming water, burned to death or suffocated in fires far below the surface, or were felled by heat stroke, their temperatures soaring as their delirium yielded to death.

  In the midst of death, men lived with a fierce intensity. When shifts ended, the miners, released from the darkness of the underground and from the ever-present fear of what could happen to them at work, burst forth into the city in an orgy of drinking, gambling and whoring. They didn't lack for money. Weren't they the highest paid miners in the world? They were young, adventurous, prosperous, most of them without women of their own.

  The hurdy-gurdy girls at Hahn's Dance Hall, every miner knew, would dance with a man, drink with him, talk to him and, perhaps, dally with him later in a small upstairs room. Although it was common knowledge than The Flame, Monique Vaudreuil, was available for dancing and nothing more, she was the most popular of the hurdy-gurdy girls because of her beauty, and because her independence attracted men who were fiercely independent themselves. She was sought after also because the miners harbored a grudging admiration and respect for the unattainable, while, at the same time, they were challenged by it.

  To Monique, the night of the first Saturday in September was much like any other night at Hahn's. The dance hall was crowded, the room smoky and smelling of liquor, the music loud and lilting, the men laughing and high-spirited for the most part, gamey despite liberal applications of bay rum. There was a small spate of talk about the war, which seemed to be seesawing back and forth between North and South, but the miners were not especially interested in that news since the war seemed very far away from their lives.

  It was a while before Monique noticed the sharp-faced man watching her from the bar. He sipped his drink, never dancing, only watching. She paid him little heed, used to men's stares.

  At midnight, she put her earnings, a double eagle and six silver dollars, in the small pocket at the waist of her gown and smiled at the professor at the piano as she passed him on her way to the rear of the hall. She intended to slip out to the street for the short walk back to her room. At the door she glanced back at the bar. The sharp-faced man was gone. She paused, uneasy, then shrugged and went out into the night.

  Monique hurried along the dark streets. Men who recognized her raised their hats, and others, laughing and singing, made way for her, while still others scuttled by, heads down without a word or glance. She opened the front door of the boarding house, climbed the stairs and, pausing at the top, took the key—Philippe's key, as she always thought of it—from her pocket and unlocked the door.

  Suddenly sensing she wasn't alone, she whirled around. A man lunged out of the darkness and, before she could scream, a hand clamped over her mouth. As she struggled to free herself, he pushed backwards into her room. She heard the door slam shut.

  "I got a knife,” the man warned. “Yell and you'll make me use it."

  In the faint light from the windows, she thought he looked like the man she'd seen watching her from the bar.

  He released his grip on her mouth. She drew in her breath to scream, then held when she saw the glint of his knife blade.

  "Take off your clothes,” he said.

  "Go to hell."

  His fist struck the side of her face. Dazed, she stumbled away. He charged, bull-like, pushing her back on the bed. At that point she remembered the murder knife she'd stuck under the mattress. Before she could even move, he was on her, beating her face and breasts with his fists. She tried to protect herself as best she could, but he grabbed one of her arms, twisting it behind her painfully while he reached up under her skirts with his other hand and tore off her under garment. As he bent over her, she saw the knife clenched in his teeth.

  He released her arm and struck her along the side of his head with his fist again, making her see stars. Unable for the moment to even try to struggle, she felt him force her legs apart and then his full weight came down on her. “Animal,” she muttered as she made an effort to twist to one side. In her dazed condition, she hardly moved and he shoved himself inside her, causing enough pain she whimpered.

  You have a knife, too. Under the mattress. Get it. Use it.

  As he thrust and grunted, she inched one hand over the edge of the bed and groped under the mattress. How she hated all men. Fury choked her. Her fingers touched the handle of the murder knife just as he groaned and collapsed on top of her. She worked the knife free, raised it and jabbed it into his back, yanked the knife out and jabbed it in again, then yanked it out, preparing to stab him yet another time.

  He howled in pain, rolling off her onto the floor. Knife in hand, she flung herself over the top of the bed, found her footing and yelled, “You bastard! You're not the only one with a knife. Come near me and I'll kill you before you can touch me."

  She waited tensely, her gaze fixed on him as he slowly rose to his knees. Swearing and moaning, he got to his feet and stood swaying. “You bitch, you done for me,” he muttered.

  "Get out! Now!"

  He shuffled to the door, opened it and left the room. Though her head whirled with dizziness, she didn't move until she heard him stumbling down the stairs. Only then did she drop the knife, hobble over and bolt the door shut, fall back onto the bed and drift into unconsciousness.

  When she roused, it was still dark and, for a moment, she didn't understand why she ached all over. Remembering the brutal assault, she forced herself to rise and light the lamp. She counted out the money from the pocket of her dress, surprised to find it all there considering what she'd been through, then pulled off her clothes and bundled them together with the underg
arment he'd ripped from her. Never would she wear a single one of them again. She poured water into the bowl from the pitcher and, after taking the bar of lilac soap Philippe had given her from the top drawer of the washstand, she dabbed at her swollen face, gingerly washed her bruised breasts, then scrubbed the rest of herself clean.

  Clad in her nightgown, she wondered if she'd ever really feel clean again. Catching sight of the knife on the floor, its blade bloody, took her back to Philippe's death for a sad moment. But she pushed that image firmly away. The man she'd hurt didn't deserve to live. He'd violated her, took something from her without her permission. Finally she picked up the knife and cleaned its blade and the blood spots on the floor with the clothes she meant to throw out. The knife she thrust under the mattress again

  Staring at the blood on the sheets, she pulled the blanket up over them for the time being. When it got light she'd soak them in cold water. Satisfied she'd eradicated the bastard's presence in her room as best she could, she wrapped a shawl around her, ready to spend the rest of the night curled on top of the blanket. Something glinted on the floor near the foot of the bed. A silver dollar. Had it dropped from a pocket of that man? It must have since her money had still been in her dress pocket. She grimaced, wanting nothing of his. It made her feel like he'd paid her for what he took.

  She kicked the dollar under the bed along with the bundle of clothes, extinguished the lamp and, exhausted, laid down again.

  An insistent tapping awakened Monique. Opening her eyes, she blinked in the morning light. The tapping came again.

  "Who is it?” she asked through swollen lips.

  "Jeremy. Open the door. I have to see you."

  Jeremy! She stood quickly, only to suffer a bout of dizziness that had her clutching the back of a chair. When it passed, she donned a robe and walked to the door.

  "I was sleeping,” she said. “Come back later.” What did he want with her anyway, now that he'd married Laura? Every time she saw him the end result was heartache for her. Hadn't he done enough to hurt her?