by Jane Toombs
“California is so far from Athens.”
“True, and the voyage around the Cape is fraught with danger. Danger from storms, from disease. Still we may put into port in Brazil or Chile where the senoritas are said to be lovely creatures.”
“Don’t tease me, King. You might never come back.”
“I’ll be gone two years at least.”
“Two years! That’s half a lifetime.”
“You’ll have forgotten me by then.”
“Oh, King, you know I’ll never forget you. Never.”
Leaning down, he’d raised her face to his and was surprised to find tears on her cheeks. When he kissed her the taste of her mouth was the taste of salt. She opened her lips to him and her tongue met his before drawing away. He released her, his hand fondling her ear and trailing gently to caress the hair at the nape of her neck.
He clucked to his horse.
“King,” she called after him. “King, will I see you again? Before you go?”
He’d spurred the horses, glancing back at Mary waving to him from beneath the oak. “Perhaps,” he’d called, knowing his voice would be lost in the thudding of his horse’s hooves.
Now, in Wilkes’ study, King was considering his next move. Risk, he told himself. Risk was all. It must be an audacious gambit. Daring. At times, he thought he must want to be caught out. Punished. But that was foolish. Why would he? His mind had been in a jumble lately—there were too many complications in his life. So many that this California fantasy had a certain appeal. If he could make it real, it would give him what he wanted, freedom. Mary’s image in the mirror frowned. He saw the rise and fall of her breasts as she sighed and then her reflection was gone as she walked away toward the staircase. He pictured her entering her bedroom at the top of the stairs, imagined her sitting in front of a mirror to unpin her hair and let it cascade to her shoulders, standing while her maid unbuttoned her gown, the gown slipping from her white shoulders . . .
“The fate of this nation will be decided not by the mouthings of abolitionists or secessionists,” Wilkes was intoning, “nor by the empty vaporings of politicians in Washington, nor by the industrial might of the North nor the undoubted power of King Cotton combined with the foreign powers who must align themselves with the South. No, our fate hinges on events in the West, in Texas and, more importantly, in California. Those will be the battlegrounds, peaceful battlegrounds one can only pray, where the destiny of the nation will be decided. There the decision will be made as to whether we can exist half-slave and half-free or whether the balance of power will tilt to the North so that we in the South must sever the bonds of a union we have prized for so long. Don’t you agree?”
“Unhesitatingly,” Dr. Robinson said.
King nodded. The fool. Peaceful battleground indeed. “What Webster or Clay or Calhoun would have taken two days to expound, you’ve reduced to two hours,” he said. He stubbed out his cigar and stretched. “Your hospitality is unequaled,” he told Wilkes, looking at the clock. “Only eleven, yet I must leave. My wife . . .”
“Of course,” Wilkes said. “We understand.”
“Tell Betsy I’ll look in on her Monday next,” Dr. Robinson said. “And make sure she takes the elixir I prescribed.”
“I will, doctor.” He bowed to Wilkes. “And my respects to your lovely and charming wife,” he said.
“Thank you, Kingman. I expect Dr. Robinson and I will amuse ourselves over the cribbage board before he leaves for town.”
“Cribbage and Yancey brandy,” Robinson said, “make an excellent combination.”
King waved Wilkes back to his chair. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I know the way.”
He closed the study door behind him. The house was quiet--no servants were about this time of night. As he made his way along the hall he glanced up the staircase curving into the darkness of the second story. Mary must be in her nightgown by now, probably in bed reading her latest romance. While she had disrobed he had been forced to listen to Wilkes’ prattling. Damn Wilkes! he thought.
He removed his hat from the rack, hesitated, then replaced it on the peg. Outside, he walked quickly across the portico and down the steps to his horse. Once in the pine wood to the south of the Yancey place he dismounted and secured the reins to a tree.
King reentered the Yancey house as quietly as he could. One lamp still burned in the hall, his hat was on the peg where he had left it, the study was closed. He went to the study door and waited until he heard the drone of Wilkes’ voice. Turning, he paused only an instant before climbing the stairs.
Now there was no going back.
The top of the stairs was in shadow so he could make out only the dark rectangles of the portraits on the walls and of the doors to the bedrooms. Wilkes’ and Mary’s room was just to the left across the hall.
He glanced over the railing and up and down the hallway. No one was about. Putting his ear to the bedroom door, he listened. There was no sound from inside. He grasped and turned the doorknob. The door eased open, the room beyond was dark. He slipped quickly inside and closed the door behind him.
There were four windows, two on each of the opposite sides of the spacious room, just as he remembered from the many times he had played here as a child. Pale moonlight shimmered on the long white curtains of the two eastern windows, giving the entire room an unearthly glow.
The bed was to his left, large and dark. King sat on the floor to remove his boots. In his stocking feet he silently approached the canopied bed, and lifted the white netting.
Mary lay on her back, breathing softly and deeply, one pale arm on top of the blankets, her shoulder bare. King let the netting drop and went to check one of the windows he had chosen as an exit. Yes, there it was. Holding the window curtain aside, he looked down at the roof of the portico he had often jumped onto as a boy, there to hang from the edge by his fingers, then drop into the flower bed beside the drive. He’d done it often thirty years before, and he could still do it today.
He took off the rest of his clothes and piled them by the window on top of his boots. Then he returned silently to the bed, opened the netting, drew down the covers and slid beneath the sheets. Mary stirred. King remained perfectly still, holding his breath while he relished the moment.
He slid across the bed until he was almost, though not quite, touching her. He felt Mary’s warmth on his naked body. With his left hand he gently, caressed her with his fingers. Only after what seemed to him a long time did he feel moisture and hear her breathing quicken. Her body, as though of its own volition, began to writhe beside him.
He removed his hand and shifted away from her to the far side of the bed. “It’s not Wilkes,” he said. “It’s King.”
There was silence.
“King?” A whisper then. “King!” Almost a shout. She sat up.
“Quiet,” he told her. “Don’t wake the house. How would you explain me?”
“King.” Her voice lowered quietly. “How did you get here?”
“The usual way. Up the stairs and through the door.”
“Where’s Wilkes?”
“Playing cribbage with Dr. Robinson. When the good doctor leaves Wilkes will light him to his carriage and I’ll be able to see him from here.”
“King, you have to go. This minute. What if Wilkes does find you here? He’ll kill you.”
“Wilkes?”
“If not Wilkes, then his brothers will. You know how they stick together.”
“I had to come, Mary. I had to see you again before I left for California.” He paused. “I love you, Mary.”
“I don’t believe you, King Sutton.”
“Have I ever lied to you, Mary? You don’t know the torture you’ve put me through these last months, seeing you, seeing your loveliness and not being able to reach out to you. Not being able to touch you or kiss you.”
“King, you know how I feel. It’s as though you’re the only real person I know. You’re the only one I can talk to, really talk to.�
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He sat up beside her and smoothed her hair with his hand, a strand catching in his ring. For a moment he hesitated.
“King,” Mary said, “I go all weak inside when you touch me. Nobody’s ever made me feel like that before.”
He leaned to her, kissing her, and her lips parted. Their tongues met and she was in his arms, awkwardly, both sitting up on the bed, and he felt her bare shoulder under his hand. Then her head tilted back and she fell beside him, her back across the pillow. As he was pulling her nightgown up, it tangled under her arms. She reached down to help him. Still the gown wouldn’t come off, so she pushed him away, raised her arms, and then he was able to remove it.
As she sat facing him, she seemed haloed by the moonlight coming through the curtains and the netting, her full breasts in shadow. He felt desire rise in him, demandingly, but he held his own urgent need back. He took her in his arms, guiding her down between the sheets with his mouth to hers, his tongue twining with hers, his body to hers—feeling the thrust of her breasts on his chest, her thighs on his legs. One of his hands explored between her legs, caressing her, and she quivered in his arms.
He kissed her neck, then lowered his head to the swell of her breast, his mouth closed over her nipple and he circled it with his tongue. She moaned. “Oh, King, oh, King,” she said again and again. He slid his knee between her legs, parting them, and suddenly he was inside her, his mouth still at one breast, his hand kneading the other while her body strained to move with his.
She shuddered, a growing, all-encompassing spasm seeming to rise from her loins to shake her entire body. She shuddered again and again but still he held back, stretched taut yet waiting. Finally, after a prolonged, ecstatic gasp, she stilled and lay limp in his arms. He kissed her gently on the lips and eyes.
“Oh, King,” she moaned. “I never knew it could be like that.”
He turned her over. When she was on her stomach, he knelt, straddling her, his hands at her hips. “King?” He lifted her. “On my hands and knees, King?”
He spread her legs so his were between hers. His hands felt for her sex, caressing her as he entered her from behind, one hand on her sex, the other cupping her breast. She groaned, straining back against him.
“I can’t again,” she panted. “I can’t, I ... oh, King.” She shuddered beneath him and he felt his response, let himself go at last and moved with her. Released. Fulfilled.
The netting was thrown aside and Wilkes stood staring down at them, a lamp in his hand. Behind him King had an impression of the dim figure of Dr. Robinson in the bedroom door.
King swung out of bed on the far side, went to the window, and began dressing. Wilkes stood immobile, gaping at him. The man seemed to be in total shock.
“Wilkes,” King said, “you have the damnedest sense of timing of any man I know. If you were going to ask Dr. Robinson to spend the night, you should have told me.”
He pulled the window open, stepped out onto the portico, dropped his boots over the side, lowered himself over the edge until he hung by his hands. He let go, landing with a thud on the hard earth. Brushing himself off he found his boots and walked across the lawn toward the woods. He did not look back.
When three of the Yancey brothers rode up to the Sutton place early the next morning, they found the overseer, Amos Beckworth, in charge and Betsy Sutton confined to her room. King had ridden off hours before. He had taken two slaves, the half-brothers Joshua and Jed. Where they had gone, Amos Beckworth had no idea.
When, ten days later, Dwight Yancey tracked King to the Charleston townhouse of a Sutton second cousin, he learned that King and his two slaves had been at sea for two days.
Bound for California.
Chapter Seven
When the Empire Hotel—W.W. Rhynne and P. Buttle-Jones, Proprietors—opened in Hangtown, California in the spring of 1849, one of the greatest mass migrations since the Crusades was underway.
Over a year before, on January 24, 1848, James Marshall had made his daily inspection of the sawmill he was building for John Sutter on the south fork of the American River. He walked to the race, the channel carrying water to the mill wheel.
“I went down as usual,” he told reporters later, “and after shutting off the water from the race I stepped into it, near the lower end, and there upon the rock about six inches beneath the water I discovered the gold. I pick up one or two pieces and examined them attentively. I then tried a piece between two rocks and found that it could be beaten into a different shape but not broken.”
Sutter tried to keep the find secret until the mill was completed but he failed. As word of the discovery spread down the coast to San Francisco, to the capital at Monterey and to Los Angeles, it was greeted at first with skepticism, then mild interest, then with wild excitement.
Slips carried the first of the gold to ports on the Pacific. Mexicans by the thousands, many of them experienced miners, trekked north. Hawaiians and South Americans boarded ships bound for San Francisco. They became the Argonauts, named for the shipmates of the mythical Jason who sailed on the Argo in search of the Golden Fleece.
Word was slower reaching the United States. Not until President Folk’s message to Congress in December did gold fever erupt with full force. But when it did, there was no surcease. Workmen quit their jobs, doctors closed their practices, and farmers put aside their plows in the rush to the West.
The Empire Hotel, two stories of pine logs roofed with cedar shingles, was Hangtown’s newest and largest building. It boasted a porch with a balcony on its top. It had six windows in the front alone, two of them paned with glass. The downstairs, other than a hallway designated the lobby, was one huge room housing the saloon and gambling hall; the hotel rooms were all on the second floor. Next to the saloon in an attached building was the store.
“The miners come in,” Pamela said, her voice sharp with irritation, “they look at our merchandise, they handle it, but they don’t buy it.”
“They will,” Rhynne told her. “They’re testing the water before jumping in.”
Pamela dabbed at her nose with her handkerchief. “You told me we’d clear two thousand dollars a month,” she said. “We’ll be lucky to clear two cents.”
Rhynne gave her a calculating glance. “Have you been taking your medicine?”
Pamela looked toward the other end of the store, where Selena toyed with her hair in front of a mirror nailed to the wall. Lowering her voice, she said, “As a matter of fact, no. I’ve been out of it since two days ago.”
Their eyes met. She tried to keep her gaze level under Rhynne’s sardonic stare, but could not. How was she to go on? Her entire body ached. She had to force herself to eat food that nauseated her.
“Laudanum, isn’t it?” Rhynne asked.
Pamela nodded, then sneezed.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he told her. Again she glanced toward Selena. Had she overheard?
“Pamela, be of good cheer,” Rhynne said in a louder voice. “The winter’s over, spring’s upon us. ‘Whither is fled your visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’’
“I think I’d appreciate more customers and less Wordsworth.” Pamela tried to smile. “I don’t know why I’m so melancholy of late. The rains, I suppose, and this never-ending muck.”
“The rains are over, the mud... He broke off. "What’s this, Pamela?” Rhynne, who had been testing the scales, held up one of the weights.
“The man who sold me the scales called it an Indian weight.”
Rhynne opened the back door and hurled the weight up the rain-gullied hill behind the store. “I’ll not abide it,” he stormed. “Paying a man half what his gold’s worth simply because he’s an Indian.”
Selena watched Rhynne return, slamming the door. She pulled her golden curls out over her shoulders, finally fastening a large blue bow in the back. All day she’d had a strange feeling that something was about to happen, yet nothing had and she was restless.
“Harry Varner us
es Indian weights,” she pointed out to Rhynne. “I’ve seen him.” Varner ran Varner’s Grocery, Hangtown’s first and only other general store.
“Honest Harry Varner.” Rhynne sniffed. “He’s well-named.”
“He frightens me, that Varner, as short as he is. He’s always watching me with those rheumy eyes of his.”
“If watching you were a crime, Selena, all men would have to be declared guilty.”
“Men watch every woman in these god-awful mining camps.” Pamela said.
Selena tossed her head. “Harry Varner,” she said, “acts as though we’re marauding Indians attacking his wagon train. Just because we opened this store.”
“He probably sees us that way,” Rhynne said.
There were shouts from outside and Rhynne went to the window as a man ran up to the doorway. “It’s here,” he cried. “It’s here. Horobin’s wagon is here.”
“At last.” Rhynne strode outside.
“Mother, do you need me?” Selena asked.
“Go ahead. I’ll stay. If I wait long enough, I may sell something, even if it’s only a pin.”
Selena ran after Rhynne to where a wagon pulled by two mules had been backed against the front of the hotel. The two teamsters were attempting to wrestle down a bulky, blanket-wrapped object—a crate by its appearance—onto two planks laid from the rear of the wagon to the porch.
“Careful,” Rhynne shouted. “It’s the only one of its kind in all the diggings.” The heavy object, some five feet long and four high, tilted dangerously, threatening to topple to the ground. Rhynne sloshed through the mud, put his shoulder to it, and together the three men slid it to the porch.
Rhynne stepped to the top of the porch steps and faced the gathering crowd. “Gentlemen,” he called out, “you’re just in time for the grand unveiling. Has anyone a knife?” A miner handed him his Bowie knife. Rhynne slashed the ropes and the blankets fell to the planking.
The crowd gaped.
