Calico Palace (5 page)

“As I suppose you’ve been told, food in California is mostly beef. So here’s the beef, but I found bacon too, and I think later we’ll have ham. And here are some relishes and seasonings.” He took out curry powder and ginger, mustard and cloves and nutmegs, olives and raisins and dried apples. “It’s early for most vegetables, but I did find onions and turnips.”

“I’ll make a beef stew with onions,” said Kendra. “The next day we’ll have a curry.”

“I’m glad you like curry. This came from China on the
Eagle
.”

“And I’m glad to have these dried apples,” she said. “I’ll make a pie.

“May I give you a hint?” asked Ted. He took up the box of raisins. “Soak a few raisins overnight in wine and add them to the pie filling.”

“What a good idea! Who told you that?”

“Oh, a woman I used to know,” Ted answered, and quickly changed the subject. “Did the army boys tell you about the dance they’re planning?”

Kendra nodded, wondering about that woman he used to know. But he seemed already to have put her out of his mind. Standing with the table behind him, his hands resting on the edge, he asked,

“Dance with me?”

Kendra promised, hoping she did not sound too eager. Ted said,

“I’m invited because I was recommended by Mr. Chase, who’s a leading citizen.” His forehead wrinkled humorously as he spoke. On impulse Kendra began,

“Tell me—” She stopped, and he prompted her,

“Yes?”

“Why are you an errand boy?”

A grin creased his lean cheeks. “Because,” he answered, “I’m too bone-lazy to be anything better.”

As he said it, this seemed the most logical and amusing reason in the world. They both laughed, and Ted said,

“I like your name—Kendra. Where did you get it?”

“My father gave it to me. He liked unusual names. They say ‘Kendra’ is based on an old word that means ‘knowledge.’”

“Of course!” he exclaimed. “I know the word—
ken.
” He nodded reflectively. “And exactly right, too. That’s how it was when I saw you.

Puzzled, she repeated, “When you saw me?”

Again, as when he had stood in the doorway, Ted’s eyes swept over her. Again, it was a moment that made her feel as if she had just been discovered. He quoted,

“‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,

When a new planet swims into his ken…’”

Her breath caught in her throat. Again, she did not know how to answer, and again he saved her the trouble. He said,

“What an expressive face you have.”

Kendra put up her hand and felt it. “Do you really like my face?”

“Oh very much. Those black-lashed blue eyes, the way your hair grows, everything. Do you look like your mother?”

“No, like my father. They say I’m like him in many ways. I don’t remember him.”

“I think you missed a great deal,” Ted said gravely. At her questioning look, he added, “Because you are an unusual and winsome person. If you are like him, he must have been an unusual and winsome person.”

Kendra felt a start of pleasure. Back home, the Logans thought of her father as the family disgrace. Before she could answer they heard footsteps in the hall and Eva’s voice exclaiming,

“For pity’s sake, Mrs. Riggs, who do you suppose tracked in all this mud?”

“That’s my mother,” Kendra said under her breath.

Ted gave a long slow shrug. Hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, he sauntered into the hall. Kendra was observing that he did nothing in a hurry. She heard him say,

“I’m afraid I’m the culprit, Mrs. Taine.”

With respectful courtesy he told her who he was, apologized for his carelessness, and bowed himself out. Later that day Eva remarked that Ted Parks seemed surprisingly well bred for a man in his position.

T
HAT EVENING, WHEN KENDRA
said she wanted to cook, Eva heard her with glad surprise. Eva regarded cooking as a disagreeable duty. That anybody should
want
to cook astonished her. She was also astonished that Kendra had a talent for it. Kendra’s utter lack of skill at handicrafts, which Eva did so well, had led her to fear that Kendra had no talents at all.

“Why Kendra,” she exclaimed, “can you cook a whole meal? All by yourself?”

Kendra said she could, all by herself. “When you go to buy calico,” she continued, “let me go with you, for groceries.”

“My dear,” Eva said fervently, “I shall be delighted.”

Overhearing them, Alex smiled with more warmth than Kendra knew he possessed. “You are a thoughtful young woman, Kendra,” he said. Kendra guessed that with all Eva’s other gifts for bringing civilization to the wilds, that dreadful meal of boiled beef and cabbage was typical of what she put on table.

The next day was foggy and cold. But Eva wanted to start her shopping, so Alex sent up the horses, and two army officers as escorts. The four of them rode down to Montgomery Street and went into the trading post of Chase and Fenway.

Both partners came forward in welcome. They made an odd contrast: Mr. Chase brisk and stocky and good-natured, Mr. Fenway tall and thin and languid, with a mournful look as if he were always hearing sad music. Eva was so charming that Mr. Chase blushed with pleasure and even Mr. Fenway’s dismal face relaxed in a smile. Opening a side door Mr. Chase called, “Parks! Come take care of these ladies!” Ted came out and said he would be happy to do so.

Kendra went with him into the storeroom and he showed her around. She did not buy much, for she had the foodstuffs Ted had brought her the day before, but now she knew what she could count on. She went home and prepared the dinner she had planned yesterday: a beef stew with onions, and for dessert a dried apple pie, made as Ted had suggested, with raisins soaked in wine and added to the pie filling.

Alex ate dinner with astonished relish. Afterward he said, almost respectfully, that he would like to bring some of his army friends to dinner now and then. Kendra said of course, and Eva said they would be welcome. After this, he invited his friends often, and as they discovered Kendra’s menus and Eva’s charm they told him he was the luckiest man in town.

The mornings were foggy, the afternoons windy and sharp. With army escorts Kendra and Eva rode down to Montgomery Street nearly every day. They did much of their shopping at Chase and Fenway’s. Eva liked the store, because Ted was so obliging, and because Mr. Fenway saw to it that the place was swept and dusted and the hinges did not squeak.

The building had two main rooms, the front room for trade and the back for storage, and a smaller room used as an office. Across the front room was the counter, and at one side a stove around which men with time on their hands smoked and yarned.

In the storeroom the walls were lined with over-full shelves, and the floor crowded with crates and barrels not yet unpacked. Kendra liked to take her basket and browse in here. It was not a simple task, for as the boys unpacked they piled goods wherever they found space on the shelves, so that prunes and sardines stood among hatchets and shoes and candles; but she enjoyed it, especially when Ted had time to come in and help her.

While Kendra chose the foodstuffs, Eva would often go shopping elsewhere. (It was not wise, she said, to give too much business to one firm.) Leaving Kendra in care of Mr. Chase, Eva would take both the army escorts with her. She did not want to be seen riding with only one man (she said this was all right for a young girl but not for a married woman; it might cause talk). On days when she did not leave the store Eva waited for Kendra in the front room. Seated on a box, with traders and officers around her, she laughed and chatted with them, her manner exquisitely balanced between an artless warmth and the reserve becoming a colonel’s wife.

The door to the storeroom was always open, and Messrs. Chase and Fenway and the packing boys came in and out, but Ted and Kendra had many chances to talk. Ted was interesting, and he never spoke again of any “woman he used to know.” When the
Cynthia
sailed for Honolulu, Kendra did not miss her shipboard friends at all.

The
Cynthia
left sooner than Captain Pollock had intended. Part of the ship’s cargo consisted of goods ordered by Honolulu merchants, but he had planned a longer delay in San Francisco, to give himself and his crew a rest. However, he was leaving now because the garrison at Monterey had sent up a plea for help.

Captain Pollock told Kendra and Eva about this when he called to say goodby. He was in high spirits, laughing as he described his mission, for on shore Pollock was not as formal as he was at sea. He was being sent to Honolulu, he said, to get salt meat and dried split peas for the sailors on the battleships at Monterey.

“The naval supply is running low,” he explained, “and the boys are grumbling. They hate all this fresh food from the ranches.”

Kendra and Eva were surprised, but Pollock was not. Knowing seamen, he knew they liked the food they were used to at sea.

He said he had been told to come back as soon as possible. An average voyage to Honolulu was three weeks each way, but the
Cynthia
would probably do better than this. As he talked, Kendra mischievously wondered if his good humor at leaving for Honolulu might not be due to the prospect of seeing that gambling hostess Loren had told her about. But the lieutenants were waiting to escort herself and Eva to the store, and Ted was there, and she hardly thought of Captain Pollock again.

She was liking Ted more and more. At home, Kendra had met young men who flirted and told her she was pretty. But she was not used to having anybody, man or woman, take a genuine interest in her as a person who stood out from all the other people in the world. This was what Ted did. She found herself talking to him with more enjoyment than she had ever felt with anybody else.

He was more interested in talking about her than about himself, but when she asked him he said he came from New York, where he had worked for a legal firm. Everybody had told him he had a fine chance to rise in the world. All he needed was diligence, promptness, perseverance, and various other virtues he did not possess. He had been utterly, unbearably bored.

“So one day,” he said, “I took a ship for Honolulu.”

They were in the storeroom. Kendra held her basket, while Ted was carrying a bag of new potatoes from Sutter’s Fort. Sutter’s launch had come down a few days before, and Ted had put aside these potatoes for her as soon as they were brought in. As he spoke, Ted shrugged.

“There you have me, Kendra. Hasty, impetuous, reckless, no ambition to be President, just living life as it comes along.”

They both laughed. Ted reminded her that tomorrow night was the time set for the dance.

“I have some packing to do tomorrow,” he went on. “Sutter’s agent brought an order for tools, to be sent up by the launch. I should be finished before dark, but if I’m not I’ll quit anyway.”

There was a pause. Kendra asked suddenly, “Ted, if you could do anything you pleased, what would you do?”

“Go places,” said Ted. “Not the regular spots but—oh, the inside of China, the lonesome islands, the dim far countries.” He gave her his happy smile. “And I’d take you with me.”

At this moment Mr. Chase came blundering in to ask Ted if he had shown the young lady that cheese from the Columbia River country.

They went back into the front room. Here Eva was holding court. Her clear, friendly voice drifted across to them.

“I tell you, boys, it’s sheer nonsense. My husband told me a man came to the quartermaster’s office the other day, bringing some of those shiny flakes. He wanted to know if they were gold. The quartermaster looked at them carefully, and said they were nothing but yellow mica.”

Standing by the counter with pencil and notebook, Ted was totaling the cost of Kendra’s purchases. He glanced at her sideways. “I’d rather have a dance with you than a bag of gold,” he said softly. “There’ll be two men there tomorrow night for every woman. But you’re going to dance with me twice. I said twice.”

The next evening was cold, with a hard wind blowing the clouds across the moon. Kendra brushed her hair till it glistened, and put on a dress of white silk printed with little blue flowers the color of her eyes. With Alex and Eva she rode horseback to the scene of the ball, the Comet House on Dupont Street. When they had given their wraps to a soldier on duty they went into the parlor, a room with garish flowered wallpaper and pink-shaded whale oil lamps.

Kendra had never been to a dance like this one. The men present were army officers and their friends: traders, ranchers, officers of the vessels in port, sixty men in all. The women were all the wives and daughters that could be scraped up. There were two army wives besides Eva, all who had made the long journey to San Francisco. Mr. Chase brought his wife, a lady stout and good-natured like himself, but he had brought no daughter because his three children were all sons. (Mr. Fenway, who had neither wife nor child, was absent.) Also there were women of the Mormon families, and several native Californians of Mexican descent, wives of British and Yankee traders.

Altogether, to dance with the sixty men there were twenty-seven women. Only three of these, Kendra and two Mormon girls, were not married. While they danced, the extra men stood along the walls and gazed—no, thought Kendra, they
gawked.
They were not so bad as the loafers on the waterfront, but they did make her think of some farmers she had seen once, yearning over the prize pigs at a fair.

Kendra had so many pleas for dances that she could say yes to only a few of them. But somehow, without any appearance of pushing, Ted found her and claimed her, and got her.

Ted was good-looking in his black suit and white shirt and his well cut shoes. The music was provided by the army band, and they played well. Just now they were playing a frivolous little tune and singing the words that went with it.

“Love is like a dragonfly,

Here today, tomorrow gone,

Love’s a teasing passerby,

Blows a kiss and hurries on…”

Ted and Kendra danced. Never had Kendra been so aware of a man’s arm around her, or of how the two of them almost melted together as they followed the music. Ted looked down at her, his gaze lingering on her dark blue eyes and the arrow of hair. Bending his head closer he whispered, “You’re beautiful.”