Fool's Gold (3 page)

An auctioneer was calling his goods from a canvas booth. ‘All at a bargain! Splendid double-soled triple-pegged waterproof boots! Fit your road-smashers exactly — yours for only four and a half ounces, sir!’

Although Sacramento was a thriving city, the gold boom was tailing off somewhat and the ships tying up at the wharves with wares that they could once have sold for up to ten times their real worth, often found that the market had dried up on them. Gone were the days when cornering the market in pans or shovels could make the seller’s fortune quicker than a bonanza strike. Nowadays the man who cornered the market in cast-iron stoves was more likely to have to sell below cost to cover his shipping costs, or in the more extreme cases, see his undertaking go bust and his iron stoves, chamber pots or kegs of nails dumped into the mud pits or dustholes of the big towns to become the foundations of some of the major thoroughfares.

With a sigh of relief she lowered herself on to an upturned barrel on the dusty sidewalk and opened the bag, listening to the auctioneer while she and the child finished the food. After the boots, the auctioneer began to sell off lamps and candles, before moving on to a stock of old-fashioned clothes, male and female, that some shipper back east had had the happy thought of unloading on the ignorant westerners. Eagerly, Alicia fished out the purse she had concealed in the skirts of her old black dress. There were no ladies out on the streets that dusty afternoon and she was able to buy a dove grey silk dress with the old style leg o’mutton sleeves and rather over-ornate trimmings, two bonnets and a couple of pretty shawls and a petticoat for the expenditure of only one of the quarter eagles she had had from the man at Tresco. The rest, over and above the fare to Sacramento, she was determined to send back.

Nothing else in Sacramento proved as good a bargain as the clothes, however. After trailing around the town for a couple of hours, she was forced to take a room in a far from salubrious building behind the Embarcadero warehouses. All the decent lodging houses were far beyond her means until she could get work and earn. She was forced to concede the justice of the minister’s remarks.

She was no more successful with her attempts to find work. As she emerged from the third milliner’s to turn her down, she suddenly caught sight of herself in the plate glass window. She stopped in her tracks and passed her hand wearily across her brow.

‘What is it, ‘Lisha?’ asked the child tiredly.

‘Good God!’ she said under her breath. It was hardly surprising no one would take her on. She had barely recognised her own reflection. This shabby, stooped figure was not Alicia Langdon! Wearily she abandoned the search.

The first night in Sacramento, she was too tired to do more than wash and fall into bed, but her landlady, the Widow Grey, made up in other respects for her lack of home comforts: she knew just what work there was available in the Golden City and promised to give Alicia the names of several stores that were short-handed.

She woke next day feeling well rested. It was many weeks since she had slept a night through, despite all Kai’s concoctions. It had taken weeks to get the drugs out of her system, weeks when she had been so unnerved by the silence of the wide open spaces after the raucousness of the claustrophobic prison cell that she had turned to drink for comfort, stolen and lied to Kai to get her hands on a bottle. But now she was over the worst and as each day passed, she felt a little more able to face the world.

Remembering the shock of that reflection, she took the time to wash herself from head to foot and clean the thick dust out of her hair. She dried it and brushed it till it shone. She put on her spare black skirt and the brighter of the acquired shawls and, with one of the gay new bonnets swinging by the ribbons from her fingers, looked at herself gravely in the fly-blown mirror.

She drew herself up and straightened her shoulders. It was as if she had peeled off the old layers acquired in prison and drawn on a new personality. Behind her Tamsin bounced on the bed.

‘Now you looks like my Lisha again!’ she exclaimed excitedly.

Alicia hugged the child, but when she turned away again her face was grim. If only she felt like the old Alicia, she thought. But there was no turning the clock back. What was done was done and she could never be the same girl again; recent events had only finished what Robert had begun.

Robert.

Robert had been so handsome. He had been on board Catesby’s flag-ship when it put into Yerba Buena — or San Francisco, as she was learning to call it — to take possession of California for the United States at the end of the Mexican war in ‘48.

Grieving for her dead mother, hope fast fading for her father, officially posted missing with a lost expedition into the interior, she had hurried down to the harbour hoping for a letter from her grandfather, enclosing a ticket for her return to Connecticut, where she could make her home with him at Valley Hall.

Seventeen years old, bereaved, cut off from the world in the little house with the mourning blinds drawn against the yellow sea-fogs, she was ripe for love. Blue eyes crinkled in a tanned face, long legs braced against the slight swell that rocked the deck, the fair-haired young Lieutenant seemed to her a giant, a hero.

The servants had returned to Mexico with the
Alcalde
and his daughters at the outbreak of war and she had no one to advise her. She was swept on board the flagship and off her feet by Lieutenant Robert J. Langdon. Within a week they were wed.

Her wedding night was a disaster, an unsatisfactory, fumbling night with Robert rendered too drunk by his fellow-officers to fulfil his desires, but she was young and optimistic, and she knew it was just a hiccup in their love affair. But the next morning Robert was posted 80 miles north to New Helvetia, to carry news to the settlers up by Sutter’s Fort of their new status as citizens of the United States.

Robert came back a changed man. Outwardly still the handsome young officer she had fallen in love with, but with a feverish gleam in his eyes, a slight tremor in his hands. At first she thought he was drunk again and her heart sank at the prospect of another night of inconclusive humiliation, but he was not drunk. He was far sicker than that: he had caught gold-fever.

He had led his little party of Marines without mishap through the heavily wooded valleys up to Sutter’s Fort. It was normally crowded with newly arrived emigrants and those Californian Indians who had survived the white man’s diseases and now clustered around the trading posts or the Catholic missions, but Robert’s party found the normally bustling fort almost empty. Gradually, in cryptic whispers and muttered clues, the story came out. James Marshall had found some curious deposits in the tide-race of the new sawmill his Indian labourers had built on the American River and the resulting exodus among his workers had left poor Johann Sutter with fields of sown crops and no prospect of any to harvest them; virtually every fit man, Indian and white, had gone upriver in search of the elusive gold.

Barely half of Robert’s marines returned from the American River with him, and he made little attempt to coerce them. Within hours of their return, before the word could spread, he sold the wooden house and plot which had been her home for six years, and bought himself out of the Navy.

‘But it’s not my home to sell!’ she protested weakly. ‘It’s my father’s!’

‘If he’s still alive, which I doubt,’ he replied brutally. ‘Any reasonable man would say it’s yours, and your property became mine on our marriage, so I can do as I like with it.’

He must have seen her look of shock, for now he became wheedling, sliding his arm around her waist and kissing her cold cheek. ‘Sweetheart, how else am I to get the money to start up? I have to buy out my commission, buy some transport and tools, and still have enough for a good stake. Don’t you see, my darling, we’re in at the beginning! We’ll be in and make our fortune before anyone else knows about it! A fortune for us and our children! Why, we’ll be able to buy up the whole of San Francisco Bay by the time we’ve finished! A little hardship now, that’s all. You won’t mind living in a wagon or a tent, will you? Like a real pioneer!’

The picture he painted for her bore very little resemblance to reality. The ox-drawn wagon took them and their supplies up as far as Sutter’s Fort, but from there on, the trail to the diggings was up narrow defiles, alongside roaring torrents which flowed down to the American or Feather Rivers, and only pack-mules or horses could get through.

The first night in the diggings, she carefully hid the drink outside the tent and, despite the mountain cold, arrayed herself in the silk nightgown she had had made with her wedding dress; shyly she averted her eyes as Robert undressed, sliding across beneath the rough blanket to make space for her husband, blushing as she remembered how she had reacted to the feel of his powerful, demanding body urgent against hers as he kissed her a reluctant farewell before returning to his ship.

Seventeen and ignorant, she was not prepared for what followed. She caught her breath in a startled gasp as her husband reached out and ripped her robe deliberately from neck to hem. Frozen with fear she screamed in pain as his strong fingers dug agonisingly into her soft breasts. Before she could move he rolled heavily on top of her, tearing at the remnants of her robe and knocking the breath out of her.

‘Robert! You’re hurting!’ she whispered hoarsely, the warmth draining from her body to be replaced by a cold terror she had never before experienced.

He growled deep in his throat and transferred his cruel grip from her sore breasts to her wrists, pinning her on her back as she struggled to pull away from him. He was breathing heavily, grunting as he butted his hips violently against hers. She didn’t know what was happening, she only knew that she was alone here with a man she hardly recognised as her husband, miles from another human being, and he was hurting her. She began to struggle again and he let go of her wrists and closed his hand slowly round her throat.

‘No, Robert!’ she gasped hoarsely.

‘Damn you to Hell, you bitch!’ he cried. Then the pressure seemed to lighten a little and he rolled off her. Eyes wide with fear, she backed away on all fours, until she tangled in the shredded remnants of her silk robe and fell in a painful heap on the earth floor. A rough hand grabbed her hair and jerked her head up, then Robert swore again and threw her violently back down on the floor, shouting at her words she hardly understood. When the mists of pain cleared from behind her eyes, she looked up and saw in the flickering light of the lamp the sweat standing out on his brow.

‘Robert?’ she moaned. ‘Please, I —’

Then his open hand landed on the side of her head and she saw no more.

She grew up swiftly that early summer of 1848. Miles away from civilisation, friendless, penniless, with everything she had ever owned now Robert’s, there was nowhere for her to turn. She became increasingly a stranger to the violent man who called himself her husband. After the first few weeks of brutal, failed attempts at consummation, he did not attempt to come near her again in what she mentally thought of as
that
way. And she was glad.

Chapter Three

‘You come for them directions?’ demanded Widow Grey, not looking up from the vast tub of washing in the yard. ‘Aggie! C’m’ere and take over!’ When Aggie at last came stomping across the rotting verandah, an assortment of grubby children in her wake, she turned around, drying her huge hands on her apron.

‘My, my!’ said Widow Grey admiringly. ‘There’s a change in a night!’ She stepped round Alicia, looking her critically up and down. ‘Lot younger’n I thought,’ she said consideringly. ‘Be a waste to send you to the stores. You want to go make your fortune in the saloons! All them
hungry
miners!’

It was the way she said ‘hungry’ that did it, threatening to break through the fragile mental barriers Alicia had erected to preserve her sanity. Tendrils of panic began to lick at the edge of her mind like little flames. A brief image — one moment there, the next gone — etched briefly on the back of her eyes like a print emerging from a negative. A small body in a corner, like a rag doll tossed carelessly aside; a man in a pool of blood; terror palpable in the very air. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and the image was gone as swiftly as it had come. If she let the memory unwind — but that way lay madness.

‘You all right, dearie?’ The voice intruded, rough but solicitous. ‘Here, sit down. Don’t look like you’ve been eatin’ enough recently.’ Alicia opened her eyes to see the arch smile. ‘Have to fatten yourself up a bit. Miners like their women well-covered. Now there’s the White Horse, the Missouri … or you could try the Green Tree or the Elephant.’

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ she said firmly, ‘but I’ll start off with the stores, if you don’t mind.’

‘Too fine for the saloons, are we?’ mocked Aggie. ‘Well, there ain’t no room for airs or graces this end of town, I can tell you! An’ if you’re reckonin’ on findin’ a position, better leave the brat behind with us and that’ll be three dollars extra.’

She could feel the sidewalk loungers watching her as she walked out down the street, eyes cast down, but she forced herself to pay no heed. She found Carson’s Stores down near the waterfront without too much difficulty and within minutes had been taken on by Missus Carson, a short, rather angular woman with a sour expression.

‘You’ll help in the shop and the stores out back,’ she told her. ‘Hours as necessary — I never close when there’s folk to buy. Sundays are your own; wages as good as you’ll get anywhere.’

Alicia took what was offered gratefully. She knew she hadn’t the strength to go on looking.

*

It was hard work and none of the people she worked with particularly congenial, but it was a living. When she was fitter and stronger, she would look again. Sometimes when she was heaving sacks of flour and barrels of bacon under Missus Carson’s eagle eye she thought longingly of the pretty little milliner’s shops. But there too there’d be floors to scrub, windows to clean and back yards to scour!

By the end of the first week, she knew why Missus Carson found it so difficult to keep help in the store. Not only was there her sharp tongue to contend with, but there were two other drawbacks. One was the saloon which her brother, Ned Sullivan, ran. The saloon was attached to the store and Missus Carson stayed open much longer hours than the other stores in the hope of catching as much trade as possible from miners made more expansive by Sullivan’s rot-gut whiskey. While they bought more drunk than sober, some of them tried to be as familiar with the shop girl as they were with the bar girls, but Alicia’s years in the mining camps helped her turn off such approaches with a smile and a joke. The other problem was Mr Carson, and he was not so easily dealt with.

He must have been a handsome man once, but he had long since run to seed on his brother-in-law’s whiskey and his own weak nature. His sandy hair was thinning and what was left he plastered across his freckled pate with a strong-smelling oil which seemed to permeate him entirely. Whenever she looked up in the store, she would find his watery blue eyes fixed on her; she didn’t much like the expression in them. He was always about the store, without, as far as Alicia could see, contributing much to its prosperity. At first she thought it just coincidence that he was always in the back room when she was fetching in stores, but by the end of her first week she knew it was not.

She began to wonder whether she would not be safer in the saloon where at least Sullivan had promised that, if she would try out behind the bar, he would keep her safe from any unwanted attentions. ‘What the girls do after we close is their business,’ he explained. ‘I’ll pay you for servin’ in the bar, and that’s all you have to do ‘less you wants. And I’d like ter see the feller that’d force hisself on you when I’m around!’

The other two employees worked exclusively in the livery stable and smithy behind the store. It was one of the biggest in Sacramento and she found Jim, the liveryman, an old Cockney sailor thrown on shore by a lame leg, and Sam, his half-Indian assistant, better company than the proprietors. Part of her duties was to take them out their dinner each day and keep the livery books up to date. Early in the week she found an order for a new plough horse for Tresco and persuaded Sam to take a note out to Chen Kai-Tsu with her directions.

A week after her arrival in Sacramento, she was crossing the yard at midday, carrying a heavy tray which she almost dropped when Chen Kai stepped out of the shadows.

‘Kai!’ She pushed the tray unceremoniously at Sam and hugged her friend enthusiastically under Jim’s interested gaze. ‘Oh, I’m so glad to see you!’ she exclaimed.

‘How is it with you, Alicia?’ he asked softly, taking her hands in his and holding them tightly. Jim, clearing his throat, turned away to polish saddles.

‘Better,’ she murmured. ‘Much better.’

‘This is not what I’d have chosen for you,’ he said rather bitterly, looking at the tray. ‘Why do you have to eat in the stables?’

‘I choose to,’ she replied with a smile. ‘Better company.’

He looked her over closely. ‘You look much better.’ He was relieved to see the grey shade had gone from her unnaturally pale skin and the hollows in her cheeks were beginning slowly to fill out again. ‘Tell me how Tamsin is.’

They stood in the shade of the livery stables while she told him of the arrangements she had made for Tamsin, but all the time she was looking back over her shoulder, listening for the shout that would summon her back to the counter.

‘I can’t stay much longer,’ she apologised.

‘They work you too hard!’ he said accusingly, swift concern in his eyes.

‘You know I was never afraid of hard work,’ she said with a shrug. ‘It would have been better if I could have got a living-in job, to have Tamsin with me, but there are very few jobs like that. The hours are rather long, to be sure, but the money is good. I could get more if I took up Sullivan’s offer to work in the saloon in the evenings …’

‘No! We don’t need money that bad. I still hope Corr-onel Cornish may be persuaded to take you on. And you working as a bar girl would hardly help my case!’

‘Poisoned him already?’ she asked tartly.

‘Not yet,’ he confessed ruefully. ‘But give me time.’ The smile faded and he looked a little anxious. ‘Till now, there has only been the Corr-onel and a few hands to feed and none of them much notice what they eat. Besides, I could always blame it on the poor supplies. But new hands will demand better chow than I can manage. Next week, we go up-country with Ker-hwan and all the new hands Corr-onel is hiring. We are going to build a cabin and corral for Pedro the shepherd and his new wife. I will have to cook for them all — and I have to buy supplies myself — today!’

She laughed at the woeful expression on his face. ‘Take prepared meat that only needs slicing up or frying up at the most — hams, tongues, pickled beef. And if it goes wrong, those marvellous herbs of yours will cover up a multitude of sins! As for the supplies, you just leave it to me.’

A shrill voice called out, angrily demanding to know where that ‘dratted girl’ was.

‘Missus Carson — I’ll have to go. Kai, when you come in, don’t forget to make it clear you’re purchasing for Tresco.’

‘Or they’ll throw me out?’

‘They don’t exactly practise what they preach here in Sacramento. But Missus Carson is very anxious to get the big ranch accounts. It’s her only chance to compete with Hopkins and Huntington.’ She picked up her skirts and turned to run. ‘Oh, don’t touch the bacon, whatever you do. It’s ex-Army, and rotten.’

It was not Missus Carson but her husband who was waiting for her in the gloomy corridor that connected the livery yard to the store. She drew back to let him pass, but he stayed where he was, blocking her way.

‘Who you meetin’ out thar?’ he asked, his little eyes darting past her.

‘Meeting?’ She looked at him blankly. ‘Only Jim and Sam. I took their food to the livery stables as I have done every day since I began working for you — for Missus Carson.’ She’d given Kai time enough to get away. ‘I can hear Missus Carson calling me,’ she said. Still he did not stir. ‘Coming, ma’am!’ she called out in a carrying voice.

Carson stepped back in alarm, but as she slipped past him, she felt his sweaty hands linger on her waist. It was all she could do not to scream and she had to fight to drive away all the horrors that tried to push their way into her consciousness at his touch. She wanted to slap his stupid, leering face, but she repressed the urge before it got out of hand. For the foreseeable future at least she needed the security of the Carsons’ job to keep her and Tamsin from starvation. Just pray that Carson’s fear of his shrewish wife and her hulking brother would stop him short at the roving hand.

She bustled about the shop, tidying up. It was a large store, thriving under Missus Carson’s vigorous leadership. In the front shop they stocked staple provisions: meat, bread, molasses, salt, preserved fruits, meat and vegetables, cheeses and hams, sides of beef and so on. In the second room, they had beds and bedding, overcoats, guernsey frocks and flannel shirts and drawers, boots and shoes, rubber waders and anything else the miners might be tempted to buy for their comfort in the hills. To one side, off the corridor that led to the saloon bar, was a third chamber full of mining tools and equipment, gold scales and medicine chests, the province of Missus Carson’s brother.

She looked around the room at all the equipment, running her hand down the smooth handle of a miner’s pick. Even now, she had only to close her eyes and she could once more hear the sounds of those early mining camps and smell the overpowering stench of the primitive diggings. Men worked from morning till night, waist-deep in the icy streams, digging the dirt out, sorting it, panning the more promising material to let the water separate out the gold — if gold there were — from the heavy alluvial sand. It was hard, back-breaking work and they retired only when the light failed, to lie shivering in their inadequate tents, soaked by the heavy mountain dews, until it was time to rise and start the weary work once more. They had to be constantly alert to guard their claim, and look to their mules or their tools which they always had to leave on the claim to establish possession. There was little time to wash clothes or sweaty bodies, or dig proper latrines, and the camps looked and smelt worse than the most appalling slums of the most overcrowded cities of Europe.

In that first hot summer and autumn, the Langdons found barely enough gold to live on. Food had to be bought at highly inflated prices from the camp chandlers who had organised a supply chain from San Francisco. Bread which sold for five cents in the east cost fifty cents in San Francisco and over a dollar by the time it reached the diggings. At least eight dollars worth of gold a day was needed just for enough bread and beans to stay alive and, more often than not, they did not make that much. The level of gold in the little marked jar rarely reached pork, let alone beef, and only the merchants seemed to be making that elusive fortune. Inevitably, they had to use up what was left of the money from the house just to survive.

Those miners who had the sense to group together were a deal better off, for they could send one of their members off to the nearest town — Sonora in the southern mines or Sacramento in the north — for fresh supplies. If they trusted each other sufficiently, he could even convert their gold into currency and bank it for safety while he was there, and the rest of the group would carry on digging, with the absent member receiving his fair share of any gold struck in his absence.

Robert, however, would have none of this. No one else was trustworthy; besides, tomorrow or the day after they would make the big break, find the mother lode, make their fortune. Why bring others in to share the big strike?

Then he would go into Angel’s Camp or Hangville for supplies and hear tell of another big strike somewhere. Someone would tell him of a man who had heard another say he knew a fellow who had met a man who was in a party shovelling up the big chunks. Lump fever would strike again and they would pack their meagre belongings on to the old mule and trek across the rough foothills of the Sierras to yet another wild and desolate spot. They left Bidwell’s Bar just before the big strike, then Old Dry Diggings, then Bullard’s Bar where they had seen miners paying at the store with lumps of gold.

They spent the winter in a miserable shack at the Fork of the Yuba. When an adventurer named Stoddart reeled into the camp with a tale of a lake whose shores and bottoms were studded with gold, it was inevitable that Robert would join the expedition to find the Golden Lake. It was all a tale, of course, and soon they were all referring to it as the Great Goose Lake Hunt. Stoddart fled and the disconsolate parties returned to the Yuba. Three Germans, becoming detached from the main party, returned to Downieville by a roundabout route, further north-east than had previously been prospected, and, on the east branch of the north fork of the Feather, they found some rocks riven with cracks packed with gold they could pry out with their knives. Rich Bar and the many bars that were discovered around it were soon overrun with thousands of miners. Robert, failing to make the quick strike he had hoped for, soon abandoned his claim and moved on.