Fool's Gold (6 page)

‘No more cry, missie, please! Need help now.’

Gradually the racking sobs stopped and she took the baby in her arms and held it tight.

‘Please, missie. Help me?’ he pleaded. ‘If Chen take this Anglo baby down into town and tell the people her parents died in my tent …’

‘They’ll string you up.’

‘I could have saved them if they’d let me. I have skills with herbs.’

‘They won’t care about that.’ Prejudice against the Chinese was so strong that no one would listen to his explanation.

‘I’ll help you, of course.’ She passed a weary hand across her eyes. ‘But …’

‘Plenty time think, missie. Have to wait anyway.’

‘Of course. To be sure we don’t carry the infection.’

They stayed in the camp for three days, she with the baby in the wagon and he in his tent farther away across the gulch. They lived on the food she had brought up with her and the little that he had left. There was no milk for the baby, but he brewed up a strange gruel out of ground beans and some herbs that he picked. It seemed to agree with little Tamsin.

The first day they did little but sleep and eat, for if Alicia was tired, then the Chinaman, Chen Kai-Tsu, was exhausted.

On the afternoon of the second day, she sat on the steps of the wagon, the baby on her knee, trying to work out a tale for the folk of Sonora which would not involve Chen Kai-Tsu.

‘I could take the child to Angelina — she’ll know a Mexican woman who’ll take her in.’

A shadow passed across Chen’s face. ‘In Sonora? Picture lady not like them there. Think they all her-et-ic.’ He struggled with the word. ‘She a Batt-Batt …’

‘Baptist?’

‘So.’ He nodded. ‘She believe her God protect her.’ He laughed scornfully. ‘She better have trusted my herbs against the cholera!’ She had never heard him speak so freely and rather suspected he had been drinking. Soon after, he fell asleep, leaning against the slender tree-trunk.

He did not stir for hours. Then, as the sun began to dip below the rim of the hills behind them, the baby cried and he stirred in his sleep. Quite clearly she heard him say: ‘Even the pigs don’t foul their own troughs, but Anglos, they foul their own wells!’

She fed the baby, put her in the wagon to sleep and when he awoke she was sitting in front of him, watching him with a puzzled frown.

‘Missie?’ His eyes were alert and wary.

‘Chen Kai-Tsu, I think you should drop this “missie” nonsense. This act of the meek Chinese coolie simply will not do. Twice now when you have been off your guard, I have heard you speak perfect English!’

He jerked his head up and for the first time she saw the shadow of fear in his eyes.

‘An opinion I would prefer you to keep to yourself, ma’am,’ he said coolly. ‘With the general run of Americans in the mines, it pays to be what they expect: a meek, ignorant Chinese coolie. Exceptions are liable to be subjected to even worse treatment than the rule. Twice I have set up a small drug store, a
botega
, to sell simple medical supplies to the miners. Twice they have burnt me out. They think it unsuitable that a Chinee should claim medical knowledge, even the most basic. The last time, three of my people died.’

‘Then why stay?’

‘Like most of us here, I guess. Where else would I go?’

‘Is your family here in California?’

‘Never had a family. I’m a foundling, picked up on the banks of the Pearl River. Maybe the son of peasants who died in one of our endless famines, or maybe I was the unwanted product of one of the western missionaries or traders.’

‘You’re certainly taller than the average Chinese!’ she agreed. ‘Who found you?’

‘A very kind, very good old man who took me in and raised me.’

‘A doctor?’ she hazarded.

‘Not a doctor as you would imagine a doctor to be!’ he laughed. ‘But a healer, yes. He was a follower of K’ung Fu Tzu — Confucius — what you in the West call a philosopher, a wise man. He taught me much. But he was old and he died.’

‘What happened to you then?’

‘I went to Canton and tried to get work there, but I was still young and not strong enough. I was handed over to the British — you understand they have had great power there since the Opium Wars — and they sent me to a Mission in Hong Kong. They fed me, educated me — on their terms! Because of a shortage of western doctors, I was eventually allowed to work in the Mission Hospital. A marvellous opportunity; I could compare European medicine with traditional Chinese healing and select what is best from each. If I could have stayed there and worked with my own people, I would have been happy. But I was a
native
and could not qualify and so I had to leave.’ He chuckled reminiscently. ‘I fell out with the Crown authorities and the Mission, then I compounded my crime by telling the local overlord that I thought no more highly of his ancestor worship than I did of the Anglicans! The one action they ever agreed upon was that the colony could dispense with my presence. They found me a ship on which I could work my passage to Hawaii. I stayed there awhile — there is a large colony of Chinese among the Kanakas in the Sandwich Islands — but my appetite for travel had been whetted and so I joined another ship and came here to Gum Shan, the land of the Golden Mountain.’

He picked up a long twig and snapped it in half and half again until it was no more than a pile of bark and fibre.

‘That’s another reason why the Americans don’t like me — I’m still a free man. I worked my own passage and owe no allegiance to the companies. The democratic Californians find it easier to deal with Chinese immigrants who know their place — even though that place is virtual slavery.’

‘So you came to make your fortune in the gold fields?’

‘One man’s fortune is a hundred men’s disappointment,’ he said drily. ‘No, I don’t really know why I came. Sometimes I think it is worse here than in China. No matter how hard the Chinese work, how much trouble we go to not to vex the Anglos, they despise us. If they are drinkers, they despise the Chinese who smoke opium — yet what difference is there? They will stake a whole mine on the turn of a card or roll of a dice, and still despise the Chinese for gambling at Mah Jongg — yet what difference is there? They despise the white who does no work — yet they despise the Chinese more because they will work the abandoned claims and tailings a white man will not look at; they drive them from the mines, and they must become cooks or launderers to pay off the debts to the Companies. They pin their faith in a drunkard like Doctor Walker and his ilk, but they won’t let me nurse them because I am a “Chinee”.’ He hunched his long body forward and stared down at his hands for a moment.

When he looked up again, a smile crinkled the edge of his almond shaped eyes. ‘And now I am becoming maudlin, like the best drunken American.’ He reached behind the tree and swung a half-empty whiskey bottle in front of him. ‘If you are brought up among the
yang-kuei-tsu
, the foreign devils, it is easy to pick up their bad habits,’ he laughed.

Alicia woke early the next morning. Tamsin was still sleeping peacefully in her straw-filled drawer. Outside, the birds were singing and she felt, for the first time in years, hope stir afresh within her. It was a new day. Without Robert, a new life.

She rose quietly and stretched. She washed in the little brook that ran down from the spring and fetched more fresh water from the source, ready to mix with the ground beans for when Tamsin woke.

She had a sudden longing for a warming cup of the sage tea that Chen Kai brewed, for the autumn air was chill this morning. But there was no sign of her companion. She suspected that he had drunk rather more than he was accustomed to and overslept.

She skipped up the steps and began to explore the cupboards inside the wagon. After all, Tamsin’s family had lived here: there must be utensils and stores. And some fresh clothes for Tamsin. So far, Chen Kai had always changed the child’s bindings, but it was surely time that she pulled her weight.

The inside of the wagon was lined with cupboards. In the first, she found some cups and pitchers, rough plates and bowls and some knives and spoons, but it was what she found in the locker behind the seat that caused her to let out a whoop of triumph.

In a large latched box were sheets of polished glass in a variety of sizes. Battened tightly on the shelf above were a number of large bottles of ether and alcohol, nitrated cotton, silver nitrate, hyposulphite of soda.

She looked wildly around her, then gently lifted the baby out of the cot. Beneath the quilt and straw on which she lay was a further locker. In it, nestling in a quilted box, wrapped in black cloth, was a Talbot camera with the wide aperture lens necessary for portraiture, a tripod to support it and a case of delicate tints for hand colouring. Underneath she found a box marked ‘patent albumenized paper’ and a pamphlet: ‘All you need to know about the new collodion process, as devised by Mr. Frederick Scott Archer’. The ‘picture man’, unlike so many other daguerrotypers, had believed in keeping abreast of progress. He had moved on from Daguerre’s ‘mirror with a memory’ to the new glass plates for the wet collodion method, which Alicia had only read about, which allowed faster exposures than before and claimed to give better, clearer images even in poor lighting. And paper to print on, in the negative-positive process devised by Fox Talbot — more popular with miners who wished to send their calotypes home, to grieving parents or pining fiancées!

Chen Kai found her still standing there, in a daze. He picked up the baby from the floor where she was wailing. ‘Something is wrong?’

She turned to him, eyes aglow.

‘Chen Kai! How would you like to leave Dry Gulch — and Sierra City — and never have to go down into Sonora again? Make a completely new start!’

‘How? Have you struck gold?’

‘In a way!’ she said excitedly. Then, suddenly, her face fell and the animation drained away. ‘But … the wagon isn’t ours and nor is the equipment.’ She sighed heavily. ‘And yet it did seem such a tempting idea.’

‘If the wagon belongs to anyone, it belongs to Tamsin, and she won’t want to get up on the box and drive away yet awhile. Can’t be mine: Chinese can’t hold property.’ He looked at her curiously. ‘Were you thinking of selling it? I’ve not heard of any other picture men about the place might be interested in it — leastways, no closer than Auburn one way and San Francisco the other. This one was the only picture man I’d ever seen round the Southern mines.’

‘Was there much work for them roundabouts?’

‘Plenty. Can’t be more than a dozen men in the whole of California who know how to operate the picture machines. And like the storekeepers and the saloon-keepers: it’s the men who supply the miner’s needs who make the money, not the miners. But this wagon is about as much use as fool’s gold! We have no picture man.’

‘Yes we have!’ He looked at her in blank amazement. ‘I can make daguerrotypes.
I
am the picture man, you must be my assistant — my picture lady!’

She knew a momentary qualm as she said it. It was, after all, some years since Nuñes Carvalho had shown her how to take and fix the image, and techniques had improved rapidly since then.

‘It — it was all a long time ago,’ she stammered.

‘If you did it once you can surely do it again.’

She must. She could not turn her back on this chance of independence — a chance to escape the memory of Robert and the stigma of being Lucky Langdon’s woman.

And then there was Tamsin. Could she hand her over to some stranger and walk away, never to know how she was being cared for, whether she was loved?

‘Everything must be here,’ he said softly. ‘All you have to do is remember what order it goes in. Start practising now; teach me what I must do.’

Still she hesitated.

‘Think of all those rich miners out there in the hills, desperate to get themselves pictured off, to show their families back east how well they are doing.’ He reached out gently and touched her arm. ‘We have both suffered ill fortune in the past: now the Fates are smiling on us at last. It does not do to turn your back on them.’ She looked from him to the baby and back to the camera again. ‘They may not give a second chance,’ he said sombrely.

She handed him down a coarse apron of duck and selected two bottles from the shelf.

‘Mix some of that with twice the amount of this one,’ she instructed. ‘Don’t breathe in the fumes! I’ll set up the tripod.’

He put his hands together and bowed. ‘Velly good missie!’ he said gravely. And as he raised his head, she saw that he was beaming from ear to ear.

So they had set out, full of confidence, on the road that led inexorably to San Francisco … and the shadow of the gallows.

Chapter Six

After another hard week labouring at the Carsons’, Sunday did not turn out to be the day of rest that Alicia had hoped for, as she had decided to go to church — the church the Carsons attended. Not that she was going to suit them, of course, but she had learnt from Mr Jones that the minister’s sister ran a sort of Dame School for the younger girls of the town whose parents could not or would not send them back east to Young Ladies’ Academies.

It was, she admitted guiltily to herself, pure self-interest that was taking her to God’s House this fine summer’s morning — but then, of how many others could the same not be said?

It did not take her long to wash and dress them both. She took time to pretty up Tamsin, brushing out her thick fair hair and weaving through it blue ribbons to match her eyes.

She was a curiously biddable child, had been so ever since that dreadful time up at Coloma. If only Alicia had more time to devote to her, she knew she could bring her out, turn her once again into the bright, vivacious little girl she had once been. But a biddable child was so much easier.

She hoped she might be able to persuade the minister’s sister to take Tamsin into her Dame School. It would cost money, of course, but not much more than she already paid the rapacious Aggie Grey for her casual supervision. And this time it would be money well spent, for Tamsin would be continuing the education that Alicia had started in better days and receiving more attention than the careless, slipshod Aggie lavished on the entire brood. She had had to close her mind to the question of Tamsin’s safety and well-being during the day; it was a worry, but she could see no cure for it.

The streets were almost as bustling and busy on this Sabbath as on any weekday. With the scattered population of the outlying ranches and the mining camps, Sacramento had never concerned itself overmuch about Sunday travel and the streets were full of carts and carriages and riders on horseback.

She walked resolutely down towards the Main Street, with Tamsin at her side, looking neither to right nor left. She wore her bonnet at a demure angle, shading her face from the dust and the heat of the sun. The pale grey silk dress she had bought at the knock-down street corner auction that first day in Sacramento had been thoroughly washed and the sleeves restyled more in the modern manner; the over-ornate trimmings around the neck and hem had been ruthlessly removed and the decolletage filled with a muslin fichu. Now, with a Paisley shawl around her shoulders, more for modesty than warmth, she made a pleasant enough picture, attracting admiring glances from the gentlemen as they passed in their carriages on their way to church, and occasional warm comments from the miners hanging around on the street corners and sidewalks.

She had never rated her looks very highly, right from the earliest days in California when her only ambition had been to have olive skin, dark eyes and luxuriant black locks like the
Alcalde’s
daughters. Robert — handsome, dashing Robert — had always called her plain and, as in so many other matters, she had accepted his judgement.

In a crowded city, London, Paris or New York, she might not have rated a second look, for she was attractive rather than stunning. But she was young and she was beginning, in spite of everything, to regain that joy in life that had been so strong in her. In California women were still very scarce and Sacramento thought her beautiful.

It was pleasantly cool in the newly finished stone church, even though the place was packed to the doors with the upright citizens of Sacramento and their families and a seething mass of miners.

She realised guiltily that she had not been in a church since that fateful day in Yerba Buena when the ship’s chaplain had married her and Robert in the little clapboard church down by the Presidio.

So often she had meant to slip into a church and give thanks for the three blessings that had come into her life that autumn up at Dry Gulch: Chen Kai, Tamsin and the picture wagon, but Sunday had never been for them a day of rest. Whether in the mining camps or San Francisco, Sunday had been the only day for cleaning out the studio, polishing up the plates with acid and powdered pumice, developing and printing out the last boxes of exposed plates and replenishing the chemicals.

She settled Tamsin into the pew and gazed around with fascination at the cross-section of Sacramento society. To the right of them, in the centre aisles, the occupants of the main pews exchanged polite bows with one another. Their shawls and waistcoats were of brighter hue than might have been acceptable on a Sunday back east, but this was California, the Gold State, and here it was the fashion to show your wealth in your dress.

She listened in fascination to the elderly lady in the pew in front of her who was impressing her out of town companion by pointing out in the piercing whisper of the hard of hearing just who was acknowledging whom and, equally diligently, who was ignoring whom.

‘There’s Collis Huntington and his nephew. Look. Dressed very plain, in black. And that tall, gangling fellow, that’s Mark Hopkins. The fashionable woman next to him, that’s his wife. See, she’s smiling at Huntington. There’s a rumour Huntington and Hopkins are going to combine their stores.’

In that case, thought Alicia grimly, Hopkins’ store on K Street would cease to be one of Carson’s main rivals and would, in all likelihood, drive them right out of business.

‘I thought Hopkins was settled in San Francisco?’ objected her companion.

‘They’re here to discuss the new railroad with Theodore Judah. He wants them to finance it.’

‘Is he here?’

‘Yes, there he is.’

‘Not very handsome, to be sure, though they say he’ll go far.’

‘Crazy Judah, they call him up here. I prefer to ride on the stage coach, myself.’

‘And who is that ravishing creature across the aisle?’

‘That brazen creature all decked out in Chinese silks? What dear Henry refers to as one of our “soiled doves”. That’s Yuba Jenny.’

‘How shocking to see such a creature in the House of God!’ said her companion in a horrified whisper.

The deaf lady shrugged. ‘What would you?’ she hissed. ‘She provided most of the funds to build the church!’

So enthralled was Alicia by this recounting that she had not noticed that the preacher had come in until other members of the congregation began to shush the elderly lady, whose habits were clearly known and tolerated.

She rose with the rest of the congregation and turned to the pulpit. Suddenly the church was no longer cool and she was sure she was about to swoon with the heat. Looking down benignly on the assembled congregation was the Reverend Cooper.

By the time they rose to sing the first hymn, she had recollected herself and was able to sing, albeit rather quaveringly, with the rest of the faithful. The Reverend Cooper was, she chided herself, unlikely to condemn her from the pulpit. And half way through the mercifully short sermon she realised he was almost certainly not going to recognise her anyway. The Colonel had not recognised her in the store and he’d been standing much closer; the minister had had his attention always with his horses on the rough road and had scarce paid her any heed. And of course, the straw hats would have hidden their faces. She allowed herself to relax a little.

She realised that in dismissing him as a dry old stick, she had done the Reverend Cooper a disservice. He knew to a nicety how to hold the wayward interest of the miners clustered at the back of the church and, without insulting anyone’s intelligence, explained his beliefs and his sermon in simple terms. The hymn singing was rousing, the homilies and readings brief, and she came out of the church with a feeling of well-being she had not known for the last miserable six months.

Her heart lurched as she realised that the Reverend Cooper and his sister were waiting to greet every churchgoer individually as they came out.

Miss Letitia Cooper was a lady in her late forties, still smooth of face and with the most delightful cornflower blue eyes. Her voice had a musical lilt to it and she fluttered her hands as she spoke, like a failed opera singer, thought Alicia wickedly. But there was no mistaking the sincerity of her greeting when Mrs Carson scurried across to introduce them.

‘Mrs Owens, you say? My dear, how delightful to meet you. Our little society here can always do with some more ladies. We are so few, and out in the wilderness still, as far as civilisation is concerned, State Capital or no State Capital. And all alone with the little girl to care for. How do you do, my dear. What’s your name?’

‘Tamsin, ma’am.’ She dropped a little bob and blue eyes looked into blue and seemed to like what they saw, for a little natural smile, the first for many months, curved the child’s soft mouth.

‘What a beautiful name. In honour of the heroine of the Donner tragedy, is it not?’ She did not wait for an answer, but addressed herself again to Alicia. ‘And so you are being so good as to assist Mrs Carson in the store?’ This was a novel way of putting it and one that didn’t seem to appeal much to the Carsons. ‘I should have visited you before this, but I understand you live out of town?’

‘A little way,’ confessed Alicia, who had no intention whatever of mentioning that she lived at Widow Grey’s, which she was beginning more and more to think of as a house of dubious, if not ill, repute.

‘You must be very busy during the week, but there is not a great deal for respectable ladies to do here on the Sabbath. Apart from the services, of course,’ she said, with a wry smile at her brother who was discussing parochial affairs with one of his wardens. ‘I hold a sort of ladies’ party every Sunday when Octavius goes up to Perkins to preach. We sew for others and have a little chat and some tea and cakes and so on.’ She turned to Tamsin. ‘Now do you think you could bring your mama along, say about half after three?’

Tamsin giggled at the thought that she would be in charge of the party. ‘Oh yes, ma’am!’ she agreed.

*

In a distant room, a mantel clock struck three.

‘The lady said there would be tea and cakes, Lisha,’ ventured Tamsin. It was nearly a year since all the trouble had started and at least that long since she had eaten a cake. Her eyes grew dreamy at the prospect.

Alicia was in a quandary. She had always tried to avoid too much contact with the other females in the towns and camps, either because they were not ladies at all, or because she had not wished to provide a juicy subject for their gossip.

But surely by changing her name she had left Lucky Langdon’s shade behind? And the social contact would be welcome, she had to admit, for she was missing Chen Kai more than ever; Tamsin was normally asleep by the time she returned from her day’s drudgery at Carson’s and the Greys, mother and daughter, had not two ideas in their heads to rub together.

‘There will be a lot of other ladies there,’ warned Alicia. ‘All watching to see how well we behave.’

‘Then we can go?’ She could not suppress the excitement in her voice. ‘I’ll be very good, Lisha, really I will!’ Alicia could not resist the appeal in the child’s eyes.

‘Of course you will, my lovely!’ she said with a laugh. ‘And we shall both have tea and cakes!’

A warm welcome awaited them that afternoon at the smart house on L Street, just a block away from the Stage Depot. The house was from the outside neat and trim, just like Miss Letitia.

Inside, however, Letitia Cooper had been unable to resist the current fashion for clutter. The windows, endowed with attractively simple shutters in the Federal style, were festooned inside with deep wine-coloured curtains heavily fringed to match the covers on the chairs and couches. The walls were panelled in a rich dark wood, heavily overcarved and topped with moulded leaves and urns. In the centre of the longest wall stood a marble-faced fireplace, its three tiers supported by sculpted columns and topped by a mantel draped in rich purple velvet. In the centre of the room stood a vast table on massively carved legs, half hidden by fringed drapes, over which had been cast a linen cloth for the sewing. At the far end of the room, the panelled wall was interrupted by heavily carved doors which could, at need, be opened to throw the two adjacent rooms into one.

The floor space was almost entirely taken up by spindly chairs, delicately carved and inlaid, small desks, a secretaire and a side table. Wherever there was a space, however small, there was either a spool-turned whatnot crammed with little china ornaments, cups and plates, silver compotes and urns, or potted palms and aspidistras set in huge floor vases or hip-level wicker planters. On the walls hung tinted lithographs of bucolic scenes and recent disasters in home-made frames adorned with the cylindrical pods of the cattail reeds, and what were presumably family portraits in more elaborate gilt frames. On the floor was spread a rich Chinese rug, and the elaborate patterns struggled to emerge from their ruby red background into the few unfurnished spaces.

The overall effect was overwhelming; at Alicia’s side, Tamsin stood wide-eyed, her thumb in her mouth, drinking in the spectacle.

‘My dear Mrs Owens, so pleased to see you,’ fluttered Miss Cooper. ‘As you see we are all hard at work.’

A group of women sat around the table, their work baskets, some lined in patchwork, some in quilted satin, in front of them.

The bell pealed again. ‘And here’s another arrival. You must excuse me. Mrs Revel, I rely on you to introduce Mrs Owens to our little group.’