California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1) (29 page)

Esther put off accepting the Kelseys'
invitation to stay in their guest room for several days. She wanted to be
alone, have time to think. But then she gave in. She had grown tired of the
noise and bustle around the Parker House. Barnett had left for Monterey. She
could not join him until the end of the week, and she realized that no amount
of planning would guarantee the
Frémonts
would not be curious about questions
concerning Mosby. She would simply have to wait and improvise her approach.

Bill Kelsey offered to pick her up at the
hotel, but Esther declined. Not wanting to impose, she hired a buckboard and
driver for a late afternoon departure. It was well past supper when the
apologetic driver arrived, explaining that he had broken an axle shortly after
noon. Disgruntled because she was keeping the Kelseys waiting, Esther had the
driver load her bags on the buckboard while she crossed Portsmouth Square to a
small shop. She hoped to find an appropriate gift for Connie Kelsey as a token
of her gratitude.

The wrapped porcelain
figure
of a child under her arm, she started
back toward the buckboard. Guitar, banjo, and violin sounds wafted out onto the
plaza from the
Aguila de Oro
and
other gambling houses amid a loud murmur of voices and occasional peals of laughter.
As she glanced into the Verandah gaming tent, the sound and sight of a dextrous
musician drew her attention. She stopped and watched as the man alternately
sang hoarsely and blew through a set of penny whistles on a makeshift brace
around his neck. Simultaneously, he clapped a pair of miniature cymbals
together and beat out a tattoo with sticks attached at his elbows on a drum
hanging down his back.

She smiled and started to turn, but then
she saw the mustachioed player sitting at
a
monte
table directly in front of
the one-man band. Esther had only a three-quarter view of the gambler's face
because of the angle of his chair. From where she stood, he looked like Mosby.
It
cannot be
, she thought.
My mind is playing tricks
. She moved to the
left for a better view of the man. The profile matched Mosby's perfectly, right
down to the aquiline nose. The man laughed as he drew in a winning pot, and the
sound electrified her. She was certain it was Mosby.

She felt the certainty take on the color
and temperature of cold rage. Her heart pounded, her hands grew clammy, her
breath came in short, deep gasps. Suddenly past examining danger, weighing
consequences, she was overwhelmed by the urge for vengeance. Recrossing the
square, Esther took a small pouch of gold out of one of her bags and directed
the driver to wait for her behind the hotel.

She walked back across the corner of the
plaza and turned into the Bella Union. Three steps into the smoky, crowded
gaming room, she saw a man wearing a holstered pistol. Ignoring the cool
glances of several prostitutes, Esther beckoned the man outside.

"Is that pistol serviceable?"

The man, half-drunk, laughed, spraying
her with liquor-sweetened saliva and sickening her with his breath. "Shoot
the eye out'a Digger fifty yards away."

"Is it loaded?"

"Shore is, ma'am."

"How much will you take for
it?"

"Won't take nothin' fer it. Need it.
Can't get to sleep without it. This here's a crazy town."

Esther held out the gold pouch.
"Will you take one hundred dollars in dust for it?"

"A hunnert dollars? You crazy? You
kin buy one in'a mornin' fer less'n half that over't Folsom Hardware on
Sagra…
Sagramendo Street."

"I have to travel a ways
tonight—without my husband. I need a weapon for protection."

"Can't do it, ma'am."

"One hundred twenty-five?"

"You say a hunnert twenty-
five
?"

"It's all I have."

"Can't pass that up," he said,
unbuckling his gun-belt.

"I just want the pistol." She
handed him the pouch and extracted the weapon from its leather holster.

"Here. You might as well take these."
He fumbled with the bullets, trying to thumb them out of the snug pockets
stitched into the black belt. When he looked up, she was already walking away.

She circled the Verandah once, holding
the pistol in her open purse and noting the exits from the building. At the
doorway, she glanced at the men hanging onto the bar and the half-dozen women
in frilled corsets and high, colored stockings. The entire room blurred for a
moment. She stopped and closed her eyes for several seconds until the faintness
passed. Coldly, without thought, she eased her way through a cluster of bearded
miners intently watching a game, then sidled past three Mexicans pleading for
seats at one of the crowded tables. Above the din, the one-man band fought to
be heard, but this time Esther scarcely noticed him.

She stopped a yard or so behind the rangy
man with the moustache and looked around. No one was paying any attention to
her. She scanned the table: a polyglot mix of bearded miners and more neatly
dressed businessmen, all of them absorbed by the cards they had been dealt.
Crouching as if to pick up something she had dropped, she slipped the pistol
out of her purse. She could hear the man with the moustache say, "You're
gonna lose this one, too," and then laugh again. It sounded exactly like
the laugh she'd heard from Mosby as she lay semiconscious, face down in the
snow. She struggled to keep from tearing at the back of his head with her
hands.

Rising, she reached out and rapped the
comb-back of the man's chair with the gun barrel. "Excuse me," she
said, steeling herself for the noise the gun would make, the sight of him with
his face torn apart, flying backward over the table.

The players looked up and paled. An old
miner dropped his cards. Another gambler involuntarily put his hands up, palms
out. A third with a plump Latin face pushed back from the table, his eyes
bulging with fear.

The man with the moustache turned and
froze in his seat when he saw the muzzle of the pistol pointing straight at his
forehead.

Something is wrong, Esther thought.
"Now hold on a minute…
please
," she heard the man say as her
vision blurred again. The room was suddenly silent.

One of the professional dealers, wearing
a stovepipe hat, evening clothes, and a red sash around his waist, moved at the
far end of the table. Retrieving the derringer he had strapped to his ankle, he
pointed it at Esther and pulled the hammer back.

Esther's vision cleared. The man with the
moustache, the man she was about to kill, had one cast-eye and a cleft chin. In
full view, he looked nothing at all like Mosby. Paralyzed, Esther stared at the
derringer pointing at her, the hand holding it flexing slightly. Realization
that she was a woman had slowed the dealer's reaction; now her innocent,
curious expression stopped his trigger finger in midsqueeze.

Esther lowered the barrel of her pistol.
Her voice breaking with fast-draining emotion and embarrassment, she asked the
gambler with the moustache: "Is this yours, sir? I… I stumbled on it as I
was passing your table."

Ashen, the gambler wiped a hand across
his mouth. "No, ma'am. I think…" He looked down at his own holstered
weapon. "I think this here's mine… right here." He glanced up and saw
the pistol Esther held was now pointed at his groin. He winced. "Would you
please
aim that thing someplace else? You're makin' me awful
nervous."

Esther looked down at the pistol in her
hand as though this were the first time she'd realized what it was.
"Oh," she said, summoning as much innocence as she could muster.
"Please forgive me. I know nothing about firearms."

There
was a collective exhaling of breath around the table as the man with the
moustache reached out very slowly and eased the barrel aside with the back of
his hand. "Whoooooeeee," he said, as the dealer behind him put the
derringer down. "Will someone buy this nice lady a drink? And count me out
of the next few hands. I need a little air."

Lying in bed later that night at the
Kelseys', Esther waited for the emotions she thought she had held in check to
envelope her. Delayed fear, shame, guilt, embarrassment, anger—something. None
came. After thinking about it vaguely, generally, disjointedly for more than a
year, she had
wanted
to kill Mosby. That truth did not bother her. She
wondered briefly if she were no better than Mosby in her hatred, her wanting
revenge. She decided that was foolish. They had
rea
sons
for their behavior as different as fire and lightning. What did bother her was
that such intense emotion and desire could rob her of common sense and reason.
Any
one of those men could have killed me on the spot
, she thought.
It is a
wonder I am still alive. Again.

She got out of bed and stared through the
window at the sea of lamp-lit canvas rectangles washing over the hills and
hummocks below the Kelsey house.
I mustn't ever let my feelings overcome my
wits again
, she thought.
In that direction lies nothing but failure
.
And even if she had killed him, she wouldn't have survived the event herself.
No, a way would present itself wherein she could have her revenge and live,
kill him and still survive. Undetected. It would take time, and luck, and it
would all begin with the knowledge she obtained from the
Frémonts.
And then, no matter how long it took her,
she would do it properly, in a way that was foolproof. Letting her mind rule,
rather than her passions.

Long after midnight she lay imagining the
possible ways it might happen, savoring with each new setting the remembered
feel and heft of the gun in her hand, the silken smoothness of the trigger
under the soft flesh of her finger.

In Monterey, Esther could not at first
believe her good fortune. Within an hour of her arrival, Barnett had given her
Larkin's assurance that there would be no problem in acquiring land in the
Mariposa region. Then, not only did Barnett arrange for an introduction to the
Frémonts,
he somehow managed to have Esther invited
to stay at the spacious hacienda they had rented that summer after Jessie
Benton Fremont's arrival in California. She was ecstatic.

But Esther's hopes for an unforced, early
conversation with
Frémont
about
Mosby were quickly dampened. She found herself almost isolated, not easily in
the presence of the "Pathfinder" or his wife, situated as she was in
a guest room on the far end of a newly constructed wing. Not that it would have
been a simple matter to gain their attention had she been given a room closer
to the main portion of the house.
Frémont
was consumed by the convention, which had
begun in early September. He was absent most of the time Esther was there. His
wife was just as preoccupied. She had opened her home to forty-eight delegates
from every district in California.

Cordial and hospitable, Jessie Benton
Frémont
nonetheless hurried on about her business
each time Esther encountered her.
Frémont
himself scarcely noticed her after their
first introduction. It was obvious that one thing was uppermost in both their
minds: securing John Charles
Frémont's
senatorial
nomination. Esther found herself with nothing to do. She began taking long
walks through the quaint town, enjoying the look of the Spanish-tile roofs on
the low, sprawling haciendas and the port's picturesque setting near the
southern lip of an enormous half-moon bay.

Four days slipped by, and the most Esther
got out of Jessie
Frémont
was
a passing: "Isn't it wonderful? They have signed into law a bill allowing
women to control all property in their possession before marriage." Esther
tried to engage Jessie in further conversation then, but the eyes of her
attractive, indefatigable hostess drifted immediately to a group of delegates'
wives who had just arrived for tea.

"We will talk another time,"
Esther said.

"Yes,
forgive
me," Jessie answered, her mind already on how she could win the new
guests—and indirectly, their husbands—over to Fremont's cause. "You do
understand? I will make it a point to spend time with you later this
week."

Esther waited, read, for the most part
avoided the endless gatherings in the patio and the hacienda's huge dining
room, and walked—for hours. One afternoon, as she passed the general store Alex
had run for Larkin, nostalgia and a painful sense of loss rocked her. Shutting
it from her mind, she hurried on. Approaching the sandstone schoolhouse where
the delegates were meeting, she saw John Sutter step out through the doorway of
the building. He sat down on a bench, as though exhausted. He had aged
drastically, his clothes were shabby and mended. And now, as he rested his head
against the wall of the building, his eyes suddenly brimmed with tears.

Esther walked toward him. Unaware of her
presence, he drew out a handkerchief, wiped at his eyes, blew his nose, and
took a deep breath. She stopped several yards away, saw him try to shake off
whatever was bothering him and pull himself together before going back in to
the convention. As he stood up, he finally saw her.

"My child, my child," he said,
beaming. "What a wonderful surprise."

She moved toward him, and they put their
arms around one another. "You look well," she said.

"You flatter me. I look like
something the dogs dragged in."

"I was watching you. What's the
matter? Are you not feeling well?"

"Tired, my child," he said
unconvincingly. "Just very tired."

"You are not telling me
everything."

"Such a woman. You see through me so
easily." He sighed. "It is just that…" He could not go on. The
tears were brimming again.

"Please tell me. Perhaps I can
help."

"I will not go into all of it, but I
will say that it saddens me to be here."

"But you've aways wanted statehood
for California."

"It is not that."

"Then why… Are things going well
with your family—your wife?"

"She is an angel of patience and
understanding. She has never once spoken harshly of my leaving Europe. We could
not be getting along better."

"Then…?"

"It simply pains me deeply to be
here, partaking in this great endeavor when I…" He paused.

"Tell me,
please
."

"When I am… in such reduced
circumstances. That is all I can say,
will
say, to you."

"Do you mean you wish you were
still…?" She didn't want to elaborate. "Before Brannan and the rest
of them…?"

"Yes," he said, gazing off.
"That is it, essentially. I am no longer the man I was." He took a
deep breath and gave Esther another squeeze. "You look so beautiful, my
child. I must go back in now. They will be taking a vote on whether California
will be a slave or free state. And everyone against slavery must be heard. We
will spend some time together again?"

"Of course. I'll be here a short
while longer before returning to San Francisco."

"We will have dinner together. I
will send you a note at the
Frémonts',
yes?"

"Please," she said. "I do
so want to talk with you more."

When Sutter went through the doorway
after embracing her again, Esther turned and saw Jessie Benton
Frémont
riding toward the
Calle
Principal in an open carriage with the
wife of Andres Pico, the
Californio
delegate
from San Jose. Jessie smiled coolly and nodded at Esther before the carriage
continued on.

Barnett came bounding out of the
building. "We've done it!" he shouted, as elated as a schoolboy.
"California will be a state of free men!" Before Esther had a chance
to respond, Barnett added, "Forgive me. I must hurry to post the news to
San Francisco. I spoke to Larkin this morning, and it is all arranged. Your
land purchase. As soon as I have a moment, I'll have the builders begin work.
You did say Spanish
rancho
style?"

"Yes…"

"Then that's that," he said,
turning. He glanced back as he hurried off down the street. "I'm sorry
I've so little time. I'll make amends in San Francisco when all this is
over."

She watched him disappear around a corner
and then resumed her long walk toward the high bluff that overlooked the
Pacific. There, away from the noise and bustle of the town, the convention
crowds, the drummers and tradesmen hawking everything from pencils to hosiery,
she turned her attention back to Sutter.
He knew I was staying at the
Frémonts'
,
she thought,
yet he made no effort to
contact me
. Something was wrong. There was more to what was troubling him
than he revealed.

No word, no invitation came from Sutter.
But three days later her suspicions were confirmed when she walked out onto the
Frémont
patio.
Jessie was putting last-minute touches on a dozen table settings.

"You're not angry with me for my
unforgivable rudeness?" Jessie said, not stopping. "I have meant to
spend some time with you, but…"

"You've been overwhelmed. I know how
busy you are. And I understand. Of course I'm not angry. You've been more than
kind to have me as your guest."

"This business will be the death of
me," Jessie said, waving a hand histrionically over all the elaborate
tables, as though she didn't actually relish it. She sighed and collapsed into
a chair.

Esther sat down beside her. "There
is someone I would like to ask you about. An acquaintance of mine…"

"Mr. Sutter?" Jessie asked,
raising her eyebrows. "My dear, he seemed, if you will forgive me, far
more than an acquaintance."

Esther fought off the urge to impale her
verbally. "Captain Sutter? Oh, no. I wasn't speaking of him. He is a dear
friend. Like a… like an uncle to me. He has been very helpful."

"Well, that's a relief to hear. This
is a land of, shall we say, peculiar relationships. One never knows what to
expect of anyone. Of course, I try to keep a broad mind about such
things."

For a moment, Esther felt a surge of
jealousy as well as annoyance.
Her heart-shaped face is so perfect
, she thought.
And her figure… so exquisite. The daughter of a U.S. Senator. The wife of… for
a fleeting moment, Esther wondered what it would be like to have a normal life.
A home. A husband.

"Poor man," Jessie went on.
"It's a pity he will not allow his friends to extricate him from his
troubles."

"I haven't spoken to him for some
time, except for the other day, briefly. What troubles?"

"As you probably know, he's already
had his share," Jessie went on. "And now this Peter Corbett thing.
Totally
unjust. Just the same, one would think Sutter might have learned his lesson. No
one denies he was cheated, or that stripping him—and others—of title to lands
granted by the Mexicans is unjust, or that the squatters already overrunning
what remains of his property are in the wrong; but it still makes no sense for
a man who has lost so much through profligacy to continue being a
spendthrift."

"How do you know that is true?"
Esther asked, finding it increasingly difficult to contain her pique.

"How does anyone know? My Lord, the
man entertains friends and hordes of strangers alike in a manner that would tax
a millionaire. Nonetheless, this Corbett business is shameful."

"Corbett?"

"A Sacramento land-trader who will
have nothing less than the governorship. It would be a disgrace to the new
state, I tell you. Imagine such a man in the executive office!"

"What has he against Sutter?"

"Sutter is a strident voice against
him at the convention. Corbett knew he would be, and tried to prevent him from
coming here as a delegate. First he disgraced Sutter publicly during the
delegates' election. By having a man Sutter still owes several thousand dollars
press for repayment. Sutter didn't have the means, as Corbett knew from the
outset, and the next step was to initiate a legal action to dispossess Sutter
from his farm. It's a valuable piece of property, I'm told. Corbett and Brannan
have coveted it for some time."

Shocked, Esther couldn't believe the
extent of John Sutter's pride. "He's lost the Hock Farm?"

"Not yet. The convention has delayed
the case. But Corbett hasn't missed an opportunity to make the matter public
here. He's succeeded in humiliating Sutter completely. And you can be sure
he'll have the property when all this convention business is over."

"How much did you say Sutter owes?"
Esther asked, exasperated. Why had he let things go so far without asking her
for help!

"Four thousand dollars is the figure
I've heard."

"Perhaps one of his friends will pay
the debt for him."

"Perhaps," Jessie said, getting
up. "And now I must…"

"I was going to ask you a question
before we were sidetracked by this sad business about Sutter," Esther said
quickly. "It will only take a minute."

"Just a moment, then. I must get
back to the kitchen."

"I… had the pleasure of meeting a
gentleman once… while I was journeying west. A man who was a member of one of
your husband's remarkable expeditions."

Jessie smiled proudly. "Yes, which
man, dear? I must hurry."

"A man named Luther Mosby. Whatever
became of him?"

"I don't have the faintest idea. But
perhaps John does. He's kept track of most of those ruffians." She paused
for a moment, staring at Esther. "Perhaps I speak out of turn, but I would
be wary of Mosby. Beneath his silky, Southern manner there lurks a male beast.
Oh, my goodness, I've spoken out of turn. Is he a friend?"

"No, I met him only briefly."

"Then why do you ask of him?"

"It seems he was at the Alamo, or
near it…"

"Far enough away to avoid the fate
of braver men," Jessie cut in acidly. "From what I hear, he has tried
to mask that act of cowardice with brutality and violence ever since."

"I believe a relative of mine was
either at the Alamo itself or with Colonel Fannin's troops, where Mr. Mosby
repaired just before the siege. I thought perhaps Mosby might have some word of
him. My… cousin didn't return home at the close of the Mexican War."

"Why didn't you ask Mosby when you
met? Where did you say it was?"

Apprehensive, Esther hesitated a moment.
"It must have been at Bent's Fort, in '46," she finally said. "I
meant to ask him, but he and Colonel
Frémont
were gone the following morning when I
sought him out."