California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1) (47 page)

Alex shook his head in disbelief. "I
don't know what to say, Mrs. Cable. I can't thank you enough." He looked
down at the floor. "You know, I was never cut out to be either a borrower
or a politician."

"Thank God for that," Ralston
said, echoing Esther's thoughts.

Alex laughed self-deprecatingly. The
sound sent a current of memories down Esther's spine. "I suppose I could
go back into business. But I… I have a hunch I'd be suited—I think I could do a
good job as a judge."

"I'm sure you will," Esther
said, trying to hold on. "I wouldn't be doing it unless I knew what a
decent, conscientious man you are." She wondered if she sounded too
familiar, if she had gone too far. It frightened her. She looked at her watch.
"Now… both of you will have to excuse me. I'm expecting my doctor any
minute." She smiled to herself. She might need a doctor. She turned to
Ralston. "You'll be sure…" Her voice was beginning to fail her. She
cleared her throat. "The railroad business. You'll be sure to look into
it?"

"Yes, ma'am. As quickly as I
can," Ralston said as he and Alex got up and turned toward the door.
"As well as that rumor I mentioned about the Ophir mine. I think we ought
to buy more of it."

"Thank you again, Mrs. Cable,"
Alex said softly, looking back.

The sound of his voice and the imminence
of his departure sent a pang through her. As relieved as she was that they were
going, she wanted to prolong his presence, if only for a few seconds.

"Your wife, Mr. Todd. Is she any
better?"

"Thank you for asking. I'm afraid
not."

She searched for something else to say,
going headlong over the limit she usually placed on personal questions.
"Is it… the nature of your wife's illness… is it serious?"

"It could be. She's having early
complications."

"Early… complications?"

"She's with child, Mrs. Cable."

Esther bit her lip. "Well… I do hope
she's feeling better."

When they were gone, she sat silently for
a moment, stunned, unable to do anything but stare at the door. She felt
herself beginning to come apart. She asked
Solana
to wait for her in the lobby, and after
the Indian woman had left, she rested her head on her arms and wept. The
hollowness in her chest and the knots in her stomach were ample evidence of the
truth. Now she had to find a way to deal with it. If there had ever been any
doubt, any rationalized belief that her feelings had diminished, it was gone
now. She still loved him, wanted him as much as she ever had. Enough to
disregard willfully the pain this meeting might have held for him as well as
her. And there was nothing she could do about it, other than find something to
occupy her mind totally, shut him out as she had in the past.

She sat there for almost half an hour,
going over what she could do, what would most absorb her. A few minutes before
she collected herself, dried her eyes, and got up,
Solana
quietly came back and peered through the
door at her, unseen.

The Indian woman went back down the
hallway and the stairs and waited. She weighed the extreme measures Esther had
taken not to reveal herself to Ralston and Todd. She thought of the day they
had found her on the river ice… pictured the baby, ice blue, cradled in her
arms… remembered the heretofore unexplained slightly wistful look in Esther's
eyes whenever Todd's name had come up in conversation with Miwokan and
Murietta. And then she nodded to herself as it finally began to come together.

There was little doubt in her mind that
Alex Todd was the dead child's father, that he thought Esther had died with the
baby in the mountains, and that Esther wanted it that way.

Shaking her head sadly,
Solana
turned her thoughts to the newspaper picture
she had seen of the man who had killed so many in her village. She had carried
his first name, along with that of the red-bearded man who had killed her
husband, in her mind for years. She knew the moustachioed man's last name:
Mos-by
.
She turned the name over in her thoughts as she recalled vaguely the questions
she had once overheard Esther asking Murietta about him.
Mos-by. Clauss-en.
She remembered something about Mosby beating Murietta. She pictured Esther
clipping a line drawing of Mosby out of the paper, placing it in a pigeonhole
of her desk, and wondered if what he had done to Murietta was all there was to
it. Instinctively, she sensed there was more, and guessed that it went back as
far as the time before they had found her, half-dead, walking on the ice.

And then her eyes narrowed and she nodded
to herself, smiling as it began to fall into place.

"The man in the top hat, the judge
with the whiskers. You watch him always. Why?"

Esther felt a burst of annoyance with
Solana.
"I'm not watching anyone!" She
softened her voice. "We're simply out for a ride. I needed some air."

"He is always there when we go in
the carriage together."

"He is? I hadn't noticed. Just
coincidence."

"Many coincidences."
Solana
clucked and snapped the reins.

"What are you
doing?"

"We are out for a ride, you
said."

"Stop the carriage. I… I want to
rest from the… jouncing."

"As you wish, Sunsister."
Solana
gave no hint she knew Esther was trying
to conceal her continued observation of Mosby. The tall man and his friends
walked up the steps of the state courthouse and disappeared beyond its ten
massive pillars.

"I'm sorry I spoke so sharply,"
Esther said. "We can drive on now."

Solana
smiled.

For
a moment Esther wondered what
Solana
knew,
if somehow she recognized Mosby.
Ridiculous
, she thought.
She was
unconscious while it happened.
She toyed with the idea of telling the
Indian woman everything. Mosby
had
been a part of the death of her
husband, her son. For an instant she was seized by the conviction that she owed
it to
Solana,
and
briefly, guilt over her concealment almost prompted her to speak. But then she
wondered what the Indian woman would do, how she would react. Overcome by
emotion, would she attempt to kill Mosby and be killed herself? Short of that,
she might rob Esther of the chance to take revenge. Sighing with a measure of
guilt, Esther decided to remain silent.

It is true
,
Solana
thought.
I feel it. Mosby was the one who had given Esther Moses when she did not want a
child. The boy looks too much like him for it not to be true… If it was only
what he did to Murietta, she would not be doing this, watching him, thinking of
him and almost nothing else when she was not with the children at the school.
That is why there was not only one picture of him in Esther's desk now, but
many. And if he was a part of the death of Esther's firstborn, then all this
could only mean she would one day try to kill him. She had the power of the
sun, who was with her, and the power of the white man's money turned from gold.
She would try to do it! If she destroyed or changed the place of the pictures
in her desk, then it would be clear that the time had come.

He was the man who had held Mwamwaash in
the fire.
Solana
was
certain now. He did not kill Miwokan, but he had been a part of it, and he had
killed many others. And she would kill him someday. She was only an Indian.
Only a woman. But she would wait until her sunsister found the way and the
place, and then she would be there and be the one to kill him. For herself and for
Esther.

Riding back to the school, Esther mused
about the year that had passed since they moved to Sacramento. Scarcely two
months after returning from Europe she'd closed the San Francisco house again,
in the wake of her painful meeting with Ralston and Alex. She recognized now
that her move  here to the state capitol  initially was just to be nearer to
the man she had always loved. But after Alex had won his election, resigned
from the assembly, and moved back to sit on the bench in San Francisco, Esther
had stayed on.

She worked hard at her original
intention—to shut all thought of him out of her mind. She plunged into
expanding the Sacramento school; converted its attic into an apartment
containing two small bedrooms. Nights, she pored over Ralston's reports. Most
of her investments had dipped to only average returns, but the money was
literally pouring into her account from the Comstock mines. She had given
Ralston leeway to use his own judgment, and he was shoveling at least a quarter
of everything he made for her into the Ophir and other mines he virtually
controlled now, after pulling together a dozen investors besides Esther. She
had been the first, so when the others came in with them, the value of her
stock jumped even higher.

Last but not least, she had avidly
followed the activities of Theodore Judah, the builder of the Sacramento Valley
Railroad. Ralston kept her abreast of Judah's unsuccessful efforts to form a
stock company to underwrite a railroad across the Sierras. After reading
Ralston's latest report, she had taken it upon herself to speak to Leland
Stanford, her tenant, and two men she was indirectly associated with through
Blue Star: the Sacramento hardware merchants, Collis P. Huntington and Mark
Hopkins. They had reluctantly agreed to attend one of Judah's almost
evangelistic presentations of maps, charts, and figures at the St. Charles
Hotel this coming week.

Other things kept her mind off Alex, as
well. The Butterfield Overland Mail was making the trip from St. Louis to San
Francisco in twenty-three days. With the inception of the transatlantic cable,
news from Europe was reaching America in twelve hours. Dispatches from New York
and Washington as well as London and Paris were on the presses in San Francisco
and Sacramento more rapidly than ever before. The news from the East was
ominous. From the tenor of the reports, secession and war seemed inevitable.

Barnett had been in Washington since his
election to the U.S. Senate the year before. He had outmaneuvered Gwin in
California, won most of the political patronage Gwin controlled as a condition
for supporting the Southerner's reelection. Outspokenly anti- slavery, Barnett
had been received icily by President Buchanan, who saw to it that the patronage
remained in Gwin's hands. Barnett was back in California now, for the state
Democratic convention currently being held in Sacramento. She hoped he could
regain some of the political power that was slipping from his grasp. They
planned to have dinner together. Perhaps she could be of some help to him.

By the time the convention  started,
thousands of Californians had crossed the Sierras, drawn by the extraordinary
yields of the Comstock. Ralston was increasing what were now their joint
holdings in the mines. Her profits were beginning to rival the initial sums she
had made in the gold fields. At first that had bothered her, but she quickly
suppressed her distaste for precious metal. She knew now that she would
probably need all the money, all the power she could accumulate if she were
ever to have what she wanted most.

For despite all the other interests that
absorbed her, her greatest preoccupation was with Mosby. During that year in
Sacramento she took every opportunity to observe his movements. She knew where
he lived, where he ate, the women he spent time with. She sat in the gallery
and watched him, contemptuous and coldly efficient, in his courtroom. By now
she knew he was virtually unreachable. Hated by political opponents, former
vigilantes, and those he had dealt with harshly on the bench, he was
accompanied by a bodyguard everywhere. During the day, cronies surrounded him.
At night, two Sacramento policemen watched his house until midnight, when a
pair of state militiamen took over. He was inaccessible at the courthouse. In
the streets she rarely saw him unaccompanied by other men. On the rare
occasions when he went to a restaurant, the bodyguard kept the curious away
from his table, and friends usually occupied several tables around him.

Esther had again contemplated having him
assassinated, but the chances for success were slim and the risk of exposure
too great. In any case she still considered that method morally unacceptable.
And she still wanted to strike the avenging blow—in a manner that would provide
at least a chance of bringing it off undetected, of surviving and savoring her
accomplishment.

So she had continued to observe him,
follow him and his cluster of bullies at a distance whenever she could. She
knew just about everything she needed to know about him now. Sooner or later he
would reveal an Achilles heel, uncover for her the ways and means she was
watching for. Now, as she and
Solana
returned
to the school from the latest of her rides, she knew she would have to devise
methods of surveillance that were less obvious. If
Solana
were suspicious, others might react the
same way.

The
next time Esther rode out in her carriage on a reconnaissance mission, she did
not take
Solana
with
her. She saw no sign of Mosby that day. And in the late afternoon he did not
return as usual to the Supreme Court offices in the Hastings Building at Second
and J Streets. On the ride home she did not recognize the red-bearded man
carrying the case into the gunsmith's on M Street as she drove past. Five years
of trapping in the Rockies and a prison term for manslaughter in Texas had
slimmed him down considerably.

"French dueling pistols," the
gunsmith said, fingers splayed on the counter of his immaculate shop.
"Beauties. I don't see nothing wrong with them."

"There
ain't
nothin' wrong
with 'em." Isaac Claussen pointed one of the long-barreled, understocked
weapons at the gunsmith's face and pulled the trigger. He laughed as the hammer
snapped home and the gunsmith flinched. "Nothin' wrong at all. Want you to
file down the trigger mechanism for me, that's all. On both of ‘em."

"Hair triggers, huh? Now why would
you want me to do that?"

"You'd
be smart to mind your own fuckin' business," Claussen said, glaring.
"Now and in the future, if you know what's good for you."

Esther
passed the swarm of children playing in the schoolyard. At the mailbox the
happy noise of their shrieking and laughter faded as she opened the evening
edition of the
Sacramento Union
and began reading the first of two
adjoining stories on the front page. Her mouth dropped open. Luther Mosby had
been one of Gwin's most vitriolic allies against Barnett in the past, but this
time he had gone even further:

Barnett
is an arch traitor to the Democratic Party. The men who follow him are personal
chattels of a
 
single
individual who has not even kept his pork-barrel promises of make-work jobs. A
man they are ashamed of but beholden to for pathetic political crumbs he has
fed them through the years. They belong heart, body, and breeches to the
hoodlum son of an illiterate Irish, New York City Tammany shoulder-striker and
ballot- box stuffer. Their souls are owned by the devil incarnate, Warren
Barnett.

Esther
grew more apprehensive as she read Barnett's caustic response:

I
once called Luther Mosby the only honest man  on the California Supreme Court.
That was when he  was one of the few who stood up against the vigilantes. I was
mistaken. I donated two hundred dollars to a San Francisco newspaper to defend
Judge Mosby when he
 was
incarcerated
by the Committee of Thirteen in the matter of the stabbing of a vigilante. I
realize now that that was a mistake as well. As much as I detest all the
vigilantes stood for, California might have been better served if they had had
their way with the man. If I were to be asked now, I have no doubt whatsoever
that I would not offer the opinion that Judge Mosby is an honest man.

Esther
was temporarily stunned, almost as much by the discovery that Barnett had once
helped Mosby as by the severity of the exchange. She was so engrossed by what
she had read, so gripped by an inexplicable certainty that things would get
worse, she didn't realize the children around her were shouting playfully that
the dinner bell was ringing. One of them finally brought her to her senses when
he tugged innocently on her glove and almost pulled it off her disfigured left
hand.

"Hold your forefinger out straight,
judge, against the front of the housing when you lift it. And don't move sudden
with it. Otherwise, the hair trigger'll—"

Mosby turned to Claussen icily. "You
really think I need telling how to handle a weapon,
any
kind of
weapon?"

"Just—"

"Just shut up, Isaac." Turning,
Mosby slowly lifted the dueling pistol and aimed at the target tacked to the
privy behind his house. Holding the ball-and-cap model steadily, he fired off
the single round. Dead center. He smiled at Claussen. "Here. Load it up. I
want to see you do it just in case the son of a bitch surprises us and shows
some courage sooner than I expect."

Claussen carried the loaded pistol to the
same spot, aimed, and fired. The ball went through the rim of the outer circle.

"Stay here and practice until you
can put two or three shots in a row right in the center circle," Mosby
said. "Unless you want to lose the chance of gettin' fat as a bloated pig
again."

"Ain't no need to talk to me that
way, Luther."

Mosby
stopped without turning back. "I'll talk to you any goddamned way I
please, and don't you forget it! And the name is
Judge Mosby
, you hear?
You might also try to remember, if your pea brain is up to it, that a letter
from me got you out of prison five years early. Wouldn't take much to have you
thrown back in."