Fool's Gold (8 page)

Tamsin and Gertrude skipped out of the hall just as Colonel Cornish re-emerged from the saloon.

‘I do so hope you will come to our little soirée on Saturday,’ she pressed Alicia. ‘An excellent way to get to know people — nothing too formal, you understand. Saturday at nine.’ She seemed to take Alicia’s acceptance for granted. ‘I am sure that Mrs Carson will let you leave a little early if I ask her.’

‘Oh, but ma’am, I really think not …’ There was a note of panic in her voice. Sewing afternoons were one thing, but a full evening in society was quite another!

‘Nonsense, my dear Mrs Owens. It will do you a world of good to see a little more company,’ insisted Miss Cooper.

‘I — I do not go into society …’ she began.

‘Why not?’ demanded Cornish, reappearing at her elbow. ‘Do you have some dread secret?’

‘No, of course not! But …’

‘Colonel, really! Mrs Owens is a widow,’ chided Miss Cooper.

‘But not still in strict mourning, or she wouldn’t be here,’ he went on relentlessly.

‘No indeed,’ said Miss Cooper. ‘I’m sure Mrs Owens will give us the pleasure of her company.’ She was struck by a happy thought. ‘Colonel Cornish, you can escort her!’ she announced.

From the look on the rancher’s face Alicia doubted whether he had had any intention of attending the soirée, but he swiftly suppressed the look of annoyance and bowed politely.

‘At a quarter before nine, Mrs Owens. At the store.’

Before she could protest any further, he was gone.

*

The first day’s logging went well. On a little bluff, close to the stream that ran down the hillside, but high enough above it not to be in danger of floods in the spring thaw, the foundations of Pedro’s house could just be seen in the silver moonlight. Away from the bottom of the valley the nights were much cooler, and the men welcomed the hot chow that Chen had prepared for them. It was not exactly what they had expected, however, for the pickled tongues were very salty and Alicia had forgotten to tell him to soak them. The beans were tastier than usual and the bread was good, but the men drank a great quantity of coffee that night.

As the stars came out, twinkling above the massive trees, and the moonlight spilled on to the grassy slopes of the Vaca foothills, the men wrapped themselves in their bed-rolls against the chill and gathered around the camp fire. The boss, as the new hands called him, opted for the first watch. He had little interest in tall stories and whiskey drinking and relied on Kerhouan to keep it under control.

Watch was not too arduous up here: there was more danger of wolves coming down from the high timber-line after the sheep than of rustlers or Indians. Once the pen was built, Pedro and his Julia would have a peaceful, idyllic place up here. He knew a brief pang at the thought of what might have been, but he shrugged it off, walked away from the fire and sat himself down on a rock where he could keep a good eye on the sheep, temporarily penned in a bowl-shaped depression just beyond the house.

Back at the campfire, the conversation had turned, inevitably, to women. One of the men was reminiscing about a saloon girl he had met in Coloma, while another grumbled about the lack of decent women who were not too proud to be seen with a ranch hand.

‘Say, Jo,’ chimed Jos Evans, one of the older hands, a rough but skilled horse-wrangler. ‘Didn’t I hear tell you brought a woman overland with you? White woman?’

Chen Kai gave a grunt that might have been a yea or a nay.

‘Whatever happened to her? For sure the boss didn’t want no woman out on the ranch!’

Kai threw the dregs of his coffee onto the fire where they spat and sizzled.

‘She went to work in Sacramento,’ he said curtly.

‘Must look her up,’ said Jos with an evil grin. ‘What saloon she work in?’

‘No saloon!’ snapped the cook. ‘She is not that kind of woman!’

‘Huh! If I had a dollar for every time a man said that ’bout a woman …’

With a hiss Chen Kai sprang up from his bedroll; his knife was at Evans’s throat before the other man had realised what was happening.

Kerhouan’s soft commanding voice cut through the simmering tension.

‘Don’t do it, Jo,’ he called softly. Unseen by the others, his hand had gone to his gun under the bedroll. He would not hesitate to use it: that was his duty as foreman of the hands, but he hoped he would not have to. The dour Breton had grown to like the cook. Perhaps the fact that they had both been brought up by nuns, he in Brittany, Chen in Hong Kong, had provided a common thread in the two disparate lives. Certainly he appreciated the Chinaman’s wry sense of humour, if not his cooking.

‘Then he will apologise!’ snarled the cook. ‘Or I kill him!’

‘Apologise, Evans,’ said Kerhouan, still in the same level tones. ‘And if you want to stay working at Tresco, lay your tongue off his woman.’

‘Not my woman!’ growled Chen. ‘If he want to stay
breathing
, he will keep his foul tongue off my friend!’

‘Here!’ protested Evans, rolling his eyes to see whether the knife had been withdrawn. ‘I never meant no offence, not to you nor her, I swear it!’ The sweat gathered on his brow and rolled down into his eyes as he looked up into the implacable face above him. ‘If’n I’ve offended, sure I’m sorry!’

Chen Kai let out his breath in one long hiss, then rocked back on his heels and sheathed his knife in one rapid movement.

‘Is good,’ he said, his precise English deserting him momentarily. ‘Will do.’

Later next day Cornish found himself working alongside Chen Kai, trimming the logs with adzes while the others hauled them across to set on the foundations to form the front and back main timbers.

He pushed his hat to the back of his head and leaned against a tree.

‘You know, Jo, you’re a good worker,’ he observed, ‘but no one’s indispensable.’

He looked up to see what effect his comment had had. Chen lowered his adze and stood before him, stony-faced.

‘Ker-hwan told you,’ he said heavily.

‘Had to. It was his duty as foreman. He also told me Evans provoked you. But that’s no reason for knives. If you have any grievances with the men, settle them with your fists.’ He threw his adze down and brushed his dark hair out of his eyes. ‘I need to build up a good team of men if I’m to put this ranch to rights. And if I have dissension and feuds, then I don’t have a reliable team.’ He paused and looked long and hard at the cook. ‘There’ll be no guns or knives between the men. Those are my terms, Jo, and if you’ll accept them, we’ll be happy to have you.’

Chen looked the other man straight in the eye. ‘It will not happen again, Corr-onel,’ he said gravely.

Later that evening, Cornish left the rest of the group by the campfire and crossed to the cook pot to fill his tin mug.

‘My God! This coffee’s thick enough to float a pistol!’ he muttered. He took a cautious sip. ‘Still, least it’s not salty! Mind if I join you, Jo?’

‘Please.’

‘This woman you had the fight over,’ he began carefully, ‘I guess she means a great deal to you.’

‘She is my friend,’ answered Chen with simple dignity. ‘My good friend. We have been together for more than four years now.’

‘In San Francisco?’

‘No, not there!’ he answered, rather too quickly. ‘All round. Everywhere. We — er — travelled a great deal through the mining camps.’

‘Selling?’

‘Just doing — well — this and that, you know …’

‘Uh-huh. Why d’you give it up?’

‘It — ah — it gradually became less profitable,’ stammered Chen Kai, looking down into his coffee. ‘And — and — she felt we should be more settled — for the child’s sake. That was why we looked for housekeeping posts …’

‘She would not have enjoyed working for Jem,’ said Cornish, picking up a stone and pitching it viciously into the stream below. ‘But you: surely you could always find work?’

‘In Chinatown, you would say?’ He laughed, but there was no mirth in the sound. ‘No. My roots are not there. I have no wish to get on over the backs of my fellows and I will not get involved with the
tongs
or the Six Companies. Besides, many Chinese would not accept me: I reject their ancestor worship and superstition. I think my chances of reincarnation are the same whether I’m buried here or have my bones shipped back to China! One land is much like another, except that here in Gum Shan there is no famine.’

The Six Companies were merchant companies who paid a man’s ticket over from the impoverished Middle Kingdom to America and then hired his services out to mining companies, road and railroad builders, thus holding him in a kind of perpetual debt bondage, where his labour never improved his lot. The Six Companies kept the largest part of his earnings, a small part went to keep the individual alive, another fraction back to his family left behind in China, and the last part was kept by the Company to ship his coffin home in the event, disastrous for most Chinese, that he should die in Gum Shan, far from home and far from his ancestors.

‘No,’ sighed Chen. ‘I do not belong there. They think me a heathen, I think them gullible fools. And they would never accept her — or the child.’

‘California is no place for a woman,’ growled Cornish. ‘Women are never anything but trouble.’

‘Not to me,’ said Chen quietly. ‘She was my strength when I had almost given up. She made me proud of what I am. And now I must be strong for her and for the child … It is the least I can do.’

‘You saw the child when you were in town?’ The thought of the child had weighed more heavily on his conscience than the woman.

‘Not this time,’ he chuckled. ‘She is boarded out and not everyone welcomes a Chinee on the doorstep. Or treats him like a human as you and Ker-hwan have done.’

‘Kerhouan and I have travelled the world some,’ said Cornish with a wry grin that made him seem much younger. ‘We see a man as a man. Most forty-niners never went further than the next street before they made the great trek to the mines. And once gold fever grabs ’em, they just see everyone else as a rival for that elusive fortune. Anyways, you’ve clearly been better educated than the rest of ’em: that’d put their backs up from the start!’

‘True!’ Again he laughed that harsh, untuneful laugh. ‘I have much to thank the mission for: with one stroke they made me — and unmade me!’

Chapter Eight

Mrs Carson had tried in vain to attract the ‘society’ trade and she didn’t know whether to be more pleased or exasperated when the Sacramento ladies began to call at the store. It was Ned Sullivan who revealed that the new assistant had made quite a hit at one of the gatherings that the Reverend Cooper’s sister held. Mrs Carson herself had gone once to an afternoon ‘At Home’, but she had not felt comfortable and had never gone again, though that did not stop her strongly resenting their interest in the Owens woman! When Miss Cooper herself came into the store and asked if the assistant might finish work early on Saturday to attend the soirée, she resented it every bit as much as Alicia had known she would.

‘Got another gel to help in the store then, have ye?’ demanded Sullivan thrusting his face pugnaciously in his sister’s.

‘You know I ain’t!’ she snapped back.

‘Then don’t push her the way you are!’ he told her. ‘She’s enough to do in the store without sending her to heave the barrels and sacks about. You’ll make her ill, you will. Or she’ll up and quit and then you’ll be in trouble.’

‘Thinks herself too proud to help in the storeroom, do she?’ sneered Missus Carson. ‘Just because she’s found some high-falutin’ friends don’t make her any more’n just the hired help around here. An’ don’t think I didn’t see you carrying those barrels for her, fool that you are! Think she’ll thank you for it? Anyways, if she don’t do it, who will? Hey? You oughta be in the store or the bar, not runnin’ around like a dog arter a bitch. And I’ll not do it for her. Why should I? What do I pay her for, eh?’

‘Neither you nor her should be doin’ it,’ he insisted. ‘What’s wrong with that lazy husband of yours doin’ some work, eh? Whiles we’re talking about dogs.’

*

Alicia was in two minds as to whether she should go to the Cooper house again. If the musical soirée was anything like the ones they used to hold in Yerba Buena, each of them would be expected to contribute something to the entertainment and the only songs she knew were either in Spanish or the popular songs of the mining camps! If she did go, she’d better confine herself to accompaniment on the pianoforte — if her fingers had not stiffened up too much since those endless hours of practice with Mama.

She was discovering that Sacramento was seething with more social activities than she had thought possible. Now she was known to be not only a widow but one not averse to appearing in society, a number of unmarried men — clerks, ranch foremen, the tongue-tied manager of the Express Office, an actor from Forrest’s Theatre, a doctor, two attorneys and the undertaker — drifted into the store in the course of the week to persuade her to accompany them to lectures, concerts, barn-raising dances, or a debate on phrenology and philosophy between Professor Buchanan and Doctor Rice. She declined all the invitations politely, even though she was pining for adult company and it appeared that single women in Sacramento did not go to interesting things like lectures by themselves. First let her overcome the hurdle of the musical soirée, she told herself, and then she would see. Meanwhile there were barrels to move and stores to clear out. Time and Missus Carson waited for no man.

*

Out at Tresco the hands were just coming in from the fields down valley where Kerhouan’s crops were growing tall and lush, promising a decent harvest despite the recent neglect.

They cleaned up in the bunkhouse and then sat down at the long table in the centre of the room, their faces grim and set. They ate their chow pretty much in silence, in contrast to the usual good-humoured ribaldry that accompanied Jo Chen’s tough cornbread or overdone hotcakes, because word had got around — nobody quite knew how — that bad news had come to the boss, all to do with the ranch, and each man was wondering to himself whether having fallen into such a comfortable berth, he might not be about to be tipped out of it again.

Most of the hands were former miners who had either failed to make the big strike or had frittered their gold away on high living and ended up poorer than when they had arrived. Nearly all of them — whether European, Mexican or eastern Americans — lacked either the desire or the finance to return; for better or for worse, they were now the new Californians. There was not a great deal of choice of work in the new state for men such as them: either you signed on with the big mining companies that were tearing the landscape apart to get the less easily accessible gold out — quite a different proposition for the miner who had previously only worked with a pick and shovel and pan — or you went as a ranch hand, turning the wilderness into good agricultural land to feed the teeming population of San Francisco and the other communities that were springing up all around.

There were plenty of ranches where a man could find work, although few of them were crying out for workers as they had in the early days of the gold rush, when high wages were offered to tempt men down from the Sierras to the farms in the valleys, but good employers were few and far between. Tresco offered year round work for good men, not just seasonal employment and hunger in the off season; more to the point it offered a man great opportunities. Within the fort there were any number of buildings that the boss was having cleaned up; he planned to have proper bunkhouses for the hands, where other ranchers took advantage of the climate and left men to sleep out throughout the year, a good cookhouse, stables, a smithy. To men who had seen mining towns spring up overnight, the potential of Tresco was clear. And there was always the example of Pedro to tempt them: set up in his own little establishment with his wife and her brother, to all intents and purposes his own man, in charge of the sheeprun up-valley. Yes, a wise man would stick around Tresco and see what happened. But they’d all be glad to know what it was that had maddened the boss so.

Chen Kai-Tsu left the two young lads whom Kerhouan had delegated to help him scrubbing out the pans and took a dish of the stew and a heap of the hotcakes into the ranch house.

He looked around in disapproval at the mess in the house which never failed to vex him. The fellow they had been burying the day of his arrival had left the house a veritable pigsty and it revolted him to see the Colonel living in such chaos. He had allowed Chen to clean out one end of the kitchen and one of the rooms upstairs where he slept, but there had been no time to do any more, for more often than not they were all out on the ranch every day, seeing to the herds, overseeing the planting of the second crop and checking the boundaries down in the valley to make sure that no squatters had damaged the fences or taken any of the animals.

The Colonel and his foreman were sitting at a table covered with paper, old documents curling at the corners mixed in with scraps of paper sacks covered with scrawling figures. Chen was at a loss to find a place to put the dishes down.

‘Leave it,’ said Kerhouan tiredly. ‘Eat, then we’ll see if we have any better ideas.’

‘What better ideas?’ demanded the Colonel, sweeping the papers aside angrily. ‘There are no better ideas, dammit! If I sell my land to pay the lawyers to fight, he’s got us. If I don’t fight he’s got us. Either way Lamarr can’t lose.’

Chen hovered around while the men ate, fetching salt, filling glasses, stacking the dishes. When the table was clear, he recovered the papers from the floor and attempted to put them in some sort of order.

‘Leave that!’ snapped Cornish.

‘Very good, sir.’ His heavy lids hooded his eyes, hiding the expression there. He bowed to the Colonel and turned to go.

‘Hell, Jo, I didn’t mean to snap.’ Cornish passed his hand over his eyes. ‘Bring us some of your appalling coffee — and a cup for yourself. I don’t see why we should be the only ones to suffer it!’

He had regained his customary self-control by the time Chen Kai came back with the coffee can and the three mugs, and Kerhouan had produced a bottle of whiskey.

They sat together occasionally in the evenings, the boss, the Breton foreman and the Chinese cook, trying to sort through the piles of unpaid bills and unanswered letters which lay in dusty heaps all over the house. Chen had some skills in accounting which Kerhouan lacked and between them they had managed to solve a few of the problems which had been Jem Cornish’s legacy. Chen sat impassively, sipping his whiskey, waiting. Across the table from him, Cornish drank glass after glass as if it were water.

‘Heard of Sutter?’ demanded the Colonel at last.

‘Sure. The man who started all the gold rush. Used to own all the land north of Sacramento and up along the American River.’

‘That’s right.
Used to
. Used to own all of Sacramento too. But his land grants were suspect and he had to mortgage his holdings to pay lawyers to fight his claims for him. Lost almost all of it.’

‘Remember also the Indian girls and him three parts drunk every day on
aguardiente
!’ protested Kerhouan. ‘And he could have raised money from his harvest if he had not been too mean to pay top dollar to get workers.’

‘Nevertheless, he went from the ruler of a virtual kingdom to poverty in a few years. He had gold, cattle, grain, land — and what has he now? Six hundred acres of Hock Farm on the Feather. All because the lawyers disputed his boundaries and his land grants.’

He reached out an unsteady hand and slopped some more whiskey into his glass, wincing at the movement.

‘Another bottle!’ he demanded. Kerhouan looked at him steadily, his eyes narrowed, making no move.

‘Another bottle, dammit!’ he repeated.

Kerhouan shrugged and rose from the table, returning after a moment with more whiskey.

‘And now that bastard Lamarr wants to see me off the same way!’ He ground his teeth. ‘Four years the Land Commission’s been sitting and next month it’s supposed to close and now —
now
, by God! — he says that my boundaries have never been “satisfactorily fixed”!’

‘Are your boundaries not then laid down in the title deeds, Corr-onel?’ Chen’s face was as impassive as ever, but his eyes were bright with interest.

‘Oh, yes, they are all described — in Spanish, which the Land Commissioners do not speak! But will they be satisfied that “the large oak by the third waterfall from the source”, or “the three cairns” is where I say it is, and not where Lamarr says it is? If he had put in his claim even three months ago, I could have had a surveyor out to draw up the disputed areas — but less than a month! It’s impossible. Even if I could find one that Lamarr hadn’t got to first, I doubt he could draw up the relevant points in time.’

‘Is that all that’s needed? A representation of the points Lamarr disputes?’

‘Yes. Then we swear their accuracy in front of a lawyer — I know one in San Francisco who is honest enough — and it is then up to Lamarr to disprove their validity.’

‘I can find you a good mapmaker,’ said Chen Kai casually. ‘In Sacramento.’

The rancher looked up from his glass with a startled expression on his face.

‘Trustworthy?’

‘Completely.’

‘Able?’

‘Competent and intelligent.’

‘My God.’ Cornish tossed down another glass. ‘And will he work for me?’

‘This … mapmaker … needs a good position,’ replied the cook carefully. ‘And will do whatever you require in as short a time as is practicable.’

‘Jo,’ enunciated the Colonel solemnly, ‘if this fellow is all you say, then perhaps we can beat Lamarr after all! I’ll ride in first thing in the morning!’

‘I’ll give you the directions,’ promised Chen Kai.

‘Then, gentlemen, adieu until the morrow.’ He staggered to his feet and picked up the almost full bottle of whiskey by the neck, swaying slightly. He bowed mockingly. ‘So, I bid you goodnight.’

Kerhouan watched his unsteady progress across the floor and listened to the crash of his booted feet on the wooden stairs, then turned to Chen with a wry grin.

‘Don’t count on seeing ’im until Sunday at soonest.’

‘Who then is this Lamarr?’ asked Chen, a frown wrinkling his smooth forehead. ‘He has much of his own land. Why does he want Corr-onel’s?’

‘It’s personal between them two. Ever see Mrs Lamarr? No? Belle Kingsley she was when Jack first met ’er. Daughter of one of the California Steam men. Rich and spoilt. “
La belle Belle
” they called her here in Sacramento. But Sacramento not good enough for ’er. ’Er father take ’er to San Francisco.’ His English was becoming more fractured as his narrative progressed: he too had been drinking freely. ‘Only the best for Belle: balls, soirées, theatre outings — and ’im,
mordieu
! Like the lap-dog. She whistle, ’e run after ’er. I think it was still the bang on the ’ead, make ’im stupid. They was engaged, but it was one day on, one day off. Then she begin to play ’im off against Lamarr. Quiet rivalry was no good to ’er, it ’ave to be all in public. I think she like them to fight over her; in the end, it nearly come to a duel between them.’

‘What happened?’

‘Overnight, just like that —’ he snapped his fingers ‘— Colonel Jack come to ’is senses. Tells Lamarr he can ’ave ’er and welcome. Lamarr is pleased, but I think she never forgive Jack. I think she is behind all this — or maybe Lamarr too ’as come to ’is senses, who can tell?’ He drained his glass and set it down with a heavy sigh. ‘Anyways, soon after, Colonel Jack receive news that this Jem —’ he said the name with unmistakable loathing ‘— ’e is sick, so he come back ’ere, and find Tresco like this.’