Fortune's Journey (20 page)

At least she still had the nugget.

They decided to backtrack to Centipede Hollow. Though they had left it by only a few miles, it was morning by the time the weary band staggered back to the top of the last hill that overlooked the town.

When they looked down on the place, saw the desolation, Fortune heard a small groan. It was a moment before she realized that it had come from her own lips. After yesterday's disaster, the catastrophe below seemed too much to bear.

Water covered every street in the town, as if the place had been built in a lake to begin with. Here and there could be seen the remains of a building that had been put up too rapidly, or with a shoddy foundation, and was now nothing but a heap of rubble. The hill on the other side of the main street was dotted with tents and makeshift shelters.

The sight drew a collective moan from the group. They had managed to get through the last twenty-four hours partly on the belief that they would find food and shelter when they finally made it back here. They hadn't been expecting to stumble into yet another disaster area.

Still, bad as the situation was, at least they could find some kind of help.

Besides, there was nowhere else to go.

Fortune knew she should probably be concerned about the townspeople and what they had suffered. But when she had groaned, she had been thinking only of her stomach. Wearily, the five who were still on their feet trudged down the hill. Aaron was leading Romeo. Walter, semiconscious, half delirious and gibbering about Hamlet's ghost, was slung over the horse's broad back.

Fortune dropped back to examine him. Walking beside Romeo, she put her hand on Walter's shoulder and whispered, “I'd be dead now if it wasn't for you, old friend.” She wondered if he could even hear her. “Oh, Walter, do you feel like you've redeemed yourself yet? I stopped being angry long ago. Don't leave us. Not now.
Please!”

She shook her head, fighting back the tears, then whispered again, “Please!”

The mere act of walking through Centipede Hollow was a major effort, since water still stood in all but the highest spots, and where there wasn't water there was mud—clinging, catching, holding mud.

Fortune had been hoping that they would find a doctor when they got back to the town. But though there was urgent need of one, since broken bones and fever were everywhere, no medical man had settled here.

“I wish we were home, back where it's civilized!” said Fortune angrily. She was speaking to Edmund and Aaron. The three of them had spent hours combing the town for someone to help Walter. At one point, her nerves frayed beyond endurance, Fortune had found herself standing in the middle of a street, screaming at the mud to let her loose. When she had finally realized how stupid she must look, she had glanced around, then begun working quietly to free herself.

They were standing now in the lobby of the hotel where she had browbeaten the clerk into letting them have a room on credit because their money, along with their props and their clothing, had been lost with the wagon.

Actually, she would gladly have parted with all of it to have Walter recover. They had lost everything before, and regained it. The only thing that had disappeared in the flood that couldn't be replaced was her letter from Jamie.

Wearily, the three dragged themselves to their room, where they found Mr. Patchett and Mrs. Watson, seemingly numb beyond response, sitting beside Walter's cot, silent and staring.

Two days later they were sitting down to breakfast when Edmund suddenly bolted from the table. Fortune hesitated, then ran after him to see if he was all right.

She found him kneeling in the street outside the hotel, vomiting. Her stomach churned at the smell.

When he was done, she helped him to his feet, holding her breath against the odor.

That was the first sign they had of what others in town had already discovered during the night. The cholera had arrived, as it so often did in towns that had suffered a flood.

Poor Edmund's supercilious elegance failed him utterly as the disease took over his body, racking him with fever, causing him to spew out liquids violently.

Mrs. Watson was next to fall. The disease devastated her. It wasn't the thought of dying—it was the simple betrayal by her body, the humiliation of losing control of her functions. Fortune's heart ached for Mrs. Watson when she heard her sobbing in her bed.

Walter and Aaron followed in rapid succession. Because of Walter's weakened condition, the disease seemed to strike him hardest of all.

Only Fortune and Mr. Patchett remained untouched.

Fortune now found herself cast in a role she had never expected to play: nurse to the sick and the dying.

Few residents of Centipede Hollow escaped the touch of the disease. Of those who did, many fled, their terror of contracting the scourge outweighing any compassion they might feel for those who had already been stricken by it.

Fortune longed to flee, too. Centipede Hollow had become one vast sickroom, and it brought to mind all too painfully the memories of her parents' last hours.

Shame-faced, Mr. Patchett suggested it to her.

“Maybe we should go,” he said late one afternoon. “There's too much death here.”

Fortune nodded. She had seen too much death, and it was weighing heavily on her.

But as she started to pack her bags, something stopped her. In her mind, she imagined Jamie being struck down by the cholera, and wondered if anyone would nurse him if that should happen.

She went back to where Mr. Patchett was waiting for her.

“We're staying,” she said.

He looked at her for a moment, then shrugged.

Rolling up their sleeves, they walked among the dead and dying, and did what had to be done.

Chapter Twenty-One

To her amazement, Fortune found the work of nursing the sick very rewarding. Though she was exhausted, terrified, revolted by the filth and the suffering, when she entered a room and the moaning creature that lay on a cot saw her and, for a moment, seemed to be free of the fear and the pain, she felt something she had never experienced before, something that struck deeper even than the applause she had learned to love.

In a matter of days she had become the stuff of legend. The miners referred to her as “The Angel of Centipede Hollow,” and many a miner would claim in later years that he survived the cholera because he lay in his bed day after day “waiting for his Fortune,” unwilling to die until he had had his chance to see her that day, and too filled with hope to die once he had.

Fortune herself never fully realized the impact she had on those men. Traveling the streets in an old blue cloak that one of the other women had given her to wear, she would come in from the fog or the darkness, her golden hair tumbling over her shoulders, her eyes filled with compassion, and suddenly make life seem worthwhile again.

Her world became an endless round of the sick and the dying, a sea of mud, an overwhelming stench of disease and filth that could not be escaped no matter where she went.

Yet she would have been content, were it not for her fears for her friends. Edmund, with remarkable strength, had thrown off the disease in less than three days. Weak but willing, he joined the nursing effort by helping with the preparation of food for the victims.

Fortune, astonished, said nothing.

Jamie was on her mind constantly during these days. Every time she ministered to a sick miner, wiped someone's brow, or fed him broth, she wondered if Jamie was well, and if he was not if anyone was caring for him.

She wondered, too, what he thought of her, if he ever thought of her at all.

Sometimes she wondered if he was even alive. That thought, when it came, was ruthlessly purged. She would lift the chain that hung about her neck, cup the golden nugget in her palm, and try to keep from weeping. Even when not holding it she was aware of the heart-shaped nugget where it rested against her own heart.

She tried to console herself with the knowledge that Plunkett's Players had been lucky. By rights, more of them should have lost the battle with cholera. But Edmund was almost fully recovered, and Aaron and Mrs. Watson were both doing well. The troupe had beaten the odds. Yet she was greedy. She wanted
all
of them to survive.

And it seemed clear that Walter would not.

Sometimes at night, when she simply could not walk another step, Fortune would take out the banjo a dying miner had given her, and sing quietly to herself, the little songs she had been writing about California.

If she sat on the porch of the hotel when she did this, miners would soon gather about her, in the same way the wagon people had. Then she would feel once more what it meant to be a performer.

She understood, in those days, how her songs could be as important as the nursing she was doing, for she could see the gratitude in the eyes of the men who listened—gratitude for what her songs gave them: a momentary release from the sorrow that surrounded them, and an escape valve for pent-up emotions. When she sang of homes that were far away, she could count on bringing them to tears every time.

It gave her a sense of power, and a sense of responsibility.

Late one night Fortune sat on the porch, strumming the banjo and thinking about all that had happened in the single year since their wagon had rolled into Busted Heights the previous April.

A heavy fog closed over the streets, so that the dim glow of yellow from the window behind her provided the only illumination.

Suddenly she began to weep. Seven more men had died that day, despite everything she had done. It was no surprise. Everyone knew what the odds were. But she could never get used to it. She wanted to be back on the stage, where death was a bit of pretending, and at the end of the show everyone came back to take a bow.

Sorrow found voice in song. Plucking the banjo, she began to sing the words she had written back while they were on the trail:

“When I rise up
And look around,
My home I cannot see…”

She stopped, the painful hurt in her throat too thick to let the words pass. But from out of the mist and the darkness a sweetly familiar tenor voice picked up the lyric, finished the verse.

“For I have wandered
Far away…
What will become of me?”

She seemed to hang suspended in space, unable to speak, to move, to breath. From the corner of her eye she saw a movement in the fog at the end of the porch. It freed her to move again. Silently she placed the banjo at her side. Then she stood and brushed out her skirt.

“I'm here,” she said softly.

The mist seemed to cling to the man who stepped forward, hiding his face. It made no difference; she knew who it was.

She wanted to run to him, throw her arms around him, cover him with kisses.

But she couldn't. Not yet. Not until she knew how he felt about her.

He stepped still closer. She was on fire with the need to reach out to him. But she had to wait, had to know if he would accept her, forgive her…

Still not saying a word, Jamie stepped out of the mist. His eyes were dark, as if he had not slept in a long time, and they seemed deeper than ever, full of wonder.

Slowly, almost fearfully, he reached out to touch her hair.

A sob broke from his chest. “My God. You are here. And you're alive!”

Trembling, she placed her hand over his.

“I've kept track of you every day since I left,” he whispered. “When I learned about the flood, the cholera, heard what you were doing here, I had to come. Even if you didn't want me, I had to see if you were all right, to see if…if you needed me.”

The words caught in his throat. They were unnecessary. She saw everything she needed in his eyes.

Tentatively, still trembling, but knowing that he was willing to risk even the horror of cholera on her behalf, she reached out her hand and laid it on his chest.

“Jamie.” Her body shook like a leaf in the wind, and no more words would come. It didn't matter. His arms were around her now, and he was holding her against him so tightly it felt as if they were a single being.

“Oh, Fortune,” he gasped. “Oh, God, you don't know how I've missed you. Every day was a little death, every night an eternity in hell. There hasn't been a morning I've woken without you on my mind, a night when you weren't the last thing I thought of before I went to sleep.”

“I thought I would die when you went away,” she whispered. She drew away from him slightly, remembering how he had been hurt by what he saw. “Let me tell you what happened.”

He covered her lips, first with his finger, then with a kiss. “It doesn't matter,” he said a few moments later. “I don't care what happened, as long as you love me now.”

“I do.” She pulled his face back down to hers. “I do.”

After a time she took Jamie into the hotel and led him to Walter's bedside. He gasped, and Fortune realized again how old and shrunken their friend now looked.

Jamie turned at her, and she could read the question in his eyes:
Is he going to make it?

She shook her head.

Before either of them could speak, Walter opened his eyes.

“Jamie?” he asked, struggling to lift his head. Then, when he was sure of what he was seeing, he held out his hand. “Jamie! Do you know me?”

“‘Excellent well,'” said Jamie, reaching down to take Walter's hand. “‘You are a fishmonger.'”

“It
is
you!” said Walter, clutching him desperately. “You came back!”

“Couldn't stay away!”

“I've been waiting for you.” He gasped, and broke into a fit of coughing. When it finally subsided, he said, “There's something you have to see!” He turned to Fortune. “Show him.” He reached up and touched her neck, laying his fingers lightly over the chain she had worn throughout the winter. “Show him what you always have with you…”

Without a word, Fortune drew out the heart-shaped nugget.