Heartbroke Bay (3 page)
Authors: Lynn D'urso
The train lurches, and she staggers. Hans catches her waist in his hands. The swell of her breasts presses briefly between them, and there is a flash bright as magnesium, an instant of heat of the sort that passes between a man and a woman who know without question how their bodies might fit together.
Neither Bernard nor Lady Hamilton rise as Hannah escorts Hans into the Pullman car, tucking a strand of hair into place. Her scent, a pale blend of gardenia and sandalwood, blooms on the risen temperature of her skin, and Her Ladyship, Victorian bird dog of sin and temptation, seems keenly aware of it; her nostrils flare, and the beginning of a scowl splits her face.
Hannah says, “Your Ladyship, may I present Mr. Nelson,” and there is an awkward moment as Hans holds out a hand and Lady Hamilton does not take it. He is saved from discomfort by a jolt and the clang of steel couplings. There is a mechanical hiss as the speed of the train slows to a crawl, the engine drained of steam by a split boiler line.
Bernard throws a world-weary smile in Hans’s direction and sighs, “So much for one’s schedule,” as if important plans must now be put in abeyance. To Hannah, his tone implies that such disappointments are naturally to be expected of anything American, and by extension, of Hans Nelson. After a moment, Lady Hamilton murmurs “perhaps Mr. Nelson will entertain us as repairs are made.”
Her Ladyship’s lack of enthusiasm rolls off Hans without notice; as tea is served with sugar cakes and biscuits, he launches a conversation heavy with forced bonhomie of the sort that serves well in boardinghouses and saloons but draws terse responses in a Pullman sitting car.
Outside, a panorama of white clouds drifts over foothills laced with dry riverbeds. The train creeps into the wasteland of an Indian reservation, and Hans gestures to draw his companions’ attention to a cluster of disastrous-looking huts alongside the tracks. Beyond the huts, rye-colored children with arms like sticks prod at cattle that are no more than desiccated hides draped over slow-moving bones.
“Hunkpapa,” he says knowledgeably. “Hunkpapa and Miniconjou Sioux. The government gave ’em all the land around here a few years ago to keep ’em off the warpath.”
Bernard glances out the window, picks up his cup, and takes a sip. “It doesn’t appear as if they have done much with it.”
Lady Hamilton sniffs in agreement. “Lord Hamilton’s experience in Kabul and Africa was that the primitives are rarely appreciative of largess. It was much the same with the Boers.”
“Colonists,” sniffs Bernard in near-perfect imitation of Her Ladyship. “In Afghanistan with Chamberlain, was he?”
“No, Lord Hamilton was adviser to Abdur Rahman, after the Khan fled. In Africa, of course, he was with the Suez Enterprise.”
Hannah listens as the exchange of chopped and coded references to obscure, bright moments in Britain’s affairs excludes Hans from the conversation. She watches, growing increasingly uncomfortable, as Her Ladyship takes a single bite of a biscuit, makes a moue at the taste, and puts it down; picks up a cream pastry and does the same again without offering the plate to Hans. Through the window, sitting hunched in the doorway of a shack, a wretch so poor and miserable that he does not brush aside the insults of insects drinking at the corners of his eyes watches the atrocious privilege within the stalled train, contrasting the plentitude of dishes on the table with the hunger in his children’s eyes. When he locks eyes with Hannah, she looks away, unable to hold his gaze.
Leaning forward, Hans helps himself to a slice of cake and pushes into the conversation. “This bunch was brought out here after the battle at Wounded Knee.”
Bernard adopts an expression meant to show both boredom and astonishment at the interruption before mumbling, “Wounded Knee? Odd name . . .”
Hans waves the cake, spilling a rain of powdery sugar. “They jumped the reservation and went to Ghost Dancing, trying to pray all the buffalo back to life. When the army caught up with ’em, I guess there was quite a fight.”
Mistaking Bernard and Lady Hamilton’s stares for interest, he presses on, stringing together bits of information gleaned from distorted, bloodthirsty newspaper accounts to transform the slaughter of nearly three hundred men, women, and children by artillery at close range into a heroic battle. “The Sioux killed a few troopers, but the seventh cavalry gave ’em hell. Chased ’em halfway to Canada and did most of’em in.”
Hannah, in a small voice, says, “How horrible.”
Bernard quips bemusedly, “Bit more than a wounded knee, eh?”
Lady Hamilton, her voice tight with revulsion at Hans’s unthinking equation of a savage ceremony with proper prayer, murmurs, “This Ghost Dancing. I presume the authorities have put an end to it.”
Hans nods, slurps at his tea, and swallows before continuing. “They gave the medal of honor to twenty of the troopers. It pretty much ended the Indian Wars. Of course, what really whipped the Sioux and Cheyenne was General Sheridan coming up with the idea of wiping out the buffalo. No buffalo, no Indians. But some medicine man got ’em all worked up about this Ghost Dance, telling them it would bring back the buffalo and run off the white men.
“There used to be millions,” he says, waving a hand at the empty landscape outside the windows to indicate the missing herds. Something inside Hannah churns at the thought of endless slaughter, then eases at the almost wistful tone of her suitor’s voice when he says, “It does seems a shame somehow to just wipe ’em all out . . .”
Hannah is not certain whether he means the buffalo or the Indians. Bernard, weary of both buffalos and aboriginals, watches as Hans pops the last of the cake into his mouth. He looks at him over the top of his glasses. “America seems to have no shortage of animals, Mr. Nelson.”
Pink light gleams off Bernard’s buffed and trimmed fingernails as he reaches to pour more tea for Lady Hamilton and himself, ignoring Hans’s cup and—to punish her for bringing this blond Visigoth into the Pullman—Hannah’s. The subtlety of the jab is lost on Hans, and he is about to continue when Hannah can no longer contain herself and rises, a rush of anger and embarrassment coloring her face.
“My apologies, Mr. Nelson, but I’m sure Bernard has work he must attend to.”
Hans, taken aback, looks up at her for a moment before turning his stare on Bernard, as he slowly decodes the insult. Realizing the interview has been a failure, he rises to go.
Putting his hat on to signal a newfound disregard for English gentry and its puffery, he glares down at the secretary. “That may be so, Bernard.” The address is insultingly familiar, and it galls the Englishman to hear the illiterate American accentuate the last syllable.
“But tell me.” Hans towers over the slender secretary. “Are men as scarce in England as I think?”
The insult drives home, peaking Lady Hamilton’s dudgeon. Bernard turns the color of a plum. Hannah closes her eyes, appalled, yet thrilled by what she has done . . .
Dear Diary,We approach the Rocky Mountains of the West. This continent seems endless, and I sometimes feel we are bound across a land strange as dark Africa. Mr. Nelson has deeply offended L. H. and her pet—I am forbidden Mr. Nelson’s company, but this serves best to add some adventure to our meetings and prevents nothing. Victoria calls me a trollop—in humor, I assure you—and says I have been infected with the same madness that affects the haughty American cowboys in their great hats, which they often fail to doff to L. H. but always tip to Victoria or myself—a further proof to L. H. of their savagery.
Under makeshift repairs, the train pulls into Butte, Montana, where it sits on a siding as a mechanic attempts to weld the split boiler line. With Victoria’s assistance, Hannah slips away to a clandestine dinner with Hans, who props one elbow on a table in a rough café and listens, chin in hand, while she describes, in a manner more familiar than she could have imagined possible only a few days earlier, the details of her life. Finding herself at ease, she relates how shortly after her most recent birthday her father had called her in to dinner with a pronouncement that he had “wonderful news.”
“John Nightwatch,” said Poppa Butler, referring to the second son of a powerful Bristol family, “has asked for your hand.”
The Nightwatch fortune had been created during the eighteenth century by the auctioning of Africans from a stable on Blackboy Road. After slavery was outlawed in England, it had been doubled again by the diversion of the family’s ships across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, where a triangle of trade involving rum, molasses, and slavery continued to flourish. For years the Nightwatch Corporation had been Poppa Butler’s biggest customer for the barrels, cordage, and iron goods that rig a ship, and though the families often socialized, Hannah could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times John Nightwatch had spoken to her directly; he preferred instead to address his remarks to a point in space somewhere beyond her shoulder.
“And your reply?” she had asked Poppa, feeling the breath being pressed from her body.
“He is a fine young man,” said Poppa Butler. “And Mr. Nightwatch informs me that he is the recipient of an annual income of three thousand pounds.”
He does not mention that the allowance had been settled on John after a series of embarrassments removed him from the family business—not the least of which was a dalliance with a married woman who, Hannah’s friends now whisper, has been so reduced in circumstances as a result of the ensuing divorce that she is rumored to be earning her living on the streets of Whitechapel. Apparently Poppa Butler had forgiven John Nightwatch his peccadillo, because three thousand is three thousand, earned or not. When she protested that she felt no particular affection for Mr. Nightwatch, Poppa Butler had glared at her over his rimless spectacles and said, “The match is a fine one, Hannah. I have already assented.”
Hers was an England where bells rang on time, grass was trimmed when trimming was due, and the general order of life proceeded as planned. A good English daughter would do as her father thought best; within a week an announcement had been made and plans were laid for an elaborate wedding. Hannah’s stomach cramped as she paged through samples of wedding gown silk and invitations.
Hannah does not detail for Hans how a month before the wedding she had invited her father, mother, and John Nightwatch into the parlor, where she fumbled for the words of a speech carefully arranged and rehearsed in the small hours of the night, or how all she could say through her tears and trembling was, “I cannot . . .”
She offers instead only that she and Mr. Nightwatch were incompatible.
“And now you are here,” Hans replies, in a tone that indicates he is greatly pleased with this result. Hannah waits for a waiter to refill her glass before explaining how the withdrawal of the outraged Nightwatch family’s account from her father’s business had guaranteed the downfall of the Butler holdings when the market crashed. She steers wide of Poppa Butler’s reluctance to forgive her for losing the income of a Nightwatch wife, but sketches briefly for Hans how his debt to Lord Hamilton rendered her unable to refuse the offer to enter into Lady Hamilton’s service.
Hans listens carefully, then waves a hand in a gesture that seems to dismiss the Hamiltons and John Nightwatch simultaneously, saying laconically that a thousand pounds sterling certainly isn’t enough to justify indenturing oneself.
“The world is full of money,” he adds enigmatically. “All one needs is the courage to go out and pick it up.”
Reassured by his open face and attention, Hannah asks, “And you, Mr. Nelson? Have you not considered marriage?”
He pauses, leans back, and folds his arms across his chest.
“I’ve been rather busy working to make a go of it.”
“Of course,” says Hannah, feeling on the verge of intrusion. “But you’ve done well for yourself.” An inflection in her voice shades the statement as a question.
Nelson thinks a moment, edges forward in his seat, and lays his hands palms up on the table. “These are working hands, Miss Nelson. Mining is hard work, and sometimes one’s success is just a matter of plain luck, up or down.” This is as close as he can bring himself to telling her how he once found himself on the seesaw rise to fortune through the discovery of a plum-sized nugget that he sold for several hundred dollars, a windfall he then rolled into an apparently gold-heavy claim pimped by a crooked geologist, only to learn the claim had been salted.
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