Never Look Back (68 page)

Three days later, on Friday, five men were waiting outside the mill when Matilda arrived there with Sidney in the cart, all of whom had seen the advertisement in the newspaper. Cissie had declined to come with them, she laughingly said she would only choose the most handsome one, and anyway Matilda had the business head.

Of the five men Matilda had no real choice but to select the one she liked least, for he was the only one who had the physical strength, the real knowledge of timber, and enough greed to get the job done in time.

Hamish MacPherson was a Scot, like John, but that was the only similarity. He was a giant of a man, at least six feet three, with forearms like tree trunks. His black hair was long and greasy, his teeth were rotten, he smelled as if he’d never taken a bath in his life, and he chewed tobacco too. Each time he opened his mouth he spat out a disgusting brown stream.

He listened to what had to be done very carefully, stopping Matilda now and then to make a point or two clear. She thought he was a very sly man, his eyes never met hers, and she had a feeling his mind was on working out some kind of fiddle.

‘You’re really gonna pay me eighty dollars a week?’ he asked finally.

‘Of course, that’s what I promised,’ she said, taking a step back from him because his smell was making her faint. ‘But you must understand that you will have to find men to help you, and
pay them yourself. And you won’t get the bonus I offered until the timber is all on the ship.’

‘I reckon I can get the help,’ he said, scratching under his arm pit and revealing he was lousy as well as dirty. ‘I been working on a logging camp up in Canada and most of the men I was working with have come down here, intending to go on to California for the gold. A few weeks longer won’t bother them too much, specially if I’m the boss.’

‘You will be
their
boss, but I shall be yours,’ she said crisply, giving him a stern look. ‘I was Mr Duncan’s agent and I am handling everything for his widow. I shall be here every day, and if you fall behind, our contract will be cancelled immediately.’

‘I ain’t a shirker,’ he said, looking a little hurt. ‘I’ll get the timber on that boat for you, come hell or high water. Got anywhere I can sleep? I ain’t got fixed up with a place yet.’

The thought of having him sleeping at the mill was horrifying, but under the circumstances she had no choice but to offer him the shed where her wagon had once been.

‘Just make sure you don’t start a fire,’ she warned him. ‘Now, we’d better go through the orders so you know exactly what timber is needed.’

Cissie looked very apprehensive when Matilda described MacPherson. Sidney went into a sulk because she said she intended to come in with him every day too.

‘But why?’ he asked. ‘I can see to everything. You should be here.’

‘I’m not going to be there to supervise you,’ she said quickly, afraid she might have hurt his feelings. ‘I’ll need you to check each order as it’s completed to make sure it’s the right thickness and length. I’m just going to be there to watch MacPherson. I know his sort, I bet he’s already thinking of selling off timber on the side. And we don’t want him finding out who any of the orders are for, or getting an inkling of how much profit we’ll be making. Or he’ll be off to California getting his own orders. You’d be no match for a blackguard like him!’

‘And you reckon you can deal with the man?’ Cissie said with a saucy grin. ‘If he’s as big as you’ve said, you won’t be tall enough to kick him in the balls if he plays you up.’

‘There’s more ways to keep a man under control than kicking
him in the balls’ Matilda laughed. ‘You always seem to forget that I grew up amongst his kind. Now, are you going to be able to cope here without me?’

‘I reckon so,’ Cissie said, picking Amelia up off the floor and cuddling her. ‘But I think Sidney ought to build me a little pen, so I can put this one in it to play sometimes. She crawls so fast I need eyes in the back of my head and it ain’t fair to make Tabitha and Peter stand over her all the time.’

Sidney cheered up then, delighted to find he was really needed. ‘I’ll make something tomorrow,’ he said.

MacPherson proved to be far more efficient than Matilda expected. When she and Sidney arrived the next morning he had three equally rough-looking men with him, one of whom was already yoking the oxen up to the cart. MacPherson said they were going out to the forest straight away to fell the timber. He said they would camp out and stay there until they’d felled all the trees necessary.

‘Better that way, won’t waste so much time,’ he said, spitting out a stream of tobacco and narrowly missing the hem of Matilda’s dress. ‘Once we’re nearly done I’ll come back with one load and start on the sawing, then they can bring the rest back in relays.’

‘How long will this be?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘Two weeks maybe. Keep me money till then. Ain’t nuthin’ to spend it on out there.’

Matilda lived in a permanent state of anxiety for the next two weeks. Although MacPherson had been advanced no money, he had the cart, the oxen and John’s felling equipment. She had no way of knowing exactly where he and his men were, so she couldn’t ride out to check how they were doing, and there was nothing to keep her at the sawmill each day.

Suppose they hadn’t really gone out to the forest, but had gone instead in the cart to California? By the time she found out it would be too late to hire another man.

She took out all her nervous energy back at the cabin, chopping enough wood to last right through the winter, and digging over a piece of ground which John and Cissie hadn’t yet touched, ready to plant more fruit trees. Often at night she would look at her hands and sigh. They’d looked better when she arrived back
from San Francisco, a few weeks of no rough work had softened them, but now they were awful again, and she didn’t think anything would improve them.

Seventeen days after MacPherson left, Sidney came galloping home one evening to report MacPherson and one of his men had come in that afternoon with the first load. They had unloaded it, and the other man had turned around and taken the cart back for a second load.

‘I sure don’t like the look of the man, he’s an animal,’ Sidney said, breathless from the ride home. ‘But he’s a worker and no mistake. Said they’d been felling from first light till dusk.’

Matilda felt like falling down on her knees to offer a prayer of thanks. ‘Let’s just hope he’s as good at the rest of the job,’ she said. ‘But I’ll come with you tomorrow to see.’

If Matilda had thought work on the land back at the cabin was gruelling, she was soon to find running a sawmill was even more so. MacPherson and his assistant never let up on the sawing regardless of how hot it was. The saw buzzed, wood chips flew, the dust got right into her chest, even when she escaped up to the tiny office above the wood shed, it followed her. But she rarely stopped to rest, for there were so many small jobs she could do while Sidney helped the men. She swept and shovelled up the sawdust and chips, for that could be sold later to the paper mill further along the river. Bark and small off-cuts could be used for fires, and the larger off-cuts stored to be sold to carpenters.

As the sawn planks gradually piled up, she and Sidney carried them between them to start the piles for each customer. Mostly the orders were for pine planking, but there were also some for oak and ash, and she soon learned to tell the difference.

Meanwhile the other two men kept returning with further loads, dumping it and going on back for more. It was Matilda who led the oxen down to the river to let them drink and graze before the next load, and she wondered at their gentle docility when they were treated so callously by the men.

At the end of each day she often envied the men when she saw them run off to the river to swim and wash their grimy, sawdust-covered bodies before going along to the saloon. Their lives might be hard, but they were uncomplicated by domestic problems. From what little she learned of the men from Sidney, they had been moving between jobs like this for years, the
wages they earned all spent in saloons and brothels, none of them had ever stayed in one place long enough to marry Sidney said their conversations with one another were all about the gold in California, where they believed they would strike it rich, and never need to work again.

Their arrogance amused her. They all knew she had been to San Francisco, yet not one of them had asked her for advice, or even her opinion about the place, because she was a woman. If they had, she might have advised them to delay going until early spring, for if they arrived in the fall, it would be too wet and cold to pan for gold. As it was, she thought it would serve them right when their money ran out and the only shelter they had was a tent. But at least that lust for gold was making them work hard.

It was as she arranged the shipping of the timber and booked her own passage with it for the morning of 12 September that Zandra came back into Matilda’s mind. Half the orders were completed now, well before time, and in all that had happened since she returned from San Francisco she hadn’t had time even to think about her, much less to sit down and write a letter. That visit to the parlour house was the one story she’d omitted to tell Cissie and Sidney. It didn’t seem appropriate after John’s death, Cissie didn’t need reminders of her past at such a difficult time.

But she had liked the woman very much, and Zandra had offered to help her find accommodation. She might even have some ideas about a business Matilda could run with Cissie to support the children. Her friend was on the mend now, she was gaining weight, her old energy was back, and even though she still lapsed into mournful tears sometimes, on many an occasion she’d expressed a wish to live somewhere with a bit of life and colour.

Knowing there was a boat sailing to San Francisco at the end of the week, which would be carrying mail, Matilda sat down in the sawmill office and wrote several letters, first to all her customers advising them of the shipping date. She stated that she would be sailing with the timber and that she expected it to be collected and paid for at the wharf on docking. Then she wrote to Zandra.

It was the first week in September when Zandra’s maid Dolores came in with two letters from the mail office. Zandra was feeling very disconsolate as both her knees were badly swollen and she had been unable even to walk down the stairs, much less make it to the mail office. Joining the line of men waiting patiently for news from home was one of her little pleasures, it was here she often overheard the most interesting gossip. Men who couldn’t read themselves often asked her to read their letters to them, and it gave her a chance to touch the very pulse of the bustling little town.

But when Dolores handed her the mail, she forgot her aching knees, that the doctor had said she must accept old age graciously, and that the parlour mirrors hadn’t been polished as she liked to see them. The first letter was from a lawyer friend, Charles Dubrette, in New Orleans. He had decided to come out to California to see what was going on there himself, by sea to Panama and then overland to the Pacific, and should be arriving around the end of September. The other letter was from Matilda.

Zandra was delighted by Charles’s letter, she was very fond of him, but even more by Matilda’s, for everything in it proved she was right in her feelings about the girl.

Contessa Alexandra Petroika had always preferred men’s company to women’s. Never in her entire life could she remember ever opening up to any woman as she had to Matilda, or particularly wanting friendship with her own sex. Her relationship with her ‘boarders’ was akin to that of a schoolmistress with her children. She taught them how to behave, how to dress, scolded them when they misbehaved and looked after them when they were sick. But they rarely touched her emotions.

Yet there was something about Matilda which had touched her, and she’d thought about her a great deal since that one, rather brief meeting. She thought perhaps it was because she recognized a very similar character to her own: a good-hearted, feisty woman who looked life right in the eye and refused to be brought down by either tragedy or misfortune.

Now as she read Matilda’s letter she saw she’d had more misfortune with her friend’s husband dying, yet nowhere in the letter was there any self-pity. Zandra guessed that Matilda had taken the entire burden of looking after her friend and her children on to her own shoulders, and she knew too how hard
it must have been for a woman to organize getting that timber felled and ready to ship. Most would just have covered their faces with their apron and wept.

Zandra read between the lines of the letter and recognized that same indomitable spirit which had driven her to Paris at a similar age, where, penniless, with nothing but her wits and her looks, she’d risen to become the most fêted and influential courtesan in the city.

She could have stayed in her beloved Paris, accepted any one of many offers of marriage to ensure she would be cared for in her old age. But her pride wouldn’t allow her to do that, these men had been lovers and friends for many years, and she wanted to remain in their hearts as she was when she was young and beautiful. So at forty-five, twenty-two years ago, she packed her bags and slipped out of Paris to take a chance on America.

She opened her first ‘parlour house’ in New Orleans. It took her entire savings to get a house in the right location, to pay for the lavish decorations and elegant furnishings. Her ‘boarders’, as the girls were known, were selected equally carefully, not just for their looks, but for their warmth and personality. She opened with a grand soirée, inviting only the richest men in town, and laying on champagne, fine wines and superb food. She recouped the cost in just the first few weeks, for her gentlemen soon discovered an evening in her sophisticated ‘parlour’ was not only the best fun in town, but utterly discreet.

Twenty years later, at sixty-five, Zandra was growing tired, and she felt it was time to retire. She had one last glittering party, said her goodbyes, sold up and moved to Charleston, taking Dolores her maid with her. She might have stayed there for ever but for hearing a whisper that a carpenter had found some gold near Sacramento. In the early spring of the following year she booked a passage for herself and Dolores on a ship sailing right around the Horn, just to take a look.