The Furies (19 page)

She strained on tiptoe, her dyed cotton dress a sparkle of red amid the drab rags of most of the other inhabitants. Her son Louis wore a flannel shirt and homespun trousers. Bart didn’t even notice what Israel, the tall mulatto, was wearing. He was concentrating on the vibrant, dark-haired woman who kicked off her shoes and dashed to the water’s edge, awaiting the lighter.

Bart felt unusually sentimental just then. During all the years of his marriage, his wife had never once generated emotion of the kind that gripped him as he watched Amanda barefoot in the white foam. She was a prize, a genuine prize—

She’d been married once, lived in Texas a while, then in the pueblo of Los Angeles. She’d been in Yerba Buena for the last four years, and on the surface seemed content to earn a meager living selling food and drink. But he knew how deceiving that air of contentment was. He knew because of things she asked of him, and because of the parcel he bore under his arm.

She was waving hard now, her hand flying. On her wrist he saw that peculiar rope bracelet given her by the vanished cousin she spoke of occasionally. She claimed she could have been a Boston heiress if the right cards had fallen. But here she was on the California coast, scraping out an existence in a single-story building she’d put up with the last of her savings after paying sixteen-fifty American for her fifty-vara lot—

And damned if he wasn’t glad about the whole business.

Better watch yourself, McGill, he thought, or you’ll do some fool thing like deciding you love this woman enough to marry her—and there goes independence and a handsome living with the Messrs. Ball.

The lighter grounded. The cornets blared as Bart prepared to jump down into the surf.

Amanda spun toward the crowd. “Louis? Come here and see Captain Bart—”

“Oh, they’s one more thing I forgot to tell you,” the oarsman said suddenly.

Bart turned, an inquiring look on his face.

“Folks around here got tired of the old name for the town. Some of ’em are starting to call it after another settlement that used to be near here.”

“What settlement?”

“San Francisco.”

“Bart!”
Amanda cried, throwing her arms around his neck. “I nearly fainted when Louis ran in to say they’d sighted your clipper from the hill. I thought you were going straight back to New York this trip—”

“Planned on it. Ran into an out-of-season blow.” He bussed her cheek, relishing the clean, soaped smell of her skin. Even in such a public place, the touch of her body produced a decided physical reaction. “Tell you about it later,” he added as he hugged her. She felt him, all right.

“I can tell you’ve been away a while. Lord, how I’ve missed you!”

He grinned. “That’s why I don’t come around too often. I reckon we’d get pretty tired of each other if we slept in the same bed year in and year out—” He planted another kiss on her cheek. “I swear you just keep growing prettier, Amanda.”

“No. I’m getting gray, Bart.”

She was; strands of white showed in the dark glossiness of her hair.

“It’s becoming. You take it from one who’s seen all kinds.”

“Nice of you to flatter an old lady, Captain McGill—” She caught his arm as they walked from the surf to the damp sand. She picked up her shoes, still teasing him. “You know some of the local women think I’m scandalous, keeping company with a youngster like you—”

“The hell with ’em. Five years’ difference is no difference at all.” He peeked around her at the sturdy, black-eyed boy with swarthy skin and broad shoulders. He held out his hand.

“How are you, Louis?”

“Very good, Captain Bart, thank you,” Louis Kent said with a cheery smile.

Bart gave the obligatory nod to the hulking yellow scarecrow lingering a respectful distance away. “Israel. Things well with you?”

“About the same, Cap’n.”

In the opaque brown eyes, Bart detected the hostility he’d encountered before. Amanda said Israel bore southern-made scars on his back—Bart had never cared to ask to see them—and so all southerners were anathemas to the mulatto. Israel made no secret of having run away from a Mississippi cotton plantation. How Amanda could treat the ex-slave as an equal, Bart McGill’s experience and education did not permit him to fathom.

Amanda had met Israel in Los Angeles, where he’d gone as a member of one of the trading brigades coming up from the southwest. That was early in ’44. She’d hired him to accompany her north to Yerba Buena, where she’d hoped to find a more prosperous economy than the one she’d left in the pueblo. In that, she had been disappointed.

Together, Amanda and Israel, who was about thirty now, had built Kent’s. It tickled Bart that Amanda approached physical work with an almost masculine directness. He’d watched her split a log for firewood once, and laughed aloud when she raised her palms to her mouth, spit on them, and clamped a grip on the ax—treating him to an arch look because he laughed. He’d assured her he was only laughing because her behavior was such a delightful contrast to the vaporish ways of eastern ladies—including his unlamented wife—who probably would have gone to their graves rather than let anyone see them spit
or
chop wood.

The mulatto had helped supply the knowledge of carpentry required to put up the tavern. He and Amanda had shared the labor equally. He’d remained her devoted—and free—employee ever since. For no rational reason, Bart distrusted him—an inheritance from his own upbringing, he occasionally admitted to himself.

The crowd was dispersing. Amanda and the clipper captain started up the beach toward the crude buildings that comprised the settlement. Israel and Louis followed.

“Feels good to be on shore again,” Bart said.

“Feels good to have you here.”

“Reckon we should celebrate with a little music after you’re finished for the day.”

“Not just with music,” she laughed, squeezing his arm.

“Miz Kent already hung up the sign saying we’re closed,” Israel remarked from a pace behind.

Bart was annoyed at the Negro eavesdropping on private conversation. But Amanda’s bubbling voice took the edge off his irritation.

“I’m going to cook you the biggest meal you’ve had in months. And Louis and I want to hear some songs—”

“Got a new one I think you’ll like,” he said, taking her arm. He noticed her dark eyes straying to the parcel in his other hand. “But you’re more interested in these, aren’t you?” He bent to whisper. “There’s a price on ’em.”

Her eyes brimmed with warmth, and she was only partly teasing when she replied, “You don’t have to bargain for that, Bart. You know how much I long for you while you’re gone—”

“Still say you couldn’t stand me if I was around all the time.”

She kept eyeing the parcel. In answer to the unspoken question, he said, “Yes, Kent editions, every one. Three Coopers. A collection of stories by Hawthorne—
Mosses from an Old Manse,
I think the title is—and a bunch of peculiar—oh, supernatural tales, I guess you’d call them. Written by some fellow named Poe. I didn’t care for ’em much. That particular book was secondhand. I was told the public doesn’t care for ’em much either.”

Amanda’s ebullient mood seemed spoiled by the mention of the books. Soon after they had met for the first time, she had spoken candidly about her childhood, who she was and who her father had been. She said she had never imagined her father’s firm was still in existence until, by pure chance, she had come across a tattered copy of Headley’s
Napoleon and his Marshals
in Los Angeles.

The book was being sold among other odds and ends by a wagon trader who had passed through the pueblo. It was the twelfth edition of the popular work, published at Boston in 1839 and carrying the words
Kent and Son
and a design representing a bottle of tea on its title page.

After that very first visit, Bart had brought her Kent books on every trip. Whenever possible, he also brought her answers to questions.

Listening to the story of her early years, he had learned in the bargain how she’d traveled this far west. He had been thunderstruck by the account of what she’d endured, and not a little disturbed by her unpleasant expression when she spoke of the man who had won the family firm from her stepfather in a dice game—

Her face had the same grim look now. In New York the past autumn, he had found the answers to some new questions. He wondered whether he should tell her. He disliked seeing the angry streak in her nature assert itself—

She didn’t leave the choice to him. She quickened her step so they drew ahead of Israel and the boy. They swung past a smith’s and walked on toward the oddly quiet Portsmouth Square. Even Brannan’s mercantile emporium looked deserted.

Abruptly, Amanda said, “What about Stovall?”

“What about him?”

“Bart, don’t string me along. Did you find out everything I wanted to know?”

He sighed. “Most of it.”

“Well, then—is Stovall still running Kent and Son?”

“Yes.”

She swore as vehemently and violently as any of his able seamen. He finally interrupted. “I don’t know where you learned all those words, sweet, but I’m suitably impressed. Now you want to let me finish?”

“I’m sorry, go on.”

“Stovall’s running the company, but through underlings, not personally—”

“The way you say that, you make it sound like I put you to some terrible chore—”

“I’m out of my depth investigating a muckety-muck like Mr. Hamilton Stovall. Steel’s a far cry from shipping, and I got plenty of peculiar stares at the saloons where the newspaper writers hang out—”

“You also got answers, didn’t you?”

“Eventually. But those reporter fellows sure as hell wonder why a sea captain’s buying them rounds and asking about the third biggest steelmaker in the whole United States.”

Amanda seemed not to hear.

“Where is he living?”

“A fancy mansion in New York—he and his wife.”

“He’s
married?
”

“He is. The woman’s a good deal younger. They have no children.”

“I’m not surprised. From what Jared told me, I can’t imagine Stovall being interested in a woman—unless she could confer some kind of respectability on him.”

“Perhaps that is why he married. He’s certainly not the same man you described to me—at least not in public. He’s eminently respectable.”

“But treating the book company like a stepchild—”

“Not exactly. A couple of clerks told me Kent’s is still a popular and successful imprint.”

“Which he keeps going solely because it makes money?”

“Why else would he keep it going?”

“My father and my grandfather believed printing books served a useful purpose.”

“So it does. It lines Mr. Stovall’s pockets.”

“I’m talking about educating people. Having a point of view and not being afraid to express it.”

“It’s my impression Stovall cares very little about the state of the public mind. The clerks said the Kent and Son list is growing less substantial every year. And the house publishes nothing controversial—though come to think of it, I did see a Kent edition of
Awful Disclosures.
”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Caused a real stir when it was issued in ’36—and discredited soon after. It was written by a girl named Maria Monk. That is, her name’s on it—hacks probably prepared the manuscript. Maria claimed to have been a nun. Later it was proved that the closest she got to the Roman faith was a religious home for wayward girls. The whole book’s fiction, but it’s lip-smacking stuff. Nuns submissive to the carnal will of priests—midnight revels in a Montreal convent—illegitimate babies baptized, then strangled, nine months after the aforesaid revels—”

“That’s disgusting.”

“But you can’t call it controversial. Too many people believe such tales about Catholics.”

“Does Stovall?”

“Can’t say. But I imagine that if he published the Monk book, he hates the papists—especially all the Irish filling up the eastern cities.”

“Did you ask about his politics?”

“Forgot. You know I don’t give much of a damn who votes for what. Again,
Awful Disclosures
would lead me to guess he’s a Know-Nothing.”

“God!” Amanda seethed. “If my grandfather knew a bigot like that was publishing books under his name—” She was too angry to continue.

“I did discover a couple of things about Stovall’s main business,” Bart went on. “He’s opening up a new mill in Pittsburgh. The railroads are using more steel than he can produce. And he’s changed the company name from the Chesapeake Iron Finery to the Stovall Works.”

“Did you find out who’s actually running Kent and Son?”

He shook his head. “But I know who’s general manager of the Stovall Works. One of the boys from the
Sun
stood me to a schooner of beer after I bought him three. He got to talking pretty freely. He said—”

Bart’s hands grew chilly. How he despised the sight of Amanda’s lovely face when it was this white, this intense. She got that way whenever she discussed Stovall—

They had reached the edge of Portsmouth Square. The stars and stripes snapped in the breeze above the rows of turned earth; the square was Yerba Buena’s potato patch.

Bart still hadn’t finished his last sentence. In front of the Old Adobe, the town hall, Amanda stopped, blocking his path. “Go on with it, Bart.”

“Jesus! You could let me get to your place, at least—”

“Tell me right now!”

“All right. The reporter happened to mention the name of the fellow in charge of the steel operation. It’s one of the names you remembered. But you didn’t have it quite right—” He hesitated again. “It’s not Waltham. It’s Walpole.”

“Walpole!”

Louis, who had been dawdling behind with Israel, ran to her. “Ma, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing—nothing.”

“You sounded so mad—”

“You and Israel go on to the tavern—
go on!
”

The gangling yellow-skinned man drifted up.

“Do like your mama says, Louis.” He took the boy’s hand and started off. The sight of black skin pressing white made Bart McGill feel slightly unclean. He’d been brought up to loathe that kind of familiarity between the races.