The Furies (20 page)

Amanda showed no sign of moving. One hand shielding her eyes from the sun, she was waiting for the rest. He figured he might as well get it over.

“Walpole,” he repeated. “The same name as the fellow your cousin shot.”

“He’s a relative—one of Walpole’s sons?”

“He’s the same man.”

“That—that can’t be!”

“Who asked the questions, you or me?”

“But Jared killed Walpole!”

“I know that’s what you said. But I’m the one who spent three gold pieces on more beer and two telegraph messages. The
Sun
reporter contacted a man he knows on a Baltimore paper. The man wired information back the next day. Walpole’s old—almost ready to retire. There are employees at the company who’ve heard him speak of being shot by one of the Kents way back in fourteen or fifteen—whenever it was that Stovall took over your father’s firm.”

“Then—Stovall let Jared think—”

“Think what? Your cousin never waited to discover what really happened. You said both of you ran away the very same night—” He grimaced. “I’m getting weary of this blasted detective work, Amanda. What I’ve found out hasn’t done any good at all. It only makes you more miserable. When are you going to realize it’s downright unhealthy to harbor a grudge for so many years?”

She paid no attention. “He let Jared think he’d done
murder
—”

“Jared never gave himself a chance to find out otherwise!”

“Stovall could have tried to locate—”

“Oh, come on, sweet!” Bart broke in, angered that the past had cropped up so soon. It always did eventually. But it seldom produced the degree of rage seething in her right now. Well, he’d guessed this might happen. But he tried to make her see reason. “Stovall didn’t care a damn for your family. Hated them, in fact—you said so yourself.”

“And all this time, he let Jared believe that he killed—”

“All this time!”
he echoed in a sarcastic way. “Your cousin’s probably dead.”

“That makes no difference. By God, I’m going back there!”

He sounded tired. “You’ve told me. Over and over.”

“Ten years ago, I had the same idea—but for a different reason. I just wanted to see where the family lived—search for some mementos my father owned. When I came across the Headley book, everything changed. I want Kent and Son out of Stovall’s hands!”

“Maybe the first reason was better. This jeremiad against Mr. Stovall eats on you worse every year—”

“Because I’m getting older. I may not have many years left. I swear, if I can ever put together more than twenty dollars at one time, I’m going back and take the company away from him. I’ll do more than that to him if I can—”

Inexplicably chilly in the sun, Bart said, “Sometimes, Amanda, you scare the bejesus out of a man. I know this much. You get involved in trying to destroy someone and you’ll wind up suffering as much as he does. Hate works that way. It hurts the one who gets it
and
the one who gives it—”

I have firsthand experience.

“Christ amighty, that’s exactly what’s happening back east right now. One section against the other—the tempers hotter, the words more vile and unreasonable with every day that passes—before it’s over, people on both sides are liable to be killing each other!”

She didn’t want to hear. She snatched the book parcel from his hand, her fingers almost colorless as they clenched the oilskin.

“If I only had some money—”

“Damn it, woman, don’t you
ever
listen to what I say? I’ve told you a dozen times you don’t need money to pay your way east. Say the word and I’ll take you and Louis aboard—”

“I’m not talking about money for passage. I’m talking about a lot of money.”

Exhausted and unsettled by the discussion, he was snappish. “What if Mr. Hamilton Stovall doesn’t care to sell Kent and Son the minute you say so? Did you ever think of that?”

Outwardly, she remained the same Amanda Kent: full-figured, with a deliciously wide mouth, lovely dark eyes—and yet the fury in those eyes produced a subtle distortion; the total effect was spoiled.

“I’ll make him sell. No matter what I have to do.”

“Then you’re just as crazy as you claim he is!”

“Thank you.”

“Amanda—”

“Thank you very much, Captain McGill!”

Jamming the parcel of books under her arm, she whirled and hurried away.

“Amanda, come back here! I didn’t mean to make you fly off—”

She didn’t stop or look around. He swore a few blistering words, then followed her slowly across the sunlit square.

She dashed straight in the front door of Kent’s and slammed it after her. He noticed the closed sign Israel had mentioned. Puzzlingly, similar signs hung on the door of Sam Brannan’s store, and on the door of the small, jerry-built office of the
Star
immediately adjoining. Brannan owned the paper as well as the mercantile establishment.

But Captain Bart McGill had things to worry about besides the curious absence of the town’s most industrious citizen. The visit to Yerba Buena had gotten off to a catastrophic start. All he’d wanted to do today was spend a while enjoying Amanda’s company—talking with her of inconsequential things, laughing with her, touching her. And then, at an appropriate hour when Louis was bedded down and Israel had retired to his shanty behind the tavern, he would have climbed into her bed and loved her—

Instead, he’d wrecked her customary composure with the one thing capable of doing that—the past, the past she constantly picked over so the wound could never heal.

Goddamn
, why had he ever spent so much time and energy on those inquiries? Why hadn’t he refused to discuss the contents of the parcel, or what he’d learned last autumn, until later? Until it was dark and calm and they’d taken their sweet fill of one another—?

He knew why. He’d questioned the reporters in New York, and answered her promptly this morning, because she asked—because he liked to please her.

But she
was
getting too old for silly notions about bringing the Kents back to the position of eminence she claimed they’d once enjoyed. Forty was an average life- time; five years beyond that, she was lucky to be in such astonishingly good health. She should be enjoying what was left of her life, not dedicating it to some fool scheme that soured her disposition and didn’t stand a chance of succeeding. Wealthy or not, she’d be no match for a powerful man like Hamilton Stovall—who logically couldn’t be expected to hand over Kent and Son to a member of the family he despised.

Yet Amanda was a determined woman—that he knew very well. Maybe she
could
succeed if she tried hard enough, and had a touch of luck. What upset him was the fact that her ambition was so closely tied to an almost fanatic hatred of Stovall. And as he’d tried to tell her, hate was a costly, destructive emotion—

Except when some shipboard crisis sparked him to a fury and drove him to action, Captain Barton McGill was a calm, detached sort of man. He’d been raised in a Charleston home where two aristocratic people of high temper had clashed often. Among his most vivid memories of childhood were the sounds of argument—

Cursing.

Crying.

Crockery smashing—

He’d been fortunate to discover the haven offered by a career at sea. His parents—both dead now—hadn’t objected to his leaving home when he was quite young. He felt they had little interest in him, and suspected they were glad to be rid of him. But he’d married unwisely, married a woman who had much the same disposition as his mother and father. Her anger, easily roused, had driven him deeper within himself. He developed a kind of spiritual kinship with the spotted turtle he’d kept as a pet when he was eight or nine—

Kept, that is, until one of the stormiest of the arguments between his parents. His father snatched the turtle from its box on the porch and hurled it at his mother. She dodged and the spotted turtle hit the house, its carapace cracked even though it had frantically withdrawn its legs and head—

The turtle died that same night. Bart never forgot. Over the years he concluded that those who indulged their tempers for any but the most practical and pressing reasons were fools doomed to destroy others, and be destroyed. Even turtles weren’t perfectly protected from the wrath of such fools, but at least they had some armor. His was intellectual.

He abhorred, and took no part in, the venomous debate the slave question produced in the north and south. He jeered at the hysterical abolitionists and their bombastic, foully slanted pamphlets and newspapers. But his contempt was nearly as strong for those cotton-kingdom demagogues who puffed out clouds of gas about states’ rights and offered sly threats of separation—secession—to
scare
those northern bastards—

No matter what the motive, hate bred hate and, in the end, chaos. He had long ago weaned himself away from such damaging passions. He preferred the steady, soothing beat of the ocean against a clipper’s hull, the spirited but essentially civilized bargaining in the Chinese hongs. In the Far East trade, a man could do his task, take pride in it, and make a little money without staking his life on worthless angers and woolly ideas—such as Amanda’s notion that Kent and Son was supposed to do more than bring in a profit, that it had some higher responsibility to inform and inspire the people who bought the books bearing its imprint. Ideas like that—turned into crusades—only brought people to grief—

Damnation! He should have lied about the questions she’d put to him on his last visit. Lied outright:

“Kent’s isn’t owned by Stovall any longer. No one’s heard of Walpole in years—”

As he stared glumly at the closed front door where she’d vanished, he realized that if he’d thought things through a little more—or if he cared for her a little less—he
would
have lied.

Now it was too late.

Whittling, Louis Kent looked up as Bart McGill approached the shadowed rear stoop of the sun-bleached frame building. Out back, Israel was pottering in the garden next to his shanty.

Bart wanted to go on inside, into the building’s rear room, a large, square chamber partitioned into sleeping space for Louis, and a second somewhat bigger alcove for Amanda. He could see the room’s furnishings—the piano he’d brought on one voyage, the walnut dining table and chairs that had come on another. Amanda and her son entertained visitors at the table, and took meals there. Food came from the tavern’s small kitchen, located between the rear living room and the more spacious public room in front. Kent’s didn’t waste money on fancy fixtures. A plank bar and several cheap tables and chairs satisfied the diners and drinkers of Yerba Buena—

He saw it all, fondly, but he didn’t go in because he suspected Amanda was probably still upset. She’d let him know when she was composed enough to see him again.

He sat down beside the boy on the splintery step. “Louis, I’ve been wondering something.”

“What is it, sir?”

“Have I got my days mixed up? I swear last night, my log read Tuesday. But places around here are closed tight, just like it’s Sunday.”

“You mean Mr. Brannan’s store?”

“And his paper.” Bart nodded. “Where is the old money-grubber, off palavering with brother Brigham?”

“Oh, no, Captain Bart, Mr. Brannan’s given up the Mormon faith.”

“He has! Why?”

“He and Young fell out over the place those Latter-day Saints were going to settle after they got run out of Missouri. Mr. Brannan brought some families to Yerba Buena by ship, you know—”

“Yes.”

“—and he tried to persuade Young this was the promised land. I guess old Mr. Young saw it differently, back at that salty lake they say lies east of the Sierras. Young threw Brannan out of their church—”

“Good God! I beg your pardon, Louis. Continue.”

“—and he said he wanted all the money Brannan had collected in tithes, too. Ma said Mr. Young claimed it was the Lord’s money, so Mr. Brannan said he’d return it as soon as Young sent him a receipt in the Lord’s handwriting. That Mr. Brannan’s pretty good at turning a dollar—”

“Almost as good as your mother,” Bart observed with a wry smile. “But you haven’t told me where he is.”

“I think he must have gone up to Captain Sutter’s mill.”

Bart blinked. “You mean the fort on the Sacramento? New Helvetia?”

“No, I mean Captain Sutter’s sawmill. I guess it’s been built since you were here last. About forty or fifty miles beyond the fort, on the American River. Mr. Brannan probably went up to see about the gold—along with Mr. Kemble, the editor of the
Star.
”

“What gold are you talking about, Louis?”

The boy shrugged. “Probably isn’t real. Probably just pyrites.”

“Found in the river?”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Marshall, who was putting up the mill, spied it first.” Louis fished in his pocket, produced a crumpled clipping. “This was in the other paper last month. I tore it out—I got pretty excited. But Ma calmed me down quick enough. She said a lot of the yellow stuff had showed up around here before—and all of it busted apart the minute someone laid it on an anvil and hammered it. That’s one way you tell fool’s gold, they say.”

Bart scanned the story from Yerba Buena’s other occasional newspaper,
The Californian.
The item was dated the fifteenth of March:

GOLD MINE FOUND—In the newly made raceway of the Saw Mill recently erected by Captain Sutter on the American Fork, gold has been found in considerable quantities. One person brought thirty dollars’ worth to New Helvetia, gathered there in a short time. California, no doubt, is rich in mineral wealth; great chances here for scientific capitalists.

He didn’t read the final sentence, because Louis interrupted. “Nobody believes that now.”

“But a few still went to look for themselves?”

“Yes. Mr. Brannan even fetched along some
aqua fortis.
I don’t know what that is, but he said if you poured it on gold, nothing would happen, and that’s another way you tell real gold from pyrites.”

“Explains why the town’s so quiet, anyway. Strikes me that if there were gold up along those rivers, someone would have made certain by now. It’s April already—”