Belle Cora: A Novel (75 page)

“Do you know the watchword?”

“
Fiat justicia ruat coelum
, which is Latin. ‘Let justice be done though the heavens fall.’ ”

This was a secret at the time, supposedly known only to committee members. “I knew that,” said Broderick, and I believed him. “Now tell me something I don’t know.”

“I must find it out first. I will, don’t worry.”

“And what do you want in return?”

“Three things. If and when you come out on top, I’ll want your protection.”

“All right,” he said. That was easy to promise.

“Good. But there’s something else, and this is important to me. I have a family connection to Lewis Godwin. I’d like you to keep an eye on him.”

“I always look out for my boys,” he said calmly.

“I am attached to him. I don’t want to see him sacrificed to your noble causes. If he’s hurt, I’ll be your enemy, for what that’s worth.” Broderick’s lips tightened. He had a bad temper—that was what got him killed, in 1859, in a duel with a former chief justice of the California Supreme Court. But he wanted to use me, so he kept listening. “If he’s killed, I’ll use everything I’ve got, call in every favor. I’m sorry if it offends you, but I need you to know it.”

There was silence while the sober mind behind the saintly eyes performed various measurements and calculations. “You said three things.”

“Tell me things I can tell the committee. Things you can afford to let them know, but which they’ll see as useful. It doesn’t have to be big, but it has to be true. I’ll tell it to them, and they’ll be beholden to me; if they win, I’ll have their protection.”

After considering this for a while, he called out, “Ned, come here,” and McGowan joined the discussion.

When we were done, Charley came back and we said our thank-yous and goodbyes to Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher. Near the door, the maid handed Broderick his hat. With an expression I had not yet seen on his face—a warm smile—he thanked her and patted her on the shoulder. Turning to me, he said, “Sam Brannan has money and influence. But he hasn’t got any persistence. He gets an idea in his head, and he runs with it as long as it’s fun. Who dares to say no to him? Nobody, except Coleman, but Coleman’s a fool.” He put his hat on. “These vigilantes may have their way awhile. But they’re impatient. They’ll get bored, they’ll get tired. I don’t get tired. It’s their hobbyhorse. It’s my life.”

I HAD NOT BEEN ENTIRELY CANDID
with Broderick. I did have an excellent source of information about the committee, but it wasn’t pillow talk. Though these men didn’t have the mighty minds they thought they had, neither were they stupid, and I didn’t dare ask my girls to wheedle secrets out of them.

Instead, Herbert Owen was my spy; it was he who gave me my privileged view of the committee’s inner workings. Sam Brannan and William Tell Coleman, wanting to have a lawyer on the executive committee (the committee’s head, the select group that made the big decisions), had invited Owen to join. Owen was flattered to have his judgment and expertise solicited by such important men, and tempted by the promise of their future support. But he had been against the quick hanging of Jenkins, and hurt when his advice was ignored. He had thought of the committee as a kind of trade association full of men it was useful to know. He had not really expected them to do anything, certainly not so quickly. He felt that he had been swept into criminal actions that his family back east would never understand. Two days after the hanging, he contacted me, and he began supplying me with the committee’s secrets, aware that I would pass them on to its enemies.

Herbert Owen wasn’t the only man with doubts, but whenever public opinion seemed about to turn against the Vigilance Committee, something would happen to direct people’s fury elsewhere. On the very day when David Broderick was to hold a big anti-vigilante rally in Portsmouth
Square, there was another big fire, and nearly everyone was convinced it had been set on purpose, and that all the fires had been set on purpose. Frightened people, wanting to be saved from this chaos, were grateful to the Committee of Vigilance when its private army conducted street patrols and searched houses and ships in the harbor.

A week or two after the fire, I opened the
Alta California
and read that a suspicious character caught hiding out in the high brush of California Street Hill had been turned over to the Committee of Vigilance, and this man had confessed that he was the real English Jim, the notorious thief and killer (and according to the newspaper he bore an uncanny resemblance to the unfortunate fellow who had already been hanged). The committee kept the new English Jim in a secret location, where he was confessing to many other crimes, and naming his associates and the dirty politicians who had helped him, and from these confessions the committee was already compiling a secret list of men to be hunted down and hanged or driven out of the state.

It seemed clear that the committee was going to add everybody they disliked to this list. Herbert Owen memorized it and gave me a copy to slip to Ned McGowan, who passed the names on to David Broderick. In July, English Jim was hanged. In August, on the authority of his secret confessions, two more men were hanged. Several more were put on ships to Honolulu and Shanghai. With forewarning, Broderick arranged to have some of his men leave town in advance of their capture, though he didn’t bother to warn a couple of fellows who had become a liability to him.

“I thought your man would fight harder,” I told Ned McGowan.

McGowan had a way of stroking his triangular mustache as if it were an abacus or an oracle to be consulted on important decisions. “We decided it was better to duck this time. We will melt into the hills, Indian-style. Brannan will get his candidates elected, and they’ll have the government for a year. Then we’ll be back. Don’t worry. You didn’t back the wrong horse. Well, I guess you backed both horses, right?”

OFTEN DURING THIS TIME I WENT
to the Clay Street Unitarian Church, where, week after week, Jeptha preached against the vigilantes. In this respect, he was unique among the city’s clergymen. The rest of them stood in their pulpits asking God to further the Vigilance Committee’s
noble work, or else they preached against the “criminal element” in a way that complemented the committee’s efforts. An Episcopalian priest lent dignity to the hangings by wrangling privately with the condemned in their last hours, afterward passing on the news that this one had died repentant and that one blaspheming to the last. Meanwhile, before a congregation that included three members of the executive committee and probably hundreds of regular committee members, Jeptha hunted in his well-thumbed Bible for verses that spoke of God’s monopoly on vengeance, the bad judgment of mobs (“Give us Barabbas”), etc., and moved quickly from the text, which really gave him little support, to tell his audience that they were surrendering rights for which English-speaking people had been giving their blood since the days of bad King John and the Magna Carta, that a city of thirty thousand young male transients was bound to have crime, and if they wanted less of it they ought to employ more policemen and pay them better. Next he dwelt on the horror of the hangings and the bestial emotions they aroused. (Fool, high-minded fool—my eyes told him that. But I could not help taking a secret pride in him. He had preached his first sermons to me from the boughs of trees.)

There was much angry murmuring the first time Jeptha spoke against the vigilantes. The second time, one man stood up. It was a signal: fifty others promptly rose in a body and walked out, and most of them joined other churches. The men who remained were the least passionate ones, but even among these there was talk of dismissing Jeptha—impossible, since Jeptha himself had contributed a third of the money to build the church, and unpalatable, because he was a talented preacher, not easily replaced.

I had many complicated feelings about all that, but I did not examine them very closely; I was thinking of other things. By the time English Jim was hanged, Agnes was visibly pregnant, completing her victory over me—her victory over him, too, as I thought. I lost sleep trying not to think of the child Jeptha and I hadn’t had; of their happy life, their serious, churchy life elaborating itself. It was like watching a ship with my heart on it sail away from me. Only a few weeks later, in September, I learned from a couple of male members of the congregation who snubbed me in church but were talkative in my house, that Agnes had lost her baby. I went to church the following Sunday. Her pew was in the front row, and
mine five rows back. Twice she looked at me and looked away, unable to keep up her charade of pity for me. She was still stout from her pregnancy. Jeptha saw me from the pulpit, and as always his eyes rested on me just long enough to acknowledge our prior acquaintance, but not long enough to announce it to the congregation. The ship had returned, and I was relieved, but I did not triumph. What had I won? I had won nothing, and it was all too sad.

Did Jeptha find himself thinking, lately, that, but for his actions,
we
might have a child? Did he remember my saying that I hoped he would never be a father? Did he believe in God now, or did he see religion as a big white lie? Or had he become even more cynical than that? I told myself that I was curious about these things. I thought I lived without illusions, but really no one does.

CITY ELECTIONS WERE HELD IN SEPTEMBER
. David Broderick and the men he supported were voted out, and were replaced mainly by Know-Nothings chosen by Sam Brannan and his friends. The Committee of Vigilance promptly announced that the city was safe and officially ceased its operations, with a warning that they would keep an eye on evildoers and return if the people needed them. They were to return five years later.

LIII

A MAN WHO CALLED HIMSELF JAMES KING OF WILLIAM
, and who was to become famous as a newspaper editor and as my enemy, came to my house for the last time a month after the 1851 Committee of Vigilance disbanded. He had been an occasional visitor for almost a year.

He was a banker then. With help from his connections back east, he had become very rich in San Francisco; he was vain of that accomplishment. He was vain generally, and sensitive, and vindictive. He came to
my house with his customers and colleagues. He did not touch the girls; he said that he was married. When I told him that half my patrons were married, he raised his chin absurdly (no one dared to smile) and said, “I don’t look to what other men do.” Everyone could tell he was here for Pauline, poor fellow. When any other man went with her, King’s nose would lift and his head turn in a transparent parody of indifference. Evidently a great drama was unfolding in his breast. He was torturing himself. Perhaps somehow he enjoyed it. I hoped so. I felt sorry for him.

He had a stage hero’s face, placed, like a cruel joke, atop a small, narrow-shouldered body. To the girls, the combination was funny. How he might have reacted had he heard their talk, I shuddered to imagine, for his self-esteem was exquisitely tender. Yet he tempted the world’s laughter with his oddities, beginning with the ridiculous self-chosen name. Why “of William”? people would ask innocently. Is that your home town? With icy vehemence he would reply that William was the Christian name of his father back in Georgetown, Maryland, where there were several James Kings. Calling himself after the town would have been “quite useless.” But hadn’t John Smiths and Tom Browns the world over solved this exact problem by means of middle initials? “I
told
you: I don’t look to what other men do.”

I hope I need not point out that a man who says such things is a slave to his obsession with the doings of other men.

He told me about his mostly ordinary life: he had been a printer, and a bank clerk, and apparently he had come west in emulation of his big brother, Henry, who froze to death in the Rockies and was eaten by his starving comrades while James was on a ship rounding the Horn. There was also a younger brother, a black sheep, named Thomas.

He liked me. He showed it by expressing disapproval of the company I kept.

“I don’t care for your friend Mr. Cora,” he said one day. “He’s one of Broderick’s scoundrels.”