The Rich Shall Inherit (5 page)

“They were partners?”

“Of course they were partners, why else would they live practically next door to each other and farm the same land? Read it, will you?”

The yellowed piece of card was headed,
CLANCEY’S IRISH SALOON, KEARNEY STREET, SAN FRANCISCO
, and underneath,
AMERICAN AND IMPORTED BEERS AND ALES … A DOZEN DIFFERENT WHISKEYS … FREE LUNCH COUNTER NOON TILL TWO DAILY.
In the center was written in a bold hand:
Jeb Mallory and Nik Konstant are equal partners in the Rancho Santa Vittoria and all its lands and livestock. Dated this tenth day of April, 1856.

Jeb Mallory had signed his name with a flourish, but Nik’s name was written with the careful letters of a man just learning to write.

“My grandfather was fresh off the boat from Russia,” Hilliard explained, “he was still learning English. Jeb Mallory Americanized his name. As you see, they became partners while drinking in a saloon. It’s always been said that Nikolai learned a lot from Jeb Mallory—and probably more than he’d bargained for.”

“Such as?”

He shrugged. “If I ever knew, young man, I’ve forgotten. I’m seventy-four years old and at this age you have enough trouble just keeping up with today, never mind the past. Still, I expect it’s all in there, if you’re interested enough to look.” He gestured toward the library. “Everything the Konstants ever wrote is there, neatly bound and put away. There’s probably an old journal or two—women always kept those things in the old days, y’know, gave ’em something to do, I guess, writing up all the births, deaths, and marriages …. It’s no good for my eyes, all faded ink and crabby writing. I was a soldier, y’see, Mr. Preston, an outdoorsman, never had time for all this chitchat. That’s why I’m so bad at it now.”

Mike was itching to get his hands on all that untapped material, but the old man suddenly looked very tired. “Maybe I should come back tomorrow?” he suggested.

“Nonsense, nonsense.” Hilliard’s pale eyes were suddenly beseeching. “I haven’t had a chat like this for years, and I don’t mind admitting I’ve enjoyed myself. There’s no one comes here much anymore, y’know,” he added sadly, “just the Japanese gardener you saw—and he doesn’t speak English—not
proper
English. And, of course, there’s Mary, my housekeeper, a nice woman but she watches television all the time … I can’t stand it myself. Have another sherry, won’t you?” he said eagerly, wheeling his chair back into the library. “Tell you what, if you want to go through all this stuff, why don’t you just come and stay a while? You can work late at night, all by yourself—isn’t that what you writers like to do? And then you can ask me questions anytime you want.”

“It’s a deal,” Mike said, hardly able to believe his luck. But as he shook his hand, the gleam in the old man’s eyes made him wonder uncomfortably what he was up to.

The big old house was silent but for the ticking of a clock in the hall as Mike pushed the old-fashioned leather chair from the table. He frowned as the casters screeched from rust and long disuse. It was three-thirty a.m. and he’d been reading in the library since eight that evening, when Hilliard Konstant had retired to bed. The big oak table was littered with books and papers, mostly old ledgers and documents relating to the running of the ranch, but they were not what he was seeking.

He paced the plum-colored carpet restlessly, too alert to go to bed and sleep. The library was thirty feet long and twenty-five wide and lined wall-to-wall with books. Hilliard had given him no clue as to where to begin, he’d simply said, “It’s all there somewhere, young man. Help yourself!” Sometimes Mike would catch Hilliard looking at him with a sardonic twinkle in his pale eyes, as though he was enjoying some secret joke, and he wondered if he knew more than he was telling—like
where
to look on those walls of shelves!

He wandered restlessly through the hall into the huge drawing room that ran the full length of the house. It was like being in a time warp. Hilliard had told him that the walls were still hung with the same faded blue damask chosen by Rosalia Konstant more than eighty years before, though the matching silk that had once covered sofas and chairs had been replaced sometime later by a mixture of cheerful flower prints. Mike stared at the twin portraits of a boy and a girl hanging over the mantel. These were
Rosalia and Nik Konstant’s two children: Gregorius—always known as Greg—and his sister, Angel, the girl who had been born within a few weeks of Poppy. He knew that Greg was Hilliard’s father, but the old man had told him very little about Angel, except she was famous for her looks.

Even at nine years old, Angel had been a beauty. She was small, with fine bones, her father’s enormous pale blue eyes and a cloud of softly curling blond hair. She was wearing a pink ruffled dress and held a tiny black dog with a matching pink ribbon, and she was smiling sweetly but confidently at the artist.
Angel and Trotty 1889
was inscribed at the base of the baroque gilt frame. Mike would have bet that Angel grew up to be a charmer; it was all there in the picture—the confidence in her beauty and in her position as daughter of the rich, landowning Konstants.

Sixteen-year-old Greg was tall, dark-haired, and handsome, with his mother’s laughing brown eyes. He was a sturdy lad who had wanted his portrait painted outdoors so it could include his favorite horse. He was leaning on the paddock fence, holding a wide-brimmed Mexican riding hat in one hand, while the thumb of the other was linked jauntily through a leather belt with a chased-silver buckle, of which he was obviously proud. In the paddock behind him a beautiful chestnut gelding with a white blaze on his forehead grazed contentedly.
Greg with Vassily 1889
was the legend at the bottom of the matching gilt frame.

Greg had a cheerful grin and that direct Konstant gaze, and Mike stared hard at the brother and sister, wondering what lay behind such confident facades, and whether life had lived up to their obvious expectations.

He walked on through the shuttered dining room in search of a cold beer, into the original adobe part of the house, built by the Indians two hundred years ago. Now it was a gleaming, efficient kitchen, but the old open fireplace where an Indian servant had once cooked Nik Konstant’s meals still remained in the corner.

Mike poked the glowing embers with his foot as he settled in an old high-backed rocker, a can of Miller in his hand. Despite the modern appliances, this room felt different. Sitting here, staring into the embers, he might have been living a century ago … with Nik and Rosalia, Greg and Angel.
And Poppy Mallory!

Mike supposed he must have been dozing when the answer came to him … but of course, it was quite logical. He had been looking in the wrong place. What he was seeking would never be
found in a library. Where else did every family store its discarded treasures and its secrets—but in the attics!

“I wondered how long it’d be before you thought of the attic,” Hilliard said, grinning maliciously. “Nobody’s been up there for years, but anyway there’s only a load of old junk. If there’d been anything of value one of the Konstants would have sold it by now!”

“I’m not looking for valuables, sir,” Mike protested. “I’m searching for information.”

“Information? Bah … you’ll find nothing up there but a few old theater programs and dance cards—and a lot of moth-eaten clothes.” He relented suddenly. “Still, if you want to …”

Hilliard was wrong—the clothes weren’t moth-eaten. But there were lots of them, all beautifully folded away between tissue paper in enormous old chests and steamer trunks, plastered with the labels of long-ago Atlantic liners and continental hotels. Mike rummaged through trunks of lace tea gowns and stiff silk afternoon dresses, sneezing as he shook out a cloak of golden brown otter skins that had once been soft and supple but was now dry and cracked, though the taffeta lining had kept its gay, scarlet color. There were evening dresses embroidered with glinting beads and dulled pearls, and a magnificent blue silk chiffon gown with the label
WORTH, PARIS
sewn inside.

After a couple of hours he’d found nothing of any use and he slammed the last trunk shut exasperatedly. It was a collection worthy of a museum but it had got him no farther along the trail to Poppy Mallory.

Brushing a thick coating of dust from the lid of an old school desk, he ran his finger across the carved initials
AK
, imagining the pretty Angel, bored with her lessons, etching them into the soft pine with a hairpin. Inside was a collection of girlish mementos, a pile of old theater and concert programs, a bunch of dance cards with tiny gilt pencils still attached, a crumbling posy of pressed flowers. Then, at last, several batches of letters tied with ribbon. And underneath was a blue leather book imprinted in faded gilt:
Rosalia Konstant-Her Journal—Vol I, 1863.
There were more—
Vol II & III
—and then a thin pink velvet book:
Angel Konstant’s Journal, Age 12—18.
And at last, a plain brown leather book inscribed
Margaret Mallory-Her Journal—1873.

Margaret
Mallory! Mike’s hair stood on end as he ran his dusty hand excitedly over it.

Hurrying from the attic, he laid out his finds on the library table, arranging the dance cards in small piles alongside the packets of letters, and then the precious journals. With a satisfied sigh, he began to read.

Two days later, he refolded the final letter, retied the red ribbon carefully, and sat back gazing out of the window, puzzled.

“A glass of the finest manzanilla for your thoughts?” suggested Hilliard from the doorway.

Spinning around, Mike smiled at him. “Sorry, I was miles away … or rather years!”

“Well?” Hilliard wheeled himself across the room to the drinks table and poured two glasses of sherry. “Have you solved the mystery of Poppy Mallory’s heir?”

Mike ran his hand thoughtfully through his hair, frowning. “No …but it’s a beginning….” The funny thing was that they had all written so much about Poppy, he felt he almost knew her—or at least the young Poppy. Because quite suddenly, she had disappeared from the pages of those journals as though she’d never existed.

He thought Hilliard would never go to bed, but as darkness fell the old man finally said good night. Turning his wheelchair at the library door, he smiled sardonically. “I think you’ve got your work cut out for you, Mike Preston,” he said with an edge of bitterness to his voice. “Nothing in life is ever as simple as it seems—that’s my experience, anyhow.” Turning abruptly, he wheeled himself along the hall to his room.

Mike stared after him, puzzled. Then he looked at the little pile of letters and journals on the library table. “Okay, Poppy Mallory,” he said determinedly, “you’ve hooked me …. I’ve got to know what happened. And when I do, I’m gonna tell the whole world about you!”

He knew he would have to use his imagination to fill in the gaps left by the journals, but now he had a pretty shrewd grasp of the characters involved. Inserting a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter, he wrote, “In the beginning, there was Nikolai Konstantinov and Jeb Mallory …”

1856, CALIFORNIA

Jeb Mallory was celebrating his thirtieth birthday alone in Clancey’s Saloon, Kearney Street, San Francisco. He drank his third Irish whiskey quickly, followed by a beer chaser, and signaled the bartender for another. The memory of his turbulent passage through the years from a raw fourteen-year-old lad in southwestern Ireland, learning his craft of a gambler the hard way, to a much traveled professional gambling man wise in the ways of the world, did not depress him, simply because he barely thought about it. Jeb was a man of the moment. When he was asked, he always claimed he had no past, but the truth was, he preferred to forget it—or at least to embroider it to suit the company he was in. Not that those years had been bad ones—there had always been plenty of excitement. He’d had a great many winning streaks and a few fast losses, as well as more than any man’s fair share of beautiful women, most of them with the luxurious red hair and transparent white skin that was his downfall. And it was true that easy money ran all too quickly through his fingers. But the plain fact was, the highs had not been high enough and the lows had been merely boring, and Jeb still craved the ultimate excitement of the big game … the one where a fortune rested on the turn of a card.

Calling for another drink, he folded his lean height against the wall, watching the poker game in progress. His face was impassive, but inside he was seething with frustrated excitement. He had been playing poker since the age of nine, perfecting the art in the poor shebeens and shabbier taverns of his native land. Now he played on three levels: skill, intuition—and an uncanny ability
to sense the underlying excitement of a man holding good cards. Jeb was a master of the bluff, a connoisseur of character—and a man for whom the game meant more than the money. His only trouble was that right now he didn’t have
enough
money to join this game!

There was a certain man at the table whose progress Jeb had been following for three nights now—a rancher, up from the hill country near Lompoc. He’d been playing a flashy game, placing large bets and out-bluffing the others, guffawing loudly when he won—which he did most of the time. The sound of his winner’s laugh was a constant irritant, and Jeb ached either to ram a fist into his florid face or to take him on at the tables. He turned away with a shrug; he would do neither. If he wanted to get back into any game around here, he’d have to get hold of some money—and fast.

He had exactly twenty dollars in his pocket and that didn’t suit his extravagant way of life at all! He grinned ruefully as he remembered the girl who’d stolen his billfold from the hotel room a week ago. He couldn’t blame her—after all, he’d left it lying around on the dresser, stuffed with bank notes. He’d just laughed it off as his stupidity and her good luck, thinking maybe it was a fair price anyway.

He turned his attention to a young man sitting alone at a table by the window. He was just a boy, really, but he was built like an ox, six feet four or five, with a massive torso and powerful shoulders. A lock of thick straight blond hair fell across his brow and his broad-boned face was clean-shaven. His eyes were of such a pale blue, they seemed to reflect the light, hiding his expression. Jeb could tell he was a foreigner—and not long off the boat. He was all alone and he guessed he had his savings from the old country strapped safely in a money belt around his waist. Sipping a beer, he thought out his plan before going over and taking a seat opposite him. “Jeb Mallory,” he said, offering his hand with a friendly smile.