Midnight Star by Catherine Coulter
“Dear Del,” he read, “I hope this letter finds you in your usual good health. Actually I will be glad if this letter finds you! Giana is doing splendidly, as are Leah and Nicolas. My life is never dull, I can promise you.” Delaney skimmed the next page of the letter that dealt with Alex’s business and suggestions to Delaney on investments he might consider. “Speaking of investments, brother, I’m enclosing a clipping from the London Times. Wasn’t Sir Alec FitzHugh one of the men who invested in your mine in Downieville? It appears he’s quite dead, has been, as you can see from the clipping, for nearly ten months now. Unfortunately, Giana and I hadn’t noticed it. In fact, she was wrapping a gift to send to her mother when she came across the paper, and wondered if you knew about his demise. I trust you were duly informed long ago by his lawyer.” Delaney laid down the letter and gazed into the empty grate of the fireplace. No, he hadn’t been informed by Paul Montgomery, Sir Alec’s solicitor in London. Every month he sent a bank draft to Montgomery, quite large amounts, for the mine had proved a true find, as Delaney had known it would. Why hadn’t Montgomery written to him? Perhaps he had, Delaney thought, remembering his comment to Lucas about the chancy mail system. Hadn’t Sir Alec had a daughter? Was Montgomery simply giving her the money now? Still, he should have notified me, Delaney thought, slowly rising from the chair. He had heard about his own solicitor’s death, which had occurred before Sir Alec’s. He didn’t like coincidences.
As he bathed and changed into a frilled white shirt and a black frock coat, he mentally composed the letter he would write to Paul Montgomery. He was somewhat distracted when he greeted Penelope and her mother some thirty minutes later in what Mrs. Stevenson persisted in calling his drawing room.
“My dear Mr. Saxton, how delightful to see you again! Penelope has missed you sorely, sir! How nice of you to invite us for tea.”
The woman was as loud and vulgar as her husband, but Delaney’s smile never faltered. “My pleasure, ma’am. Penelope, you are looking lovely, as usual.”
He took her small slender hand and raised it to his lips. He could see her preening at his courtly gesture. “Won’t you ladies please be seated? Lucas, you may serve the tea and cakes.”
Mrs. Agatha Stevenson was large-boned, her bosom overpowering. She persisted in wearing the most youthful of French fashions, gowns of daring colors decorated with quantities of ribbons and furbelows. Delaney silently hoped that the chair she chose would crack under her weight. How she and her equally large and clumsy husband had produced such a slender daughter was beyond him.
“English tea,” Mrs. Stevenson said complacently, adjusting her bulk in the creaking chair. “Did you not tell us once, Mr. Saxton, that you were in England several years ago?”
“Oh yes, Del, do tell us about it,” said Penelope, her brown eyes wide with interest. “How I should love to go there.”
“First the tea, ladies,” Delaney said, signaling to the expressionless Lucas to wheel the cart to Mrs. Stevenson. “The cakes,” he added blandly, “are Lin Chou’s creation. I trust you will find them as delicious as I do.”
“It could not be otherwise!”
“They look marvelous, Del!”
Delaney almost grinned when Mrs. Stevenson bit into the rice cake. Her jowls quivered, but of course she could say nothing now. Lin’s rice cakes, flat and delicately browned, were more decorative than edible.
Why not impress the hell out of them? he thought, and with a nonchalant air said, “I returned to London in the company of my brother’s mother- and father-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Graffton.”
“Oh,” Penelope said, sitting forward in her chair. “Royalty!”
“Not quite, Penelope,” he said blandly. “In any case, I spent an enjoyable several months in London, and managed at the same time to conduct a goodly amount of business.” With Sir Alec FitzHugh, among others, who is now dead.
“Oh, Del, do tell me about the Tower of London,” Penelope said in her breathless high voice. “Is there still blood about from all the people beheaded there?”
“No blood. The English are quite fastidious about things like that, you know.” It was Montgomery who pressed for Sir Alec to invest. Why didn’t the man write to me of Sir Alec’s death?
Delaney felt a veil of boredom begin to descend. Surely teatime in England never lasted so bloody long! Did he really want to marry a chit who was only eighteen years old, and as empty-headed as a gourd? “Jesus,” he muttered.
“What did you say, Del? . . . Nothing? Well, let me tell you our news. Mama is giving a formal ball in three weeks and everyone will come! We’re all going to wear masks—Papa insisted.”
Delaney nearly spilled his tea. Masks! How could the girl and her mother be so ill-informed? Mr. Stevenson wanted everyone in San Francisco to attend his wife’s ball, and that would necessarily mean that many of the ladies who would grace the function weren’t ladies at all, but the men’s mistresses. But Mrs. Stevenson did know, he silently amended to himself, watching the older woman shift uncomfortably in her chair as her daughter gibbered on. Anything, he thought, to fill the Stevensons’ ballroom.
At last Delaney heard the Stevensons’ carriage pull up in front of the house. He did not call for Lucas, but saw the ladies out himself. He returned Penelope’s exuberant wave, walked back into the house, and made for the kitchen. The door was partially open, and he paused a moment at the sound of Lin Chou’s giggle.
“I tell you, Lin,” Lucas was saying to the slight Chinese girl, “the old behemoth couldn’t say a word about the rice cakes. Mr. Saxton spiked her guns again, having her admit how marvelous they were before she took a bite.”
Delaney could picture Lin nodding her head in a quick birdlike movement. “Rice cakes are very delicacy, Lucas. Are you certain you not try another one?”
Delaney heard her laugh sweetly again, a sound he would not have heard from that of the silent, terrified girl he had rescued six months earlier from a filthy crib on Washington Street. He had bought her, as a matter of fact, at an auction. He had no idea if she had already been prostituted on her voyage from China. And of course he couldn’t ask her. It would result in a loss of face that she could not endure. Thank God, Lucas had taken her under his mighty wing. Delaney grinned, remembering the gibe from Sam Brannan about Delaney taking in outcasts. “A chink whore and a one-legged pirate, Del! Jesus, man, don’t you fear waking up with your throat cut? Or contracting some vile disease to rot off your privates?”
Delaney turned away from the kitchen and made his way to the library, his favorite room, built exactly to his specifications. It was a smaller model of the Duke of Graffton’s library in London, replete with heavy dark leather furniture and three walls lined from floor to ceiling with bookcases. A thick red Aubusson carpet made the room less austere. It made it elegant. He tried for a moment to picture Penelope in this room and failed utterly.
For God’s sake, man, he told himself silently, you’re twenty-eight years old! You’ve got to marry someone, and Lord knows there are slim pickings in San Francisco. It occurred to him as he sat down behind his massive desk that if he did marry Penelope he would not give up Marie Duchamps, his French mistress. He spent several moments in vivid imagery of Marie, soft, beautifully white, lying naked on her bed, her arms open to receive him, her dark eyes dreamy with anticipation. She was faithful to him, at least he hoped she was, for the last thing he wanted was to contract the pox. He could already see her petulantly tossing her thick black mane of hair when he told her he could not take her to the Stevensons’ ball. He shrugged, thinking he would have one of his employees escort her. Jarvis he could trust. Jarvis didn’t like women.
He pulled out his stationery, dismissed both Marie and Penelope from his mind, and bent to the task of writing to Paul Montgomery in London.
6
Aboard the Eastern Light, 1853
It was an overcast day, chill and damp, but Chauncey was too excited to notice the weather. She stepped off the sidewalk onto the
I am going to die! Crushed beneath the horses’ hooves and the carriage wheels!
She smelled the thick steaming air blowing from the horses’ nostrils, saw the flecks of foam dotting their necks. She could feel their bodies hurtling against her, crushing her . . .
“No!”
Chauncey jerked upright in her bunk, trembling with the crushing fear of the nightmare.
“Miss Chauncey! Are you all right?”
She raised dazed eyes to Mary’s concerned face, shadowed in the early-morning light. “I’m all right,” she said, her voice quivering as violently as her body.
“You dreamed about it again, didn’t you?”
Chauncey nodded as she ran her hands distractedly through her disheveled hair. “It was an accident,” she said. The words were becoming a litany after each recurrence of the awful dream.
“Yes it was, in a sense anyway,” Mary said, handing Chauncey a dampened cloth to wipe the perspiration from her forehead. “But it happened in England. Whatever madman it was who tried to run you down is many miles behind us. Lawks, miss, two oceans behind us, now that we’re in the Pacific! There’s no more need for you to fret about it.”
“But why?” Chauncey asked in a thin voice, like a child who wants reassurance from her parent. “I’ve done nothing to anyone. Who would try to kill me? Not even Aunt Augusta or Uncle Alfred—”
“Now, you listen to me, Miss Chauncey,” Mary interrupted in her no-nonsense voice, sitting herself beside her mistress on the narrow ship bunk. “That nice sailor saved you, and although he was just in the nick of time, you are alive and unharmed. It was a lunatic who drove that carriage. We know those kinds of folk don’t need reasons. Now, you will think no more about it.”
But why would a madman be driving such a fine carriage? Why would a madman have his face hidden by a black handkerchief? Why would a madman, driven by insane, inexplicable forces, keep whipping the horses forward, leaving her in the gutter, held up by the sailor who had thrown his body against hers?
“I just wish it would stop.” She sighed, lying back against the narrow pillow. She did not repeat her thoughts again, for Mary had no answers to the questions that haunted her.
“It will if you’ll but let it,” Mary said sharply. “Lord knows I’ve nearly forgotten it. Thank the Lord Captain Markham stopped in Los Angeles to bring aboard fresh supplies. If I never eat another fish again it will be too soon!”
Chauncey forced herself to clear her mind of the memory and swallowed the retort that Mary could well forget it. It wasn’t she who had been nearly killed. She forced a smile to curve up the corners of her mouth. “I fancy the supplies he brought aboard from Valparaiso will bring him more of a profit.”
Mary’s full lips pursed into a thin line. “What an awful, depressing city that was! At least those trollops keep to themselves! It’s a disgrace that women would willingly accept such conditions! The good Lord knows . . .”
Chauncey stopped listening, for Mary’s outrage about the young women bound for prostitution in San Francisco was a theme with few variations. “Perhaps their lives will be better,” she said mildly when Mary stopped her diatribe to take a breath.
“Harrumph,” said Mary. “At least Captain Markham has the decency to keep them away from you.”
“I am, after all, a paying passenger,” Chauncey said.
“And a lady! I hope you’ve been paying attention to all Captain Markham’s been telling you. Not all that many proper ladies in this so-called city we’re traveling to. And another thing, Miss Chauncey. All your subtle questions about the wealthy men in San Francisco, Mr. Delaney Saxton in particular—well, I think you should go easy. He might begin to think that you have some sort of unhealthy interest in the man.”
“I’ve learned all I need to about Mr. Saxton,” Chauncey said. “At least, enough for the moment. I admit to being surprised that he is so young, and unmarried. Somehow one tends to think that a true villain must be older, paunchy perhaps, with a dissipated face.”
“Many of the men in San Francisco are young and unmarried, and if they are married, their wives and children are safely back East. Why do you think these . . . trollops are in such demand?”
Off again, Chauncey thought. If only Mary knew the half of what Captain Markham had told her! At least she didn’t have to be fearful of his motives, for indeed he seemed to regard her as a daughter to be protected. “So many young, boisterous men, my dear,” he would say over the months they traveled together. “Wild, full of spirits, and dangerous upon occasion. Duels, fights, violence—they exercise little restraint. Practice with the derringer I gave you, my dear. Even a lady such as yourself must be prepared. San Francisco is not yet civilized like New York or your home, London. Not, of course, that things haven’t changed over the last couple of years. More decent women now, but not that many more. The Vigilantes helped quiet things down. Two years ago, that was. Hanged some of those rotters, the Sydney Ducks, scum, the lot of them! Villains and criminals from Australia come here to rob and murder. Aye, you’ll stay far away from Sydney Town.”
If Mary were to see the ivory-handled, very deadly derringer, she would likely swoon, Chauncey thought. She shot it well now. Over two months of practice, when Mary was snug in her bunk for her afternoon nap, had made Chauncey a competent marksman. Captain Markman’s first mate, Mr. Johansen, had been her instructor during the past month. He was utterly in awe of his captain, and so Chauncey felt as safe with him as she would with the vicar from her home in Surrey.
Mary became silent, seeing that her mistress had fallen into a brown study. She does naught but think about that man, she thought as she smoothed out the sheets on her own small bunk. It’s unhealthy. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. Mary frowned at her biblical turn of thought. She could just imagine Miss Chauncey’s fine eyes darkening with implacable determination were she to say something like that to her. “The Lord would likely take too long, if he ever got around to it,” she could hear Miss Chauncey say in a cold, remote voice.
Actually, Chauncey was remembering her carefree life before her father’s death. She wasn’t certain now if she’d had two serious thoughts in her head then. “You’re such a loving, sweet little soul,” her father would tell her, ruffling her tousled curls. “But such a little scamp! What would your dear mother think, I wonder.” That loving, sweet little soul had seemingly disappeared. The scamp was long gone too, as were both her parents. She shuddered, wondering whether she would now be wed to Sir Guy, living in his home and paying obeisance to his mother, if her father hadn’t died in such circumstances. “There’s always some good, no matter how bad things look,” her old Irish nurse, Hannah, had told her as a child. But that was when a picnic was canceled because of rain. Poor Hannah, dying of cholera on a trip back to Ireland.
Three months aboard a ship is enough to drive one mad. I’m becoming maudlin and stupid. I must remember; I must plan.
“Is it time to get dressed for breakfast, Mary?”
Mary nodded briskly. “Just about. There’s but a small basin of clean water, as usual.”
“Ah, to be perfectly clean again,” Chauncey sighed. “A real bath.” She rolled out of her bunk and planted her bare feet firmly on the wooden floor.
“Well, it won’t be long now. Captain Markham said we’ll be arriving in San Francisco in but three days! It seems like ten years since we left New York, much less England.”
“I doubt San Francisco will be anything like New York,” Chauncey said as she drew her white bastiste nightgown over her head. “I was surprised at how . . . civi
“Do you know how lucky we are, Mary? Mr. Johansen told me that many of the ships take a good eight months to navigate from New York around Cape Horn to San Francisco. And we’re going to reach San Francisco in three months.”
Three months of miserable food, cramped quarters, and near-death, Mary thought. “I suppose it’s better than struggling overland through that awful-sounding Panama place with all its fevers and vicious natives! And just thinking about riding in those dreadful wagons across the interior of America, thirsting to death in the desert or losing your head to those red Indians—”
“Scalps, Mary, not heads.”
“The result is the same, miss!”