Felicia Andrews

by Moonwitch

  "Private guards," Trevor explained to them. "If your friend didn't hire them, one of the others must have. They'll take a percentage of the salvage in return for a few busted heads. "

  "Nice people," Harley muttered.

  "It's better than having one of those decent, law-abiding citizens making off with something valuable . "

  Harley's hands had been jammed deep into his hip pockets as if, Amanda thought, he were watching a cattle drive from the bluff over Wind River. Now he pulled out his left to gesture with a sweep from left to right. "You think anything there is goin' to be worth stealin'?"

  "You'd be surprised, " Trevor said. "See over there, where that bit of iron bracing's caught . . ." He gently loosened Amanda's hold on his arm and nudged Harley forward, momentarily excluding her from the conversation. She watched the rancher's face closely, seeing his suspicious sideways glances softening as he nodded, his right hand leaving its pocket to point while Trevor kept up a stream of description. She frowned for a moment before she realized that this was a deliberate attempt on his part to win Peterson's good graces.

  She wasn't sure that she liked it.

  Harley had warned her that Eagleton had been bragging about winning her, however temporarily, and when she had apparently acquiesced, his game should have been done. Or was there more to it? Slowly she scratched at the side of her neck, finding herself staring at the breadth of his shoulders, the trim V as it slipped into a waist she could encompass without stretching. She suspected that his so-called traveling from one city to another included some hectic bouts of exercise. Most men who were deskbound seemed to let themselves fall into what her father called disrepair, all of it settling unflatteringly from the waist down. But not Eagleton. She sniffed and turned her attention to the people still standing beyond the burly outstretched arms of the guards. Bonnets, feathers, bowlers, ten-gallons, and snap-brims could be seen, and even a few of the East Coast's straw skimmer affectation.

  There were fewer than before as a desultory but uncomfortably damp breeze wafted in from the bay. Nevertheless she estimated the number now at well over a hundred. Is this all they have to do? she wondered, ignoring a few open looks of amazement and contempt cast in her direction.

  A hand touched her shoulder and she started. She looked back and up, into Harley's face. It was guarded.

  "Well?" she said, daring him to argue with her now.

  "Seems all right. Knows his stuff. "

  She nodded sharply, and a sheepish grin swept over his lips and was gone. "He does," she said. "And if he asks me to lunch, I'm going. " She braced herself for a spate of caution and disapproval, but Peterson only nodded as though it were no more than he expected and he wasn't even going to think twice about it.

  And at that reaction she was somewhat, paradoxically, disappointed.

  "Goin' to stick by Willy," he said then. "Heard from one of the others that the lawyer fella was havin' some trouble with guys down at the docks. Figure it might be him they was after. Scare him off. "

  "They do things awfully big around here, don't they?" she said.

  "A big state, " he replied sardonically.

  She slapped his arm playfully to produce a laugh and was smiling as she turned around to face Eagleton. His hat was held carefully in one hand while the other pushed at his blond hair unnecessarily. His sharp blue eyes were scanning the crowd, and the vague hint of cruelty she noticed at the line of his mouth was accentuated by the way his lips had tightened and lost their color.

  "Scavengers, " he spat in a husky whisper. "They're hoping someone will find a body. "

  "People, " she said by way of explanation and did not flinch at the cold look he cast her way.

  "Perhaps. " Then, suddenly, his features seemed to rearrange themselves, and he was boyish once again. "I, Mrs. Munroe, am rather hungry. Though the sun has seen fit to duck out for the day, I can tell by my internal clock that it is fast approaching noon. And unless you wish to stand here until sunset and beyond, watching those men turn themselves into darkies, I would be most grateful if you would join me."

  "Hell of a speech," she said.

  He blinked, not at all sure he had been insulted, or rebuked, but before he could make up his mind, she took his arm and led him away, laughing. Then she looked down at herself and shook her head.

  "What?" he asked when they reached the corner.

  She indicated her riding trousers and headband, the white shirt embroidered with pale rainbows across the shoulders.

  "Hardly the type of apparel that will admit me into society around here, Mr. Eagleton. "

  He stepped away from her and examined her, one finger alongside his nose in a critical air. Then he nodded. "You're right, Mrs. Munroe. The people of this marvelous city like to think of themselves as free thinkers, but they're just as bad as anyone else when it comes to snobbery. "· He looked up and down the street, then clapped his hat on his head. "So. If you don't mind a short walk up a hellishly long hill, there is always the place where I headquarter when I return. I can guarantee you a marvelous meal, superb company, and perfect safety at all times. "

  Amanda did not think twice. She agreed, and they turned to their right and proceeded to walk along a street faced primarily with shops displaying freshly caught sea food packed in shaved ice. Young boys, she noted, were in the alleys, sitting on open crates, ice blocks as large as they were between their legs. Picks rusted and dripping rose and fell as they produced the shavings scooped up from the ground by assistants. Overhead were clouds of gulls, a complement to the seeming hundreds of cats that prowled through the pedestrians' legs.

  On the next block were fruit stands owned mostly by, she gathered, Orientals. They stood quietly behind tilted stands racked neatly with brightly polished oranges and limes, apples and small green fruits she did not recognize. Vegetables and meats were all over, every other storefront hanging poultry and hocks from large iron hooks. A few dingy restaurants with Chinese characters in gilt on the windows were in the area, along with the noise of children shrieking and a pungent mixture of aromas that made her mouth water and her stomach feel as if it had not been filled for a hundred years.

  Finally there were the people--on the walks and in the streets, vying with each other for the foodstuffs on display, competing with the trolleys and carriages for the right of way from one comer to another.

  She shivered and pressed closer to Eagleton, who quite absently slipped an arm around her waist. He whispered something to her, but she did not catch it, and was about to ask him to repeat it when suddenly she stopped dead in her tracks. Eagleton's momentum carried him forward and pulled him around to face her.

  Impossible. She felt the blood slip from her cheeks, and a brief surge of dizziness passed over her eyes.

  "Amanda, are you all right?"

  It was bound to happen, she told herself as she smiled weakly to reassure him she would not faint dead away on the sidewalk. Bound to happen. In a city of such size and diversity, it was inevitable that she should see someone who reminded her of someone else. But, she told herself grimly, that someone did not have to be Simon Maitland.

  SIX

  She was almost ready to suggest they take one of the hansom cabs she had seen, or even the trolley. The "couple of blocks" he had promised her had thus far turned into seven, and the hill they were climbing had, in some places, achieved an almost vertical cant. Perspiration had broken out on her back in spite of the cool breeze, and her legs had begun to warn her that they would not long suffer the hard walking she was forcing them into. Yet, when she looked over to Eagleton, it was as if he were strolling contentedly across a perfectly flat

  meadow with nothing but the sky and the birds to accompany him. His arms swung loosely at his sides, his head was tilted back to stare at the varied facades of the town houses they were passing, and every so often he would lift his hat politely to a woman who caught his fancy on the opposite side of the cobblestoned street. He was not even breathing hard, she noted sourly. T
he only sign that he was exerting himself was a slight flush across his lightly freckled cheeks. Nevertheless she would not complain to him; somehow, somewhere back down the hill, the walk had become as much a challenge as the man himself-she would not give up until she dropped, and even then she would crawl if he would let her. It was foolish, and she knew it, but she was not going to allow him to best her.

  And to keep her mind off her walking and off the hard slap of her boots on the pavement, she tried to recall the man who had reminded her of Maitland. She had had little more than a fleeting glimpse of a face and an erect stride in a milling crowd in front of a shop whose wares she could not now remember.

  But Simon she could remember very well. She rubbed a hand hard over her face, astonishing herself with the depth of the hatred she was still able to conjure just thinking about him. It was unnatural, she thought. And the face she had seen had borne the . . . the man only a resemblance, nothing more.

  It was bound to happen. Maitland was not in California.

  But, she thought, brightening, Trevor Eagleton was, and he was finally turning off the pavement and up a steep flight of stone steps to an ornate oaken doorway set deep in a recess on the first floor of a three-story townhouse. It was of brick and white board molding, clean and fresh like the others on the same block, and she suddenly felt ill-dressed. This was not a place to walk into dressed like a squaw cowhand, she told herself. But Trevor did not seem to mind. He waited on the threshold with one hand extended, and when she took it, he led her inside without ceremony.

  "It's not the most expensive place in the city," he told her as they walked into a cluttered sitting room whose bay window surveyed the sloping street, "but it serves. " He reached for a scarlet bellpull by a mantel of green marble and yanked it twice. Within moments, from a door at the back, a tiny, elderly Oriental dressed in a flowing emerald and silver robe shuffled in.

  Eagleton spoke to her softly, and when she looked up at Amanda, she saw that the face was a map of deep wrinkles, the hair bunned in back shot through with tired gray. Yet the eyes were animated; they clearly approved.

  "This," Eagleton said, "is Lu Chang, Amanda. Her family came over with her to work on the Union Pacific. When that was done, they gravitated back here where they had disembarked. None of them wanted to return, so her husband opened a small shop down by the waterfront. He was killed in a robbery. Her two sons and daughter went north to strike it rich in lumber country. She hasn't heard from them since."

  Amanda bowed her head slightly to the old woman. Lu Chang returned the gesture and backed out of the room.

  "Does she speak English?"

  "Better than you or I, my dear. She prefers not to, however. She says it spoils the image. " He laughed. 'That woman, Amanda, is no one's fool. Never take her for granted, and never assume she doesn't know what you're talking about. "

  A moment of awkwardness reached them, then. Amanda did not want to give in to the trembling in her legs until she was asked. Meanwhile she saw that either Eagleton or the previous owner had, like most others she had seen in the city, yielded to the Spanish influence with heavy dark furniture, gaily embroidered draperies, white walls with heavy beams, and huge hand-woven throws scattered about the intricately pegged flooring. Though the house was equipped with gaslight, candles in great black iron sconces adorned the walls wherever she looked, making the place seem almost like a chapel without an altar.

  Suddenly Eagleton remembered his manners and bade her take a high-backed walnut chair in front of the fireplace. Then, with a mischievous grin, he stripped off his jacket and proceeded to lay the fire. Within moments its warmth had taken the chill from her bones, and she stretched out her legs over the low brick hearth so that her boots would absorb the heat and keep her feet from feeling as though they were mired in mud.

  "It's beautiful," she said, wriggling deeper into the upholstery.

  "It serves, " he said, taking a sprawling, careless position on a couch that to her seemed as long as the room itself. "I'm not in it as much as I'd like, but . . . " And he shrugged. Then he snapped to his feet. "Amanda, I'm sorry. I don't know where my mind is today. Would you care for something to drink?"

  Without waiting for a response, he crossed to a carved ebony sideboard where, from a display of at least a dozen deep green and brown bottles, he chose one of sherry and poured them each a dollop in a thin, plain glass. "A local wine, " he said. "I know one family-have you heard of Nob Hill? Good-they will drink nothing that isn't trampled, drained, strained, bottled, and labeled in France. Snobs, the lot of them. " His smile was intoxicating. "Of course, they've the money and I don't. That, I suppose, makes the difference."

  Amanda let the smooth, nutty wine slip into her throat and curl to her stomach. She had not realized what the climb had taken out of her until she had sat down; and now the combination of flame and sherry was adding weight to her eyelids.

  She shook herself quickly and sat up, back straight, feet drawn under the chair's skirting.

  "I know the feeling, " Trevor said when he saw her. "It's the day."

  "No, " she said with a grin, "it's the walk. I've climbed mountains before, ridden days without stopping, but that street you have out there would kill a bull."

  He laughed, and she watched his face smooth into something without a name, a comforting mask that denied the world outside and the evils it contained.

  She sighed inwardly and allowed him to begin what she knew was a deliberate campaign to ingratiate himself. He displayed his wit, his erudition, brought her once to her feet and walked her eagerly through the first-floor rooms where he explained each piece's history, each painting's background almost from the creation of the pigments.

  Twice he suddenly turned and caught her staring at him; twice he smiled and leaned down to brush a kiss across her cheek.

  After the second time Lu Chang caught up with them to announce that their luncheon was ready. Immediately Eagleton ran to fetch his jacket and escorted her to a small flagstone patio beyond the French doors of the dining room. There was a tiny plot of land behind the house, marked off from the neighbors by a high enclosing wall. A single tree grew massively in the center of carefully tended grass, the bole surrounded by a profusion of indigo, pink, and scarlet blossoms.

  The tree, he confided as they ate, was considered by the previous owner to be a source of good fortune.

  "What he meant," he said, laughing, "was that the branches are so thick, the leaves so numerous, that none of the neighbors could see his seductions. Or anything else, for that matter."

  Amanda said nothing.

  They ate the rest of the meal in silence, a tension growing between them that she was hard pressed to prevent from exploding into a trembling of her hands, or her lips.

  Lu Chang bustled in and out of the house silently, replacing this platter with another, refilling their glasses, all the time averting her eyes and keeping her mouth securely shut.

  They could hear no traffic on the street, no sound from the houses that towered over them up the hill's slope. The sky's gray deepened to an imposing black, and the wind began to toss the leaves of the tree carelessly.

  "Storm, " Eagleton muttered.

  "It seems like it, " she said.

  He daubed at his lips with a linen napkin and dropped it on the table. "I expect we should get back inside before we're drenched."

  "I guess so."

  Yet, knowing full well what he would attempt once they were within the confines of the house again, she did not know if she wanted any part of it. The man was without question handsome and intriguing, but she could not shake Harley's warning before she had met Trevor for the first time. Suppose all this was an act, she asked herself; suppose all he wants is to bed me so he can brag about it to his friends. She could imagine the looks she would receive from the men at her next function, the lustful stares and the supposedly meaningful glances in her direction. They would be lining up to see who would be next to take the redskin between the sheets, a
nd they would be wage ring on whether it was the same for an Indian as it was for a white woman.

  The thought made her cheeks burn, and for a moment she was unable to stem a rising tide of anger that enveloped her heart and made it beat more rapidly. It would not be the first time that she was mistaken for a slattern simply because of her open, straightforward manner; and it would not be the last, she supposed. Most of the time she was able to control the men who approached her, however. Most of the time she could fend them off with a word , a gesture, that was sometimes clever and sometimes downright rude, if not obscene.