California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1)

by Daniel Knapp

"It's all right. It's all right. I get that way sometimes." She shoveled in some eggs and washed them down.

  "You do? I would think you'd have all the company, a handsome man like you."

  He couldn't look at her for a moment. "Don't know about that. And there's difference between company and… and…"

  "A woman you admire."

  "That's it."

  "Do you know, I have admired you—from a distance?"

  His mouth dropped open, and he stared at her. "You have? I can't believe it." He looked away.

  "Tell me, Mr. Carter—this will seem terribly forward of me—but are your intentions honorable?"

  His eyes darted back to her. "As pure as the driven snow. And now that I've really seen you…"

  "You like what you see?"

  "God, yes."

  "You would like to marry me?"

  He nearly choked. "Why… why… yes. After a decent period of… of… courtship."

  "I should hope it wouldn't be too long a period. I never want to feel the way I did last night… never want to drink out of loneliness that way… again."

  "Are you sayin… you'll marry me?"

  "I will have to think about it, Mr. Carter. I'm not an experienced woman… I don't care too much for the physical aspects of marriage, you understand. But it's been too long without someone I can lean on. I need a man like you. Strong… decent… honest."

  He stared at her wide-eyed. "I don't believe it. Are you sayin'—?"

  "Yes, Mr. Carter. I am. I fully expect my answer to be Yes."

  "Gaaaaaaah-damn! Uh, excuse me."

  "It's all right, Mr. Carter. I understand exactly how you feel."

  Billy Ralston sat behind his massive desk at the bank, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. "There's nothing I can say that will dissuade you?"

  Esther leaned back in her chair. "No. We will be married this weekend."

  "It wasn't what I did the other night? Having Alex Todd—?"

  "Don't be silly. I have known Mr. Carter for quite some time."

  "But not as long and as well as some do. Forgive me, Esther. I just have your interests in mind."

  "And your own."

  "That's true… but a little unfair."

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound cutting. You've been extraordinarily skillful with my investments. Totally honest. And a friend. Always. That's the primary reason I'm here. I want you to help me arrange things so only enough for Mr. Carter to buy a silent partnership will be available to him."

  Ralston's eyebrows shot up. Then he thought for a moment and smiled. "Esther, you amaze me. It could easily be done. All we need is to sign most of it over to someone you trust. With an accompanying document, signed at the same time, that returns all of the stock, cash, whatever, to you the moment you exercise it. Or transfer it to an heir automatically, in case of your death. We'll need an alternate holder in case the first one dies… I need the names of two people you not only trust that much, but who would do it."

  "Why not yourself? And… Alex Todd?"

  "Esther, I don't want to be in a position where you might even suspect I was acting purely out of self-interest. And you hardly know Alex."

  "He's… a friend. And I know he's an honest man. If I'm wrong about that, well…"

  "All right. Alex as an alternate. Who first?"

  "William Kelsey?"

  "Fine. If you want me to, I'll sign as a second alternate—in case, God forbid, both of them should—"

  "Let's not even think about that." She smoothed her skirts, adjusted her veil, and got up. "I'll be going back to Sacramento after a short"—she almost gagged on the word—"honeymoon."

  "I'll have the papers drawn up this afternoon. You can sign the initiating document late today or tomorrow, whichever's more convenient. By the way, who'll be the heir?"

  "I'd like to keep that private." Who else but Alex? she thought.

  "All right. I can have a separate document drawn up for that. I'll send it along. You can fill in the name. Just be sure to put it in a safe place."

  "I'll be seeing Bill Kelsey this evening. I'm sure he'll agree to do it. Would you see Mr. Todd? I… I'll be somewhat busy the next few days. It would be helpful if you could get his signature."

  "Consider it done, Esther. I'm having dinner with him tonight."

  "Are you still playing matchmaker?"

  Ralston laughed nervously. "As a matter of fact, I am introducing him to a young lady this evening. Katherine McDonnell… ah, an acquaintance of an acquaintance. Do you know her?"

  "I can't say that I do," Esther said, fighting down a wave of regret. She paused at the door. "You're wasting your time, Billy. He's really not interested right now."

  Ralston hurried to join her at the door. "He will be. She's an extraordinarily beautiful woman. And he needs company, if nothing else."

  "You may be right. Well, thank you for taking care of this for me."

  "Glad to. You're certainly nobody's fool, Esther." He opened the door for her. "I can't tell you how much better I feel about this now."

  "I'm a bit more comfortable myself. I hope you don't think any less of me."

  "Why should I? You're just protecting yourself. Wisely, I might add."

  "Yes, you might. But it is calculating. Someday I hope I can explain why I did this… All of it."

  Bull Carter brought the lamp over to the bed where she lay with the covers pulled up to her neck. "You're not mad at me for asking you to postpone the honeymoon, are you sweetheart?"

  The sound of his voice almost made her sick. "No. I'm just cold." She tried to appear cheerful. "And driving back to Sacramento is like a short honeymoon, isn't it?"

  "Kinda." He slipped out of his shirt and trousers.

  She could see the outline of his genitals beneath the stained front of his long johns. She was surprised and then relieved that he was so small.

  "This is a nice little inn, isn't it?" He got into bed with her. "Benicia used to be the capital."

  She stared up at the beamed ceiling. "It's lovely."

  When it was over, a mercifully few minutes later, she waited until the revulsion subsided, then turned to him.

  "What is it, sweetheart?"

  "You're not going to like this, Mr. Carter."

  "For Christ's sake, call me Bull. And what won't—?"

  "No. I will call you Mr. Carter now and in the future."

  He frowned. "What the hell does that mean?"

  "It means that I have never for a moment fallen for your stupid little scheme.” She paused for a second. “ And that you have had all you are going to have of the marriage bed with me."

  "What…?"

  For a moment she wondered if he were going to hit her. But then she saw that he was too shocked even to speak. "Listen to me, Mr. Carter. I have known all along what you wanted. And now you have it. I want to leave it that way."

  "But…"

  "But nothing. There will be a transfer of my savings and the money from all the stocks I have liquidated to a bank account in both our names as soon as we reach Sacramento. It will not be quite what you expected, but it will be enough. You can take it to Mr. Crocker and buy your way in. Do you understand? I won't get in your way. It suits my purposes, as well. You can have it. But that is all you can have."

  "Sweetheart, you're all wrong about me. I—"

  "Oh, I've seen the change in you since the other morning in the kitchen. The moony eyes. The fear of displeasing. No doubt it's authentic. But it comes too late. You have a choice, Mr. Carter. You can leave me alone and get additional money as the few stocks I have kept in my name turn their investments. Or you can be made a laughingstock when I leave you and inform your half-brother that I am his silent partner as well."

  "But, Esther…"

  "I will live in your home, undertake all the other duties of a wife. I will say nothing. No one has to know. But I will not spend another night in bed with you."

  "For God's sake, Esther. This ain't fair!"

 
"If you raise your voice to me, lift a hand, I will do the same thing. And you will look like an utter fool, to Crocker and everyone else."

  He stared past her, his face frozen in a scowl for a moment, then collapsing in resignation. "I can't believe you'd do this. I never—"

  "You did, and you know it. Why don't you act like a man and accept this for what it is? A business arrangement. That's what you had in mind to begin with."

  "But now it's different."

  "That's too bad."

  "You're a bitch, ain't you? A twenty-carat bitch. I can't believe this."

  "Believe it. In time, you'll accept it, if you've got half a brain. You have what you want. No one need be the wiser. And I certainly won't expect you to live up to your vows."

  "You mean…?"

  "Yes, I mean. Whoever, wherever you want. As long as you don't cause either of us embarrassment or bring attention to what the truth really is."

  "I'll have to think about this."

  "No, you won't. Just sleep on it, Mr. Carter. I'm sure you already understand it's to your advantage. Just remember what I said."

  "Do you… do you want me to get out of bed right now?"

  "That won't be necessary," she said, turning her back to him. "It will be the first of many penances I must undertake for doing this just the way you would have."

  Sixty-six

  She knew she was pregnant even before the doctor confirmed it. Now, sitting in the parlor of Bull Carter's surprisingly comfortable and well-kept house on the far end of I Street, she had a passing thought about finding a way to safely rid herself of the baby. But she knew the unborn child might have been fathered by Alex. There was at least a 50 percent chance of that. She had received both their seeds within the space of a week—and Carter had pulled out of her hurriedly, for the most part spending all over her thigh. The irony of it made her smile.

  She got up and walked through the house. Carter would not be back from Crocker's dry-goods store before supper. He had railed off and on about her sexual embargo for a few weeks, then pleaded for a few more. Now a cool, polite truce existed between them. She climbed the stairs to the second floor. His brother had moved out of the third bedroom and into a hotel the day she arrived. She glanced in through the door. It could be fitted out nicely as a nursery. The house would not be a bad place to raise a child, she thought. The fenced rear yard was ample. There was a loft over the carriage stable that could be made livable, if she decided to have Solana move here from the school to help her.

  Turning, she started back down the hall and went into the room where Bull Carter grudgingly slept by himself. She began to make the rumpled bed. In time, she thought, it will not even matter to him. She finished, went into her own bedroom, and glanced at the tintype of herself taken in San Francisco the day of their wedding. The other daguerreotype, of the two of them smiling, was downstairs on display in the foyer.

  She went to her desk and looked at the calendar. Eight weeks had passed since the wedding, and it seemed to be working well enough. Carter had his "nights out" once or twice a week. The rest of the time he read his paper and went to bed early. She fulfilled her promises, kept the house neat and clean, cooked, saw to it that the Chinese man who came in to do their laundry attended to his shirts, socks, and underwear properly. She had even darned a bit, repaired the seam in one of his jackets. Twin pangs of regret and remorse stabbed at her for a moment. She no longer believed Carter was an evil man. Just morally small, dense, and overly ambitious. He hated the arrangement. She was certain that he had indeed experienced a sudden infatuation for her that morning in the kitchen. Nonetheless, he spoke to her courteously and avoided arguments. When she carefully suggested several ways to negotiate cleverly and protect himself from Crocker, he not only listened but implemented the advice. As a result, he had been able to buy for himself the superintendancy of the construction company Crocker, Huntington, Hopkins, and Stanford were putting together. He had not fared as well in acquiring stock in the Central Pacific Railroad; he and Esther owned only one-quarter as much as each of the four principal officers. But he was satisfied, and so was she.

  Esther sat down at her desk, thinking about what she had heard the icy-eyed Huntington say in the sitting room downstairs the night before. They were going to ask the government for alternate sections of land on either side of the entire line as one consideration. It was outrageous, but after her first careful look at Huntington and two sentences from Crocker, she had no doubt they would get what they wanted. And a joint, one-twentieth ownership of just the acreage alone would probably make her richer than she had ever been prior to the crash of '55. Richer and more powerful, in an indirect way. The thought warmed her as much as the summer sun coming through the window.

  She thought of the other men involved: Hopkins, the accounting genius, was painfully shy, timid. He probably wouldn't even plant a radish in the backyard from which he still sold vegetables to neighbors without his wife's permission. She laughed to herself. Bull Carter weighed twice as much as Hopkins, and he was behaving just as meekly for her. She surmised that if Huntington would steal the gold out of his mother's teeth, Crocker would beat his for it at the drop of a hat. It was also obvious, from what she had overheard during the previous night's meeting, that they all thought Stanford useless—save for his ability to impress people with his overly dignified verbosity—and that Bull Carter both hated and worshipped his half-brother.

  It would be interesting to see them jostling one another for dominance, she thought, wondering how Judah would fare with them in the long run. She shuddered as she weighed it, suddenly conscious that if the railroad did make it over the Sierras, and was joined by lines from the East, Judah, Crocker, Huntington, Hopkins, Stanford—and, in a lesser way, her husband—could rise to a place among the most powerful men in the nation. If there was a nation left after the war. She guessed there would be, despite the dark news of a Confederate victory at Bull Run.

  She opened the latest letter from Ralston. It described in glowing terms the frenzied expansion of the Comstock, outlined the astronomical rise in value of her mining stocks, then went on to summarize quickly the gains the rest of her investments were making on the swell of the silver boom. A trace of concern danced through her mind. Although Ralston had tried to hide it, it seemed apparent that some of what was now going on at the Comstock was paper speculation, not a solid reflection of ore ripped from the mines. How widespread and potentially dangerous the inflation might be, she could not tell. Then the ripple of concern was lost in waves of apprehension and anger as Ralston turned gravely to a personal matter in a postscript on the second page. Alex was in trouble.

  "And she claims Alex is the father?" Esther asked.

  Ralston put his hand over his eyes. "I feel like a fool. Worse. A Judas goat. It's a setup. She's after social position and the money Alex's put away all these years. And I introduced them!"

  They were sitting in his carriage at the wharf. She had disembarked from the paddle-wheeler Senator just minutes before. Beyond a thick latticework of square-rigger masts and spars, the heat of a warm August sun rose from the waters of San Francisco Bay and made the Golden Gate shimmer in the distance. It was Sunday, and there was little activity on the waterfront. The last of the passengers from Sacramento hurried past and funneled into the streets of the city as Esther sat there, thinking.

  "When does this Miss McDonnell say they were… together?"

  "Two nights after we had our discussion about the stock transfer."

  "What does Alex say?"

  "That he was alone, all evening. And I believe him. The irony of it is that he seems to have driven up to your place. But you weren't there. I don't know what he wanted to talk to you about, but he says when he didn't find you, he went directly home."

  Esther was rocked by guilt for a moment. "God… the Wednesday night before my wedding. I was with Connie Kelsey until late in the evening. She was helping me with alterations on my wedding dress. Has Alex seen the woman
since?"

  Ralston snapped the reins, and they started off toward Esther's home. "A number of times. He says they haven't been intimate. It seemed strange at first. He didn't particularly take to her the night we all had dinner together, and I didn't think he'd see her again. But then about two weeks later he had a sudden change of heart. It wasn't like him. Usually, when he makes up his mind, that's it. I was glad at first, but now I could kick myself."

  "It's simply her word against his, then?"

  "Not quite. That would be difficult enough, considering what even an unsubstantiated claim like this would do to his reputation. But she's got a doctor who'll testify she became pregnant when she says she did. And an aunt who says she was with Alex that night—and has spent time with no one else."

  "Who is the doctor?"

  "A man named Leander Sims."

  Esther remembered his name immediately. If she proceeded with what she had in mind, it was conceivable that Sims might recognize her from that Sunday at the vigilante headquarters. She had no idea what might come of such a revelation at this late date, but it seemed likely that it would cause her more than just embarrassment. She thought of Carter, then of Alex and the prospect of having almost all of it uncovered, having to face him and try to tell him why she had deceived him all these years. She sighed. His honor was at stake, not to mention his money. If it comes down to revealing myself, she thought, I will simply have to. I must help him. It might be that the time had finally come to be honest with Alex. Reluctant about that, she made one more stab at finding a variation on the strategy taking form in her mind. "What if you, or another of Alex's friends, testified that he was with him that night?"

  '"We've discussed that. In a case like this the woman's word would probably carry more weight. She and her lawyer know that they'd have better than a fifty-fifty chance in court. And by then, even if they failed, Alex's name would be tarred."

  "And if another woman gave such testimony?"

  "That might do it. It would be worth a try. Might even head her off before it ever got to court. But she'd have to be pretty convincing."