by Ciji Ware
Lucky for him, Amelia had noted after climbing the scaffolding to the top floor that the head carpenter, Jake Kelly, had erred in the way his crew had installed the first roof joist. They had been forced to pull it apart and realign it properly. Dick Spitz hadn’t been happy that the “lady architect” had caught the mistake, but he was.
Thinking of roof joists and climbing scaffolds inevitably drew his thoughts to the subject of Amelia herself—and that was forbidden territory. Even so, he couldn’t stop reflecting on how calm and collected she’d been when she informed Spitz of the problem. Dressed in a clean shirtwaist and gored skirt and sturdy boots, she’d been a pretty sight debating with that uncouth lout. She was no classic beauty, to be sure, but with that figure; clear, smooth skin; and her mass of brunette hair piled atop her head, she was a damned appealing woman… even when she wore men’s trousers beneath her skirt!
J.D. gazed into a shard of mirror that had started life in a gold frame and resolutely turned his thoughts to other subjects. He’d rescued the glass from the rubble and leaned it against one wall in his makeshift bedroom. For a long moment, he surveyed the handsome tweed suit, cambric shirts, starched wing collars, and two pairs of trousers hanging on nails he’d pounded into the wall studs. Knotting his tie, he began to consider various schemes to lure more capital to complete the rebuilding. To do that, a man couldn’t look like some refugee, could he? Now, if the Chinese workers could hurry up and gain access to either the cistern or the walk-in safe still buried deep under the wreckage at the back of his property—or both—J.D. would consider himself a happy man.
Except for Ling Lee and Mother…
Funny how he’d begun to see the unfair treatment of these two women at the hands of men in their lives in a rather similar light.
Firmly putting all such errant thoughts aside, J.D. slammed his new hat onto his head and donned the stylish overcoat that would protect him from the evening chill. With a pat on Barbary’s head and an order to “stay!” he headed outdoors for the Winton parked on Taylor Street, wishing that he didn’t need to ask Kemp for yet another favor.
***
J.D. parked the Winton near the wharves and strode up the gangway a few minutes before the Sausalito ferry pushed away from the dock. Soon the boat was heading north, cutting through the choppy water as it passed Alcatraz Island, a garrison where Confederate sympathizers and renegade U.S. soldiers had been held nearly half a century earlier. In 1901, the fortress’s cannons had been dismantled and J.D. wondered what the desolate twelve acres in the middle of the bay was good for now.
Before long, the Cazadero nudged against the dock and J.D. disembarked for Sausalito’s two-story terminal that let onto the commuter train platforms where standard-gauge electric cars would whisk him to Mill Valley in less than ten minutes. The quality transportation signaled that the territory across the Golden Gate straits was coming into its own as the locus of second homes for wealthy San Franciscans. Many city residents, in fact, had camped out in them since the quake. Marin County also served as a place where lumberyards, shipbuilding, and dairy and vegetable farms thrived in support of the larger cities trying to rebuild across the bay.
J.D. climbed into the gold-lettered carriage and watched the verdant landscape slip past his window as the four-car train gathered speed along a stretch of seashore known as Richardson Bay.
No wonder Ezra Kemp liked Marin so much, J.D. thought with a glance at the giant redwood trees whizzing by. Kemp must feel right at home among his fellow ne’er-do-wells, grabbing up land for a song from distressed owners hit by the financial panic of the previous decade, then cutting down entire forests to sell uncured wood. These same environs also attracted smugglers, rumrunners, off-track bookies, and a variety of other shady characters relying on the remote geography to provide cover for their questionable schemes.
I wonder where that puts me? J.D. mused, staring through the window at a half-mowed stand of redwoods marching up Mt. Tamalpais, its peak looming above Mill Valley. The mountain offered evidence of the clear-cutting that was providing San Francisco with the lumber necessary for the reconstruction. Amazingly, other than a few collapsed chimneys, hilly little Sausalito and the surrounding countryside showed few signs of damage from the quake, even though the area was located mere miles from the spot on the Mendocino Coast, where the newspapers reported the temblor had originated.
A few minutes later, the train pulled into the Mill Valley depot where, coat in hand, J.D. stepped onto the platform.
“Mr. Thayer, sir?”
“Yes, I’m Thayer.”
“I’m to take you to Mr. Kemp’s house.”
Kemp had apparently sent his livery to transport him via the muddy streets of the little town that took its name from the first mill that straddled Fern Creek back in 1834.
The driver flicked the reins and guided the carriage out of the town center and into a glade encircled by a magnificent forest of mighty redwoods with branches so lofty they blocked any glimpse of the night sky. The conveyance passed a sign proclaiming that they were traveling on a bumpy road called Throckmorton Avenue.
Less than a quarter mile along an adjacent road that paralleled a rushing creek, he caught sight of winking lights tucked among the trunks of the thick-barked trees. Kemp’s mansion built of river rock and redwood timbers was a fantasy construction that looked for all the world like a hunting lodge for Hapsburg royalty nestled deep in a parkland.
Terraced grounds rose in steps from the gurgling brook, etched by parterre hedges and dotted with camellia trees taller than J.D. himself. Stone turrets, capped with thick shingles coated with bright green moss, guarded the four corners of the massive house. A rolled roofline and ivy-covered walls added to the sense that even on a sun-filled day, the Kemp residence would be shrouded in darkness and mystery.
J.D. dismounted from the carriage, nodded to his silent driver, and watched the vehicle disappear around the side of the stone house into deep shadows. He inhaled air pungent with the rising damp and strode along the spongy ground until he reached a stone path, laden with the same tufts of furry moss that clung to the roof. The walkway led to a heavy oak door adorned with a wrought-iron knocker fashioned in the twisted countenance of a troll.
Despite the showy extravagance of his abode, Ezra Kemp largely kept silent about his family’s origins. J.D. had made it his business, though, to learn that his former gambling partner was the son of one Klaus Kemp, a German immigrant who found work as a blacksmith repairing pickaxes in the mines of the Mother Lode. The bearded giant who was Ezra’s sire had sought sexual satisfaction in the arms of a prostitute named Ellie Jenks—a slender young woman who had died giving birth to their ten-pound son. Ezra’s large size and barrel chest bore the stamp of his hard-drinking father, long deceased. His lack of social niceties reflected the world of the mother he’d never known—and the stigma that her profession carried from beyond the grave.
Given such inauspicious beginnings, Kemp’s innate intelligence nevertheless had taught him to seize opportunity when it knocked. He’d parlayed that and a certain mechanical ability into a highly successful lumber empire with saw mills scattered along Fern Creek and the Russian River in the heavily forested lands in regions of Marin and Sonoma counties to the north.
That spring’s calamitous quake and fire had proven to be the most fortuitous event in Ezra Kemp’s life. An entire city begged for the products he supplied: stately redwoods felled and hewn into usable lengths of lumber, along with the means to transport these goods to a city desperate for wood. After years of being shunned by the nobs of Nob Hill, he was suddenly asked to serve on the Committee of Fifty for the Reconstruction of San Francisco and had set his sights on making further inroads into the society that, ironically enough, J.D. Thayer had persistently spurned.
Thus, for J.D., the evening ahead provided an opportunity to demand better service and products from Kemp Lumber Company so that he might satisfy his ambition to be the first major hotel owner in San
Francisco to open his doors before the first anniversary of the disaster of April 18. Once back in business, he could then pay his previous debts to Kemp for the destroyed gambling club and be free of the man he’d grown to heartily dislike.
“Ah… Thayer, welcome.” Ezra himself had appeared at the front door to greet him while a manservant took his coat and hat. His host ushered him into a paneled study. “My daughter, Matilda, will join us for dinner, along with a school friend of hers visiting from back East. Emma Stivers is her name. The chit’s a bit long in the tooth, if you ask me,” he added sourly, “but they seem happy enough making pottery or whatever on God’s earth they do in that studio of Matilda’s at the bottom of the garden.”
At twenty-seven, Matilda Kemp was—to be blunt—a bit long in the tooth herself, thought J.D., recalling the first and only time he’d laid eyes on the woman on the evening he’d come to this house to sign the purchase agreement for lumber to build the gambling club.
But then again, times were changing and many women no longer married by age eighteen. Unbidden, the image of Amelia floated through his mind. She seemed proud to admit she was thirty years old and focused on life as an architect—not as a wife and mother. Ling Lee had been another woman who had eschewed marriage and shown she was as capable as any businessman. Perhaps it was, indeed, a new age for women, he mused, accepting Kemp’s offer of a drink.
“Cheers, Ezra.” J.D. raised the glass of whiskey his host had poured from a crystal decanter. “I’m looking forward to a civilized meal with people who don’t have to dust off their boots every time they take a step.” He sank into a leather chair and offered another salute. “Let us drink to the opening of the Bay View before April eighteenth.”
Kemp also raised his glass. “And may you beat that wretched Morgan woman and the Fairmont to the finish line.”
“She bought her lumber elsewhere you say?” J.D. asked, biting back a smile.
“Yes, she did, the witch,” Kemp replied with no sign of humor. “You know, I’ve often thought it might not be so difficult to arrange some unforeseen problem on the Fairmont site, if you catch my drift. What if, by chance, an entire section of her scaffolding mysteriously weakened and—”
“No need for anything that drastic,” J.D. intervened, affecting a shrug. “We’re proceeding nicely at the Bay View and should have no trouble opening our doors first.”
He was beginning to see that Kemp was more than just an opportunistic, larcenous hardhead. Ezra’s minions reported everything to him from key building sites around the city, intelligence he had then been known to pass on to the enforcers at City Hall. Kemp’s bullyboys were perfectly capable of making a mishap on the scaffolding of a competitor appear an accident. As it was, it was dangerous for Amelia and Miss Morgan to be scampering around six stories in the air without Kemp’s murderous musings.
Stay clear of this, J.D. Keep your focus where it belongs.
He swiftly assumed the air of a coconspirator in the push to open the Bay View before the Fairmont. “In fact, Ezra, you’ll be pleased to hear that we’re progressing at Taylor and Jackson with due speed—assuming I can encourage you to urge your people to deliver sound lumber in the correct length.”
Kemp’s genial manner toward his visitor underwent a swift change.
“My best wood goes to customers who pay their bills. Make good on the note due me for the last lumber you bought to build the original gambling club, J.D., and you will marvel at the efficiency of my employees.”
J.D. carefully set his glass down on a small table to the right of his chair.
“You’ve known from the beginning that I can’t give you the final payment on the old note until I open the doors to the new hotel,” he replied matter-of-factly. “I can only use my insurance and loan monies on current construction. But rest assured, Ezra, you are the first creditor on my list. Thanks to funds from the Committee, you’ve certainly been paid handsomely for the lumber you are currently supplying me, so I think it’s only fair, therefore, that you give my orders high priority for quality and an honest count. The sooner I complete the hotel and open it to paying customers, the sooner you’ll be paid back on your original investment in the old club.”
Kemp cast him a noncommittal look. Then, eyes narrowing, he said, “You know, J.D., I’d be willing to forgo immediate payment of what you owe me from before the quake—which is my right to demand, by the way—if we could… uh… reach a certain understanding about something.” He lowered his gaze to the rim of his whiskey glass as if deep in thought.
“And what understanding might that be?” J.D. asked warily. He could just imagine Kemp demanding a partnership deal in exchange for forgiveness on the money owed.
Kemp looked up from his drink. “That you begin to court my daughter.”
“What?”
J.D. couldn’t disguise his astonishment. He instantly regretted revealing his obvious dismay, but a man only had to behold Matilda Kemp in all her gangling awkwardness to understand his reaction.
“You heard me,” snapped Kemp. “I have a daughter of marriageable age with no prospects in sight. You and she are near contemporaries, and despite your unhappy status with your family, I think an alliance of my wealth and your name could do wonders for us both.”
“I have no intention ever to marry,” J.D. declared bluntly. There was no point mincing words about such a preposterous proposal.
Not ever?
He immediately realized he’d taken a radical stance, considering the majority of women he’d known well had either been prostitutes or ninnies like Matilda Kemp. Even so, his experience in his own family showed all too clearly that a state of matrimony could create plenty of misery for everyone concerned.
Kemp, however, was doggedly sticking to the subject at hand. “All the more reason such an alliance with Matilda would be of no personal consequence to you whatsoever. You’ll live your life and she’ll live hers.”
J.D. was more amused than vexed at Kemp’s outrageous proposal. “Have you discussed this idea with the lady in question?”
“I have hinted at your interest in getting to know her better,” Kemp replied, straight-faced.
“I’ve met Matilda exactly once, Ezra, and exchanged a few inane pleasantries. How could you possibly convince her of my interest, for God’s sake?”
“That is your task. Either that, or I will be forced to demand that you pay me the note for the gambling club in full. Immediately.”
“You know all my funds are committed to rebuilding.”
“A pity,” Kemp replied. “Well, then, I expect I’ll have to put a lien on the new hotel and have a word with the Committee of Fifty that you’re in debt to me and it’s my recommendation that the bankers not risk another loan since you’re so deeply in arrears.”
“So is half of San Francisco,” scoffed J.D.
“Perhaps they’ll see the wisdom of turning over the project to me, since I can guarantee its completion. After all, it’s my wood, my foreman and carpenters you got through my good offices.”
J.D. felt like reaching across the narrow space that separated their two chairs and slapping the smug look off his host’s face. In Kemp’s usual, grasping fashion, he’d done his best to wrest the Bay View away from him from the first, and by this time, J.D. was thoroughly fed up.
“Why are you suddenly so eager to marry off a daughter whose welfare you’ve ignored since her babyhood?”
“You know nothing of these matters.”
“I know that the moment her mother died of pneumonia, you shipped Matilda east to boarding school and even after she returned, you have barely allowed her out of this house.”
Kemp appeared nonplussed at the accuracy of J.D.’s observation. “What business is this of yours?”
“I make it my business to know with whom I’m dealing.”
“She’s twenty-seven years old. She should be married.”
“She was twenty-six last year and you never showed a scintilla of concern.”
“Let’s just say marrying her off to you would benefit me in several ways, not the least of which is that I would be protecting my investment in the Bay View.”
“You’ll get your money. I’m a man of my word and I pay my debts.”
“Perhaps I would prefer to own the hotel myself, rather than just the lumber in it.”
J.D. regarded his host for a long moment. “Ah. I see. You couldn’t win the Bay View gambling at cards, so now you’re resorting to extortion. You’ve been hanging round Schmitz and Reuf too long, I fear.”
“You were just damned lucky the night of the quake, and you know it. If you don’t wish to revisit that event, J.D., or want problems on your building site, I suggest you lavish some attention on my daughter at dinner this evening.”
J.D. couldn’t believe that he’d been at Ezra Kemp’s house for less than a half hour and could barely keep his temper under control. The man was infuriating. And dangerous.
J.D. set his drink down with a thud. “So… the charming host reverts to his bullyboy tactics from days of yore. Don’t you realize, Kemp, that you can never worm your way into Nob Hill society—such as it is—behaving like a boor? You must at least make a show of civility, though God knows there are plenty of other thugs in evening clothes masquerading as pillars of society in this town. The only difference, my dear Ezra, is that they are better than you at covering their tracks—and their parentage.”
A murderous look invaded Kemp’s features. “Thayer, I’m warning you—”
“I like your daughter,” J.D. interrupted, noting with satisfaction that he’d succeeded in goring Kemp’s ox. After all, Big Jim Thayer taught him well in the art of deflating an opponent. He swiftly considered the various moves he could make in this treacherous game. He had to have a continuing supply of decent wood, since the hotel was covered in shingles and Kemp had bankrupted most of his fellow lumbermen. Even worse, J.D. needed Kemp’s foreman, Dick Spitz, and his head carpenter, Jake Kelly—no matter how incompetent they were—to keep the unions from causing trouble and to continue their working full-bore on the Bay View to open on time.