A paddle-wheel steamer like the Illinois, the America seemed to strain eagerly at its lines, thrusting its pert bow high above the pier. The sun sparkled on its clean, wind-polished hull, and a remnant gust of smoke swirled up from its stacks, dancing gaily on the breeze. It seemed a very sound and capable vessel to Josephine, although she had no experience with seafaring. She felt her spirits rise in its presence.
As the women assembled on the pier, checking over their bags and fussing with one another’s heat-wilted curls, Mr. Mercer approached a pair of men who made their way down the America’s ramp. They seemed to be the final passengers to disembark the ship. Josephine peered at them curiously as Mercer raised his hand in greeting. Something about the passengers’ haggard faces gave her pause. Their footsteps along the dock were dragging and heavy, and they stared about them with a kind of hungry disbelief, as if they couldn’t quite believe they had made land.
Josephine lifted her hem and edged behind Mr. Mercer, stepping as quietly along the sun-bleached planks of the dock as the hard soles of her boots would allow. She leaned her hip casually against a pyramid of barrels and stood with folded arms, gazing out across the harbor, never looking at Mercer or the America’s two passengers. But her ears strained to catch every word.
Mercer called out to the men in his smooth-polished tenor. “Good afternoon, sirs! You’ve come from San Francisco?”
The men paused and shared a weary, cautious gaze. Finally one, a gentleman with a dark mustache, said, “We have. And made it safe to Panama at last, thank God.”
“Was the passage troubled?” Mercer asked the question lightly, but Josephine could detect the smallest quaver of concern—or perhaps of defeat—in his voice. His shoulders slumped a little, and his feet shifted anxiously, scraping against the dock.
“I should say so,” said the man with the dark mustache. “The sailing took five days longer than intended. It seemed the boilers leaked—or so we heard—but engine troubles weren’t half the woes we faced, my good man.”
“No, indeed,” the other gentleman supplied. His lined face spoke of middle age. “There were two deaths aboard—two burials at sea.”
“Deaths?” Mercer exclaimed.
“Fever,” said the older man. “That’s why we were obliged to consign them to the deep. A crewman and a passenger, they were. I can’t imagine a worse fate than to die of fever while at sea. It’s no good keeping a corpse around if he’s expired of the fever, you know. The illness will only spread.”
The other passenger said, “May God have mercy on their souls. When Gabriel blows his trump, the poor fellows will have a difficult time resurrecting, trapped as they are now in the bellies of the fishes.”
Josephine had heard all she needed. Quickly, she slipped back to her trunk before Asa Mercer could spot her loitering on the dock.
Fever—and a passenger dead of it! Fear coiled tight in her gut. Was the illness lurking even now in the dim, cold quarters where she and the other women must dwell for sixteen long days, confined in the close, laden air of the cabins? A bead of sweat trickled down her spine, and she twitched her shoulders in irritation.
“What’s the matter, Josephine?” Sophronia, resting on the lid of her trunk, looked up at her with concern. “You seem rather shaken.”
Josephine gazed up at the America. The ship moved slowly, leaning away from the pier, and its mooring lines issued a tight, high moan.
Dovey had been closer to death than Josephine cared to admit, those long, terrible days on the Illinois. Who would be next to fall ill? And with fever lurking in the America’s hold—an illness far worse than mere dehydration—could anyone hope to survive?
I can still go back, she thought frantically. The rush of her heartbeat filled her ears. I can turn around now, go back to Massachusetts …
Go back to Lowell, and face what she had left behind. Go back in defeat, and look despair in the face, and know that it would be hers forever.
Josephine shook her head, driving away the impulse to flee back the way she had come. I can never go back. I cannot. And I never will. She would only move ahead from now on—forward, toward what was, she prayed, a brighter future.
And her only way forward lay to the west.
She turned back to Sophronia with the most unconcerned smile she could affect. “All is well. How could anything be amiss? We’re halfway to Washington Territory already!”
All too soon, as Josephine sat fretting and staring up at the towering smokestacks of the America, the steamer’s captain approached Mr. Mercer to welcome him aboard. She rose reluctantly from her trunk and took one final look around. Panama was ablaze with color in the afternoon light, so garish that its cheer seemed forced, a trap laid to lure the unwitting to a grim, sad fate.
But whatever the voyage held in store for Josephine—tossing waves, raging fever, or the cold embrace of death itself—it was sure to be better than what she’d left behind.
“Forward,” she muttered as she lifted her trunk and carried it resolutely toward the America. “Forward, and west, to whatever fate God has planned for me.”
A slash of white light appeared, cleaving the dark as the cabin door creaked open. Sophronia looked up from Annie’s bunk, blinking against the sudden brightness. Annie Adams moaned in her restless sleep, turning her face away from the intrusive light. The sweat shimmered on her brow.
“Close that door,” Sophronia snapped. “You’ll wake her, and she needs rest.”
A silhouette darkened the entry, then the door softly closed. Sophronia blinked into the dimness. Josephine stood with her back to the cabin door, her limp, light-brown hair tousled and tumbling out of her bun. “How is Annie doing?”
“The fever broke at last,” Sophronia said. She stood from her small, three-legged stool and stretched her back, swaying with the unceasing movement of the ship. “She’ll pull through, thank God.”
“Our work isn’t done yet,” Josephine said. “Now it’s Sarah Gallagher who’s taken to her bed.”
Sophronia sighed, weary to her bones. The America had left Panama City five days before, and almost at once, the fever struck its first blow. One by one, the girls fell ill, sweating and moaning, helpless in the grip of the disease. It struck each girl in a different manner, rattling some with violent shakes, making others vomit into their pots until they were weak and mewling like day-old kittens. Sophronia’s supply of ginger tea vanished all too soon; she and the women who remained healthy were left to combat the fearful plague with only the medicines the America and God could provide: cool, damp cloths on the forehead; soothing words; and fresh air, when the chill could be tolerated. They were poor weapons with which to fight, but Sophronia and Josephine soldiered on.
The fact that no woman had yet perished—nor Mr. Mercer, who had also been afflicted with the shakes and sweats—was nothing short of a miracle. This fever was as bad as any Sophronia had seen, and seemed to spread quickly.
It was little wonder, though, that the illness had taken root aboard the America. Despite the ship’s fine, polished exterior, the accommodations left much to be desired. The cabin walls leaked, allowing constant dampness to invade, along with an odor of mildew so strong that Sophronia was almost glad when the stench of sickness overcame it. Wind whistled unceasingly through the cracks in the wood, affording no restful silence, night or day. And the seas were rough and heaving, so that even when one lay down, one was jostled to and fro, and tired out by the mere act of sleeping.
Every woman who was fit to stand tended to the ill, under the direction of Josephine and Sophronia. Neither had much experience nursing the sick, but all the same, the other women seemed to look to them for guidance. Perhaps that was natural, in Josephine’s case—her age and maternal impulses toward Dovey, as well as her old-fashioned style and soft-spoken manners, made her a figure of comfort.
But Sophronia could not understand why the women of the expedition seemed to place their trust—perhaps their very lives—in her hands. She certainly
did not consider herself a match for this fever, and she tended the ill with a level head and calm demeanor only because it seemed the only dignified thing to do. During her few hours of rest, when another girl would take her place at the side of a sickbed, Sophronia would fall onto her hard, heaving bunk, shaking from exhaustion, squeezing her eyes tightly shut to drive away hopeless tears.
In those hours, with the wind screaming through her dark cabin, when she tried and failed to sleep, she entertained bleak thoughts of the future. What kind of Hell am I sailing into? she asked herself wearily. And she wondered with a dull, fatalistic acceptance how Seattle would be worse than the America. For she perceived somehow, through some obscure, clouded instinct, that what awaited her when the ship finally made landfall was far worse than her present torment. She knew, with a shiver of dread, that she had already been judged by God and found lacking—that her eternal punishment had only just begun.
When the fever finally struck Sophronia, eight days into the voyage, she felt the fires of Hell roaring all around her. Through those terrible hours the faces of all her regrets stared down upon her, flickering like candle flames, warped and distorted by the heat—James Gooding, Martin Steele—all the young men who had professed their love and then withdrew it. Shuddering with cold and doused in sweat, she tried to struggle from her bed, tried to hide from the pain of her past. But cool, gentle hands pushed her down, and soothed her brow with water.
Voices mocked her from the fire; demons wearing Clement’s mask shouted scorn and roared with laughter, while James’s distorted face wept tears of fire. Sophronia clung tightly to the hands that held her own—and always their touch was loving, forgiving. Always the presence that never left her bedside was female.
Now and then she would remember her own cries, her sobs in the night when, again and again, more times than any woman could bear, her heart broke in the wake of an angry, departing suitor.
Worse still was the memory of Elizabeth Steele—Elizabeth, whom she had loved so well, as much as she loved her little sisters. She was the sister of one of her earliest suitors, Martin Steele. Elizabeth was of an age with Sophronia, but they were opposites in every way; Sophronia’s pale-golden coloring made Elizabeth’s lustrous, black hair and olive complexion all the more striking when they walked side by side, and where Sophronia was proper and restrained, Elizabeth was fond of mischief and had a laugh that could be heard from miles away. Sophronia loved her even more for all their differences. She was the first—the only friend Sophronia had ever known.
Martin Steele made no impression on Sophronia; he was kind enough but unremarkable and lacking in ambition. She never would have considered his suit were it not for his sister. The prospect of gaining Elizabeth as a true sister had filled Sophronia with hope and longing. And when Sophronia’s rigid ideals finally chased Martin from her side, it was Elizabeth’s wooden, offended departure that had cut Sophronia to her heart. It was the loss of her friend, not the loss of her suitor, that had taught her how deeply pain could cut.
In the grips of her fever, she heard Elizabeth’s laughter—then her voice calling, fading. And then, distant and soft, mingling with the never-ending moan of the wind over the waves, Elizabeth weeping. Sophronia tried to call out to her, to ask her forgiveness, to beg to start their friendship anew. But she heard no reply, save for those distant sobs.
Then the sobs came from somewhere closer to hand—not from memory or the fancies of the fever, but from her own chest. The force of her grief wracked her body, wringing the frail strength from her limbs.
Whenever she cried out, a woman’s voice answered. Sometimes it was Josephine, murmuring below the howl of the wind. Sometimes it was Sarah Gallagher, or Annie Adams, or either of the two Catherines. Now and then it was even Dovey who nursed her, stroking her hand, her round, pretty face gazing down at Sophronia like an angel of mercy.
Sophronia clung to those threads of friendship with all the force of her soul. Even if she sailed through Hell itself, she sensed that these girls, at least—the women of Mercer’s expedition—would not judge her, even if God already had. Their voices were a balm to her, their hands one soft, collective blessing.
When at last Sophronia rose from her sickbed, with San Francisco only a day away, she felt renewed—washed clean, as if by baptism, even if her limbs shook with a terrible tremor. She knew the Lord had shown her mercy, not only in delivering her from the fever, but by placing her in the care of this band of thirteen sisters. Even Dovey was her sister, Sophronia now knew, and would be good to her if only she could only make herself mend the needless rent between them.
Sophronia leaned on Dovey’s arm as she stepped through her cabin door into the fresh air of the America’s open deck. I have come through a trial of tribulation, she thought, holding tight to Dovey as she had once done to Elizabeth, and found my family, and my true heart, at last.
She gazed north and east, where a heavy white mist obscured the horizon. But somewhere beyond that blur of misted light lay San Francisco—and farther north, tucked in the green fold of the earth’s velvet robe, Seattle. My future, my salvation. My fresh start.
The future would be kind to her, Sophronia knew, if only she could withdraw her defenses, her barbs and spines. If she could find it in her wounded heart to join this sisterhood, she would have her reward at last.
“I’ll try, Lord,” she whispered as San Francisco drew nearer. “You know I’ll try.”
CHAPTER TEN
DOCKSIDE TRYST
Rain beat against the boardinghouse windows, tracing crooked lines down the panes, obscuring the hills of San Francisco behind a veil of low-hanging clouds. Dovey pressed close to the sill. A chill crept inside the room, brushing her cheeks and eyelids with the rain’s damp touch. But the girls gathered close beside her pushed back the dismal cold. They clustered together, warm and comforting in their solid presence, arms around one another’s shoulders or waists, the room filled with the sweet mélange of their powders and perfumes.
Annie sighed. “Another city, another boardinghouse. They’re all starting to look the same to me.”
“Nonsense,” Sophronia replied. “This one is clean and bright, and everything in it is so fresh and new. That place in New York …” She shuddered.
“It was miserable, wasn’t it?” Georgianna Pearson, a dark-eyed beauty with a face as regal as a Roman statue, gazed out at the gray layers of San Francisco. “I hate being cooped up here, like a bunch of hens in a shed—but we can at least be thankful that the wallpaper isn’t peeling away. And the beds aren’t so hard or narrow as in New York.”
“That’s some consolation,” Catherine Stickney agreed. “I’ve slept better these past six days than I have since leaving home.”
Six days, Dovey thought morosely. An awfully long and dull spell to stay put in one boardinghouse, no matter how wide the beds are.
The America’s voyage from Panama had been one long, cold, heaving torment, fraught with bleak anxiety and shrouded by a pervasive stench of illness. Dovey recalled the dark passage on the Illinois, when she had lain trapped, weak and helpless, on her tossing, rolling bunk. She had been certain she’d fall hopelessly ill on the America, too—certain that this time she would meet her fate, out there on the cold, gray peaks of the Pacific waves.
When Dovey reached San Francisco without contracting that terrible fever, she had nearly fallen to her knees on the dock to kiss its pale, salt-roughened planks. When they’d arrived at the boardinghouse, its homey comfort had been more than a relief: it had seemed to Dovey an omen of good tidings, like Noah’s rainbow—a promise that she had been delivered safe from destruction, that the worst was forever behind her now and she need never fear a cold, watery death again.
But six days of confinement had ground comfort into monotony, and what had once felt like a home now seemed more like a prison. Asa Mercer had not intended this delay. The women were to while away two nights at most in San Francisco before boarding a new steamer that would carry th
em up the coast to Seattle. But the America, with its leaking boilers and its plague of fever, had limped into the great, blue curve of the harbor too late. All the steamships had gone, and no one could say just when another, northward bound, might arrive. Mercer had spent every day since their arrival, even the Sabbath, scouring the city for news of a suitable vessel. But if he had found one yet, none of the women of his expedition had heard of it.
And so the girls remained gathered at their windows, watching San Francisco through its mist of springtime clouds. They were not forbidden to leave the boardinghouse—no, of course not! They could venture out as often they pleased, and the well-off women did so, nearly every day—for San Francisco beckoned with a raw, ceaseless energy that could scarcely be denied, pounding with a rapid heartbeat—gold, gold, gold!
Gold. That was just the trouble. The only women who could fancy themselves up and take off to the shops and shows were those who had plenty of coin to spend. Most of the girls were obliged to live frugally, to experience San Francisco from the inside of the rainy windowpanes—Dovey most especially, who was already indebted to Jo and Sophronia for their generosity. Whenever one of the girls would declare that she’d had enough of this dull waiting, and would someone please help her on with her best dress, for she was going out there, Dovey would sigh and swallow her envy and then watch from the window as the lucky adventurer disappeared up the hilly streets, her bright parasol bobbing on her shoulder.
Jo left the pack of girls pressing around the window and sank down onto her bed. The springs gave a squeal. “What I wouldn’t give to go out exploring,” she said dreamily. “Who knows how many more days we have in San Francisco. Mr. Mercer could find a boat to Seattle this very hour, and we’d be off.”
“I wish he would find a boat this very hour,” Sophronia muttered. “I don’t like this city. It’s a pit of avarice.”
“It’s not so bad, Sophronia,” Georgianna replied. She and her sister, Josie, had been among the lucky few to go exploring, and they had brought back popcorn and taffy to share with the girls who had remained behind. “The people do seem very nice, and not avaricious in the least. Everyone we met had perfectly lovely manners, didn’t they, Josie?”
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