At the highest point, they stopped. Not too far away they could see the Anaconda Mine, and its outbuildings and town. Beyond lay the rolling mountains with their slopes denuded of trees, and past them the snow-capped ranges of the Sangre de Cristos.
Nearer at hand on the slope were mine tailings with their peculiar shadings of yellow and gray and orange, pulled from a shallow hole like dirt from a prairie dog’s burrow. A few weathered timbers hung askew over it, and on one was tacked an uneven board painted with a faded name. This was the site of some man’s claim, the place where he had pitted his luck and muscles against a dream of riches, and seen both worn down by the hard granite that lay glittering with quartz in the sun.
“Do you know what this is?” Ward asked the question with deliberation, his gesture indicating the piled rock.
“It’s a mining claim.”
“Yes, but which one?”
Serena stepped closer to the signboard. By narrowing her eyes, she could just make out the lettering.
“The Dragon Hole,” she said softly, almost to herself. She looked up then, her eyes wide. “Isn’t that—”
“It is. Would you care to take a look?”
Serena lifted her chin while the blood drained from her face. “I don’t think so.”
“I recommend it,” he said, and gave her a small push forward.
There was iron in his voice. Fear rippled along her nerves and then receded. She pulled her arm from his grasp and stepped away from him. Her blue-gray gaze direct, she stared into the gold-flecked green of his eyes. What she saw mirrored there gave her the courage necessary to turn and step closer to the hacked-out hole in the ground.
The shaft was not deep, no more than eight feet. She could see the bottom plainly, and the solid granite that floored it. There had been some small amount of caving from the top; low piles of fine rock and dirt lay against the sides, but the walls were as solid as the floor. There was blown pine straw and spruce needles in those rocky depths, but nothing else, no crumpled form, no decomposed body, or gnawed skeleton. There was no sign that Otto Bruin had ever occupied this pit called the Dragon Hole.
Serena whirled. “Where is he? Where is Otto?”
“I have no idea. When I went back after him that night, he was feeling sorry for himself, but very much alive. I offered him the chance of a permanent occupancy here, or taking the horse I had brought to transport him here and getting out of the district as fast as he could travel. He saw the wisdom of accepting my last alternative.”
“I didn’t kill him?”
“Unfortunately not.”
Serena looked away, a dazed expression in her eyes, then she turned back. “But you said you put him here. You told me how and where and when.”
“I will have to admit I made a good story of it.” For all the lightness of his words, the look on his face was still dark.
“But — why?”
“Haven’t you guessed? I wanted you, Serena, any way I could get you. But you were married to Nathan. I knew without being told that you would never consent to meet me behind his back, even if you cared for me, which I had reason to doubt.”
“So you blackmailed me with an empty threat.”
“It seemed worth the risk.”
The wind ruffled his hair and flapped his shirt collar that he wore outside his corduroy coat against his lean brown cheek. It caught at her mauve-gray skirts, fluttering them, molding them against the symmetry of her body.
“You let me think I was a murderess, that I had killed a man.”
“Dear God, Serena,” he said, his voice rough. “Don’t look so. I would spend a lifetime in recompense if I thought you would accept it. For all the pain and guilt you have known, I have suffered the same a thousand times over for what I was doing. There was pleasure in my bargain, but when I looked in your eyes and saw the contempt, I deserved, I knew that even as I held you, you were lost to me.”
“How could you do it? How could you, if you cared for me?”
“Cared? No word so tame can describe what I feel. I love you, Serena, and that being so, how could I not want you near me, whatever the cost?”
“But you left me again and again.”
“What kind of life could I give you at the Eldorado? I had to find something else. I left you first to go to Denver to raise capital to work the mining claim. When it began to look like money thrown away, I played a long shot, prospecting in the mountains. I lost that bet, though while I was gone the claim proved out — when it was too late. And then, after Nathan died at Bristlecone, I had to leave you because I had put you in danger. I had heard rumors that Pearlie was up to something, but not exactly what. I thought that if I showed up at the Eldorado again she would put a stop to it. I guessed wrong again, and this time I nearly lost everything; I almost lost you.”
“I would rather not think of it.” He had also come close to death.
“Nor would I, except for that one memorable moment when I heard you declare that you loved me. In the full knowledge that it may commit you, Serena, tell me the truth. Were the words a lie for the sake of argument, or did you mean them?”
“Oh, Ward,” she breathed, the sound an ache in her throat. She took a stumbling step toward him, and then she was in his arms. He swung her around and her feet left the rocky slope. Above them the bright blue of the sky wheeled in dizzying circles.
“I do love you,” Serena whispered against the warm column of his neck.
“And will you be my wife,” he asked, his voice deep, “knowing that all your life through you will be plagued by devotion and adoration until you are sick unto death of hearing of my love, by always having me close beside you so you cannot move or turn without finding me there, by the necessity of sharing my bed and my constant touch?”
“It may be that I can bring myself to bear it,” she answered, her blue-gray eyes warm and shining.
The kiss he set with hard and cherishing strength upon the softness of her mouth was a seal.
Serena slipped her arms around his neck, brushing her cheek against his. “Could we go home now?” she murmured. “The ground here is more rocky than can possibly be considered comfortable.”
“The ground?” he asked in distraction as he removed her wide hat, the better to hold her to him.
“At Bristlecone there are any number of beds more inviting. I have a mind to hurry and see whether I am going to enjoy being plagued as much as I think. My whole life gives me little enough time to decide.”
Author’s Note
The Cripple Creek gold rush, the last of the great gold rushes, began in 1891. By 1899, the district, located at an elevation of 10,000 feet, boasted 475 producing mines and a half-dozen towns with a combined population of 55,000. By that year, $59,000,000 in gold had been taken from the ground, figured at slightly less than twenty dollars an ounce. There were forty-six stockbrokerage houses, forty-one assay offices, thirty-four churches, two opera houses, nineteen schools, eighty doctors, ninety-one lawyers, fourteen newspapers, and over a hundred women’s clubs. In Cripple Creek township, there was a red-light district with seventy-three saloons, eight burlesque houses, a dozen or more parlor houses, several opium dens, and scores of cribs featuring girls of every nationality. And this was in spite of the fire only three years before that had virtually destroyed the town.
Labor wars, water in the mines, high production costs, and the rescinding of the gold standard caused the slowdown of mining in the early years of the twentieth century. By early 1920, Cripple Creek was dying. During the thirty-year period of its peak production, some $800,000,000 in gold (based on values at the time of mining, which would be equal to approximately $16,000,000,000 at prices quoted in today’s market) was taken from the area. At least fifty men could claim to have become millionaires, some many times over.
In Golden Fancy I have attempted to recreate the atmosphere of the gold camp in its heyday. The representation is as authentic and factual as several months spent doing research in the district
can make it. There are, however, two exceptions. The first concerns the origin of the fire that brings the book to a climax. The conflagration actually started at about one o’clock in the afternoon of April 26, 1896, on the second floor of the Central Dance Hall. Depending on the version you are prepared to believe, the cause was the overturning of either a gasoline stove or a kerosene lamp being used to heat curling tongs, during a scuffle between a girl and her male companion. The second deviation is in the use of a series of murders. To my knowledge, no such crimes occurred, though the blending of fanaticism and sex is consistent with similar incidents from ancient times to the present day.
For those interested in historical detail, the brief mention of the most famous of the Cripple Creek millionaires, Winfield Scott Stratton, is the only use of a real personage in the book. All other characters are fictional, though drawn with an eye to the type of person who might have been attracted to the boom towns of Colorado during the late nineteenth century.
The Mormon leader, Elder Greer is completely fictional. Polygamy was no longer condoned by the Mormon Church at the time of the Cripple Creek gold rush, having been abolished in 1890. However, the elder’s fanatic adherence to the older doctrine faithfully mirrors certain splinter groups that continued for decades in the practice of plural marriage — and still do so today.
At this writing, there are approximately a thousand people still living in the Cripple Creek district, most of them occupied in tourist-related businesses. A few of the landmarks of the old days still stand, notably the Midland Terminal Railroad Depot, now the Cripple Creek museum, and the Old Homestead, which has been restored in the manner of a parlor house of the 1890s. These are visited during the summer months by thousands of tourists.
And yet, geologists say that eighty percent of the available gold has never been touched. It waits underground, embedded in the hard granite of the area. With the recent sky rocketing of the price of gold, there is much interest in reopening the old mines. One or two have been put into production again. There are gold-mining claims advertised in the local papers, and Cripple Creek gold stocks bought and sold by the local brokers. Cripple Creek may soon begin to boom again!
Jennifer Blake
Green Mountain Falls, Colo.
November 9, 1979
Addendum
When I visited Cripple Creek in the late 1970s, it was a virtual ghost town. A few hundred people were resident in winter and maybe twice that many in summer as tourists came to ride the narrow gauge railroad train, ramble through the museum or stay in the one old hotel. The mellow brick buildings and wooden sidewalks were little changed from when mining played out at the turn of the century. Many of the old late-Victorian frame homes stood empty, with their lace-edged curtains blowing in the chill breezes that whistled through shattered windows. I could have bought any one of them for a few thousand dollars.
But boom times came again to Cripple Creek in 1991 — just not as I predicted. That year, Colorado voters cast their ballots to allow gambling casinos to be established in the town. Soon every store along the main street, and most side streets as well, housed a casino where slot machines clanged and jangled. Gone were the dusty antique shops with their fascinating treasures, the authentic general store with its pickle barrel and rock candy, the artisan shops selling handmade pottery and silver Indian jewelry. Money poured into the town, probably more than was ever made from gold mining. I’m happy for the residents who prospered with the change, yet it seems a loss.
I’m thankful I saw it before the change came, when the ghosts of miners still stalked the dusty streets, shades of ladies of the night could almost be glimpsed in their Red Light District windows, and the wind still carried the lonesome sound of a train whistle. I’m glad I captured some small vestige of it back then, when I used imagination and what was there to write Golden Fancy.
Jennifer Blake
Chatham, LA
June 28, 2012
About the Author
Since publishing her first book at age twenty-seven, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Jennifer Blake has gone on to write over sixty-five historical and contemporary novels in multiple genres. She brings the story-telling power and seductive passion of the South to her stories, reflecting her eighth-generation Louisiana heritage. Jennifer lives with her husband in northern Louisiana.
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HISTORICAL ROMANCE
THE LOVE AND ADVENTURE COLLECTION
The LOUISIANA PLANTATION COLLECTION
The LOUISIANA HISTORY COLLECTION
THE ROYAL PRINCES OF RUTHENIA
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CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE
THE ITALIAN BILLIONAIRES COLLECTION
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SWEETLY CONTEMPORARY COLLECTION
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Table of Contents
SURRENDER IN MOONLIGHT
BEGINNING
MID-POINT
AUTHOR’S NOTE
NOTORIOUS ANGEL
PART 1
PART 2
AUTHOR’S NOTE
GOLDEN FANCY
PART 1
PART 2
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT JENNIFER BLAKE
Love and Adventure Collection - Part 2 Page 135