Janet Quin-Harkin

by Fools Gold

  Don Miguel bowed to Libby and extended his hand. “I expect you like cool drink,” he said. “Come, we go out to my patio. Very nice in summer.”

  “Maybe I could take a drink out to my servant first,” Libby suggested.

  “He is welcome to come inside,” Don Miguel said. “Manuel, go invite this lady’s servant into kitchen and give him drink. And you señora, please come with me.”

  Libby allowed herself to be escorted out through a door at the back and again was overcome with wonder. “But this is beautiful,” she said. “This is paradise.”

  The walled garden was covered with an enormous grapevine, hung with purple grapes and throwing the tiled area beneath into deep cool shade. A table and chairs, slung with leather, stood together under a large feathery tree and on the wall on the other side another large tree was festooned with yellow fruit.

  “Why, it’s lemons,” Libby said in surprise.

  “Si, limone,” Conchita said, nodding excitedly. She held up the jug she had carried out from the kitchen. “Limone, fresce.”

  “How wonderful to grow your own lemons,” Libby said as Conchita poured out the lemonade and handed them first to the children. “I must plant a lemon tree first of all when I find a place for my new house. And grapes, just like these. I think everything grows to giant size here.”

  Miguel translated this for his wife, who laughed and said something in return. Miguel laughed too. “My wife says she think you grow fine strong baby here,” he said. “Please excuse.”

  “Nothing to excuse,” Libby said smiling. “I think it will be a fine strong baby. It certainly kicks hard enough.”

  Miguel pulled out one of the chairs for Libby, who seated herself gratefully.

  “My wife says she is very sorry that you lose your husband at such a time,” Don Miguel went on. Libby nodded to Conchita who looked at her with understanding and sympathy. “She thinks you look very simpatico. She say she like if you build house close by. Then she have children to play with.”

  Libby’s face lit up. “You mean it?”

  Don Miguel nodded. “I let you have that land you want,” he said. “I’m happy if you live there. Now it’s empty. I keep no cattle up there because always they get stolen. All my cattle now down in valley where no gold miners come. So that land no good to me. Take what you need. Build house. You make my wife happy.”

  “That is very nice of you, Don Miguel,” Libby said, feeling that she might be about to cry at any moment. It was so long since she had met gentility and kindness that she found it overwhelming. “I think I will be very happy too to know that there is another woman nearby.”

  Eden and Bliss, with the unerring instinct of the very young, had followed Conchita back into the kitchen and now came running out again excitedly. “Look, Mama, the kind lady gave us cakes,” Bliss cried,

  “And guess what?” Eden asked, her face flushed with excitement, “they have kittens. Can we have one? Please?”

  Libby laughed. “First we need a house and some furniture. Then we can think about kittens.”

  “But the kittens will be all grown by the time we have a house,” Eden begged. “Can’t I keep just a little one, Mama?”

  Don Miguel smiled indulgently. “Ask your mama if you can choose one kitten and then it can live here until your house is ready.”

  “Can I, please?” Eden asked, beaming at him. “Oh, thank you. That would be wonderful. I’ve always wanted a pet of my own.”

  “You have never had a pet?”

  Eden looked sorrowful. “No, never. In Boston we lived with Grandmama and Grandpapa and they didn’t like animals, and since we came out here, Mama’s been too busy to think of pets.”

  They lunched on the patio, Bliss and Eden each with a sleeping kitten in her lap. The air was scented with lemon blossom. Conchita brought out plates of cold beef, tomatoes, and flat bread, also a spicy relish Don Miguel called salsa. He poured red wine for Libby. “We make our own,” he said. “Just for ourselves, but it is good, no?”

  Libby sighed with contentment. “I could sit like this forever,” she said.

  “Why you not stay here until you finish house?” Don Miguel asked. “You are most welcome. My wife would be happy.”

  Libby got the impression that he would be happy too, but was too polite to say so.

  “I couldn’t impose on you,” she said hesitantly. “I don’t know how long it will take to build a house and there are hotels up in the gold towns . . .”

  Miguel and his wife exchanged remarks in Spanish. He frowned. “My wife thinks the gold towns are not good place for little girls. She think they better here. Good food. No shooting. No bad men.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Libby said, “and I would love to stay here, but it might take a long while until I can move into my own house.”

  Manuel had come to sit beside them. “I think you find, señora, that there are many men who want work,” he said. “Too many men find no gold and need money. If you ask for carpenters, I think you do not have to pay them much and the house go up very quick.”

  “What sort of house you want?” Don Miguel asked.

  Libby looked up at the red-tiled roof. “A house just like this,” she said.

  The men laughed. “Then you will indeed be our guest for a long while,” Don Miguel said. “This house is built of adobe. Do you know what that is? It is the name for the clay soil we find by the creeks here. We make bricks of clay and straw, and let them dry. Then they make very good walls. Very thick—keep out heat in summer and cold in winter. But it takes a long time to make all these bricks. We start with little wood house and every day we make more bricks, build this house nearby.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll do,” Libby said. “I’ll start with a little wooden house and you can show me how to make adobe bricks.”

  “But ladies cannot make bricks. This is man’s work,” Manuel said in horror. “Especially not lady expecting like you.”

  Libby laughed. “There is not much that this lady has not tried,” she said. “I’ve surprised myself during the past year. But the bricks will have to wait a while. It’s most important that I get my planting done first if I’m to get next season’s potatoes in. And I’d like to grow grapes like you, and fruit trees. I want to make sure that the miners never have to send down to Chile for their fruit again. From now on they buy from me.”

  CHAPTER 30

  AS DON MIGUEL had predicted, there was no shortage of men roaming the gold fields, disappointed, hungry, and ready to work for a small wage. Libby found a skilled carpenter to be her foreman and had him select ten willing and strong men. Putting aside her visions of a house like the Flores’, Libby decided to start simply, with a small wooden frame house, containing two bedrooms and living area. It was to be connected by a covered walkway to another building containing the kitchen and Ah Fong’s quarters. He nearly wept when he saw what she was planning for him. “House of my own. This is too good,” he said.

  “Nonsense, Ah Fong,” Libby said, smiling in embarrassment. “Of course my farm manager has to have a house.”

  Ah Fong beamed at her. “Wait till I write letter home to my village in China. They going to think Ah Fong done pretty well here. I tell my father he better start looking for bride for me.”

  “That would be wonderful, Ah Fong,” Libby said, enjoying his happiness. “You’ll start your own family and your children can play with my baby.”

  “Better get house built first,” Ah Fong said practically.

  The timbers from the house were sent down from Sutter’s Mill. Libby had the stove moved down from the old cabin and put in the new kitchen, but she also had a big brick oven built outside, knowing how hot the kitchen would get in the summer. In her own living room was a large brick fireplace and before she paid off her team, she had them cut and stack firewood for the winter.

  It was all finished before the rains and she stood outside with her Mexican neighbors, looking at it with pride.

  �
��Now all I need is furniture, dishes, cookware, bedding and it will be a home,” she said, laughing excitedly.

  “I expect these men could make you some furniture, if you tell them what you want,” Manuel said.

  “Oh, no.” Libby shook her head. “I’ve slept on a leather-strip bed long enough,” she said. “I want real furniture—a feather bed and proper carpets on the floor.”

  “Then you’ll have to go down to San Francisco and see what you can find,” Manuel said.

  Libby nodded. “I have to go to San Francisco anyway,” she said. “I want to arrange to have fruit trees sent up from Chile.”

  “You will undertake such a journey now?” Don Miguel said, looking with concern at the bulge in her dress. “Is that wise?”

  “I still have almost three more months,” Libby said. “I don’t intend to stay away that long.”

  “But the journey by coach to the ship. So much shaking.”

  “I’ll drive my own buckboard down,” Libby said. “Then I can go as fast or as slowly as I want.”

  “But Señora Libby . . .”

  “I’m a pretty tough woman, Don Miguel,” Libby said. “I’ll be fine. In fact I’m looking forward to going to the city. It will be a treat to buy clothes and eat well and maybe go to a theater.”

  She had wanted her fields plowed while she was away, but could not find a plow in the whole area. So she kept on some of the unskilled men to dig up the earth with shovels. They were glad of the extra work.

  “Maybe you’d like to keep us on to work the fields after you’ve planted,” one of them suggested.

  “In the spring, maybe I could use you,” Libby said, “but nothing happens all winter. I couldn’t afford to feed you all while you did nothing.”

  After he had walked away, Ah Fong drew her aside. “Missee, I like to come San Francisco with you,” he said urgently.

  “You would?”

  Ah Fong nodded seriously. “I want find good Chinese men, come and work these fields with me in spring,” he said. “Those white men no good.”

  “They seem hard workers,” Libby said.

  Ah Fong shook his head even more violently so that his pigtail danced. “No, missee. They not take orders from Ah Fong. They not think Chinese man know nothing. They think Chinese man like dirt.”

  Libby considered the wisdom of this and decided he was right. No white man was going to take orders from a Chinese. “Very well, Ah Fong,” she said. “You shall come down to San Francisco with me and select some workers for the spring.”

  Ah Fong grinned happily. “And I find Chinese food in San Francisco,” he said.

  They set off two days later, all four of them in the blackboard, dressed as presentably as was possible in their homemade ginghams. Sacramento was as smelly and chaotic as ever, dusty and plagued with mosquitoes and flies and garbage, but had already turned from tent city to permanent settlement. A levee had been built to keep out flood water and brick buildings were going up on all the streets. The new store that Mark Hopkins was building with a partner called Hutchinson was nearing completion, but the workmen told Libby that Mr. Hopkins himself was down in San Francisco.

  The steamer ride down to San Francisco was pleasant and restful, with Libby sitting on deck and watching marshlands slip past. The girls were excited to watch herons and egrets flap lazily from the reeds and as the river opened into the wider waters of the delta and then the bay, they were amazed by the thousands of duck and geese that had already come south to these placid waters for the winter. As the river opened into Suisun Bay, hills rose up again and the steamer sailed between steep banks. Everyone crowded to the rails to get the first glimpse of the city. At last it came into view, with little wooden houses climbing up hills so steep that they seemed to hang there, one above the other. As they approached the dock, they had to sail past a forest of masts, where hulls of rotting ships lay, abandoned by sailors gone to try their luck in the gold fields.

  Everywhere in San Francisco there was building going on. One of the deckhands told Libby there had been a terrible fire just a month before and now everyone was building with brick and iron, in case it happened again. After the quiet and loneliness of life up in the gold country, San Francisco was almost overwhelming. Almost every building they passed on the way from the wharf to the hotel was a saloon and piano music spilled from every doorway to create a cacophony of sound in the street. It seemed everybody was either coming or going. Men with packs on their backs staggered ashore excitedly as other men, slouched and disillusioned, waited to board ships sailing round the Horn back home. Supplies of every description were piled on the waterfront, some rotting or spilled in the thick bay mud, making the area smell even worse than Sacramento.

  As they moved away from the foul-smelling mud of the port, they started seeing the wealth of the city. The streets were boarded over to cover the sand, and in winter the mud, which had made travelling in San Francisco so treacherous. Tall new buildings were going up on Montgomery and Kearny Streets. Fashionably dressed men and women rode past in fine carriages. Restaurants might still be in large tents, but they had gleaming white tablecloths. There were seedy, hastily built sheds which advertised themselves as boarding houses, but there were already one or two fine hotels with mirrored foyers decorated with palm trees. Libby checked into the St. Francis on the corner of Clay Street, just off the central plaza, while Ah Fong disappeared up Dupont Street where a large Chinese settlement was rapidly springing up.

  In such opulent surroundings, Libby was painfully aware of their shabbiness and countrified appearance. She hurried the girls to a dressmaker and had them all measured for complete new wardrobes, waiting until one good outfit was ready before she conducted any business. She obtained the name of the Chilean merchant who brought in most of the fruits and vegetables and arranged a meeting with him for the following day. She spent the rest of that first day shopping for furniture. She found that precious little could be obtained ready-made. What furniture there was had come by ship around the Horn and was ridiculously expensive. But she did get referrals to a German cabinet maker who seemed very obliging and told her he could make her anything she wanted. She later found out that he had a team of men stripping the idle ships of their teak and mahogany cabin panelling for the wood.

  By the end of the day she was able to collect the first of her new outfits from the dressmaker and although she thought privately that she looked rather like a ship in full sail, at least she no longer looked shabby. Now that she had city clothes, she was emboldened to send a card to Mark Hopkins. A cordial message was returned, inviting her to dinner at Brown’s Hotel, just across the square. He arrived looking very distinguished in a suit and starched white shirt. Apart from this he showed no signs of wealth, but the way the headwaiter treated him convinced Libby that he was already a person of stature in the town. Although she was now well enough dressed and her hair was tamed with mother-of-pearl combs, Libby still felt uneasy as she was escorted to a table in a velvet-draped alcove. Everyone else was chatting easily, sipping champagne and scooping oysters from the shell as if these were normal activities. Beside them she felt like a country bumpkin, come to the big city for the first time. She found herself glancing across at the next table to see which fork to use.

  “What’s wrong?” Mark Hopkins asked her.

  Libby blushed. “This sounds stupid, but I’m scared of making a fool of myself,” she said. “It’s so long since I ate in elegant surroundings. I’m not sure I know what to do anymore.”

  Mark laughed. “Why worry about it?” he asked. “None of these people do. Look at that old man over there.” He motioned with his head to where a paunchy, florid man was sitting between two beautiful young women in velvet gowns, their high coiffures decorated with sweeping ostrich feathers. “See what he’s using to eat his oysters.”

  Libby looked across discreetly and saw that he was clutching his knife like a dagger and stabbing each oyster before bringing it to his mouth.

  “A
nything goes here,” Mark whispered. “Those girls are from the Pink Palace down the street. They get a hundred dollars a night.”

  Libby’s eyes widened as she noted the emeralds on one girl’s neck.

  “And see the young woman who has just come in?” Mark whispered. Libby followed the progress of a gorgeous blond who seemed to have been poured into a red satin dress with a tiny waist and enormous hooped skirt. Around her shoulders was a velvet cape which swept to the floor behind her and she demurely fanned herself as she walked with a black lace fan. Mark put his hand up to his beard and muttered into it as she went past. “She is having herself a mansion built over in North Beach with the proceeds of faro dealing. They say she’s the best gambler in the city.”

  The word gambler sent Libby’s thoughts racing to Gabe. She stared out across the smoke-filled room, wondering where he was and whether she would ever see him again. Then she blinked and her heart lurched as she saw him. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks, but as he stood for a moment surveying the scene, she realized that it was truly Gabe. He stood in the doorway leading to a back room, looking even more handsome than she remembered him. He was wearing evening dress with a white ruffled shirt. A diamond stickpin sparkled at his throat. A red satin-lined cape flowed behind him. Libby felt as if she couldn’t breathe as he started to walk across the restaurant toward her. He was coming closer to her table. She wanted to cry out to him. She prayed he’d look her way. Then the miracle happened. He glanced in her direction. She saw him register surprise, a half smile, then with a polite nod he swept on.

  Libby got to her feet. “Excuse me one moment,” she said. “I’ve just seen someone I know.”

  She hurried out after him. Gabe had stepped into the marble foyer of the hotel as she reached the door after him. A footman sprang to open it for her. She saw Gabe’s cape billow out as he crossed the foyer. She opened her mouth to call out to him, but before the word could come out, she watched a beautiful woman rise from a red leather bench. She watched the woman’s face break into a smile. As if in slow motion, she watched Gabe offer his arm, the woman slip her delicate white hand through the proffered arm and look up at him. Then Gabe bent slightly to give the woman the most gentle of kisses and they swept out together into the night. Libby stood there, her hand on her cheek as if she had been slapped.