by Lynn D'urso
“I have decided it is best if you become betrothed. An unmarried woman of your age is susceptible to sinful urges.” Lady Hamilton’s words echo the Calvinist cadence of a Scotch parson, and her scowl tightens.
“I have spoken with Bernard. He agrees that you would be a suitable wife for himself.”
Bernard nods, smiles, and looks at Hannah over the top of his spectacles before speaking, a prim grimace that reminds Hannah of a toad considering a fly. “It is best, Miss Butler. Being both in Her Ladyship’s employ, it is natural for two of our station to agree to this marriage.”
Lady Hamilton blows and sips at her tea. “You must marry soon, Hannah. Your thoughts wander, I can tell. In your condition, the wrong man might endanger your soul. And for you to marry and leave my service would be an inconvenience to me. Betrothal to Bernard smooths many wrinkles, don’t you agree?”
Hannah struggles to find her voice. When she speaks, the words tremble.
“Beg pardon, ma’am, but such an arrangement does not appeal to me, thank you.”
Bernard begins to speak, but Her Ladyship interrupts curtly. “Miss Butler! You entered my employ after the reduction of your family’s circumstances.”
Her voice grows louder. “One in your situation should be grateful I am willing to use my position to form a proper arrangement for you! I have told Bernard you may wed when we return to England.”
At the thought of waking every morning for the rest of her life to the sight of the pallid and sanctimonious Bernard, Hannah feels her blood curdle and shakes her head in an autonomic denial of the unthinkable. The unconscious gesture enrages Her Ladyship further, until Hannah can only stare at the floor, listening to the turbulent rush of her own blood in her ears amid the rising fever of her employer’s outraged rant.
Hannah looks up and is met with a stinging slap, then another and another as she ducks her head into her forearms before finally rising to catch and push, sending Lady Hamilton stumbling backward into her silken chair. Stunned and ashen, Hannah turns away, fumbling with trembling hands at her dishevelment. From her chair, Lady Hamilton curses.
There is a sudden quiet, followed by the clink and splinter of a china cup crashing to the floor. Hannah turns to see Her Ladyship arched and quivering, her dress and bodice dark with spilled tea, her jaw working soundlessly, mute from the shock of blood vessels bursting within her brain.
Bernard gasps, carefully places his own cup in its saucer on the table before rising to his feet, and begins shrieking for a doctor.
TWO
Tears of outrage shine in Hannah’s eyes. She stands rigid before Bernard, refusing to look at him, staring instead at the hammered tin ceiling of the Tacoma, Washington, station. Bernard’s voice squeaks and trembles as he curses, banishing her from the entourage.
“You,” he froths, one finger of a suede-gloved hand thrust at her averted face. “You are …” His speech dissolves at the memory of Lady Hamilton lying speechless, the left half of her face drooping in a macabre, stroke-induced grimace.
“Loose, Miss Butler, decidedly a slattern!”
He sputters in frustration, mouthing ridiculous threats of sheriffs and bailiffs. Victoria hides in the Pullman car, knowing she will suffer later for her friendship with Hannah, and worse, for Bernard’s impotence. Earlier, she had thrown Hannah’s clothes into a case, whispering fiercely that Hannah “must accept Mr. Nelson’s offer. It is clear he loves you!”
“But … ,” Hannah had said, unable to marshal the words to say she hardly knows him. “It would be … madness!”
When Nelson stepped through the doorway from where he had been listening, smiling the bold, white smile Hannah found so delectable, and said, “Really, Miss Butler, don’t you think not accepting would be the true madness?” Victoria had slammed the lid on the case, giddy with recklessness, and shoved it into Hannah’s arms, whispering, “When shall you ever again have such a chance? It’s so romantic!”
Now Hans, triumphant at having such a prize as Hannah laid at his feet, laughs and tells Bernard to “get out of the way or you’ll wear your ass for a hat,” before removing Hannah’s portmanteau to a waiting carriage. From the safety of the Pullman car steps, Bernard hurls a promise to Hannah that should she ever return to England, there will be charges laid. “Assault!” he cries, and—absurdly—“Attempted murder!”
Stunned by her sudden, explosive exile, Hannah stares at the wagon, which in turn seems a transport into a giddy freedom or a tumbrel on its way to the guillotine. Leaving on the arm of the handsome blond stranger is certainly a fairy tale, but one that will leave her marooned, eternally deprived of a ticket or welcome home to England.
Her possessions are limited to a trunk of clothing and a small box of books—two journals, one of which is half filled and the other entirely blank, a volume of poems, and a Bible. In addition, she owns two pairs of shoes, an umbrella, and a heavy coat with a fur collar. Hidden between the pages of the unused journal are her life savings: forty pounds sterling, plus one hundred and eighty-three dollars in U.S. currency. The world seems suddenly huge and threatening.
Two blocks from the station, Hans draws on the reins and brings the carriage to a halt. Shifting on the hard plank seat, he removes his hat, stares at it, replaces it on his head, and settles it. Turning to face Hannah, he begins:
“Miss Butler …”
He pauses, looks away, and twirls the reins.
Hannah waits for the jaws of some trap she feels yawning beneath her to spring.
Hans eyes a passing horseman, then blurts, “I’ve some money,” before mumbling, “I mean … if you’d rather.”
The words slip crossways through Hannah’s brain, spinning without clear meaning, until assembling themselves into a pattern ripe with a malign offer of prostitution. Voice trembling, she struggles for frost in her reply.
“Surely, Mr. Nelson, you do not propose …”
Suddenly awkward as a boy, Hans nods. “Yes. I’ve some money. And if you’d prefer, instead of this …” A loose hand wave encompasses the whole of the bustling street, the patchwork of wood frame buildings to either side, and the gaggle of rough-looking characters who pick their way through random piles of horse dung along the street.
“It’s not much, but I’ve enough to get you back to England. You don’t have to stay if it is not your wish.”
The whip-snap reversal makes her dizzy, requiring she breathe once, then again, before the notion that Hans is offering her a choice can sink slowly in. Rather than propositioning her, he is offering her the freedom to decide.
One gloved hand reaches out to rest lightly on his forearm. Then in a small and tenuous voice she says, “Please continue, Mr. Nelson. We must see to rooms for the night.”
A preacher charges a dollar to perform the short ceremony that binds them. Witnesses are included in the price. Then there are papers to sign at a recorder’s office, and she receives a document that changes her name to Nelson. After the ceremony, her new husband beams as the preacher shakes his hand, while Hannah feels a knot in her stomach, just below her sternum, as she stares at the man to whom she has been bound.
They rent a room on the third floor of the Empire Hotel. There is a stand with a basin and a carpet patterned with roses. The sounds of the booming streets below come to her through a window that opens outward above a saloon, and she feels as if she is someone else, some other young woman who lies watching as Hans methodically forces his way through her hymen. Afterward, he goes to the hotel kitchen and returns with two plates of kidneys and beans and a spray of yellow honeysuckle, which he drapes across her belly. Once, then again, she lies and watches as the act is repeated. Then on the second day, she awakens to wonder, as her nerves and skin and blood come alive, washing her in new sensations that allow Hans’s lips and hands to sweep her over the precipice of a new carnality.
On the third day of their marriage, a sodden and sated Hans gives her a possessive, playful slap on her bare bottom and says, “It is time
to head for Alaska, Mrs. Nelson. Time to get rich,” after which he shows her a newspaper he has saved in his luggage. A bold headline proclaims, “A Ton of Gold on Board,” above an engraving of a crowd of grinning men on the deck of a ship. Earlier in the summer the steamer had returned to Seattle from Alaska with several miners aboard, among whom was George Washington Carmack, an old sour-dough who had “dealt himself a royal flush in life” by bending to take a drink from a small tributary of the Klondike River and finding raw gold glittering in every crack of the creek bed. The latest shipment of veterans from the Klondike had disembarked in Seattle carrying satchels stuffed with more than three million dollars’ worth of bullion.
“They pitched nuggets of solid gold into the crowd!” Hans said, with something like awe. “Just tossed ’em around like they were nickels.”
Gazing at the picture of the ship and its prosperous cargo, he shook his head and said, “I aim to get my piece of that, Mrs. Nelson. I surely do.”
Dear Diary,
We are bound north to the Alaska Territory. I am a bit frightened at these grand and sudden changes in my life, but have only to consider my new husband to be reassured. While certainly not the circumstances for marriage of which a young girl dreams, I am sure he will care well for me and our future is assured. As I write this, he is out to send notice of our marriage by telegraph to his family in Minnesota. When next I correspond with Poppa and Mother, it will be as Mrs. Hans Nelson, but I shall wait until we return, triumphant, from the goldfields and I am able to address the debt to Lord Hamilton. It is impossible to know what tale they will have heard of the events with Lady Hamilton, but I pray they will not judge me too harshly. My husband and I shall have the best reward, however. It will take some time and effort to realize our acquaintance, but I am sure we shall be comfortable and happy together.
In a hotel in Seattle, Hannah is bitten by a flea. The hotel, with its population of layabouts and drunken bellhops, frightens her; for hours after she discovers the insect, her skin crawls with the phantom sensation of invisible, many-legged things scratching and burrowing. She bathes in a pan of lukewarm water with a cake of hard soap that refuses to lather.
“A bit much, isn’t it, Mr. Nelson? Deplorable, really.” The marriage is too young for Hannah to find comfort in addressing her husband by his given name.
Hans, with American familiarity, has no such constraint. He swishes a razor in a pan of water, forms his mouth into an O to stretch the skin of his upper lip, and carefully draws the singing blade from top to bottom before answering. “I’m sorry, Hannah, but my wallet is a bit thin for anything better at the moment. My money will be better spent on tools and supplies for the goldfields, now won’t it? After all”—and he pauses to wipe the razor on a towel—“when I was borrowing the money to head for Alaska, I didn’t budget for the cost of a wife, did I?”
Hannah does not look up from the basin of tepid water, fearing she is somehow being made responsible for their tenuous finances. With an effort to sound casual, she asks, “Our money is borrowed?” The water seems suddenly frigid, and a fatty scum floats on its surface. The idea of more debt chills her. Debtors lose everything. Margin calls and debt closed her father’s chandlery business. It puts women and children on the streets.
Equally casual, Hans wipes his face with the towel and bends to examine the shine of his smooth skin in the mirror. “Oh, yes. From my brother-in-law.”
“Right hard about it he was, too. I had to promise him a three-to-one return before the tight bastard would go along.”
A quiver flutters in Hannah’s stomach. Three to one? The word usury rises to her lips, and she bites it back. “How much have you … What is our debt?”
Hans ignores the question and thumbs an imaginary spot from the front of his undershirt, before hoisting his galluses to his shoulders. “It hasn’t all been cream, Hannah. They kicked me out when I was sixteen.”
Whenever Hans thinks of his mother, Ula Nelson seems to loom, arms akimbo, with a look on her face hard and sharp enough to scratch glass. Widowed at a young age by an overturned reaping machine, Ula had raised Hans and one sister with the grudging help of her own widower father, a raspyvoiced old-country bastard who never lost his delight in telling Hans that such a stupid lazy boy would never have “a pot to piss in, ner a window to t’row it out of.” On his sixteenth birthday Hans had returned from a long, hot day of slitting throats and scalding hogs for a well-to-do neighbor, to find his grandfather sitting on the weathered porch, watching as his mother dropped the last of Hans’s possessions onto a meager stack in the yard.
“We can’t be feeding you no more,” was all she said, but the old man could not resist throwing in his two cents. “You kin come back when you have made somethin’ of yourself.”
Remembering, Hans bites his lower lip then swallows to clear the bitter taste of bile. “I will, too, by God. Just see if I don’t.”
There is a tremor in his voice as he mutters, “Always looking down their noses at me, just because my luck has been bad a few times over the years.”
Coming behind Hannah, he places his hands on her hips and bends close to her ear. “But now I’ve a lady for my wife. And we’ll show them, won’t we?” His nuzzling lips feel alien and intrusive as he whispers promises of the status they will have. While his hands roam, Hannah thinks of how the new homburg and fine wool suit, which had so impressed her at their first meeting, were purchased with borrowed money.
“Ah, God, Hannah. I just want … I want so badly to …” And because there is no choice but to believe, she holds his head to her breast while he makes promises to care for and cherish her.
Dear Diary,
We shall have to work very hard. Poor Hans. He adores me so much—and I him, I am sure—that he sought overly hard to impress me and perhaps exaggerated his situation out of ardor. It is not the bargain I presumed to be making, but still a fine one, to be so loved, isn’t it?
Seattle is an accumulation of weathered gray buildings under a sky of the same drab shade. A rash of cobbled shops line muddy lanes, all selling the same prospectors’ things, and with prices for an ever-dwindling supply of shovels, hammers, boots, blankets, packs, and pans doubling daily, the moss-rotted boardwalks are peppered with those too poor to buy a miner’s outfit. Hans is frantic. “A few months ago, passage to Alaska cost two hundred dollars. Now the thieves booking for the steamship lines are demanding a thousand!”
The heartless triaging of humans becomes an economic filter, a merciless Carborundum that grinds away the poor and the hobbled, those less able to pay. This is also a great kindness, for those who arrived in the first waves of immigration to Alaska and the Yukon are already dying in great numbers, though the days of summer are benevolent and gentle. They disappear into crevassed glaciers, fall from crumbling precipices, or are murdered by brigands like the infamous Soapy Smith gang of Skagway. They run screaming into the endless forests, where they perish of exhaustion after losing their minds under the torment of a million mosquitoes. An appalling number commit suicide, overcome by a landscape so vast and strong that the burden of their own smallness becomes too great to bear.
A derbied huckster sells Hans and Hannah the last available bunk on the Pegasus, a seventy-foot harbor tug, converted rudely into service as a passenger liner. After boarding, they discover that Hannah is the only woman on board and that their berth has also been sold to a schoolteacher from California. Hannah negotiates and reasons, but Hans grows impatient and waves a work-knuckled fist until the unfortunate teacher evacuates the bunk to build a nest on the deck.
Hannah leans into Hans at the bulwark, the weight of his arm pleasant across her shoulders. In the cool, moist air, the steam of her own breath twists and rises, as if her core boils with life, and together they watch the heavy mist obscure the retreating shape of the city.
Pegasus rolls and steams through the green waters of the San Juan Islands at a subtle speed. Proper steamships overtake her, shouting of their superio
r bulk with insulting whistle blasts, while the captains exchange obscene gestures from their respective wheelhouse windows. Aboard the Pegasus, the men smoke and mingle, telling each other briefly of their previous lives and discussing at great length their strategies for obtaining riches. There are many opinions on matters of geology and minerals, and the smoothly planed wood of the galley table is soon covered in penciled designs that a new-comer might take to be engines of war, instruments meant for storming castles or raining a shower of boulders down upon approaching ships, but which instead describe wash-boards, sluice boxes, and odd, hieroglyphic machines for crushing stones. Hannah observes that among the would-be prospectors it is the most poorly informed who hold forth the loudest and longest, and that all of the raucous, late-night discussions are pervaded with a sense that there may never be another opportunity like this to grab at easy wealth.
Pegasus plows north, shouldering apart the water with her stem. Hannah sits in a canvas deck chair on the bow, watching the world rise before her, staring ahead to where the mountains paralleling the strait converge in a shallow V. Hour after hour the hammering beat of the steam engine throbs through the hull, until it seems her heart must begin to beat in time with the whooshing spin of the pistons. She goes once to the stern but the sight of the wake peeling and unfurling away from the ship and a seemingly endless line of islands and peaks dropping slowly below the horizon serves not as a change of view but as a too-graphic reminder of how all that she has ever known or been part of is slipping away, disappearing perhaps irredeemably and forever behind them. Bracing herself against a quickening trepidation, she turns on her heel and returns to the bow, resolving to look only forward.
Nights are spent at anchor in small coves where the shores are dark with massed trees. In the cramped and crowded quarters, Hans rigs a curtain of blankets across the face of their bunk to separate them from the other passengers. Behind it, he introduces Hannah to the pleasure of slow, careful coupling, whispers, and the sweetness of two curled into a single pair.