by Janet Fox
I woke in the night. I thought it had all been a dream. I peered through the tent flap, and someone slept right where David had slept the night before, and my heart lifted for a moment. Then I realized it was Will, lying on David’s blankets. He was homeless, just as we all were.
And Jameson still sat as he had before. Staring out over the park, holding a portrait box open in one hand, the firelight glinting off the glass.
I hadn’t spoken to Miss Everts, and I didn’t until the next morning. We sat side by side, the sun rising behind us and the shimmering sea in the distance.
“I know why you put me in the room with the portrait.” The portrait still leaned, wrapped in its canvas covering, against the wall of the tent where I’d propped it. “You wanted me to discover it.”
She looked away down the hill toward her old neighborhood. “That’s your grandfather, in the painting.”
I pondered that. My grandfather, in a fine painting. Kula Baker, daughter of an outlaw, a girl who grew up longing after fine things, found herself newly rich and in possession of a portrait of her high-society grandfather. “How the world turns,” I said. I shook my head. “What about the ring he wears in the painting? That dragon ring?”
“They each had one, the three partners. Everts, Baker, and Henderson. That ring was their crest, the imperial dragon was their symbol. They were tied to one another and to the Wongs. Your grandfather’s ring was lost when he died in the ferry accident. I don’t know what became of Henderson’s.”
“And so then the one I saw on Mrs. Gale belonged to Theo.” And now I understood something else: Mrs. Gale had known who I was and how we were connected, knew it from the moment Pa had returned her rings to her.
Miss Everts nodded. Then she dropped her eyes. “I didn’t shut William Henderson out. That was his parents’ doing. We were partners, as much as I hated it. Once he finagled his way back to his share of the fortune, I had to humor him. Especially once I suspected that he was involved in that other wretched business.”
“So he financed the slavery . . .”
“And I bought the girls. He didn’t know that, of course, any more than I was certain he was the money behind Wilkie.”
“You were pretending. With me, with Henderson. Pretending about being angry with Hannah Gale, pretending not to know my pa . . . it was all so you could save those girls.”
She did not meet my eyes.
“How many did you save?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. As many as I could. Until I ran out of money. My well ran dry not very long ago.”
“Where are all the others?”
“They’ve moved across the country. I always try to find them a place to go where they’d be well looked after. That shoe you found—that thread was gold. They wore the little wealth I could give them in their clothing. It wasn’t much. But at least it was something to start with.” She leaned toward me. “Now, Kula. Our work isn’t done. I need someone like you here, to help me. These girls . . . they need you. You can teach them a good skill. One they can use. Embroidery, sewing. Something useful.”
“I don’t want to stay here.” I bit my lip.
“Why not?”
“There’s nothing here for me. There’s no one here for me, not anymore. I need to get home to my pa. I can work for Mrs. Gale.” I rubbed my palms against my skirt. My pa would be fine. I wouldn’t have to work for Mrs. Gale; I had my own fortune now, my pa’s fortune. “I miss Yellowstone.” That much was true. But it wasn’t the real reason I didn’t want to stay. I looked at my hands, grimy and calloused. “I just don’t know that I can stay here in San Francisco with him gone.”
“Yes, I’m sorry about David,” she said. “I truly cared for him.”
I swallowed and shut my eyes. David. The ache wormed its way through me. I’d never lose it. After a few minutes I found words again. “You were in love with Ty, his grandfather.”
She was silent.
“And I wager he was the love of your life. That’s why you never married. That’s why Hannah married Edward Gale, and you didn’t.”
“It was convenient for me to pretend that Edward had abandoned me. It removed the prying eyes.” Her hands fluttered to her hair, tried to pat the loose strands back into place. “It was convenient to pretend to be angry with Hannah.”
Another pretense. She was a surprise, Miss Phillipa Everts. Well, I had a surprise for her. “You do know, of course, that Jameson is in love with you.”
She started. “Nonsense.”
“He is. He’s probably been in love with you for years.”
“Roddy? Nonsense.” She turned her head, looking out the tent to where Jameson, silent but steady on, was busy adjusting ropes, fixing supplies, seeing to the comfort of us all. “That’s impossible.”
“No more impossible than you loving Ty Wong.” No more impossible than me loving David—or David loving me.
She stood. “I’ve heard that we can get across the bay now. We can get to my house in Sausalito. I think that’s the next order of business.”
She went outside to Jameson. I watched her. She spoke to him, clearly telling him that it was time for us to pack up and move, that we would go to Sausalito. Just as she turned away, she placed her hand on his arm. And left it there. And he leaned toward her, just ever so little.
Through all my own sorrows, I could still feel glad.
Will looked up at me as I left the tent.
“I’m going to go to the beach. I’ll be back.”
“I’ll take you,” he said.
“No. Just point me in the right direction. I want to walk. By myself.” I did not look at Will.
“We’ll leave on the evening ferry,” Miss Everts said. “You could walk to the Golden Gate, but be back here by three.”
I’d walked many a mile in my life; this walk would not be difficult.
All around me the city was shoring up. Cleaning up. The soup lines were long but amicable. Children laughed and played while their parents gossiped. This part of the city had seen earthquake damage but not the fires. Still, bricks littered the streets; buildings were collapsed, tilted, gaping. Great cracks crisscrossed the streets. In places the paving was lifted right up to a cliff. I had to take care as I walked.
But the walking cleared my head, even if it could not mend my heart.
After about an hour or so, I reached the Golden Gate, where the bay meets the ocean; I tripped down the rocky slope into the grass-covered dunes, right down to the narrow strip of beach where the ocean rolled and roared against the sand and the rocks. Sea lions with their great, slinky bodies lounged and barked on the rocks, and I knelt and pushed my hands into the damp sand. The sun was in my eyes so that I could hardly look at the water, sparkling as it was like a million jewels.
I wished I’d come here with David. I let myself cry again. I let it go. I let him go. David.
I rocked gently on the sand, let my love of David sink with my damaged heart into the waves that sparked so, the cut-glass edges of the waves slicing me up until I was all pieces, floating, washed, strewn on the sand, David forever with me, forever gone.
At least my pa was safe now. And it really began to dawn on me, I had inherited some kind of fortune. I didn’t need to marry for money now; I no longer needed to work, whether as a lady’s maid or an artist’s model. I had my own means. I’d never dreamed that I’d have my own means. I could support as many girls as I could free from slavery or, better yet, use it to fight the import of them altogether.
There was much work to be done here, so much could change. The city at my back had to be made new, and I could be a part of that.
I just had to accept what I was and what I had to give.
I understood now. I understood that forgiveness was the path to happiness. That I had to learn to forgive in order to be happy.
Wilkie had been lost in his desire for money and power, unable to forgive Min, the woman he loved.
My pa had been unable to forgive himself for losi
ng his beloved Anna, my ma.
William Henderson had been unable to forgive my pa for taking what William thought was his.
I’d been unable to forgive almost everyone. Not Maggie or my ma, not my pa, not Will or his father. Certainly not Wilkie.
I’d been unable to forgive this city for stealing my heart.
I’d been unable to forgive myself for being what I was: a simple girl with a hard past and an uncertain future.
Until now.
I stood up and brushed the sand from my hands and skirt. I looked out over the ocean toward the west. I had some decisions to make.
Chapter THIRTY- SEVEN
April–May 1906
“I thought of all the solitary places under
the night sky where I had slept, and how I prayed
that I never might be houseless any more, and never
might forget the houseless . . . I seemed to float, then,
down the melancholy glory of that track upon the sea,
away into the world of dreams.”
—David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, 1850
MISS EVERTS’S HOUSE IN SAUSALITO HAD LOST ITS chimney and a part of its porch. Jameson and Will made a full exploration of it before allowing us all inside.
We had no running water, but there was an old well out back, so we could hand pump water until things were repaired. And the house was comfortably furnished. It was a large and rambling structure that held all of us with ease.
Will had become a part of this odd family we’d formed. He had nothing left. He went back and forth across the bay to look after his father, who would stand trial for his crimes.
Now William Henderson, as well as my pa, was in jail.
Word came down from Montana and Mrs. Gale that my pa still had to serve time for his part in certain robberies. As for the murder of that rancher, Black, he was deemed innocent.
The girls we’d rescued became like sisters to me, and I started them on learning to embroider. After all, I had to bide my time while sorting out what to do next.
Will’s handsome eyes followed me when we were together. I didn’t love him in the way I’d loved David, but I liked him well enough. Liked him, but didn’t need him. Funny, that. How I’d always thought I’d needed a man to raise me above my station, how I’d needed to marry rich. Now I could do what my heart told me was right, and my station was of no importance.
Every day now, in the evening, I made my way to a point of land from which I could watch the sun skimming across the water. Something about looking over the water soothed the ache in my heart. Once, Will went back up Mount Tam with me, and we walked in silence over the hills at the top, to that same point where we’d once stood with David. Now we stood and stared in silence toward the far western horizon.
One morning about a month after the earthquake, the fog came in. The fog rolled in around the city from down the hills above us, rolled across the bay, wrapped the house we were in like a shroud. I sat at the window and saw only the gray wall of fog. San Francisco had disappeared.
From the small parlor came the sound of soft laughter. One of the girls. It was the first time I’d heard one of them laugh, and it struck me then, hard. Not just what they had been through, but what lay ahead for them. Phillipa had places for them to go, paths she’d laid out before, trails blazed by the other girls who had been spirited out of their terrible quarters and given a new chance at life. They would find new homes in safe havens in the West, the Midwest, the East. I was teaching them skills they could use, ways to control what happened to them in the future. Yet their nightmare past would linger, and they would meet with other trials, and their road would not be an easy one.
And me?
The fog had weight. It rolled around the house and moistened the windows so that they ran with soft drops. I put my fingers on the glass, and it felt cool to my touch.
I went back into the room where Mei Lien and Yue and the other girls waited. They were so patient. I picked up the stitching we’d started and began again with the simple stitches. They were learning quickly, I could see that, and then they could make their way out of here. They could choose a new life. They’d be free, and I’d have helped them. Just like I could help make San Francisco new.
One day, I would return to my high and snowy peaks, to my bubbling springs and endless skies. I’d return to my pa and we’d make a life together. But for now I would stay in this broken place to heal my broken heart.
It was a new century, and all things could be made clean and shiny, even a city destroyed by earthquake and fire. Even the soul of a girl who thought she knew what she wanted.
The soul of a girl who had lost all hope, lost love, and needed to be made new as well.
We worked all day, and the fog lifted just before sunset.
I left the girls to their work and went out to the porch and looked across the bay. It looked as if it was on fire, sparking and flashing. Across the bay, San Francisco was already coming back from the ashes. I wanted to help bring that city back to life. I wanted to help others find a new life. I’d discovered how to find my own life, how to open my heart.
Kula Baker was ready to live.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The truth, however, is—judging by an analogy
and all the light that science has placed within our reach—
San Francisco is in very little more danger of a disastrous
earthquake than the Eastern States of being flooded by
an overflow of the Atlantic ocean. . . ”
—San Francisco Real Estate Circular, April 1872
When I began writing Forgiven it was with the intent of following Kula, a secondary character in Faithful, for whom I’d developed a strong attachment. Kula is feisty, strong-willed, and actionoriented; I wanted to see what would happen to her if I put her in difficult circumstances. I decided to let her mature a year and a half “offscreen,” and this was partly because I was attracted to the idea of sending her to San Francisco so that she might experience the great earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906 (Faithful is set in the summer of 1904). What I did not know until I began my research was the extent to which San Francisco of that time was a city divided.
The wealth of the Gold Rush of 1849 coupled with the westward migration of many of the tycoons of nineteenth-century industry gave rise to a population of immense wealth. Nob Hill and Russian Hill were crowned with extravagant mansions. At the same time, San Francisco was a seaport and gateway to the Orient. As a result, the extreme poverty and dissolution that often follow the hardworking homeless sailor lay side by side with enormous wealth. Furthermore, the government in the city of San Francisco at the turn of the nineteenth century was acknowledged to be corrupt. In the notorious Barbary Coast, a young man who let himself become too inebriated was subject to being “shanghaied,” a condition in which he would wake up to find himself an unwilling seaman in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The Chinese population, so important to the economy of San Francisco, suffered constant harassment. And I discovered the horrors of child slavery, wherein young girls were sold in China and brought to San Francisco and housed in terrible circumstances. This last fact became an important part of Kula’s story.
Several books were important to my research, including Herbert Asbury’s The Barbary Coast, first published in 1933, James Smith’s San Francisco’s Lost Landmarks, and Bill Yenne’s pictorial, San Francisco Then and Now. The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco (http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/index0.html) is a treasure house of photographs, movies, period newspaper accounts, and scholarly articles. Two fictional accounts also made an impact on my understanding of the various cultures of San Francisco: Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, and Laurence Yep’s Dragonwings: Golden Mountain Chronicles 1903.
The earthquake and fires of 1906 did have something of a cleansing effect on that great city. But the exploitation of children—degradation, humiliation, the worst forms of abuse—continues in all parts of the world eve
n today. A portion of the author’s proceeds from the sale of Forgiven will be donated to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It is my hope that my readers will become aware of this continuing problem and choose to act on behalf of children everywhere.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first draft of Forgiven became my creative thesis for my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I could not have written the novel without the guidance of my thesis advisor, Leda Schubert. Her patience, vast knowledge, encouragement, and editorial skills sustained me when I needed them most. Leda, I’m grateful and proud to call myself your former student and forever friend.
My critique partners, Kathy Whitehead and Shirley Hoskins, read bits and pieces of the novel as I struggled to bring it together, and as always, their wise words guided me through thick and thin.
My friends in SCBWI, in the classes of 2k9 and 2k10, and at the Vermont College of Fine Arts—you are my heroes. You have come through for me time and time again, when I felt I couldn’t go on, or when I needed guidance, or when I needed to know that the struggle was all worth it. My ThunderBadgers—especially my friends and confidants Kari Baumbach, Anne Bustard, and Lindsey Lane—I love you all.
The faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts is without peer. My advisors, Sarah Ellis, Jane Kurtz, Uma Krishnaswami, and Leda Schubert, provided me with craft tools I will use forever. And Kathi Appelt and Cynthia Leitich Smith—you are my special Texas connection, boosters, and sweet friends.
Wayne and Martha Sellers, and Tim and Randi Jacobsen—thanks for being there, and for supporting my craft, again and again.
Alyssa Eisner Henkin—you are my agent; but you are also my rock. I can always count on you, and I love you for it.