Beneath a Golden Veil

by Melanie Dobson

  Alden shook his head.

  “Then we can’t even sell him,” she fumed. “Just because she can’t afford to feed another mouth—”

  “I don’t eat much,” Isaac interjected.

  Alden pressed into Isaac’s shoulder as a warning, but it was too late. His mother’s eyebrows pinched together, and she bent down toward him, clearly irritated that he spoke without permission. “We don’t tolerate thievery here, for as long as we decide to keep you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Nor any kind of sass.”

  “Missus Eliza don’t tolerate no sass either.”

  His mother groaned. “Doesn’t—Eliza doesn’t tolerate any sass. Why can’t your people learn to speak the English language?”

  “Probably ’cause it’s illegal to teach it to us.”

  A vine of red crept up his mother’s neck and then flooded her face. Isaac was right—a slave’s education was a punishable offense. If slaves could write, they might forge their own emancipation papers. If they could read, they might find out about the abolitionists fighting for their freedom up north. And if they found out they had a home waiting for them in Canada, they might encourage a larger group of slaves to run away.

  But there was no arguing this with his mother. She didn’t erupt with words like his father, but if Isaac angered her, she would make his life at Scott’s Grove miserable.

  Alden pushed the boy toward the door. “I’m going to get some stew.”

  She nodded grimly. “Then you must join the search.”

  He didn’t answer, knowing he could never hunt for his friend like he was an animal. Instead, he planned to find Mammy.

  His mother pointed a shaky finger toward Isaac. “Take that boy down to help Hattie. No matter what happens, we will have a meal to celebrate Christmas Eve.”

  Back in the corridor, he leaned against the papered wall. Isaac looked up at him, his eyes wide. “Will Benjamin get away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I pray he runs like the dickens.”

  “You best learn to keep your thoughts to yourself around here.”

  Isaac prodded the edge of the braided rug with his bare toe. “Master Duvall lets me speak my mind.”

  “What about Mrs. Duvall?”

  “She usually pretends I’m not there,” the boy said, inching the rug away from the floor again. “But Master Duvall says I amuse him.”

  “I’m sure you do, but the master of this house won’t be amused.”

  He stood taller. “I can hold my tongue if I put my mind to it.”

  “Then tell that mind of yours to lasso your tongue and don’t release it again until someone in charge asks you a direct question.”

  Isaac nodded his head.

  “Hattie rules the kitchen,” Alden explained. “If you do what she says, she’ll treat you well.”

  “Will she feed me?” Isaac asked, rolling his hand over his stomach.

  “Let’s hope she’ll feed us both.”

  Alden directed him to the kitchen steps. It had been a long time since he’d been in the basement of the house. When he was a child, all his meals were served in the nursery, though every once in a while, Mammy would slip him and Benjamin down the back staircase to sample the sweet cakes or Polish tarts. Hattie pretended not to notice them.

  As he grew older, he began taking his meals in the dining room with his family. Mealtimes were strict in their home, and he respected that rule along with the many others that came with managing a household of this size.

  Before he stepped down toward the basement, the front door of the house banged open, and he heard boots stomping on the floor.

  As the cold air swept through the corridor, he pointed Isaac downstairs. “Tell Hattie that I sent you.”

  Isaac stuck out his tongue. “It’s lassoed.”

  He sighed. “You can unlasso it just this once.”

  Isaac muttered to himself as he walked downstairs. Alden hoped the boy would learn the many rules at Scott’s Grove so he could stay.

  His father stood like a returning warrior in the entryway, with both Rhody and Jeptha standing behind him. His favorite bloodhound, Moses, was at his side.

  Relief flooded over Alden when he didn’t see Benjamin, but the triumphant smile on his father’s face—and Jeptha’s grimly set jaw—expunged any hope.

  His mother hurried toward them, collecting the leather cloak his father dropped onto her arm.

  “We caught him,” he proclaimed.

  She smoothed her hand over the leather. “Very good.”

  “He won’t run away again.”

  “You all must eat,” his mother directed.

  His father glanced toward Alden, but didn’t greet him. “Rhody earned herself a fine meal. She was the one who found him hiding in the basement of the Congregational Church.”

  The glory in Rhody’s eyes sent tremors down Alden’s spine. His younger sister had warred alongside their father, and she had won.

  “Does Reverend Andrews know?” his mother asked.

  “I’ll find out after Christmas. His wife claimed he was out visiting the sick today.”

  “Likely story. I’ve never trusted the man.”

  “I’ll find out the truth.” He retrieved his cloak from her hands before motioning toward Alden. “Come with me, son.”

  Alden moved forward. “Where are we going?”

  “I’ve decided not to eat quite yet.”

  “But you must be famished,” his mother said.

  “I need Alden’s help first in the curing barn.”

  Chapter 3

  Sacramento City

  December 1853

  Isabelle Labrie swept into the elegant dining room of the Golden Hotel along Sacramento City’s bustling K Street. The lilac gown she wore belled out from her fitted bodice until it reached the polished wood floor. It was modeled after the latest fashions in Paris except there were no ruffles or lace around the sleeves or skirt. And she had tiny bags of birdshot stitched around the hem to keep it from yielding to the California winds that swept up the river and through this growing town.

  “Good evening, monsieur,” she said to Edmund Walsh, the one gentleman seated near the rosewood box grand. It was Christmas Eve, but it didn’t feel like a holiday. A light rain fell outside instead of the snow she’d loved back in Baltimore, and few wanted to stop and celebrate the birth of Christ when there was a pile of gold waiting to be found in the hills.

  She reached for the bottle of Madeira the steward had left on the table, filling her customer’s glass.

  Mr. Walsh ate dinner at her hotel almost every night—salmon in the autumn, roasted duck in the summer, oyster loaf whenever a crate of oysters arrived from San Francisco. Rumor had it that he’d once been the milliner for Queen Victoria in London. Others said he’d been a blacksmith in Buffalo.

  That was the beauty of California. A person could take on any persona they wanted. Be whomever they wanted in the shadows of this strange land.

  When he’d first arrived in this new state, Mr. Walsh cast his line for gold and snagged a fortune. Gold was much harder to find in California than the East Coast papers liked to report—its dust sifted through fingers like sand in an hourglass, especially at the bordellos and saloons. Many miners wealthy at sunset were penniless again by sunrise, but Mr. Walsh was one of the few who’d managed to keep his money.

  “When is Mr. Kirtland returning from the fields?” he asked.

  She glanced out the large window along the front of the hotel, at the gray sky and a glimpse of river two blocks away. She’d been hoping Ross would return for Christmas, but it was already Christmas Eve. In the four months he’d been gone, she’d only received one letter from him, postmarked from the diggings near Marysville, and he gave no indication as to when he would return.

  But he’d wanted to marry this spring when the flowers behind her aunt’s cottage were in full bloom. She’d promised that she would have an answer to his proposal when he retur
ned.

  Isabelle glanced back at her customer. “He said he’d be back before the rains.”

  “Any day now, then,” Mr. Walsh replied, though they’d only had a few showers in the past month. Not the torrential rains that would bring in the throngs of gold miners from the fields.

  She nodded. “Any day.”

  Mr. Walsh took a bite of the iced Venetian cake on his dessert plate, and she filled his crystal goblet again.

  Liquor was banned from her establishment, and she didn’t allow her patrons to smoke cigars—there were plenty of saloons along Second and Third Streets for that sort of thing—but she did serve wine to her regular clients. The finest drink shipped over from Italy and Portugal in casks called pipes. She then transferred the wine into green-tinted glass bottles before serving it to her clientele.

  Ross had said good wine was essential if they wanted to bring in those who appreciated the refinement they missed in cities like Paris and New York. The Golden was the only hotel in Sacramento that catered to the businessmen who owned local banks, shops, and shipping companies. A few of these men had sent for their wives, and these ladies basked in the opulence of her establishment as well.

  Most of their guests, though, were the miners like Mr. Walsh who’d struck it rich and craved a nice dinner and clean bed when they returned from the goldfields.

  Mr. Walsh lowered his glass. “That’s all for me tonight.”

  Isabelle replaced the cork in the bottle after he left and moved back toward the cellar where she stored her wine. Her hand against the brick wall, she slowly descended the rickety steps. She didn’t bother to bring a lantern with her. Light filtered down the staircase from the dining room, illuminating the mortar and fired clay.

  Whenever the Sacramento River flooded, everything in this cellar was carried to the upper floors of her three-story hotel until the water decided to recede. The last time the river seeped through her front door, Ross had been here to help her. They’d worked through the night to save almost everything on the lower floors. The piano’s rosewood legs had been stained and the wood floor and wainscoting in the dining room ruined, but everything else in their hotel had survived, including the gold Ross had hidden for them behind this wall.

  Smiling, she thought about the man she hoped to marry. Did he miss her as much as she missed him?

  Even though she’d had proposals, she hadn’t sought love in Sacramento, hadn’t thought she would ever marry, but Ross had been kind to her heart. Patient. And she had learned to be patient with him too—waiting for months last summer and fall as he searched for gold along the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The Mother Lode.

  It didn’t matter to her if he brought back a bagful of gold nuggets from the fields, as long as he returned.

  The bell chimed overhead, and she slid the wine bottle onto the rack, then picked up her skirt to hustle back up the steps. It was probably a late delivery from one of the steamboats—or it could be a new customer for the hotel—but every time the bell chimed, she thought Ross might have returned.

  She swept through the dining room, then rounded the stairs to her right and entered the front lobby. But instead of a deliveryman or Ross waiting for her, a woman stood alone by the front desk. She was wearing a floral calico dress, and her light-chestnut hair was swept up in a knot behind her neck. Isabelle guessed she was a few years older than her own twenty-three years.

  The women held a carpetbag in her right hand and a soggy sunbonnet in her left. Her face was quite pretty, but her clothing smelled of seawater and coal smoke.

  A wave of nausea swept over Isabelle—most of the young women who traveled alone were from France or China, their passage purchased by so-called benefactors, the men and women who operated brothels across California.

  The woman looked as if she could be from Europe or the East Coast, and Isabelle prayed for her sake that she was simply looking for a husband or father who’d come ahead of her.

  Isabelle stepped behind the wooden counter where she kept her roster and the ledger of accounts. “How can I help you?” she asked, folding her hands on top of the shiny mahogany surface.

  The woman glanced up at the wall beside the desk at the list of eight rules that Isabelle displayed so that all her guests clearly understood that the lawlessness in this new state didn’t extend into her establishment. “I’m looking for the proprietor of this hotel.”

  Isabelle stood a bit taller. “I’m the owner.”

  The woman tilted her head, her dark-blue eyes wrinkled with confusion. “I thought Ross Kirtland owned this place.”

  Isabelle placed both her hands on the ledger, wondering at the familiarity of the woman’s language. How did this woman know Ross? “I bought out his portion when he left for the goldfields.”

  “Oh.” The woman leaned back against a post. “I reckon it’s good that he’s looking for gold.”

  “He goes out for a few months every year, like most of the men around here.” Isabelle sat on a pine stool. “Where are you traveling from?”

  “Kentucky,” she said. “Boone County.”

  “And how exactly do you know Mr. Kirtland?”

  The woman smiled. “I’m married to him.”

  Married to him?

  The woman’s words ricocheted in Isabelle’s mind, clanging together like the bells on wagons running up and down K Street. And the stool—it felt as if it had disappeared from under her, as if the wine cellar had opened up, swallowing her.

  “But Ross—” she began to protest before correcting herself. “Mr. Kirtland’s from New York City.”

  Bitterness wove through the woman’s laugh. “I suppose New York sounds more sophisticated than Boone County.”

  Isabelle clung to a thread of hope. It was all a misunderstanding. “The Mr. Kirtland who owned this hotel was definitely from New York.”

  The woman shrugged. “My Ross always liked to make up a good story.”

  Had it really all been a story? The hotel Ross said he’d owned in New York. The parents who were deceased. The sister who sent him letters at least once a month.

  “Perhaps there are two men in California with the same name,” Isabelle said, trying to explain this more to herself than to the woman across from her. Ross had fervently declared his love for her, said they would marry this spring. He never would have done that if he had a wife back east.

  The woman leaned across the desk toward her, a locket dangling around her neck. She opened the clasp, and inside was a miniature daguerreotype of her and Ross. His handsome face was resolute.

  “This was taken on our wedding day,” the woman said.

  Isabelle didn’t reply.

  “Is this the man who owned the hotel?”

  Isabelle swallowed hard, her face warm again. “It is.”

  She dropped the carpetbag onto the floor. “Then I’ve found him at last.”

  Isabelle stared at her in shock. How could Ross have done this to her? To both of them?

  After closing her locket, the woman collapsed on a cane chair near the front door. There was a hole in the toe of her boot, and her skirt was stained. “The whole room is rocking,” she declared.

  Isabelle wanted to run upstairs and hide, but instead she went into the kitchen and mixed the woman a drink with bicarbonate of soda, crushed sugar, and a dose of quinine to help calm her stomach and ward off disease.

  “What is your name?” Isabelle asked, her voice shaky when she returned.

  “Fanny. Fanny Kirtland.”

  The name of the letter writer, the woman Ross had declared to be his sister.

  Isabelle tried to steady her voice. “How long have you and Ross been married?”

  “Four years, though he left for California about two months after we married to make a home for us out here,” she explained. “He said he would send for me, but he never did so I decided to come on my own and surprise him.”

  Isabelle forced a smile. “I’m certain he will be surprised.”

  Fanny lo
oked at the Irish lace over the front window, then up at the lime and pink medallions above the chandelier.

  “Is Ross’s house nearby?” she asked.

  Isabelle shook her head. “He lived in the back rooms of the hotel when he owned it.”

  “I suppose I shall have to stay in those rooms, then.”

  Isabelle hesitated. She had been living in those rooms since Ross left the city.

  “Ross can pay my bill when he returns.”

  Isabelle wanted to turn the woman away, tell her to take the steamboat back to San Francisco and catch a clipper returning to the East Coast, but she would never turn a woman onto the streets of Sacramento City alone. Hers was the only establishment in town fit for a lady.

  “I could help here until Ross returns,” Fanny said, and Isabelle could hear the desperation in her voice.

  “Do you know how to bake?”

  “No—but I can learn.”

  “I need help with cleaning too and changing beds. We use real linens at this hotel.”

  Fanny crinkled her nose for a moment, but then composed herself. “I can make beds.”

  “Very good,” Isabelle replied. “I suppose you can stay here and work until your husband returns.”

  “When he returns with his gold, we’ll be able to live wherever we want.”

  Isabelle leaned forward to pat the woman’s bare hand.

  Chapter 4

  Scott’s Grove

  December 1853

  The stench of decaying leaves seeped between the walls of the curing barn and out into the yard. Alden hesitated by the door, afraid of what he would find inside. His father hadn’t spoken to him during their walk to the barn, hadn’t asked about his journey or his last term of school. Silence was one of the many weapons in his arsenal, and often it felt more destructive than his words.

  Moses waited patiently beside Alden as Master Payne stepped into the door of the barn and returned with another of his weapons, a long black whip, the strips of leather coiled at his side. “It’s time for you to grow up, Alden.”

  His heart beat faster as he eyed the whip. “I’ve already grown up.”

  “You’ve been pandering too long.”