Beneath a Golden Veil

by Melanie Dobson

  No matter what happened, she would never let Victor take Isaac away from her again. She’d protect him from the Duvalls with her life, if she must.

  Soon, after Victor was gone, she and Isaac would return to the city, and she’d take him up to safety on Vancouver Island. Until then, she couldn’t risk telling him or anyone that she was a runaway slave. As long as Victor didn’t find them, her façade would protect both herself and her son from harm. And keep them together for the rest of their lives.

  A rustle in the grasses startled her, and she jumped, thinking it might be a wildcat, but when she looked up, she saw Alden walking toward her.

  She sat up, wiping her eyes on her sleeves before climbing up onto the flat edge of a rock.

  He studied her for a moment. “Are you ill?”

  She contemplated his words. Her body was well, but everything inside her felt sick.

  He found a seat on a rock near her, his head resting in his hands. “It’s horrific what some slave owners do.”

  She nodded, wanting him to think her tears were for the horror of the branding alone. He could never know about the rose and letter that marked her shoulder as well.

  “Isaac thought you were mad at him.”

  Her heart clenched. “Oh, no—”

  “I told him that you just needed to exercise your legs since you weren’t able to swim. He seemed satisfied with that answer.”

  She looked up into the swell of compassion in Alden’s eyes. “Why are you different?” she asked.

  “I’ve never tried to be different.”

  “I mean—” She had to tread cautiously, taking care not to reveal too much. “You said your family owns slaves.”

  He picked up a stick and threw it into the river. “Unfortunately.”

  “Yet you helped Persila escape from her owner. And you said you want Isaac to be free.”

  “I’ve never been a proponent of slavery.”

  “What would your family say?”

  His gaze settled on the water. “My father would say that I’m a coward. That I’m weak-willed and pitiful for entangling my emotions with people he considers to be property.”

  “I don’t think you’re a coward.”

  His eyes found her again, and he flashed a wry smile. “That’s because you don’t know me very well.”

  She wiped her eyes again, wishing she could tell him that she did indeed know him, back when she wore a linsey-woolsey dress and a cotton cap and spoke with the timid voice of a slave girl. “I think it’s quite brave of you to bring Isaac west.”

  “I ran away from home,” he said. “It wasn’t the least bit brave.”

  She shook her head. “Running takes a lot of courage, especially when you choose to do it for the right reason.”

  His gaze fell to the blood still trickling on her hand. “You’ve hurt yourself.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. It stung a little, nothing else.

  “We have to clean it.”

  “No.”

  Standing up, he reached for her good hand. If she were thinking clearly, she would have refused, but she followed him to the edge of the bank. He scooped cool water from the river and gently washed her palm. After the blood was gone, he wrapped his dry handkerchief around the wound and stepped back.

  She stared at the gray cloth around her hand before looking back up at him. “Thank you.”

  “Isabelle,” he started, locking her gaze. “If I were a gambling man, I’d bet a pile of gold that I’ve seen you before, long before Isaac and I came to California.”

  Her gaze returned to the handkerchief. “Have you been to Baltimore?”

  “No—did you ever visit Boston before you came west?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sure there are plenty of women who look like me.”

  “I don’t think there’s anyone else in this whole country quite as lovely as you,” he said tenderly.

  Her heart seemed to flip with his words, her fingers trembling. She didn’t dare glance back up at him.

  He cleared his throat. “I think it’s very courageous of you to not only run a hotel on your own but help Persila escape as well.”

  She put her hands back down at her sides, hiding them in the folds of her dress so he couldn’t see them shaking. Plenty of men back in Sacramento City had called her beautiful—men desperate for female attention—but no one had ever called her courageous.

  “I wish you would have met my aunt before she died. She was a truly brave woman.”

  When she looked back up at him, his gaze was still intense. “I wish I could have met her too.”

  “She would have liked you.”

  When Alden smiled back at her, it seemed as if everything would be fine now. As if he could take care of her and Isaac alike. She nodded back toward the camp. “I’ve never eaten antelope before.”

  “Me either, and I’m starving.” He laughed. “There will be plenty of new things for us to try out here.”

  She trekked back through the rocks and grass, Alden at her side. It seemed like they both had run away from their pasts. Just as she’d worked to break free from the Duvalls, she needed to offer him the same grace if he sought redemption from the sins of his family.

  It was a new season for both her and Alden now. And a new season, she hoped, for the boy back at the camp too.

  No matter what happened, she would do anything she could to rescue her son.

  Chapter 39

  Sacramento City

  August 1854

  Sacramento City was still smoldering a week after the flames had been extinguished. The fire left behind charred skeletons of buildings on at least twelve of the city’s blocks, the crumpled walls reeking of smoke and slag. Ashes shrouded the once-planked streets, and every structure that remained was blackened with soot.

  Mallie’s hotel had resisted the inferno, but the metal shutters and doors were welded together from the heat. Victor had walked down K Street every day since the fire, searching, but after he’d followed Mallie into the alleyway, it seemed as if she’d blown away with the smoke. Like she’d known he was looking for her.

  But no one knew he was searching for Mallie except Fanny, and she’d disappeared as well, taking with her the cache of coins she must have stolen when she rifled through his portfolio. He’d hoped the fire had taken her life, but the only bodies found in the aftermath were those of three workers who’d perished behind the shutters of a mercantile.

  According to the chief engineer of the fire department, the fire had been an accident. He said it began when a guest knocked over a lantern at the Kirtland House. No one knew the name of the guest. And no one, it seemed, had guessed that the proprietor’s wife had started the blaze.

  Sacramento’s residents had already begun to rebuild, but there was nothing to occupy Victor’s time except to continue his search. The fire had burned everything he owned except his portfolio, his wallet, and the clothes on his back. A steamboat from San Francisco had delivered food and clothing yesterday, but he hadn’t found out about the arrival until after their wares had sold at ridiculously high prices. He’d heard that a pair of boots went for fifty dollars. A readymade shirt for thirty.

  The proprietor at his new place of residence—a man by the name of Louis Gibbs—was a cheat too, taking advantage of those made homeless by the fire. Louis’s boardinghouse had burned down, but he’d hired a hungry crew for a pittance to clear his property while he retrieved enough canvas from San Francisco for a large tent. Then the man charged five dollars for a spot underneath it.

  For seven days, Victor had slogged through dust that blew west from the valley, through the scorched streets and those that had dodged the fire. He visited the wharf every day to watch the passengers embark on the steamers, and he’d stopped by the Wells Fargo stagecoach office three times, asking if the woman known as Isabelle Labrie had been a passenger out of town.

  As he searched for Mallie, he’d been looking for Alden and Isaac too. The firemen stopped the blaze
before it reached Mr. Fallow’s office, so Victor visited there almost every day as well. Horace had grown tired of his inquiries, as if the man had a hundred things to do in the absence of his employer, but he didn’t particularly care if the man disliked him.

  This morning, Victor paused outside the closed door of the lawyer’s office. Someone had posted a notification on the wall beside it.

  After he knocked, Horace called out for him to come inside. Then the man rolled his eyes. “Can’t you read?”

  Victor flinched. “Read what?”

  “The sign.” Horace stood up and marched toward the door, rapping on the paper nailed beside it. “Mr. Fallow. Has. Not. Returned.”

  “I didn’t notice it.”

  “I will take down the sign when he returns. Until then, it’s useless for you to continue knocking.”

  After Horace locked the door, Victor tore down the man’s sign and crumpled it into a ball before stomping away, swearing under his breath. He was more than ready to leave this town in its dust and ashes and return east where people treated him like a gentleman.

  Before he went to his home in West End, he’d travel to the office of the New York Herald and tell the editor exactly how unwelcoming the people in California were. He’d name names, show the people here in Sacramento that they should have treated Victor Duvall with dignity. Then he’d settle back into his comfortable farmhouse and wait patiently for his time to rule over Scott’s Grove.

  With the sign clenched in his hands, he marched up I Street until he reached the stagecoach office. “I’m looking for a woman I lost in the fire,” he explained to the agent on the other side of the counter. “Her name is Miss Isabelle Labrie.”

  “A hundred people leave here every day,” the man said coolly. “Going all different directions.”

  “I understand, but this woman would be hard to forget. She’s French, you see, and has these beautiful brown eyes that will haunt a man.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “During the fire, over on K Street.” Victor shook his head solemnly. “Isabelle and I were planning to marry, and then we were separated in all the chaos. I fear she might have traveled out to the goldfields, looking for me.”

  Another man stepped up to the counter. He was almost a foot taller than Victor and much more stout. “I drove a woman named Isabelle out to Columbia last week, but she was already married to a fellow named Payne.”

  His fingers curled around the paper. “Was she traveling with anyone?”

  “A colored boy. And her husband.”

  Anger flickered at first and then roared inside him, hotter than the inferno that had blazed through this town.

  “Seems like you were jilted,” the agent said after the driver walked away.

  Victor stepped back from the counter.

  Had Alden traveled to California to marry Mallie? Were the two of them laughing together now as husband and wife?

  He looked down at his hands, at the crumpled paper, and tore it into shreds.

  Had Eliza arranged this secret meeting? She’d probably known all along about Alden and Mallie. Mallie hadn’t run away from Victor. Alden had stolen her away and then he’d taken Isaac. And his beastly wife was probably at home, laughing about it all, as if it were all a grand scheme.

  He’d left Eliza eight thousand miles ago and still her laughter stung his ears.

  The law may acknowledge her as his wife—until death parted them—but he only needed her alive until John and Alden were gone. If he was patient enough, resolved, he could secure Scott’s Grove and the two people he loved most in the world.

  Good riddance.

  That’s what Eliza had said about Isaac, and it’s exactly what he would say about her after he inherited the plantation.

  “How much is a ticket to Columbia?” he asked the agent, his voice calm again.

  “A hundred dollars.”

  “That’s outrageous!”

  The man shrugged. “Gold prices.”

  Victor reluctantly lifted the wallet from his coat pocket and opened the brass clasp. Then he counted through the coins inside. Blast Fanny Kirtland. He didn’t even have enough for one return passage to Boston, clear around Cape Horn, but right now, he’d spend every dollar left in his wallet if he must to find this semblance of a family.

  He removed five gold coins and put them on the table. The agent slid them off the counter, into his till, then held out a ticket.

  “The next ride to Columbia is in two weeks.”

  Victor choked. “What do you mean, two weeks?”

  “I mean that is the next time we have a seat available on a coach going to the town of Columbia,” the agent said, annoyed with him. “They’ve been finding gold out there by the fistful, and after the fire, it seems like half of Sacramento wants to go.”

  “How about taking a boat?” Victor asked. “Or a train?”

  When the man snorted, Victor snatched the ticket out of his hand.

  He’d find Mallie, and then he’d figure out a way home. This trip had cost him dearly—all the money left from his inheritance—but he was almost finished.

  He felt like Captain Ahab, sniffing the scent of the white whale in the ocean. Except no rope was going to take him down to the depths of the sea.

  Unlike Ahab, he was going to conquer this whale.

  Chapter 40

  Columbia

  August 1854

  The cypress writing desk in Isabelle’s hotel room was similar to the one found in her aunt’s cottage, the narrow drawer at the bottom folding out for miners to hide their gold. She removed Aunt Emeline’s box from the hidden drawer and stared down again at the rose inlaid on the lid. Then she smoothed her hand over the skirt of her plum-colored working dress.

  Unlike the silk and taffeta of a fashionable French woman, this calico was supposed to help her blend in on the crowded streets here in Columbia, but even dressed plainly, the miners and businessmen watched her and Isaac closely whenever they left the hotel to eat. Perhaps it was because she was a woman. Or perhaps it was because she was accompanied by a black boy. She’d only seen two other Negros since they’d arrived in Columbia, both of them freedmen working as miners.

  She rested back in a chair, the trinket box on her lap. It would make Aunt Emeline so happy to know that she’d been reunited with her son—pleased that God was creating beauty from the ashes of her life.

  Her window open, she could hear the crack of a wooden ball knocking down bowling pins across the street. Chickens squawked from a pen, men sang off-key in what she assumed was a nearby saloon, and in the distance, she heard what sounded like a trombone.

  The town of Columbia was about the same size as Sacramento, but there were no tidy blocks or planked streets here. The town’s center hosted hotels, saloons, dry goods stores, a bank, an assay office, and several eateries. A lovely frame home with its picket fence and flower garden was the crown jewel, the residence of the bank president and his family, but a mishmash of ramshackle tents and wooden buildings fanned out from Main Street, bleeding down into the gulch and up into the forested hills.

  Miners seemed to be everywhere, carrying their shovels and picks back and forth between the diggings and saloons in town. The air here was cleaner than in Sacramento, the mountains blowing down a light coolness that stifled the summer heat, and the streets seemed to buzz with optimism. These were the men who still believed in the power of gold, unlike so many back in Sacramento, who’d lost everything in their quest.

  It felt strange to be the patron of a hotel instead of the matron, but the Broadway Hotel was the finest establishment in this town. With Alden off trying to stake a mining claim, it seemed like the safest option for her and Isaac as well. She’d secured two rooms for them, connected by an inside door in case Isaac needed her.

  Isaac was reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the next room, a book he purchased with the money she’d paid him for his work at the Golden. Over the past week, she’d been continually amazed that God
had seen fit to bring them back together again. And she wished that Aunt Emeline were here so she could ask her how to be a mother.

  She brought the crocheted baby blanket with her, but instead of it bringing her sadness, it filled her heart with a deep joy. What she thought she’d lost had been found.

  Now she needed to do one last thing before she stepped boldly into this new season of life. She needed to find out what her aunt had given her.

  Her hands were resting on the lid when Isaac poked his head into the room. “Are you hungry?”

  She smiled, the joy flooding her heart again. “I am if you are.”

  “I’d like more oysters.”

  “Then we’ll find you some.” It wouldn’t be hard. It seemed that every establishment in this town sold oysters along with champagne. She and Isaac ate their oysters with buttered bread and a bottle of root beer.

  He pointed toward the box. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a gift that my aunt left for me.”

  He rested on the edge of the bed. “What’s in it?”

  She looked at the boy sitting beside her in wonder, marveling at the genuineness in his brown eyes, the curiosity in his voice. She’d been worried this past week that she might see Victor in him, but Isaac was confident and kind and thoughtful. Nothing like the man who’d fathered him.

  “I don’t know what’s inside.”

  He stared down at it. “Why haven’t you opened it?”

  “I suppose it’s because I’m scared.”

  “Is there something scary inside?”

  “No.” She smiled at him even as tears formed again in her eyes. It seemed she’d been an open spigot of water the past week. “It’s my aunt’s last gift to me, and I suppose I’m afraid to say a final good-bye.”

  “But what if it’s not good-bye?” he asked. “What if there’s something inside that will last forever?”

  She blinked back the tears. “You sure ask a lot of questions.”

  “Master Duvall says I’m insatiable.”

  “Inquisitive might be a better word.”