Of Gold & Blood Series 2 Books 1 & 4

by Jenny Wheeler

  She stood and squared her shoulders.

  “I have to focus my attention on today. I was wondering what you could tell me about the Ophir. Did you have a chance to take a look?”

  Willie got up and went to a small wooden chest that stood against one wall from which he drew some tattered rolls. He spread them on the table, and Graysie saw that the parchment edges were well worn, the surface smudged by dirty finger and pencil marks.

  “These are the maps Eustace gave me.” She came and stood beside him and he traced down a black line on the map with his stubby index finger. “This is the shared ridge that runs between the Ophir and the Ruby. You’ll see the Ophir is lower down—below the Ruby—here to the west of it, but still on the same fall line.

  “The Ruby has these mighty greenstone dykes which bind the ore veins, and there’s a good chance those dykes continue down into the Ophir. They say the rocks can always be relied on to surprise, but those greenstone towers are so strong it’s unlikely they just vanish. And where there are these greenstone buttresses there’s likely a nice ore shoot locked in as well.”

  He turned his kindly face towards her. “You wouldn’t know without taking a look yourself—or seeing a prospector’s report from someone you could trust.”

  Graysie bent over to look at the map spread before her. It was easy to see where the Wolf River ran down the valley and then split into two tributaries, one of which went towards Grass Valley, and the other in the direction of the Ophir. She knew that some of the most productive Grass Valley mines edged the Wolf River lower down. She turned to Willie with a frown.

  “What about random reports from people I don’t know—and may not be able to trust?” She pulled out the report Willoughby Martens had given her.. “This, for example. It was given to me last night.”

  Willie stroked his long beard as his eyes flicked over the pages. “I’d have to take more time to do it justice, but it looks like just the sort of thing that’s manufactured for a particular purpose—either to elevate or reduce a property’s supposed value. Who prepared it, do you know?”

  “I was told it was someone called Lightning Bill Whitlock.”

  Willie nodded. “Funny how both the Ophir and the Ruby seem to be attracting attention recently. And yet poor old Andre Guilliame couldn’t get any investors interested when he was desperate. I suppose that’s the way of things.

  “If you’re too keen, buyers back off. And yet only last week Vance Pedersen came to see me and asked me to store some papers of his for safekeeping. Said he’d been doing a bit of investigating along the Ophir- Ruby fault line—don’t know who for. Might have even been you.”

  She shook her head. “No, not me.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “That’s where he died, isn’t it? Well, in the vicinity. Poor sod.”

  Graysie was having trouble swallowing, her throat was dry. A tingling sensation swept up the back of her neck and into her face.

  “I made contact with him ten days ago. He was up there at my request—well, heading for there anyway. But I hadn’t got as far as commissioning any report.

  As she was speaking, Willie had returned to the wooden chest and drawn out a package wrapped in oilcloth. “I haven’t even looked at this. Don’t know what it is. But it’s what Vance left. Said something about how he didn’t want to leave it at home with all the children. Not sure if he thought the blighters might get their hands on it or what.”

  “How strange. I’ll take a look.” She turned towards the door, the friendly little spaniel tagging along at her heels. “I’ve kept you for long enough, I’m sure. Would it be alright if I left this new report for you to take a closer look? Perhaps I could call by again in another few days? I’d value your opinion.”

  Willie nodded, and his brown eyes shone. “Very happy to take a look for you. I wouldn’t be expecting too much from it.”

  As she turned to leave, another thought suddenly struck her. “Willie, both Lisette Guilliame and I have been approached by investors who seem interested in shares of these mines, but naturally they want to play down their value. I guess that’s part of the game. Hector de Vile for one. Willoughby Martens for another.

  “Lisette was approached by that man Weavers, saying he represented a mystery buyer whose identity could not be divulged. Goodness knows who else. Have you got any idea of the value of these mines? What we should be selling for? Or any clue who Weavers might have been working for?”

  Willie stood on the doorstep, running his fingers through his beard, considering. “My dear, if I were honest, I’d have to say anyone with money. Sir John, de Vile, they’d all feel a sense of competition about it, even if they play at being disinterested. They’re all scared the other will get their hands on something good and they’ll miss out. It’s the age-old problem, isn’t it? Greed. You’re holding onto something they think they want. I’m just not sure what lengths any of them would go to get it.”

  He still held the report she’d given him in one hand. He tucked it into the waistband of his working man’s trousers and pulled on his hat. “Just got to water my lettuces and Argus, and then I’ll take a seat in the sun and have a look at this. Come back tomorrow about this time and I should be able to give you some answers.”

  Twenty Four

  Willoughby Martens slipped around the back of the outhouse, pulled a black kerchief out of his pocket and tied it around the lower half of his face. If circumstances required, he’d play the outlaw. Thanks to Russell’s determination to drive him out of the finance business, he had no other choice, but that was about to change. That was why he was standing on this flat, weed-covered patch which backed onto the widow Anna Santa Maria’s house.

  The delicious gut heat he’d felt when grinding Nathan Russell’s reputation in the dirt last night lingered. His fingers tingled with the pleasure of reliving it. Seeing Graysie Castellanos’s slack jaw at the revelation of Russell’s murky past. I’d like to get my hands on that hot little number! Those cascading curls, the tempting rise of her breasts, the long legs…

  He squeezed his eyes shut and shook the image away. There’d be time for that soon enough. Weavers had frightened the French woman good and proper—he was pretty certain she’d sell at the required price, even with Weavers dead. But Martens needed that benighted report on the Ruby operation from Pedersen. By tomorrow. De Vile was adamant it existed. He just hadn’t anticipated it would be this hard to track down. It had to be here at the engineer’s home, or if it wasn’t, his strumpet must know where he’d have put it. So she wasn’t his wife, so what? She was raising his kids, wasn’t she?

  His insides pinched as he thought of the dumb Mexican and snivelling tribe of children who stood between him and his chance to be somebody. There was no way they’d stop him, even without backup from bumbling old Weavers. He felt for the newly sharpened steel blade he kept in a pouch at his waist. Good. All shipshape and ready. Casting a final look around to ensure he wasn’t being observed, he doubled into a silent run and was at Anna’s back door, pounding with his clenched fist.

  He heard a strong female voice respond, “Who is it?”

  He pulled the scarf down, and yelled, “Open up! One of the children is hurt. Badly hurt.”

  He flattened himself against the wall on the door’s opening side, readjusted the scarf over his lower jaw, whipped out the knife, and waited. He heard a heavy bolt rattle in its casing, and the door flew open. Anna Santa Maria stepped into the doorway, eyes fixed expectantly on the empty space where he’d been standing just a few seconds before.

  Face screwed up in worry, she took a step forward and ran her hand through her long hair. “Who’s there?”

  As she turned in his direction, he grabbed her with a lock hold across her throat and dragged her backwards into her house, slamming the door behind him. She was wheezing and coughing and struggling to breathe because of the brutal pressure he was applying, but he didn’t care. She needed to be frightened. Very frightened. She needed to u
nderstand that she and all her children were expendable. He pulled her even tighter as he stretched back and pushed the door bolt smoothly back in place, locking them in.

  He positioned the flat knife blade under her chin and ear, on a diagonal angle across her jugular vein. It was so sharp he only had to place it against her skin and it opened bloody scratches, some deep. Without him needing to apply any extra pressure, blood trickled over her collar bone and down her front. She stifled a sob but remained stiff and motionless except for a sudden release from her bladder. A gush of warm urine splashed onto his boots, the acrid acidic smell overpowering a ripe tomato fragrance in the kitchen.

  “Start talking, bitch. Where did your useless brother-in-law keep his papers?”

  She froze, then said very slowly, “Papers? I know of no papers.”

  He applied more pressure to the knife, and the blood flowed more freely. “Wrong answer. Try again. If you’re wrong this time, I’ll start on your kids.”

  Sharp children’s voices erupted from the room next door, and then two small children appeared in the entryway to the kitchen. They stopped abruptly and stared at the woman with huge, frightened dark eyes.

  “Mamma! Mamma!” Little mouths turned down at the corners, and they began whimpering.

  Anna Santa Maria took a deep breath. “It’s just a silly game, darlings. Just a silly game. Go and play.”

  “His papers!” Martens hissed. “I haven’t got all day. Where are his papers?”

  Anna held herself even more rigidly, he felt sure she was steeling herself for death. Then she said slowly and deliberately, “I do not know of these papers. He was an engineer. He had no papers.” A desperate gagging noise sounded deep in her chest. “I swear! I know nothing of any papers.”

  He was hot and panting, and a pleasurable tide of excitement rose up in him as he heard the fear in her voice. Her neck against his arm was slick with sweat and blood. He was about to press the knife against her throat one last time, but the movement was interrupted by a gibberish wave of high-pitched wailing in a childish Spanish. The two small children had returned, joined by a thin dark-headed boy of about nine or ten.

  Martens hauled Anna around to face the boy who had come running at the sound of his sisters’ crying. The kid stopped short, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. He stared at his mother with narrowed eyes, and Martens had the disconcerting feeling he was recording every detail of the scene before him: the knife at her throat, the blood. Martens could pick the moment when the full extent of the danger registered on his stark white face. He backed away like a small ghost, gathering the two smaller children in behind him, one on each side of his slim hips.

  Before the boy reached the door, Martens yelled, “Stop! Stop! Not one step further or your mother dies.”

  The boy’s quietly exaggerated backward steps froze in mid-air, and he released his sisters with a gentle whisper. “Go and play, little ones. Go and play.” He gently turned them around and pushed them back the way they had come.

  Then he stepped back into the kitchen, staring blankly at his mother as he moved.

  He spoke urgently to her in Spanish, while she quietly sobbed. Martens couldn’t pick up anything more than a few words: “Padre… perro… asesinato.” Father… dog… murder… The kid’s sharp, he thought. Smarter than his mother.

  “Come here.” Martens barked the command at the boy, who didn’t move. “I said, come here.” His voice rose to a scream like a wind howling to gale force. The noise seemed to unlock something in the child, and he moved quickly to his mother’s side.

  “You can let her go. She knows nothing.”

  The child’s hands were shaking violently, his eyes widened in terror, but his voice was surprisingly calm.

  Martens had a strange sensation of the world tilting on its axis, jolting him onto unfamiliar ground. A kid was telling him what to do?

  He grabbed the boy roughly by the shoulder with his free hand and snarled, “Stay still or the knife ends it.”

  The boy swayed and went momentarily limp under his hand, like he might be about to pass out, but he steadied himself and stood erect.

  “She knows nothing. Let her go.”

  The woman broke into a violent wave of wailing, and Martens loosened his hold on her throat, eased the knife back from her skin.

  “Antonio, no, no. He is a devil. A devil. Vance had no papers. There is nothing here. Nothing!”

  She broke into harsh sobs, her chest heaving, cheeks wet with tears. Now she had started crying, she was fast approaching hysteria.

  “There is nothing here! Just a widow with six children with barely enough food for the table. What do we know of fancy papers? You are a fool! A fool!”

  She began crying loudly, and the children who had disappeared earlier re-appeared. They rushed to her side, also wailing.

  “Enough!” Martens roared over the racket. “Shut up!” He squeezed the boy’s shoulder hard and felt his rakish body tense up with the pain.

  “You know about those papers!” he yelled. “Where are they? I am not waiting any longer.”

  The boy turned slowly and glowered. “She knows nothing. Let her go, and I will help. Otherwise nada. Nothing.”

  There was a charged, drawn-out silence. The woman had stopped crying. Martens watched in disbelief as the stony-faced boy spread his hands wide.

  “Well, cowboy. What’s it to be?”

  This kid should be a lion tamer. He’d never seen such self-possession. Such courage. Or was it straight out gall? And did he even know anything?

  “You’re showing me where they are. And you”—he swung to the woman—“If there is so much as a peep out of you to anyone, you won’t see the kid alive again. Is that clear?”

  Martens released the woman. She pulled the boy against her hip, his head resting on her skirts, and cried until he thought her heart would break. He thrust the knife back into his waist pouch and waited, tapping his foot impatiently. When he’d had enough, he grabbed the boy by the ear and dragged him away from the keening woman.

  “You’d better know where we’re going, boy, because we’re going there right now.”

  Twenty Five

  The only bed was overturned, the mattress and quilt slashed open. The spilled feathery down floated in the still air like snowflakes that refused to come to rest. The chairs lay up-ended, one with its legs broken, and the table lay on its side, one edge propped against an armchair. Willie Watson’s homely forest haven had been the subject of a raid.

  Willoughby Martens repeatedly thumped his clenched fist on the kitchen bench—up and down, up and down, in a rhythmic tantrum, and howled in rage. He stopped to take a breath and glared venomously at the boy who cowered behind an armchair.

  “Where the hell is it, you little son of a bitch?”

  In three steps he was standing over the boy. He lifted him off his feet by the back of his collar and flung him headlong towards the door. Antonio’s shoulder hit the doorjamb with a heavy thump, and he slid to the floor and lay motionless at Billy B’s feet.

  Martens had recruited Billy, a notorious Aussie gang member, from San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, and he was as ruthless as any man Martens had ever come across. He’d sunk many an ale with the ex-convict on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. When you needed good backup there was nothing like being able to trust your own.

  Martens strode over to the crumpled heap and hoisted the kid to eye level by his shirt front.

  “If your uncle brought it here, where is it now?”

  The boy barely registered the words. A cut had opened up on his right eyebrow, and blood trickled down his face. He shook his head wordlessly and touched his forehead, then looked down at his blood-covered fingers. He wiped his hand on his pants and collapsed.

  Truth was, there were very few hiding places in the simply furnished cottage, and Martens was pretty damned certain they’d searched them all. Antonio had barely said a word since he’d been hustled out of his home. He’d made a garbled
admission that Vance was a good friend of Watson’s and they often got together to talk.

  “If there was a report… He might have shown Willie… He never said…”

  Getting anything else out of him was proving impossible. He’d lapsed into terrified silence and had not said a word since. When they arrived, the place was deserted, and it had been the work of a few minutes to overturn the main room and find absolutely nothing.

  Martens was not in a mood to be reasonable. Goddammit, I have to find that report by tomorrow. It just can’t be that complicated. And if the kid can’t be more use than this, he’ll have to pay.

  His head roared, and his rage focused on just one thing: to get the kid who’d led him on this wild goose chase. He saw that the boy understood the danger. He’d gotten slowly to his feet and had just slipped out of reach of Billy’s outreached hand when a clamor of high pitched barking sounded from outside. Billy opened the door a crack to peer out. Gunfire peppered the wood, and he slammed it shut again.

  “What the blazes…” He stared wildly at Martens as if expecting instruction.

  “Grab the kid.”

  Billy lunged for Antonio, who scuttled sideways to avoid him, but his way was blocked by the table. Martens grabbed him by the hair.

  “Stop shooting or the kid gets hurt!” Martens yelled so hard his throat hurt. “Hear me? Stop shooting.”

  He nodded to Billy who slowly opened the door. Martens grasped Antonio’s shirt firmly and pushed the boy slowly out through the narrow doorway in front of him, using him as a shield.

  “If you shoot, he dies,” Martens bellowed again. “Hold your fire.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Nothing moved in the trees in line of sight of the door. Martens couldn’t see Fat Jack, a gunslinger he’d left on watch outside. His stomach roiled like it had on the festering barque from Sydney to California. He was hot and cold at the same time—how was that possible? The moment hung in a timeless bubble, and then the quiet was shattered by more frantic high-pitched barking.