Of Gold & Blood Series 2 Books 1 & 4

by Jenny Wheeler

  “Stop! Stop, please!” Graysie wrung her hands together. “This is all too much to take in. What are you talking about?”

  Mr. Fisher regarded her gravely for a long minute and re-steepled his fingers. “What I have to tell you will be a shock, Miss Castellanos.” He paused and nodded courteously in Alycia’s direction. “Mrs. Stockton. I think it is best if I hand over Mr. Mountfort’s documents for you to read for yourselves.”

  Fisher began rustling through a folder on his desk and drew out two documents that appeared to have been written on the same expensive cream parchment writing paper. He placed them on the desk in front of him and protectively drew his hands along the sides of the paper, tracing the pages silently.

  The rigid line of his shoulders fell forward a fraction.

  “In effect, Miss Castellanos, he wanted to make a clean breast of a very turbulent period in his youth relating to his relationship with your mother, Elanora Grayson Castellanos. Events occurred which cast a cloud over the rest of his life, and I believe he wished to clear his conscience before he died.”

  Graysie and Alycia stared at each other; neither spoke. Alycia’s normally acute gaze had a glassy sheen. Graysie felt light-headed. The lawyer stood up and walked around his desk to place one of the parchment documents in Alycia’s hand. The other he offered to Graysie. Her fingers were so stiff from clutching the solid arm of her chair, she fumbled to take it.

  It was addressed to Miss Grayson Mountfort Castellanos. Her cheeks felt warm, and her fingers tingled. As she unfolded the page, she smelt a faint whiff of masculine cologne. How she wished Eustace was here to tell her in person whatever it was he thought she needed to know. She smoothed the paper and began to read.

  My dear Miss Mountfort Castellanos,

  As you are reading this letter prepared after many years of heart searching, I can only assume my solicitor Mr. Fisher is satisfied my conditions for its release have been met—namely that you sought further information about me and the bequest I made to you within twelve months of my death.

  I would never have been in a position to disclose the information following here if your mother Elanora had not died so prematurely and tragically, as I would have felt that it was not mine to make known.

  However, with Elanora now long gone, I have convinced myself the needs of the living should take precedence over the vanished desires of the dead. What is it our dear Lord says in Luke? “Why do you look for the living amongst the dead?” You, my dear Graysie, are our living legacy. Your mother and I are no longer here to love and to fear, and I feel it is incumbent on me to make you aware of just what a remarkable birthright you carry.

  Your mother and I were very young, very foolish, very much in love, and certain we would be together forever when we celebrated New Year’s Eve 1848 in the most intimate way a man and woman can. We had no notion our lives would be unhinged by my mother’s unexpected death on New Year’s Day.

  Our lives were ripped apart forever by my father’s insistence that, with her gone, I take over the family business in the West Indies. Within a few days of my mother’s funeral I was on a boat to Kingstown, shell-shocked and feeling like I was walking underwater. He would not countenance the idea of me marrying at that time. Apart from anything else, the family was in mourning.

  I had no idea I had left your mother in an appallingly exposed situation, with no one to appeal to. She married within a few months of my departure and you were born a very short time after that. She was shunned by her family, and it is one of the great griefs of my life that, because she died so young, she never had the chance to properly reconcile with them.

  I have watched your life from afar these many years and have felt ashamed I was not able to step in and ease the hard times you have faced, the disruption of your life after your mother’s death, and the loss of family that was never restored in her absence. Elanora was never replaced in my life, and I understand she was never to be adequately replaced in yours either.

  I have been in awe of the resilience and courage you have displayed as you have grown. I have come to wonder not just at your strength but your blossoming as a gifted artist. I have had the pleasure of sitting in your audience on more than one occasion, basking not only in the beauty, so like your mother’s, that you radiate at every turn, but also the poise and talent that you display on stage.

  It’s been a lifelong sorrow that I have not been able to make myself known to you for what I am—your father.

  Graysie had to stop reading. Her eyes were blurred with tears. Her heart felt huge and was blocking her throat so she struggled to swallow.

  This can’t be happening. The man I thought was my father all these years was a shadow? I have another father? She sat for several minutes staring at the page without reading a word. When her pulse had returned to a steady calm, she resumed.

  My decision to leave you the Ophir as an inheritance was made after long reflection. I have not been able to ease your path while I have lived, but perhaps I can help a little when I am no longer there.

  I want you to know that, as the daughter of Eustace Mountfort and Elanora Travers, you were intended for the fullest of life and love that any loving parent wishes to bestow on their child, and your forbears on both sides are amongst the most noble and upright people you could hope to know. It is the tragedy of all of our lives that our good intentions did not prevail and, in one way or another, they brought disaster for us both. I do not want your legacy to be tainted by our lack of wisdom.

  I have good evidence that, with sound management, the Ophir will provide a handsome income for you for many years to come. I regret I will not be there to see it happen and that I have had to leave you in this exposed situation, but I have faith that when my sister Alycia realizes the true situation you will be able to call on very sound support from my family. At least I pray this will be so.

  I am forever, your loving father, Eustace Reverdy Mountfort.

  Graysie hesitated from her reading and squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, the room hadn’t changed. The shelves of ancient leather bound legal tomes, some dusty from disuse, hadn’t moved. Alycia was sitting in an unnaturally still pose, still reading. Graysie could only guess at what he’d told her.

  The older woman seemed unaware of the tears that were trickling slowly down her face as she read on, deeply absorbed in the letter’s contents. Then, perhaps becoming aware of Graysie’s gaze on her, she glanced up quickly and shot her a wan smile.

  “More bad news to come, I’m afraid. My brother was a lot more foolish than I ever realized.”

  Forty Six

  With the gun barrel in his back, the Sydney gangster marched Nathan over bumpy sand to a ramshackle jetty on the water’s edge. A tall man with blackened teeth slipped from the shadows under the jetty. He held a rope in one hand. Nathan saw that it was attached to a bow ring on a battered dinghy that gently rocked on the shore line.

  They were on a deserted section of the river, where the levee, built up to protect against flooding, obscured any view of the water from the warehouses, granaries, and lumber yards which lined this commercial strip of Sacramento. The turpentine smell of cut logs and wheat dust tickled Nathan’s nose.

  He could see an old man in the distance fishing, but apart from that, the river moved with a slow oily sheen, undisturbed by man or wildfowl. The afternoon had that eerie feeling of a falling barometer, of the calm before the storm. Hot, still, and ominous.

  Clouds were rapidly closing in so that the line between water and sky was a vague misty border. It was unclear where one ended and the other began. There was no one to call on for help, no one who had noticed his abduction.

  The brown depths seemed to rise before his eyes, and cold terror clutched him in the pit of his stomach. The unwelcome memory of another fateful night two years flooded back. A storm at sea, the waves hammering against a foundered ship.

  Despite the steamy Sacramento afternoon, his teeth chattered. The gun dug painfully into
his back. The toothless man grabbed his shoulder and squeezed it hard; pain shot down his arm into his elbow. The man motioned towards the dinghy. Nathan stumbled over the rotting side and collapsed onto a bench seat. The dinghy bottom slopped the water, and his panic rose.

  His senses concentrated on one place, this one instant in time back on the New South Wales coast two years ago. The same cold wet soaking through his trousers. The sharp smell of salt. A whine of rising wind. Sand stinging his face. Without any warning, the heavens opened. Rain drummed on his head and shoulders. His eyes were watering, and he couldn’t tell if it was raindrops running down his face or his tears.

  With hundreds of staring spectators he’d watched from the beach as the Cawarra’s funnel and then foremast broke away. A steamship on her maiden voyage, the pride of the line, reduced to a wallowing hulk battered against the Nobbys Head sand bar as they’d stood by helplessly. Next day the bodies began washing ashore, but he’d never found Charlotte and Joshua to give them the funeral they’d deserved, despite scratching through the wreckage for days afterwards.

  The toothless crook gave the dinghy a short shove off and leapt aboard. The vessel tipped to one side dangerously with three of them on board, and more water slopped in. The man with the bad teeth also had foul breath, Nathan discovered, as he lent in and wrenched Nathan’s arms in front of him. The thick marine rope he used to tie Nathan’s wrists together chafed his skin and sent pins and needles up his arms.

  “Try anything smart and we’ll dump you overboard and leave you to drown,” the man with the gun hissed in his right ear.

  Bad Teeth settled in the middle seat and began rowing with smooth control. Halfway across that changed. The heavens opened and turbulent wind and drenching rain made hard work for the oarsmen to pull their way across the main river channel to a small island at the confluence of a trickling tributary.

  Nathan was facing the island, but through the gray, sheeting deluge it was hard to make out any detail until they were close enough to go ashore. He saw there was no jetty, just a muddy sloping bank fringed with straggling swamp trees. Bad Teeth angled the dinghy into the shallows and beached it.

  When he leapt overboard to drag it up and tie it to an old stump, he sank halfway up his calves in mud. Each foot made a plopping sound which released a smell of rotting fish. Nathan pitched forward, half in and half out of the boat, unbalanced by his tied hands, and Bad Teeth clutched his elbow in a vise grip.

  He swore and pulled some filthy rags from his pocket, gagging and blindfolding Nathan before shoving him forward.

  “Move. We haven’t got all day.”

  Walking blind, half falling every few yards, Nathan fought to stay upright. If he got off course, Bad Teeth cursed and pummelled him. The gag made it difficult to breathe, and he was panting raggedly when they finally called on him to stop. The cloth was wet from his saliva, and his eyes hurt from the pressure of the blindfold. His throat was dry, and he had a raging thirst.

  The river sound had faded as they had walked, and Nathan sensed that, although they had not gone very far, they had moved inland. Not above the water line, however. He calculated they were slightly below the river level, in a dip which, from the feel of the ground under his feet, was sand pocked with the boulders he’d stumbled against.

  The rotting fish smell had also disappeared, replaced by an acrid bird dung odor. He could hear the cry of gulls wheeling in the sky overhead; he guessed they must be near some kind of nesting place. He was focused on what his nose and ears were telling him when Bad Teeth shoved him in the back again, this time so hard he fell forward on his knees.

  He raised his hands to protect his face as he collapsed. He rolled on his side and flipped over so he was sitting up, momentarily dizzy. Was he facing the river or inland, and where were his captors? The question was answered when one of them spoke.

  “This is where your journey ends.”

  Even through the blindfold, Nathan sensed the shadow of the man leering over him, his voice laced with malice. He caught the slight onion fragrance of a popular hair tonic, said to repel insects.

  “Big storm.” He was almost certain it was Bad Teeth who spoke. “Just the right place for a man who doesn’t mind his own business.”

  With his mouth stuffed with the soppy gag, it was impossible to reply, but Nathan knew it would be useless anyway. The man was just following orders. He needed no further confirmation that Martens was issuing them.

  He sank onto his elbows. He smelt yellow gorse, heard the mourning keening of seabirds. And then a blow across the side of his face knocked him sideways. He curled up to protect himself from the next one. He heard a high-pitched derisive laugh.

  “You’re done for, mate. With the rate this rain is falling this island will be swamped in no time. I’d say you’ve got less than half a day before this will all be river and you’ll be a dead fish.”

  A second cracking blow landed, and then he felt nothing more.

  Forty Seven

  Graysie and Alycia had less than half a block to walk from the lawyer’s office to a café and ice cream parlor that advertised ‘sedate and elegant’ rooms for ladies. The boardwalk was busy with families on weekend errands or taking their children out for a treat, and the two women did not attempt to talk until they were quietly seated in a private room.

  The news that Eustace was her father had numbed Graysie. So many wild thoughts clamored for her attention that she could not focus on any one of them, and she was anxious about what further revelations Alycia might have for her. She could tell by the older woman’s tense movements and tightly clamped jaw that she was doing the best she could to suppress her anguish.

  When the waiter had taken their orders and left, Alycia drew the lawyer’s document from her reticule and offered it to Graysie across the table. She shook her head.

  “Maybe later. I’m quite happy for you to tell me what it contains. I don’t need to read it now.”

  Alycia creased her brow and took a deep breath. Graysie had the impression that, like her, she wasn’t sure where to start.

  “He’s been very honest about his belief that you are his daughter, conceived on New Year’s Eve 1848. I have no reason to doubt his account, and I do acknowledge there is an uncanny resemblance to Eustace in some of your gestures: the way you hold your head in a certain erect manner, a particular little movement you make with your mouth when you want to speak but then decide to keep silent. Small unconscious body language that no one could fake.

  “Quite honestly, that disclosure was not a complete surprise, though I never discussed my suspicions with anyone. No, the details that upset me very much, and which I believe will also cause you pain, relate to your mother’s death.” Alycia paused, her face drawn and white. She fingered the gold cone at her throat, almost as if seeking reassurance from something familiar, and took a deep breath.

  “You see, from what he says, it’s clear Eustace was involved in the events of that dreadful night.”

  As if on cue, the waiter returned with their coffees, and Alycia paused while he set their cups down. After he left, they sat in silence for another minute. Alycia vacantly plucked a sugar cube in silver tongs from a bowl on the table and added it to her cup. Although it was not cold outside, Graysie felt comforted holding the warm cup in her hands. She held off taking the first sip.

  Alycia resumed. “When Castellanos asked Elanora to join him with you children in Sacramento, it appears Eustace conceived this mad scheme for intercepting the stage coach and convincing her to run away with him. He was certain she was going to be miserable. Just craziness. I told you he was out of his mind where Elanora was concerned.” She sighed, took a sip of her coffee, and cleared her throat before continuing.

  “He’d heard a month or two previously about some jape where a miner had kidnapped his beloved and eloped with her—and everyone thought it was a great joke. It was like that in the early days. No consequences. Eustace seems to have been under the illusion that he could pul
l the same stunt. They were just wild boys who thought the rules didn’t apply to them—and out here in the early days of the Gold Rush, they mainly didn’t. You could get away with such pranks.

  “From what he says, it all went tragically wrong when the stage coach driver lost his head and tried to run him down. The horses took fright and bolted, the coach overturned, and your mother was thrown out.”

  Graysie was aware of a painful tightening in her throat, and she saw spots flashing before her eyes. Her heart felt like it had been skewered; she could not have risen from her chair even if she had wished to, the pain was so fierce. She heard again the terrible screech of wagon wheels, the terrifying rasping of the coach walls hitting big trees, the twins crying in the darkness.

  She wanted to pull her hair and wail loudly, instead she clutched her chest and concentrated on breathing in and out very slowly. She knew she was pinching her lips together; she wasn’t sure if it was to try and stop herself from trembling or crying.

  Had she never grieved for her mother until that moment? All those years when she’d felt aggrieved for being left alone, the loss of the twins gnawing away at her. She’d sometimes blamed herself, but more often she blamed her mother.

  Now with a rush she understood: her mother had only been a few years older than Graysie was now when she died, and it was so different for women then, especially women with children. What options had she had?

  “Does he say anything about the twins? Anything at all?”

  A crushing weight pressed down on her chest. As she waited for Alycia to speak, she wondered if she would ever breathe properly again, the squeeze on her windpipe was so tight.

  “Only that they both survived the wreck. They were very securely fastened into a traveling cot. They were crying but seemed otherwise unharmed. He says he left them in their cot in the shelter of a cave near the crash.”