Belle Cora: A Novel (65 page)

The most popular explanation for the fire was that Australians set it in order to loot the stores. Another theory, told to me in several versions, was that the fire had been set by a Negro, who had been thrown out of the saloon where the conflagration began. Other people—Australians, Negroes, workingmen—insisted that the merchants had set it, to raise prices by destroying excess stock. The city was awash in tales of conspiracy, as might be expected when such a varying group of men are brought together and there is a treasure for them to fight over.

JEPTHA MADE TEN DOLLARS A DAY
helping to put up new edifices that were only a little more substantial than those that had burned down so easily. Many of them were portable houses of wood or iron that had been shipped in pieces around the Horn. He continued to preach in the streets outside the gambling saloons, and along the wharves, and among the tents on the hillsides. I noticed that when he talked to me about putting the houses together he spoke with pride, but when he spoke about his preaching, whether it went well or badly, there was a new distance in his voice, as though it had been spoiled for him. Once, in our cabin on the
Flavius
, he rehearsed to me the outline of a sermon he planned to give. “But I thought …,” I began, and stopped myself.

“What?” He turned to me abruptly, as if I had caught him in the midst of some furtive crime. “What did you think?”

“Nothing—just that you used not to prepare your sermons in advance.”

He said nothing for a moment, and I saw he was sorry he had snapped at me. “I said, I think, when we were on the
Juniper
, I said that I
used
to plan them, and then I stopped planning them and just waited for the spirit to move me. But that was on the
Juniper
. Now I’m here in California, and a great deal hangs on the success of what I do here, and it would be remiss of me not to plan.”

He had begun gently, but by the time he was done, the tone of his voice was nasty and defensive, a tone I had never before heard him assume with anyone. “I see,” I said.

That night, a gasp woke me. I felt him leave the bed. I heard him moving in the dark. A match sputtered to life and lit the candle in its lamp on a small table we had bought for the cabin. I sat up and saw him reading the list of names of well-connected men my grandfather had sent in his last letter. This was the part of his job he hated most, going to these practical men, these proud adventurers in the world of trade, and asking them to subscribe to a church, or to help him to rent space for worship in some schoolhouse or the back room of some store, and working on their vanity and their ambition to be big men—founders of a great city’s oldest Baptist church—since it was no use working on their religious feelings. Even their vanity was a weak force, compared with their greed. He wrote in pencil next to some of the names. He knew I was watching him. “I’m a beggar,” he said. “Parsons are beggars.”

Most professions have their little indignities. In the past he had always borne his cheerfully, sure of his abilities and his destiny, and believing that nothing was more important. “You work,” I reminded him. “You work as hard as any miner, for me and for God. They live for money; you have a higher purpose. Come to bed, Jeptha.”

Eventually, he did. We lay together. He stroked my hair in a way that he sometimes did before he took me. I yielded to him, needing this comfort, too. He threw his flesh into mine as though he wished he could drown in me; and I felt that, after all, I was learning something new about the uses of carnality. But after our crisis, before we drifted off to sleep, I recollected that when his gasp woke me I had been dreaming of Philippe. And I thought that probably Jeptha had been dreaming of Philippe as well.

Everything had been about Philippe since the moment the boy fell to the deck of the
Juniper
. Jeptha was like an animal running through the woods with a hunter’s arrow in him. The arrow had not taken him down yet, but it was bound to finally. Nothing I said was any help. The truest things I could think of saying—that no one is perfect and everybody makes mistakes—seemed banal and inadequate, and I made them weaker by hiding them among a lot of lies about Providence and tests from God,
and everything being for the good in the long run, things he must have guessed I did not believe. In completely separate conversations, sometimes he would say he didn’t deserve me, and I would say, “Just the same, you have me, you always will.” Then we would go to bed.

The next day, he came home carrying an empty light-brown sack imprinted in Spanish with the name of a Chilean flour company. He opened one of our trunks and stuffed into the sack every one of the forbidden books he had inherited from William Jefferds’s library—Paine, Volney, Strauss, Lessing, etc.—threw in rocks for extra weight, tied the sack, walked out of the cabin with the bag over his shoulder; I followed him, feeling that something very grave was happening, whose nature I did not quite comprehend. The hard edges of the books bulged, receded, and bulged again in temporary lines and rectangles on the coarse-woven cloth as they swung behind his back. He walked to the schooner’s stern, which was in the deepest water. I saw what he meant to do. “Must you?” I asked; he nodded, and he threw the sack into the bay.

I didn’t need to tell him that the books might fetch a great deal of money here. Nor could I believe his character had deteriorated to the point where he feared it to be known that he had possessed them. No, it had deteriorated to this point: he saw them as dangerous—to him and to others. Destroying books was no longer just for priests.

I asked him how his day had gone. He told me that he had preached to excellent effect outside the old adobe Custom House on Portsmouth Square.

“You’re doing well,” I said. “You’re becoming known.”

“I think so.”

“This is what you are made for. You’re good at it because you are made for it.”

“Yes, no doubt.” He was quiet for a while, and then, as if he had just been reminded of a completely different topic: “I’ve lost my faith.” He said it lightly, as if he meant his gloves, and they were bound to turn up.

“No,” I said. “You don’t mean that. Do you?”

“No, of course not. I was just joking,” and he talked a little about the sermon he would deliver next Sunday at the First Presbyterian Church.

I had sometimes hoped he would lose his faith, so we could be of like mind; but I had wanted it to happen gradually, over the years, taking it
all a little less seriously as time went on, with maybe just enough complacent, nebulous credulity left over to ease the passage to decrepitude and death. Not like this; I had no idea where this might lead.

XLVI

ABOUT EVERY TWO WEEKS
, the placement of two long black boards on a high tower on Telegraph Hill announced the arrival of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s side-wheeler. Then for a few days, the post office—a small wooden building with a porch and square columns, at Clay and Pike Streets—would be surrounded by a homesick mob while the clerks inside frantically alphabetized. Two lines formed, one before the window for mail in foreign languages, the other before the window for English mail and newspapers. Some men made a regular occupation of standing in the mud half the day, while slanting rain beat their hats and puddles deepened, so when their place was close to the front they could sell it.

To be sure of intercepting letters from Agnes, I always went straight to the front of the line and paid one of those men for his place. I would pay cash on delivery for Agnes’s letter, read it to follow the progress of her investigation, and burn it, the first moment I was alone, in the cookstove in the galley of the
Flavius
. I left all the other letters for Jeptha, so that he would think he was getting the mail.

Our room on the
Flavius
was a sailing vessel’s stateroom, with a few chairs and a table and a washstand, and a spring bed with a feather mattress in place of the shelflike berths. It was damp and chilly and smelled of the wharf. I expected that in a few months at the most we would find better accommodations; in any case, the discomforts of my existence did not make me long for my former life with a cook, a lady’s maid, carpets, fireplaces, a water closet, theaters, and restaurants. I wanted everything to be different, so that I could be different. I cooked, cleaned, carried
water, and made fires. With every sweep of the corn broom, I was becoming a better woman.

Memories of the
Flavius
come back to me easily: calm days when each vessel sat on its quivering, upended watery twin; clear nights when lights on the ships were reflected as shimmering yellow streamers in the bay. Up in the hills, the tents and canvas houses, lit from within, resembled paper lanterns suspended in the blackness.

I don’t remember the exact date when I went to the post office and saw Jeptha stepping out from the shadow of the porch and into the light, a clutch of envelopes in his hand. I do know that it was in late February, and that I was a month past my time, with all the signs of pregnancy, but I had not told him yet. As soon as I saw him, I formed a plan to distract him with the news of my condition and get the letters before he read them.

It was chilly but clear. The wind rose, sending handbills into flight, making ripples in the shallow tawny puddles and the deep silver-black puddles on the undulating streets, while men pulled their coats tight and grabbed their hats. Jeptha looked dazed and lost, sadder than his fellows, and when he saw me there was something else—shock, fear—and he turned his face away as though consulting with the horizon or a wheelbarrow or a sparrow; when he turned back, he looked on me with a sort of shyness. I knew he had just read one of Agnes’s letters. I felt I was in terrible trouble, but not beyond hope. We walked toward each other and embraced. I realized
again
, as if in the previous second I had forgotten it, that he had read the letter. “Arabella,” he murmured, and the knowledge was present in the way he uttered my name, with a hint, suppressed, but detectable, of helpless grief.

We walked down the muddy hill, his arm around my shoulder. “You’re trembling,” he said.

“I’m cold,” I said.

“Arabella, I have just read a letter from Agnes,” he said, and though I had been as sure, as sure as that I was standing on a wet hill among a crowd of men sporadically putting their hands to their hats, that he had read the letter, to hear him say it made my knees buckle, and though it was in my interest to seem indifferent to the news, I could not. I would have fallen in the mud if he hadn’t caught me. “Are you all right?” he said,
and we walked again, facing in the same direction, toward a little rise of mud and sand and rocks that hid the bay from view just then. “This isn’t her first letter,” he said. “You’ve read her earlier letters. You read them and you destroy them. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes, Jeptha.”

There was silence as, perhaps, he waited for me to speak. It was a hopeful silence. It was an invitation for me to explain it all away. I had thought a thousand times of what I would say, worked out half a dozen speeches, and I saw now that none of them were any good.

“When, Arabella?”

“In Rio. That was the first letter. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said, squeezing my shoulders. “What else would I mean?”

“I don’t know.”

The bumpy street of mud and pebbles and scrub began to rise. At the top of it the bay came into view, the geometrical lines of the wharves, the tidal stretch of mud flats which grew and shrank daily, the crescent-shaped little city of wooden ships, the watery expanse gleaming and shadowy, here blue, there silver, in constant watchful motion.

“Arabella,” he said.

I turned and looked up at him. He was troubled, but he wasn’t cold. I had hope.

I said, “You’ve read it; it’s the fifth one. I know most of what’s in it—she adds something new to each one and repeats the old accusations. She seems to know I’m intercepting them, and she keeps on, knowing one is bound to get through finally, and now one has. I know what you’ll say, that you know she is a liar, that I should have trusted you not to believe her, but—” He began to speak; I put my hand over his mouth. I was inspired, I felt as if I were telling the truth; I was telling the inner truth. “I couldn’t bear it. Do you understand? I couldn’t bear to let her put those pictures in your mind. To be thinking those things when you looked at me. She scours the mire of the streets, she is willing to abase herself and pick up the dung of the streets to fling at me. She wants to poison our marriage. And now she has.”