Belle Cora: A Novel (95 page)

“Does it hurt, Jeptha?”

“Yes, it hurts,” he said. “But I can walk.” He let go of me, taking the pistol with him, and walked a few steps.

“You win,” I said.

“Maybe. My socks are wet.”

Wet socks: blood. That gave me hope. The door opened. Soldiers rushed in.

I HAD TORN A HOLE THROUGH
his boot and blown a small chip off the medial malleolus of his left tibia; it was the little knob just below the ankle. Better aim and I would have put him out of the war for the duration. As it was, he was laid up for a week. It was agreed, officially, that it had been an accident. A determination that I had shot him deliberately, after having been left alone with him on orders from Colonel Baker, would have been too embarrassing to all concerned. But everyone in the regiment knew better. I would never again be allowed on an army base or in an army camp.

Unable to do more, forbidden even to see my man until he was discharged, I took a steamship down to Panama and the rail across Panama
and another steamship back to San Francisco, a journey as grim and bleak as the one before it had been hopeful and fine. I was helpless to control events and helpless to control my thoughts. Having nothing else to distract me, I resumed the management of my properties, including the parlor house on Pike Street. Like all the other anxious wives and mothers and sweethearts, I fell on each new issue of the
Alta California
and the
Bulletin
for news of the fighting in the East, and felt easier as soon as I was sure the headlines did not name the 71st Pennsylvania Regiment. The casualty lists came at the article’s end, in the smallest type.

Like the other women, I hoped for letters, and fortunately Jeptha was a good correspondent. During the war he wrote to me 137 times.

LXVII

WITH MY HEART ON THE OTHER SIDE
of the continent, I held a grand ball—as I had been doing annually for some years—sending out invitations to all the wealthiest and best-regarded men (including all the clergymen, just for the talk it caused) and to every surviving member of the vigilantes’ executive committee. I would also hold a soirée, smaller and even more select, whenever a new girl arrived.

Now and then I wrote a letter to Frank at the Pearson Academy. On occasion he answered. His letters were brief and uninformative.

I had always to be on the lookout for an interesting new girl. Those leaving me sometimes recommended a replacement. Occasionally, I made use of an employment agency. I know it sounds strange, but it is true. There existed in those times several organizations in New York that would arrange for young girls to go to California, promising them highly paid work as maids, housekeepers, or cooks; the girls need pay no fee, thanks to the great demand for female help in the West. Three of these agencies were really professional procurers whose fees were paid by madams and pimps, as some unsuspecting young females learned only upon
reaching their destination; and if the girls offered resistance, they were treated, I am sorry to say, very roughly, until their will to resist had been broken. I had sometimes used these agencies—insisting that they send me only girls who knew exactly what they were getting into. However, as you may imagine, the men and women who ran these businesses were not very scrupulous. One day late in August of ’61, there appeared at my door a fresh, slender, willowy seventeen-year-old girl, apparently under the impression that she was going to be a maid in a hotel. Her face was not beautiful, but it was pretty; she had good skin and teeth and a splendid figure; and she was pleasing enough in her apparent innocence to have made a small fortune for both of us, providing she was game and cooperative.

When a servant had taken her coat, I said, “You have a good figure.” She smiled nervously. I had her bags brought up to the room I had prepared for her. We sat in the parlor. Girls in various states of undress, who had already heard from Niobe that this child had identified herself as the new maid at the “Cora Hotel,” came in to get a look at her. I watched as she responded shyly to their sly inquiries, and then I shooed them away. At last I said, “Colleen Flynn. You’re Irish.”

“Yes,” she said, sitting—I had insisted that she sit—with her knees together and her hands folded, leaning forward. “They told you what my name was. They told me that they told you.”

“Did they? Well, they have lied to both of us. But I don’t mind an Irish girl so long as she doesn’t steal and her manners are good. Many San Francisco employers are less broad-minded, and if for some reason you must seek employment elsewhere it may be an obstacle to you. Do you go to mass?”

“I used to.”

“You speak well for an Irish girl.” In this at least the agency had followed my instructions. “Were you born here or there?”

“Here. In Brooklyn. I was a maid in New York.”

“So was I, once. Do you have family?”

She nodded. Her father was an iron molder in Troy. One sister made hats, another was married, two brothers were in the Army of the Potomac. Her mother was dead.

“Why have you come here, Colleen?”

“I wanted to see California. I heard wages were good.”

“Forgive me for asking, but where you were a maid, did the man of the house do anything improper? Try to get you in his bed? We’re alone here. You can tell me.”

She blushed easily—to some men an exciting feature. She hated the question. She didn’t think I had a right to ask it, but she had come a long way and had no idea what awaited her in San Francisco if she did not get this job. At last she made a small, almost imperceptible nod.

“He did,” I said. “Well, it’s natural. It’s human nature. Did he succeed?”

“No!” she said hotly. “Why do you ask these questions? What is this place?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh, please let me go. I won’t tell anyone that you brought me here. You can have my things that your servants took.”

I rang a bell, frightening her even more for a moment. I told Niobe to have Colleen’s bags brought down. “I would never make a girl stay here against her will. You can ask anyone here, or anyone out there where they hate Irish girls.”

The only way to make her believe that she was really free was to let her go. I called my driver to bring her to the Railroad House, where I had her put up for the night at my expense.

The next day, I visited her and persuaded her to come back to be my lady’s maid. I told her quite openly that I hoped exposure to the other girls would lead her to change her mind. She would see that they were comfortable and about as happy as most people are. They were not really any different from other women, and the men who visited them were a very high class of men. To know such men was a privilege which a girl like her was unlikely to enjoy in any other profession. She would be proud of her ability to please them; whenever she felt dirty, she could take a bath; whenever she felt guilty, she could go to confession. She would begin to think of the tidy nest egg she could save in just a year of this work, after which she might move somewhere else, as so many women who were now respectable wives and mothers had done, with no one the wiser.

She didn’t say that she would rather die; she just said that her mind was made up. I liked her for that. She was bright and, whatever her private
opinions, not openly judgmental. She became friendly with the girls, who were amused by her innocence, some teasing it, some protecting it. I enjoyed her company. It seemed to me that in time she would come around.

I received the following letter from Jeptha:

This letter, because of its last paragraph, had an overwhelming effect on me, with three distinct phases. For a day, I was very happy. On the second day, I was overcome with terror. It was too good to be true. I was bad. I didn’t deserve such happiness. Something terrible would occur to prevent it. Four more days passed. It was unbearable. I decided that I must make a bargain with fate. I made a resolution, and relief came instantly. I knew that I couldn’t cheat, I couldn’t hesitate, or it would all come back.

Over the following two months, I sold my boarding houses and several other properties in San Francisco, retaining deeds to many lots of wasteland in places likely to become more valuable with the growth of the city. I bought shares in Eastern railroad stocks and Western silver-mining stocks. I sold the house in Sacramento to the woman who had been managing it for me, and the girls currently there stayed. I closed up the house on Pike Street and lived there alone with Colleen. When I went out, I walked into the stores, carrying a handkerchief before my face and coughing in the way my mother had coughed for years before she died. As a final measure, I bribed the city coroner, who gambled and was always in need of money, to write out a death certificate and a report asserting that Belle Cora had died of consumption, hastened by opium poisoning, self-administered.

My death was announced in the next issue of each of the city’s newspapers, and I had the satisfaction of reading my obituaries. The majority treated me as a relic of San Francisco’s legendary past, recounting the events surrounding Charley’s trial and his hanging as if they had occurred a century ago. Others defamed us both one last time.

A black wagon came to my house, picked up a coffin weighted with
bags of sand, and brought it to the Pleasant Valley Cemetery, to which I had long ago moved Charley’s remains; his tombstone was replaced with another, which bore both our names as well as a bas-relief carving that depicted our wedding in the vigilante headquarters. I took up residence under the name Frances Dickinson in a two-story, brick-and-clapboard house on Stockton Street. From my top window I could see Alcatraz, Angel Island, and the mountains on the other end of the bay.

I had already written to Lewis, Edward, Agnes, Anne, and Jeptha, telling them what I was doing and that they should address letters to me to a post-office box until further notice; I communicated my new name, circumstances, and address to Frank as well. I asked Jeptha what he thought our next move ought to be. I had written him exactly 152 letters.