Midnight Star (7 page)

It was an overcast day, chill and damp, but Chauncey was too excited to notice the weather. She stepped off the sidewalk onto the wide street, a bright smile on her face for an old woman who was selling apples on the corner. Suddenly she was alone on that street in Plymouth, watching a carriage race toward her, its high wheels bouncing on the sharp cobblestones.
What is the fool doing!
She saw the driver vividly, his face swathed in a black handkerchief, an old felt hat pulled over his forehead. She heard his hoarse voice yelling at the horses as his whip flailed their backs.

I am going to die! Crushed beneath the horses’ hooves and the carriage wheels!

She smelled the thick steaming air blowing from the horses’ nostrils, saw the flecks of foam
dotting their necks. She could feel their bodies hurtling against her, crushing her . . .

“No!”

Chauncey jerked upright in her bunk, trembling with the crushing fear of the nightmare.

“Miss Chauncey! Are you all right?”

She raised dazed eyes to Mary’s concerned face, shadowed in the early-morning light. “I’m all right,” she said, her voice quivering as violently as her body.

“You dreamed about it again, didn’t you?”

Chauncey nodded as she ran her hands distractedly through her disheveled hair. “It was an accident,” she said. The words were becoming a litany after each recurrence of the awful dream.

“Yes it was, in a sense anyway,” Mary said, handing Chauncey a dampened cloth to wipe the perspiration from her forehead. “But it happened in England. Whatever madman it was who tried to run you down is many miles behind us. Lawks, miss, two oceans behind us, now that we’re in the Pacific! There’s no more need for you to fret about it.”

“But why?” Chauncey asked in a thin voice, like a child who wants reassurance from her parent. “I’ve done nothing to anyone. Who would try to kill me? Not even Aunt Augusta or Uncle Alfred—”

“Now, you listen to me, Miss Chauncey,” Mary interrupted in her no-nonsense voice, sitting herself beside her mistress on the narrow ship bunk. “That nice sailor saved you, and although he was just in the nick of time, you are alive and unharmed. It was a lunatic who drove that carriage.
We know those kinds of folk don’t need reasons. Now, you will think no more about it.”

But why would a madman be driving such a fine carriage? Why would a madman have his face hidden by a black handkerchief? Why would a madman, driven by insane, inexplicable forces, keep whipping the horses forward, leaving her in the gutter, held up by the sailor who had thrown his body against hers?

“I just wish it would stop.” She sighed, lying back against the narrow pillow. She did not repeat her thoughts again, for Mary had no answers to the questions that haunted her.

“It will if you’ll but let it,” Mary said sharply. “Lord knows I’ve nearly forgotten it. Thank the Lord Captain Markham stopped in Los Angeles to bring aboard fresh supplies. If I never eat another fish again it will be too soon!”

Chauncey forced herself to clear her mind of the memory and swallowed the retort that Mary could well forget it. It wasn’t she who had been nearly killed. She forced a smile to curve up the corners of her mouth. “I fancy the supplies he brought aboard from Valparaiso will bring him more of a profit.”

Mary’s full lips pursed into a thin line. “What an awful, depressing city that was! At least those trollops keep to themselves! It’s a disgrace that women would willingly accept such conditions! The good Lord knows . . .”

Chauncey stopped listening, for Mary’s outrage about the young women bound for prostitution in San Francisco was a theme with few variations. “Perhaps their lives will be better,”
she said mildly when Mary stopped her diatribe to take a breath.

“Harrumph,” said Mary. “At least Captain Markham has the decency to keep them away from you.”

“I am, after all, a paying passenger,” Chauncey said.

“And a lady! I hope you’ve been paying attention to all Captain Markham’s been telling you. Not all that many proper ladies in this so-called city we’re traveling to. And another thing, Miss Chauncey. All your subtle questions about the wealthy men in San Francisco, Mr. Delaney Saxton in particular—well, I think you should go easy. He might begin to think that you have some sort of unhealthy interest in the man.”

“I’ve learned all I need to about Mr. Saxton,” Chauncey said. “At least, enough for the moment. I admit to being surprised that he is so young, and unmarried. Somehow one tends to think that a true villain must be older, paunchy perhaps, with a dissipated face.”

“Many of the men in San Francisco are young and unmarried, and if they are married, their wives and children are safely back East. Why do you think these . . . trollops are in such demand?”

Off again, Chauncey thought. If only Mary knew the half of what Captain Markham had told her! At least she didn’t have to be fearful of his motives, for indeed he seemed to regard her as a daughter to be protected. “So many young, boisterous men, my dear,” he would say over the months they traveled together. “Wild, full of spirits, and dangerous upon occasion. Duels, fights, violence—they exercise little restraint. Practice
with the derringer I gave you, my dear. Even a lady such as yourself must be prepared. San Francisco is not yet civilized like New York or your home, London. Not, of course, that things haven’t changed over the last couple of years. More decent women now, but not that many more. The Vigilantes helped quiet things down. Two years ago, that was. Hanged some of those rotters, the Sydney Ducks, scum, the lot of them! Villains and criminals from Australia come here to rob and murder. Aye, you’ll stay far away from Sydney Town.”

If Mary were to see the ivory-handled, very deadly derringer, she would likely swoon, Chauncey thought. She shot it well now. Over two months of practice, when Mary was snug in her bunk for her afternoon nap, had made Chauncey a competent marksman. Captain Markman’s first mate, Mr. Johansen, had been her instructor during the past month. He was utterly in awe of his captain, and so Chauncey felt as safe with him as she would with the vicar from her home in Surrey.

Mary became silent, seeing that her mistress had fallen into a brown study. She does naught but think about that man, she thought as she smoothed out the sheets on her own small bunk. It’s unhealthy. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. Mary frowned at her biblical turn of thought. She could just imagine Miss Chauncey’s fine eyes darkening with implacable determination were she to say something like that to her. “The Lord would likely take too long, if he ever got around to it,” she could hear Miss Chauncey say in a cold, remote voice.

Actually, Chauncey was remembering her carefree life before her father’s death. She wasn’t certain now if she’d had two serious thoughts in her head then. “You’re such a loving, sweet little soul,” her father would tell her, ruffling her tousled curls. “But such a little scamp! What would your dear mother think, I wonder.” That loving, sweet little soul had seemingly disappeared. The scamp was long gone too, as were both her parents. She shuddered, wondering whether she would now be wed to Sir Guy, living in his home and paying obeisance to his mother, if her father hadn’t died in such circumstances. “There’s always some good, no matter how bad things look,” her old Irish nurse, Hannah, had told her as a child. But that was when a picnic was canceled because of rain. Poor Hannah, dying of cholera on a trip back to Ireland.

Three months aboard a ship is enough to drive one mad. I’m becoming maudlin and stupid. I must remember; I must plan.

“Is it time to get dressed for breakfast, Mary?”

Mary nodded briskly. “Just about. There’s but a small basin of clean water, as usual.”

“Ah, to be perfectly clean again,” Chauncey sighed. “A real bath.” She rolled out of her bunk and planted her bare feet firmly on the wooden floor.

“Well, it won’t be long now. Captain Markham said we’ll be arriving in San Francisco in but three days! It seems like ten years since we left New York, much less England.”

“I doubt San Francisco will be anything like New York,” Chauncey said as she drew her white bastiste nightgown over her head. “I was
surprised at how . . . civilized the city was.” She fell silent a moment, remembering Rio de Janeiro, a city as exotic as any described in the Minerva Press novels. They had docked there for a week while repairs were made on the
Eastern Light.
Although there were many Europeans and Americans living in the city, it was the influence of the early Portuguese inhabitants that seemed to dominate. Chauncey would never forget shopping in the open-air stalls, watching the garishly dressed black women hawking all kinds of fruits as well as cloth, jewelry, tea, and coffee. She had brought enough gewgaws to fill a small valise. She smiled vaguely, now remembering how she would have gladly tossed away her exotic purchases when the ship floundered like a toy wooden boat in the cold, raging winds that gusted as the two oceans met at the tip of South America. Chauncey as well as the majority of the other passengers fell so ill with seasickness that she had wanted to die. Both she and Mary had even been hurled from their damp bunks several times by the ferocious hail-and snowstorms that pounded the ship. It had taken the
Eastern Light
an entire week to round Cape Horn. One of the great sails had been torn asunder, but Captain Markham hadn’t seemed overly perturbed. “Slight damage, very slight. Fine sailing and a kettle full of luck” was what he said.

“Do you know how lucky we are, Mary? Mr. Johansen told me that many of the ships take a good eight months to navigate from New York around Cape Horn to San Francisco. And we’re going to reach San Francisco in three months.”

Three months of miserable food, cramped
quarters, and near-death, Mary thought. “I suppose it’s better than struggling overland through that awful-sounding Panama place with all its fevers and vicious natives! And just thinking about riding in those dreadful wagons across the interior of America, thirsting to death in the desert or losing your head to those red Indians—”

“Scalps, Mary, not heads.”

“The result is the same, miss!”

“Indeed,” Chauncey said absently, no longer paying attention, her thoughts inevitably going to the man in San Francisco. “Soon, Mr. Delaney Saxton,” she said softly. “Soon.”

The
Eastern Light
didn’t pass through the Golden Gate until five days later. There was another storm to ride out, not so severe as the one that had sent the ship diving into the trough of incredibly deep waves off Cape Horn, its white sails beating against the savage burst of rain and wind. But still the rolling and bucking decks were enough to send Mary to her knees in devout and loud prayer and to make Chauncey’s stomach roil in protest.

“Another trip safely done,” Captain Markham said with simple pride as he stood by Chauncey on the quarterdeck as the ship neared its berth on what the captain called the Long Wharf. “More changes, I see,” he continued. “Every time I return, the city has stretched itself outward. That area yonder—but two years ago it was still bay. A lot of bay has been filled in since the first argonauts arrived for gold in forty-nine, and more miles of wharf than you’d imagine. You’ll find many streets paved with wooden planks now,
Miss Chauncey. Lucky they are, else after the rains you’d sink to your knees in the mud. And I heard that we’ll have gas lights soon. Not a dismal little village any longer. No, as bustling a port as New Orleans.”

“Just look at the hills,” Chauncey said in some awe.

“That’s Russian Hill,” Captain Markham said, following her pointing finger. “And there is Telegraph Hill, called that because of the semaphore atop it. And there is Fern Hill. Houses are starting to creep up them now, but it’s tough going. On the ocean side, there’s naught but rolling sand dunes, no hills.”

“The city looks quite modern. All the brick buildings.”

“Aye, that’s true. Used to be all wooden shanties, but fires have been a problem. Lucky in the long run, I guess. After each fire, San Francisco rebuilt better than before. Brick replaced wood. Makes men proud of their city.”

It required another three hours before Chauncey and Mary, their luggage piled high in a dray, were on their way to the Oriental Hotel on Market Street at Battery. “The only proper place for a lady to reside,” Captain Markham had told her at least ten times. She had bid the captain an affectionate good-bye, promising to dine with him two evenings hence.

Their dray made its way ponderously down a bustling street lined mostly with brick buildings and colorful signs proclaiming the type of business. “What a beautiful and . . . unusual city,” Chauncey said to their driver.

“Montgomery Street,” their loquacious driver
told them. “All the bankers, assayers, gold buyers, and jewelers have businesses here.”

Delaney Saxton’s bank must be somewhere close.
“Where is the Saxton, Brewer, and Company bank?” she asked.

“There, miss, on the corner of California Street. A good solid bank. You’ll do well there.”

You may be certain that I shall, she thought, her eyes darkening as she stared at the brick-faced building. She thought of the thousands of dollars’ worth of diamonds carefully sewn into the hem of her gown. Oh yes, I will be giving Mr. Saxton a good deal of business.

“Forgive me, miss,” the driver said, turning slightly to look at Chauncey. “You here to meet your parents?”

“I am here to visit your beautiful city,” she said.