Tears of Gold (15 page)

“And how much longer must we be waiting, Don Luís?” Mara asked, “I can’t be promising for Brendan that he’ll be content to stay any longer. He’s getting restless,” Mara warned him.

Don Luís stared down his aquiline nose, his lips tightening into a thin, tight line. “And he also will not be getting paid, should he become too restless and decide to leave in the middle of the night,” Don Luís replied coolly.

“Maybe you should be worrying about having us gone from here because as Señora Villareale,” Mara taunted him, “I could make sure that your business deal never did reach completion.”

Don Luís’s dark eyes narrowed dangerously. “I think in future I shall have to devote more time to my niece. I do not want you building up false hopes; that would not do at all,” he said in a hard voice as he smiled down at her.

“Oh, I think we understand one another, Don Luís,” Mara said with an answering smile that did not touch the gold of her eyes.

“I am relieved, then, for I shall see to my part of the bargain, that I promise,” Don Luís declared haughtily, “only I cannot succeed without you fulfilling your part. So we are at what they call a stalemate, sí? We work together, and we both profit handsomely. Agreed?”

Mara reluctantly nodded her dark head. “Agreed, Don Luís.”

Don Luís smiled in genuine pleasure. “Do not fear, my dear, for all shall work out as I have planned; it is merely a matter of time and patience, and I have enough of that for all of us,” Don Luís said confidently.

The rest of the evening passed quickly and gaily, with Brendan fetching his fiddle and joining the musicians for a couple of rousing tunes that harmoniously blended many familiar Irish ditties and strange Spanish melodies into a unique concert, much to the pleasure of the appreciative, music-loving Californians. Brendan, as usual, was the star of the evening and thoroughly enjoyed taking his bows after his impromptu performance and basking in his much exalted position. The merrymaking continued until the pink edges of dawn drew the evening to a close and the revelers slowly made their way to their rooms, many reluctantly, Mara thought as she continued to hear laughter and voices from the sala across the courtyard even as she fell into a deep, untroubled sleep.

***

Nicholas Chantale stared thoughtfully through the iron grillwork of his window as the first blush of morning lightened the eastern sky, shading it into pink and mauve. He stared, unseeing, as he felt a wave of frustration wash over him. How could he have been so mistaken? He would have sworn that the woman had been the actress, Mara O’Flynn. He had searched the mining camps and finally the ranchos of the coastal range for her, certain at last that his quest was at an end, only to find a woman called Amaya Vaughan instead. What a fool he’d been to think that fate would have played into his hands so easily in that chance encounter.

He laughed derisively as he remembered not having believed his luck when he’d glanced up and seen before his very eyes the face that had haunted him for over two years. Who could have imagined that he would see Mara O’Flynn in the dining room of a hotel in a place called Sacramento City. As a gambling man he wouldn’t have accepted the odds, thinking them too high.

Two years. Had it really been so long ago that he’d stood over Julian’s bed helplessly watching him suffer, hearing his fever-cracked lips curse the woman who had caused him such anguish? He had gone to her lodgings the following morning, only to find that she had left just hours before for the Continent. He had hired detectives to track her down, even though he hadn’t been quite sure of his plans when he did ultimately find her. He’d received a report that she was living in a Paris hotel with a man, also called O’Flynn. Probably a husband who was conveniently absent most of the time, he thought in disgust.

But before he could travel to Paris to confront her, they had disappeared without a trace, running out on their hotel bill in the middle of the night.

Being of the theater, they would have eventually reappeared in either London or Paris, or perhaps even Dublin since they were Irish; but the unexpected had happened and he’d had to set aside his plans for revenge. Gold had been discovered in California, and he, like so many other thousands, had set out to make his fortune. He had roused his longtime friend and traveling companion, Karl Svengaard, from a warm bed and a dalliance with a buxom seamstress. Overcoming the big, raw-boned Swede’s initial resentment at having been so rudely interrupted, he had easily persuaded him that it would ultimately prove to have been a timely interruption and well worth his while.

They had made their plans immediately and set sail for New York, arriving in the spring of ’forty-nine. They paid the exorbitant three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar ticket price for their berths on a steamer bound for California via the Isthmus of Panama, well worth the price considering it would take them only little over a month to reach the California shores, rather than the seven-month journey around the Horn. He could remember standing alone on deck as they sailed from New York, no family or loved ones to wave farewell to them from the noisy, pushing throng of people crowding the docks and piers to see off relatives as they began their uncertain voyage and quest for gold.

The overloaded steamship had slowly made its way into the stormy Atlantic and sailed down the east coast to Charleston, past Savannah, and on down the length of sandy beaches and thick, low-lying swamps of cypress and mangrove that choked the shores of Florida. Carried along in the balmy weather of the Gulf Stream, they soon reached Cuba and sailed under the old fortress guarding the entrance to Morro Bay as they docked in the port of Havana. Leaving behind the lush vegetation, slopes of sugarcane, and groves of oranges that belonged to the rich planters who lived in the gleaming white houses on the hillsides, they had sailed deeper into the Caribbean. After stopping briefly in Kingston, Jamaica, they’d had an easy crossing to Chagres, as far as they could go by sea. They would now have to travel up the Chagres River and across Panama to Panama City, where they would be able to catch a Pacific steamer to carry them the rest of their journey. They had traveled the first fifty miles across the isthmus in native dugout canoes poled along the river by Indians as they passed beneath creepers hanging down on them from low boughs of sycamores, and they took shelter from the downpour of frequent storms in primitive huts along the mosquito-infested banks of the river. They had left the river at Cruces and traveled the last twenty-five miles or so by muleback on a rough road cut through gullies and along steep hillsides covered with thick jungle vegetation. It had taken them five days to travel through the tropical forests of Panama, the sudden and drenching rainstorms leaving them struggling knee-deep in red mud, their clothes sticking hotly to their skin as they fought off the armies of gnats and mosquitoes that viciously attacked them.

Upon reaching Panama City they had found over a thousand stranded gold seekers camped in primitive quarters outside the city as they impatiently waited for transport to the gold fields of California. There were few hotels in the ancient and decaying city that had once seen Spanish conquistadors with their stolen Incan gold make plans for conquering the New World. It was now a city of grass-grown plazas, rotting wooden structures, and adobe walls deteriorating under the choking tentacles of jungle creepers and vines. The once heavily fortified fortress for protection against pirates now lay in ruins, and the cathedral was hardly more than a stone shell, ravaged by fire and sword.

Most of the adventurers camped around the city were sick with dysentery, malaria, or cholera caught from the fever-ridden jungles. They gambled and sweated away the endless hours as they waited for the steamer from Peru that would take them the rest of their journey. Adding to the discomfort of mind and body suffered from the squalid living conditions they had been forced to endure, many a dispirited traveler had found his ticket to California had only been good as far as Chagres and had not guaranteed passage to the end of the line. Because of overbooking by the steamship line, tickets were at a premium and being sold at an extortionate price. He and the Swede had been the lucky ones, for they’d had the extra thousand apiece needed to buy their way to San Francisco. The less fortunate, either too sick to travel or too poor to continue any farther, were stranded in Panama and left to uncertain fates.

Nicholas refocused his eyes on the dawn now lightening the California sky to a pale shade of blue. That had been almost a year ago, a year spent in the diggings working his fingers to the bone, standing hip-high in ice-cold mountain streams or raising a pick high over his shoulder under a blazing sun as he searched for those elusive gold nuggets. Existing on beans and bacon, pancakes and pork roasted over an open fire, they had camped high on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, where once only herds of elk and black-tailed deer, grizzly bears and rabbits had roamed the forests of virgin pine.

Rising at daybreak, he and the Swede would start panning a stream for gold, standing with the snow-melted waters swirling around their thighs while they rotated a flat-bottomed tin pan until their arms felt like lead and their legs were numb with cold. Working the stream until sunset, they might average around sixteen to twenty dollars, a very small profit when one egg had cost them a dollar, and a pair of boots, forty dollars. They had sweated through the long, hot summer months, showing very little profit for their backbreaking toil, only to be driven indoors for weeks at a time when the rainy season began. They couldn’t risk leaving their claims unwatched and had to suffer months of claustrophobic inactivity as they shivered in damp blankets and amused themselves by gambling and drinking. Nothing was constant in the mining camps, for the adventurers were a restless breed who grew impatient if they could not find that promised gold immediately; it was a never-ending search for some unclaimed, gold-rich piece of earth. Rumors were rampant, and a city of tents could be uprooted and disappear overnight, the miners pulling up stakes at the first whisper of a strike in another valley. The streets of the mining camps twisted tortuously along steep ridges or through the bottoms of deep canyons and were dusty in summer, muddy in winter, their rutted surfaces littered with garbage from the miners’ casual lifestyle. The most respectable-looking building in the whole town was always the gambling hall, with its long, gilt-framed mirrors and red velvet hangings where exhausted, weather-beaten men could spend their gold dust on whiskey and women.

Nicholas wondered now at the chain of events that had brought him to Sacramento City in time to be misled. He had thought for a while that his good luck had been disguised as bad, but now he was faced with the realization that his mind might have been playing fantastic tricks on him. For how could he ever have thought that the Swede’s broken leg could have been anything but the worst luck? They had been working a Long Tom, a fifteen- to twenty-foot-long wooden trough with a perforated iron sheet called the riddle at the lower end, and beneath, the riffle box, a catchall for the dirt and gold that was washed through the trough. Usually it required three to four men to handle the cumbersome device. The two stationed at the head with spades would throw in large quantities of dirt to be washed down with a stream of water to the riddle, which was kept in motion by a man with a hoe. The heavier gold particles would remain in the riffle box while the dirt washed over the sides in a muddy stream of water.

Nicholas mentally kicked himself now for having let the Swede persuade him that they could easily manage the Long Tom by themselves and had little use for two more partners. The Swede had been shoveling the dirt into the long trough while he had stood at its bottom shaking the riddle when the trough had started to slide from its precarious perch on the hillside. The Swede had tried to halt its progress and had succeeded only in falling into it and toppling down the slope with it into the stream bed below, a tangle of waving hands and feet and broken boards. Nicholas smiled reminiscently, for the Swede’s clumsy and ill-advised attempt at saving the Long Tom had given him the time needed to jump clear, and he had emerged unscathed except for the stream of abuse and profanity flung at him from beneath the rubble of the Long Tom.

This time he had ignored the Swede’s opinion that he could set the bones himself and be healed in no time, and under the threat of being hog-tied had persuaded the big Swede back to Sacramento City. He had seen too many miners die from their wounds after having a leg or an arm amputated by a well-meaning friend and occasional surgeon on the side.

The Swede’s leg had been set that morning he had been sitting in the City Hotel and had seen the woman he had thought was Mara O’Flynn. He had been forced to wait another couple of days to make sure the Swede would have no difficulties, and finally had set out to search for the woman he had just briefly glimpsed passing through the dining room. He’d left the Swede contentedly ensconced at the hotel and being consoled by a handsome French faro dealer, her dark eyes attracted to the blond, blue-eyed Swede and his buckskin pouch full of gold dust.

Nicholas hadn’t thought he was wasting time, for the Swede would not be going anywhere for at least a month, and this unexpected meeting with Mara O’Flynn had been too good an opportunity to pass up; only now it looked as though it had all been for nothing. Nicholas flexed his shoulder muscles tiredly, and scratching the dark, wiry hair covering his bare chest, he had to admit that he was puzzled, for unless that woman had a twin, she was Mara O’Flynn. Shaking his head, Nicholas walked over to his bed, where he had carelessly discarded his shirt and waistcoat, and now searched through the waistcoat pocket until his hard fingers closed over a smooth metal object.

Nicholas thoughtfully dangled the golden locket from its delicate chain, then opened it to stare at a face he had come to know as well as his own. His green eyes burned into the painted face that seemed to mock his every move. He could almost hear the derisive chuckle coming from that provocative half-smile. And wasn’t the stare from the slightly slanted golden eyes becoming more contemptuous with each passing day? Nicholas gave a snort of disgust. By God, he was becoming obsessed with a woman he had never even met, because of that promise made to his sister during Julian’s illness. It did not carry quite the same importance it once had. Julian had recovered. But he hadn’t left his sick bed completely unscarred. He had learned a valuable lesson, and maybe next time he would be a little more cautious before giving his heart.