California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1) (53 page)

"You didn't know him well,
then?"

"Well enough. I knew all my men. But
he was not among the cavalrymen and officers I spent most of my time with.
There were four hundred men under me, you understand."

"You say he wasn't with your
cavalry?"

"No, he was assigned to a detachment
of unmounted. They served primarily as picket guards. In battle he was a
flag-bearer."

"And you didn't actually see him
killed?"

"No, madam. I was told of the
peculiar nature of his death by his friend, Lieutenant, then Sergeant, Harlan
Cooper."

"What do you mean, peculiar?"

"We were unexpectedly overrun by a
superior force of Mosby's guerrilla cavalry at Aldie. Most of our engagements
were with the raiders, as they were called. Very difficult business for almost
a year. Back and forth across the Potomac and just about every hill in northern
Virginia."

Esther's mouth was suddenly dry.

"Mosby?"

"Yes. Colonel John Singleton Mosby.
In any case, they caught us by surprise. Overran us and took quite a number of
prisoners. Killed and wounded many of our men, Lieutenant Cooper among them,
and then they were repulsed. The battle was over, and we were peppering  their 
retreat from across a meadow when Private Cable inexplicably dashed after them
across the field. He was ordered back several times. At least once by
Lieutenant Cooper. To no avail. For some reason he seemed to have lost his
senses. Kept rushing across the field in an apparent attempt to kill one of the
Confederate officers with the point of his flagstaff. He was carrying the
regimental colors, you see. They were already in the woods, continuing their
retreat, when Private Cable reached them and was—killed."

"He was buried there?"

"I'm sure he was. I did not witness
the burial myself. We were quickly in pursuit of Mosby and his men. Never quite
caught up with them." Thompson paused, staring sadly out through the
windows of his study at the waters of San Francisco Bay. "That is all I
can tell you, madam. You might gain additional details from Lieutenant Cooper.
I can give you his address."

Thompson
walked with Esther to her carriage. "I grieve with you, madam, believe me.
Your nephew was a popular young lad. The pity of it is that his death was
unnecessary. Aldie was our last serious encounter with the guerrillas."

She found Harlan Cooper at the wayside
inn he ran just north of Sausalito the following morning. When she told the
slender, bearded man with deep hollows under his eyes who she was and why she
had come, he limped out from behind the beer  taps and sat down with her at a
table half-lit with shafts of sunlight. A thousand dust motes danced between
them in the dark, sour-smelling tavern as he covered what Thompson had already
told her, then described Moses' last moments of life.

"I was lyin' there, couldn't move
with this leg shattered, you see, and he was tendin' to me and several other
men who was wounded. Keepin' his eye on the Rebs across the way. It'd grown so
quiet, 'cept for an occasional peppershot, you could hear yourself breathin'.
Of a sudden, a look come over Moses' face the likes of which I never seen. Like
he saw somethin' or someone that crazed him. I don't know what it was, anger
over what happened to me—we was close, you know—or what. But as I said, of a
sudden he gets this look in his eyes, like… like a wild creature, and ups and
sets out across that field after 'em, colors in hand. I don't know what he was
thinkin', or whether he had one of 'em picked out, but when he gets near the
woods on the other side, he runs straight at this officer on horseback,
pointin' that flagstaff right at the bloody Reb's chest. Captain he was—"

"An officer. A staff officer?"

"Yep. Seen that bird many a time
before. We was at 'em off and on maybe thirteen, fourteen months, you know.
Mean-lookin' man as I've ever seen. Rumor had it he was a relative of that
devil Mosby himself."

Esther closed her eyes and began to shake
her head, but Cooper, eyes blank and caught up in the memory, stared past her
all the way back to Aldie, Virginia, in July 1864.

"Anyways, Moses run at him and he
backed his horse so's the little fella missed him. Wheeled and come down on the
boy full force with a saber."

Esther put her hands to her face and
began to sob.

"I'm sorry, ma'am. Really sorry. At
the time it struck me down worse than this ball I'm carryin' in my hip. If it's
any comfort, I hear tell this officer, this relative of the guerrilla king
himself, was killed—in an accident—about a month later. More than a rumor,
actually, though I didn't see it myself. We'd pulled back to the Potomac by
then. Blown to bits by one of his own artillery pieces. I'd seen him cut down
so many men, I couldn't a' been more glad if I'd done it myself. Johnny Reb
bastard."

"Thank you," Esther said,
getting up. She was too numb even to cry now. Cooper limped with her to the
doorway.

"I'm sorry, ma'am. Like I said, I
took it hard when he was killed. He was a good boy. No better. You might say he
was like a son to me. Hope you'll pass my regrets along to his mother."

Esther turned to him. "He was buried
properly?"

Cooper had seen the sorrow etched around
Esther's eyes many times on many faces during the past year. "Had the boys
carry me on a litter to where they put him in the ground. Placed a cross of
thick branches on it myself."

He did not have the heart to tell her
that they had all moved on, either in pursuit of the raiders or to the medical
area at Fairfax County Courthouse, within minutes of the incident. Or that
Moses, along with two dozen others in darkly stained blues, had been left there
in the meadow grass under the scorching summer sun and the dark swarms of
eagerly keening flies.

Aboard
the
Pacific Union Express

May
7, 1869

11:55
a.m.

John Sutter gazed out through the window
beside his seat as the train slowed, then emerged from the pine forest and
rolled across a trestle high above a deep canyon. He could feel the express
begin to climb again as it left the trestle behind and moved on into wild
mountain country. Sutter got up and walked to the forward door of his car. He
turned for a moment, tipped his hat to Alex Todd, then went out the door and
stood on the platform, thinking. He stepped to one side so he could see through
the port in the opposite entrance. Luther Mosby was laughing as he drew in a
winning hand in the card game he was playing with three other passengers.
Sutter recognized the men. Southerners. The war was not over yet. It had simply
taken on a more subtle complexion. Sutter saw Mosby look at his watch and
wondered how the pieces he had begun to put next to one another in his mind
would all fit together. All the elements added up to more than the simple fact
that Mosby would undoubtedly attempt revenge on Alex Todd, no matter what he
had said to the contrary. Sutter hoped neither Alex nor Esther would be harmed.
But there was more to it than that, and Sutter sensed vaguely that it had
something to do with the pages in Esther's diary that he had read almost
twenty-two years before. He could not remember them in detail, but the gist of
it was enough. Esther had been in those mountains, and so had Mosby—at roughly
the same time. That much Sutter was sure of. Less certain was that somehow
Esther's part in whatever was about to happen went back far beyond the incident
involving Todd and Mosby the previous year.

It would all be foolish conjecture, he
thought, if he had not seen Mosby move down Front Street, then double back and
head for the parlor car late the night before. Ralston had gone to bed, and he
had remained in the second rocking chair on the third-floor porch, smoking his
cigar. Puzzled, curious, he had waited almost an hour until Mosby reappeared
and then saw Esther hurry back from the direction of the parlor car five
minutes later.

Considering
Esther's feelings and Mosby's obvious hatred for Alex, none of it made sense.
Particularly the fact that she seemed to have asked him to meet her in the
parlor car. Sutter shook his head. The look of unmitigated hatred on Solana's
face, a look she had concealed until she turned away from Mosby—after she had
delivered what was no doubt a note from Esther in the lobby of the hotel before
dinner—was even more puzzling. It was the first time he had ever seen
Solana
display more than a minimal degree of
emotion. Where, he wondered, could she have seen Mosby before? And what could
he have done to her to elicit such intense wrath? Sutter stared out at the
green blur of the conifers sweeping past, oblivious of their beauty, hardly
hearing the roar and racket the locomotive and the cars were making as the
train rushed onward. Many times he'd wondered about exactly what had happened
to Esther in the Sierras. Now he was sure that somewhere between here and
Promontory he would find out.

*
* *

Luther Mosby dealt, looked at his hand,
and decided to fold.

"What's the matter, judge?" one
of the players joshed. "Cards turned bad on you?"

"No, it's my stomach. Don't agree with
me, all this rattlin' and shakin'." He thought about the questions that
might be asked if he stayed in the parlor car with the woman all the way to
Promontory. "Keeps troublin' me, might just get off and stay off at Dutch
Flat. Excuse me, gentlemen. I think a little air might do me some good."

On the platform up forward, Mosby checked
the ladder leading to the roof, then looked up at the space between the cars.
They were rocking slightly, but he anticipated no difficulty in jumping from
one to another when he went up later. Back in the car he got his bag down from
the luggage rack. "Think I'll try to trade for a seat in the one up ahead.
Ain't rockin' as much."

"Hope you feel better, judge. We'd
hate to see you miss the festivities at Promontory."

Mosby
smiled, thinking of Alex Todd. "Wouldn't want to miss it for the world.
You boys stay honest, you hear?"

Solana
huddled beside young Todd in the engine
cab, fighting the fear engendered by this strange metal monster and the
incredible noise it was making. She glanced back over the low, attached
fuel-unit at the two infantrymen, rifles across their laps, sitting on the
crates lashed to the bed of the flatcar. Looking past them, she studied the
platform of the first passenger unit. The ladder was within easy reach. She
knew there were similar ladders on each end of the cars she could not see. She
pictured the other platforms farther back that she had observed the day before.
They were all the same, except that the forward platform of Charles Crocker's
parlor car contained a large, wooden equipment-bin.

*
* *

The roar of the train doubled in volume,
and the parlor car grew suddenly dark as the train rattled through a long,
wooden snowshed at the base of a steep ravine. When the car grew light again,
Esther uncorked the vial of powder and poured a small amount into a glass. It
was ground from four red and black jequirity-bean beads removed from the rosary
Colonel Thompson had given her along with the rest of Moses' personal effects.
Harmless when lacquered, even if a child sucked on them. When stripped and
ground to a fine dust, two of the beads contained enough indigenous poison to
kill a man. She shook the glass, one of a set carefully selected for their
color-match with the jequirity powder, until the poison lay in a fine coating
across the narrow bottom. Then she set the glass down with five others on a
tray containing a decanter filled with sherry. Placing the tray on the hinged
table between her seat and the one facing it, she arranged the glasses so they
appeared to be placed at random.

Leaning back, she thought of the numbing
grief that had enveloped her after she learned of Moses' death. For a month or
so it had been as immobilizing as the bone-deep mixture of lethargy and hatred
that gripped her for almost a year after she came down out of the Sierras.
Added to that were the frustration, anger, and then disappointment born of
being certain she would never have the opportunity to get back at Mosby.

Her chair swayed slightly as the train
rolled over another trestle, and she remembered how her rage at being cheated
of her revenge had actually outweighed sorrow over Moses' death. All her
accumulated wealth and power meant nothing. There was little to live for—except
young Todd. That was just enough to sustain her at first, and then more than
enough as she invested all her love and attention on the boy.

In the soothing, distracting light of her
young son's love, the sorrow, anger, and frustration faded. Then, as the spring
of 1866 burst forth magnificently all around her, she began a parallel process
of rebirth. She started closing the door on the long spiritual winter she had
lived through. Adjusting, rationalizing, she attributed her preoccupation with
Mosby to an understandable kind of madness. Now that it had all ended
fruitlessly, she remonstrated with herself, no matter what Mosby had done,
revenge did not seem worth lowering herself almost to his level, giving up
Alex, and living the life she had led for the better part of two decades.

Briefly she punished herself with
questions about what it might have been like if she had rejoined Alex in 1847.
But then she put even that aside as her duties at the school and the demands
young Todd was making on her time and attention pulled her bodily back into the
present and started her thinking of the future.

Esther
listened to the clanking sound of the train wheels for a moment, pictured the
miles they were crossing, then translated them into the months of her life. She
opened the journal again, smiling as she recalled Todd's first day of school,
and then frowning as she skipped several entries and began to read.

Sacramento

September 30, 1866

Astonished to read today, after months of not being interested
in newspapers, that Luther Mosby is alive! Good God! He is not only a survivor
of the War, but a beneficiary! He has won election as U.S. Senator from Nevada
after having been back in Virginia City for a mere six months. His picture and
the mention of his name evoked an intense sequence of feelings. The old urge to
get back at him, then an awareness of futility, what with his imminent
departure for the East. Followed by a slow return to the state of mind I have
been in since spring. Let fate have him. Sooner or later it will all come home
to roost, and someone will make him pay for everything he has done. Perhaps
God, in the end. Do not know how I would feel were I placed before him again.
But that seems unlikely for some time to come, in any event, and I have spent
enough time, wasted enough of my life in that obsession. Perhaps I am getting
older, more tired, less able to pursue such a thing. After all, I will be
thirty-seven years old in less than a month. Or perhaps I am simply growing
wiser. But it does seem as though such preoccupation would simply be still more
self-inflicted punishment I no longer deserve. If, indeed, I ever did. Who is
to say what might happen if he returns to northern California? Perhaps I would
maintain my present attitude in the matter. Or possibly the hatred would be
fanned to uncontrollable flames again. I do not know, even though at this very
moment I am feeling the beginnings of my old lust for his destruction. But I
certainly feel no urge to travel to Washington City after him. And I will not
waste time even thinking of him while revenge is almost an impossibility. After
all, what chance would a lone woman have of gaining satisfaction while he is
ensconced in the Senate? To hell with him! For now, at least.

Ironic is the coincidence that Sutter will also be in
Washington. Since the fire that leveled all but the "shack" he and
his taciturn wife now live in, he has become almost a mad Don Quixote, jousting
with the Federal Government over his land claims. He actually plans to move
there, take rooms until he either dies or gets his due! I fear there is little
hope for that, but seriously doubt he will not return, at least from time to
time, for his unending "public appearances."

There are other matters to consider. Todd seems well-adjusted
here, so I see no reason to move him to a normal school. Much as I detest
Carter, perhaps I should think about selling this place (and the house in San
Fran
cisco
as well?) and moving back into his.
Todd has begun to ask questions about why we live here rather than at his
"father's" house. Considering how much Bull is away, it might be
tolerable. Then there are the investments. I have thought long enough about
them. I can find no justification for remaining even indirectly involved in the
vile madness of Virginia City. And the other stocks have lost their meaning to
me. Ralston's latest report: an unbelievable three-and-a-half-million dollars
in assets! There is nothing I can do about the railroad stock, since it is in
Carter's name. But there is no reason now not to liquidate everything else.
Blue Star holdings included. Let the money sit in the bank and draw interest,
for all the use I will ever put it to! Let Todd have it all when he reaches
maturity and Carter is no longer in a position to do anything about it. I
suppose there may be some legal complications in keeping it out of Carter's
reach, even after Todd comes of age. I will have to speak to Ralston about that
next week. I am still unaccustomed to thinking of Billy as a married man. Such
a sudden shift of heart for what appeared to be a confirmed bachelor. Well, she
is young and quite lovely, and I wish him well. But it pains me to hear of the
lengths he goes to for her. He will probably still be engrossed in that
ridiculous marble barn he has built for his new bride at Belmont. He mentioned
that he had a surprise for me. Wait until he hears that I have decided to
liquidate all my holdings! No matter what he has to tell me, I doubt it will be
as surprising as that. I must resolve not to alter my decision no matter how
hard he tries to dissuade me.