Belle Cora: A Novel (91 page)

Lewis was in a bedroom at the time, where he had been made as comfortable
as possible with linens and pillows and a spring mattress. Now and then we wrapped him in canvas and ice. Gray was on the table in the kitchen. He lay on his stomach, gurgling and moaning. I spoke to him. “Mr. Gray. You can’t see me. I’m Belle Cora. I think perhaps we have met before. This would be a good time to consider your sins, Mr. Gray. Were you ever burned, for example, by touching a hot frying pan? Imagine that happening all over your body for all eternity.” Then, remembering what one of my girls had reported about his behavior back in ’56, I thought a bit and added, “But perhaps, for you, the punishment will be gagging. Gagging forever—that would not be very agreeable, either.”

The sheriff at the time was a Mexican War veteran named Charles Doane. He had been grand marshal of the Second Committee of Vigilance. As soon as Doane heard about the incident, he ordered that Lewis be arrested on a charge of murder and moved to the county jail, which since ’56 had become a rat-infested hell by reason of Doane’s embezzlements and the thrift of Know-Nothing government. Not that the destination mattered: moving Lewis at this point would have killed him. Matheny and Blair, who had some standing in the community, said they would call it murder. Doane posted a guard at the shack while an investigation was conducted.

Doane himself handpicked the grand jury, but all the witnesses had the men in the house firing at Lewis first; it was obviously an ambush, and the jury was forced to rule that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.

IT WAS A YEAR BEFORE LEWIS FELT
quite himself. He never recovered a full range of movement in his right shoulder, but with practice his right hand reacquired its former speed and accuracy with a pistol. By posting anonymous advertisements in the
Bulletin
and the
Globe
, offering a reward to anyone who could find Eugene Howard, he learned that Howard’s wife was receiving letters from a mining camp in Coulterville. “It’s a trap,” I told him. “Don’t go.” But he wouldn’t listen. He returned two weeks later, his eyes glittering, and the first words he said to me were “That’s finished.” He had killed every man on my list.

I have wondered, from time to time, how accurate that list was.

LXIV

No, it wasn’t a very nice letter, but I loved it. It was bracing, it was thrilling to have my son, whose last word to me had been his very first word, suddenly appealing to me, surly and forthright, as a third party in the middle of a family argument, bold enough and clever enough to track me down. I remembered the passionate letter I had once written to my grandfather, begging him to take me away from the very same place, and the patronizing reply that I had received. Frank was not going to get that kind of answer. He was luckier than he knew.

At the little table in the cottage where I would make Jeptha eggs and toast and bacon and coffee, I had put the letter into his hands and watched him read it. When he put the letter down and dipped the end of his toast into the yolk of the eggs, I asked if he did not think it was remarkably intelligent, and if Frank did not seem like an unusual boy. After a telltale hesitation he replied, “Yes.” After a while he added, “He doesn’t write like an orphan.”

“No, he doesn’t,” I said proudly. Then I saw that he had not meant it as a compliment. “What’s wrong with that? You don’t expect him to sound like one of the orphans in your asylum?”

He looked at me awhile. “No. Of course not. Still, I would expect him to sound like a country boy—who with other children might talk disrespectfully about his elders out of their hearing, but would never write in that vein in a letter to a grown man or woman. A country boy with such manners would be horsewhipped every single day. If Frank isn’t, maybe it’s because Anne has been his sturdy shield, but it hasn’t done his character any good.”

“It’s absurd for you to conclude all that from one letter. He’s angry. They lied to him. And he’s writing to
me
. He knows instinctively that he can share these thoughts with me and I won’t judge him. Even if he thinks I’m his godmother, his blood tells him there’s more between us. Where he says, ‘It’s death here,’ I know you never felt that way about
Livy, but you and I are different that way. Frank is my son, and he’s more like me.”

“Of course,” said Jeptha soothingly. “It’s just one letter. And he was angry.”

For days, and then for weeks, I thought of nothing but Frank’s letter—I thought of it while I bid on linens and china at the auction houses; when I went to the theater with Jocelyn and Lewis; when I presided over the ball I held each spring. I thought of it while all around me men talked of the election of Lincoln and the breakup of the United States—which must be saved at all costs some (including Jeptha) said, or which had gotten too big anyway others said (I was with that group)—and the inevitability of war and the improbability of war. That was the year when news from the East came halfway by telegraph and the rest of the way by Pony Express in a mere ten days, and it seemed as if the States had drawn closer to us at the very moment they were falling apart.

I decided that to help Frank I must go myself. I wrote ahead to tell Anne I was coming and began my preparations immediately. To my surprise, Edward and Jeptha announced their intention to come along. Edward would visit Robert and his family. Jeptha would accompany me as far as Baltimore and then go on to Ohio to visit his mother and father, who was ailing. On the way, the farther we got from California, the more freedom we would have to be together and stroll on the deck together and stay in hotels together without damage to his reputation or his livelihood.

And so, one sunny day in the first week of April, not quite a month after Lincoln’s inauguration and two weeks after his speech about graves and hearts and hearthstones reached San Francisco, we all went up the gangplank of the North American Steamship Company’s S.S.
Nebraska
.

LXV

THE
NEBRASKA
WOULD TAKE US
TO PANAMA
. We would go by rail across the isthmus, and another ship would take us to New York after a stop at New Orleans, now a foreign port, and another in Baltimore. It would take three weeks.

Amid the usual commotion—the fluttering flags, busy porters, handshakes, embraces, and last-minute panics—I felt emotions appropriate to a forty-niner who has prospered in California. I looked back to the shore. Where there had been water there were now theaters, hotels, and banks. Montgomery Street, formerly on the beach, was four blocks inland. Where shacks and tents and crawling bedraggled humanity had swarmed the hills there was now a mighty city, its roofs and chimneys daubed with the fool’s gold of morning sunlight, each edifice raked by the shadows of its neighbors; and from the deck of the
Nebraska
my eyes sought the roof of my current parlor house on Pike Street, and the roof of my old parlor house on Dupont Street, now a legitimate boarding house, and with effort, elsewhere in the town, bits of my boarding houses and my laundry, and several sandy acres on California Street Hill that also belonged to me and might be valuable one day. I could see the American Theatre, where Mrs. Richardson had initiated the chain of events that turned us both into widows.

I had left the management of the parlor houses in the hands of Georgette and Mrs. King. Niobe and two women who have had no other part in this narrative looked after the boarding houses and the laundry. They were all diligent, and liked me as much as was consistent with fearing me.

Lewis was not with us: he had gone to Nevada Territory, where silver had been discovered; Jocelyn had gone with him. Agnes was not with us, of course; a year before, she had divorced Jeptha and gone to live with a friend, also a spiritualist and freethinker, in Monterey. There she worked as a schoolteacher, two or three men there wanted to marry her, and one she liked very well, but still she hesitated. Was Jeptha, then, at last free to marry me? No. A sickly wife had never been the only obstacle to our union. Jeptha was also the pastor of his flock, the head of the Orphan
Asylum, and the moving spirit behind the Drunkard’s Asylum, the Mariner’s Hospital, and other civic projects and worthy charities that would be deprived of his guidance as soon as it became known that he had associated himself with Belle Cora, the notorious madam. We would have to leave California and start over. And he still had his old objection to living off my earnings.