The Rose Legacy (11 page)

Feeling the grade change, Carina opened her eyes. After the pristine wildness of the Rose Legacy, Placerville seemed squalid in its decay. Too bad the fire had not consumed it as well. She imagined the catcalls from the saloons, the tobacco spit and animal leavings in the street, the grubby children … was Quillan one of them? Again the curiosity stirred. What did she care?

Carina kicked Dom’s sides, and he headed down the road toward Crystal, lengthening his stride until her hair flew out behind her and the rush of air stole her breath. Dom’s chest was sweating and heaving when she reined in at the livery. Leaving the mule for Mr. Tavish’s boy to rub down, she hurried off to balance Mr. Beck’s ledger.

As she entered the numbers into neat rows beneath Mr. Beck’s figures, Carina noted his exact script. Unlike his office, Mr. Beck’s ledger had order—meticulous figures beside neat descriptions of services rendered. Catching her lower lip between her teeth, she flipped back the pages to the date of her arrival. Had he entered her case?

Once again she was trespassing on information, but she had started the day prying, so she may as well continue. She searched the page of entries for June seventh. There was no sign of her charge against the Carruthers, no listing of her claim dispute. But then, he had charged her nothing so far. No money taken, none recorded. But why had he not yet required payment from her? Would he collect upon completion?

She looked around the room. Where could her own deed and paper work be? She had filed the backlog, those cases successfully and less successfully completed. She had filed the ongoing disputes and even some he was not sure he would represent. But she had not found hers. Surely she would have seen and noted her own name beneath the date and type of claim.

Maybe in sensitivity he had filed it himself. It was possible. She sighed, looking up from the desk when the door opened. She had expected Mr. Beck, but the man was clearly not he. Standing even shorter than she, with a curvature of the spine and small rawboned face with protruding teeth, he looked like a ferret with dark, darting eyes.

“May I help you?”

“I’m looking for the lawyer.” He waved toward the sign outside the door. “Berkley Beck?”

“I’m sorry, he’s not in.”

“Does he handle property disputes?”

Carina had to smile as she waved to the crates along the wall. “He does.”

“Well, I have a house …” He stomped forward and shoved a paper at her.

Carina’s jaw fell open as she stared at the very same property advertisement she had carried with her to Crystal City. Her heart sank when a deed swooped into place beside the illustration, replica to the one she had turned over to Mr. Beck herself.

She looked up at the little man and read in his eyes the anger she had felt in his place. If this man had a deed to her house, how many others did as well? And suddenly she was not sorry for him. He was a threat, an enemy. “Mr. Beck cannot take your case.”

“What do you mean? Why not?”

“There are other lawyers in town. See one of them.” She shoved the papers back toward the awful little man and thought for a moment he might explode with the blood rising to his face like a flood.

He snatched up the papers. “Well, I will then.” With sharp, quick steps he went out.

Carina sagged in her chair. Mr. Beck might not approve of her sending business away, but how could he represent both of them? It was hers first, forgery or no. She had paid her money and would not be cheated. And the moment Mr. Beck returned, she would let him know that.

N
INE

If the eye is the window to the soul, and from the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, why can’t we all be blind and dumb?

—Rose

C
ARINA WALKED HOME
without having seen Mr. Beck. Her head ached and the anger she had controlled for days was burning inside. How many times could the same house be sold? How many deeds were out there for her property? Her ride up the mountain was all but forgotten in her renewed frustration. What did she care for a burned-out cabin on a forsaken mine? It was real walls she wanted, a floor and ceiling of her own.

“Hard day with Mr. Beck?” Mae came around the corner, her arms full of wood for the stove.

Carina remembered Mae’s earlier words.
“Half the deeds in town are forgeries.”
Well, Mae was right. Carina had been cheated. How many more people would take advantage of her?

She didn’t answer Mae’s query and didn’t offer to help. As she passed the kitchen door, the smell of stewed bear and potatoes turned her stomach. She pushed out the back door and headed for the pump, then, furious as it gushed out icy cold, she slammed the handle down and stalked toward town.

Across Central and through the tents and shacks, she came to a low stone building at the side of the creek. She pressed the hair back from her face and went inside. The steamy, slightly sulfur aroma teased her nostrils. The air was damp and moisture beaded the walls.

A tall woman appeared and stretched out her palm. Carina laid a coin there, and without speaking the woman took a thick, rough towel from a stack and motioned her to follow. Carina did. Having learned of the hot spring’s existence, she would splurge, never mind the cost.

The woman turned the corner like a sleepwalker, her face long and square as her shoulders and hips. As she walked, the brown braid barely stirred between her shoulders, and Carina was intrigued. How did she hold herself so straight? Carina tried to mimic her, then stopped when the woman glanced back.

“Watch your step.”

She speaks
, Carina thought as she started down the uneven steps into the dark stone cave. Inside the first alcove was a small circular stone basin, and steam rose in wisps from the water. There were four such caves, Mae had said, each bubbling up independent of the others, yet so close together the one entrance served them all.

The woman set the towel down on the ledge, tugged a curtain across the opening, and left her. Alone in the dim lantern light, Carina stripped off her dusty outer clothing. She touched the water with her toes, then jerked the foot back. Gingerly, she stepped again into the steaming water, then lowered herself slowly and sighed. How long had it been since she’d indulged in hot soaking water?

She cupped a handful and let it stream through her fingers, imagining Divina across from her with a palm full of suds. They had covered each other in suds, then splashed them off with such noise and giggling that Mamma would run in scolding and end up laughing, nearly as wet as they. Carina was surprised at the happy memory of Divina. They were few enough.

She sank down into the pool until the water cradled her chin and crept up the back of her head. Closing her eyes and pinching her nose shut, she ducked under. She could feel her hair swirling on the surface and shook her head side to side, then came up.

“Hot?” The woman had returned with a bar of soap that smelled of clove.

Carina nodded. “How does the water come out hot right next to the icy creek?”

“It comes from a crack in the earth’s crust. The creek is runoff from the snows higher up.”

“The creek also comes from a crack in the rock. I saw where it started. Only it’s cold.”

The woman shrugged. “I guess some comes out hot, some comes out cold. There’s places in the creek where it runs both hot and cold.”

“Really?” Carina glanced up to verify the truth in the woman’s eyes. That intrigued her to think the water had a life of its own, playing some game of nature they could enjoy, if not anticipate. She pointed at the soap. “Is that for me?”

“If you want to use it.” The woman held it out. Her pale hazel eyes were almost expressionless, as though spending her days in these caves dulled her, sapped from her some energy vital to life.

Carina reached for the soap. “Is it extra?”

“Twenty-five cents.”

“Extortionary. But why not. In my skirt there.” Carina watched her dig into the skirt pocket for the change, then turn, straightening like a sapling after a breeze.

“You’re new.”

The words were soft, tentative, and Carina guessed more personal than the woman was used to. She knew what was meant but considered it figuratively, feeling as though she had just been hatched or birthed into a new and unrecognizable world. She thought how naive she had been eight short days ago, driving her wagon toward a dream. Within hours she had been stripped of all but her determination. Now she was learning, learning to fight, to win.

“Yes.”

The woman nodded, and a small spark of life touched her eyes. “My name’s Èmie.”

Carina realized she was younger than she’d first thought, nearer her own age than not. Perhaps outside the caves she was not so blank, so stiff and pale. “I’m Carina DiGratia.”

“You have lovely hair, Carina DiGratia, the way it ripples like that.”

An ache started as Carina recalled Flavio coming upon her once in the swimming cove. He had stood on the side and stared at the rippling veil laid out across the water’s surface as she floated on her back.
“One day I will marry you, Carina Maria,”
he had called from beneath the overhanging palms. And she had dived under and swum through the salty waves with strong strokes, laughing inside because she knew it was true.

She swallowed the pain. “Thank you.”

Èmie eyed the hollow at the base of Carina’s neck. “Father Charboneau will say Mass tomorrow.”

Carina touched the silver crucifix that hung there, hot against her skin. Why did she suddenly feel uncomfortable? “A priest? In Crystal?”

“He’s many things. Priest, prospector, even a boxer at the fairs. He goes between the mining camps and cities. He’s been serving these mountains since Placerville.”

Carina shivered in spite of the steaming water. A priest from Placerville. But for one street corner shouter, she had heard no mention of God except in blasphemy in this godless city. Of course, she had spent the last Lord’s Day in bed. She couldn’t know what kind of observances had occurred while she slept.

The melting soap felt silky in her palm as Carina pressed it to her neck. “But I’ve seen no church.” She thought of the Spanish mission church in Sonoma with the white stucco towers and the arch that held the massive bell, where the black-scarved women had streamed each morning, she and Mamma and Nonna and all her tias and some men among them. Not a man would miss Sunday Mass, but only a handful went daily. Carina had gone to please Mamma, yet she wondered sometimes why Mamma went.

Èmie started for the cave’s opening. “There isn’t one. Father Charboneau has a small cabin west of Spruce and Central. We meet there.”

Carina’s heart sank with the news. “Which one is Spruce?”

“Just past Drake.”

Closing her eyes, Carina rubbed her face with soap. The melancholy that had settled on her in the ruins of Placerville returned. Her soul required she attend, but her heart quaked at the thought.

Sunday. Quillan lay back on the mattress, arms folded behind his head.

A day of rest. Even he had to take it sometimes. His body needed it. Too many long days in the wagon were enough to warrant a break, and tomorrow he’d be better for it.

Not that he could lie there completely idle. He reached for a book he’d purchased on his last trip up.
Tales From the Brothers Grimm
. A collection he hadn’t read as of yet, being something that would not have been approved in his youth. The Book of Job, the Psalms and Proverbs, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and the Gospels had made up most of his expected reading.

The dime novels and works of Hawthorne, Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe were confiscated when found, though he had become adept at hiding them. He thought of the precursor to the hole under his present canvas floor. He had loosened the floorboard under his bedstead and replaced it so carefully that his book cache had remained hidden until he left home at thirteen.

Quillan rolled to his side and flipped open the cover of the book. It was sheer pleasure to lose himself in tales of inconsequence, even absurdity. Unbidden, he thought of Miss DiGratia and her sheetful of books. Had she lost others from the wagon for which she risked the mountain? He frowned.

She should have claimed them, then. He would have carried whatever she named most dear. What did she have in the black leather satchel that meant more than the wealth of books she went down the mountain for? He’d like to know what caused her queer expression when he made to throw the satchel down to her.

Maybe it was fragile, but he hadn’t heard any clinking inside, nor felt anything but soft padding between the leather sides. He hitched his shoulder to capture the down pillow into the crook of his neck. Whatever it was, she had demanded it be handed to her in that smoky voice of hers with a tone that left no argument.

It was something she valued, no two ways about it. So he had saved it for her. He should credit himself for that. The rest was forfeit, not through malice, as she seemed to think, but necessity. The wagon road had to stay open. Too many depended on it for their livelihood. He turned the empty leaves to the first page of the initial story,
Make Me Shudder
. That should prove entertaining enough, he thought with a wry smile.

Somewhere a bell rang, the sort that was fixed to a base and struck with a hammer. Though it wasn’t the deep heavy throat of a tower bell, it sent a cold spear down his back nonetheless. Somewhere, folks were gathering to pay homage to an invisible being who meted out justice and punishment with the heavy hand he had known all too well in the flesh.

Though no church building had yet been raised in Crystal, the faithful gathered where they could. There were the Methodists and the Baptists down by the creek, the Catholics over on Spruce, Anglicans in a small house west of town, a handful of Saints sent up from Salt Lake to enrich the coffers of their believers, and of course the Jews, though they met quietly Saturday nights without bells and incense. Fools every one.

Quillan rolled to his back and rested the book on his chest. Unbidden, the words came to his mind.
Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates, waiting at the posts of my doors. For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the Lord. But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death
.

He heard his small voice reciting it in the darkness of wooden walls closing in around him, not seeing from where the blow would come. The smack of wood on flesh.
“Again. Repeat it.”
With his groin liquid and his knees locked, the words coming from his lips again, and the blow sending hot fire to his flesh.
“Again …”

Quillan closed his eyes and shut out the sound of the bell. The stories would not be enough. He needed to
do
something. He rolled restlessly to his feet and stood.