Chapter 39
Sacramento City
August 1854
Sacramento City was still smoldering a week after the flames had been extinguished. The fire left behind charred skeletons of buildings on at least twelve of the city’s blocks, the crumpled walls reeking of smoke and slag. Ashes shrouded the once-planked streets, and every structure that remained was blackened with soot.
Mallie’s hotel had resisted the inferno, but the metal shutters and doors were welded together from the heat. Victor had walked down K Street every day since the fire, searching, but after he’d followed Mallie into the alleyway, it seemed as if she’d blown away with the smoke. Like she’d known he was looking for her.
But no one knew he was searching for Mallie except Fanny, and she’d disappeared as well, taking with her the cache of coins she must have stolen when she rifled through his portfolio. He’d hoped the fire had taken her life, but the only bodies found in the aftermath were those of three workers who’d perished behind the shutters of a mercantile.
According to the chief engineer of the fire department, the fire had been an accident. He said it began when a guest knocked over a lantern at the Kirtland House. No one knew the name of the guest. And no one, it seemed, had guessed that the proprietor’s wife had started the blaze.
Sacramento’s residents had already begun to rebuild, but there was nothing to occupy Victor’s time except to continue his search. The fire had burned everything he owned except his portfolio, his wallet, and the clothes on his back. A steamboat from San Francisco had delivered food and clothing yesterday, but he hadn’t found out about the arrival until after their wares had sold at ridiculously high prices. He’d heard that a pair of boots went for fifty dollars. A readymade shirt for thirty.
The proprietor at his new place of residence—a man by the name of Louis Gibbs—was a cheat too, taking advantage of those made homeless by the fire. Louis’s boardinghouse had burned down, but he’d hired a hungry crew for a pittance to clear his property while he retrieved enough canvas from San Francisco for a large tent. Then the man charged five dollars for a spot underneath it.
For seven days, Victor had slogged through dust that blew west from the valley, through the scorched streets and those that had dodged the fire. He visited the wharf every day to watch the passengers embark on the steamers, and he’d stopped by the Wells Fargo stagecoach office three times, asking if the woman known as Isabelle Labrie had been a passenger out of town.
As he searched for Mallie, he’d been looking for Alden and Isaac too. The firemen stopped the blaze before it reached Mr. Fallow’s office, so Victor visited there almost every day as well. Horace had grown tired of his inquiries, as if the man had a hundred things to do in the absence of his employer, but he didn’t particularly care if the man disliked him.
This morning, Victor paused outside the closed door of the lawyer’s office. Someone had posted a notification on the wall beside it.
After he knocked, Horace called out for him to come inside. Then the man rolled his eyes. “Can’t you read?”
Victor flinched. “Read what?”
“The sign.” Horace stood up and marched toward the door, rapping on the paper nailed beside it. “Mr. Fallow. Has. Not. Returned.”
“I didn’t notice it.”
“I will take down the sign when he returns. Until then, it’s useless for you to continue knocking.”
After Horace locked the door, Victor tore down the man’s sign and crumpled it into a ball before stomping away, swearing under his breath. He was more than ready to leave this town in its dust and ashes and return east where people treated him like a gentleman.
Before he went to his home in West End, he’d travel to the office of the New York Herald and tell the editor exactly how unwelcoming the people in California were. He’d name names, show the people here in Sacramento that they should have treated Victor Duvall with dignity. Then he’d settle back into his comfortable farmhouse and wait patiently for his time to rule over Scott’s Grove.
With the sign clenched in his hands, he marched up I Street until he reached the stagecoach office. “I’m looking for a woman I lost in the fire,” he explained to the agent on the other side of the counter. “Her name is Miss Isabelle Labrie.”
“A hundred people leave here every day,” the man said coolly. “Going all different directions.”
“I understand, but this woman would be hard to forget. She’s French, you see, and has these beautiful brown eyes that will haunt a man.”
“When did you see her last?”
“During the fire, over on K Street.” Victor shook his head solemnly. “Isabelle and I were planning to marry, and then we were separated in all the chaos. I fear she might have traveled out to the goldfields, looking for me.”
Another man stepped up to the counter. He was almost a foot taller than Victor and much more stout. “I drove a woman named Isabelle out to Columbia last week, but she was already married to a fellow named Payne.”
His fingers curled around the paper. “Was she traveling with anyone?”
“A colored boy. And her husband.”
Anger flickered at first and then roared inside him, hotter than the inferno that had blazed through this town.
“Seems like you were jilted,” the agent said after the driver walked away.
Victor stepped back from the counter.
Had Alden traveled to California to marry Mallie? Were the two of them laughing together now as husband and wife?
He looked down at his hands, at the crumpled paper, and tore it into shreds.
Had Eliza arranged this secret meeting? She’d probably known all along about Alden and Mallie. Mallie hadn’t run away from Victor. Alden had stolen her away and then he’d taken Isaac. And his beastly wife was probably at home, laughing about it all, as if it were all a grand scheme.
He’d left Eliza eight thousand miles ago and still her laughter stung his ears.
The law may acknowledge her as his wife—until death parted them—but he only needed her alive until John and Alden were gone. If he was patient enough, resolved, he could secure Scott’s Grove and the two people he loved most in the world.
Good riddance.
That’s what Eliza had said about Isaac, and it’s exactly what he would say about her after he inherited the plantation.
“How much is a ticket to Columbia?” he asked the agent, his voice calm again.
“A hundred dollars.”
“That’s outrageous!”
The man shrugged. “Gold prices.”
Victor reluctantly lifted the wallet from his coat pocket and opened the brass clasp. Then he counted through the coins inside. Blast Fanny Kirtland. He didn’t even have enough for one return passage to Boston, clear around Cape Horn, but right now, he’d spend every dollar left in his wallet if he must to find this semblance of a family.
He removed five gold coins and put them on the table. The agent slid them off the counter, into his till, then held out a ticket.
“The next ride to Columbia is in two weeks.”
Victor choked. “What do you mean, two weeks?”
“I mean that is the next time we have a seat available on a coach going to the town of Columbia,” the agent said, annoyed with him. “They’ve been finding gold out there by the fistful, and after the fire, it seems like half of Sacramento wants to go.”
“How about taking a boat?” Victor asked. “Or a train?”
When the man snorted, Victor snatched the ticket out of his hand.
He’d find Mallie, and then he’d figure out a way home. This trip had cost him dearly—all the money left from his inheritance—but he was almost finished.
He felt like Captain Ahab, sniffing the scent of the white whale in the ocean. Except no rope was going to take him down to the depths of the sea.
Unlike Ahab, he was going to conquer this whale.