Chapter 3
Sacramento City
December 1853
Isabelle Labrie swept into the elegant dining room of the Golden Hotel along Sacramento City’s bustling K Street. The lilac gown she wore belled out from her fitted bodice until it reached the polished wood floor. It was modeled after the latest fashions in Paris except there were no ruffles or lace around the sleeves or skirt. And she had tiny bags of birdshot stitched around the hem to keep it from yielding to the California winds that swept up the river and through this growing town.
“Good evening, monsieur,” she said to Edmund Walsh, the one gentleman seated near the rosewood box grand. It was Christmas Eve, but it didn’t feel like a holiday. A light rain fell outside instead of the snow she’d loved back in Baltimore, and few wanted to stop and celebrate the birth of Christ when there was a pile of gold waiting to be found in the hills.
She reached for the bottle of Madeira the steward had left on the table, filling her customer’s glass.
Mr. Walsh ate dinner at her hotel almost every night—salmon in the autumn, roasted duck in the summer, oyster loaf whenever a crate of oysters arrived from San Francisco. Rumor had it that he’d once been the milliner for Queen Victoria in London. Others said he’d been a blacksmith in Buffalo.
That was the beauty of California. A person could take on any persona they wanted. Be whomever they wanted in the shadows of this strange land.
When he’d first arrived in this new state, Mr. Walsh cast his line for gold and snagged a fortune. Gold was much harder to find in California than the East Coast papers liked to report—its dust sifted through fingers like sand in an hourglass, especially at the bordellos and saloons. Many miners wealthy at sunset were penniless again by sunrise, but Mr. Walsh was one of the few who’d managed to keep his money.
“When is Mr. Kirtland returning from the fields?” he asked.
She glanced out the large window along the front of the hotel, at the gray sky and a glimpse of river two blocks away. She’d been hoping Ross would return for Christmas, but it was already Christmas Eve. In the four months he’d been gone, she’d only received one letter from him, postmarked from the diggings near Marysville, and he gave no indication as to when he would return.
But he’d wanted to marry this spring when the flowers behind her aunt’s cottage were in full bloom. She’d promised that she would have an answer to his proposal when he returned.
Isabelle glanced back at her customer. “He said he’d be back before the rains.”
“Any day now, then,” Mr. Walsh replied, though they’d only had a few showers in the past month. Not the torrential rains that would bring in the throngs of gold miners from the fields.
She nodded. “Any day.”
Mr. Walsh took a bite of the iced Venetian cake on his dessert plate, and she filled his crystal goblet again.
Liquor was banned from her establishment, and she didn’t allow her patrons to smoke cigars—there were plenty of saloons along Second and Third Streets for that sort of thing—but she did serve wine to her regular clients. The finest drink shipped over from Italy and Portugal in casks called pipes. She then transferred the wine into green-tinted glass bottles before serving it to her clientele.
Ross had said good wine was essential if they wanted to bring in those who appreciated the refinement they missed in cities like Paris and New York. The Golden was the only hotel in Sacramento that catered to the businessmen who owned local banks, shops, and shipping companies. A few of these men had sent for their wives, and these ladies basked in the opulence of her establishment as well.
Most of their guests, though, were the miners like Mr. Walsh who’d struck it rich and craved a nice dinner and clean bed when they returned from the goldfields.
Mr. Walsh lowered his glass. “That’s all for me tonight.”
Isabelle replaced the cork in the bottle after he left and moved back toward the cellar where she stored her wine. Her hand against the brick wall, she slowly descended the rickety steps. She didn’t bother to bring a lantern with her. Light filtered down the staircase from the dining room, illuminating the mortar and fired clay.
Whenever the Sacramento River flooded, everything in this cellar was carried to the upper floors of her three-story hotel until the water decided to recede. The last time the river seeped through her front door, Ross had been here to help her. They’d worked through the night to save almost everything on the lower floors. The piano’s rosewood legs had been stained and the wood floor and wainscoting in the dining room ruined, but everything else in their hotel had survived, including the gold Ross had hidden for them behind this wall.
Smiling, she thought about the man she hoped to marry. Did he miss her as much as she missed him?
Even though she’d had proposals, she hadn’t sought love in Sacramento, hadn’t thought she would ever marry, but Ross had been kind to her heart. Patient. And she had learned to be patient with him too—waiting for months last summer and fall as he searched for gold along the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The Mother Lode.
It didn’t matter to her if he brought back a bagful of gold nuggets from the fields, as long as he returned.
The bell chimed overhead, and she slid the wine bottle onto the rack, then picked up her skirt to hustle back up the steps. It was probably a late delivery from one of the steamboats—or it could be a new customer for the hotel—but every time the bell chimed, she thought Ross might have returned.
She swept through the dining room, then rounded the stairs to her right and entered the front lobby. But instead of a deliveryman or Ross waiting for her, a woman stood alone by the front desk. She was wearing a floral calico dress, and her light-chestnut hair was swept up in a knot behind her neck. Isabelle guessed she was a few years older than her own twenty-three years.
The women held a carpetbag in her right hand and a soggy sunbonnet in her left. Her face was quite pretty, but her clothing smelled of seawater and coal smoke.
A wave of nausea swept over Isabelle—most of the young women who traveled alone were from France or China, their passage purchased by so-called benefactors, the men and women who operated brothels across California.
The woman looked as if she could be from Europe or the East Coast, and Isabelle prayed for her sake that she was simply looking for a husband or father who’d come ahead of her.
Isabelle stepped behind the wooden counter where she kept her roster and the ledger of accounts. “How can I help you?” she asked, folding her hands on top of the shiny mahogany surface.
The woman glanced up at the wall beside the desk at the list of eight rules that Isabelle displayed so that all her guests clearly understood that the lawlessness in this new state didn’t extend into her establishment. “I’m looking for the proprietor of this hotel.”
Isabelle stood a bit taller. “I’m the owner.”
The woman tilted her head, her dark-blue eyes wrinkled with confusion. “I thought Ross Kirtland owned this place.”
Isabelle placed both her hands on the ledger, wondering at the familiarity of the woman’s language. How did this woman know Ross? “I bought out his portion when he left for the goldfields.”
“Oh.” The woman leaned back against a post. “I reckon it’s good that he’s looking for gold.”
“He goes out for a few months every year, like most of the men around here.” Isabelle sat on a pine stool. “Where are you traveling from?”
“Kentucky,” she said. “Boone County.”
“And how exactly do you know Mr. Kirtland?”
The woman smiled. “I’m married to him.”
Married to him?
The woman’s words ricocheted in Isabelle’s mind, clanging together like the bells on wagons running up and down K Street. And the stool—it felt as if it had disappeared from under her, as if the wine cellar had opened up, swallowing her.
“But Ross—” she began to protest before correcting herself. “Mr. Kirtland’s from New York City.”
Bitterness wove through the woman’s laugh. “I suppose New York sounds more sophisticated than Boone County.”
Isabelle clung to a thread of hope. It was all a misunderstanding. “The Mr. Kirtland who owned this hotel was definitely from New York.”
The woman shrugged. “My Ross always liked to make up a good story.”
Had it really all been a story? The hotel Ross said he’d owned in New York. The parents who were deceased. The sister who sent him letters at least once a month.
“Perhaps there are two men in California with the same name,” Isabelle said, trying to explain this more to herself than to the woman across from her. Ross had fervently declared his love for her, said they would marry this spring. He never would have done that if he had a wife back east.
The woman leaned across the desk toward her, a locket dangling around her neck. She opened the clasp, and inside was a miniature daguerreotype of her and Ross. His handsome face was resolute.
“This was taken on our wedding day,” the woman said.
Isabelle didn’t reply.
“Is this the man who owned the hotel?”
Isabelle swallowed hard, her face warm again. “It is.”
She dropped the carpetbag onto the floor. “Then I’ve found him at last.”
Isabelle stared at her in shock. How could Ross have done this to her? To both of them?
After closing her locket, the woman collapsed on a cane chair near the front door. There was a hole in the toe of her boot, and her skirt was stained. “The whole room is rocking,” she declared.
Isabelle wanted to run upstairs and hide, but instead she went into the kitchen and mixed the woman a drink with bicarbonate of soda, crushed sugar, and a dose of quinine to help calm her stomach and ward off disease.
“What is your name?” Isabelle asked, her voice shaky when she returned.
“Fanny. Fanny Kirtland.”
The name of the letter writer, the woman Ross had declared to be his sister.
Isabelle tried to steady her voice. “How long have you and Ross been married?”
“Four years, though he left for California about two months after we married to make a home for us out here,” she explained. “He said he would send for me, but he never did so I decided to come on my own and surprise him.”
Isabelle forced a smile. “I’m certain he will be surprised.”
Fanny looked at the Irish lace over the front window, then up at the lime and pink medallions above the chandelier.
“Is Ross’s house nearby?” she asked.
Isabelle shook her head. “He lived in the back rooms of the hotel when he owned it.”
“I suppose I shall have to stay in those rooms, then.”
Isabelle hesitated. She had been living in those rooms since Ross left the city.
“Ross can pay my bill when he returns.”
Isabelle wanted to turn the woman away, tell her to take the steamboat back to San Francisco and catch a clipper returning to the East Coast, but she would never turn a woman onto the streets of Sacramento City alone. Hers was the only establishment in town fit for a lady.
“I could help here until Ross returns,” Fanny said, and Isabelle could hear the desperation in her voice.
“Do you know how to bake?”
“No—but I can learn.”
“I need help with cleaning too and changing beds. We use real linens at this hotel.”
Fanny crinkled her nose for a moment, but then composed herself. “I can make beds.”
“Very good,” Isabelle replied. “I suppose you can stay here and work until your husband returns.”
“When he returns with his gold, we’ll be able to live wherever we want.”
Isabelle leaned forward to pat the woman’s bare hand.