On a cold, cloudless morning, after weeks of hard travel, we reach the busy San Francisco docks. The Major and the college men depart right after breakfast to pursue their own errands, so it’s just me, Jefferson, Hampton, and the Joyners.
The huge bay is a wonder, so crowded with ships it looks like another city spread out across the water. Masts rise like steeples of a hundred churches, each one a temple to the love of gold. Seagulls dive between ships, or settle on abandoned masts, or swirl in the air. Beyond the ships, choppy gray-green waves froth into white peaks.
The air is breezy and wet, and it smells of salt and fish. To our left, out of sight beyond the golden hills of the peninsula, the Pacific Ocean supposedly stretches as far as the eye can see. We caught glimpses of it on our way here—smudges of blue shining through the creases of the hills—but I’ve never seen an ocean up close, and there’s no way I’ll allow us to do our business and be on our way without setting eyes on such a marvel.
I turn to say as much to Jefferson. He’s riding Sorry, the sulky sorrel mare that carried him all the way from Dahlonega, Georgia, to the goldfields of California, the same way my palomino girl, Peony, carried me.
Jefferson’s hat is tipped back, his dark hair spilling out around the edges. His eyes are alight beneath raised brows. An odd thing happens every time I look at his face, ever since I asked him to marry me and he said yes: my heart beats faster and everything else in the world—the crowds, the noise, even the smell of fish gone sour—disappears like a puff in the wind.
A grin plays at the corner of his mouth.
“What?” I wipe the back of my hand across my cheek, thinking of the crumbly sweet bread we had for breakfast at Mission Dolores.
“That look!” he says. “Miss Leah Westfall has seen all the wonders of the continent, and she still turns into a slack jaw at something new.”
I clamp my mouth shut and glare at him.
“It’s one of the things I like most about you,” he admits.
“Well, can you blame me?” The wide sweep of my arm encompasses the city, the ships, and the bay. “They say it’s one of the most perfect harbors in the world. Canyon deep all the way through the Golden Gate, but shallow in the shelter of the bay.”
He turns his head toward the water, which is fine by me, because I like his profile as much as any other part of his face. Peony shifts beneath me. We’ve all stopped to take in the view, but the folks around us are starting to glare, like we’re taking up too much space.
The muddy street overflows with people bustling by foot and cart and horse, with faces and fabrics from all over the world. A brand-new warehouse goes up before our eyes as workmen scamper up and down the scaffolds. Beyond the warehouse rise the hills of the San Francisco peninsula, the slopes covered with every manner of building, house, and tent. The air resounds with voices shouting in a hundred languages, hammers pounding, wagons creaking.
Jefferson says in a soft voice, as if we’re all alone, “Those ships look like the woods after a wildfire. No leaves, no branches, nothing left but barren trunks standing up against the sky.”
I see it through his eyes. A forest of abandonment. “What will happen to them all, do you think?”
“They’ll get scavenged. Used for building up on land. Some might be turned into prisons, like the one we saw on the Sacramento River.”
The one holding my uncle Hiram, is what he doesn’t say. We’ve been through a lot together, Jeff and me. I reach out and clasp his fingers with mine.
“Will the two of you stop mooning over each other?” Becky Joyner asks, from the wagon behind us. “You’d think nobody in the world ever fell in love before the two of you invented it.”
“Becky!” Heat fills my cheeks, and I drop Jefferson’s hand.
She grins at me.
Becky sits with Hampton on the wagon bench, holding the reins of a team of cart horses we bought at Mormon Island. The one on the right, a chestnut with a wide white blaze, tosses his head in impatience.
“I don’t care if the two of you make eyes at each other all day like lovebirds in a cage,” she says, “but can you carry on with it after we get my house? If we don’t run into any snags, we can shop for your wedding dress and then head home as early as tomorrow.”
I frown. This is not the first time we’ve had this discussion. “Jeff and I don’t need a fancy wedding, and I don’t need a fancy dress.”
“Nonsense. We’re family now, and your family wants to see this done right.”
“Jefferson?” I plead.
The traitor holds up his hands in mute surrender.
Hampton quickly schools his grin. “We might even have time to get a proper suit for the groom,” he suggests with a perfectly straight face.
Jefferson and I glare at him.
“All right, folks,” Becky says. “Let’s go get my house.”
I urge Peony toward the docks, and the wagon rattles behind. We carefully make our way down the slippery, muddy slope until we reach the dock described in the letter.
“That’s it!” Becky calls out.
I swing a leg over Peony’s back to dismount, but as soon as my feet touch the ground, my legs turn to jelly, and I stumble.
Becky jumps down from the wagon, and Jefferson leaps off Sorry, so that within seconds I have someone at each elbow, steadying me.
“You all right?” Jefferson asks.
“Just need get my bearings,” I say, suddenly breathless. There’s no need to explain the problem—they all know my secret.
Gold has been singing a muted song for our entire journey here, sometimes from far away, sometimes buzzing in my throat. But this, when my feet touch ground here . . . this is like hearing a chorus of a thousand voices.
Softly, so only Jefferson and Becky can hear, I say, “I think it’s all the practice I’ve been doing, learning how to control the gold when I call it to me. It’s made things . . . sensitive.”
“How bad?” Jeff asks.
“It’s everywhere—like trying to sip water from a flood.”
“What do you mean, everywhere?” says Becky, looking around in consternation. “I don’t see—”
“Everywhere,” I whisper.
My gold sense is always strongest when I touch the earth. Men are digging a hole in the street outside the warehouse to sift gold flakes from the dirt—there are two ounces to be found if they’ve half an eye. A block farther, a couple of children sit outside a tavern, where they lick the heads of pins and use the wet tips to pick gold dust out of the sweepings, speck by speck. They won’t get much for their labor, but each mote of gold burns like a tiny ember. Buttons and watches and brooches and hairpins flare all around me. Gold is in almost every purse and pocket. My own significant store of gold, in Peony’s saddlebag, brought along for an emergency. The locket dangling at my throat. A half-dozen nuggets in Jefferson’s right trouser pocket—he’s been carrying them for months, ever since we escaped from my uncle’s camp. And, in a little velvet clutch tied to her waist, Becky has more than a dozen gold coins—
A group of laughing, dirty-faced children plows into us, setting the horses to bellyaching. They are no older than Olive or Andy. A few apologize with “Sorry, ma’am!” and “Sorry, sir!” while others shout “Tag!” and “You’re it!” before dashing away.
Becky brushes dirt off her skirt, as if the children’s behavior might be contagious. “So rude. I have to wonder where their mothers are.”
“Becky, where is your—?”
I sense her purse, or rather the particularly shaped pile of gold coins in her purse, moving away. I scan the crowded street ahead.
There—a towheaded little scamp, rapidly disappearing among taller bodies. Without taking my eyes off him, I hand Peony’s reins to Jeff. “Hold this,” I say, and I start running.
The boy is small and quick as a rodent, disappearing behind people and barrels and wagons. I’m not really pursuing him, only what he carries, and all the other gold around me is a distraction, like trying to follow the buzz of a single bee in a hive. But my practice pays off. With focus, I hear the unique melody of Becky’s gold, not quite overwhelmed by a cacophony of overlapping songs.
I have him in my sights. “Hey! Stop!”
He glances over his shoulder, sees me gaining, and pumps his legs even faster, dodging carts and barrels. His head is cranked around, eyes wide with fear, when he careens into a young woman, maybe even younger than me. Her hair is dirty blond, her skin is darkened by the sun, and her secondhand calico dress—too loose on her by half—is dimmed by dust and wear. She clutches a small cloth bag to her waist like it contains all her possessions in the world. The boy bounces away and falls down.
She snatches him by the collar, smacks him on the back of his head, and scolds him. He’s almost in my grasp when he tears free and darts around the corner into a warren of smaller streets and shanties. The young woman continues calmly toward the docks as if nothing has happened, clutching that bag tight.
I tear after the boy. I’m around the corner and halfway down the street when I catch myself.
The melody of Becky’s gold is moving in the other direction now. Away from me.
The bump was a handoff.
It was done so smoothly that I didn’t suspect a thing. Without my witchy powers, I’d have missed it, for sure and certain.
I dust myself off and turn around as if I’ve reluctantly given up pursuit. My performance is wasted. The boy is long gone, and the young woman is headed away, oblivious to me.
She walks at a normal pace, like a woman with nothing to fear, so it’s easy to extend my stride and catch up. Seeing as how she’s leading me right back to Becky and Jefferson and Hampton, I’m in no rush.
I steadily close the distance and listen for the gold. The shape of it tells a story. She has a secret pocket sewn in the waist of her dress, which she hides by clutching the mostly empty bag in front of her. The pocket holds Becky’s purse and two others, plus several large nuggets of varying shapes and a few loose coins, including a half coin with a sheared edge.
That last one’s call feels sad, like a song in minor key. The shape of it is so distinct and specific that it’s easy to single out from the rest. It becomes my beacon.
As I approach her from behind, I focus all on my attention on that broken coin.
When I first learned to call the gold to me, it was all or nothing. Every nugget, every flake, every piece of dust in range came flying and left me standing there like a statue covered in gold leaf. The first time, it happened when a few folks happened to be watching.
It was dark and rainy, and no one knows for sure what they saw. Still, in the months since, the story spread faster than a summer wildfire. Even some of the miners in Glory have been telling tall tales of a Golden Goddess. They say she’s lucky. That if you catch a glimpse of her in the hills, you’ll be blessed by a straight week of pure color.
There’s no stopping tall tales from spreading, but letting those stories get connected to me will draw a deadly kind of attention. So with Jefferson’s help, I’ve been figuring out how to control my power.
Only a few steps behind the young woman now. The waist of her dress is cinched as tight as it can go, and it still hangs loose. In spite of the cool air, sweat curls the dirty blond strands at the nape of her neck.
I think hard about that broken coin. Then I hold my hand out in front of me and close my fist.
The jagged edge surges toward me, straining against the pocket seams.
I unfold my hand and push the broken coin away.
The gesture is unnecessary—I can control the gold just fine without it—but I’ve found it makes things a little easier, acting like a focus for my thoughts. So my fist clenches and releases, clenches and releases, as we walk down the street. I probably seem daft to anyone looking, but San Francisco is a busy place, and no one pays me any mind.
My friends are waiting just ahead. Hampton has climbed down from the wagon. Jefferson stares at me with a worried frown. Becky seems distressed.
I ignore my friends for the moment and work harder, pulling and pushing the rough edge of that coin like a saw against the seam of the hidden pocket. The young woman’s steps quicken; surely she has noticed something odd by now.
She’s making her way around our wagon, and my friends are stepping toward me, when the seam breaks and the coin comes flying out of the dress.
I mentally grab everything else in the pocket—the other purses, the nuggets, the coins—and imagine a sharp tug downward, just like milking a cow.
A small fortune in gold tumbles from her dress and plops into the mud. She gasps, falling to her knees, ruining her skirt.
“Ma’am,” I say, rushing forward before she can gather it all up herself. “Ma’am, you dropped something.”
She faces me. Up close, she’s even younger than I expected. In spite of her light hair, her eyes are as brown and hard as acorns. An awful lot of thinking is going on in those hard brown eyes.
“I reckon this is yours.” I pick up the broken coin and put it in her hand. It gleams like a half moon. Her palms are calloused, her fingernails ragged as if trimmed by teeth. She did hard labor before turning to thievery.
Her fingers close around the coin, and she slips it quickly into the cheap cloth bag she carries. I squat beside her.
“I don’t know what happened,” she says, quickly gathering nuggets and loose coins into her bag. “I must have tipped my bag when I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Just an accident, I’m sure,” I tell her. “My name’s Lee.”
“Thank you, Lee. I’m Sonia. I can’t tell you how much your kindness means to me.”
She reaches for Becky’s coin purse. I pin her wrist with one hand and snatch up the purse with the other.
“Sonia, I’m afraid this one belongs to my friend. There’s an engraving on the inside of the clasp that says R.J., and I can tell you exactly how many coins are in it and what their weight comes to.”
Her brows knit, and she stares at me with those hard eyes. She tries to jerk her hand free, but I’m not about to let go—I’ve spent my life doing hard labor too, on the farm at home, on the wagon train west, in the goldfields.
Becky, Jefferson, and Hampton surround us. “What’s going on here?” Jefferson asks, genuinely mystified.
“My new friend Sonia here dropped some things, and I’m helping her pick up,” I explain. I hand Becky’s purse to her. There’s a firm set to Becky’s mouth, and unlike Jeff, she knows exactly what we’re about.
Sonia jerks her hand away, and this time I let go. Her face shows relief as she shoves the remaining items into her bag and stands. No one will be turning her in today.
“Thank you for your help, Lee. Not everyone in this town would’ve been so kindly.”
“That little blond-haired boy—is he your brother?” I ask.
“Billy? No, ain’t many left as still got family. Just a few friends.”
Maybe I’d be in her place, if I didn’t have Jefferson and Becky and Hampton and everyone else. “It’s important to have friends.”
She holds my gaze. “Thanks again. Be careful here in San Francisco—this city is full of thieves.” She pauses, her stare unwavering. Then, carefully: “The biggest thieves, the real ones, will take everything you have, even the clothes off your back.”
She rushes off before I can respond. Jefferson removes his hat and scratches his head. “What just happened here?”
Hampton laughs, a deep rumbly sound. “That little slip of a girl just tried to rob Mrs. Joyner. Thought she had a sunfish on the line, but it turned out to be a shark.”
I glare. “I’m the shark?”
“Meant it as a flattery.”
I turn to Jefferson, the question in my eyes, and yes, I’m not ashamed to admit I’m fishing for a compliment.
“Well, you do have a dangerous smile.” Before I can follow up, he says, “But seriously, what just happened here?”
I say, “She’s working with that group of children who bumped into us. I bet she walks down the street and identifies the targets—”
“Marks,” says Becky. “Mr. Joyner always called them marks. Gullible gamblers. Different situation, same principle.”
“So she walks down the street and identifies the marks—”
“Probably while the two of you were staring all googly-eyed at one another,” Becky interrupts again. She’s clutching her purse tight in both hands, knuckles white as she comes to grips with the fact that she nearly got robbed.
“And then she sends the little urchins out to play in the street and pick pockets. They bump into her coming back the other direction, but it’s really a handoff. That way, if anyone catches the children, they don’t have any evidence.”
“Anything incriminating,” suggests Becky, who never heard a fancy word she didn’t want to flaunt. “There was a pack of orphan children back in Chattanooga that functioned much the same.”
Maybe that’s what my life would have been like if my uncle Hiram had murdered Mama and Daddy and left me an orphan when I was five instead of when I was fifteen.
“She almost got away with it,” Jefferson says.
“Well, she didn’t,” Hampton says, climbing back onto the wagon bench. “Let’s get on with it. I want to check the post office when we’re done, see if there’s any word of my Adelaide.”
Hampton started out his journey on the California Trail as a slave. When his master died, he followed the wagon train west, secretly aided by the Illinois college men. Once we got to California and found gold, he bought his own freedom, with Tom’s help.
“What ship are we looking for?” Jefferson asks.
“It’s supposed to be right here at Washington Pier,” Becky says. “It’s called the Charlotte.”
“Then let’s have a look around.”