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  DANIEL KNAPP

  California Woman

  CALIFORNIA WOMAN

  Copyright © 1980 by Daniel Knapp

  All rights, which have reverted to the Author, are reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, now known or hereafter invented, without the written permission of the Author or his heirs or assigns, except where permitted by law.

  ISBN 0-440-11035-1

  Published in the United States of America

  For my beloved wife, Leslie Ann

  Acknowledgements

  This book would not have been possible without the assistance and resources of Joseph Praske, Elmundas Zalys, Dr. Leslie Ann Knapp, Richard Kahlenberg, veteran Southern Pacific Railroad executive John Pitkin, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Bancroft and Huntington libraries, and the California Historical Society.

  My special thanks also to: Drs. Adel Jabour and John and James Williams; Antonia Knapp, James Himonas, S. Koscuik, J. Mulcare, Richard Erickson, Colby Chester, Charles Bloch, Paul Kohner, William Kelsey, Linda Lichter, Ilse Lahn, William Warnick; Judy England; my editors —Tova Laiter, Bill Grose, and Linda Grey; and the many other friends and associates who provided me with invaluable support, help, and expertise during the writing and editing of this novel.

  The Author

  Know ye that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very near the terrestrial paradise and inhabited by… women… living in the manner of Amazons. They are robust of body, strong and passionate in heart, and of great valor. Their island is one of the most rugged in the world, with bold rocks and crags. Their arms are all of gold, as is the harness of the wild beasts, which, after taming, they ride.

  …Over this island of California rules a queen, Calafia, statuesque in proportions, more beautiful than all the rest, in the flower of her womanhood, eager to perform great deeds, valiant and spirited, and ambitious to excel all those who have ruled before her.

  —García Ordóñez de Montalvo

  Las Sergas de Esplandían

  1510

  CALIFORNIA WOMAN

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Fifty-four

  Fifty-five

  Fifty-six

  Fifty-seven

  Fifty-eight

  Fifty-nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-one

  Sixty-two

  Sixty-three

  Sixty-four

  Sixty-five

  Sixty-six

  Sixty-seven

  Sixty-eight

  Sixty-nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-one

  Seventy-two

  Seventy-three

  Seventy-four

  Seventy-five

  Seventy-six

  Epilogue

  About The Author

  One

  SNOW

  One

  Sacramento

  May 6, 1869

  11 p.m.

  The woman in Charles P. Crocker's elaborately furnished private railroad car watched and waited in the darkness. In black widow's dress, a broad-brimmed black hat, and black veil, Esther Cable Carter virtually blended into the interior of the unlit car.

  Illumination from the gas lamps at the Sierra Hotel and in the adjacent buildings on Sacramento's Front Street scarcely reached the empty railroad station. There, a solitary kerosene lantern flickered ineffectually. Only when a brief opening in the slow-moving clouds released a spray of soft light from the moon was she fully conscious of the deep red velvet and ornate patterns of the soft chairs and settees in the forward portion where she sat. Only during those moments was she more than vaguely aware of Charles Crocker's teak and brass military field desk, the cushioned swivel chair before it, the cupboard and shelves containing railroad maps and reports at the front end of the car.

  She preferred the longer intervals of cool darkness. They matched more accurately the circumscribed, lethally tinted place her thoughts traversed at the moment. Suspended there, she remained heedless of the rest of the ceremonial Pacific Union Express train she was aboard, of anything, in fact, beyond the small, sharply focused world of her thoughts.

  Forward of the private car, the giant locomotive Jupiter rested silently for the next day's journey; its gargantuan wheels, pistons, concave-ribbed cowcatcher, glass-encased square head lamp, and oversized conical stovepipe chimney ready. Waiting. Behind the engine, a matching black coal-car; a wooden flatcar with low plank sidings made up the third unit of the train. In the morning a polished laurelwood railroad tie and a small crate containing a solid-gold spike would be placed aboard it, along with two armed infantrymen.

  In less than nine hours, in the morning, several hundred prominent Californians would board the three wooden, cap-roofed passenger cars. Politicians, judges, prosperous businessmen, lawyers, bankers, railroad officials, and a few less successful but historically significant men would accompany the laurel tie and solid-gold spike on a journey of nearly one thousand miles. Their destination: Promontory Point, Utah, and the ceremony commemorating the joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads.

  But for Esther, sitting in the darkened car, there were no thoughts of that historic moment. Another, more eagerly awaited private ceremony and the small rolling stage upon which it would unfold preoccupied her. Out of deference to the widow of William "Bull" Carter, the late superintendent and silent partner of the Central Pacific, Charles Crocker had offered his
private car if she cared to take her husband's place of honor at Promontory. Esther Cable Carter smiled in the darkness. Crocker and the other three members of the railroad's powerful Big Four—Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Collis P. Huntington—had provided her with the perfect setting.

  Behind her, the red velvet curtain that separated the two halves of the private car hung on brass rings encircling a brass rod. Beyond it lay Charles Crocker's brass feather bed, private dining table and chairs, small utility kitchen, pantry, and toilet. The windowed rear door of the car, the studded metal observation platform and its runged, three-and-a-half-foot iron-rail fence took shape in Esther's mind. Even in the darkness she could picture every square inch of the area beyond the curtain, every object in it, the door, the platform beyond, as clearly as though it were lighted by the sun at noon.

  Once more, slowly, she went over every step, every act, every detail of what would transpire beyond the curtain during the private ceremony she had planned. A ritual that would begin in deceptive gentleness tonight and end with the brutal honesty of winter lightning tomorrow.

  Satisfied, she let her thoughts drift back to the present. She gazed through the window at the front door of the Sierra Hotel. Someone sat rocking and smoking on the railed porch on the third floor, but no one was on the one below it or near the entrance. Faint strains of music and then the sound of applause, muffled by distance, wafted past her from the Eldorado Theater. She could see a few figures moving about in Kennedy's Saloon, but it was Tuesday night, and despite the festive spirit that had gripped Sacramento all week, all but a few people were already at home or asleep. For a moment, the irony of it struck her. There, in that hotel and in a number of homes here in the thriving state capital, were more than half of the people whose lives had significantly touched hers during the past twenty-five years.

  Among them was John Augustus Sutter, who had ridden in from his farm upriver to make the trip to Promontory. She shook her head. For at least the hundredth time, the powers that be were exploiting Sutter. He was the founding father of American California, or at least one of them. But the only use they had for him now, even while he spent months, years in Washington seeking to regain title to the vast lands he had once owned, was to play upon his egocentricity and good nature, call him back to California, and trot him out on display as if he were some prehistoric fossil. Whatever his faults, Sutter deserved better, and he could not have been more important to Esther had she been his daughter—or even his wife.

  He had been there, at her side, when they brought her, delirious and near death, her lips still crusted with human blood, to Sutter's Fort early in 1847, after she had staggered down out of the snow-choked Sierras. He had held Esther's right hand—tightly—while "Doctor" John Marsh amputated two gangrenous, frostbitten fingers from her left.

  Esther touched absently now at the cotton-packed pinky and third finger of the black glove on her left hand. She sighed. Sutter was indeed more than a friend. He had imperiously refused Marsh permission to cut off the tip of her frostbitten nose that day. The pale, scarcely visible scar tissue remained, but as much as she hated the mark and often felt the need to conceal it with a veil in public, it was far better than a tiny stump between her nostrils. Beyond that, Sutter was the only one who had known most of the truth from the beginning. The only one aware that Elizabeth Purdy Todd, now known as Esther Cable Carter, had survived those indescribable weeks in the mountains almost two dozen years earlier. He had never known the worst of it. But he had helped her conceal what he did know, and he had kept her secret all these years.

  Billy Ralston had also helped her, in a different way. The millionaire banker was smoking and rocking on the third floor porch of the Sierra Hotel at this very moment; no doubt dreaming, Esther guessed, of new ways to milk silver from the Comstock, further enrich himself, and additionally enhance his beloved San Francisco. Billy had made her a second fortune, greater by millions than her first. But tonight that mattered only because it had helped place her in a position to dictate the events about to unfold in this private car; and prevent, if all went according to plan, the worst of those scheduled for Promontory.

  Less than a mile away, Alexander Todd lay asleep in the home Esther had sold him. She wondered what the future held for them. He was still her husband, had been for twenty-four years, even though she had married another man whose surname Todd's son bore. It had been a struggle to get seven-year-old Todd Carter to bed tonight. The prospect of riding with the engineer in Jupiter at least as far as Reno had kept him rambunctious until the last minute, when he finally slumped in a chair by one of the windows in her hotel suite. Esther felt no concern for him now. The Indian woman, Solana, would watch over him until Esther returned, no matter how late it was.

  Out there somewhere in the city, Lewis Keseberg, half-deranged now in his declining years, would be pacing the floor of his shabby little house, shouting at the top of his lungs, as Esther had heard he did almost every night about midnight, insisting in one of four languages that he had not murdered anyone that incredible winter a little more than two decades ago. Esther did not believe or disbelieve him. But it really didn't matter now. Most of those who had survived the endless weeks in the snow, herself included, had done what they had to do. They had eaten the flesh of men and women, even some of the children who had succumbed to the starvation and the cold. Keseberg may have been grossly indiscreet, indeed grotesque, in his recounting and exploitation of the experience through the years, but it was a wonder any of them who had come down out of those forbidding mountains had retained sanity enough to speak at all, let alone discreetly. None of it mattered any longer. What did matter was that after all the years of her hearing stories about Keseberg, he had chanced to learn that Luther Mosby, the man she now waited for, planned to kill Alexander Todd at Promontory. Keseberg had gone straight to his old friend Sutter with the information, and Sutter had come to her. What mattered even more was that Mosby would be on this particular train when it left Sacramento tomorrow. He was in the Sierra Hotel right now. He would be standing before her in minutes, unknowingly joining her in the first, purposely misleading phase of the ritual she had waited so long to perform.

  For a moment she wished that Alex Todd had listened to her. She wished that he was not making the trip in the morning with the rest of them. But he was probably right. If Mosby did not try to kill him at Promontory, it would be at someplace else.

  So it was in her hands again, as it had been off and on for twenty-two years. Since the day in the Sierras she had later written about on a predated page of her leatherbound journal. The page, inscribed more than two decades ago in her own exquisitely delicate hand, that ended: "If it is the last thing I do on this earth, I will see Luther Mosby either ruined or dead."

  Two

  Luther Mosby appeared in the doorway of the Sierra Hotel. He was just a silhouette, but there was no mistaking him. Still lean in his mid-fifties, he carried himself, stood, and walked as he had two decades ago. Slightly flexed at the knees, his left arm dangling oddly, loose and ready to spring. Moving down the wooden sidewalk now, away from the train—as Esther had directed him to do earlier in the evening—Mosby reminded her of some lean creature of the wilds.

  Breaking his rangy stride, he took out a pocket watch, noted the time, and began doubling back on this side of Front Street toward the railroad station.

  Mosby stopped suddenly in its shadow. Esther heard the soft whistling of the railroad watchman, who passed directly beneath the window beside her, then angled off toward Kennedy's Saloon. When the watchman was gone, Mosby began walking again, coming straight toward the train. He stopped opposite the engine, glancing about.

  Esther laughed inwardly. He had reason to be cautious. More than a few persons in Alta California, as she was still occasionally in the habit of calling it, were not beyond shooting or bludgeoning Mosby in the dark. It was probably the only place any average man would have even a reasonable chance to compensate for Mosby's ferocious
skill with the bowie knife and derringer he carried. It was a wonder that he had accepted her invitation. Even at that, she had been forced to reveal factually—and physically—more than she thought prudent to get him here at this hour.

  The Indian woman had taken the message to Mosby before dinner, a brief note asking him to come to the door of Esther's suite at eight o'clock. In the dining room of the hotel, Esther calculatedly sat in profile to Mosby at the next table with her son. Mosby had not missed a detail of the lustrous dark hair that fell over her shoulders, the full, tightly clad bosom, slender waist, and curve of calf that was exposed when she "accidentally" snared her long skirt on a nail in the table leg. She knew the black clothes, hat, and loose-fitting short veil and black gloves had not lessened his curiosity. Nor had his awareness that she was "Bull" Carter's widow. Neither had her frequent glances in his direction, each punctuated with the slight hint of an admiring smile. Still, it had taken some doing to persuade him to come.

  "I don't know, ma'am," he said, after she had opened her chain-latched door a crack and suggested the late-night meeting. "It comes of a sudden, and...and...as you may know, I'm a recently married man."

  "To Miss McDonnell."

  "You seem to know a bit about me."

  "I have been an...admirer...of yours for some time."

  "That so?"

  "Indeed it is, Mr. Mosby. We could..." She lapsed into silence and summoned up a suggestive smile.

  "Yes?" he said, still guarded. "What is it we could do? I take it you have something you want to discuss."

  "Not precisely."

  "Well, what is it you want of me?" He glanced up and down the hallway.

  "It...it's difficult for me to speak of it."

  "Well, try anyway."

  A gust of wind blew the curtains against the sash with a sudden whisper of sound down near the stairway. Mosby turned to it smoothly, his right hand going inside his unbuttoned frock coat faster than she could see it move. He turned back.