Heartbroke Bay Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Dear Diary,

  The advance from rags to riches has been swift. Thanks to the Indian Negook, we have at last achieved our goal of striking “pay dirt.” The strike is wonderfully rich, yielding four or five times as much gold as any ground we have previously worked. At the present rate of recovery, we shall all be very well off by the time autumn forces us to retire to Sitka.

  The days now grow rapidly shorter as winter approaches, and Hans, Harky, and Dutch work from daylight until dark, while Michael hunts. Hans speaks of working by torchlight, but the others decline to work any harder, as they already return to the cabin at night, exhausted and bleeding from their palms.

  The men’s days are strictly scheduled: Breakfast before daylight, work until dark, bathe in the pool (which grows chillier these days, but is still the best part of my day; I have my bath after the men have left in the morning), then the evening meal, after which the take is weighed before we retire to our bunks. Dutch crows and struts like a banty rooster each evening as Hans weighs out the take, but it is easy to forgive him his unseemly exultations, for he has been richly vindicated by Negook’s strike.

  Michael is proving to be a fine huntsman, adept at bringing fresh meat to the table. The flesh of the goats and sea lions is often stringy and tough, but he has fashioned a mallet from a spruce knot with which I beat the meat tender.

  Only Harky seems untouched by our fortune, but he is always such a silent man it is difficult to say whether or not he shares the exuberance of the strike.

  I must admit that the gold ignites grand dreams in my own mind, dreams of a fine home and nice things, but it stirs a certain fear as well, an uneasiness I cannot define …

  A BERKLEY BOOK

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  Copyright © 2010 by Lynn D’Urso

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  D’Urso, Lynn.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44497-9

  PS3604.U7575H43 2010

  81356—dc22 2010022330

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a heartfelt thank-you to the staff at the Alaska State Historical Library for their endless patience and help with my many requests for texts, articles, microfilms, and photos over the decade it took to write Heartbroke Bay. The efforts of Gladi Kulp, Gayle Goedde, and Jim Simard, among others, were indispensable.

  I also owe Jack Poulson, Kristie Swanson, Jonathan Wolfson, Luan Schooler-Wilson, David Hunsaker, the author Stuart Archer, and many others my thanks for their invaluable support through what now, after so many years, I realize have been an imposing number of draft manuscripts and rewrites. Were it not for my agent, Bonnie Nadell, I am not sure Hannah Nelson would have ever found her voice, and the support of my editor, Jackie Cantor, made Heartbroke Bay possible. I am grateful to you all.

  Lynn

  Winter

  In autumn the earth tilts away from the sun and winter looms over North America. In the farthest reaches of the North Pacific, where the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska meet, the winds begin to churn, spinning and building into muscular storms that hurry the change of the seasons on.

  By November the snow begins to fly. The moon the coastal tribes call Kokaha-dis, the “bears-digging-dens” moon, rises, and throughout the sprawl of rugged islands and glacier-filled valleys that make up the territory of the Tlingit Indians the clans begin moving baskets of dried fish and moose meat into the rafters of planked longhouses, measuring and remeasuring their weight against the coming darkness. On a rare windless night in December, the eyes of wolves and ravens carved into the totem poles that keep watch over the villages stare out from under a thick layer of frost.

  Now comes T’ak, the terrible child-dying time, when ferocious winds tear the trees from the ground and the cold can freeze a man’s eyes. T’ak passes slowly, slower than the creep of ice crystals up the inside of the longhouse walls. By Kladashu , the sixth moon, there is no fat left under the skin of the wild animals and the lamps in the longhouses burn with a dim yellow light. And one by one, as winter rages, even the strong begin to tremble, lose the will to live, and die.

  ONE

  AUGUST 1898

  A locomotive draws a thin stripe of smoke along the horizon. Overhead, the infinite blue dome of a prairie heaven fills the sky. Where the train runs swiftly across level ground, the smoke pales quickly, but on rising grades the engine slows and sketches a series of evenly spaced strokes that hang motionless against the sky. In the middle of the line of railcars rolls an elaborate Pullman car. Within the Pullman car sits a young woman, perched on a severe chair of oak and cane, swaying to the beat of the wheels as she stares out at an unending procession of fields burned to dust by the relentless heat of the Dakota sun. Scattered at random across the fields stand decaying sod shanties, abandoned by their builders as the tariff charged by the railroad for carrying their meager crops to market rose from eleven cents per hundred-weight to thirty, then fifty-five, until finally flood-cresting at more than a dollar.

  Four more years, thinks Hannah Butler. However shall I manage four more years? Behind her the voice of her employer, Lady Hamilton, drones a chorus of complaints against the chartered Pullman and its crew. At Lady Hamilton’s feet sits Victoria, Lady Hamilton’s second handmaid, who in the weeks since the entourage’s departure from England has become Hannah’s good friend, taking notes on a sheet of paper embossed with a crest of rampant unico
rns.

  “Perhaps a better grade of coal,” murmurs Lady Hamilton’s personal secretary in response to a demand that something be done about the sulfurous odor of engine smoke permeating the Pullman car. After offering the suggestion, Bernard (who pronounces his name with a purring emphasis on the first syllable) purses his lips and peers over a pair of pince-nez glasses as he waits for Lady Hamilton to agree with him.

  The smoke, the smells, a dearth of inspiring scenery—little has pleased Her Ladyship since departing the mouth of the Thames by steamship a month earlier for a tour of the American West. After a voyage of fifteen days to New York harbor, she had turned up her nose at a steady succession of imaginative American inventions, including an electric bread toaster, a confectionary whimsy described by its Italian immigrant inventor as an “ice-cream cone,” and a demonstration of one of the new gasoline-powered motor cars. Even the sight of an automatic staircase dubbed the “escalator” had been met with vinegar.

  Now, after a week on the rails, with the American prairie unrolling in all directions, Hannah feels trapped, damned to suffer Her Ladyship’s endless complaints while boredom nibbles at her like a crab.

  Freckled and gap-toothed like the Wife of Bath, she is twenty-three years old and blessed with a prosperous head of shining auburn hair that reaches the small of her back and light gray eyes that look out at the world with the shine of intelligence—a trait considered neither a virtue nor a demerit in English girls of marriageable age. Her nose is straight but perhaps a bit too long. Called comely by some and peculiar by others, she has believed each opinion in its time. Though sidelined from the world of business by her gender, she understands how the usury of railroad corporations grown bloated as show hogs on the sale of worthless stock certificates has brought her to this arid American savanna as surely as it has wrung the sap from the missing farmers, because she had watched, with growing concern, as her father, a once-successful British merchant engaged in the chandlery of supplies to the fleets of English traders, had funneled more and more of her family’s fortune into the pyramid schemes of the American tycoons.

  A flutter of guilt trickles through her stomach as resentment at her father’s profligacy rises; had he not financed his stock purchases through a series of loans from Lady Hamilton’s husband, each one secured by a note on the Butler holdings, she would not be here now, subject to the stultifying atmosphere of the clattering carriage, calculating again and again the time it will take for her salary of twenty-three pounds a month to repay the balance that remained on the notes after Lord Hamilton foreclosed on her family’s home. Swallowing her resentment, she stifles also the question of what there will be for her after her employment with Lady Hamilton ends; in four years, she will be almost twenty-eight years old, and with the world’s economy in rags, and her mother and father reduced to a one-room walk-up on the outskirts of London, it is difficult to imagine anything favorable waiting for a single woman on the verge of middle age—especially one newly released from the thrall of a wasp-tongued tyrant who has been known to strike serving girls during the course of her mottle-faced rages.

  Upon Hannah’s entrance into Lady Hamilton’s service, it had been agreed that draws of up to four pounds a month were to be allowed against her garnished wages for critical expenses such as books and clothing. She is considering how she may do without either when there is a light tapping at the door separating the opulence of the sitting car from the clattering, workaday world of the kitchen car. Victoria rises, cracks the door, and exchanges low words with a scullion maid in a dirty apron, then comes to where Hannah sits and bends low to whisper, “He’s here.”

  Casting a last look at the bleak prospect outside the Pullman’s window, Hannah rises, excuses herself, and tries not to hurry as she walks, with the sway of the rail car accentuating the swing of her skirts, through the door of the Pullman into the steam and smells of the kitchen car.

  Two days earlier, as the English party had prepared to depart Chicago on Lady Hamilton’s tour of the West, she and Victoria had gone to the station by carriage to ensure proper disposition of the numerous trunks of clothes, books, medicines, and delicate foods. Two wagons driven by thick-wristed teamsters followed, piled top-heavy with the equipage of the tour. A youngster perched on the tailgate of each wagon armed with a club of strong, supple ash to deter snatch-and-grab thieves. Hannah hated the city. She felt constricted by the endless threading of pedestrians and wagons through mounds of rubbish awaiting removal and the smell of stables swarming with flies.

  A Negro porter threading his way through the throng of passengers and hawkers shouted an offer to bring hand trucks and laborers for their luggage. To Hannah his speech sounded like “Ma’am, Ah’ll getcha trucks an de fellahs.” Dazed by the hubbub and unsure where to go, Hannah looked puzzled and asked the porter to repeat himself.

  “Trucks, ma’am, fo’ wheah?” He waved to a gaggle of stringy-limbed black boys in singlets and worn trousers to come forward. Again Hannah was at a loss and turned to the driver, who spit a stream of tobacco juice into the cobbled street and replied to her questioning look with a single word. “Where?”

  The Negro laborers swarmed the wagons, hefting trunks and cartons over the side, the light-colored palms of their hands and the soles of bare feet flashing, as they shouted unintelligible instructions back and forth, levering and lashing the freight onto carts and barrows.

  Hannah had no idea where the departure platform of the Northern Pacific Railroad was located within the maelstrom of steam whistles and shouting that was Chicago’s Union Station. A fistfight broke out between two young boys, and the mother of an immigrant family screeched at her scattering brood in a language bristling with consonants. A blind beggar playing a mouth harp held out a cap to passersby and was ignored. Hannah fought down an impulse to scream for silence and closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, a blond man was standing before her. Tall, with wide shoulders and a square, open face that had seen a great deal of sun and a recent close razor, the man stepped forward and tipped a well-kept homburg. The stranger wore a suit of light wool, gray, with thin, vertical blue stripes. His coat, unbuttoned over a pair of matching trousers, accentuated the length of his legs and narrowness of his waist. The legs of the pants were bloused into high-heeled riding boots of the sort Hannah had seen in drawings of American cowboys.

  The gray of the suit set off the color of the stranger’s eyes, which drifted the length of Hannah’s body before finding their way back to her own eyes. Rimmed in deep blue and with centers the shade of undyed flannel, they gave Hannah a moment’s pause and a vague sense of recognition, until she realized with a start that they were the exact color and composition of her own. Embarrassed, she looked away when she realized she was staring.

  The stranger’s blond mustache curled at the corners of his mouth as he grinned at Hannah’s discomfiture. Strong white teeth contrasted nicely with the ruddy brown of his face. Removing his hat, he held it to his chest, as if to testify that he was an honest man, and offered his name—“Hans Nelson”—like a title, then after a moment repeated it, appending his geographic origins as validation of his rectitude. “Hans Nelson. Of Blue Lake, Minnesota.” Smiling, he stepped closer to Hannah, his eyes roving the details of her face. She, in the manner of a woman who finds herself both unsettled and proud at being so admired, stood more erect and looked away. Victoria crowded closer, eyeing the new acquaintance with the shining eyes and swelling breast of a dove performing a courtship dance. Hannah stammered that they were to board for the West, on the North Pacific Line, “but the dialect of the porters is quite difficult.”

  Mr. Nelson waved to the sergeant of the bearers, shouted, and directed the delivery of the baggage to the westbound platform.

  “I’m bound for the Pacific Coast myself, by way of Butte, Montana, and then west to Tacoma, Washington. From there I go on to the Alaska Territory by steamship.” He smiled, waiting for the English girls to be impressed by his adventurism.r />
  Hannah found herself enjoying the forward American fashion, so different from the diffidence of strangers in England. “We have much the same itinerary then, Mr. Nelson,” she said, introducing herself, then Victoria, before giving a summary of Her Ladyship’s entourage, as the trio followed the cart train of porters through the crowd.

  Nelson instructed the luggage handlers in dividing the goods at the cars, saw to a guard for the property going into storage, then escorted Hannah and Victoria to the steps of the Pullman and tipped his hat.

  Victoria curtsied; Hannah removed a glove and held out a hand. Hans made a slight bow to Victoria, but his eyes were on the rose-colored blush that spread up Hannah’s neck, accentuating the lovely freckles on her nose and cheeks.

  Now, two days later, as the steel artery of the Northern Pacific Railroad crosses the Missouri River and rolls toward Montana into a region beyond the worst of the drought, Hans Nelson has come calling and presses a small bouquet of softly pink and blue foxglove blossoms into her hand. As she takes the offering of flowers, Hannah notices how strong Mr. Nelson’s hands look, all knob-knuckled and thick, with fingers almost square across the tips and nails scrubbed clean of any sign of work.

  After a brief exchange of simple pleasantries freighted with the complex messages of flirtation, Hannah is recalled by the imperious voice of a suspicious Lady Hamilton.

  Nelson strides the length of the train back to his car, slowly removing a cigar from an inside pocket—one of the good ones, a fresh Partagás—and slices the tip with a clasp knife before rolling it over a match. As he does, he smiles to himself. Strolling and puffing, he imagines returning to Minnesota with a beautiful, gray-eyed English prize on his arm and a fortune from Alaska in his bags.

  Quite refined, he thinks. Working for that Lady Hamilton. He reckons a lady as something akin to royalty. And the arch of Hannah’s neck and the hourglass shape of her waist and bosom make his groin ache.