There were things he'd have to do to protect himself... have her followed, make sure she meant him no harm with all the secrets she possessed... but not today. If she were a man, he'd have her killed, but he hurt too much to be practical. Was this what losers felt, this abysmal desolation? Or was this agony reserved for lovers?
He glanced at the stocky, square body reflected in the gilt mirror beside his desk. He saw middle age... gray hair, face lined with experience, a grim expression born of power. How could a woman like Fancy love a man who looked like this? Wouldn't she always long for youth and handsomeness, for the ephemeral perfect lust of the young that nothing, not even money and power, can compensate? He took the photograph of Chance McAllister out of the Pinkerton folder on his desk and stared at it with hatred.
Jason Madigan put his silver head down on the desk where deals were consummated daily that made men tremble, and he cried.
Fancy stood with her back against the door, a pain like a toothache in her head. What if he was right and what she planned was insane... she'd have to leave quickly before his logic or his love undermined her resolve.
"I'm so sorry, Jason," she whispered into the silence. "I never meant to harm you. I didn't even know you could be harmed..." What if the Binding" Ritual was responsible for his obsessive passion. No! That was absolutely ridiculous. This was 1878 and the ritual was just some stupid Gypsy superstition, and besides, she hadn't even done it right.
Fancy, guilty and nervous, moved to the closet and began to yank her clothes off the hangers, wondering why on earth she could never stay where it was safe.
***
Jason didn't thunder at her as she walked out the door the following day. In truth, he seemed more injured than vindictive. He would miss her, he said, and he would miss Aurora, who clung crying to his waist.
Jason reminded Fancy of all she was leaving behind in her career and her life-style, but never once pleaded for her to stay. His dignity surprised her.
Truth was, he had no frame of reference for the emotions he was feeling, that threatened to unman him. He wanted to beg her to stay... he wanted to weep for his loss... He wanted to kill her. He would force the unfamiliar emotions into insignificance... he would obliterate her unworthy memory... he would forget the love and the longing...
He would hire a detective from the Pinkerton Agency to follow her to Leadville.
PART VII: THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN
Fancy, Her Friends, and Thier Enemies
The Late 1870s
"You kin strengthen the soul with sweat faster'n with prayin'."
Bandana McBain
Chapter 56
When Fancy stepped off the stage from Denver with her daughter by the hand, she thought Leadville was like a patch of recent bean sprouts, one day nothing but a seed, the next a thousand stalks of green life bursting out.
The Kansas Pacific Railroad was raising money to run the Denver and Rio Grande along the rim of the mountains she'd mucked in seven years before. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe was edging along the Arkansas valley; once the railroads were complete there'd be no stopping the boom times, for trains could bring in the hard-rock machinery and take away the ore. They could also provide the brocade and ebony, the European silver and crystal, the antiques and the reserve-stock wine and brandy, the cigars and the diamonds for the big winners.
Fancy could feel the rhythm of expansion all around her. Every intuitive bone responded to the possibilities; she'd made the right choice in leaving New York. Back East, there were cities with conveniences and culture and history, but they were bound into their own ways and those ways belonged exclusively to men. In the West, she sensed a newness, as if the world had been born this morning and you could do anything you wanted with it.
Women were scarce here—scarce enough so men tended to give them the latitude to be entrepreneurial. Many's the woman who supported her husband's prospecting efforts by baking pies and cookies or taking in laundry, and nobody batted an eye at that. In Leadville, nobody would care if Fancy tried her hand at empire building. For all she knew, they might even give her a hand.
Jewel's Rules
Gentlemen are expected to wash out of doors and find their own water. Lodgers must furnish their own straw. Beds on barroom floor reserved for regular customers. Persons sleeping in the bar are requested not to take their boots off. Lodgers inside rise at 5 a.m., in the barn at 6 a.m. Each man sweeps up his own bed. No quartz taken at the bar.
No fighting allowed at the tables. Anyone violating the above rules will be shot.
Jewel stood back to admire the new sign that adorned the bar at the Crown. She smiled with satisfaction and the smile made her face beautiful and young. The artist had achieved exactly what she wanted, small gold curlicues at the corners and a heavily embellished crest at the top. Other than that, the lettering was big and simple.
"Got to be able to read it with a bellyful of Taos Towse," she'd told the sign painter, whose own belly was full of the stuff so frequently, she knew he'd understand.
It was tough enough, Jewel thought, to handle the tired, lonely, uneducated, frustrated, and otherwise desperate men who came there in droves, as she had been doing for years in one brothel or another, but to handle them when they were likkered up was another matter entirely.
Part of the problem was that a saloon wasn't just a place to drink. It was a hotel, an eatery, a gambling den, a livery stable, a social club, a political arena, a dance hall, a trading post, and sometimes even a mortuary. Old Dan Kelleher had been laid out real nice in front of the bar before they'd planted him, which had seemed only fitting as he'd breathed his last right here at the Crown of Jewel's anyway. Of course, all of that was the good news, because it meant the revenue was always steady from one part or another of the options of the Crown's hospitality, and business was seldom slowed by changes in the economy.
"Pour me a whiskey, will you, Rufus?" she called to the bartender, who raised an eloquent eyebrow at her. Jewel seldom drank before sundown.
"And make it the good stuff. Not any of that cow piss the miners live on." She noted the disapproving eyebrow. "And no comments to go with it neither, if you don't mind."
The man smiled enough to show he understood, not what she said but what she meant. He placed the shot glass and the bottle on the bar with a practiced thunk and wordlessly returned to shining up the bottles. A good barkeep made a hundred dollars a month, vastly more than a miner's wage, and as far as Jewel was concerned, Rufus was worth his pay times ten.
"Might be I'm gonna like bein' an impresario," Jewel said with an expansive wave of the hand to Rufus, or the air and nobody in particular. She'd already outlined for him what would be involved in creating a theatre for Fancy.
"Better like it," Rufus replied laconically. "Gonna cost you money, sweet thing."
Jewel looked at the big colored man in the lamplight. "Or it might just make me some," she replied. Then she threw back the whiskey neat without a grimace. Rufus shook his head and grinned; even smiling, he looked like a man you wouldn't want to mess with. He was huge and powerful; his bald head gleamed in the light from the chandelier.
"When God give you dat hollow laig, you s'pose He knowed what yo' profession gonna be? It come in mighty handy."
Jewel laughed, but didn't answer. She thought of Rufus as a friend. In her kind of business, it paid to have someone trustworthy to watch your back—especially if he handled Remington's new double-barrel shotgun like he'd been born with it in his hand. She plunked the shot glass down and headed for the second floor.
Fancy curtsied for the last time and threw kisses to the wildly cheering audience. The lonely men loved her when she sang the ballads they remembered from their lost childhoods... they loved her when she sang the bawdy lyrics of the cabaret... and when she danced, or recited poetry. Truth was, thought Jewel, watching the rapt audience of ragged, bearded, dirty, hard-drinking men, they loved the kid, period.
Fancy's little music hall had doubled Jewe
l's business in two months. Despite Rufus' dire predictions about the time that would be taken out from serious gambling and drinking, just the opposite had occurred. The miners drank steadily while Fancy performed, the "beer jugger" girls scurried back and forth from the bar to the tables, and the gamblers either gambled through the performance or came earlier and stayed later to compensate for the time their pigeons spent listening.
Fancy swept from the platform amid a chorus of cheers, whistles, and stamping feet. It fascinated Jewel that such a little bitty thing could look so grand as she entered and exited; no one ever missed the moment of Fancy's arrival or departure.
Ten minutes later, Fancy reappeared, out of costume and dressed in a robin's-egg-blue gown that showed off her bosom in its youthful perfection; her eyes, lips, and cheeks were enhanced with subtle color, or perhaps just flushed by the adulation of the crowd.
"Evening, Jewel. Nobody looks as good in red as you do." Fancy smiled engagingly as she reached the larger woman's side. Jewel was dressed in a tightly corseted red taffeta dress with black lace on the stays and decolletage. Rumor had it that the sturdy supports needed to prop up Jewel's monumental bosom were made of steel; that once a crooked gambler had tried to shoot her and the bullet had ricocheted off a stay and given her time to wing the man with a tiny Derringer kept in her garter for such emergencies.
"Scarlet as sin itself, kid. What could be more appropriate? You could have heard a poker chip fall into the sawdust tonight while you were singin'. Could've swore I was in church."
Fancy smiled graciously at the compliment; she knew it was entirely true. "Have you got a minute to talk about an idea I've had about making extra money, Jewel?"
"Always got a minute for that, I guess. You sure don't let any grass grow under you, do you, kid? The cabaret's only open two months and now you got another business percolatin'."
Fancy was ambitious in ways Jewel hadn't even imagined a woman could be. Jewel knew her way around a buck, but Fancy's need was voracious... unsatisfied by success, unsatisfied by whatever money she put in her poke, maybe insatiable. She was headstrong, too; Jewel was keeping a close eye on that particular failing.
"I've been hearing things and I've been thinking. Jewel... when I was working the digs with the boys, it seemed to me there were two things the men needed more than anything. A safe place for their money and someone to do their laundry."
Jewel laughed uproariously. "There's sure as hell a third thing I can think of, Fancy—that's where the bulk of my business comes from! Besides, by the look of most of them men, you wouldn't think that laundry was a big priority."
"I mean it, Jewel. They trust you, and they like me. I'm telling you we could do it. They don't trust bankers and they don't want their money where they can't lay hands on it. As it is, I'll bet there are plenty of men who'd rather have their pokes in your vault than under their cots. What if we started a little sideline offering to bank it for them? We could learn about investing—I lived with a man who started out a miner and ended up a banker—"
"Hold your horses, kid! I keep their gold as a favor. Rather have it safe in my vault with Rufus and his twelve-gauge to keep an eye on it than see 'em bury it under a rock in the Mosquitoes and get their throats slit guardin' it. But I don't know a damn thing about investin'."
"But I do, Jewel, and what I don't know we can learn."
"And what's this fol-de-rol about laundry? That's a pretty far cry from bankin' or sellin' booze or nightbirds or entertainin' for that matter." Fancy realized for all Jewel's protests she hadn't said no.
"It's just another opportunity, Jewel, and a damned good one. If we open a laundry, we'll have men lined up in a queue that'll reach to Denver."
Jewel scratched the underside of her chin, thinking. "Need a Chinaman for laundry, Fancy. Had 'em on the Comstock. They know more about laundry than any men alive. But I ain't seen one since."
"The railroad's coming through here, Jewel. When they hook up the Union Pacific to these mountains there'll be all the Chinamen we could ever want. Besides, I know one who'd be sensational. His name's Wu. I'm not sure exactly where to find him, but if I can, he'd be the perfect man to run our laundry business and maybe a few other things I've got in mind. He's as ambitious as we are and smart as paint. We'd make money, Jewel. Lots of money."
Fancy's voice had risen enough to attract the notice of the men around her.
"Anybody looks like you, sweet thing," said a drawling man in a sweat-stained ten-gallon hat, "shouldn't have to worry about makin' money."
Fancy smiled warmly; she remembered Magda's tactics for keeping men at arm's length without offending them. "If I had a man like you at home, Bent, I wouldn't have to worry, now, would I?" she replied with just the right hint of coquettishness, then she returned her attention to Jewel who was watching her appraisingly.
The kid was no fool—banking was a tricky proposition, although not one Jewel hadn't dabbled in, in her own way. She didn't keep the men's gold entirely as a favor, she was paid for her services; it was an easy and lucrative sideline she'd learned about in other mining camps. Every camp needed a woman who was the "trusted repository"—sacrosanct, untouchable by unwritten law. After all, on a mountain a thousand miles from nowhere, somebody had to be declared neutral territory or no one's poke was safe; and she was a damned good shot with pistol or rifle. And then there was Rufus and his shotgun. "Buckshot makes a mean and oozy corpse," he would have said to anyone stupid enough to trouble him or the gold.
Fancy was smart all right, and quick to spot an opportunity, but Jewel would be damned if she'd cut the kid in on everything—at least not right away. Laundry, on the other hand, that was a whole new area of enterprise....
"Why don't you see if you can find this Wu feller. See if you can get him in here for a little chitchat. If I think he can do it, I suppose we've got enough money in the kitty to bankroll some soap and a clothesline, just for the hell of it."
Fancy smiled her delight at the answer; now all she had to do was find Wu.
Fancy Deverell
The Crown of Jewel's
Leadville, Colorado
September 18, 1878
Dear Wu,
I have no way of knowing if this letter will ever reach you. If it does I want to offer you a business proposition.
I now live in Leadville in the Mosquito Range about seventy miles from Denver. Destiny has given me a part interest in a music hall and a saloon. While it is not yet the success I once dreamed of, it is at least situated in the goldfields and so I still believe firmly that all we once wished for can be ours.
The proposition I offer you is this: The town of Leadville is growing daily. The miners need laundry done and I propose to start a business to do it for them, but I am busy with other enterprises. If you wish to participate with me in this venture, please (and I truly hope you will, Wu) contact me at the Crown of Jewel's, in Leadville, Colorado. I will make you a partnership arrangement that is certain to please you.
I send my hopes that this letter finds you well and prosperous and that I may see you soon again.
With love, Fancy
She tucked the letter to Wu inside the one to Magda and Wes— she thought she remembered the Gypsy saying she knew where to reach him. She also arranged to have an ad run in the Chinese newspapers in New York and San Francisco. If Wu Chin was alive, she'd find him, she was sure of it.
Fancy had invited her three circus friends to come to Leadville to be part of her little theatre, but to her surprise, they'd declined. Denver was their home now, they said. Jarvis was a respected newspaper columnist and Magda had many prosperous clients who depended on her advice. Even Gitalis now managed the burlesque, and they were content to remain where they were.
Fancy sealed the envelope with a sigh. She could hear Aurora's high-pitched voice outside the window; thank heavens the child seemed to be making friends at last.
The first few weeks after New York had been a nightmare of anger and surliness. Auro
ra had so adored Jason, his "castle," and the fairy-tale life he'd provided. She'd cried for a month after leaving and hated every minute of the trip west. Fancy'd outdone herself on the train and stagecoach trip to divert her, but when Aurora was displeased with life she made certain everyone in her vicinity shared her misery. Fancy had sung to her, held her, told her stories; she'd pointed out the passing prairie and woven tales about every inch of desert or mountain as they passed it by, but Aurora had made it very plain that none of this was of the slightest interest to her.
"She's the strangest child, Magda," Fancy told her Gypsy friend when they stopped by Denver on their way to Leadville. "Sometimes I think she loves me as I love her, and other times I think she hardly cares if I live or die. She has no interest in any of the things that excited me when I was little. She learns only what she wants to learn and not one jot more. Why, at her age, I was a sponge that soaked up every drop of knowledge."
"Did you think she would come to you a clean white sheet of paper, Fancy, on which you could write what you wished to see? Her soul is as old as yours is, child, only the body it inhabits is young. You and she may not be friends at all, you know. Mothers and daughters seldom are."
"But that's absolute nonsense, Magda. I adore my daughter— I've slaved for her and gone hungry so she could eat. I've worked myself into a stupor and then gone home to play dolls, so she wouldn't feel different from the children whose mothers didn't have to work. There isn't anything I wouldn't do for her—I love her more than anything."
Magda's eyes, when Fancy looked into them, were utterly uncompromising. "What difference how much you love her, Fancy, if she loves you not?"
Fancy drew back as if slapped. "How could she not love me? Are you telling me that my daughter doesn't love me?"