In these last two years Matilda had learned that there were travelling whores who went up into the mountains to earn their money. In a hastily erected tent they would take on as many as sixty men every night. In the further far-flung mining towns there were the hog farms too, a row of dirty little shacks with a woman in each, and they worked round the clock to satisfy the men’s needs. Worse still, Chinese girls, some as young as nine or ten, were being shipped over here, often sold by their families because a girl child was of no value. Their life was the very worst, kept in what was little more than a cage, half-starved, doped on opium to keep them quiet, and never receiving a cent from their hundreds of customers. Matilda had heard to her horror that when the owners knew these young girls were too diseased to attract any sort of buyer, they were administered poison, and their emaciated bodies were then dumped into the bay.
Matilda could do nothing about any of this, particularly for the Chinese girls. To most Americans this race were not even considered to be human, fit only to work as coolies on road gangs, at best as servants, lower still than Negroes who at least spoke English. So when she tried to rouse people’s sympathy she met a wall of indifference. All too often she had seen groups of miners catch hold of a Chinese man and cut off his pigtail to humiliate him, then beat him to a pulp, and this was considered good sport! It was hardly surprising the Chinese stayed in their little part of the town and rarely ventured out of it, and that in itself perpetuated the myth that they were to be feared.
Yet she was determined that she would do something to get these evils stamped out. So far all she’d been able to do was rescue a few girls from the streets and offer them proper employment.
She looked down at Mary Callaghan elbowing her way through a group of men carrying a tray of drinks. With her red ringlets, a sprinkling of freckles across her upturned nose, and her bright smile she looked like a girl fresh from a farm in Idaho. Yet six months ago she was better known as ‘Adobe Moll’, living in an adobe cabin on the river bank in Sacramento, taking on all the fresh young men stepping off the boats in search of gold.
It was just by chance that Matilda met her. She was on the way down to the mail office early one morning when she saw the girl staggering across a vacant lot towards her. She looked as if she’d been rolled in mud, her dress was filthy, the bodice ripped open, her face swollen and cut. Instinctively Matilda asked if she could help, and how she had got her injuries.
‘What’s it to you?’ the girl replied defiantly.
Matilda said that she wasn’t able to walk past anyone who looked hurt. At this the girl slumped down on the ground and burst into tears. She said she’d left Sacramento to try to make a new start here a few days ago. Last night a man had approached her and said he’d like to look after her.
‘I knew what he meant all right,’ she said angrily. ‘I told him I didn’t need no pimp, I could look after myself. It were a bit later when these two fancy women came up to me, first I thought they was going to get rough ‘cos I was working their patch, but they seemed real friendly and bought me a gin. Next thing I know they said they was going up to London Lil’s and did I want to come too. I never got there though, they led me over there.’ She pointed back across the vacant lot. ‘He was there waiting, weren’t he. The geezer I met earlier. He hit me and kept hitting me till I passed out. When I come to, I found he’d robbed me too, so I just stayed there all night hurtin’. I don’t know what I’m gonna do now. I ain’t got no money and he said if I tried to work in this town he’d kill me.’
Matilda couldn’t help herself, she just put her arms round the girl and hugged her. ‘He won’t kill you,’ she said. ‘I’ll see to that. Now, come on home with me and let me clean you up.’
‘I ain’t working in no brothel,’ the girl said, recoiling from her embrace. ‘That’s how I got this way, letting a woman who said she’d look after me take me back to her place.’
‘Is that what you think I am? A brothel keeper?’ Matilda exclaimed.
‘Ain’t you then?’
‘No, I am not,’ Matilda said indignantly. ‘What made you think I was?’
‘A regular lady wouldn’t speak to the likes of me,’ the girl said.
‘I guess I’m not that regular,’ Matilda said, and laughed. ‘I own London Lil’s.’
The girl just stared. ‘You ain’t! They says the woman up there is as hard as rock-face.’
‘Do they now,’ Matilda replied with a wry smile. ‘And why’s that?’
‘’Cos she won’t allow no fancy girls doing business in there.’
‘That’s true, I don’t,’ Matilda said. ‘But that doesn’t stop me from taking a girl in to clean her up.’
Matilda was reminded of the day she bathed Cissie as she prepared a bath in the wash-room for Mary, for the two girls had a great deal in common. Mary was every bit as saucy as Cissie and her story just as tragic. She had come out to California on a wagon train in ’48 with her widowed father and two younger sisters. One sister died of thirst in the Nevada desert, later her father accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun, and died a couple of weeks later from the infected wound. Mary made it through heavy snow in the mountains to Sacramento, but her last sister died soon after they arrived. Mary was just thirteen when the brothel owner sold her virginity to the highest bidder.
Matilda found her a dress to wear while her own was washed and mended, but it wasn’t until the next day that she offered Mary a job as a waitress and a room at the back of the saloon, on the understanding she was to turn away from prostitution for good.
Almost all the girls who worked for her had been whores, and she had no illusions that they’d all abandoned it for good. She paid good wages, but if for some reason they left, she guessed they’d be back to their old habits quickly. As Zandra had said, girls got into the profession for any number of reasons, and greed and laziness were two powerful ones. But Mary was different, the joy on her face when Matilda offered her the job was deeply moving. When she said she never wanted a man even to touch her again, she meant it, and now six months later she was the most hard-working and conscientious girl in the place, and fast becoming a friend rather than a mere employee.
Matilda moved on downstairs as the evening’s entertainment got under way. Tonight there were dancing girls, a tenor from Italy and a lady contortionist, and as usual the place was packed. Matilda moved around through the crowd, greeting regulars, introducing herself to those in for the first time, and watching for trouble. She had grown adept at sensing danger signals, often she could look at someone as they came through the door and know that were spoiling for a fight.
There had been some terrible fights in here on occasions, tables and chairs flung at the mirrors, bottles smashed and innocent people hurt as onlookers joined in the fray. Usually it was over a woman, for there were still so few in proportion to the men – at the last count she had heard there were eighty men to every woman.
The dancing girls returned briefly at the end of the show, and Matilda was just about to go back up to the gallery to keep watch from there when she sensed someone staring at her.
Mary had recently laughingly claimed that she had another pair of eyes hidden under her hair, and it was true she could sense something going on even behind her back. She turned, and to her utmost surprise Captain James Russell was standing just inside the door, looking right at her as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Her first instinctive reaction was to run and hide. She had thought about this man so often in the first few months in Oregon, and she would have welcomed him calling at the cabin at any time. But he hadn’t called, or even written her a letter, and all she could think in the first moment of recognition was that this was the man who knew all her secrets.
But she couldn’t run, she was penned in on all directions, and anyway he was moving towards her.
‘Is it really you, Matty?’ he asked, and his deep voice brought back so many sweet memories of the wagon train. ‘I can’t belie
ve it. Oh, Matty!’
The surprise, joy and utter disbelief in his face was almost too much to take. She felt as if she’d been winded, her stays were suddenly too tight, her heart pounding. The desire to hide had gone, it was wonderful to see him again.
‘Why, Captain Russell!’ she said, trying very hard to regain her composure. ‘What on earth are you doing in San Francisco?’
He came nearer still. His fair hair was cut shorter now, barely reaching his collar, his moustache trimmed to a thin line, he was wearing a dark green coat over riding breeches and long shiny brown boots. He looked like the gentleman she knew him to be, but the leanness of his body, the lines around his eyes from squinting into the sun for long hours hadn’t changed. Applause for the show erupted all around them, and if he did answer her question, she didn’t catch it.
His hand came snaking through the people surrounding them. ‘Come with me so we can talk,’ he said, grabbing her wrist.
He led her towards the door, clearly intending they should go out on to the veranda, but Matilda stopped him. However stunned she was to see him, it was a chilly evening, and besides, she needed to keep watching her customers.
‘No, come upstairs on the balcony,’ she insisted, and turning away, left him to follow her.
He raised one eyebrow as she sat down at the table marked reserved, but Matilda didn’t inform him that it was her table, or even that she owned this place.
He just sat there for a few moments looking at her almost as if he was seeing a ghost. ‘What a thrill,’ he exclaimed eventually, his bright blue eyes even more sparkly than she remembered. ‘I’m sorry to keep repeating myself but it’s just so amazing. You see, when I was told London Lil’s was the best place in town, that name instantly made me think of you.’ He paused as if to steady himself and put his two hands to his temples. ‘It was so strange. I got this sudden vivid picture of you telling me about London. I think even if I’d been told it was the worst saloon in town I’d still have come, for the name alone. All the way up the hill I was thinking about you. Then I walked in and there you were.’
His delight in seeing her was very touching. It brought home what good friends they had been, and indeed reminded her that if she hadn’t been pregnant it could possibly have grown into something more. Yet it still stung that he hadn’t written to her as he said he would.
‘I’m surprised you even remembered me,’ she said starchily. ‘You must meet so many women on the wagon trains.’
‘Not like you,’ he said with a smile. Just the way his full lips curved made her feel uncomfortably aware of how much time she’d spent thinking about him when she first got to Cissie’s. ‘I was so disappointed when you didn’t reply to my letter, but I thought maybe you had married.’
‘Letter! I didn’t get a letter,’ she exclaimed. ‘When did you send it?’
‘That first Christmas after we parted. I stayed on at The Dalles for some weeks, organizing the rest of the party down the Columbia. I planned to come and see you later in the spring, but as I got no reply, and then I was posted back to Fort Laramie, the chance was lost.’
She didn’t know whether to believe this or not. She had after all received other letters sent on from Independence. If they could get to her from such a long way off, why should his letter fail to reach her?
‘So what are you doing here?’ she asked. He sounded as different as he looked, a real gentleman now, not the rough, tough man he’d appeared to be on the trail. ‘Have you left the army?’
He shook his head. ‘No. I stuck with it. I’m on my way to a new posting in New Mexico territory. But tell me about you, Matty. How are Tabitha and Amelia? Do you live here now?’
Nothing had ever been so hard as to admit her children were still in Oregon with Cissie. She saw his eyes grow cold and he seemed to move back a little from her.
‘And you took a job here?’ he said in a scandalized tone.
‘This is my place, Captain Russell,’ she said in a haughty manner. ‘I am London Lil, I own it.’
She beckoned to Mary over the balcony while he reflected on this. Suddenly she needed a drink, and quickly.
Mary came. Matilda ordered a brandy for herself and whiskey for him. Mary looked curiously at the handsome stranger but at a sharp glance from Matilda she shot away again.
‘How, why?’ he asked once Mary had gone. He looked bewildered. ‘I thought you’d get land and turn to farming.’
Matilda explained as quickly and concisely as possible. ‘I’m not cut out to farm,’ she said. ‘I wish I could bring the girls here, but it’s not a safe place for children as I’m sure you’ve seen. They are very happy with Cissie, the money I send keeps them very comfortably. I miss them a great deal, but I go home as often as possible.’
He didn’t say anything for some time. Mary returned with their drinks and he sipped his reflectively. ‘Amelia must be four now, and Tabitha twelve,’ he said at length, and it was clear that he was recalling many memories of all of them. ‘I had always imagined you tucked into a little cabin, perhaps even married with another baby too. But then you always were a surprising woman.’
‘Tell me why men always consider that getting married and having babies is the answer to any woman’s prayer,’ she said, tossing her head in defiance. He was making her feel she ought to apologize for the way she’d turned out, and she didn’t like that. ‘If I’d come in here and discovered this was your place I’d say “How marvellous”, “What a clever man you are”. I wouldn’t say I expected you to be back in Virginia cutting sugar cane, with a parcel of children around you. I never met one man in Oregon I even liked enough to hold his hand, much less marry. I’m working to give my children a future, and giving work to dozens of people. Is that so bad?’
‘As bristly as ever,’ he smiled. ‘Still as English and twice as beautiful! I have to admit, Matty, that your gown becomes you far more than the widow’s weeds you wore on the trail. If I haven’t been able to express my admiration for this place, it’s only because I am so overwhelmed by seeing you again.’
Appeased, Matilda relaxed a little, telling him that it had all really come about through John’s business, then his death. He questioned her closely about the timber deals, clearly impressed by this, and went on to say how so many of his old friends had been caught up with gold fever, and how men he knew back in the East were hoping to build a rail road right across America to here before long.
‘I’ve heard that too,’ she said. Henry Slocum was anxious to get involved with this scheme and just lately he rarely talked about anything else. ‘I just wish people back in the East could be warned before they set out that few of them will make a fortune from gold. I’ve seen more men leave the town penniless than ones with loaded wallets.’
‘I don’t much care about the crazy people who chase dreams,’ he said. ‘My fear is chiefly for the Indians. There is bad trouble brewing, so far there have been only minor skirmishes with the settlers, but the Indians are far from happy now so many people are trailing across their lands. We are introducing diseases that they have no resistance to. The herds of bison they rely on for survival are being decimated. If we lay train tracks across their hunting grounds and bring millions more people, they will rise up and we will see bloodshed so terrible I cannot bear to think of it.’
She was very pleased to find he’d retained his support for the Indians, most men she’d met in this town would gladly see them wiped out. ‘That will make it very difficult for you then, James,’ she said in sympathy. ‘For I suppose as an army officer, you will have to lead men out to fight them?’
He nodded, and looked ashamed. ‘What else can I do? I have to take orders. But I don’t like it, Matty. I’ve learnt to admire and understand the Indians, there is much in their culture which is preferable to our own. I think it would be possible for white settlers to live peaceably alongside the Indians, if it was handled with sensitivity on both sides. But the vast majority of men in government are fools, or greedy speculators
interested in nothing more than lining their own pockets.’
‘Can’t you take a middle road and speak up for Indian rights, while still protecting the settlers?’ she asked.
‘There doesn’t appear to be a middle road anywhere in life,’ he said with great sadness. ‘You of all people must know that, Matty.’
She knew exactly what he meant. By opening a place like London Lil’s she had ostracized herself from society. Yet had she chosen to stay in Oregon living what most people perceived as a ‘decent’ life, she would be no nearer it either.
‘Someone long ago once asked me what I wished for from life,’ she said. ‘My reply was, that by the time I died I wanted to have felt I had made a difference, for the good, in someone else’s. It’s still my wish, and that’s my middle road, Captain.’
He smiled. ‘That’s a good wish,’ he said. ‘And I’m glad to see you haven’t lost an ounce of the integrity and courage that you displayed so admirably on the trail. Now, I see there are people dancing down there – is London Lil herself allowed to dance?’
‘I see no reason why not, Captain,’ she laughed. ‘It will probably be the talk of the town tomorrow, but such things never bothered me before.’
‘If you call me Captain one more time I might just give them even more to talk about,’ he said with twinkling eyes. ‘You have been warned!’
Matilda had never danced with a man since the night with Flynn in New York when the Milsons were away in Boston. But the moment James held out his arms to her all the excitement and wonder of that night came back to her. Lily had schooled her back in Missouri, just in case the opportunity of a real dance ever arose, but two women holding each other and giggling as they tried to hum a tune and keep in step was nothing like being in the arms of a real live man.