To her amazement, Fortune found the work of nursing the sick very rewarding. Though she was exhausted, terrified, revolted by the filth and the suffering, when she entered a room and the moaning creature that lay on a cot saw her and, for a moment, seemed to be free of the fear and the pain, she felt something she had never experienced before, something that struck deeper even than the applause she had learned to love.
In a matter of days she had become the stuff of legend. The miners referred to her as “The Angel of Centipede Hollow,” and many a miner would claim in later years that he survived the cholera because he lay in his bed day after day “waiting for his Fortune,” unwilling to die until he had had his chance to see her that day, and too filled with hope to die once he had.
Fortune herself never fully realized the impact she had on those men. Traveling the streets in an old blue cloak that one of the other women had given her to wear, she would come in from the fog or the darkness, her golden hair tumbling over her shoulders, her eyes filled with compassion, and suddenly make life seem worthwhile again.
Her world became an endless round of the sick and the dying, a sea of mud, an overwhelming stench of disease and filth that could not be escaped no matter where she went.
Yet she would have been content, were it not for her fears for her friends. Edmund, with remarkable strength, had thrown off the disease in less than three days. Weak but willing, he joined the nursing effort by helping with the preparation of food for the victims.
Fortune, astonished, said nothing.
Jamie was on her mind constantly during these days. Every time she ministered to a sick miner, wiped someone’s brow, or fed him broth, she wondered if Jamie was well, and if he was not if anyone was caring for him.
She wondered, too, what he thought of her, if he ever thought of her at all.
Sometimes she wondered if he was even alive. That thought, when it came, was ruthlessly purged. She would lift the chain that hung about her neck, cup the golden nugget in her palm, and try to keep from weeping. Even when not holding it she was aware of the heart-shaped nugget where it rested against her own heart.
She tried to console herself with the knowledge that Plunkett’s Players had been lucky. By rights, more of them should have lost the battle with cholera. But Edmund was almost fully recovered, and Aaron and Mrs. Watson were both doing well. The troupe had beaten the odds. Yet she was greedy. She wanted all of them to survive.
And it seemed clear that Walter would not.
Sometimes at night, when she simply could not walk another step, Fortune would take out the banjo a dying miner had given her, and sing quietly to herself, the little songs she had been writing about California.
If she sat on the porch of the hotel when she did this, miners would soon gather about her, in the same way the wagon people had. Then she would feel once more what it meant to be a performer.
She understood, in those days, how her songs could be as important as the nursing she was doing, for she could see the gratitude in the eyes of the men who listened—gratitude for what her songs gave them: a momentary release from the sorrow that surrounded them, and an escape valve for pent-up emotions. When she sang of homes that were far away, she could count on bringing them to tears every time.
It gave her a sense of power, and a sense of responsibility.
Late one night Fortune sat on the porch, strumming the banjo and thinking about all that had happened in the single year since their wagon had rolled into Busted Heights the previous April.
A heavy fog closed over the streets, so that the dim glow of yellow from the window behind her provided the only illumination.
Suddenly she began to weep. Seven more men had died that day, despite everything she had done. It was no surprise. Everyone knew what the odds were. But she could never get used to it. She wanted to be back on the stage, where death was a bit of pretending, and at the end of the show everyone came back to take a bow.
Sorrow found voice in song. Plucking the banjo, she began to sing the words she had written back while they were on the trail:
“When I rise up
And look around,
My home I cannot see…”
She stopped, the painful hurt in her throat too thick to let the words pass. But from out of the mist and the darkness a sweetly familiar tenor voice picked up the lyric, finished the verse.
“For I have wandered
Far away…
What will become of me?”
She seemed to hang suspended in space, unable to speak, to move, to breath. From the corner of her eye she saw a movement in the fog at the end of the porch. It freed her to move again. Silently she placed the banjo at her side. Then she stood and brushed out her skirt.
“I’m here,” she said softly.
The mist seemed to cling to the man who stepped forward, hiding his face. It made no difference; she knew who it was.
She wanted to run to him, throw her arms around him, cover him with kisses.
But she couldn’t. Not yet. Not until she knew how he felt about her.
He stepped still closer. She was on fire with the need to reach out to him. But she had to wait, had to know if he would accept her, forgive her…
Still not saying a word, Jamie stepped out of the mist. His eyes were dark, as if he had not slept in a long time, and they seemed deeper than ever, full of wonder.
Slowly, almost fearfully, he reached out to touch her hair.
A sob broke from his chest. “My God. You are here. And you’re alive!”
Trembling, she placed her hand over his.
“I’ve kept track of you every day since I left,” he whispered. “When I learned about the flood, the cholera, heard what you were doing here, I had to come. Even if you didn’t want me, I had to see if you were all right, to see if…if you needed me.”
The words caught in his throat. They were unnecessary. She saw everything she needed in his eyes.
Tentatively, still trembling, but knowing that he was willing to risk even the horror of cholera on her behalf, she reached out her hand and laid it on his chest.
“Jamie.” Her body shook like a leaf in the wind, and no more words would come. It didn’t matter. His arms were around her now, and he was holding her against him so tightly it felt as if they were a single being.
“Oh, Fortune,” he gasped. “Oh, God, you don’t know how I’ve missed you. Every day was a little death, every night an eternity in hell. There hasn’t been a morning I’ve woken without you on my mind, a night when you weren’t the last thing I thought of before I went to sleep.”
“I thought I would die when you went away,” she whispered. She drew away from him slightly, remembering how he had been hurt by what he saw. “Let me tell you what happened.”
He covered her lips, first with his finger, then with a kiss. “It doesn’t matter,” he said a few moments later. “I don’t care what happened, as long as you love me now.”
“I do.” She pulled his face back down to hers. “I do.”
After a time she took Jamie into the hotel and led him to Walter’s bedside. He gasped, and Fortune realized again how old and shrunken their friend now looked.
Jamie turned at her, and she could read the question in his eyes: Is he going to make it?
She shook her head.
Before either of them could speak, Walter opened his eyes.
“Jamie?” he asked, struggling to lift his head. Then, when he was sure of what he was seeing, he held out his hand. “Jamie! Do you know me?”
“‘Excellent well,’” said Jamie, reaching down to take Walter’s hand. “‘You are a fishmonger.’”
“It is you!” said Walter, clutching him desperately. “You came back!”
“Couldn’t stay away!”
“I’ve been waiting for you.” He gasped, and broke into a fit of coughing. When it finally subsided, he said, “There’s something you have to see!” He turned to Fortune. “Show him.” He reached up and touched her neck, laying his fingers lightly over the chain she had worn throughout the winter. “Show him what you always have with you…”
Without a word, Fortune drew out the heart-shaped nugget.
“See!” Walter was smiling now, his face more peaceful than she had seen it in months. “See, Jamie, I didn’t waste all your gold.”
Jamie looked startled. “What do you mean?”
“Later,” whispered Fortune. “I’ll tell you later.”
Walter took Jamie’s hand and squeezed it fiercely. “Be good to her, boy,” he whispered. “Be good to her. If you don’t, I’ll come back. I’ll haunt you fiercer than the ghost of Hamlet’s father.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes. “I always wanted to get the death scene,” he whispered. His hand tightened on Jamie’s. Then his once massive body, shrunken and wasted by the disease, twitched in a final spasm.
Jamie stood without moving for a long time. Finally he released Walter’s hand and placed it tenderly on the old man’s chest.
Moving slowly, as if with a great weariness, Fortune pulled the other limp hand on top of it. Then, repeating a gesture she had made all too many times in the last few days, she drew the sheet over his still and silent face.
After a time she took Jamie’s hand, warm and pulsing with life, and led him from the room.
“Tell me what happened,” he said urgently, as if life would always be too short. “Tell me everything—everything you’ve done and thought and heard and seen. And then I’ll tell you about me—about how much I love you, and about the million letters I wrote and tore up, and how you were on my mind every minute of every hour, and about the fortune in gold I’ve dug out of the hills, and—”
“It can wait,” said Fortune, tracing the line of his jaw with her fingertip. “I’ve got everything I need right here.”
He took her in his arms and made everything else disappear.
Three weeks later, on a morning brilliant with sunshine, the six members of Plunkett’s Players crested a California hill.
“There it is!” whooped Mr. Patchett, who was walking alongside the new wagon they had bought with the money Jamie had dug from the hills. “There…it…is!”
“The promised land,” said Aaron, who was walking beside him. His voice held no trace of cynicism.
Fortune felt her heart leap. It really is beautiful, she thought, gazing down at the city her father had set out to reach over two years before. The sparkling waters of the broad bay where the city lay waiting seemed to beckon them on. Gulls wheeled and cried above great ships with furled sails that sat rocking at anchor. To the west the blue-gray waters of the Pacific stretched as far as the eye could see, until they were lost in the haze of the horizon.
Papa! Oh, I wish you could see it. I wish you could be here with us.
“Ready, Mrs. Halleck?” asked Jamie softly.
Fortune reached out and took her husband’s hand. “Give me just a minute longer, Mr. Halleck. I never really expected this to happen.”
He smiled and in the moment of astonishing warmth that flooded her heart she thought, This is it. This is home. It’s with him, wherever that might be.
She smiled. “I’m ready now.”
With a smile as big as tomorrow he looked over his shoulder, into the wagon, and said, “Ready…Mom?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be, my chicks,” replied Mrs. Watson happily.
Jamie shook the reins. Romeo and Juliet started forward.
Fortune took out her new guitar and began to sing.
Behind them was the land they had challenged and survived.
Around them, on foot or in the wagon, were four dear, dear friends.
And just ahead—there at last—lay San Francisco, and all their golden dreams.