Lydia MacPhail was forty-seven years old and weighed close on two hundred pounds. Her hair was brittle gray and so tightly curled that it gave the impression that a brisk stroke with a comb would chip pieces of it away. She tended to wear long, loose dresses in severe colors, usually modified by a faint pattern of checks or diagonal lines. These, like most things she bought, were brought direct to her door by a freight company working out of San Francisco. Some of her dresses originated in England, a good deal of her lingerie came from France. From time to time an outburst of extravagance overtook her and in this way she had acquired a number of statues of horses and dogs from Italy; all of these she had by now lost patience with and they were to be found scattered about the gardens that surrounded the house overlooking ridge after ridge of pines and cedars. She had also bought gilt mirrors which were now fixed to the four walls of her drawing room and which she liked to think (at those certain times when teasing herself in such a way was welcome) had spent the earlier years of their life in a New Orleans whorehouse.
MacPhail was the name she had taken when she had married her third husband, the one she chose to keep. She kept it, not because she remembered him (when she remembered him at all) with any particular fondness, but because it was also the name of her only son, Robert.
She had married first when little more than a girl and the rancher who came night after night to sit rocking on her father’s porch astonished both of her parents by pausing late in the evening in the act of untying his horse from the hitching rail and asking if he could marry their daughter, Lydia. They were as surprised as they were partly because the rancher was almost the same age as themselves, partly as in all his visits he never seemed to have paid Lydia any attention. It was true that he’d not exchanged more than a couple of dozen words with her, but he had looked. Not long, not often, but enough. Lydia was not so much a girl that she had failed to understand the meaning of those passing, shifting glances of appraisal. When her startled parents went into the room where she was feigning sleep and informed her of the rancher’s offer she was unable even to pretend surprise.
Her mother was of the opinion that Lydia should accept marriage as soon as any man of substance offered it, and the rancher was certainly that. Her father, though, soft of heart as fathers often are about their only daughter, had always argued that Lydia should make her own choice and marry for love. But Lydia knew she was not the kind of girl that most men considered pretty and sensed that the older she got the more this would be the case. She looked at the silhouette of the farmer pacing up and down alongside his patient horse, seeing him through the screen door illuminated for moments at a time by the fireflies that darted through the close night. She saw him and saw a way out of northern Montana.
Her father’s surprise was compounded by her ready acceptance, her mother was delighted. The wedding had scarcely been consummated (with little pleasure for Lydia, yet little pain) when her husband was badly gored by a longhorn bull and spent five agonized weeks while the wound in his groin refused to respond to treatment and the color and life gradually drained out of him.
Lydia nursed him efficiently and well, almost lovingly, and she was at his bedside when he wrote his will in weak, sprawling letters and left the ranch and its stock to her alone.
At the funeral she set up conversation with a banker who was a friend of her father’s and inside another month the ranch had been sold to an absentee landlord who lived in Edinburgh and Lydia was on her way from Montana to California and her vision through the screen door proved finally correct.
She stayed aloof from men for the next few years, investing her money in land and a small shipping line and setting up a dress shop in the fashionable area of San Francisco which was so successful she soon owned two others which were managed by independently minded women like herself.
Lydia met Gerald MacPherson at a dinner party on Nob Hill, the weight of the silver on the table enough to sink one of her ships on its way south to the Cape. He was fresh from Scotland and inevitably the sale of her ranch was mentioned, and from then on MacPherson monopolized her completely. Not only that evening, but many others. He was seven years younger than her, handsome in a pretty and vacant sort of way, his manners were good and Lydia’s inquiries into his finances showed that his family had given him a more than generous allowance to get him away from a scandal involving one of their servants.
He asked her early one morning, after they had danced close to exhaustion, if she would allow him to stay for what remained of the night in her bed. She patted his hand and told him that such things were allowable with serving girls but not with ladies. Gerald gave in and asked her to marry him. Lydia pretended to think about it for three days and then agreed. She took Gerald to her on their wedding night with a voraciousness that he never quite got over and which never was to be repeated.
After less than a year of marriage, gold fever struck and Gerald went into the city and bought an eighteen-inch-diameter gold pan, a pick and a long-pointed shovel, a crevice knife, a bucket, a magnet for removing black sand and a hand-pick and tweezers for tiny grains. He added a number of stoppered storage bottles and a set of scales, which the storekeeper suggested might be a touch optimistic.
He bought cooking utensils and a variety of foodstuffs, a pair of huge canvas water containers and a crate of imported Scottish whisky, packed everything on a train of three mules, saddled up one of the thoroughbred horses Lydia and he had been raising on a ranch to the south of San Francisco, and set out alone for the hills.
Himself and hundred upon hundred of others.
Gerald skirted north of Gold Run and Dutch Flat on the Bear river and headed through Rough and Ready, where his mules cost him two dollars at the toll house and his horse a quarter. He made slow, careful progress up along the Pleasant Valley road and across the South Yuba river, stopping and doing as much prospecting as he considered each site deserved. Every night, just when the fire was fading and the whisky felt good in his stomach and on the back of his throat, he wrote to Lydia and mailed the letters in batches whenever he arrived at the next settlement. Some arrived, while others didn’t, and she read them with a certain cursory interest before fastening them with black ribbon and placing them in an otherwise empty drawer.
After two months away from home, his whisky all but gone and his hands and feet raw to the point of bleeding, Gerald smashed his pick against a shelf of rock in sublime anger and found himself staring at a line of solid gold more than three inches thick.
He was off in the wooded hills below Feather Falls and he rode his sagging horse through the night in order to file his claim. When he arrived home a month later, the mine was being worked eighteen hours a day by three hired Chinamen and guarded twenty-four hours a day by a Cree Indian with a head like a bull moose and a tall Norwegian who had jumped ship in order to search for gold. Lydia met him with open arms, a magnum of best French champagne and a gown of smoke-gray silk.
They had their house built in the Sierra foothills way above Spanish Flat. Lydia wanted it close enough to the snow line to feel the beauty of its coldness, stare at the way it covered everything in its path; close enough but not so close that they would be threatened themselves.
As soon as the house was finished Gerald set out for the mine on one of his usual visits of inspection and arrived to catch the Norwegian and two of the Chinese appropriating a large quantity of gold for themselves. He came at them with the Webley revolver he was in the habit of keeping in his coat pocket. The Norwegian panicked and slammed the edge of a long-handled shovel into his head, lifting away several inches of scalp and removing one eye from its socket with uncanny precision. The two Chinamen took it in turns to drive a knife in and out of his fallen body.
Lydia paid excessively to have her husband’s body freighted back down to the house and buried close to the roots of his favorite Black Oak. Less than two weeks later the Chinese fell into a bitter quarrel in an opium house and killed each other. The Norwegian gambled away half of what he had stolen, drank and whored away most of the rest. When what remained was stolen from him in a drunken stupor on the waterfront, he signed on for a ship bound for Cuba. Passing Tierra del Fuego in a fierce storm he was swept overboard and presumed drowned.
By the time that happened Lydia had fallen in love for the first time. Like many women to whom this happens relatively late in life, she was all but irresistible in her passion. Jordan MacPhail married her more or less under threat. Fortunately. Lydia had sufficient of a sixth sense to ensure that there was no way he could get his hands on most of her money.
He gave her a son, whom she named Robert and doted on, even while Jordan was becoming more and more grudging with his attentions and more and more demanding in his requests for spending-money that would see him through his increasingly frequent trips to San Francisco.
Lydia gave him as little as she could to keep him quiet, loved her son all the more and despised the father to the same degree. After he returned sick with what she assumed (yet had no way of telling for sure) was a venereal disease, she hired a detective from the Didion Agency in Sacramento to follow him. When she read the report he was already too low in her regard even to be shocked; all that it did was to confirm what she had suspected. The only thing for which she could not forgive him was dragging her son’s name through the smirch and stink of the gutter.
One night she plied him with brandy and champagne and made him think she was inviting him into her bed for the first time in a long while. Naked, he cowered beneath her eyes when she showed him the detective’s report of his activities. She told him that she was making him a regular allowance on condition he left the house in the morning, changed his name and promised never to attempt to get in touch with either her son or herself again.
She had ceased to think of Robert as Jordan’s son also.
There was little Jordan could do but agree.
From that minute Lydia considered herself a free woman and at breakfast the following morning she told Robert that his father had died in a shooting accident in San Francisco. A fight had broken out in the street and he had been hit by a stray bullet. It had entered his brain and he had died instantly, without pain.
Robert was then a month short of his third birthday.
Lydia was no more than thirty-four but she decided that she had done with men for all time. She put a good manager into the mine, paying him the highest wages of all to secure his best service and loyalty. She took advice about investment and diversified sufficiently to treble her income over the next decade. She was a very rich, large woman who lived in a large, rich house with two servants and a cook and a handyman and – since seven weeks earlier – without her son.
That was the reason for her contacting the Didions for the second time in her life; the reason for R. G. Fowler’s sweating, finally dangerous journey up through the spreading foothills and. onto Bear Creek road in search of the MacPhail house. It was not quite grand enough to be called the MacPhail mansion, though some did, shaking their heads in a mixture of envy and admiration that one person should own so much.
And a woman at that.
~*~
But, ‘See,’ they said, ‘she’s lost her husband and now her son’s run out on her. They ain’t happy, not for all their gold.
And they shook their heads, feeling some sorrow and not a little pleasure.
When Fowler clambered, wet with sweat and masked in trail dirt, from the chestnut’s saddle, his suit was a torn rag, his dark hair tousled and unkempt, his temper that of a bear who’d been caught with his leg in a rusty trap.
He shambled a few paces towards the porch and an astonished Lydia MacPhail, her hand resting with an attempt at elegance against one of the white-painted wooden pillars.
‘If you don’t get back on that animal and ride out of here this instant, I’ll order my men to run you out!
‘Yeah,’ said Fowler with a slow nod of the head. ‘Yeah, that’s fine. Fine.’ His voice was slow and low, near enough inaudible. He made a couple of scratching gestures across his chest and said: ‘Lady, I could use a drink.’
‘Didn’t you hear what I—’
‘Sure I heard you. You were real good. Now about this drink
Her hand came off the pillar in the shape of a not-so-small fist. There is no drink!’
Fowler’s nose twitched disappointedly. ‘No drink, huh? Damn big place like this an’ you ain’t got a drink in it.’ He heaved his chest forward and lumbered a few vague paces towards the porch. Lydia was certain by now that the intruder was either suffering from sunstroke or merely insane. She called aloud for the handyman, set herself across the front of the porch with her arms folded and waited for the stranger to be thrown out.
‘Lady, it’s hot an’ I been in the saddle of that nag for a long time gettin’ up here. If you’ve changed your mind that’s okay by me, I guess, though you might’ve sent a wire and saved me the trouble. But if you can get one of your boys to feed an’ water my horse and get me a couple of shots of bourbon, I’ll be on my way.’
The hired help appeared round the corner of the house, a pick handle tapping against the palm of his open hand.
Lydia MacPhail said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Fowler’s shoulders lifted and fell. ‘Suit yourself. Just keep that boy there away with that stick.’
‘Cord, throw him out.’
Fowler gave another bear-like shrug and shifted his weight on his short legs and waited. The feller with the pick handle was maybe twenty and an inch or so over six foot. Muscles bloomed under the thin cotton of his work shirt. His eyes were bright and blue and dismissive as he waved the handle in Fowler’s direction and told him to mount up and get the hell out. Fowler gave his head a shake and waited, standing his ground.
The youngster came for him then, throwing the pick handle high over his shoulder and then bringing it down through a wide curve that was aimed at the side of Fowler’s skull.
But Fowler was hot and tired and sick of playing games. What’s more he was thirsty. He didn’t believe what the woman had said about the house being dry. One moment the length of wood was on its way down and the next it was looping harmlessly away over the grass. Cord’s right arm was up tight between his shoulder blades and he was on his knees, face contorted in a scream.
The bright, blue eyes found Lydia MacPhail imploringly.
She advanced a step from the porch. ‘Let him go. Let him go!’
Cord went spinning forward, arms and legs flailing. He scrambled to his feet and stood there, breathless and hurt, hugging his arm like a busted wing.
Fowler looked at Mrs MacPhail and said: ‘Next time be more careful about sending a boy where only a man will do.’
Cord’s eyes smarted but he held both his tongue and his ground.
Fowler scuffled his right foot and said, ‘Aw, hell! The agency’ll send you a bill for my time.
He was gripping the bridle when Lydia MacPhail stepped towards him. ‘You’re from the agency? The detective agency?’
‘I sure as hell ain’t Western Union.’
‘You didn’t look like a detective.’
Fowler shrugged. ‘It’s something to do with the way I dress.’
The last detective—’
‘I know. Looked like Kit Carson in a three-piece suit.’
‘I thought I might get the same man.’
‘What I heard, you prefer to change ’em every once in a while.’
Lydia MacPhail flushed and started to say something but Fowler raised a hand apologetically and stopped her. ‘Okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean no offence an’ I don’t want to have to bust that kid’s arm on account of you setting him on me again. Like I said, I’ll report back that you got your business done some other way an’ the Old Man’ll send you a bill.’
‘My business,’ she said to his back, ‘it isn’t dealt with. Not at all.’
‘I understood you to say …’
‘I was confused.’
‘About the drink too?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. Just level with me.’
‘About my business?’
‘About my drink.’
She rubbed her hands together for a moment and sighed. ‘You’re a very determined man, aren’t you, mister …’
‘Fowler. And about some things, yes.’
‘Like your work?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘And alcohol.’
‘Always. Now do you have any bourbon?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. My last husband, he may have left some behind …’
‘He must’ve run out in a hurry. You set your boy on him?’
Lydia MacPhail came close to a scowl. ‘For a detective you aren’t very close with your tongue, mister …’
‘I told you. Fowler. And maybe you noticed, I’m not very tall either.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Just your thirst. All right, Mr. Fowler, why don’t you come inside?’
As she turned and walked towards the paneled front door, Fowler noticed, a little to the right of the sullen handyman’s head, a bronze statue of a hunting dog poised in the bushes, its nose pointing expectantly skyward.