“He meant this to be a source of comfort, not sorrow,” she said to the sleeping child. “When you are older, you will come to appreciate this gift from a man who was a stranger, but who cared for you and your mother deeply.”
Leaving the tea on Antonia’s nightstand in case she woke up later, Inez took the bedside lamp to the storage room, unlocked the door, and went in.
Jamie’s trunk was just as she’d left it, by the window, unlocked. Inez wondered if the temptation had been too much for Antonia and she had snuck back in to see what the trunk held while Inez was busy downstairs with Flo and de Bruijn. If so, her little exploration would explain the icy feet. The room, unheated and a hallway removed from the kitchen with its stove, had a bite to it.
Inez set down the lamp, turned up the wick, and lifted the large trunk’s heavy lid. The interior exhaled a mix of cedar, wool, and tobacco. Inez sifted through the top layers. There were clothes, of course. Several suits of fine wool Inez had never seen him wear. Dress coats and morning coats. Waistcoats. Fine linen handkerchiefs with the embroidered initials RHG. Expensive kid gloves. All attire from the privileged life he had cast aside.
She picked up a rectangular box, which had rested uppermost on the contents. About one foot long and half that deep, it held cuff links, shirt studs, coiled watch chains, and a few other male accouterments in an upper tray. Below the tray was a compartment holding a few cabinet cards and cartes de visite. An ambrotype in an ornate gold frame showed a close-up portrait of a woman, perhaps thirty-five or forty, with ash-blond hair, pale eyes, delicate features, and aristocratic bone structure. Definitely not the Leadville fiancée, Inez thought. Most likely his mother, Harry’s deceased wife, whom Inez had never met.
First his wife, and now his son.
The losses had to be a heavy burden, she realized with a pang. She shook her head. Why pity him when he seemed intent on ruining her life?
Inez examined the box further as the cold crept through her skirts, petticoat, and stockings to freeze her knees. The shallowness of the inner compartment indicated there was yet another storage area beneath. But there was no lock, no little handle, no way to open the bottom drawer. It was secured tight. Inez spent several frustrating minutes pushing on the drawer’s face and going over the exterior of the box, trying to find the “key” to disengaging whatever hidden mechanism held the drawer shut. About ready to give up for the night, she opened the box to replace the top tray. Only then did she spot the small brass button, positioned between the two hinges on the back edge. She pushed the button and the drawer popped open.
Inside the hidden compartment, she found a cache of letters, bound with a satin ribbon. Her heart wrenched when she recognized Carmella’s letter-perfect penmanship. As she lifted out the letters, a folded piece of paper stuck to the bottom of the packet floated to the floor. Inez scooped up the paper and opened it. It was a receipt, stamped “PAID” from Barnaby Jewelers on Market Street, for a woman’s gold ring engraved inside with “Two but one heart till death us part.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
The next morning felt almost normal to Inez.
Almost.
Antonia appeared on the mend, bouncing back with the incredible speed of the young from minor coughs and colds. Over breakfast, she rattled off her times tables at a lightning pace. She seemed anxious to get to school and banged out the door, leaving with considerably more energy than she had demonstrated over the past couple of days.
“Forward into the day,” Inez said aloud, taking herself down the stairs and out into the street. She paused and took in the morning traffic from her vantage point on Kearney. She could see the busy to-and-fro of pedestrians, wagons, and horse-drawn street cars down toward Market, and up toward California, the warning clang of the cable-pulled street car, as it made its stop at the corner of Kearney and disgorged swarms of men, who hurried toward the big-board San Francisco Stock and Exchange and “new board” Pacific Stock Exchange on Montgomery.
Who were the souls who dabbled and dealt in stocks? Almost everyone, as far she could tell. Lawyers, doctors, preachers, bankers, merchants, clerks, bookkeepers, mechanics, and even women. No one, it seemed, was immune to stock mania. Inez allowed herself to consider what life might have been like if she, her then-husband Mark Stannert, and their business partner, Abe Jackson, had come all the way to San Francisco as originally planned. Perhaps they would have built a drinking and gaming establishment to capture some of the fortune from gambling fever that clutched the golden city.
But that was not what happened. Seduced by the possibilities in the silver mining boomtown of Leadville, they had lingered in the city in the clouds, then settled in.
She took a deep breath of the air. Cool, but not the piercing cold that sliced into the lungs in the Rocky Mountains this time of year.
Glancing up at the overcast sky, she wondered if she had made a mistake in not insisting that Antonia take an umbrella to school. “She at least has her bonnet,” Inez said to herself.
She had just entered the store and was checking that the sign still displayed
