She had grown up in a bordello—her mother, Irene McCalley, was among the first madams in San Francisco—with dozens of soiled doves as her surrogate sisters. Her father was Jack Daley, her mother’s common-law husband, who ran a Barbary Coast gambling hall. Her mother’s place had been a plush parlor house, her father’s a wide-open saloon, and both catered to clientele that included judges, senators, and a governor or two. By the time she was eight, her parents had moved to Nob Hill and she was enrolled in various all-girl schools locally, all Catholic of course, instilling in her a disdain for religion that had only grown in time.
Not yet twenty, she was courted by Andrew Hammond, a Wyoming cattleman who had started out her father’s valued customer, then became his best friend, and finally business partner. But after the Frisco vigilantes strung up her father and drove her mother to suicide, with the collective fortune of her parents swallowed up by a corrupt local government, Victoria was swept to safety by Andrew Hammond. The older man’s ranch near Cheyenne became her sanctuary, or at least seemed so until her drunken savior ravaged her one storm-swept night.
Sober, in the sunshine, Andrew had apologized, and within a year they had wed, she sixteen, he forty-six. She had come to admire his strength and ruthlessness, and continued success in a hard business. Living well made up for her husband’s boorishness, when drink took over, and she had a grudging affection for the sober version of him in the early years. Three boys came of their alternately tender and violent marital bed.
Should she have believed the disgruntled, fired ranch ramrod who between the sheets shared secrets perhaps better kept? That Andrew had swindled and stolen far more money from her late father than had San Francisco’s venal city hall? That her boys’ father had sold her own father out to the vigilantes and handed him over to them for their necktie party? And that her mother’s suicide had been less about the loss of a husband and their fortune, and more about being rejected after years as Hammond’s secret lover?
Skepticism would have been the better part of valor, but she knew the truth the ramrod’s words suggested. She stayed with Andrew, never a mention of any of this passing between them, and she went on sharing his bed, in both his sober and inebriated states. She did this for many years, until on another stormy night—one that recalled the nightmare of her deflowering—she’d had enough of his drunken debauchery.
She had sat naked by his bedside with a Colt .45 in hand, waiting for him to stir, waiting for him to wake, and when he did, she fired a bullet into his belly. She did this knowing full well the placement of her gunshot would mean he’d take a good while to die.
When her oldest boy, Hugh, sixteen, ran into the room and saw what she had done, and stood open-mouthed while his father bubbled blood, the youth put an arm around his mother’s shoulder.
“We’ll make up a story,” he said.
His father had often beaten the spunky, wiseacre boy, for cause (sober), and for sport (drunk).
Hugh said, “We’ll say a thief broke in.”
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“Someone with a grudge.”
“Yes! But there are so many. . . .”
“This will be a stranger. One we heard shout,‘At last my indignities are avenged!’ ”
Having witnessed this exchange, eyes wide, mouth filled with frothing red, Andrew Hammond died seconds later, his hands clasped over his wound and blood oozing between his fingers. But the oozing soon stopped, as dead men do not bleed.
Mother and son worked up a story, and created the impression of a break-in, and of course a description of no real person, and spread some money behind the scenes. With the ranch now hers, rumors swirled. She built the spread up over the next few years, sold out, and moved to Colorado, near the New Mexico Territory, toward new opportunities, and away from the talk.
The hard winter of the Big Die-Up had inspired this southward move, where opportunities for investing in cattle land were one benefit of the otherwise disastrous blizzards.
A knock at the library door interrupted her reverie.
“Yes?”
Byers stuck his head in. “Mr. Colman is waiting on the west veranda, ma’am.”
“Good. Tell him I’ll be a few minutes. Have Conchita bring him a coffee with whiskey. Remind her he likes more of the latter than the former.”
Victoria went to her bedroom and got out of her mourning gown with its mantilla and slipped into black crepe, not for grieving, rather a dress with gaucho-style pantaloons and a scooped bodice, its jacket decorated with white filigree trim. She added a silver necklace, then allowed two plump tendrils of her black curls to fall to her shoulders. She did this only in certain situations, as hair as long as hers worn down was the way of saloon wantons. So was make-up, but she paused at her mirror to apply just enough for her purposes.
Black leather boots were the last touch, fit for riding.
On the veranda, at a wicker table in a wicker chair, her ramrod, Clay Colman, sat sipping his coffee and looking out at the stand of tall firs edging the shallow backyard, its grass well-tended in the modern manner. Hearing her footfall, he stood quickly and turned to her, hat in hand.
He was a handsome devil of perhaps thirty-five, blond, blue-eyed, clean-shaven, sharp-featured, in a brown leather vest over a brown-and-green plaid shirt, his pants canvas, his Boss of the Plains hat dark brown and sporting a rattlesnake band.
The hatband was a vestige, a symbol, of his having ridden with the criminal gang in Arizona known as the Cowboys. This was not a drawback—as a long experienced rustler, her ramrod knew his way around cattle.
