The Lost Baroness Read online

  Jaeger watched them go. He had been unable to hear the last of their conversation, due to the three men who'd taken a table between his and theirs. It did not matter. He had heard what was important.

  When she smiled, the little hotel maid was almost pretty. It was a pity she wore such ugly clothing and made no effort to be attractive. She was not to his taste though, for she was gaunt and bony.

  No matter. Once he was established in the hotel, he would cultivate her. She would come to trust him and would tell him want he wished to know. Perhaps he would make her fall in love with him.

  It might be amusing to take a woman from Buffalo Lachlan.

  * * *

  The light rain that fell that cold January afternoon was nothing like the morning's storm. The wind still gusted wildly between the buildings, turning umbrellas unexpectedly into sails. So Buff pulled his hat low on his forehead and Siri concealed her moonlight bright hair under an ugly wool shawl.

  They walked slowly down Main Street, stepping carefully on the still-wet boardwalk. After they crossed Cushings Court, the river was visible. They were also out of the wind, more or less.

  Buff said, "You were going to tell me why you were trying to kill that fellow Sunday."

  "Kill? Nej, I did not try to kill him. Only to make him stop his lies. I was so rasande, so angry. When I asked Oskar--he had been Valter's friend since they were boys. He now works at the docks but he was a gillnetter, like Valter--"

  "Siri, why were you beating the tar out of him?"

  "I am telling you," she said primly. "Oskar tells me when a boat comes in. Sometimes I do not see, if they dock while I am working. Oskar sends word and I can come to the docks and speak to the captain, sometimes to the crew also. Someday I will--"

  She ducked her head but not before Buff saw her throat work. When she spoke again, there was the faintest quaver to her voice.

  "Someday one will have news for me. Someone will have seen them, mina barn."

  He pretended he didn't see her wipe tears from her cheeks. If she wanted to seem brave and strong, the least he could do was act as if she was.

  Well, damn it, she is brave and strong. What a life she's had. That husband of hers must have been a real useless piece of work. And his ma...what a heartless bitch! "So what did Oskar say to make you so mad? I heard you call him a liar."

  She stopped walking and turned toward him. "Oh, nej! Not Oskar. His friend, Karl. He said the reason Martine took Rolf and Rosel was that I was a careless mother. That I starved them and gave them only rags to wear. That the best thing that ever happened was when Martine took them from me. Karl lied! I am a good mother. I love mina barn. I love them!"

  Her voice had grown stronger with each word, until the last ones came out almost as a shout.

  "I don't think there's any doubt of that, Siri," Buff said, soothingly. "But wasn't beating the shi...the tar out of him a little extreme?"

  "Ah, ja. I would have snubbed him, if that had been all he said. But then he said he knew why I worked at the hotel, instead of at the cannery. He said I..." She looked away.

  In the flickering light from a street lamp, Buff saw her mouth tremble. He waited.

  "He said the reason I work at the hotel is so I can earn more. That I...the men pay..." Her chin came up and she looked him straight in the eye. "I am respektabel. I do not..."

  "Of course you don't. Anyone who even thinks you would is crazy." He doubted Siri would ever come to a man's bed for money. She wasn't that sort. But for love? Out of gratitude?

  He pushed the thought aside. A woman like Siri could add all sorts of unwelcome complications to a man's life.

  "He laughed. When the men at the hotel tired of me, he said, he would come to me and I would welcome him, because he was a real man. Bah! He is a dumbom, with a mouth bigger than his brain. But he made me so angry, when he would not stop laughing. So I hit him."

  Again that swift duck of the head. In a near-whisper, she said, "I could not stop hitting. It was as if...as if I was hitting Martine. I wanted to hurt... Perhaps..."

  "You wanted to kill her," he said, understanding the red rage she must have felt. Berserker, they called it in the north countries, but a rage anyone might feel when driven beyond human endurance. Gently he gathered her into his arms. "Siri, we'll find your children. One way or another, we'll find them."

  Her body slowly lost its unnatural stiffness and she relaxed against him. After a while she sighed, a long, sad exhalation that almost broke his heart.

  * * *

  While Mr. Lachlan was gone on his upriver errand, Siri found sleep elusive and her appetite vanished. Each night she lay awake in her bed, forcing herself to be still instead of tossing and turning. At mealtimes, she forced herself to eat, although each bite was an effort.

  She no longer went to the waterfront each evening. Mr. Lachlan had arranged with Li Ching for her to get word if a river steamer landed. He had also made other arrangements--she had no idea what they were--for crews of both river steamers and ocean vessels to be questioned. "They'll often hear things the captains don't," he'd told her.

  And she counted the days. He had departed early Thursday, saying he planned to return no later than Monday.

  On Friday a new resident moved in, a Mr. Gans. He took the last unoccupied room, one of three very small ones on the third floor. He was a writer, he told Mrs. Welkins, planning a book about Astoria's history.

  Siri saw him for the first time at supper on Saturday night.

  "This is our other lovely maid, Adolf," Captain Stokes, said, catching her around the waist as she reached past him to set dessert on the table. "This is Siri."

  Knowing that the captain's feelings would be hurt if she tried to escape, she smiled down at him and stood quietly in his loose embrace. When she looked across the table at Mr. Gans, she had to stifle a shiver.

  His eyes were pale, almost colorless. They held no warmth, no curiosity, no friendliness. It was as if she looked into and through his head, into a vast emptiness. "God middag, Mr. Gans," she said, wondering if her lack of sleep was making her fanciful. "I hope you will enjoy your stay at our hotel."

  His reply was flavored with a slight accent. German, she thought.

  Seeing that the captain had his eye on the trifle she'd brought in, she slipped free of his arm. Quickly she distributed the bowls and spoons. "I will bring coffee," she said, hurrying back to the kitchen.

  The hair at the back of her neck wanted to stand on end.

  "You are being fånig," she told herself on the way to the kitchen. "Fanciful. He is a perfectly respectable man."

  "Gans is handsome, isn't he?" Carleen was primping at the small mirror over the settee, getting ready to go to the dance.

  For an instant, Siri envied her. Valter and Martine had not held with dancing. She had always thought it sounded wonderful. To be held in strong arms, to glide around a wide, polished floor with her skirt billowing out in graceful waves of velvet and satin.

  Carleen worked a tendril of curl loose to dangle in front of her ear. "I wouldn't mind if he was going to the dance, but he said not tonight,"

  "He gives me chills," Siri said. "He looks at me so...so..." A shiver crept up her spine. "As if I was a little insekt and he was thinking of stepping on me."

  "Oh, pooh! It's just those eyes of his. I've never seen eyes so light gray before." She teased another tendril loose. "They're really something, aren't they?"

  "Yes," Siri had to admit, "they are really something."

  Each time she returned to the dining room, she felt his gaze on her. When the men had at last finished their coffee and she had cleared the last of the dirty dishes away, she was all too happy to retreat to the kitchen.

  That night her dreams were full of danger and terror.

  Chapter Nine

  Buff took the Kwitshadie upriver. The shallow draft steamer carried freight to the settlements along both shores of the Columbia, going as far as the Northern Pacific rail terminal at Kalama. She also c
arried an occasional passenger, usually other rivermen. As they rounded Tongue Point, he stood in the pilothouse with Captain MacLasky, watching the scenery slide by. Although it was midmorning, the light seemed more like dawn's. A wet dawn, for moisture hung in the air so thick he felt as if he could almost sip it.

  "You've been on the river for some years, haven't you Captain?"

  "Ayup." The ginger-whiskered riverman shifted his pipe to the other side of his mouth. "Come in '57, been here ever since."

  "You live in Astoria, don't you? Have you always lived there?"

  "Ayup."

  "Nice town. Friendly. Busy." Buff peered out at the channel between two islands. Was that a heron? It was. "I imagine you know just about everybody."

  "Ayup. Pretty much."

  Pretending to watch the heron stalk its fishy prey, Buff said, "I ran across the daughter of an old time fisherman at the hotel. Maybe you knew her father? Arne Hansen?"

  "Ayup. Big Swede. Good man. Too bad about his girl."

  "Yes, it is too bad. She's young to be a widow."

  "Any age is too young. It's too bad about her marryin' that Valter Trogen in the first place. Bad blood there. Mother's tetched." He took his pipe out and looked at it. "Damn thing. Always goes out about here. Don't know why.

  "I rented from Martine Pedersdotter--she wouldn't take her man's name like a decent woman ought. Stayed about a month. Got tired of having to take my shoes off in the parlor."

  Buff chuckled. "Don't blame you." He stood and watched the scenery a while, as the captain maneuvered the Kwitshadie through a maze of sandbars.

  After a while, he said, "Was the mother--Martine?--was she the sort to take children away from their mother?"

  Captain MacLasky's face tightened. "Martine is one of them who knows she's right and everybody else is wrong. That's all I have to say."

  "I see." Buff had his answer. Martine Pedersdotter was certainly capable of stealing her grandchildren from their mother. He no longer doubted it.

  They docked at a sawmill about eight miles upriver from Astoria. "Fernhill," the captain said.

  Buff spoke with the men on the dock while the Kwitshadie offloaded consigned cargo. None of them knew either Arne Hansen or Martine Pedersdotter. One man did claim to have been in Astoria when the survivors of the Dancing Goddess were brought in.

  "China girls, all of 'em. They brung in some bodies too, evil lookin' fellas." He spat. "Good thing they was dead, else we'd have strung 'em up. Filthy slavers." He couldn't remember how many girls there had been. "A bunch," he reckoned.

  All that day the little steamer made its slow way upriver, stopping here and there at small settlements or homesteads. Often there was no one to meet the boat, and the crate or barrel consigned to that place was left standing on a rickety dock or a gravely shore. Once they pulled in to a shallow beach where a ragged, torn banner flew from a branch. "Cheese," Captain MacLasky said, when Buff wondered aloud what the waiting barrel contained. "These folks ship a barrel every month or so, consigned to the Occident Hotel." He watched his deckhand roll the barrel aboard and secure it.

  "You was askin' about the Hansen girl's babes," he said. "I hear things, now and then."

  Buff waited.

  "Martine was lookin' for a place in Portland, along last summer." He paused, watching a tangled mass of debris narrowly miss the starboard paddlewheel. "I never heard if she found anything." He glanced sideways at Buff. "Now if I was wantin' to find her, I'd check out boarding houses that cater to Swedes. She favors them who can speak her lingo."

  They reached Westport near dusk. Once the Kwitshadie was tied up for the night, Captain MacLasky directed Buff to the small boarding house that was the town's only accommodation for travelers. Fortunately there was a room available.

  After supper, Buff stayed at the table, listening to the talk among the other residents, sawmill workers most of them. He learned of the enormous market for lumber in Europe and Asia, heard stories of logs so big that twenty men, with their arms outstretched, could barely encircle the trunks. As a stranger, he was expected to listen in wonder and awe as the men described the land and its challenges. He refrained from telling them of his own adventures, doubting they would be much impressed by anything that didn't involve lumber.

  Gradually the men departed, seeking their beds. When the big fellow who'd introduced himself as Pete-the-sawyer rose, so did Buff. "A word with you," he said, quietly, so the others didn't hear.

  Pete cocked an eyebrow, but nodded. "I'm goin' out for a smoke, boys," he said. "G'night."

  "I'll join you," Buff told him.

  They walked down the narrow, rutted street toward the landing. Just short of it, Pete led Buff into a tree-lined path that paralleled the shore. When they came to a small shack with a lamp glowing in its window, he stopped. "What d'ye want?"

  "Longstreet said you'd be the most likely to know about a cargo of girls that was shipwrecked off Point Adams back in '59. He said you were in on the rescue, and you'd dealt with the Chinese afterward."

  Pete grunted. "Longstreet, huh? How do I know he sent you to me?"

  "Belinda," Buff replied. He had no idea whether it was the name of a woman or a ship, but he saw Pete's teeth flash in a quick grin.

  "Right. Maybe you ain't the greenhorn you look to be." He opened the shack's door and motioned Buff inside. An old woman sat rocking in a chair before a fireplace built of rounded river rock.

  For a moment homesickness was an ache in Buff's gut. The fireplaces in the cabin where he'd spent his growing-up years had looked just like that. He greeted the woman politely, but she ignored him.

  "Deef as a post," Pete said. He knelt before her and caught her attention. "I'm home, Ma," he said, his lips exaggerating the shapes of the words.

  She nodded and patted his cheek.

  Pete motioned Buff to a seat at the table, seated himself on a section of log. "Ask away. Ma won't bother us."

  Once again Buff told the story of a girl child stolen from her family, of the clues he'd found that had convinced him she could've been aboard the Dancing Goddess.

  Pete didn't interrupt. "Wish I could help you," he said, when Buffalo was done. "I'd a girl of my own, not much older than that when she drowned. It's hard, losin' your own flesh and blood."

  "That it is."

  "I was a hell-raiser back then. Pretty much boss of Astoria, leastways the part of it where an honest man wasn't welcome. If there was a way to put gold in my pocket, I took it, or I sent my boys to take it. So when the boats came in with those China girls, I laid claim to 'em right off. Knew I could get a good price for 'em."

  "I thought they were turned over to the Chinese community?"

  "Well, they were, such as it was. Only half a dozen Chinamen in town back then, and only one who mattered. His lay was smuggling opium, not keepin' a crib, but he bought the girls, after we'd haggled some." Again he scratched his stubbled chin, his fingernails grating like sharkskin against the weathered skin. "Funny, there never was a Chinese crib in Astoria 'til five, six years back. He must'a sent 'em off somewheres."

  Buff bit back a cussword. "You're sure?"

  "'Twas my business to know that sort of thing." He grinned. "I still keep up with the news, for all I've left that life behind me. I'd've known if anyone had China girls for sale."

  Well, hell! Longstreet had been sure Pete could help him.

  "You're absolutely certain all the girls were Chinese?" he asked again, not yet willing to give up his most promising lead. "None were white?"

  "I never heard a word of any white girls in that cargo. And believe me, if I had, I wouldn't have sold 'em to that pig-tailed heathen."

  No, you heartless bastard, you'd have put them to work in your own cribs, for all they were no older than the daughter you treasured.

  "Well, then, I guess I don't have any more questions. Thanks for the information."

  "Anytime. And when you get back to Astoria, tell Longstreet he owes me a beer."

  Buff
went to the door, but paused with his hand on the latch. "You say you keep your hand in. Have you heard of any children--a boy and a girl--for sale? They're young, three and five, I think."

  Again the prolonged chin scratching. "No, not a word," Pete said at last. "You want me to let you know if I hear anything?"

  "I'd be obliged," Buff said. With a finger to his hatbrim, he went out into the cold night.

  * * *

  Mr. Lachlan returned just before supper Tuesday. Siri was in the back yard, beating tracked-in mud from the entry rug, when she saw him come up the street. She waved, before she could stop herself. She wanted to ask him what he'd discovered, but reminded herself that his trip upriver had been for his own purposes, not hers.

  He waved back, but did not pause.

  Although his smile had seemed forced, a tendril of warmth crept into her belly. Vad stiligt, she thought. How elegant. Unlike the men she was accustomed to, Mr. Lachlan was polished and refined, as if he would be equally at home in a palace or in a small hotel in Astoria.

  I wonder if he kisses the hand. She had once read a story about a brave knight. In one scene he kissed a lady's hand. Siri thought it was the most romantic gesture imaginable.

  Her own hands tingled, as if ghostly lips had touched them fleetingly.

  She did not see Mr. Lachlan again until she served supper. He did not even look up as she set his plate before him. "I'm going over to Fort Stevens tomorrow," he said to Mr. Gans, who sat next to him.

  Siri almost spilled the pickled beets. Tomorrow! He had promised to take her to Daws' Landing when he returned. She bit her lip. Why had she believed he was interested in her problems? She listened as she went around the table, refilling water glasses.

  "I don't think so," Mr. Lachlan said, in response to an unheard comment of Mr. Gans'. "I doubt they have accommodations for tourists. I'll be staying with a friend of my father's." He appeared to think for a moment. "I'd be happy to carry a letter to the fort commander, though, if you want to inquire."

  "No, no," Mr. Gans said quickly. "It is a matter of small importance. My book is about the past, not the present. Idle curiosity, no more. I have never been to an Am-- an Army fort and thought to seize this opportunity."