A/N: Well, hello there. This is the beginning of an idea that wormed its way into my mind recently. The actual idea will be around chapter three. So will the reason for the M rating. :)
Instead of doing a flurry of flashbacks, the first two chapters are background – prologues, if you will.
UPDATE: There are a ton of historical facts referenced in this. They are listed at the bottom.
The title comes from a line in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous sonnet 43. It was written during this time period.
England to United States, 1846
In his twenty-second year of life, he goes west like so many others. To find adventure, riches, a life that calls him away. It is not as though he has solid ground to stand on.
In the little village where he was born, he will forever be the groom's son. His mother, a gentle soul, was a seamstress.
He is now alone. The world beckons.
From Yorkshire to Liverpool, across the stormy Atlantic, to the port of the city named after the Duke of York. Then to Philadelphia, where the American rebels had once defied King George III and declared their independence.
The cities are nothing to him; he has always loved and preferred the countryside. But this country is vast, so much greater than the old one he left.
He sails down the Ohio River on a steamboat. One day he listens to a man tell how the Shawnee had burned settlers' cabins to the ground in his grandfather's day, and had taken the females captive. Another group of travelers listen to the stories with interest, but the women and children are sent away when the details are deemed too bloody.
He thinks it is ridiculous that women cannot hear what happened to other women.
From the stubborn look on one red-haired girl's face she agrees. But she goes with the crowd of women and children to watch the steamboat wheel turn.
The burning of cabins and the raids by the Shawnee are long past. Over thirty years have come and gone since Tecumseh was defeated and the Treaty of Greenville signed. Ohio is full of white people now. Settlers. Farms. Towns with churches, their white steeples.
Civilization.
He has not crossed an ocean to settle with some farmer's daughter.
Sailing down the Ohio, he continues further south on the Mississippi River. The grand plantations, the splendid houses, the men who live like princes, are nothing like he has ever seen.
It seems incredible to think most of them were once like him. Born with nothing.
In England, one man tells him, I would have spent my days farming the earl's land where I was born. Now I am the master. He puts a hand on Charles's arm. You can do that, too. You can be anyone here.
You can be anything you want.
New Orleans, 1846-1849
The old city is a revelation. The vibrant French Quarter with its exotic atmosphere and its equally exotic women. He loses his head for a time there, enticed by its particular allure.
He gets close to a dancing girl on Bourbon Street named Genevieve. He never does figure out where her accent comes from. A blend of the cadence of the south and Creole, with a hint of melancholy.
He becomes a man under her capable hands. For several months, he spends many of his spare hours in her bed, or his. Learning how to please a woman.
But their dalliance is a fleeting thing; neither wants to be alone. And she is slippery, more like the water on Lake Pontchartrain than solid ground.
She kisses him on the cheek one rainy night. It is goodbye.
Six months later, he loses his heart.
Alice Neal is the daughter of a wealthy merchant. The first time he sees her he is delivering a new cabinet piano to her home. She comes down the stairs into the music room to see the instrument.
Brown hair, bright green eyes, and an exquisite figure.
He has never seen anyone so beautiful in his life.
She flirts with him, and he knows it, yet he cannot stop himself from falling for her.
He could marry her, he thinks. If he works hard. She deserves someone who will care for her.
From that moment, he is determined to do whatever it takes to win her. No job is too small. Alice's father sees the eager young man and hires him.
Charles is soon busy with ledgers, with the problems of supply and demand, with business. It is not what he set out to do. But for the woman he loves, he is willing to forego the life of adventure.
Even when war with Mexico is declared. He is one of the few that does not enlist, though when he sees the way Alice lights up around several uniformed men, he is sorely tempted.
He is not comfortable in most social situations. There is a façade, an artifice about many of the men and women who attend the balls and picnics.
They do not know who they are, he thinks one evening in Mr. Neal's parlor, surrounded by stuffed shirts and cigar smoke. They try to appear a certain way. To impress their peers.
Maybe they all have an Alice in their lives. Someone they are trying to make happy.
He hopes she will let him try.
There are good times. Carriage rides, dances, talks on the moonlit veranda.
When he proposes and she accepts, he thinks his happiness is complete. His future father-in-law is delighted, Alice's mother less so. Charles is not surprised. Mrs. Neal was born in France. He will forever be an uncouth Englishman to her.
Mr. Neal takes him shortly to the slave market after he and Alice's engagement is announced. To further teach him how business is done.
And there, for the first time, he sees the buying and selling of wares that until that day have been to him only numbers on a page. At most, semi-visible figures in the background.
Men. In chains. Forced to dance. Their teeth examined as if they are horses.
Women – Charles averts his eyes, but he cannot look away – stripped in full view of a crowd of men.
The image of a child crying as she is taken from her mother haunts him.
He has seen them before, of course. The Africans are everywhere in the south. But they are never quite seen.
After going to the market, he sees them everywhere.
Alice does not understand. They are not people, she tells him incredulously. Not like you and me. The fact that she says this with one of her family's slaves standing mutely in the background is not lost on him.
He cannot marry a woman who will not see the world the way it is. He cannot be a man who struggles to maintain a façade.
He yearns for the touch of something real. The way he felt when he first arrived on the continent. The smell of earth when it has been plowed under in the spring. The fresh breeze on a steamboat on the Ohio River.
His fiancée is more angry than devastated when he breaks their engagement. She cannot believe he would do such a thing. To her.
When he leaves the house for the last time, she shouts at him. Tells him it doesn't matter how hard he works.
You will always be a nothing man from nowhere.
Crying later, he wonders who he fell in love with. The image of Alice, not the woman herself. The knowledge does not make his heart any less broken.
Mr. Neal is shocked when Charles tells him he can no longer work for him. He pleads with his would-be son-in-law to stay.
But the lure of the city at the mouth of the Mississippi has lost its appeal. He lingers for a time, trying to figure out what to do. At a gathering with a mutual friend he spies Alice with her new fiancé.
Western United States, 1849-1850
He leaves New Orleans shortly thereafter, heading north. To shed the memory of the city and Alice, he decides to go west. The land explored by Lewis and Clark over forty years earlier is still vastly empty.
Riches he knows now he can live without; honest work is enough. To work for himself, to build his own home is what he wants.
Nothing more.
But not many agree with him. The cry of "Gold!" is on everyone's lips like a fever. It feels like the whole country is headed to California.
He decides to go along, if nothing else to see this country from one end to the other. He knows it is unlikely many of those rushing west will get rich. But it occurs to him that they will need many of the same things.
At St. Louis he meets a fellow Englishman, John Bates. The two have a mutual respect for the vastness of the land, and a camaraderie common among fellow emigrants. By the time they disembark from the steamboat at St. Joseph, Missouri, Charles feels as though he has found a real friend. He never speaks of Alice, but John senses he suffers from heartbreak.
The two are hired as drivers on a wagon train heading for California. The journey is perilous. Overloaded wagons, men who have no knowledge of the land (but think they do) often cause more deaths than if they stayed at home.
They are fortunate there are a few among them who understand how precarious the journey is. Charles and John learn to listen to those who had gone before, getting advice from men at Fort Kearny. They also listen to the fears and trepidation of the women in the train.
Wives and mothers are usually more concerned with keeping their families alive than getting west quickly.
Along the Platte River, Charles intercedes when John gets into a heated argument with a fellow traveler. Guns are drawn. John is right that the oxen are exhausted, but Charles sees the man who hired him cannot see reason.
You could have been shot over nothing, he bellows later to his friend. Hold your temper, and keep your life. John is angry with him for days.
The cholera that strikes changes everything.
Nearly everyone in their wagon train falls ill. A quarter of those who began the journey die. Many oxen are scattered, and it is only when enough people have recovered who can bury the dead that they are able to move on.
Charles feels God has given him a second chance. At what, John asks, ever cynical, one early morning. Life? We all will die one day. We'll be as forgotten as the poor sods buried by the river.
Something else, Charles replies. I came to America in search of adventure, of riches, of a better life than my parents had. Now that doesn't seem to be enough. He looks down at his loose trousers, the symbol of the weight he lost. His body that nearly wasted away.
I have a chance to find what I've been looking for.
John smiles. Charles Carson, you're a romantic.
Maybe he is.
Among his prized possessions are treasures carried from England. Books. The plays and sonnets of Shakespeare, the poetry of Burns. Keats.
Alice always preferred dancing and conversation. She never understood why he read so much.
Charles reads them all by firelight. Sometimes he or John read aloud to the others. Most of the settlers left in their group are mainly preoccupied with getting to the west, but some listen. Including a kind schoolmaster and botanist named Joseph Molesley.
They press on, through Great Salt Lake City and the Latter-Day Saints that live there (John was tempted by the thought of multiple wives, but Charles talked him out of it) and into the sparse Humboldt River passage. The lurid tales of the ill-fated Donner party spur them on.
The thought of being stuck in the mountains in winter is terrifying.
When they reach the Carson River, Charles finds himself the center of attention. He has to explain numerous times that the river is not named for him.
California, 1850-1852
California is a teeming mass of people. Flooded with those who dream of quick riches, it is hard to find a spare bed at night, much less anyone with common sense. John leaves to go make his fortune further north.
Charles misses his friend.
Fortunately, there is plenty to do. He sets up a store selling various goods. In little over a year, he has made more money than he ever dreamed of before leaving home. Most of his customers are American. But there are also Chinese, Italians, Germans. Mexicans. He sells to everyone, regardless of where they came from.
He finds himself listening for the sound of a Yorkshire accent. The day he first hears it, it comes from a rather noisy, stout girl with reddish-orange hair. Beryl Patmore is a recent arrival. She works as a cook in a mining camp with her mother.
There being so many more men than women, she has already gotten twenty-three marriage proposals. But who's counting, she says. Numbskulls, most of them.
She becomes good friends with the storekeeper, mostly on account of him not being a numbskull. They can talk about lots of things – how easy it is for hapless settlers to get cheated, the difficulty of providing food for men, the slowness of news from back east.
Her mother gets the wrong idea.
It is one of the more embarrassing moments in his life when he has to tell Mrs. Patmore he has no intention of marrying her daughter.
He likes the frank young woman. As a friend. In many ways, she feels like the sister he never had. She helps him to feel less lonely.
His loneliness recedes further when John returns from the northern gold fields. He had some luck, he says, but the open greed and lack of human decency appalled him. He joins Charles at the store.
Life, it seems, is good.
What more is there, he wonders. Good health, a thriving business, good friends.
And yet he is not content. His spirit is restless.
His friends notice. Beryl says he needs a wife. Charles argues that is not the answer to everything. Maybe you need a change of scenery, John says. To find what you're looking for.
Whatever it is, he has not found it yet.
He listens to his Yorkshire friend. Charles has seen many women since Alice. Since his heart was broken. Some are kind, some are even more beautiful than the southern belle.
But he doesn't want to marry any of them.
He's not sure he's the marrying type, anyway.
Finally he takes John's advice. You're right, he says one night as they close the store. Maybe I've been here too long. Maybe it's time to move on. Six years I've been in America. Maybe what I was looking for was never here to begin with.
He thought he had found it in New Orleans, then in California.
Signing up aboard a sailing vessel that will depart San Francisco, to sail around the tip of South America, then on to Europe – that surely will bring him what he longs for. Or at least bring him closer to it.
His heart whispers that he is running again. Running from the fear of never finding solid ground, a firm place to rest.
Better to keep moving, lest he be disappointed again.
He will miss his friends. Beryl tries not to show her tears when she visits the store for the last time before he leaves. I hope you find a good man, if you want one, he tells her. Surely there has to be a man either than me or John who isn't a numbskull. She laughs despite her red eyes, makes him promise he'll write.
He promises.
John shakes his hand. Thanks him for the store. I'll run it well, he says. Before Charles goes, he stops him with words to remember.
You saved my life, he says. At the Platte, that night I lost my temper. I'd be just another forgotten sod buried next to the river if not for you.
I will come back, Charles tells them through a lump in his throat. If…if I don't, divide my books between you.
He is leaving most of his treasures behind, partly out of wanting to keep his possessions few on board ship. But also because he knows there is a chance he will not come back.
Everyone knows how treacherous the passage through Cape Horn is.
He arrives in San Francisco and looks out at the bay. Crowded with ships, with people arriving. To a New World. New lives. He tells himself that is what he will find.
He steps into a tavern two days before his ship leaves and has a drink. On the way back to his room, he stumbles in the street, falling heavily.
A moment later, a knife is at his throat.
Put your hands behind your head, the thief hisses. Everything you have is mine. And then I'll cut your throat. He forces Charles to kneel.
The cold steel is sharp against the warm skin of his neck.
How stupid, Charles thinks with disgust. Pointless. A wasted life. I survive an ocean voyage, a journey through these United States down to New Orleans, then back north. Cholera. A dangerous trail west.
My whole life ended by a stranger. Tears prick his eyes. Not even my friends will know I am dead. My body will lie in some unmarked grave.
And then he hears the unmistakable click of a Colt revolver.
Drop the knife, a quiet voice demands, or I'll drop you. The thief lets go of the instrument at once.
Get out of here, his unknown savior orders the would-be thief. Now.
The man trips before he runs off. Charles still kneels in shock. I am not dead, he thinks. Not dead. Alive.
It feels the same as after he recovered from the cholera.
Someone lays a steady hand on his shoulder.
"Are you all right?"
"Yes," he answers, mortification making his face burn. He gets up and lets her lead him back down the street, to where there are lights and crowds.
He almost wishes the thief had cut his throat.
That a woman had to save him! How could he ever look at himself again? Or look her in the eye?
She talks to him as they walk. "This is a dangerous place," she says. "Best to keep to brighter streets. Or carry a revolver."
"Thank you," he mumbles, shame eating at him. She must think I'm a sad fool. "I have one," he explains, "but I left it at my boardinghouse."
She asks where he stays. He tells her, and she nods. The light from the tavern blinks out the windows.
"You should walk back that way," she points in the opposite direction. "It will take you longer, but there are no dark places like the one we just left. You'll be safe there."
The way she rolls the letter r makes his belly flip over. Lovely Scottish brogue. Her red hair glints in the light of the sunset. He cannot make out the color of her eyes at all. Though she is much shorter than he, she walks so fast he almost has to trot to keep up with her.
And, he suspects, it was no empty threat when she ordered the thief to drop the knife. The thought fills him with equal parts awe and curiosity.
"Where do you live?" He asks. He wonders what she is doing out alone.
She raises her eyebrows, her dark eyes glimmering. "I don't make a habit of telling strange men where I live," she says in a clipped tone. His embarrassment increases.
"I-I only want to repay you for your kindness, miss," he stammers. "But I must be on board my ship tomorrow and will not be able to call on you."
"There is nothing to repay," she replies, her voice gentle. "Now if you don't mind, I must get on."
"Of course," he says, defeated. At least tomorrow he can sail away and forget this entire humiliating experience.
She stops a few feet away, scrutinizing him. "You seem to be a decent sort," she says softly. "What's your name?"
He removes his hat, remembering his manners. "Charles Carson."
"I'm Elsie Hughes." She takes a few more steps, walking away from him before turning around.
"Are you going to walk me home, Mr. Carson, or are you just going to stand there?"
He wonders if she is being patronizing. Or teasing him.
Then she smiles. Her eyes dance.
And for the first time he feels solid ground beneath his feet.
A/N: List of historical facts (to the best of my knowledge):
*The city named after the Duke of York is New York City.
*Philadelphia is where the Continental Congress declared the independence of the American colonies in 1776.
*Before the proliferation of the railroad, travel by water was the fastest way to go. Steamboats were used on the major rivers east of the Mississippi.
*The frontier continued to change as European settlers headed west. There were skirmishes and battles between the native peoples and settlers in Ohio and Indiana until 1814, when the Treaty of Greenville was signed. The details of the stories were, unsurprisingly, vivid Tecumseh was one of the greatest native leaders in American history. He was Shawnee, and he assembled an alliance between many tribes to fight the Americans during the War of 1812. A famous Union general in the American Civil War, was named after him - William Tecumseh Sherman.
*Bourbon Street is probably the most famous street in New Orleans. Think Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), beads, heavy drinking, and flashing women.
*Louisiana Creole is a term used for people descended from colonial settlers, mostly French or Spanish. They have a distinct culture, separate from the traditional "southern" culture.
*Lake Pontchartrain is a huge lake that sits next to New Orleans.
*The Mexican-American War was fought between spring 1846 to the autumn of 1847, and won by the United States. It officially concluded with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which was ratified by the U.S. in February 1848 (see chapter 2) and Mexico in May 1848. It resulted in the transfer of a large chunk of territory, including what would become the state of California, and a number of other states. There was no military conscription at the time of the war in the U.S.; one would not be passed into law until the Civil War (1862). So Charles didn't HAVE to go to war. :)
*New Orleans had a large slave market. It had an effect on many who witnessed it, including Abraham Lincoln.
*William Clark and Meriwether Lewis were the leaders of the Corps of Discovery Expedition, which explored the source of the Missouri River from 1804-1806.
*Gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in January 1848. By that summer, the news had reached the east coast of the U.S. The term '49ers' was coined because the first mass of people who went to California arrived in 1849.
*For those who traveled overland across the U.S., St. Louis, Missouri was a jumping-off point, as it is on the Mississippi River and just south of the confluence of the Missouri River. Many took a steamboat to St. Joseph, Missouri (on the opposite side of the state) and from there acquired wagon, oxen, horses and supplies.
*Fort Kearny was an important landmark on the trail. It is in present-day Nebraska. The trail west followed the Platte River. Cholera was endemic along this juncture; water sources often became contaminated. Trust me. You do not. want. to. die. of. cholera. Or dysentery, for that matter (some of you may get the reference; it dates me)
*Great Salt Lake City was the original name of Salt Lake City. The Latter-Day Saints (commonly known as Mormons) in the 1840s practiced polygamy. Their continued persecution was why they eventually settled in the Salt Lake Valley.
*The Humboldt River passage was a dangerous part of the route to California.
*Timing was essential to traveling west. Wagons could not leave until the spring (April-May), and it was imperative that people arrive in Sutter's Mill before they were trapped by the snow in the Sierra Nevadas. If the snow came early...
*...the Donner Party is Exhibit A for what happens when everything goes wrong to a group of pioneers. Over eighty people traveled west beginning in spring 1846. Half of them died. They were trapped by the snow in November 1846; the last surviving member was not rescued until April 1847. Disease, madness, hypothermia, starvation, cannibalism. Basically if you want a story about the worst of the survival instinct read about these people. Their story was famous even before it was over. Suffice it to say NO ONE wanted to share their fate. On the positive side, there are a ton of places named after them in California.
If that's what it takes, I'd rather die forgotten.
*There is a Carson River in Nevada. The capital of Nevada is named Carson City. Both were namesakes of the western explorer and soldier 'Kit' Carson.
*People from all over the world came to California during the Gold Rush, not just Americans. The vast majority were men. Women were seriously underrepresented, especially in the early years.
*Before the construction of the Panama Canal, for many people the only way to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific (and vice versa) was to sail around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America. It was exceptionally dangerous.
*The Colt revolver was one of the most commonly-used revolvers in the U.S. for many years. It was popular with officers in the Civil War. It was lighter than other guns, thus easier to handle for those with smaller hands...and women.
If you still have questions, please feel free to ask.