Josiah's Treasure

by Nancy Herriman

Genres: Historical Christian

Synopsis

In 1882 Sarah Whittier dreams of opening an art studio run by immigrant women. She plans to use the house left to her by family friend Josiah Cady as collateral for her studio. But will all be lost when the inheritance is challenged by an angry man claiming to be Josiah's son and legal heir? Rumor of gold nuggets hidden in the house place Sarah's life in danger. Her future uncertain and her safety threatened, Sarah has nowhere to turn. That is, unless she can soften a vengeful man's heart - and they both learn that love is finer than any gold.

Release date: April 1, 2013

Publisher: Worthy

Print pages: 320

Sample

San Francisco, California June 1882

“In this town, Sarah Jane, a man’s worth is calculated in dollars and cents. Measured by what he has to show for himself . . .”

Sarah Whittier clasped her hat against the stiff summer wind and stared up at the four-story building on Montgomery Street, the soaring stone facade and row upon row of arched windows impressive, daunting. Worth a great deal of dollars and cents—a concrete manifestation of Josiah Cady’s oft-repeated saying. Sarah refused, however, to be intimidated by the carved limestone and the windows reflecting the fog-laced California sky. Even though, before Josiah left her a house and a chance, she had once been worth not much more than a plugged nickel.

Sarah sucked in a breath, as deep as her corset would allow, and returned her gaze to the real estate agency’s front door, housed smack-dab in the middle of the courses of gleaming stone. This morning marked the third time she’d come by. Mr. Pomroy would be unhappy to see her again, but she had to secure the lease on the Sansome Street storefront. It was the perfect space for her design studio, and she had promised the girls she would get that lease no matter what. For them, she would work until she dropped and defy the most stubborn man she’d met in California. Opening the shop so each of the girls could have a real chance at a decent future had become her mission. Her sole purpose: to take care of them. They were her family now, after the one she’d been born into had tossed her onto the street.

Mistakes—her terrible mistakes—had proven awfully hard to forgive.

“You goin’ in?” A man from the adjacent business, an insurance agency, had come on to the sidewalk to smirk at her. “Or you just gonna stand there and stare at the front door?"

Sarah gave him a tight-lipped smile. “I am going in.” Not that it is any of your business what I do.

His smirk broadened. “I’ve found applying your hand to the doorknob helps.”

“Thanks ever so much.”

The glass in the door rattled when she closed it firmly behind her, drawing a scowl from one of the clerks occupying the front office of Pomroy Real Estate Associates.

“Miss Whittier.” He squinted, his long nose crinkling. “Come to see Mr. Pomroy again?”

The low hum of male voices swelled and chair casters squealed as the men turned to stare, abandoning any pretense of working. Cigarettes smoldered forgotten in fingers; fountain pens halted mid-sentence; ledger pages ceased being flipped. The sandy-blond fellow perched on a stool near the tall windows—if she continued to come here daily, she’d probably learn his name and everyone else’s—elbowed the man seated at his left. They guffawed loud enough for Sarah to hear. She ignored them.

“I have an eleven o’clock appointment,” she said.

The clerk with the long nose consulted the logbook atop his desk. “Somehow, you do.”

“Miss Whittier.” Ambrose Pomroy’s voice boomed. He strode through the crowded real estate office, weaving his way between the cluttered desks arrayed like rows of produce wagons at a country market, jostling for prime space. “Here you are once more.”

He made her arrival sound like a visitation of the plague.

“I’ve secured a loan from Mr. Theodore Samuelson. For five hundred dollars.” She showed him the note from Lottie’s father that had delivered the news. Charlotte Samuelson—excellent business partner, better friend—had come through as promised. “And more importantly, I finally have a buyer interested in the property in Placerville that Josiah left to me. It will provide plenty of cash to cover my business expenses for several months.”

Mr. Pomroy inspected the letter and then folded his arms. He had the air of a man who was used to assessing, and right then he was assessing her. “You have been hard at work.”

“You said you needed me to provide proof that my studio will have a sound footing, and I have.”

“What you should have done, Miss Whittier, is obtain a partner with experience managing a business.” Mr. Pomroy punctuated his statement with an arch of his graying right eyebrow. “That store space is a valuable piece of property. I want the right tenant.”

“I am the right tenant.”

“You are a potential tenant. Whether or not you are the right tenant remains to be determined.”

“Mr. Pomroy,” she said, fixing him with the steely gaze she had taught herself after hours practicing in front of a mirror, “you seem to be under the impression I am going to leave this office today without a rental contract. Well, I can tell you this time I—”

He didn’t wait for the rest of Sarah’s sentence. Mr. Pomroy turned on his heel and marched back the way he’d come. Sarah set her chin and chased after him, her half boots tattooing a beat on the polished oak floor.

“Mr. Pomroy,” she called, clutching at the skirts of her striped amber twill dress to keep from tripping on the hem, “you must listen to me.”

He serpentined between stools and trash cans and an errant filing cabinet, the tail of his frock coat flapping against his legs. “I have listened.”

“I am not going to give up today. I promise you.”

A clerk sniggered openly as Sarah passed, affirming that she looked ridiculous, pursuing Mr. Pomroy like a street urchin.

“Turner, back to work,” Mr. Pomroy snapped at the man. “We are trying to make money here, not offer commentary on our clients.”

Sarah’s bustle brushed against the side of a desk, scattering papers and causing another of Mr. Pomroy’s employees to grumble a complaint about women and their proper place. “Might we discuss this matter in private?” she asked. Might we sit down?

“A private discussion will not reduce my concerns about your business venture.” He paused in an aisle and leaned close to emphasize his point, near enough that she could smell the lemon-clove astringency of mouthwash on his breath. “A custom artwork studio run by immigrant women? What do illiterate seamstresses and coarse factory girls know about operating a lithograph press or coloring photographs, balancing the books?”

“As I explained yesterday, they will know everything they need to know by the time I have finished training them. They all possess the necessary talent or else I wouldn’t have taken them on. I’m satisfied we’ll be successful.”

“Be honest with yourself, Miss Whittier,” he said bluntly. “Your enterprise is more of a charity than a business. If you are so keen to have a job, then teach young ladies—ones able to pay a fee—how to paint. A more genteel and respectable occupation than this folly.”

“Mr. Samuelson and the others”—she wished there were more than one or two “others” but she wouldn’t mention that now—“who have offered to support my shop don’t seem to think my artwork studio is a charity.”

“I would not be so certain about their opinions, if I were you.”

He started walking again, leaving the open floor area to stride down a hallway.

Sarah sprinted after him. “My girls need the good jobs this shop will provide them, Mr. Pomroy,” she persisted as sweat collected beneath her collar. “I can’t let them down.”

“Your girls are street savvy. They will survive. Their kind do.”

Sarah halted. Survive? Would they? Would I have survived, if it weren’t for Josiah? She’d come frighteningly close to paying a terrible price for her misdeeds and had far more in common with her girls than Mr. Pomroy need ever know. If he ever did find out . . . a shudder rolled across Sarah’s shoulders.

“I want those girls to do more than survive. I want them to thrive,” she said to his retreating back. “I don’t know how you can be so indifferent to Josiah’s wishes. You know he wanted this for me. You told him before he died that you would help.”

“Josiah Cady was too sentimental.”

The offhand criticism bit, sharp as a wasp sting. “Is that what you’ve been thinking all along? All these days I’ve been coming here, urging you to lease me that storefront, you’ve been thinking Josiah was simply overly sentimental? I thought you were his friend.”

He stopped and faced her. Red blotched his neck above his collar.

“It is precisely because we were friends that I am working so hard—unsuccessfully—to convince you to see sense, Miss Whittier, despite what I may or may not have said to Josiah,” he answered. “If those men do not come through with their offers of money and your shop fails, think how that will crush those girls of yours. Young women to whom you’ve promised a great deal. Are you willing to bear their disappointment and upset?”

He was right; they would be crushed and might blame her. She wouldn’t let it happen, though.

“There’s no need to worry, because I will not permit the shop to fail.” Sarah closed the gap between them and peered into his face. He had to understand. He had to see. “I don’t care what you said about Josiah—he wasn’t being sentimental when he encouraged me. He was shrewd and you know it.”

“You are very determined.”

“If I intend to be a success, I have to be.”

“Which is why Josiah Cady took to you like a tick to a dog, Miss Whittier.” He softened the assessment with a hasty smile that twitched his mustache.

A spark of hope flickered. “Take a chance with me, Mr. Pomroy. Six months. Lease me the space for six months, and I will prove to you my shop is a viable business.”

She saw the retreat in his eyes. Her hope bloomed into a flame. He was going to concede; she was going to win.

Sighing, Mr. Pomroy opened the nearest door. His personal office sat hushed in the dim morning sunlight, exhaling the scent of cigars and leather chairs, beeswax polish. “The paperwork is on the desk. Allow me to fill in the necessary details and the shop is yours. For six months.”

The strain she had lived with for weeks, and longer, released from Sarah’s shoulders like a watch spring uncoiling. “Thank you. You won’t regret your decision.”

Sarah swept past her new landlord. After he modified the rental agreement to include her name and the length of the lease, she signed both copies, folding one carefully and tucking it into her reticule.

“Here is the first month’s rent,” she said, handing him the money. Eighty-five dollars. An unimaginable sum not so many years ago.

“You will have a one-week grace period for a missed rental payment, with a fifteen-percent penalty fee. Miss that payment and you will be evicted from the premises,” Mr. Pomroy said, kneeing aside his rolling chair so he could access the center desk drawer. He glanced at her. “You do trust these girls you’ve hired, correct? They are not going to do anything to, shall we say, cast you or your business in a bad light?”

“They may have made bad choices in their pasts, Mr. Pomroy, but I assure you, that is behind them.”

“Good, because after the last disgraceful tenant we had in that space, my partners and I would prefer not to discover the name of a client in the newspapers again.”

“You will not have any trouble from us.” She extended a gloved hand, palm up. She was thankful it didn’t shake. However, she had practiced forgetting her transgressions far longer than she’d practiced her steely-eyed gaze. “So if everything is in order, might I have the keys to the shop?”

“I believe so.” He slid open the drawer and slipped his copy of the paperwork inside. From the same drawer, he extracted two sets of iron keys.

“Front door. Alley door,” he said, identifying each key with a flick of his forefinger. “The next rent payment is due on the twenty-fifth.”

He dropped the keys into her hand. They were heavy and reassuringly solid, and she closed her fingers tightly around them. “You will see my check on the twenty-fourth. Good morning, Mr. Pomroy. And thank you again.”

“Prove me wrong to worry, Miss Whittier.”

“I shall,” she answered.

Sarah rushed out of the office, past the prying stares of Mr. Pomroy’s clerks, down the narrow hallway. Grinning, she burst through the front door of the building, into the din of Montgomery Street. She had done it. She had persisted and won.

You always believed I would, Josiah. Even when I didn’t believe it myself.

While pedestrians rushed by, Sarah gripped her reticule tightly and breathed in the energy of the city. Inhaled the aromas she so strongly associated with San Francisco—the iodine tang of the bay and the metallic sharpness of factory smoke and steam engines, the acrid reek of horse manure and construction dust. The sweet spiciness of food intermingling with the lye from laundries in the Chinese quarter two blocks distant. The warm yeastiness of a bakery.

She stepped back as a flock of tourists scuttled up the sidewalk, bound for the sights of Chinatown with a policeman as guard, eager to peep at vivid red joss houses and opium dens. If he took them farther north, they could venture into the saloons of the Barbary Coast, jangling with piano music and drunken laughter. Sarah watched them disappear around the corner and wondered if they felt the city’s vibrancy too. If they could sense its limitless possibilities, where people from every walk of life scraped and struggled to be better than they were before they arrived. To become someone new, just like she had done.

“Miss Sarah!” Minnie Tobin hurried along the asphaltum sidewalk, her faded gray dress kicking wide, brown curls bouncing beneath her straw bonnet. “Have you done it?”

“Minnie, how did you manage to get here?” She was the first young woman Sarah had plucked from the streets, the ragged daughter of a drunken grocer, a girl with a cheerful disposition, enviable spunk, and a gift for painting. Her father had plans to marry her off to his brutish best friend, consigning her to a life not much better than slavery. But not if Sarah had anything to say about it. “Your father allowed you to leave the grocery early?”

“I snuck out.” Minnie’s grin dimpled her cheeks. “I had to know if we’d got the shop. I couldn’t concentrate on stacking tins of meat, knowing you were down here today, fighting for us.”

“Here is your answer.” Sarah held out the two sets of keys and jingled them. “We have the shop.”

“Oh, thank goodness!” Minnie leaped into Sarah’s arms and hugged her tight, knocking her hat askew. “That’s wonderful!”

“It is wonderful, and an incredible relief.” Sarah extricated herself from Minnie’s grasp and dropped the keys into her reticule. “What do you say . . . chocolate macaroons from Engel-berg’s Bakery as a treat?”

“It’ll have to be quick, if I’m to make it back to the grocery before my pa returns from his lunch. Don’t want him to find me gone.” Minnie’s voice conveyed her dread.

“Then quick it shall be.”

Buoyant, Sarah planted one hand atop her hat, clutched Minnie’s arm with the other, and strutted down Montgomery.

“Miss Charlotte will be pleased about the shop,” Minnie said as they paused at the intersection, waiting for a cable car to collect its passengers and make the turn, clearing the roadway.

“Lottie never doubted I would be able to convince Mr. Pomroy to lease us the space.” But then Lottie had endless faith, far more than Sarah could ever claim. Enough to convince her father to invest in the shop against his lawyer’s wary nature.

“I never doubted, either, Miss Sarah,” said Minnie, her nut-brown eyes full of trust.

Sarah’s heart constricted. I will never let these girls down. Not a one. “Thank you.”

“ ’Welcome, miss,” Minnie replied with a dimpled smile. “What’s next?”

“Tomorrow I plan to go to the storefront and make a list of any necessary repairs.” A lengthy list already existed in her head, but she had been too superstitious to commit it to paper. “Then I’ll make down payments on the equipment we need—first and foremost the lithograph press—take you and the others to see the space, and begin tidying and organizing. In a week, the first of our supplies should arrive. We can start to move in then.”

“That’s so exciting, I think I’m gonna burst!”

“Please don’t, because I need you whole,” Sarah teased.

The cable car clanged up the road, and they hurried across the cobbles.

“I predict Whittier and Company Custom Design Studio will be a roaring success,” Minnie proclaimed with a dramatic wave of her forefinger. “Because if anyone can do it, you can, Miss Sarah.”

“If anyone can do it, we can.” Sarah squeezed the girl’s arm. “Remember that.”

Minnie giggled and Sarah joined in, the sound of their carefree laughter snatched by the breeze swirling along the street, carried off with the fog lifting into the blue, blue skies. Their spirits lighter than a bubble floating.

And hopefully not, thought Sarah with a shiver, just as fragile.

“According to the city directory,” the hotel clerk spread his fingers across the pages of the book and pointed, the freckles dotting the backs of his hands looking like splashes of orange paint, “he’s listed as having an address on Jones Street, sir.”

Daniel squinted at the entry, upside-down from his vantage point across the waist-high desk. There he was. After all the months Daniel had searched, he’d finally located the man. In a San Francisco directory, owned by every hotel in the city, plain as could be.

“This directory’s over a year old, though. We haven’t received the latest, so I can’t guarantee the address is still current,” the clerk added, apologetic for any shortcomings exhibited by the Occidental Hotel. “Might have moved on by now. Folks around here come and go like ants on a hill.”

“It’ll do for a start.”

Slowly, Daniel spun the directory on the smooth walnut surface until the entry was right-side up. He traced the print with his thumb as if the contact of his skin on paper would verify the reality of what his eyes saw. The noises of the hotel—the chatter of guests lounging on the plump furniture, the tinkle of the piano meant to entertain them, the rattle of the elevator arriving on the ground floor—became a distant buzz. All Daniel noticed, his entire concentration, was focused on two words. Josiah Cady, in wavy typeset. He was still alive. Daniel had started to wonder.

I’ve found you at last, Josiah. Dear old Pa. The scoundrel who had gone to strike it rich in the gold fields never to return or ever send a dime home, leaving his family without the proper means to survive. Daniel felt heat surge, and he curled his fist atop the open book. He had found him, just as Daniel had promised his mother on her deathbed he would, had promised his sisters. An answer to a prayer, if he ever prayed. Which he didn’t. Not any longer.

“You’ve come a long way to unearth the fellow,” observed the clerk, filling the dead silence. He glanced at Daniel’s fist then shot a nervous look at his fellow clerk, helping another guest at the far end of the main reception desk. “All the way from Chicago, eh?”

Daniel uncurled his hand and willed himself to relax. He would save his anger for when he met Josiah face-to-face. “Yep.”

The clerk exhaled his tension and smiled. “One of the fellows who work the dining room says the train can get here from Illinois in just five days. Is that so, Mr. Cady?”

“I can’t tell you, because I didn’t come directly.” No, he’d been traveling since October, poking through every godforsaken mining town between here and the Rocky Mountains, across wind-swept wastelands and craggy snowcapped mountains, searching for traces of the man who had been more in love with gold than with his family. “Where is this address on Jones Street?”

The clerk released a low whistle. “Up Nob Hill, sir. One of the best parts of town,” he explained when he realized Daniel didn’t recognize the name.

“Folks are rich up there, then.”

“Lots of them sure are. Real estate investors, businessmen . . . gold speculators. Wish I’d had the nerve to go mining.” A wistful look crossed his boyish features. “Why? The fellow owe you money?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Thirty thousand dollars, based on Josiah’s final telegram. His father’s take of the profits from the small gold-mining company he and a partner had run. Daniel kept the telegram, faded and deeply creased, in the inner pocket of his coat. Read it over and over again, a reminder of what Josiah owed Daniel and his sisters back in Chicago. Cold, hard cash. Enough to set himself up in business and build that fine house he had promised to Lily and Marguerite. Because, the Lord knew, he and his sisters weren’t looking for a father’s love anymore. “How do I get to Jones Street from here?”

“Go north two blocks and catch the California Street cable car. That’s your best bet. Only costs a nickel and the views up there are first-rate. You can see right across the Golden Gate, you can! I take my sweetheart on the Clay Street cable line all the—”

“Is it far?” Daniel interrupted the man’s enthusiastic praises.

He shook his head. “Five, ten minutes at most, Mr. Cady.” “Good.”

Without being asked, the clerk scribbled Josiah’s address on a scrap of paper and handed it to Daniel. Tucking the note in his pocket, Daniel headed downstairs and out of the hotel. At the street corner, he had a clear view of the city cloaking the sandy hills until every square inch seemed to be covered by pavement and buildings. Up there, among the jumble of dusty streets and bay-windowed houses, church spires, and telegraph poles, Josiah lived in comfort and security. Oblivious to the surprise he was about to receive.

Daniel secured his hat on his head and stepped off the curb. Five, ten minutes at most to get to Josiah. Not long, but long enough for Daniel to decide exactly what he intended to say to him.

“I forgive you, Father” was not on the list.



“I did it, Mrs. McGinnis,” Sarah announced to the empty entry hall, her voice echoing off the curving staircase. Out of habit, she brushed fingertips across the solitary painting hanging above the demilune table tucked against the wall. A painting she’d done of her family farm, a watercolor almost as wispy as her memories of the place, the gilt frame rubbing bare down to the wood where she touched it all the time. “Mrs. McGinnis!”

Rufus, their orange tabby, jumped down from the padded chair that was his observation post on the second-floor landing, his claws tapping rapidly across the floor. Sarah stripped off her gloves and threw her hat onto the table. It bounced against the floral wallpaper along with her discarded reticule, the keys inside releasing a satisfying clink. “Mrs. McGinnis?” Sarah peered at the empty dining room, the darkened front parlor to her right.

The housekeeper, wiping her hands on her apron, bustled through the kitchen doorway at the far end of the dining room.

“There you are,” said Sarah.

“Wheesht, lass, stop screeching, I heard you,” Mrs. McGinnis chided, shaking her head. A strand of brown hair escaped from the tidy bun at the base of her neck. “And where else would I be at this hour? Gone for a stroll?”

Sarah smiled, patting her hair and finding more than a few strands of her own unwound. She jabbed hairpins home. “It is a beautiful day.”

“And nae time for someone like me to enjoy it.”

Sarah clasped the other woman’s fingers. They were gritty with flour, strong as bands of iron, chapped from lye. Warmth and support and fortitude all wrapped up in the hands of a servant.

“I did it,” Sarah repeated. “I have the keys to the storefront and a six-month lease. On my terms.”

The other woman’s answering grin, the light in her sea-blue eyes, was infectious. When she smiled, she was so pretty that Sarah wondered, yet again, why she had never remarried after becoming a widow. Wondered why she had spent the last six years tending first to a crotchety old prospector and now to Sarah.

Mrs. McGinnis enfolded Sarah within her arms. She smelled of vanilla and Castile soap. “I knew you would, lass.”

“I must have been the only one who doubted.”

“You need more faith.”

Sarah made no comment; they’d had this conversation before and she did not need to reply.

“Mr. Pomroy was difficult, but I think he just wanted to challenge me to make certain I was resolute.” She dropped onto the chair against the wall and wiggled out of her half boots, freeing her aching feet. For Mr. Pomroy she had bothered to purchase new ones, as if the sight of buff Dongola leather might have swayed his faltering opinion of her worth. Dollars and cents. A plugged nickel. “I had macaroons with Minnie and then stopped by the storefront on the way back home. The shop is going to need some work to get into shape, but the girls and I can do it. The space should be ready in a couple of weeks.”

“So quickly?”

“We have to open the shop as soon as possible and bring in income. Mr. Samuelson’s loan and the proceeds from the sale of Josiah’s land in Placerville won’t pay the bills forever.” Sarah massaged the cramps in her toes and looked askance at her boots. She wouldn’t be buying shoes from that store again. “I can’t wait to show the girls. Cora will love to paint in that second-floor room. The light is perfect for even the most detailed work. And of course there’s a nice area for the lithograph press, and there is even a small corner room for Emma to work on the accounts that is well lit by gas lamps. It’s nearly a miracle to have secured the space at such an excellent price.”

Mrs. McGinnis rested a hand on her shoulder. “Mr. Josiah would be proud of you.”

“Yes.” The aching twist she felt in her heart was a constant companion. “He would.”

The housekeeper dropped a kiss to the crown of Sarah’s head and stepped back. “Change out of that frock afair Miss Charlotte arrives with Anne and Emma for instruction this afternoon. You don’t want paint on yer best outfit.”

“Lottie . . . I almost forgot.” After a final rub of her toes, Sarah stood. “First, I’d like to spend a minute with Josiah, though. Then I’ll go change.”

In her stockinged feet, she entered the parlor just off the entry hall. Rufus slunk down the stairs and followed her inside.

The shades had been pulled against the noonday light, and the room lay dim and quiet. All these months later the sweetness of Josiah’s cigar still lingered, clinging to the drapes and the Turkish rug covering the mahogany parlor table, as unwilling to relinquish the memory of him as she was. Sarah had always tried to shoo Josiah off to his upstairs library to smoke, but he loved to sit in his overstuffed red velvet chair by the bay window and critique the neighborhood happenings. Nobody could convince Josiah to do anything other than what he set his mind to.

Sarah trailed a hand over the lace-trimmed antimacassar spread across the back of the chair, the indent of Josiah’s weight still visible. . .