Read an Excerpt

Jubilee Trail

A Novel

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

In the summer of 1844, Garnet Cameron graduated from Miss Wayne's Select Academy for Young Ladies. This was a boarding-school on a country estate in upper Manhattan, and Garnet had been a pupil there for four years. On graduation day she was awarded three medals: for music, horsemanship, and politeness.

Garnet was halfway between her eighteenth and nineteenth birthdays. She had black hair, so smooth and shiny that it had blue lights in the sun. Her eyes were gray, fringed with heavy black lashes, and her cheeks were so red that she had sometimes been accused of painting them. In spite of her rich coloring she was not beautiful. Her face was too rugged to meet any ideal of beauty; her forehead was too square and her jaw was too strong and her lips were too full and red. But she had a firm slim body, her waistline was a mere trifle, and the clothes they were wearing just now were admirably designed to show a well-set figure like hers. A daytime dress covered a girl from throat to instep, but the bodice fitted almost as if it had been pasted on, and the skirt flared just enough to emphasize a tiny waistline without being too full for graceful movement. Garnet was very graceful. At Miss Wayne's Academy part of her daily routine had consisted of walking up and down a circular staircase with a book balanced on her head.

She was perfectly healthy, and looked it, and she took a great interest in living. Garnet would have liked to know all about everything. Her main complaint about the world was that it had given her so little chance to know anything at all. She seldom said any such thing out loud. After years of good breeding, Garnet knew that nobody wanted to hear a young lady speak her opinions.

Garnet lived in Union Square in the city of New York. In Union Square the houses stood around a park, where in summer a fountain played all day. Children rolled their hoops under the trees, and ladies and gentlemen strolled along the gravel walks. Whether in the green of summer, or in winter when the trees were bare and the windows around the park were rosy with firelight, Union Square had an air of well-being. Anybody could have seen that this was a nice neighborhood and the families who lived here were nice people. Garnet's father was Mr. Horace Cameron, vice-president of a bank in Wall Street. Her mother was a charming woman who had found life agreeable so far and expected it to remain so. Garnet had two younger brothers, named Horace, Jr., and Malcolm, who went to the grammar school that prepared boys for Columbia College. They were a pleasant family, well-bred and well-behaved. On graduation day at Miss Wayne's, when Garnet received her medals and made a curtsy of respect, her mother's friends said she looked like an ideal of proper young ladyhood. Or she would have, if only she had not had such violent red-and-black coloring. And it was a pity her features were not more delicate. But at any rate, she was a nice girl and no doubt she would make a good marriage.

When Garnet got home that evening she put the medals into her bureau drawer. As she shut the drawer she gave a sigh of relief. Her schooldays were over. In a few weeks more, as soon as she could get some clothes, she was going to take a holiday with her mother at Rockaway Beach. They were going to stay at a fashionable hotel and meet a lot of people, and she would never have to think about Miss Wayne's Select Academy any more. Now at last she was grown up, and she had a right to expect that something exciting was going to happen to her.

But at first, nothing happened.

She received two proposals of marriage, both of which she declined as fast as possible. The first offer came from a young gentleman she met that summer, while she and her mother were at Rockaway Beach. He belonged to a good family, but Garnet thought he was so stupid that he ought to be charitably locked up somewhere. As usual she did not say what she thought. Her mother had taught her so well how to do these things that when she refused him the young man got the impression that Garnet was going to remember him wistfully as long as she lived.

The second proposal came in September, after she had come back to New York. The young man's name was Henry Trellen. Garnet's parents were disappointed that she would not have him, for he would have been a brilliant match. Henry Trellen was enormously rich, and an only child. He lived with his widowed mother in a darkly magnificent house on Bleecker Street. The house reminded Garnet of a mausoleum, and Henry's mother reminded her of a marble angel on a tombstone, and Henry himself bored her to the yawning point. She thought she would as soon be locked up in a cemetery for the rest of her life as be married to him. She did not say this. She said that after careful study of her heart, she was sure she did not love him.

Her parents did not insist. They had married for love and they wanted her to do the same. She had plenty of time, and her mother saw to it that she had ample chances to meet eligible young gentlemen.

Garnet loved her parents, for they were sweet and lovable people. She would have liked to please them. But she detested the eligible young gentlemen. They were often handsome and sometimes rich, but they were always dull. They were so stuffy with good manners that they acted as if young ladies were not quite human. To hear them talk, you would have thought there must always be a haze of make-believe between the two sexes, through which men and women must never see each other plainly. Garnet danced with them and flirted with them, and did it rather well, but she could not get excited about it. For Garnet found no relish in saying one thing and meaning another; by nature she was as simple and direct as a shower of rain. The system of whispers and head-tossings and fluttering lashes by which young ladies were supposed to get husbands, seemed to her just plain silly. She could do it, but her heart was not in it and it made her tired.

A girl must have beaus, of course, but Garnet wondered if there was not, anywhere on earth, a young man who would talk to her as if he and she were two reasonable people living in the same world. She told herself there must be such a man. There might even be one in New York.

But though she had lived there all her life, she did not know much about New York. Garnet thought about it often that fall, as she stood at her window and watched the trees of Union Square, red in the crackling October wind. New York, New York—such a gay, thrilling town, and she could have so little of it! There were so many places in New York where she was not allowed to go, so many streets that she had never even walked on.

New York was growing like a morning-glory vine. Now in 1844 it was a town of nearly four hundred thousand people, a hundred thousand more than had lived here ten years ago. They had a railroad to Philadelphia and another to White Plains; they had ferryboats that went every five minutes to Brooklyn; and they had steam-cars that left the City Hall Depot every fifteen minutes for Harlem. They had splendid public baths, where for twenty-five cents you could stand under a shower or lie in a marble bathtub. At Castle Garden, across the bridge from the Battery, they had two swimming pools, one for gentlemen and one for ladies. They had fountains in the parks and fire-hydrants on the streets, for New York had the finest waterworks in the world.

Broadway started at the Battery and ended at Fourteenth Street. If you walked these two brilliant miles you could see all the most famous places in New York. The gayest part of town was City Hall Park. If you were walking up Broadway toward the park, you would pass the Astor House on your left, at the corner of Broadway and Vesey Street. The Astor House was the finest hotel in America. It was five stories high, with white steps leading to an entrance between white columns. Facing it across Broadway you saw Barnum's Museum. The museum had a big sign showing you mermaids and sea-serpents, to hint at what you could see inside. Just above the museum you came to the park.

Around the park you passed restaurants and theaters, saloons and gambling palaces. If you were rich enough you could dine at John Florence's, at Broadway and Park Place. Or you could go to the Park Theater and see the greatest stars in the world. If your taste was less refined, you could risk your money in the gambling rooms, or you could see a show offering music and lovely girls. If you were a lovely girl yourself, you could visit the studios of fashionable artists, who would paint your face on ivory and frame it in gold. It would cost you a hundred dollars, but if you were pretty enough it was worth it. Here you also saw Plumbe's Galleries, where for five dollars they would clamp your head in an iron thing and take your picture. It was great fun, but the pictures always had a scared look; for as soon as they clamped your head in the iron thing you began to wonder what would become of you if the place caught fire.

But there was not much danger of fire. A man was always on duty in the cupola on top of the City Hall, to look for fires. The City Hall was fifty feet high, so the man could see over the whole town. If he saw a fire he rang a bell, the number of strokes telling where it was, and the wagons rushed forth to put it out.

Around the park, Broadway roared and clattered. But as you crossed Chambers Street on your way uptown, you noticed that things were getting less noisy. For here you were passing the great stores of fashion, the greatest of which was the store of Mr. Alexander Stewart. As you went by Stewart's you heard the clop-clop of highbred horses and the voices of ladies; you passed windows full of cut glass and silver, furs and velvets and silks, fine gauzes that tumbled in the sunshine like waterfalls. As you went on uptown, Broadway grew shy and respectful, minding its manners. By the time you reached Union Square you could hardly hear the downtown noise at all.

Garnet had shopped on Broadway with her mother; she had been to concerts and to plays that were suitable for young ladies. But she knew this was only a fraction of New York. She would have loved to investigate those exciting places around City Hall Park, and those streets that led mysteriously away from it. Of course she never said so. Her parents would have been amazed, and hurt. Even if she said yes to one of the eligible young gentlemen and became a married woman, she was sure she would never go inside a gambling palace or a naughty theater. The whole town was full of things that ladies were not supposed to be interested in. Well-bred young men took it for granted that Garnet was not interested in things like that. They took it for granted that she was not interested in anything except getting one of them for a husband. Good manners kept Garnet from telling them she had turned down Henry Trellen, who was the greatest catch of them all. But she often wished she could.

From June to October, Garnet wondered if nothing was ever going to happen to her. And then, one day in October, something happened. A young man named Oliver Hale came to town. And though neither her father nor her mother knew it, Oliver started the most enchanting ripples on the smooth white surface of her life.

Things took place so strangely. It was very odd to think that if there hadn't been that scandalous murder last summer she never would have met Oliver at all.

The murder had occurred in August, while Garnet and her mother were at Rockaway Beach. Two men were shot in a brawl at a gambling palace in New York. One of the men was an ex-convict of uncertain origin; his death had interested nobody. At least, it had not interested any of Garnet's friends. If the other victim had been like him she would never have heard of the murder.

But the other victim was Mr. Francis Selkirk, aged forty-six, a wealthy man who had lived in Washington Square. Mr. Selkirk was a gentleman of imprudent habits, used to frequenting haunts of sin. But he was also rich and well connected, and he had recently married a high-born lady about half his age. His death in a gambling-house brawl started a buzz of talk at the summer hotel. Garnet was immensely interested, but nobody would tell her anything about it. The older ladies stopped whispering as soon as she came near, and her mother told her positively that she must not show indecent curiosity by asking questions. So Garnet knew almost nothing about the Selkirk murder, except that it had happened, and that the police seemed unable to fix upon the guilty person.

Mr. Selkirk's relatives made angry demands that his murderer be brought to justice. But this was very difficult. There were many witnesses, for the gambling house had been full of people that evening. But most of them had been patronizing the bar, and their stories were not to be trusted. The weeks went by, nobody was put on trial for the Selkirk murder, and people began to talk of other things.

This was all Garnet knew. Except that she always had an unbecoming curiosity about things that did not concern young ladies, she did not dream that the Selkirk scandal was of any importance to her.

But it happened that Mr. Selkirk had died without making a will. His estate was put into the hands of his bank. Garnet's father was Mr. Horace Cameron, vice-president of the bank, in charge of settling estates. One item of the Selkirk property was a store dealing in cloth and household goods. Mr. Cameron sold the building, and since Mr. Selkirk's widow was willing to take a loss in order to have the business done quickly, he advertised the merchandise for sale at a low price.

This was the reason Oliver Hale came to the bank one day in October, and asked for Mr. Cameron. Oliver had just arrived in New York. He had never heard of Mr. Selkirk and was not interested in the manner of that gentleman's death; but he had seen the advertisement of cloth and household goods at a bargain. Since these were the staples of his trade, he told Mr. Cameron he would be glad to have a look at the lot.

Oliver was a prairie trader. He had come to New York to buy merchandise, which he would pack into covered wagons and take to the Mexican provinces that lay west of the United States. He was twenty-six years old. That was young for such an arduous enterprise, Mr. Cameron said. Oliver laughed and replied that he had been in the prairie trade since he was eighteen. Most of the men in the trade were under thirty, he added; when they got older, they usually settled down to an easier way of living.

Oliver was a genial young fellow, his talk of frontier commerce was interesting, and one day Mr. Cameron brought him home to dinner. Mrs. Cameron, who had rather expected anybody from the frontier to be uncertain about forks, was agreeably surprised at Oliver's polished manners. To her adroit questions, Oliver replied that he had grown up in Boston. He laughed as he told them how he had left Harvard in the middle of his college course, because frontier adventures were more to his liking than Latin and Greek.

Garnet listened with interest, but she was not at all sure that she liked this Mr. Hale. She thought he was the oddest-looking man she had ever seen. He gave her such an impression of size and strength that she was surprised to notice that his height was only average. He had big thick muscles, knotty under his clothes. And though he was well dressed, in a black broadcloth suit and a brocaded vest and a linen shirt with a high stock about his neck, he wore his clothes as though he felt silly in them. He made her think of an actor dressed up in a fancy costume and trying to pretend he was used to it.

Oliver's hands were quite clean, but they were rough and horny like the hands of a day-laborer, and they looked as if he had had to do some furious scrubbing to get out the dirt. He had thick sandy curls, neatly cut but unruly; and his face was extremely puzzling. It was a rather handsome face, with merry brown eyes and a humorous mouth, but it looked as if it had been put together from two faces that did not match. The upper half was deeply tanned and weathered, and the laughter-crinkles around his eyes were white in the tan, as though he had spent months laughing at an almost unbearable glory of sun. But his cheeks and chin were as white as those of a lady who never went outdoors without a veil to shield her complexion. Garnet tried not to stare at him, but to save her life she could not help giving a quizzical glance now and then at that face of his. Once Oliver caught her eye as she looked at him across the table. He gave her a little private smile, and she blushed.

After dinner they were alone for a few minutes. The boys had been sent upstairs to do their lessons, Mrs. Cameron stopped to speak to the servants, and Mr. Cameron went to get the brandy for his guest. Garnet led Oliver into the parlor. As he drew a chair to the fire for her, he smiled at her again, as though they had a secret agreement about something, and the crinkles around his eyes quivered with amusement as he said,

"I had it shaved off ten days ago, in the barber shop at the Astor House."

---

Excerpted from Jubilee Trail by Gwen Bristow. Copyright © 1978 Gwen Bristow. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---