Lincoln had argued in court that railroads had as much right to cross rivers as steamboats had to paddle up and down them, and that it was the manifest destiny of the American people to forge their way west. Theodore had dug out his own notes of his hearing when it first looked likely that Lincoln might win the Republican nomination, and he had put it under Collis’s nose with a meaningful tap of his finger.

‘There’s our man, Collis,’ he had said. ‘If Abraham Lincoln’s nominated, and elected, then we’ll take ourselves off to Washington right away, and by God we’ll get our railroad.’

Collis had been sitting in the Jones’s living-room, after one of Annie’s best meat-pie meals. ‘Lincoln?’ he had asked. ‘What’s our benefactor William Stride going to say if we court Lincoln?’

‘I don’t think that Senator Stride’s opinion is going to matter,’ Theodore had said, sitting down in his rocking chair and crossing his legs. ‘Because if Lincoln’s elected on his anti-slavery platform, it’s a railroad to a red cent that Jeff Davis and the rest of the South will secede in weeks rather than months. And where, I might ask, will that leave Senator Stride, with his substantial interest in a northern-route railroad?’

As 1859 turned, as the Sierra snows thawed, and as spring began, Collis began to see more of Hannah. He took her out to a merchants’ hall dance, where amid laughing and clapping and furious fiddling, they showed off their fancy Eastern dance steps to the stiff-legged storekeepers of Sacramento. Hannah still wore a black ribbon on her arm, but Collis had been right. Modern life moved too fast for a widow woman to keep up her mourning for the full year, especially if she was young and energetic, and had a suitor as popular as Collis.

The news came at last that John Brown had been hanged. And the same afternoon, Collis and Hannah were taking a drive out of town in Collis’s new wagon, northeastward as far as the old Vallejo farm, to deliver a load of pitch and guttering.

It was the last day of January 1860. The sky was clear and sharp, and the wagon wheels ground noisily over the rutted track. Collis was wearing a flecked tweed suit in grey and white, and Hannah was dressed in a dark-brown cape, and a brown bonnet. Her pale hands lay in her lap like two birds.

‘How is the railroad?’ she asked. ‘Any news?’

Collis shook his head. ‘Not since last week. Mind you, John Brown’s execution might help us.’

‘You don’t really want the North and the South to go to war?’

‘It’s not a question of what I want. It’s inevitable. If it was just a moral issue about slavery, it wouldn’t happen. If it was just a political issue about who controls Congress, it wouldn’t happen either. But it’s a financial issue, an issue about money, and when men find their gold is threatened, they will go to war.’