Hannah was sitting in their light, spacious front parlour, embroidering a firescreen, when Collis returned home from the store the Tuesday after the Sturgeon stabbing. He came across and kissed her, and then went to the pearwood cabinet for a drink.

‘Did you hear the news from South Park?’ asked Hannah.

‘About the Willard Mannings? Yes. Kwang Lee told me.’

‘What do you think about it?’

Collis turned. ‘What do I think about it? I don’t think anything about it. The North and the South are steaming themselves up into a condition of civil war, and incidents like this are all part of it.’

Hannah laid her embroidery in her lap. Her blonde hair was tied up in plaits and pinned with combs, making her look rather cold and Nordic.

‘Don’t you think it’s time you went to San Francisco and talked to Mr Laurence Melford?’

‘Melford? You mean about the railroad?’

‘Of course about the railroad. What else? The time is just ripe, with all this uncertainty about the coming elections. Even Laurence Melford isn’t going to be fool enough to ignore the possibility of war, and of Lincoln’s being elected.’

Collis finished mixing himself a stone fence, and then walked thoughtfully across the room. ‘I was going to wait to see the outcome of the elections themselves. But I guess you could be right.’

Hannah reached out her hand for him. ‘If the election goes to Douglas or to Breckinridge, then Melford will ignore you. If it goes to Lincoln, then everyone will be panicking too much to think clearly about railroads at all. Now is an ideal moment, don’t you think? It is far easier to trade on fears than it is on certainties.’

Collis squeezed her hand. ‘Hannah, my darling,’ he said, ‘I do believe you’ll make a fine businesswoman yet.’

She smiled. ‘I know my own weaknesses, Collis. That’s why I can see those in other people.’

‘Even in me?’ he asked her.

She nodded, happily. ‘A man without weaknesses is like a garden wall without a gate.’

Collis sipped his drink and thought about the plan he had devised for Laurence Melford. He hoped to God it would work; but, even more, he hoped to God that Hannah wouldn’t get to hear of it.

Collis did everything he could to persuade Hannah to stay at home in Sacramento while he went to San Francisco to deal with Laurence Melford, but she refused to hear of it. She had friends in San Francisco she wanted to visit, and shopping to do, and she also wanted to tend Walter’s grave. Collis, who before their marriage would have found it comparatively easy to insist that he should go alone, now found Hannah’s gentle obstinacy to be more than he could handle. So their maid, Lilah, packed Hannah’s trunk with nightdresses and frocks and bottles of cosmetics, and Hannah joined Collis on the deck of the steamer Renown in her most elegant cream cap and parasol.