Well, he thought, this is how it ends. He stood up, brushed down his tailcoat, and put on his hat. He had a return stagecoach ticket into San Francisco, and he reckoned on going back to the International Hotel, changing, and then having dinner at Delmonico’s with Dan McReady. Perhaps he would get drunk, with toast after toast to Walter West, for his persistence and his worthiness, and his commonplace luck. Damn all haberdashers, he thought. Damn all haberdashers to hell.

He crossed the rough, stony courtyard towards the place where the Yellow Line coaches turned around. One of them had just arrived from downtown, and the conductor was holding the horses while the passengers disembarked. The wind sizzled across the dusty ground.

A man in a brown tailcoat and thick whiskers stepped down from the coach and turned to help a small blonde woman in a grey dress. Collis was confused at first, because the man seemed to treat the woman with too much familiarity, as if she was his wife, or his niece. But as Collis came nearer, he saw that the conductor had left the horses and had walked across to help the woman with two large carpetbags, and a small leather trunk, and he realised that she must be Hannah. She had to be.

‘Hannah!’ he said, with a dry throat.

She didn’t even hear him; she was too busy looking in her purse for a tip for the conductor. But he was walking towards her, almost running, and a scenic photographer caught them both at that moment, tiny figures under a wide afternoon sky, he with his hat in his hand, she with her head just lifted, and the photograph was later exhibited at the Merchants’ Hall in San Francisco, although the caption never said who they were.

Chapter Eleven

He booked her a separate room at the International — not because the management was fussy about ladies and gentlemen of quality sharing rooms for what they discreetly called ‘private conversations’, but because San Francisco was too small and Collis was already too well known for a double booking to go unremarked in the scandal papers.

Neither of them wanted to humiliate Walter any more than they had already, and Hannah that evening was still very shy, and unsettled, and frightened by what she had done.

Over a fish dinner in the downstairs restaurant, Collis held her hand and told her, ‘I was sure you wouldn’t come. It’s like a miracle.’

‘A miracle?’

He shrugged. ‘Well, a minor miracle. Not quite the raising of Lazurus, but the raising of my spirits.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Mine are raised too. I feel like a silly young girl again. You won’t fail me, will you?’

‘Do you really think you have to ask?’