Collis threw the letter down on the white lace tablecloth. He looked down at the scattered pages, his hand over his mouth, and said nothing.

Hannah stood up. ‘Is there something the matter?’ she asked him.

‘What?’ he said distractedly.

‘I said, is there anything the matter?’

‘Oh. No, there isn’t. Just a letter from Theo.’

‘You look upset.’

He shrugged. ‘Yes, I suppose I am. It’s funny how your own way of working, when other people try it, always seems so tawdry.’

Hannah didn’t pick up the letter, but came instead to stand beside him and lay a hand on his shoulder.

‘Go to the back of the house,’ she said. ‘There’s still light enough to see the Sierras.’

Chapter Thirteen

What happened during the fall and winter of 1860 and the early spring of the following year — the election of Abraham Lincoln as President and the subsequent breakaway from the Union by South Carolina and six other cotton states — all of these events seemed peculiarly remote and unreal to the people of San Francisco and Sacramento. They were part of a distant political nightmare which they could only hear about secondhand, either from weeks-old dispatches carried by the Pacific Mail steamers, or from the riders of the Pony Express. Suddenly the self-satisfied isolation of northern California became a source of champing frustration, and in the drawing-rooms of South Park and the lobby of the San Francisco Stock Exchange, rumour and feverish fear were both heightened out of all proportion by the latest news reports from the East.

David Terry, out loud, called Lincoln ‘a nigger’s lackey’, and John Frémont, at an eggnog party, referred to Jefferson Davis as ‘the lowest form of treacherous pond life’.

But it was all so far away that it seemed like a theatrical performance, rather than a real political crisis. Even Collis, who was desperately anxious to hear that the nation’s wrangles over slavery had taken a decisive turn one way or the other, so that he could plan ahead for the Sierra Pacific Railroad — even Collis found that the bulletins from Washington had a sense of melodramatic dread that was all heavy piano music and vibrato violins, and it was hard for him to believe that secession had come at last.

He felt as if he were sitting in the upper balcony of a theatre, peering through the wrong end of his opera glasses while a stage musician ostentatiously sawed a pretty young lady in half. It was all too distant to be able to make out if the pretty young lady was really being dismembered; and even if she were, he was too far away to be able to do anything about it.