Secondhand Souls (Grim Reaper 2)

My father received the count with great courtesy, and he spent many evenings at our home. My mother was intent upon showing the Russian that even in the colonies, the manners and traditions of old Spain could be maintained. Many dinners with officers and local officials and their wives were served. Even when our home was filled with guests, I could not tear my attentions from the count. He was so handsome and worldly, and he regaled us with tales of the north and Japan, where the czar had sent him as an ambassador. I was breathless in his presence, so I would retreat to the corners, but I soon found that as often as I tried to look at him from across the room, to drink him in, I found him looking back, and my heart rejoiced. I could not hide my love behind a lace fan, and he could not disguise his attentions behind courtly manners.

Finally, he passed me a note one evening when kissing my hand and I hurried away to the kitchen just to read those few precious words: “Tonight. The garden. When the moon is over Alcatraz.” He knew, somehow, that I could see the island from my bedroom window, and after the guests had left and the house was long silent, I waited, watching the moon for what seemed months, but before it was over the island, the fog spilled in through the Golden Gate like milk poured into tea, and the night sky was nothing more than a gray shroud. I could wait no longer. Still in my party dress, I went to the garden, not even stopping to take a cloak, and before the chill could settle upon me, I saw him.

“I couldn’t wait,” he said. “The fog—­I have been here all evening.”

I ran to him, then stopped, bounced upon my toes, feeling as if I might burst with excitement. He took me in his arms and kissed me. My first kiss.

In the weeks that followed I lived only for the time I could be in the presence of my beloved “Nikolasha,” and he was the same for me. He made excuses to be at the fort during the day, and I made excuses to be out and about when he was there. Even a glimpse of him during the day would make my heart leap and sustain me, until evening, when I could see him again in my parents’ house, and later, in the garden. Even as our love grew, though, so did the specter of time begin to loom over us. Nikolai had come to establish trade with the Spanish colony to sustain the struggling Russian settlements in the far north, but Spanish law dictated that the colonies could not trade with a foreign power. For all of his courtesy and goodwill, my father could not grant the count his request.

“And what if I were to marry your daughter?” Nikolai said one evening over dinner.

“Yes,” I blurted out. “Yes, Father, yes!”

My father smiled, as did my mother, for they had not been blind to our attraction, and when my father spoke, my mother smiling in a bemused manner the whole time, I knew they had discussed this possibility before it had even occurred to Nikolai.

“I would honored to grant you my daughter’s hand, but it is not in my power to enter into a trade agreement with Russia, nor, I daresay is it yours to speak for the Czar. But if you bring me a letter of permission from the Czar, sanctioning your marriage to my Conchita, then I think I can convince the king to grant a trade agreement with your colonies. In the meantime, the ­people of Alta California and Mission de San Francisco, will give, out of Chris­tian charity, enough supplies to sustain the ­people of Sitka through the winter. No trade will have taken place, no law broken. You can deliver the supplies on your return voyage to Russia to gain the Czar’s permission.

Nikolai was ecstatic. Normally composed and ever so dignified, he stood and cheered, then apologized and bowed to everyone at the table individually, after which he sat down and collected himself.

I was in tears and my mother held me as I wept with joy onto her shoulder.

“I may be gone some time,” Nikolai said, trying to calm himself. “Even after I reach Mother Russia’s shores, I will have a long trek across Siberia to reach St. Petersburg to get the Czar’s permission. It may be more than a year before I am able to return.”

“I’ll wait!” I said.

“The Czar will likely order I stop at the other colonies on the return voyage and the journey is too treacherous in the winter. If I miss the season, I may be two years.”

“I’ll wait!” I repeated.

My father smiled. “We shall all wait, Count Rezanov, as long as it takes.”

“Forever,” I said. “If it takes forever.”

When he sailed out of the bay I felt as if my heart went with him, and I swear I could feel the tether, even as I stood on the hill above the Golden Gate and watched the mast of his ship disappear over the horizon. And I waited, after a year running to the top of the hill any time the guard announced a ship. Two years.

I spent whole days, wrapped in a cloak against the fog, staring out to sea, thinking that my presence might pull him to me. I knew he had to feel the same thing, the tether to his heart, and I would be there above the Gate so he could follow it across the ocean, home, to me.

For forty years I waited, meeting every morning with the thought of him, ending every night with prayers for him, and he never returned. Word never came. What had befallen him? Whom had he met? Had he forgotten me? I died a nun, for I would have no one else, and when he did not return, the only way to keep my father from making me marry another was to marry God. Yet I was an unfaithful wife, for I was Nikolai’s and he was mine, always and forever, and there could be no other for me, not even God.

“That’s the saddest story I’ve ever heard,” said Mike, who was shivering in his safety harness, and not from the cold wind coming in the Gate. He held out his arms to her, to hold her, to comfort her.

Concepción bowed her head to hide her tears, then slipped off the beam and floated toward him.

Mike’s radio crackled. “Sully! The fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Mike scrambled for the mic strapped at his shoulder. “Wha, wha, wha.” He whipped his head around so quickly, looking for his coworker that his hard hat nearly came off.

The radio: “I’m on the lower north tower, about a hundred feet below you. Seven o’clock.”

Mike spotted him. Bernitelli, wiry little Italian guy. Berni, they called him, working in a window washer’s lift, suspended from cables a hundred feet over the bay.

“I’m okay,” Mike said into the radio. “Just shooing some gulls that were getting in fresh paint.”

“You hooked in?”

“Of course.”

“Then stop waving your arms around and hang on. I thought you were going to take the big dive.”