Blood Gold Read Online Free Page A

he had traveled to London and Paris, spending a year on the sort of Grand Tour most young men can only dream about. He could speak French, play the piano, and had recently met a man on the field of honor, prepared to fight a duel.
    Ezra had brought the brace of horse pistols—the very dueling weapons themselves—for my employer to repair shortly afterward. They were silver-chased .65 caliber flintlocks, made by Hadley of London. A morning rain shower had dampened them, and Ezra had wanted them cleaned and oiled by an expert.
    â€œI hope I never set eyes on Murray again, Willie,” he had said with a shaky laugh. “He ran away before I could take a shot at him, and that’s the worst sort of enemy to have.”
    â€œOne that can run away?” I said, jokingly.
    â€œNo,” said Ezra in all seriousness. “A proud man who’s embarrassed himself.”
    I knew Murray about as well as I knew Ezra. Where Ezra was quick with a smile, and easy to admire, Murray was a young man I almost felt sorry for—he was so difficult to like. Ezra’s newspaper had criticized the Murray banking family as heavy investors in the “rat-thick hovels for the poor” in an article I suspect Ezra had penned himself.
    The two young men had met in Rittenhouse Square, exchanged unpleasantries, and the duel had been inevitable given the high-minded energy of Ezra and the stolid pride of Samuel Murray. The big redhead was an anxious man, with a broad pale forehead and a humorless laugh. He had a way of cracking his knuckles and toying with his watch fob as he complained that the harness I mended, or the wheel I repaired, was too late, overpriced, and the workmanship unsatisfactory.
    At the same time, Murray was not a person you’d want as an enemy—rumor told of his favorite sport, shooting stray dogs with a fowling piece. Rumor filled in the details of Murray’s disappearance after the abortive duel. Some said he was having a repeating pistol custom-designed in London. Others suggested that he’d fled to Boston, where he was looking for sterner, more violent companions, so he could return to Philadelphia and shoot Ezra like a cur.
    Ezra’s family newspaper had carried dispatches from San Francisco on its front page the year before, a California official crowing “your streams have minnows, ours are choked with gold.” Ezra found a graceful and perfectly respectable reason to leave town with one of his card-playing companions, a good-natured gentleman named Andrew Follette. They were by no means the first men in Philadelphia to head west, but they were the first I had known personally.
    Ezra waved to Ben and me as servants packed his brand-new, bright-hinged trunk into a wagon, calling out the well-worn “Ho! For California!”—laughing as he spoke. It was his laugh you’d always remember about him, his white teeth flashing, a sunny, stirring sound that made you join in, despite yourself.
    Only in his fresh absence did Elizabeth write me a letter, her beautiful, usually carefully quilled handwriting unsteady with feeling. We arranged a secret meeting, late at night, the neighborhood asleep, out by the green where during happier times the summer horse races were held.
    There in the dark she confessed to me that Ezra had sworn to marry her, and had taken advantage of her passion for him. She whispered a further confession, halting, barely able to put it into words. She believed that she was carrying Ezra’s child.
    Perhaps I had read too many tales of chivalrous heroes. Perhaps I was hostage to feelings toward Elizabeth I had not fully realized until then. But I stood there under the stars and swore on the graves of my parents, with God as my witness, that I would find Ezra Nevin, and bring him back.
    The next morning Ben had chuckled in amazement. “So old Ezra is a scamp, as well as a gentleman.”
    â€œI guess the two are not contradictory,” I