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there was no turning the clock back. What was done was done and she could never be the same girl again; recent events had only finished what Robert had begun.
    Robert.
    Robert had been so handsome. He had been on board Catesby’s flag-ship when it put into Yerba Buena — or San Francisco, as she was learning to call it — to take possession of California for the United States at the end of the Mexican war in ‘48.
    Grieving for her dead mother, hope fast fading for her father, officially posted missing with a lost expedition into the interior, she had hurried down to the harbour hoping for a letter from her grandfather, enclosing a ticket for her return to Connecticut, where she could make her home with him at Valley Hall.
    Seventeen years old, bereaved, cut off from the world in the little house with the mourning blinds drawn against the yellow sea-fogs, she was ripe for love. Blue eyes crinkled in a tanned face, long legs braced against the slight swell that rocked the deck, the fair-haired young Lieutenant seemed to her a giant, a hero.
    The servants had returned to Mexico with the Alcalde and his daughters at the outbreak of war and she had no one to advise her. She was swept on board the flagship and off her feet by Lieutenant Robert J. Langdon. Within a week they were wed.
    Her wedding night was a disaster, an unsatisfactory, fumbling night with Robert rendered too drunk by his fellow-officers to fulfil his desires, but she was young and optimistic, and she knew it was just a hiccup in their love affair. But the next morning Robert was posted 80 miles north to New Helvetia, to carry news to the settlers up by Sutter’s Fort of their new status as citizens of the United States.
    Robert came back a changed man. Outwardly still the handsome young officer she had fallen in love with, but with a feverish gleam in his eyes, a slight tremor in his hands. At first she thought he was drunk again and her heart sank at the prospect of another night of inconclusive humiliation, but he was not drunk. He was far sicker than that: he had caught gold-fever.
    He had led his little party of Marines without mishap through the heavily wooded valleys up to Sutter’s Fort. It was normally crowded with newly arrived emigrants and those Californian Indians who had survived the white man’s diseases and now clustered around the trading posts or the Catholic missions, but Robert’s party found the normally bustling fort almost empty. Gradually, in cryptic whispers and muttered clues, the story came out. James Marshall had found some curious deposits in the tide-race of the new sawmill his Indian labourers had built on the American River and the resulting exodus among his workers had left poor Johann Sutter with fields of sown crops and no prospect of any to harvest them; virtually every fit man, Indian and white, had gone upriver in search of the elusive gold.
    Barely half of Robert’s marines returned from the American River with him, and he made little attempt to coerce them. Within hours of their return, before the word could spread, he sold the wooden house and plot which had been her home for six years, and bought himself out of the Navy.
    ‘But it’s not my home to sell!’ she protested weakly. ‘It’s my father’s!’
    ‘If he’s still alive, which I doubt,’ he replied brutally. ‘Any reasonable man would say it’s yours, and your property became mine on our marriage, so I can do as I like with it.’
    He must have seen her look of shock, for now he became wheedling, sliding his arm around her waist and kissing her cold cheek. ‘Sweetheart, how else am I to get the money to start up? I have to buy out my commission, buy some transport and tools, and still have enough for a good stake. Don’t you see, my darling, we’re in at the beginning! We’ll be in and make our fortune before anyone else knows about it! A fortune for us and our children! Why, we’ll be able to buy up the whole of San Francisco Bay by the time