Chapter 4
San Francisco; Four Days Later
He was a failure. There was no other word for it.
The Alliance rocked gently beneath Yuri’s feet as it crept through Golden Gate, the strait that separated the peninsula to their north from the bustling city of San Francisco to their south.
It was a narrow strip of water, only maybe a mile and a half wide, but it protected both San Pablo Bay and San Francisco Bay from the rough waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Not that the ocean was rough today. It was calm as glass, with a brilliant blue sky and gulls circling above.
If only he could force his mood to match the cheerful weather. But how could he when he still felt as though he’d betrayed Rosalind?
If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?
God had led him to that passage from the second chapter of James three years ago.
Rosalind had asked him to send and receive a single letter for her every month, a charitable contribution she hadn’t wanted her father to know about.
The Sunday after she made her request, the priest at St. Michael’s had delivered a sermon on helping those in need.
So Yuri agreed to help Rosalind donate to a charity every month, and eventually the number of charities she supported grew to six.
Each month, Yuri would send six donation letters from Rosalind, and the organizations would send six letters back to him acknowledging the donations.
Occasionally, she’d made a one-time donation elsewhere, but for the past year, her list of charities had been the same.
The Bible was full of verses about helping the needy and delivering them from affliction.
James 2:15–16 wasn’t the only one. Matthew 25:35–36 and 40 said, For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me .
. . Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
And Psalm 82:3–4 said, Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.
Yuri had taken those verses to heart and spent the last three years trying to be a living example of them.
And the entire time he was sending Rosalind’s letters, he couldn’t help thinking of Alexei.
He’d done the very thing these verses spoke of after their father and stepmother died at sea eleven years earlier.
Alexei had been in San Francisco, a year away from completing his studies in naval architecture, and had dropped everything to come home.
His fiancée, Clarise, left him a few months later, choosing to move back to Washington, DC, with all its refinements rather than stay in Sitka with Alexei.
And still, Alexei had stood by their family, never wavering once.
So for the past three years, Yuri had been happy to help Rosalind and show the love of Christ to others.
But at some point, he’d also wondered if maybe Rosalind needed help.
She wasn’t poor or hungry—there was no question about that.
But some of those verses talked about helping the needy and afflicted, and people could still be needy if they had money, couldn’t they?
It certainly seemed that way when it came to Rosalind.
Of course, it would make more sense if he knew exactly what Rosalind needed.
He didn’t, but at times he had an almost overwhelming conviction that simply being her friend and sending the letters for her was helping her in ways she couldn’t quite express.
So that’s exactly what he’d done, and from time to time, he asked her if she wanted help leaving Sitka.
She didn’t seem to care that he wanted to be her friend and had answered with a hard no any time he’d brought up the possibility of her leaving her home.
He was succeeding in only one of the things he was trying to do, and even that had changed three nights ago when Bryony had accidentally opened one of Rosalind’s letters.
The memory still caused a sour ball to form in his stomach.
Another thing he’d never done was ask Rosalind where her donation money came from.
At the beginning, he’d assumed she was giving a bit of her own money and that the donations were tiny enough they wouldn’t make much difference in the day-to-day operations of the first charity she’d supported, the orphanage in New York City.
Now Rosalind was supporting multiple institutions, and he’d long had a suspicion that the donations were for more than just a dollar or two.
But he hadn’t known for certain until he’d read the letter Bryony had opened.
It had thanked Rosalind for her contributions throughout the year, totaling twelve hundred dollars.
Since Yuri knew that Rosalind sent that organization a letter every month, it wasn’t hard to deduce that each donation was a hundred dollars.
One hundred dollars.
That was four to five months’ worth of wages for the average man.
Where had Rosalind gotten that much money?
Her father’s bank account, like Alexei and the rest of his brothers suspected?
That was the most obvious answer, but if Preston Caldwell knew what his daughter was doing with his money, there would be no need for her to hide her correspondence.
Now Alexei was worried about would happen if Caldwell discovered a member of the Amos family had been secretly helping Rosalind send his money off to various charities, and he was probably right to be concerned.
Yuri rubbed the back of his neck. Could Caldwell legally accuse him of theft or money laundering or some other Finnancial crime? The powerful businessman had had no trouble having both Sacha and Mikhail charged with crimes they hadn’t committed.
The captain shouted down from the deck, ordering his crew to prepare to dock. The men around Yuri flew into action, lowering the sails and removing the deck boards that covered the gangway stored underneath.
More shouting sounded from the shore, where men had gathered near an open slip on the wharf to help moor the ship. The helmsman pointed the nose of the Alliance directly at the opening, and the ship crawled forward with all but one sail furled.
The pier in front of them was alive with movement.
Longshoremen in work-worn coats hauled crates from incoming vessels.
Merchants haggled over shipments of goods, and dock hands rolled barrels down the gangways.
There were even a handful of cranes removing cargo from ships by hoisting crates high into the air, then swinging them onto the wharf and slowly lowering them.
Just past the wharf, a sprawling maze of warehouses lined the harbor, followed by a glut of factories. Houses and hotels and other buildings occupied space on the hillside farther away from the water, and the city’s bright energy hummed in the air.
Hopefully it would be infectious. Hopefully it would pull his mind away from how he’d failed Rosalind.
Alexei had certainly given him enough things to keep himself busy in San Francisco.
His first order of business was to procure three shipping contracts.
Alexei had been writing to factory owners, and it seemed as though three of them were ready to sign two-year contracts to have the Sitka Trading Company ship their goods from California to Japan and China.
Hopefully getting the contracts signed wouldn’t be too hard.
And then there was the barge. Made of iron and steel, it had been badly damaged in a storm, and Alexei was trying to buy it at a good price, hoping that the cost of the ship plus repairs would be less than the price of a seaworthy ship.
It was currently at the Farnsworth Shipyard, and Yuri was supposed to make an offer on it.
Yuri wiped his slick palms on the legs of his trousers as the Alliance slid into its space alongside the wharf.
When he’d volunteered to come down to San Francisco, he’d expected Alexei to tell him no, just like he’d told him last fall when they’d needed to send someone to Ketchikan.
But he hadn’t.
Yuri glanced at the wharf again and the city rising on the hill beyond it. Three shipping contracts and a damaged barge. He could do this. He wasn’t about to fail his brother.
Klawock, Alaska; Two Days Later
“Why are you packing? I don’t understand.
” Alexei stood on the beach in the small Tlingit village of Klawock, which sat on Prince of Wales Island, one island south of Baranoff Island where Sitka was located.
His gaze swept over the shoreline where dozens of people were busy packing their belongings and loading them into canoes.
Everywhere he looked, people were moving.
Women packed woven baskets with clothing, blankets, and household goods.
Men disassembled wooden drying racks and carried supplies toward the beach, and children gathered what they could, their small hands clutching toys or tools.
“Are you leaving?” he asked, even though the answer was obvious. “Now? Fishing season will be underway in a few months.”
Tlákwsháa, the oldest elder of the clan, knelt on a mat that contained a ceremonial rattle, several Chilkat blankets, and various other items. He didn’t look up as he picked up a worn raven headdress and wrapped it in a piece of deerskin, then tucked it into a cedar box.
“The soldiers said we need to leave.”
So the rumor was true. He had a hundred things to do in Sitka, but when word had reached him that the people of Klawock were uprooting their village, he’d wanted to come check for himself.
“What soldiers are you talking about?”