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restless curiosity. They had settled among the Spanish ranchers, Russian fur traders, American whalers and hide and tallow dealers in the little village on the Bay, called Yerba Buena for the medicinal herbs that grew in abundance on its many hills.
    She could barely remember her birthplace: the handsome New England estate with its gentle, undulating hills and valleys, the elegant classical mansion looking across the Hudson towards West Point was only a collection of fugitive memories now. And lost to her for ever.
    She had been eager for the new life in this vast empty country where everyone spoke Spanish and all the other children had black hair and fiery dark eyes, and soon grew impatient with a mother pining for the niceties of Connecticut Society. Papa had to come to the new lands of California and Oregon to make his maps and surveys, so it was folly to yearn to be anywhere else.
    Only later, some time after her mother’s death, married herself and walled in by the miseries of her own circumstances, could she understand how her mother had felt, uprooted from a settled society and replanted in an alien land where, of the four hundred and fifty inhabitants, barely half were American and of these only a handful female. It was a society in which Judith Jameson’s rigid upbringing and innate pride did not allow her to take a part; she had withdrawn firmly behind the shuttered windows of the wooden house which looked down Pleasant Valley to the waters of the bay, there to brood on the sad chance which had brought her to this miserable and wretched corner of the continent.
    She had married Major Owens when he was an officer instructor at the West Point Academy, and had never come to terms with the footloose, adventurous mapmaker he had become, ever eager to join one of the mad expeditions to Oregon or the Mexican borderlands, to the Platte or the Sweetwater River with Frémont, or up the Pacific Coast with Commander Wilkes.
    She would not accept any invitations from the Spanish speaking ladies in the little settlement by the Bay, or even from the wives of the American whaler captains. One group she stigmatised as heathens, the other she regarded as so very far beneath her that to notice them would be mutually insulting. She withdrew like a snail into her shell and, before long, the invitations ceased. Her only joy in life was the constant scheming to get her daughter back east to prepare for the inheritance which would eventually come her way as the last of the Jamesons.
    But Alicia had been quite uninterested in the glowing future held out to her as the chatelaine of Valley Hall and its wide acres: she was far happier if she could escape, with the connivance of the Mexican maids, to ride with the daughters of the Mexican governor, the Alcalde , with only their black-robed confessor as chaperon. And escape became far easier as her mother lapsed into imagined invalidity, hardly ever leaving her bedchamber.
    The most exciting moments in Alicia’s monotonous life were when her father and his companions made a rare return to base. Most of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers were former West Point men, like her father, selected not only for their qualities of leadership and adventurousness but also for their specialised knowledge.
    The United States wanted to purchase California from Mexico. The planned surveys were part of the American strategy to acquire the vast area before the British moved in from British Columbia and Vancouver Island, or the Russians — already established just north of Yerba Buena at Fort Ross — from Alaska, to annexe California from the weak and inefficient Mexican governors for the sake of its flourishing fur trade.
    Travelling with each survey were geologists, map-makers, guides, topographers, mountaineers and artists, as well as the necessary military support. They surveyed new routes for possible future emigration overland, for improved communication, from the frontiers of Missouri to the