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buried his father with tremendous pomp, hosting a reception afterward at the Harrison mansion attended by every one of San Francisco's notables, most of whom had made their money the same way his father had. With that done he set about reshaping the family image by covering up Lloyd's wild reputation and the facts of his own birth, and throwing himself wholeheartedly into running the business. He did both very well and in ten years he had become a pillar of San Francisco society and had tripled his assets. He was discreet about his personal life and sexual predilections and his public life was a model of propriety.
    By this time he was thirty-two years old and still a bachelor, but he wanted a son and heir to carry on the Harrison name and tradition, and so he began to look around for a suitable wife.
    He met Dolores de Soto at a dance at a neighboring Nob Hill mansion. As he whirled her around in a waltz, his hand tightly clamped on her tiny waist, her white skirts flowing, he was thinking less of her dark, sapphire-eyed beauty than her pedigree, because the de Sotos were decendants of Spanish aristocrats and they also were known for breeding sons. And he, the son of an itinerant Yankee trader and a whore, wanted to be socially well-connected as much as he wanted a son and heir. He knew the de Soto family had once been rich, owning many thousands of acres from the Spanish land grants, but generations of bad business deals had reduced their assets to a small ranch in the Sonoma Valley. They might not have money—but their breeding could be traced back to Queen Isabella of Spain.
    He requested a meeting with Dolores's father; an agreement was reached and a marriage contract signed. The de Sotos left the ranch and planned to move back to Mexico, and within a matter of weeks the girl found herself walking down the aisle of St. Mary's Cathedral in front of a crowd of three hundred hand-picked guests as Harmon Harrison's bride. At that moment her father became a rich man again and Dolores became her husband's chattel, to be used whenever he desired, to be a vessel to breed his sons, and to be present on those public occasions when a wife's presence was required.
    Dolores knew why he had married her and she breathed a sigh of relief when she knew she was pregnant. Harmon sent the best doctor in San Francisco to examine her; he watched over her health like a hawk, but she became weak and thin, her eyes were huge pools of blue in her pale face and her black hair lost its luster. Deciding that San Francisco's hills and fog were dangerous for a pregnant woman, he sent her up north to her family's old ranch in the Sonoma Valley, where he left her in the care of a nurse. He stocked the ranch with special Jersey cows to provide her with fresh milk and cream; he ordered San Francisco's best butcher to prepare prime cuts of meat, had them packed in ice and dispatched them daily to the ranch; and he hired a special cook to supervise his wife's diet and prepare her meals.
    Dolores was still only nineteen and she felt like a prize calf being reared for the kill. She was a well-brought-up girl, soft-spoken and timid, and she was afraid of her husband's coldness and terrified of his anger. Everything she did was to please him; the way she wore her smooth black hair, wound into an elegant chignon; the way she dressed, quietly but expensively as befitted a rich man's wife; the way she behaved, smiling by his side in public or supervising his dinner table. But whenever they were alone she kept to her rooms and out of his sight. Because that's the way he wanted things. And she knew for a fact that he cared for his dogs, the Great Danes, King and Prince, more than he did for her.
    When she was seven months pregnant he brought her back to San Francisco, worried that the baby might decide to make an early appearance, and Dolores, plumper and sleeker, was installed in a newly converted suite of rooms on the ground floor so that she should not have the