by Tim Westover
Chapter Thirty-Four
The roads out of the valley were very bad, rutted by rain and by the hordes who had fled ahead of them. Shadburn slept. His head smacked against the wooden panels of the carriage whenever a wheel dropped into a depression, but he wasn’t disturbed from his rest. Holtzclaw stayed awake. He contemplated his fingernails and his future.
In Dahlonega, Holtzclaw and Shadburn boarded a train, which they changed in Gainesville, reversing the journey they had made a year ago. As the steam locomotive came to a stop in Milledgeville, smoke brushed the windowpanes. Holtzclaw remembered that this was home. He had a dwelling here, filled with many things—books, ledgers, clothes, hats, gloves. He’d forgotten about his possessions; it had been so long since he possessed them.
“Shadburn, I need a holiday,” he said to his employer.
“You’ve just spent a year at a mountain resort. Where else could you go?”
“Nowhere,” said Holtzclaw. “I mean, I’ll stay here. Milledgeville. I need a reacquaintance with my life.”
“There’s too much to do. We must research our next opportunity. And there are bound to be some consequences arising from the last one. A little paperwork. A few legal questions.”
“I’ll defer those matters to you,” said Holtzclaw. “You seemed bored there, at the end.”
“Very well. But make your time useful! I want you back, refreshed and ready to work, as soon as you are able.”
•
Holtzclaw opened the door to his dwelling. A stale aroma reached him; it was his own scent, but he had not remembered it. All his possessions were untouched, exactly as he had abandoned them when he’d left for Auraria. Holtzclaw took beloved books from his cobwebbed shelves and ran his eyes over the pages. The words existed in some nebulous state—not new, exactly, but not familiar either.
Next to the books, he placed some artifacts of his travels: the small white rock from the cairn of the Queen of the Mountains, a pouch that held the eight colors of gold he had panned out of the Amazon Branch under Ms. Rathbun’s supervision, a bottle of Effervescent Brain Salts, and an empty tin of Pharaoh’s Flour. He consulted with a dozen apothecaries, but they could not restock his supplies. Some goods could not be bought in the old capital.
By day, he wandered the streets, an unending constitutional. The brown bricks were stained by too many fingerprints. Holtzclaw took his meals in a new restaurant every night. Nothing pleased his palate. One night, he ate a lobster tail that tasted as though it had very little fight in it. Another night, he ate boiled potatoes in a slophouse—the potatoes had never grinned back at anyone, and they were lifeless on his tongue. Mushrooms tasted like they had been desiccated by salt winds. Even when the clarets were excellent, the water tasted empty. Pain returned to his bowels. He asked for squirrel’s head stew—waiters sneered. He went to the produce market and bought five large sweet potatoes, each the size of his head. The recipe promised a light and fluffy soufflé, but Holtzclaw, for his efforts, was rewarded with a charred mistake. He ate it anyway, to dispose of the failure in the most thorough way possible. Sleep escaped him in his old, unfamiliar bed.
Two weeks passed, then a month. Milledgeville remained strange to him. One evening, Holtzclaw’s after-supper perambulation took him along the edge of the state house square, down a flagstone path that was a popular stroll for Milledgeville’s fashionable set. A sudden sight made his heart leap from its low state. A woman in a glittering gold dress caught the yellow sunset. She was illuminated, flood-lit. The Queen of the Mountains had descended to the Wire-grass.
Many people saw her, but she saw Holtzclaw. She approached him, a beam of sunlight made visible by the dusty street, and as she did, Holtzclaw was disappointed that she was not the Queen of the Mountains, but only the paler pretender.
“Hello, my dear Holtzclaw,” she said. “What a pleasant surprise. What are you doing in Milledgeville?”
“Hello, Lizzie,” said Holtzclaw. “My employer has his offices here.”
“Still under the thumb of Mr. Shadburn?”
“Presently, I’m on vacation.”
“How lovely. Then you will have time to join me for coffee.”
Ms. Rathbun piloted Holtzclaw to Milledgeville’s most prestigious coffeehouse. The maître d’ placed them in front of the window on the merits of Ms. Rathbun’s glittering self. The crisp white linens crackled as the waiter placed cups and saucers and plates of edibles on the table. He poured coffee, black and oozing, from a silver ewer.
Ms. Rathbun consumed a cucumber sandwich from between her fingers and nattered incessantly. Holtzclaw swirled his beverage but did not drink.
“So the insurance companies were reluctant, you see, because of the size of the claim,” she said. “But all the paperwork was in perfect order. It was only right, given the truth of the matter: you exploded my boat, Holtzclaw, and this violent act happened before the dam break. A hundred witnesses saw it. Thus, the companies had no choice but to pay. Those were the terms of the contract, in black and white.” Ms. Rathbun drew her face up in concern. “They haven’t pursued you, have they?” She put one hand against her chest and the other on Holtzclaw’s elbow.
“I haven’t heard a word,” said Holtzclaw, “but I’ve been on leave. Perhaps they’ve bankrupted Shadburn. It wouldn’t take much to finish him off.”
“Well, I am glad that my adventure has not been ruinous to you,” said Ms. Rathbun. “I would’ve felt, how do you say, remorseful. After all that you’ve done for me.” Her hand remained on Holtzclaw’s elbow.
“You’ve settled here? In Milledgeville?” said Holtzclaw.
“Oh yes, very nicely settled. I have a pleasant apartment, furnished with silk. There is a gala every night, with only the finest European dances. No molasses boiling reels or other rural nonsense. There is always splendid food. Creatures have been shuttled across the continent for our culinary pleasure. Clarets, too! We used to have claret in Auraria, do you remember? What swill. It’s only vinegar that they ship to the provinces. I’ve seen Dasha Pavlovski twice. The tickets are fabulously expensive because there is such demand. But it’s a trifle. The women are all wonderfully coiffed. They are like fine-plumed birds.”
“You’ve taken to the place well,” said Holtzclaw.
“Yes, a very good match,” said Ms. Rathbun. She looked from side to side, consulting the surrounding tables for anyone she knew, then leaned in close to Holtzclaw’s ear. “But sometimes, it feels small. Unable to contain me. There are lovely people, to be sure, but provincial, still. I wonder how I would get along in New York or Paris or Venice. I suppose I would take to those just as quickly. I wonder what food they serve at their galas. How poor the clarets of Milledgeville would seem.”
“What’s stopping you from going?”
“The opinions of others. Some of the society women think it’s inappropriate that I have no escort. I tell them that I have all that I need—by that, I mean money, which can be exchanged at favorable rates for anything else that I desire. But they want that I should be billed, wooed, and cooed.”
Holtzclaw shuddered.
“My society friends say they will take me to Saratoga for the season. They are not optimistic, though. They say it is a bad time for a good match. Too many people! Some are refugees from your hotel, Holtzclaw. My society friends say that the Queen of the Mountains, in its short time, made many successful matches. A consumptive duchess met her heart’s desire—a prince, no less! Ah, but it’s all moot. There’s no lake, so there’s no hotel, so there’s no matchmaking. Now I’ll have to go to Saratoga. It’s all so much work! I don’t fancy being dragged all the way to the north, especially when there is a suitable match right here.”
The hairs on Holtzclaw’s neck stood up.
“It would not be much of an effort for you, Holtzclaw. You would still be generally free. You are a codfish aristocrat, but we’d give you a plume of feathers and no one would know. Your only duty would be to make an appearance at galas and di
nner parties. You enjoy those well enough, don’t you? Please don’t think there would be any special emotional attachments required. We’d begin here in Milledgeville at first, and then we’d go abroad, wherever we like. When we settle, I could set you up in a little business, if you like. A silkworm concern? A little guesthouse? You could bottle your own claret.”
Holtzclaw swirled the coffee in his cup. It looked like the drying mud in the Lost Creek Valley.
•
Holtzclaw met with Shadburn at an eatery near the capitol. The cook was a transplanted mountain man who fled when the gold mines faltered. He served a passable version of hash browns, which Shadburn tucked into with more gusto than Holtzclaw.
“It’s been a pest of a time without you,” said Shadburn. “Have you cleansed yourself of what was bothering you?”
Holtzclaw demurred on the question.
“Well, I have been through some wild legal machinations,” continued Shadburn. “I have been answering claims from insurance companies. They represented your boat—or rather, not your boat, but Ms. Rathbun’s boat. They had already paid out an enormous sum to Ms. Rathbun and wanted compensation because an agent in my employ had caused the loss.”
“I am sorry for that,” said Holtzclaw. “I can offer explanations, but not excuses.”
“No apologies necessary. It has all panned out well. None of the lawsuits could land a blow. I had no deeds. I had not filed any claims. I was no more an owner of that hotel than any other man or woman, foreign or domestic. Legal agents went looking for certain key documents—property deeds, warrants, and claims. And do you know who had them? Ephraim and Flossie, who traded them for other pieces of paper in their complicated game. These two had no assets other than the papers themselves. The courts seized the deeds and then liquidated them at auction. Who would want land still caked with mud, without any mineral resources, unimproved? No one but its former owners! They bought the land back for a fraction of what we paid them.”
“How was it all so orderly?” asked Holtzclaw.
“Dr. Rathbun, while a civic authority trusted by the courts to administer the land auction, is also a kind and wise man,” said Shadburn, “with goals not too distant from my own. Not every piece of property was restored identically. Some former inhabitants took land on the opposite side of the valley, where the light suited them better. Some reassembled properties that had been split in family and factional conflicts in generations long forgotten. Some former owners didn’t want to come back to Auraria at all. This was their prerogative, of course. They earned their independence.”
“How have they earned it? By suffering through our schemes? You should have just put gold coins into bushel baskets and left them at the doorsteps of your friends and relations. I would have hand-delivered them, if the sweat itself was somehow important.”
“That would have solved nothing. Dissolved nothing.”
“I cannot help but think that you are redefining your terms of success after the fact. You’ve shot a rifle, then drawn the bull’s-eye around the bullet hole.”
“So have many other capitalists.”
“It’s remarkable, Shadburn,” said Holtzclaw. “A savvier businessman would have failed utterly and been sued seven ways to Saratoga.”
“My lack of acumen is my greatest strength,” said Shadburn. “The only trouble is that Ephraim and Flossie were terribly put out by the loss of their game pieces.”
“You can’t please everyone,” said Holtzclaw.
“Oh, but how I tried.”
“Did the railroad twins, Johnson or Carter, join in the proceedings at all?”
“I told you, Holtzclaw, that they had no legal claims. No contract. And even if they thought that they could make a case, they wouldn’t want to answer for the shoddy job they did on the dam. They could have opened themselves to liability from the insurance companies.”
“What about the hotel? Did the plaintiffs claim that as well?”
“It will be torn down for scrap. The wood and stone and brick will be of use to anyone who wants to put up a farmhouse or dry goods store. Ms. Thompson has extracted the New Rock Falls and is putting it back on its historic foundations. The New Old Rock Falls, or just the Rock Falls, if the adjectives cancel out.”
“Then it’s all wrapped up in a neat little package,” said Holtzclaw.
“Well, it’s the best I could do, at any rate,” said Shadburn. “The work there is finished, or my part is, anyway. If I kept tugging at threads, I would be apt to unravel something. I am useless if I am not being industrious. Now, on to future matters. I think we will try our hand at silkworms. There was an article recently in Harper’s. They are a specialty of yours, if I remember. We’ll make an honest try of it; we’ll start with just the capital in our pockets. It’ll be a piece of redemption.”
Holtzclaw emitted a profound sigh. “I can’t, Shadburn.”
“Well, it doesn’t have to be silkworms. We could make some islands off the Gold Coast, near Savannah. We just push rocks into the ocean until—poof!—there is an island. The hydrocannon would make short work of it. Hardly any cost to it. There are many people—honest and industrious but not pedigreed, my fellow members of the codfish aristocracy—who would like a seaside house. But the authorities at Jekyll and Cumberland won’t let them build next to the baronesses. Would that suit you any better?”
Holtzclaw shook his head in the negative. He felt like he should make some oration, but he couldn’t find words. He relished this rare speechlessness as a sign of genuine emotion.
“Oh, I’ve got a present for you,” said Shadburn. He pulled from his pocket a wadded piece of paper. He unfurled it and pointed to notarized signatures and a gold seal. “It’s the one deed I did keep. I thought you might enjoy it, as a bonus payment for a job well done.”
The deed described a parcel of land at the head of the valley, encompassing fifty acres of forest land, mineral and access rights to the tunnels of an abandoned mining operation found beneath Sinking Mountain, and, most characteristically, an artificial body of water, cobalt-blue in color.
“I’ve never owned a lake,” said Holtzclaw.
“It’s more of a pond,” said Shadburn. “Not big enough for a boat. But you could build a little cabin there if you ever need another vacation.”
“Let me buy it from you.”
“I don’t want your gold, old friend.”
