Silver
Graham Masterton
© Graham Masterton 2014
Graham Masterton has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 2001, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in the U.K. in 1986 by W.H. Allen & Co. Plc.
This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd
Table of Contents
Prologue
Book One: Borrasca
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Book Two: Bonanza
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Epilogue
Extract from Last Shot by Chrisopher Kenworthy
Prologue
In the second week of January, when the snow was falling as thick as a thousand burst-open pillows, and the thermometer had dropped fifteen degrees below freezing, a boy came into the lobby of the Imperial Hotel with a bright red nose and a message in a snow-blotched envelope.
He waited by the cast-iron stove while the porter went upstairs to fetch the lady to whom his message was addressed. On the other side of the lobby, a weeping-eyed Labrador regarded him soulfully; as if winter at the Imperial Hotel were a tragedy in itself.
Outside the snow-clotted windows, the town of Leadville had taken on a silent ghostliness. Horses and sleighs moved through the storm as dimly and quietly as memories; and it was impossible to see further than the bank building on the corner of Mackay Street. The boy pressed his hands in their wet grey woollen gloves up against the stove’s hot chimney, until his fingers tingled and the wool began to scorch. He had been told not to come back without an answer. No answer, no dime, and that was why he continued to wait.
The outside door swung open again, and snow whirled pell-mell across the hall. A man in a thick raccoon coat and a snow-covered top-hat was trying to manoeuvre his way through the entrance with a large brown suitcase and a photographic tripod which kept misbehaving itself. The boy went over and helped the man to wrestle the tripod inside, and then together they slammed the door shut again.
The man took off his hat and a lump of snow dropped off the top of it on to the damp-stained carpet. He was brown-bearded, round-faced, with small pince-nez spectacles which had already steamed up in the heat from the stove. He shook the boy’s hand vigorously.
‘Well, well,’ he said to himself, looking around. ‘Welcome to Leadville, hey?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the boy, but only because he felt he ought to.
‘Anybody at home?’ the man asked, jerking his thumb towards the unattended reception desk. It was a magnificent piece of furniture, the reception desk: carved out of solid mahogany with angels and sea-shells and curlicues; and behind it, on the wall, there was a gilt-framed portrait of the celebrated Emma Abbott, whose main theatrical claim to fame was that she had introduced a trapeze performance into Romeo and Juliet, thereby winning for ever the hearts of Leadville’s less than classically-minded audiences.
The boy said, ‘The porter’s coming down again, by and by.’
‘Well, good enough,’ replied the man, tugging off his gloves. ‘Cold out there, wouldn’t you say? Freeze your extremities off in half an hour. By the way, my name’s Sam Cutforth, Rocky Mountain News. Taken me just about a week to get up here.’
‘David,’ said the boy solemnly, and shook Mr Cutforth’s hand once more.
‘Know this hotel, do you?’ asked Mr Cutforth, pacing around, inspecting the crimson flock wallpaper with its spreading damp patches; and the half-collapsed horsehair sofas. He lifted the wilting leaf of a potted aspidistra, and said, ‘This could do with some water.’ He wrung out his gloves, one after the other, over the dried-up soil.
‘The Grand’s better, sir. Newspaper folks usually stay at the Grand. Either that, or the Clarendon.’
‘Ah, do they? Well, I suppose it depends on their expenses. On their tastes, too. I prefer a simple room and plenty of money left over for some of life’s other diversions. Faro, for example. Do you play faro? How old are you, eleven? No, I suppose you wouldn’t.’
At that moment, down the dark curve of the mahogany staircase, the porter came hurrying, brown-jacketed, like an anxious squirrel. He nodded back towards the landing, and said to the boy, ‘She’s just coming down, son; won’t be a moment. Know what she’s like; stands on her dignity, even now. Can’t go rushing her, everything’s got to be dignified, no matter what.’
Mr Cutforth pinged the tarnished brass bell on the reception desk.
‘Yes, sir, coming to you, sir,’ said the porter. He hauled out a huge leather-bound register, and banged it down in front of him. ‘Room for the night, sir; the week; or maybe the year? Leadville’s pleasant as Eden itself, in summer.’
‘The week will do me,’ Mr Cutforth replied. He was polishing up his pince-nez with his handkerchief. ‘You might tell me what’s for supper, too. The last meal I ate was cold corned-beef hash, at Fairplay; and nothing to wash it down with.’
‘We’re serving a good beef pie today, sir,’ said the porter. ‘And all the Coors you can drink.’ He peered forward as Mr Cutforth signed the register, and asked, ‘Come to see the ice-palace, then? Taking some pictures?’
‘They told me you people in. Leadville were sharp,’ said Mr Cutforth, winking at David.
David grinned, pleased to be sharing a grown-up joke.
But he turned then, because a woman had appeared on the staircase, and was slowly descending towards the lobby as if she were making an entrance at a society ball. He saw her feet first, in frayed silk slippers that had once been as pink as roses; then the hem of a cream-coloured skirt, sewn and re-sewn, but recently redecorated with pink ribbon. Around her shoulders the woman wore a thick woollen shawl, and on her head was perched a broad-brimmed hat covered in flowers and feathers. But the crown of the hat had long ago been crushed out of shape, and the flowers were broken and soiled, and the feathers had lost their plumes.
The woman reached the foot of the stairs, and stood for a moment with her hand on the banister, small and middle-aged, pausing for effect, with all the shabbiness of someone who has been poor so long that she finds it hard to remember just how grand the grand times had really been. Nonetheless, she was still extraordinarily fine-looking; and Mr Cutforth stopped cleaning his spectacles and carefully clipped them back on his nose so that he could take a clearer look at her.
It was her eyes that were the most remarkable feature of her face. They were dark, and deep-set, with slightly hooded lids, as if they were expressing what Mr Cutforth would later describe as ‘sensuousness and femininity in their most alluring and mysterious aspect’. Her cheeks were rounded but well-boned, and her mouth had the curves of an angel-bow. She wore very little in the way of cosmetics; a touch of powder, a thin crimson gloss for her lips; but it was obvious that once upon a time she had been a great beauty; the kind of woman whose face makes kingdoms; and whose desires sway the self-control of even the most adamant men.
She came forward, and Mr Cutforth for some reason found himself stepping back. With a catch in her throat, she said to David, ‘You have a letter for me?’
David held the letter out, and the woman took it. Before she opened it, she glanced across at Mr Cutforth, who snapped his head forward like a cast-iron Sambo money-box and blurted out, ‘How d’ye do? Cold day, don’t you think?’
The woman allowed the briefest of smiles to cross her lips, the smallest acknowledgement that etiquette would allow. Then she tore open the envelope while the boy and the newspaper photographer
and the porter and the weepy-eyed Labrador dog all watched her with unabashed interest.
She read the message quickly. The boy and the photographer and the porter and the dog all examined her face to see if they could guess what it might have said. But she folded the letter up without any expression of surprise or emotion, and tucked it back into its envelope.
‘Mrs Roberts said I wasn’t to come back without an answer,’ said David.
‘What?’ asked the woman, distractedly. She turned away, the letter clutched more tightly in her hand, and now it became apparent to Mr Cutforth that it had affected her more than she had tried to pretend.
‘Mrs Roberts,’ David repeated. ‘She said she had to have an answer; and that I wasn’t to come back without one.’
‘Well, then,’ the woman breathed, ‘I suppose you had better give her one. You may tell her—’
She hesitated, and looked at Mr Cutforth again, almost puzzled, as if she wondered what he was doing here.
Then, in a rush, she said, ‘You may tell her yes, if you wish. If that is the answer she wants. Well, plainly it is. So, you may tell her yes, and that I shall be there. But you may also tell her that I want no charity, nor any hint of it. Tell her to search inside her soul before she meets me; ask her if the kingdom of Heaven is any more open to those who seek revenge than it is to those who seek love that may be forbidden to them. No, don’t tell her that. I shall tell her myself. Tell her simply yes.’
David stood, in his cap and his wet woollen gloves, waiting, with the unembarrassed patience of a ten-year-old boy, to receive a small gratuity for going. ‘One come and one go at ten cents the went,’ as his black friend Walter would have put it.
The woman was flustered. She opened her purse, but Mr Cutforth knew before she started searching inside it that it must be empty. He drew back his raccoon coat, and reached inside his waistcoat pocket for a nickel, which he handed to David with great solemnity.
‘Off you go now,’ he admonished him. ‘And tell Mrs Roberts that it’s yes.’
The woman snapped her purse shut, and stared up at Mr Cutforth with hotly-coloured cheeks. Close to, Mr Cutforth could see the forty-year-old wrinkles around her eyes, and the tightening of the mouth, but there was no question that she was still a most magnetic lady. She frowned briefly towards the door as David stepped out into the whirling snow; then looked back at Mr Cutforth; with both dignity and humiliation.
‘I suppose I should thank you for your generosity,’ she said. ‘The fact of the matter is that I left my money in one of my other purses.’
‘Of course,’ said Mr Cutforth, and bowed his head to her. ‘It was a pleasure to oblige.’
‘You’re Mr—?’ she asked, very quickly, as if she wasn’t really very interested.
‘Mr Sam Cutforth, ma’am. Roving photographic correspondent of the Rocky Mountain News, Denver. City founded 1858, newspaper founded 1859.’
The woman took his hand. Mr Cutforth had thought that his own fingers were cold, after sitting on the box of a struggling buggy all the way from the railroad depot on the outskirts of Leadville. But this woman’s touch was as chilled as ice, and without thinking, he protectively sandwiched her hand between both of his, a gesture far too intimate for a mere introduction. She withdrew her hand at once, and tightened her shawl around her shoulders.
‘I apologize,’ said Mr Cutforth. ‘I didn’t mean to be fresh. It was just that your hands were—well, they were a little cold, that’s all. I’m sorry.’
‘I have been—somewhat unwell,’ the woman told him.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mr Cutforth repeated. Then ‘Is there anything I can do? Perhaps I could go get some medicine for you.’
‘There’s no need, really, thank you very much. I have to go and change. It was pleasant to meet you, Mr Cutforth.’
‘You still haven’t told me your name,’ Mr Cutforth smiled. He was trying to sound friendly and reassuring, but there was a quality about this shabby, grand, chilly-fingered woman that had undermined his usual broad self-confidence. The trouble was, he actually wanted something from her. He wanted to know her name, and who she was, and why she was living in such straitened circumstances in Leadville’s most threadbare hotel, in winter, in snow that had turned the whole world into a timeless, soundless, suffocating theatre of white.
‘My name is Pleasance,’ replied the woman. She nodded almost imperceptibly to let him know that their conversation was now over, and then she turned and walked away towards the staircase. She looked back once, as she raised the hem of her skirt to climb the first tread; but she neither smiled nor acknowledged him; and soon she had disappeared up into the darkness.
‘Well,’ said Mr Cutforth, after she had gone.
‘Some lady, hunh?’ the porter remarked, without looking up from the register. He sniffed. ‘Guess you’ll want to see your room now. Number three, right in back. Fine view of the mountains, when it stops snowing.’
‘Think it will?’ asked Mr Cutforth rhetorically, still staring at the shadows into which the woman called Pleasance had vanished with such exaggerated hauteur.
‘Think it will what?’ queried the porter. Then, ‘Care for your vittles now? Pie should be just about baked. Less’n you want to wash up first. There’s water in the washstand on your bureau, and a hammer on the wall to break it with.’
Mr Cutforth shook his head. ‘I think I’ll eat first. What is it, Miss Pleasance or Mrs Pleasance?’
‘’Taint neither.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Exactly that. ’Taint neither. That woman’s name ain’t Pleasance at all; neither Mrs nor Miss. Name’s Roberts. Mrs Elizabeth Roberts.’
‘But the woman who sent her the message was called Roberts, too.’
‘Sure enough. They’re both called Roberts. Mrs Elizabeth Roberts and Mrs Augusta Roberts.’
Mr Cutforth raised his eyebrows. ‘Well,’ he said again. He didn’t want to sound too inquisitive; even though Mrs Roberts had stirred up in him an extraordinary and inexplicable curiosity; and also, quite absurdly, when he thought how off-handedly she had treated him, and how briefly he had known her, a feeling of great sympathy, and concern, as if he ought to do whatever he could to take care of her.
Perhaps that was the magic of beauty, he thought: beauty always demands to be taken care of.
The porter led Mr Cutforth through to the hotel dining-rooms. They were bare, cold, deserted, and smelled of damp. There were twenty tables laid with red gingham tablecloths, and an elk’s head on the wall, and a huge domed carving-trolley in which the porter and Mr Cutforth, as they walked across to the far side of the floor, were reflected like two distorted dwarves.
‘Like a fire?’ the porter asked. ‘Kind of chilly in here.’
‘You can bring me a whiskey first,’ Mr Cutforth suggested. ‘And I’ll keep my coat on, until you get the logs burning up.’
He had to wait for almost ten minutes before a German-looking waitress with blonde braided hair came in through the door from the kitchen with a measure of whiskey on a tray.
‘Are you having the pie, sir?’ she asked him, her eyes as bright and inane as a china doll’s.
‘Is there any choice in the matter?’ queried Mr Cutforth. ‘Well, there’s ox-cheek stew; and I think there’s some pickled fish.’
‘In that case, I’ll stay with the pie. And bring me the bottle that goes with this whiskey, would you, there’s a good girl? It’s too darn cold for one small tot at a time.’
The porter came in with an armful of logs, dropping four or five of them on the floor with a loud barking clatter. He blew the ashes away from the grate, sneezed, sneezed again, and then began to stack up the fire.
Outside, it was growing dark; the snow was still falling as thickly as before.
‘What time does Mrs Roberts come down to eat?’ asked Mr Cutforth. The German-looking girl came in with the bottle of whiskey, and he smiled and nodded his thanks. Old Manitou Mash, it said on the label, with an etching o
f a Red Indian chief. Forgive me, stomach, thought Mr Cutforth, as he poured himself another glass.
The porter was having trouble with his matches. At last he said, ‘She don’t.’
‘You mean she doesn’t come down here to eat at all? Never?’
‘Not never,’ said the porter.
‘She lives here, though?’
‘Sure enough. Her and her husband and two daughters, all in the one room. Number eleven, up by the attic.’
The fire was crackling now, and the porter stood up, and wiped his hands on his trousers. ‘Should warm up in a while or so,’ he said, reassuringly. Then he turned and regarded the bottle of Old Manitou Mash with an expression of dogged longing.
‘Would you...?’ asked Mr Cutforth, nodding towards the bottle.
The porter almost jumped in pretended surprise. ‘Well, sir, that’s Christian of you. Don’t mind if I do. Specially these days when it’s snowing. Snow plays havoc with the alimentary tract.’
‘Sit down,’ said Mr Cutforth. And then, when the porter had found himself a glass and noisily scraped a chair across, ‘Tell me what you know about Mrs Roberts. I’m interested.’
‘Who isn’t?’ the porter declared. He poured himself a huge glassful of whiskey, and passed it under his nose, closing his eyes as if he were smelling the sweetest of flowers.
‘Was she rich, once?’ asked Mr Cutforth.
‘Rich?’ said the porter, opening his eyes wide. ‘I’ll say she was rich. They were millionaires, the Roberts. Millionaires. They used to say that Mrs Roberts was the richest woman in the world. And now look at her.’
He swallowed whiskey, coughed, shuddered, and then he said, ‘The house they used to live in was a palace, I’ll tell you. You never saw nothing like it. And that woman used to ride around the streets of Leadville dressed up in ermine, and that’s the truth.’
Mr Cutforth took off his spectacles in astonishment. ‘Of course. Mrs Elizabeth Roberts! But they always used to call her Baby Doe Roberts, didn’t they? He pointed back towards the lobby. ‘That was really Baby Doe Roberts?’
Silver Page 1
