Silver

by Graham Masterton

  The porter finished his whiskey, and wiped his mouth. ‘Baby Doe as ever breathed.’

  ‘I didn’t even realize that the Roberts were still in Colorado,’ said Mr Cutforth. ‘I didn’t even know they were still alive.’

  ‘Oh, you bet,’ said the porter. He began to stare longingly at the whiskey again. ‘Upstairs, number eleven, next to the attic. The richest folk in the world, as was; and their two daughters.’

  ‘And what about Mrs Augusta Roberts?’

  The porter looked around the dining-rooms, as if he were suddenly deaf.

  ‘Care for a little more whiskey?’ Mr Cutforth asked him, holding up the bottle.

  The porter looked at him, shiftily. Mr Cutforth poured him a small splash in the bottom of his glass, and then said, ‘Tell me about Mrs Augusta Roberts. Is she the sister-in-law?’

  The porter shook his head emphatically. ‘No, sir. Mrs Augusta Roberts is the first Mrs Roberts. The original, so to say.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Mr Cutforth. ‘So the original Mrs Roberts has sent a message to the second Mrs Roberts, and the answer to whatever question she might have put, is “yes”.’ He leaned forward on the gingham tablecloth, and asked, ‘Did they get on well, the first and second Mrs Roberts?’

  ‘Get on well? I doubt if they scarcely spoke in twenty years. Mrs Augusta hated that Baby Doe something terribly awful; there was a time that Mr Roberts warned her to keep a mile away from Baby Doe day and night, in case she was tempted to do something terribly awful.’

  ‘So what do you think that message said?’

  ‘You could search me,’ said the porter. ‘I keep myself to myself, mind my own affairs. But those Roberts are so hard down on their luck these days, well, who can say what Mrs Roberts might be thinking of; that’s Baby Doe Roberts I mean, although she doesn’t like people to call her that, not these days. Says it reminds her of times gone by, when they were rich. Says it makes her feel too sad.’

  The German-looking girl came out of the kitchen, pink with heat, carrying a huge blue dinner-plate heaped with hot beef pie. Then she brought a tureen of boiled potatoes, another tureen of winter greens, and a steaming bowl of grits; as well as corn biscuits and a jug of gravy. Mr Cutforth heaped his plate high; then took his fork and began to eat steadily.

  ‘Is Mr Roberts employed these days?’ he asked the porter with his mouth full.

  ‘Works at the post office, just like he did years and years ago, before he struck it rich. Mind you, it was only his friends that got him that job. He’s getting pretty old now, and wandering. Just remember he was fifty years old when he married Baby Doe. And when was that? Ten years ago, and a good deal more.’

  Mr Cutforth forked up some more pie, and chewed, and then said to himself, disbelievingly, ‘Baby Doe. How about that.’

  The story of Henry T. Roberts and Baby Doe was one of the legendary and often unbelievable scandals of the 1880s, when the Silver Kings of Colorado had been at their wealthiest; when huge classical mansions had risen in the mountains of Leadville as incongruous monuments to the twin principles that money can buy everything and anyone can strike it rich. Those were the days when plain men and woman had dressed in silk and lace and fed from solid silver plates; when bored heiresses had thrown silver dollars at the birds that were pecking the seed off their lawns; when the kindliest of all the successful miners had calculated the handouts he gave while strolling around the city at a rate of $50 a block.

  Mr Cutforth found himself staring up at the ceiling of the dining-rooms, and feeling the weight of destiny just above him; in room number eleven, where two of the world’s unluckiest lovers must be sitting even now, without dinner, without heat; with nothing to sustain them but the memory of an outrageous affair and a life that at one time had equalled that of emperors.

  ‘If that’s it,’ said the porter; meaning that Mr Cutforth should either pour him some more whiskey, or consider their conversation at an end.

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ Mr Cutforth whispered. He put down his fork.

  ‘Your bag will go up to your room, sir,’ said the porter, in one last effort to wheedle another drink. ‘As well as those sheerlegs of yours, sir. The real awkward ones.’

  ‘Very good, thank you.’

  The porter hesitated. ‘Is there anything else, sir?’

  ‘Yes, one thing,’ said Mr Cutforth. ‘I want you to send four portions of the beef pie up to room number eleven; with the compliments of the management. Don’t let them refuse it. Tell them it’s part of the Winter Festival celebration, something like that. And don’t whatever you do say that it came from me.’

  The porter stared at him.

  ‘If you would be so kind as to arrange that,’ Mr Cutforth asked him; with sufficient sharpness in his voice to make it clear that he was serious.

  Later that evening, the snow stopped falling, and a bitterly cold wind sprang up, blowing keen north-westerly through the Sawatch mountains, pluming the snow on the rooftops of Leadville, and keeping even the hardiest prostitutes indoors. At about nine-thirty, the full moon appeared, and gleamed impassively over the frigid streets, and the curved drifts, and the deep glittering snowbanks.

  Mr Cutforth, peering through a circular hole which he had scraped in the opaque frost that covered his second-storey window, felt that he was looking out over a secret and tantalizing landscape; a landscape of illusions and cruelty and buried hopes. He set up his tripod, and his heavy wetplate camera, and took several exposures of the yard behind the hotel, where icicles hung like lumps of transparent barley-sugar, and the water-pump had turned into a strange sculpture of spikes and spires.

  A small fire crackled and smoked in the corner of Mr Cutforth’s brown-wallpapered room, but he had decided to keep on his underwear for yet another night. There was a dark bureau, which smelled of camphor; a leather armchair that looked as if it had been savagely mauled by a bear; a cheval glass that refused to stay at any angle at which he could see himself in it; a high brass bed with white china knobs; an etching of Mount Massive, too rumpled by damp for him to see clearly; and a washstand. Just as the porter had told him, there was a hammer hanging on a nail by the washstand, for guests to crack the ice in their shaving-water in the morning.

  He stood by the window, fully clothed, his raccoon coat slung around his shoulders, and thought of Baby Doe. He hoped very much that she and Henry Roberts had accepted the pie. He wondered what kind of a man Roberts could be; a king one year, a miserable pauper the next. What did that do to a man’s heart, and a man’s sense of being a man? Yet Baby Doe had stayed with him. He must at least have been man enough to keep her undying devotion.

  Mr Cutforth drained the last of the Old Manitou Mash into his glass. Perhaps, he thought, she had nowhere else to go.

  Downstairs, in the parlour, someone began to play the piano, and sing in a harsh, high voice the song of Mollie May, who up until her death in 1887 had been Leadville’s favourite harlot.

  ‘Talk if you will of her,

  But speak no ill of her—

  The sins of the living are not of the dead

  Remember her charity

  Forget all disparity;

  Let her judges be those whom she sheltered and fed.’

  Mr Cutforth smiled, recognizing the song. He reached into the pocket of his tweed coat, and found his pipe. He was 31, Mr Cutforth, but he had come out West from Massachusetts just ten years too late to have experienced the real frontier; the way that it had been when Molly May was queen of Leadville’s red-light district, along with other prostitutes like Molly b’Damn and Contrary Mary and Little Gold Dollar; the way that it had been when William O’Brien and James G. Fair and all the great kings of silver had still been alive.

  Leadville was still rich: altogether the town’s assets were probably worth $200 million. But wealth had brought greater respectability, and a desire to impress the outside world. There were still dozens of gambling hells, and any man with the price of it could have as many women as he wanted,
singly or collectively, and some of them would rinse out his underwear, too, and cook him breakfast. Yet the wildness had gone. There was music now, and theatre, and lectures from Europe. There was electric light in the streets. And some of the miners would sit in the saloons and play faro and talk about the ‘good old days’ when a population of only 14,000 had enjoyed the benefits of 35 brothels, 118 gambling houses, and 120 saloons, not counting 19 that sold nothing but beer.

  In those days, they said, you wouldn’t have known it was Sunday unless you looked in your diary.

  Mr Cutforth opened his worn brown leather tobacco-pouch, and discovered that it was almost empty. He remembered now: he had allowed himself a last fill at Fairplay, after his lunch, while he was waiting for the locomotive to be dug out of the snow. He guessed that the porter would have some tobacco, even if it was only a crumbled-up cigar. So he neatly packed his camera away into its case; a precaution that he always took when he was travelling, after an inquisitive maid had once dropped a $30 Fox Talbot wetplate camera and broken it; and went down to the lobby.

  He was surprised to see that, although it was well after eleven o’clock, the dining-rooms were quite crowded, and the lobby was thick with a haze of tobacco smoke. He went up to the reception desk and pinged the bell, and after a while the porter came hurrying through from the office with a dishcloth over his arm and his hair sticking up at the back.

  ‘God Almighty, rushed off my darned two feet!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘What’s all this?’ asked Mr Cutforth.

  ‘Fire at the Clarendon, that’s what; fire at the Clarendon. That’s what comes of employing a fancified chef like Mussewer La Pierce. Throws a temper and throws a pan of cooking-oil; and that’s why half of the Clarendon’s diners have come down here.’

  ‘Do you have some tobacco?’ Mr Cutforth asked him. ‘Any brand will do it.’

  ‘There’s Peabody’s chew-and-cheroo shop right on the corner, that should still be open. Take your coat, though, sir. It’ll be a short walk, but a precious cold one.’

  A smiling man in a long sealskin coat came up and took Mr Cutforth by the hand. On the other side of the lobby, two ladies of the evening in fluffy fur wraps were laughing and singing. The smiling man said, ‘Shouldn’t I know you from somewhere? Denver, maybe.’

  ‘Maybe,’ replied Mr Cutforth.

  ‘This your first time in Leadville?’

  ‘Not the last, I hope. It seems like a jolly enough place, and eccentric, too. I must say that I like an eccentric place.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ said the smiling man. ‘It’s too much money that makes folk eccentric.’

  ‘I don’t believe that too much money is any kind of a problem.’

  ‘You don’t?’ said the smiling man, still relentlessly smiling. ‘Well, maybe I could help you there.’ He reached into an inside pocket, and produced two stock certificates, handsomely engraved; fifty shares each in the Matchless Mine, Leadville. ‘I acquired these in settlement of a long-standing debt; a fellow who owed me for whiskey, and dynamite, and gambling.’

  ‘Well?’ asked Mr Cutforth, sceptically.

  ‘Well, you see what it says here, in black print; the mine’s assets are $4 million; and that means these shares are worth $10,000 at today’s prices. But, the thing of it is, I have to leave Leadville quite shortly, on account of my health. The mountain air’s too thin for me, that’s what my doctor advises. So I have to dispose of these shares as soon as I can; and believe me, I’m sad to do it. But I could let you have the entire one hundred shares for $2,000 flat; here and now; signed and delivered; in cash.’

  Mr Cutforth began to fasten up his raccoon coat, and open out his gloves. One of the prostitutes had begun to dance, holding up her chocolate-coloured velveteen skirts, and revealing layers and layers of beautiful Brussels lace. The man on the piano was playing a very jangly, quick-tempo version of Swanee River. There was more laughter; the outside door opened yet again, and blew in more snow; and the lobby began to grow almost unbearably crowded.

  ‘What do you say then?’ asked the smiling man, holding up the share certificates. ‘Or what would you say to fifteen hundred?’

  ‘I would say keep your shares to retire on,’ replied Mr Cutforth. ‘I happen to know that the Matchless Mine remains the property of its original owner, who was Henry T. Roberts; and I also happen to know that Mr Henry T. Roberts is not only still living in Leadville, but resides right here, in the Imperial Hotel. I would also say that even if these certificates were genuine, which I vouch they’re not; then they wouldn’t be worth the paper they’re printed on, or else Mr Roberts and his family wouldn’t be living as destitute as they are now.’

  The smiling man’s smile didn’t even quiver. He tucked the share certificates back into his coat, rubbed his hands briskly, and said, ‘Well, then, how about a game of rummy, to warm us up?’

  Mr Cutforth shook his head. ‘I’m going out for tobacco, thanks.’

  He pushed his way out through the bustling throng; and through the door, and on to the snowy sidewalk. The door swung closed behind him; sealing off the raucous singing and the jangling piano-playing and the laughter of whores and miners and drunken tourists; and out here it was intolerably cold, but silent.

  He could see the tobacco store at the end of the next block. A wooden Indian stood outside, wearing a huge head-dress of snow. Mr Cutforth buried his hands in his pockets, lowered his head, and began to trudge through the snow towards it, his boots squeaking with every step.

  He passed the shuttered and frosty exterior of the Elegant Art Photograph shop, proprietor H. Needles; and a little further along The Professor of Tattoo, with a card outside his darkened window which asserted that for only $200 the professor would tattoo any heraldic device or motto ‘in the discreetest of locations, where they may never be detected during the normal currency of daily intercourse.’

  He had nearly reached the lighted windows of the tobacco store when he heard pattering footsteps a little way behind him. He looked back and saw a woman in a dark coat and a dark shawl hurriedly crossing the street from the direction of Dr Charles Broadbent’s medical clinic. Her head was lowered against the wind, and in spite of the rutted and icy tracks left in the roadway by horse-drawn sleighs, she was almost running. As she reached the wooden sidewalk, she stepped up too quickly, missed her footing, and fell. Under the frigid moon, his fur coat jostling wet against his face, Mr Cutforth ran back to help her. He held on to the closest verandah-post, caught her elbow, and said, ‘Here, let me lift you up.’ Her coat was smothered in snow, and one of her boot-heels had snapped off. She was quaking with cold.

  She hopped gracelessly on to the sidewalk. ‘I’m not hurt,’ she said. ‘I slipped, that’s all. It’s very icy.’ Then she turned and looked up at him; and saw who it was that had helped her.

  ‘Mr Cutforth. Well, my thanks for your courtesy.’

  ‘Not at all Mrs Roberts.’

  Her eyes widened a little. She looked away; out across the white and deserted street. ‘You’ve been told, then. Mr Finney, I suppose.’

  ‘Mr Finney?’

  ‘The porter. He means well; but he has a susceptibility for whiskey. When he drinks, he talks. I think he’s really quite proud of having us there. I can’t altogether blame him.’

  Mr Cutforth held his arms behind his back. The moonlight reflected from his pince-nez, making him look strangely sinister and blind. ‘I really wanted to know if there was anything I could do,’ he told her.

  She shivered. ‘Do? Why should there possibly be anything that you could do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’m not explaining myself too well. But you are Baby Doe, aren’t you?’

  ‘I never use that name, Mr Cutforth; and I would much prefer it if you didn’t either.’

  ‘Please, I’m sorry. But I’d really like to talk to you. Both you, and your husband.’

  ‘What for?’ she asked. Her voice was flat now, no longer interested.

  ‘Because...well, b
ecause I feel compelled to. And because I think our readers would be really interested to find out what happened to you...how you’re living these days. You’ve suffered misfortune, Mrs Roberts. I don’t mean to sound as if I’m patronizing, or gloating, or trying to make capital out of you. But the moment I first saw you, I said to myself, there’s a woman with great dignity and grace; and if she’s here, at the Imperial Hotel, well, then, there must be a story to be told. A human story.’

  Mrs Roberts looked up at him; and even though her pinched face was scarlet with cold, she was still beautiful, even then, out on that freezing night in Leadville, Colorado, ten thousand feet above mean sea-level, and a million miles away from days gone by.

  ‘I must get back,’ she said, with quiet composure.

  ‘But, Mrs Roberts—’

  ‘No,’ she insisted. ‘I am no longer an object of interest; not to anybody at all, save to my poor husband and to my two poor daughters. My husband is unwell, it is better that you forget you ever saw me; better still to forget that you even knew my name.’

  ‘The paper could pay for your story. Ten, maybe fifteen dollars.’

  ‘Mr Cutforth, the diamond necklace that Henry gave me on the morning of our wedding cost $90,000. I am done with money; done with bargaining.’

  Mr Cutforth rubbed the rime away from his beard. ‘Well, then, I apologize,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you. That was the very last thing I wanted to do. I’m sorry. Goodnight, and I promise not to make a nuisance of myself any more.’

  ‘Please,’ she said, more softly. ‘You haven’t been a nuisance at all. You were gallant enough to help me when I fell.’

  ‘It’s, uh, well, it’s nothing,’ said Mr Cutforth. He backed away. ‘I have to go buy myself some tobacco, that’s why I was out here.’

  ‘Mr Cutforth—’

  ‘No, no,’ he said, raising his hand. ‘You don’t have to say anything. All I can tell you that makes any sense is that I’m usually a loud, opinionated, confident kind of a man; but that when I first saw you, this afternoon, I was lost for anything intelligible to say. How can I explain it to you? I’m sorry, I can’t explain it. I took one look at you and felt that I wanted to help you, take care of you; do something romantic and drastic that would change your life back to what it should have been. I felt compelled. Does that sound completely ridiculous?’