Mercury's Rise (Silver Rush 04)

by Ann Parker

  Inez spared a glance from the river.

  He looked old. Older, Inez corrected herself. His shoulders slumped, lines of worry cutting even deeper alongside of his mustache as he frowned. His face still streamed with sweat, despite their being freed from the confines of the stage and the slight breeze that whispered over the waters.

  “I should not have brought her with me on this side trip, to the pestilence of Leadville. It was a mistake. A mistake. Her cough had lessened in Manitou, and now, listen to her. We were warned. We were told it was not wise. But she insisted on coming. One error in judgment breeds another. I was most foolish, and now, we will all pay the price.” He seemed to be talking to himself.

  Inez was surprised at the sudden flash of sympathy that softened her disdain of the bombastic businessman.

  “All aboard!”

  The shout from the driver indicated it was time to continue the journey.

  Pace jumped, then looked at Inez, his countenance filled with fear and something more. Guilt? Self-loathing? It was gone before she could dissect it further, and his face flooded with embarrassment.

  To spare him further discomfiture, Inez lowered her veil and disappeared into anonymity, saying, “Well, we will be in Manitou by tonight. Once we reach Ute Pass, it’s a steep ride down the other side, and we shall be there, in the shadow of Pike’s Peak.”

  Pace turned with her to the coach and suddenly slumped, one knee to the ground.

  Inez grabbed his arm. “Mr. Pace, are you unwell?”

  The rust-coated driver and the veiled Mrs. Pace were hurrying toward them.

  “Leadville. The air, the night, it must have made me ill.” He took out his kerchief with a trembling hand and held it to his mouth. “I’ll be better once we are moving again.”

  “Edward!” Mrs. Pace took one of her husband’s arms. Inez stepped away, and the driver took the other. “What is it?”

  “Tight. Like a band. Here.” He slashed a hand across his chest.

  “Perhaps we’d best get you back in the coach, sir,” said the driver. “Soonst we start, soonst we’ll get to Manitou. There’s nought here to help.” He glanced around the low sage, the small way station, the primitive facilities. “All the proper pill-rollers and practitioners of physic are in Manitou. We’ve a fresh team of horses rarin’ to go. Just need to crest Ute Pass, then it’s down we go. Shouldst be there by nightfall.”

  The trip to the pass was, if anything, worse, with the heat of the afternoon pouring onto the lurching coach. The children squabbled and whined with growing intensity. Conversation faltered as lips parched.

  Then, the rains came.

  It started with a bit of thunder, barely audible. Before long, the air around them thickened, and closed in. The first few drops whipped in the windows, slapping those nearest with a cold awakening. Curtains, which had been opened for the cooling breezes, were hastily drawn down. The interior sank into premature night.

  The patter of rain became an insistent drumming on the wood frame. The coach canted forward noticeably as they began descending the snakelike road on the other side of the pass.

  Mr. Pace drew out a silver flask and after shaking it, turned to his wife. “You have the tonic still?”

  Inez was alarmed by the odd, almost breathless rasp to his voice.

  “Of course. I finished a bottle this morning, and have several still untouched.”

  “Inside? Here?”

  Every word seemed to cost him.

  Mrs. Pace nodded, then said, “Edward, do you think it wise? The formulation is specifically for me. The doctor and nurse made it clear that each condition has its own remedy, based on symptoms, gender—”

  “Said…for…pulmonary…” It was all he could wheeze out. He gestured, an impatient give-it-to-me snap of the fingers. Mrs. Pace, who like the other women had pulled her travel veil back in the dark interior, looked alarmed. She leaned toward the nanny. “My valise. The tonic. Quickly.”

  The nanny handed the infant to its mother and yanked a soft-sided valise out from under her seat. She rummaged around in it, even as Mr. Pace’s breathing changed, taking on an ominous wheeze.

  The nanny finally pulled out a small, dark bottle. Mrs. Pace snatched it from her. The seal gave with a small crack, and Mrs. Pace handed it to her husband. “Dr. Prochazka says a teaspoon to ease the breathing.”

  Mr. Pace shook his head and tipped the bottle into his mouth. Brought it down, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “Air.” He wheezed.

  The nanny to one side of Inez and Susan to the other rolled up the leather window curtains. Rain gusted in, causing the children to scream even louder.

  Mrs. Pace rounded on them, clutching the baby tight as it began to wail. “Quiet!” The one word held a surprising edge of steel. The children immediately ceased, except for the baby, who continued a high-pitched screeching that seemed to require no intake of air. She jiggled the baby, asking her husband, “Did it help? Can you breathe easier?”

  In answer, Mr. Pace raised the dark amber bottle and drained it. Mrs. Pace cried, “Edward…no! That’s too much!” as the nanny simultaneously squeaked, “Sir!”

  The small bottle fell to the rattling wood floor of the coach. Coughing violently, Pace grabbed at his cravat with both hands, tearing at it so savagely that the detachable collar popped off at one end.

  He leaned toward Inez, almost as if he were executing a deep bow in preparation for asking her hand in a dance. Instead, he reached out, grabbed her knee. The iron grip of his hand pinched the skin beneath the intervening layers of travel skirt and petticoats. Inez inadvertently yelped, and Mrs. Pace covered a scream with her one free hand. The nanny tried to rise in the confines of the swaying, accelerating coach. Pace vomited, splashing bloody flux over Inez’s black travel skirts and shoes.

  He collapsed half against her, half on the rocking coach floor.

  His eyes stared, wide open, but Inez knew they saw nothing but blackness.

  Chapter Four

  The stunned silence in the coach vanished under a torrent of pandemonium.

  Mrs. Pace stuffed the baby under one arm and, with near superhuman strength, hauled her husband up off the floor with the other. Inez, recovering from shock, grabbed his lapels, heedless of the ominously red fluid now dribbling from his mouth and all over her gloves, and helped Mrs. Pace push him back into his seat. The nanny put her energy into screaming. “Stop! Stop! For the love of Jesus, stop the horses!”

  The baby howled from its inverted station under his mother’s arm. The toddler boy, who had gaped as his father pitched forward, now added his cries to the baby’s. The girl stuffed her gloved hand into her mouth and chewed on the fabric. Susan half rose in the pitching coach and, holding herself steady with one hand on the window frame, began pounding on the ceiling. Wooden echoes rattled inside the confined space, like a staccato drumbeat. Keeping one hand on Mr. Pace’s chest to hold his slumping form upright, Inez turned to the nanny and snarled, “Stop yelling! The driver can’t hear you!”

  The nanny, hands over her ears, continued wailing.

  Inez was ready to lean over and slap her hard, chancing a fall onto Mr. Pace’s lap in the lurching carriage, when Mrs. Pace said, “Miss Warren. Shut up.”

  It wasn’t said at the top of the lungs. It wasn’t said in anger. All the same, the tone behind those four words carried the authority of a direct order from a general to the army. Had the words been “forward march,” the inhabitants of the coach would have marched straight into a death’s hail of bullets.

  Miss Warren shut up.

  “Assist Miss Carothers,” Mrs. Pace said.

  Miss Warren aimed a meaty fist at the ceiling and added her own unsyncopated beat. Inez heard a muffled bark of the driver. The team’s rhythmic canter faltered along with the sudden drag of a brake applied.

  Mrs. Pace turned to the children beside her and, with only a modicum less of intensity, said, “Mathilda, Atticus, quiet!”

  The admonition wa
s completely unnecessary, as they had silenced at their mother’s first order to Miss Warren. The only one still carrying on was the baby. Mrs. Pace thrust the infant out—not to the nanny, but to Inez. “Take him. Please.”

  Inez automatically clutched the drooling, hiccupping babe to her best traveling cloak. His warm weight against her arm and chest, the soft head of hair brushing her chin, brought memory flooding back of the last time she had held her son William. He had been eight months old. She’d handed him to her sister Harmony in Denver, knowing she would not see him for a long, long time. The feeling of having her heart ripped in two.

  Mrs. Pace leaned toward her husband, lifted his chin off his chest, and using the same imperious tone, but softer, with desperation, said, “Mr. Pace. Edward! Can you hear me?”

  By this time the coach had creaked to a stop, nearly throwing the nanny on top of Mr. Pace’s inert form. There was a slight clatter from above, a dip and rise of the compartment as the driver jumped down from the box.

  The far door swung open. Atticus and Mathilda shrank back from the rain that drove in through the gap.

  Mrs. Pace spoke. “My husband, Mr. Pace, he’s unconscious.”

  The driver’s head disappeared, the door slammed shut. A moment later, he was on the other side opening the opposite door. Mr. Pace, now leaning half against the coach wall, half on the door, almost toppled out despite his wife’s fist balled onto his jacket sleeve. The driver caught the man’s form and half carried, half dragged him out into the open air.

  Mrs. Pace slipped out after him. Inez turned to the nanny and said, “Here.” She popped the baby into the nanny’s doughy arms like handing off a hot potato from oven to plate, squeezed past the woman, then paused on the coach step. She half-turned and addressed the interior. “Miss Carothers, would you stay with the children?”

  Susan moved to sit by Mathilda and Atticus. Inez heard her voice, low and comforting, balm to the children’s fear and confusion.

  Inez stepped carefully onto the hardpacked road, now skimmed with mud. The roaring of an unseen river racketed about in the narrow confines of Ute Pass. The driver had spread an oilcloth tarp on the ground and was setting Mr. Pace upon it. Inez drew close. Mr. Pace’s face was slack and white in the dying light, eyes open and empty.

  Mrs. Pace crouched on the edge of the tarp, murmuring her husband’s name over and over. She’d removed his glove and was chafing his hand.

  Hand to her neck, holding her travel cloak closed in the insistent wind, Inez knelt on a flapping corner of the tarp, searching for the right words to say.

  She had seen too many dead men in her time to not recognize another.

  “He has never fainted in his life,” Mrs. Pace said. “Never, ever. It must have been the altitude. Perhaps something he ate. When he returned to the hotel from his meetings last night, he seemed unwell.”

  Inez looked up at the driver, crouched on the other side of Pace’s body. He was squinting westward. The sun had slipped away and dark clouds blanketed the peaks. His eyebrows, bleached nearly white by constant exposure, were furrowed in a frown. He tipped back his soaked wide-brimmed hat and pulled down the neckerchief that protected mouth and nose from the elements, revealing a long drooping mustache covering compressed lips.

  He glanced at Mrs. Pace, then her husband, and finally at Inez, with eyebrows raised, telegraphing a unspoken question. Inez shook her head slightly. Mrs. Pace had not the ear nor heart for the truth right then. It would be the ultimate cruelty to insist she face it, straight out, in this God-forsaken spot of road.

  The driver removed one long gauntlet glove and reached over to close Pace’s staring eyes against the driving rain.

  “Ma’am, I can wrap him in the oilcloth and set him up top by me, so’st not to alarm the young’uns.”

  “No, no, that will never do.” The wind whipped tangled loops of honey-blonde hair about her ears and tugged at the lifted travel veil. “He needs to be kept warm, inside. He needs time. Time to recover.”

  The driver opened his mouth as if to argue. Then, he closed it and instead exhaled a long sigh through his nose.

  “Wrap him up,” Mrs. Pace continued, suddenly all business, “and set him next to me. We’ve a fur coat in one of our trunks. If we can find it and wrap that over him…How close are we to Manitou? He needs a doctor!”

  The driver folded the oilcloth over Pace and stood, looking around at the terrain. “We have crested Ute Pass. Just need to make the journey down to town. No needst to get into your things, ma’am. I’ve got a buffalo robe at hand wouldst keep him well covered.”

  “He needs rest,” she said, with conviction. “He just needs to rest.”

  The road stretched in both directions, as empty as the eye could see.

  Inez stood from her half-crouched position. “Let me help you back into the coach, Mrs. Pace,” she said. “Our driver, Mr.—” She looked at him, at a loss for his name. He’d introduced himself back in Leadville, but that seemed so long ago.

  “Morrow. Gene Morrow.”

  “Mr. Morrow will get the blanket for your husband.”

  She handed the tiny woman back into the coach as Morrow went to the rear and pulled the heavy skin from the boot. Inez stepped away from the coach, hugging her elbows against the chill. Before entering the coach to wrap the dead man, the driver looked again at Inez and shook his head once, a quick side-to-side motion.

  He would drive as quickly as was safe, she knew. It would be her job to keep panic and hysteria away and maintain some semblance of calm in the coach, even if it meant denying the horror that had just occurred.

  Inez waited until Morrow had tucked the robe around the body before venturing back inside. The two Pace children had changed seats to give their mother and father more room, and were now huddling between the nanny and Susan, who had draped a protective arm over their shoulders. “Did you really see a red injin savage?” the little girl asked.

  “Indeed I did,” said Susan. “When I was no older than you are now. But his skin was no more red than our driver’s. There were many Indians close to the town where I grew up in Nebraska. This one, he was hardly a savage. He liked to take tea with my father, who ran the town’s newspaper, and they would talk. Why, he even wore a top hat!”

  “Stop your prattling, Mathilda,” said Mrs. Pace sharply. “Your father needs his rest.”

  Nanny Warren was whimpering as if they were all on their way to the underworld. She clutched the baby, pillowing it to her bosom, and rocked back and forth. “Missus. Oh Missus.”

  “Shhh!”

  “Here,” said Inez injecting a no-nonsense tone to her voice. “Why don’t I sit on the other side of Mr. Pace, and we’ll just make sure that he stays covered and comfortable.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Stannert.” Mrs. Pace suddenly sounded far more subdued.

  “What’s wrong with Papa?” Mathilda wanted to know.

  Susan was staring at Inez through the darkening coach. Inez gave a slight shake of the head, cousin to the one from the driver to her.

  “Your father has taken ill,” said Mrs. Pace.

  “We’ll see what the doctor says when we get to the hotel,” Inez added.

  Mathilda looked dubious. “The medicine made him sick.”

  “Papa?” said Atticus uncertainly.

  Nanny Warren left off whimpering and began to whisper. Inez, sitting across from her, caught “Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him.”

  In her turn, Inez prayed fervently that the road to Manitou would be smooth and swift. But no matter how fast the horses ran, she feared the questions and sorrows rattling within the coach would keep easy pace and only loom the larger at journey’s end, not fade away.

  Chapter Five

  The ageless sound of racing water kept them company down the pass, across the clatter of a wooden bridge, and into the flats at last. A change in the tempo of hoofbeats alerted Inez tha
t the coach was slowing down. Inez pulled back a corner of the coach curtain, relieving the pitch dark inside. The two oldest children, huddled next to their nanny, stirred. Inez heard one snuffle, then yawn.

  Inez eyed the dark shape beside her: Mr. Pace, bundled in a tarp like a caterpillar in its chrysalis. Only, unlike a caterpillar, he was not going to emerge in a new form, unless one counted the journey from life to death as the ultimate transformation.

  Mrs. Pace leaned over and gently shook her little girl’s shoulder, whispering to wake her. Inez’s heart constricted at the sight of the children, beginning to stir. Inez became aware of a pale filtered light coming through the curtain and the motionless state of the conveyance, just as her friend Susan said softly, “We’re here.”

  A hasty crunch of feet on gravel, accompanied by low male voices outside, stopped. The coach door creaked open. Weak light resolved into a partially shuttered lantern held aloft. The shaft of light revealed the holder of the lamp—a barrel-chested man, dressed formally in a black frock coat but no hat. Thinning hair on top was offset by an impressive pair of white muttonchops, which, like a pair of parentheses, embraced a round and somber face. He gazed at the stirring forms in the coach, before taking in the wrapped figure by the far door.

  He said, “Ah,” then turned to the driver. “Mr. Morrow, please fetch Dr. Prochazka. He’s in the clinic, of course.” He returned his attention to the travelers. “I’m Mr. Lewis, that is Mr. Franklin Lewis, hotelier and owner of the Mountain Springs House. You must all be exhausted after your journey. Please, allow me to escort you inside.”

  “Are our rooms readied?” Mrs. Pace asked.

  “Indeed, Mrs. Pace, they are.” He held out a hand.

  Mrs. Pace, now holding the toddler boy, clucked to her daughter. The young girl tentatively disembarked. Mrs. Pace, holding her son, followed. Susan exited, and the nanny with the baby squeezed past Inez and the body of Mr. Pace to hasten out the door.