Silver

by Graham Masterton

  The Tremont Theatre was small, but very gilded, an essay in Western rococo. Henry sat up in the circle, while Baby Doe stood on the empty stage and recited her lines from Hamlet, in a high, clear, faltering voice.

  ‘My honour’d lord, you know right well you did;

  And with them words of so sweet breath composed

  As made the things more rich: their perfume lost,

  Take these again; for to the noble mind

  Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.’

  Henry didn’t know whether she had chosen that particular exchange to make a point; or whether it was accidental. He had decided not to return to Leadville today, but the guilt of having ignored Augusta’s telegraph sat in the back of his mind like a tattered crow, clawing its way from side to side along its perch: and it would stay there, he knew, until he went back. Then, of course, his conscience would have to deal with the problem of having abandoned Baby Doe.

  He applauded her, in the empty theatre, and his applause echoed and echoed again like trapped birds flapping against a window.

  They went to the opera, Mozart’s Idomeneo, and Baby Doe sat tensely beside him during the whole performance; so that by the time they left for the Byers’ party, Henry was anxious and off-key. In the cab, he said, ‘Let’s go back to the Corona. I don’t feel like facing the Byers again.’

  Baby Doe said, ‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. Why should anything be wrong? I just don’t feel like facing the Byers.’

  Baby Doe was silent for a while, as the cab drove past one street-light after another. But at last she laid her hand on his thigh, and said, ‘All right.’

  They went back to her room at the Corona and ordered a bottle of champagne. They sat on opposite sides of the room; and for some reason the gas-light tonight seemed flat and harsh. Henry smoked a small cigar, although he crushed it out halfway through. Baby Doe drank her champagne in small, regular sips, and watched him with the unaccusing look of someone who knows that their love affair is beginning to come apart. How could she accuse the man who had suddenly swept into her life with a theatre and a diamond ring, and had treated her right from the very beginning with care and passion and extraordinary wonderment? All the middle-aged men she had met before had been devious and self-serving and emotionally callused. But Henry had somehow managed to retain a youthful sense of romance; almost a sense of innocence; as though his mind was still in Bennington, in sunny days before the war, when the girls giggled and the Colossal Whirler turned and nobody had ever heard of Chickamauga.

  She said, as flatly as she could, ‘I know you have to go back to Leadville. You mustn’t feel guilty about it.’

  ‘Guilty?’ he asked, looking up as if she had been flicking iced water at him.

  ‘You can’t decide, can you? Between her and me? Between your past and your future? And I don’t expect you to. Not right away. Come on, Henry, we met by surprise. I didn’t know that I was going to fall in love with you; and you didn’t know that you were going to fall in love with me. So you have to go back and rearrange your life. At the very least, you have to go back and face Augusta.’

  Henry, in shirt and suspenders, his collar hanging loose, came across the room and laid his hand on Baby Doe’s naked shoulder. ‘I just want to be sure that you’ll still be here when I get back,’ he said, and his voice was hoarse.

  ‘Are you frightened that I won’t be? After everything you’ve given me?’

  ‘That diamond wasn’t meant to be an insurance policy,’ he told her; and then he smiled, and bent forward to kiss her on the forehead, and said, ‘I don’t want you to love me for my diamonds alone.’

  Without taking her eyes off him, Baby Doe slipped one shoulder-strap from her creamy-coloured evening gown, and then the other. She reached behind her, and unclasped it, and unbuttoned it, and let it fall forward, and beneath it, lifted high by her tightly-laced basque, her breasts were bare.

  ‘Kiss my breasts,’ she whispered, with tears in her eyes. And Henry knelt in front of her, waist-deep in the satin of her gown, and took her breasts one after the other in his hands, and kissed them, and sucked her nipples hard against the roof of his mouth, until she clutched his shoulders and said, ‘I love you, Henry, no matter how sudden it’s been. I love you! So you can go to Leadville, and talk to Augusta, and deal with all of your business problems; and I’ll still be here, waiting for you. Do you understand that? You have nothing to fear.’

  They went to the bedroom and made love: differently this time, thoughtfully and almost sadly, because they knew they were going to have to part for a while. But when their lovemaking was over, Henry held Baby Doe very tightly in his arms, and whispered in her ear all those words of trust and passion that he had never been able to whisper to Augusta; telling her that he was devoted to her, and that he adored her, and that when he made love to her she felt as if she were part of him, as if he didn’t know where his body ended and hers began. And silently he swore to himself that he would never lie to her, never again, and that he would never deceive her. My God, he thought: there has to be one person in your life, just one, to whom you can tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  Morning came like an unwelcome acquaintance, and there was rain in the air, freckling the windows and slicking the streets. The Front Range mountains had sulkily wrapped themselves up again in cold and tumbling cloud; and the barometer in the hotel lobby was falling steadily. Henry sat on the edge of the bed, with no pants on, tying his necktie, and said, ‘I’ll be back by Monday. If there’s anything you need, call David Moffat; or go up to his house and see him. I’ve left word with him to give you whatever you want.’

  ‘I’ll survive,’ smiled Baby Doe. ‘I’ve done it before.’

  They parted as if they were lovers who had known each other for years; and it felt to both of them that they had. For as much as Henry had felt when he had first met her that Baby Doe was the living embodiment of all of his ideals of what a woman should look like, and what a woman should be; Henry to Baby Doe was like no man she had ever imagined possible, a man whose gentility and whose gentleness had been preserved by years of being married to the wrong woman. They kissed on the sidewalk, with the cold rain falling in their faces, and then Henry took a cab around to Arapahoe Street to collect Josiah Dunkley.

  Henry and Josiah Dunkley arrived in Leadville the following afternoon; and the city and all the tree-lined mountains around it were skimmed with a thin layer of melting snow. They tied up outside the store under a sky the colour of Bible paper, and Henry walked straight in, slapping his gloves together, while Josiah Dunkley followed him with trepidation. He had heard something of Leadville’s reputation for being violent and wild; and Henry’s taciturnity had done nothing to reassure him. It was only the prospect of a $12,000 fee that had kept him smiling as they travelled to Leadville in increasingly bitter weather: that, and the chance to build one of the most extravagant houses that the West had ever seen. ‘Versailles,’ Josiah Dunkley had said to himself, with satisfaction, sitting in his office, with etchings and engravings of Louis XIV’s palace laid out in front of him. ‘Versailles in Leadville!’

  Augusta was serving mint humbugs when Henry walked into the store. She looked up at him, with suspicion and relief. ‘You’re back,’ she said. ‘You got my message, then.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Henry, in a dry voice. At that moment he wished more than anything that he was back in Denver, in the Corona Hotel, with Baby Doe. He had imagined this store so romantically, with its candies and its bags of flour, and its smoked hams hanging from the rafters; but now he was back he could see how cramped and ordinary it was; and how Augusta hadn’t changed at all. In a few days, his view of life in Leadville had been turned inside out. He had stepped through a mirror, into another place and another time and another life; and all this was only a dim reflection of what Henry Roberts had once been, and once been content with.

  ‘This is Mr Dunkley,�
� said Henry. ‘He came back here to design us a new house. You may as well know that I’m a millionaire now. Well, so David says. We’re rich. We can give up the store.’

  Augusta made no attempt to acknowledge Josiah Dunkley; and instead took the three pennies she was paid for the humbugs and rang it up noisily on the upright cash-register. ‘Do we really need a new house?’ she wanted to know. ‘Is there anything wrong with this one?’

  ‘Augusta, millionaires don’t live in general stores.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they don’t. Because it isn’t right.’

  ‘Is it right to flaunt money which you did nothing to earn?’ Augusta demanded.

  ‘Don’t say I did nothing to earn it. I suffered as much as anybody.’

  ‘Oh, did you? All those years of drinking whiskey and playing poker. What purgatory!’

  ‘Augusta—’

  Augusta faced him sternly. ‘Don’t “Augusta” me, Henry. Ever since you’ve been gone, I’ve had George Hook down here, once or twice every day, demanding to see you. I’ve been very frightened. He seems to think that August Rische was killed on purpose; that it wasn’t an accident at all; and he wants to have it out with you.’

  ‘Is that why you called me back?’

  Augusta stood up straight behind the candy counter, where she had been putting the humbugs away. She took off her spectacles, and stared at Henry with myopic eyes. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Then why?’ he asked.

  She glanced at Josiah Dunkley; but Josiah was doing his best to look interested in a display of Old Hickory Babbitt metal. The most extravagant and most expensive of Denver architects was completely confused and dismayed by his arrival in Leadville, and was already trying to think of a way of making his excuses and returning as soon as possible to Denver. As he had frequently told his backgammon partners, ‘I am never enthused by discomfort, nor by emotional stress,’ and here in Leadville he had immediately encountered both.

  Augusta lowered her head. ‘I called you back because I missed you,’ she told Henry.

  Henry rubbed his forehead in exasperation. ‘But, my dear—I was only going to be gone for a week or two. No more than that.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Augusta. ‘You’re my husband, Henry; and whatever has passed between us, I love you still, and will always be devoted to you; and I miss you when you’re away.’

  Henry didn’t know what to say. He took Josiah Dunkley by the arm, and led him through to the parlour, and said, ‘Sit down, please. Let me get you a drink. Anything you like.’

  ‘A large whiskey, I think, if that’s not too much to ask for,’ said Josiah Dunkley, looking around for a comfortable chair in which to rest his ample bottom. He had expected a kind of rough luxury in Leadville; big old-fashioned armchairs, perhaps, and sawn-oak beds. But these mean surroundings were most discouraging. Stained wallpaper, prints of Abraham Lincoln, Windsor chairs, and a smell that betrayed that particular kind of good plain food which Josiah Dunkley loathed. Boiled gammon, and onions; or braised lamb shanks; or corn pone pie.

  Augusta came into the kitchen as Henry was looking for the whiskey. She untied her apron and hung it over the back of the chair. She was wearing a home-made dress with a high collar, and her hair was tied back and streaked with grey. There was dust on her spectacles; and she wore no jewellery at all.

  ‘I had to telegraph,’ she said. ‘George Hook keeps asking where you are, and threatening to break up the store. He says you murdered August Rische; that you had him dynamited on purpose.’

  ‘Do you think that’s true?’ asked Henry, calmly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Augusta. ‘I’m afraid.’

  He had been crouching down, searching through the back of the spice cupboard. At last he stood up, and said, ‘Where did you hide the whiskey this time?’

  ‘I’ll get you another bottle from the store.’

  ‘But there was a bottle in the parlour, only a third empty.’

  She hesitated, bit her lip.

  ‘You drank it?’ he asked her, disbelievingly.

  She looked back at him with pain and defiance. ‘Well, what else was I supposed to do, left here on my own, not knowing when you were going to come back? And two or three times a day, that awful George Hook knocking at the door, demanding to know when you were coming back?’

  Henry stood up, and closed the spice cupboard doors. He was suddenly aware that this store, which had been his home for nearly twenty years, his and Augusta’s, was forfeit now; that by making love to Baby Doe he had surrendered his past, and everything that was part of it, including this business, and this house. He had alienated himself from Augusta, and from their marriage-bed, and even from the things that belonged to him, his books and his playing-cards and his bone-handled razor, resting upstairs in the rose-patterned mug. Not that he would miss any of it, not seriously. This house felt as crowded and as uncomfortable to him as it probably did to Josiah Dunkley; and for all of Augusta’s fussy supervision, for all of her fervid domesticity, it seemed dingy, and shabby, and it smelled of polish, and stale air.

  ‘You haven’t even kissed me yet,’ said Augusta.

  He looked at her steadily, but he knew that his eyes were giving nothing away. He didn’t allow them to. His hands remained by his sides.

  She stood waiting. But Henry knew that if he kissed her, it would be proof to her at least that he still felt some affection for her; and he couldn’t afford for his own sake to give her even that much hope. She stepped forward, and took off her spectacles, and said, ‘Do you still love me, Henry?’

  He looked at her thick unplucked eyebrows. The small red spot just above her left eye.

  ‘Kiss me,’ she breathed.

  There was a long moment’s pause. Then he closed his eyes and bent forward and kissed her, on the cheek. When he opened his eyes again she was weeping. Quite silently, quite defiantly; but with tears running down her cheeks and dropping on to the collar of her dress.

  ‘How can you be so cruel to me?’ she sobbed.

  ‘Augusta—’

  ‘We’re supposed to be man and wife. We’ve lived together for all of these years. I’ve given you everything, Henry. Everything. And you can’t even kiss me.’

  ‘I’ve—I’m—’ he hesitated, and then he said it. He hadn’t meant to; at least not so soon. But she with that sensitivity of hers had known at once that something was different; that his usual off-handedness had somehow altered. Perhaps it was more studied, more deliberate. Perhaps it was invested now with genuine guilt. But he said, bluntly, in words that fell through the room like half-pound weights, ‘I’ve fallen in love with somebody else.’

  Augusta touched the sides of her mouth with her fingertips as if she could feel a cold-sore developing. ‘What?’ she said. Then, ‘Who? How could you have done? Henry, what are you talking about?’

  He dragged out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down. He was crying now like her. He didn’t know why. Perhaps it was pity; not just for Augusta, but for himself, too, that it had taken him all these years to find somebody he really adored. ‘I met her in Denver. I didn’t mean to, but I did. And I fell in love; and she fell in love with me.’

  ‘Have you been...intimate with her?’ Augusta asked stiffly.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said Augusta, at once, turning her face away. ‘I forgive you.’

  Henry jolted his head up. ‘You forgive me?’ he shouted at her. ‘You forgive me? You don’t even understand what I’m saying to you, do you? I said, I’ve fallen in love. I’ve fallen in love, Augusta, in love! Do you know what that means? And you don’t even know what she looks like, or who she is, and you forgive me? Augusta, I don’t want your forgiveness! I don’t need your forgiveness! I’m simply saying—I’ve fallen in love and that’s all!’

  His face was smothered with tears. She glanced at him, and said, ‘You’re talking like a boy.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘perhaps I am. But I’m not a
shamed of it. And I’m not ashamed of what’s happened. I can’t be. After all these years, Augusta, how can I be?’

  Augusta drew a long, shuddering breath. ‘Well…’ she said, with deep sarcasm and terrible pain, ‘the faithful husband; the honest storekeeper; the man of his word.’

  He said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ she told him, her eyes blinded. ‘You’re not sorry at all. You’re glad. Not because you’ve fallen in love. My God, Henry, you wouldn’t recognize love if it came up behind you and smacked you on the back of the head with a truncheon. You’re not in love, and never will be. You’re just pleased to have another excuse to inflict hurt on me, that’s what it is. You’re cruel, and vicious, and small-minded; and in return for everything I’ve done for you, all you’ve been able to give me is constant humiliation, constant agony, constant despair.’

  She let out a wild hooting noise, and crossed the kitchen floor in two ungainly lurches, and clung on to him, pulling and tugging at him as if he were a breakwater covered with slippery weed, and the sea was sucking and dragging her away from him; as if her life depended on her gripping his coat and his shirt and never letting go.

  At that moment, however, there was an embarrassed cough at the doorway, and Henry looked up to Josiah Dunkley standing in the hall, one hand raised as if he wanted to say something. ‘I’m so sorry to interrupt…’ he began. ‘But there’s a gentleman here...a Mr Cook. He says he urgently needs to talk to you.’

  Henry stood up, but Augusta kept on clinging to him. ‘Promise me you won’t leave me,’ she hissed, under her breath.

  He grasped her wrists, tried to pull himself free.

  ‘Promise me you’ll never leave me,’ she repeated, that same hysterical hiss; and he knew that if he didn’t promise, she would probably screech and cry and throw herself on to the floor. He bit his lip, and then he said, ‘We can talk. We can discuss it.’