Silver

by Graham Masterton

  ‘If you gave her more money, would she agree to divorce you?’ asked Baby Doe.

  Henry shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Whenever she writes, she never says. It’s always about business.’

  ‘Is there any way at all that you could divorce her?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not that I know of. In two years, she hasn’t even walked out with anybody else.’

  ‘But, Henry; I want to be your wife. Surely there has to be a way.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Henry. They had been through this conversation almost every week for the past eighteen months, and he always ended it by saying ‘maybe’. Sometimes he said, ‘What does it matter, being married? We’re living together, aren’t we? You see much more of me than Augusta ever did.’ But he knew that to Baby Doe it wasn’t the same. She wanted more than anything else to be respectable, to be his wife, Mrs Henry Roberts, and join the Sacred 36. She had every right to: her lover could buy and sell most of the Sacred 36 in the same afternoon.

  The light began to fail, and the fifth-floor suite in the Windsor Hotel began gradually to darken. Baby Doe asked, ‘Shall I turn on the lights?’ but Henry shook his head. He liked the twilight; the sight of the dying day. He swallowed the last of his whiskey and held out his empty glass for another one. A black servant in a white tunic appeared as if he had been conjured out of the shadows, and took the glass to refill it. Baby Doe never asked them how they always knew exactly the right moment to appear; and they rather disturbed her, like having rats in the house always coming and going.

  He had promised Baby Doe a wedding as soon as he had walked out on Augusta. A wedding to end all weddings. Flowers, veils, choirs, orchestras; carriages and kings. But again and again he had asked her to ‘please be patient’. He couldn’t find a way of divorcing Augusta and Augusta was adamant that she wasn’t going to divorce him, no matter what he did, no matter how blatantly he paraded his affections for Baby Doe. And he couldn’t be too blatant about her, because the Republican Party of Denver seemed set to put him forward for a term as United States senator, and so far his separation from Augusta and his courtship of Baby Doe had escaped any really intensive gossip in the public prints.

  In spite of everything, however, he made a determined effort to enjoy himself. He took Baby Doe to racetrack meetings; to parties; to restaurants. On Sundays, he promenaded with her in Riverfront Park, and raised his hat to anyone who looked respectable. He drank, he gambled, and he worked hard at what David Moffat had called ‘diversifying’—investing his money in lumber, insurance, real estate, water, and gas. He had already spent $1.2 million in building a new harbour and factory town on the shores of Lake Michigan, which he believed would rival Chicago.

  ‘I have bad memories of Chicago,’ he always used to tell people. ‘That’s why I’ve made up my mind to build another city on the lake, and let Chicago die.’

  He had been true to his word to the citizens of Leadville, and built an opera house, a fire department, a street railroad system, an electric light company, and a school. The opera house, on Harrison Avenue at St Louis Street, was considered by Nat Starkey to be a ‘treat beyond belief’; and Henry had been elected mayor of Leadville with almost no opposition.

  Only the house on East 9th Street remained uncompleted. Work had ceased on the day that Henry had told Augusta that he was going to leave her; on Augusta’s instructions. It remained as a ruin, a folly; one man’s unfinished tribute to the wife he didn’t love. Children said it was haunted; and prospectors came in and stole the bricks. Shortly before Christmas, 1881, Henry ordered it demolished. He was not to know that Augusta stood in the snow and watched it being knocked down.

  Henry gave Baby Doe everything but marriage. He bought her an ermine cloak that swept the floor; he bought her so many pearl necklaces that when once she had tried them all on together, she was unable to stand up under the weight. He bought her diamonds, sapphires, and rubies. He had her portrait painted, three times larger than life-size. He had sold her house on Larimer Street and bought her an Italianate villa called Casa Blanca on the outskirts of Denver, complete with silk hangings and tapestries and ancient Egyptian busts and peacocks moaning on the lawns. He worshipped her; he would have done anything for her; but he hadn’t yet married her.

  It wasn’t only a question of Augusta’s refusal to seek a divorce. It was the fact that in every letter she wrote to him, she managed somehow to make a mention of the Platte River Transportation company. He wasn’t so simple that he didn’t see that she was warning him, and after every letter from Leadville he became irritable and morose, and went down to the taproom of the Windsor Hotel, and drank more whiskey than was good for him, in the company of fat and noisy men.

  The Windsor Hotel was his. All five storeys of it, brand-new; with towers, and parapets, and flags, like a French château, and one of the most luxurious hotels in the world. It had cost $350,000 to build; and after that Henry had spent another $200,000 on putting in three elevators, 60 bathtubs, a swimming-pool, and steam-baths complete with ‘Sudsatorium, Frigidorium, and Lavatorium’. Every one of the 300 rooms was lit by gas; over half the rooms had a marble fireplace. Downstairs, there was a gourmet restaurant serving trout, venison, bear-meat, and prairie chicken, and a steam-powered refrigerator to supply ice-cream.

  He kept this one top-floor suite for himself; for private evenings with Baby Doe; for gambling with his Republican Party cronies; for working; and for thinking. He was very rich now. His fortune was probably more than $9 million, although it was impossible to assess it with complete accuracy. It was probably very much more. The Matchless Mine alone was bringing him in $1,000 a day, which he used as pocket-money; and he would occasionally amuse Baby Doe by standing on the balcony outside their room to throw silver dollars to the crowded street below, and to watch people scramble for them.

  Not satisfied with having endowed Leadville with an opera house, he had also built one in Denver, ‘The Roberts Grand Opera House’, with carved cherrywood fittings from Japan, gilded mirrors from France, a crystal gasolier with one hundred gas jets, and silk draperies that had cost over $50 the yard. The theatre had cost him $750,000; and had opened early last September. His own box, however, had been empty on opening night. He had received a letter from Augusta, earlier in the day, and he had been too drunk to go. Instead, he had been sitting in the bar at the Windsor, where there were 3,000 silver dollars studded into the floor for decoration, drinking Old Hilltop Ten-Year Old bourbon and talking about baseball with another gentleman who was as drunk as he was. These were early days for Denver’s baseball team, and Henry and some of his millionaire chums had taken to encouraging the home players by offering $20 in gold for stolen bases and home runs, and stationing beer-barrels at every base.

  Henry patted Baby Doe’s hand. ‘We’ll get married, don’t you worry about it. I’ll find a way.’

  But just as Henry had seemed to be floating in a dream through all of his hard-scrabble years with Augusta, he seemed now to be floating even faster and even less effectually through his years of affluence. Rich as he was, he never felt that he was in control of his own destiny. Days would go by, weeks, months, as quickly as if somebody were whipping the door of his room open and shut, open and shut. Voices seemed to blur all around him; friends came and smiled and took a drink and went; games of cards flickered in front of him as if the pack were being blown across the baize by sudden draughts. The Windsor Hotel had risen as if by magic: scaffolding; foundations; brownstone cladding, towers, tiles, windows, and roof. The opera house had risen just as swiftly. All he seemed to be able to remember of its construction was when the decorators had shown him the large portrait of Shakespeare in the lobby.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he had demanded.

  ‘Shakespeare.’

  He had sucked his cigar; and then blown out smoke; and waved his hand. ‘Take it down. What did Shakespeare ever do for Denver? You can put up a picture of me there, instead.’

  He seemed to spend more and more time sitt
ing here in his suite in the Windsor; not because he enjoyed the isolation; quite often he was bored; but because it seemed to be the only way in which he could slow the days down. He would look across at Baby Doe sometimes, as she embroidered, or read a magazine, and the sun would be shining on those soft perfect cheeks of hers, and he would think: you don’t know how old I’m getting, how quickly my life is disappearing. He wanted to marry her more than anything else he could think of; but the Denver Republicans were already talking of putting him up for the United States senate; and he didn’t dare risk any revelations from Augusta about the Platte River Transportation company. So he kept her close, his Baby Doe, and tried to keep the days as long and as graceful as possible.

  He had ordered her a carriage, varnished in dark blue and striped with gold, with upholstery of pale blue satin. He had decided that it should always be drawn by four black horses. He would spend whole afternoons talking about how beautiful she would look in it, as she drove around Denver. She stared out of the hotel window, and said, ‘It’s snowing again. Didn’t you say you had to go back to Leadville?’

  ‘Business, that’s all,’ replied Henry. ‘And that Oscar Wilde fellow is supposed to be appearing at the opera house. Do you want to come to that?’

  Baby Doe said nothing, but watched the snow tumbling into the muddy streets as if it were the confetti at somebody else’s wedding. When she turned around and looked at Henry there were tears in her eyes but he didn’t see them; he was staring blindly at the wall, as if his mind was fixed a long way away and a very long time ago. ‘You will become very wealthy one day,’ the fortune-teller had told him. But what had Nina said? ‘You are a man who carves epitaphs, and always will be.’

  ‘Hm?’ asked Henry, suddenly looking up.

  ‘No,’ said Baby Doe, ‘I think I’ll go out to the house. Agnes has been missing me.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Henry. Then, ‘Yes.’

  He left Denver the following afternoon in a wild snowstorm; sitting warm and well-fed in his private railroad car with its thick brown velvet curtains and its brown sofas and crystal lamps. Now that the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad had laid a track through to Leadville, Henry’s frequent to-ing and fro-ing between the two cities had become very much more comfortable; and as the train clanked its way slowly up towards Idaho Springs, with the snow whirling against its windows, he sat back and daydreamed of Doris and summers long ago, although he found it impossible now to separate Doris in his mind’s eye from Baby Doe, and he began to wonder if in some mysterious way they were related. Was it possible for spirits to find their way into other people’s bodies, and seek out the lovers they had left behind when they died? The snow softly touched the glass of the railroad car window; and outside, although it was only lunchtime, the sky was as dark as ink.

  ‘Mr Roberts?’ his secretary asked him, uncertainly. His secretary was a young man straight out from law school in New York; a clean young man with large ears called Price. He had only been working for Henry for three weeks, and he still seemed to find his employer bizarre and baffling.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Henry.

  ‘There’s a message, sir, from Leadville. It seems that Mr Wilde is expected to arrive on Thursday, as promised.’

  ‘Did you read what they said about Mr Wilde in the papers?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Well, sir, not much.’ Young Price went pink.

  ‘He seems to like sunflowers,’ said Henry.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘He talks pretty effeminate, too. All this “too utterly-utter”. Did you read about that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well,’ said Henry, ‘you’ll have the chance to meet him this week. Just make sure he doesn’t get the idea that you’re “too utterly-utter.”’

  Henry laughed, the first time he’d laughed in a week. He didn’t know why. Young Price gave him a lopsided smile of distress, and retreated to the tiny brightly-lit office in which he worked; at the very end of the railroad car, next to the lavatory.

  Henry was superstitious about Leadville; perhaps because Augusta was there. He was unsteady on his feet when he arrived. He had drunk half a bottle of whiskey while the train had waited at Loveland Pass, over 11,000 feet above sea-level, for gangers to dig snow away from the tracks. He had sat staring at the snow, his glass in his hand; and by the time they had brought him his supper (chicken with lemon sauce) he had been slurring his words and almost snow-blind.

  All the way down to Leadville from Fremont Pass he had tapped his huge diamond ring against the window, an irritating tapping that had set young Price’s teeth on edge. It had seemed to carry all the way around the railroad car, penetrating and impatient and sharp.

  Henry slept badly that night, at his special suite at the Clarendon Hotel, on the opposite side of St Louis Street from the Roberts Opera House. At half-past three in the morning he called for seltzer and cheese, and sat in his nightshirt eating it. It had stopped snowing. Leadville lay sparkling under a clear, black sky, gritted with stars. He finished the cheese and then he went back to bed and lay there with the cover drawn up tight under his chin, staring at the edge of the mahogany bedside table and trying to think of nothing at all; not money; not Baby Doe; not Augusta; not anything. He dreamed of running. He woke up thinking, when was the last time I actually ran?

  He was busy for the next two days. He visited the Matchless No. 3 shaft, where excavations into the new lode were progressing well; he also went down the Weldon No 2 shaft, off Monroe Street on Chicken Hill; and was shown around Meyer Sampling Works on Front Street. He talked to Nat Starkey and Thos Rogers about the electric light works, and the possibility of starting up a telephone company. He was told by Price late on Wednesday afternoon that Oscar Wilde had arrived in Leadville, but all he could say was ‘good’. There were four shootings that evening: one at the Pioneer Saloon, one on Harrison Avenue, right outside the courthouse, and two in a brothel on Leiter, in the 300 Block.

  He kept thinking: one day I’m going to walk into Augusta on the street, and then what am I going to say? Good morning? Are you all right? I’m sorry? For God’s sake, why were you ever born?

  On Thursday evening, in formal dress, he went to the opera house with Nat Starkey and his wife Olive to see Oscar Wilde. He was pleased to see that the auditorium was packed; and that all of Leadville’s richest citizens had turned up, in evening dress and satin gowns, to occupy their gilded boxes. There was an excited hubbub of conversation and laughter; and even the miners in the stalls were stamping their feet impatiently, and calling out, ‘Where is he? Let’s get a look at the feller.’

  Henry settled down in his box; and the theatre manager came in to shake his hand; and to offer him a bottle of champagne, bobbing noisily in a stupendous solid silver cooler which was valiantly carried by a red-faced boy.

  At last, the theatre lights were dimmed down to tiny specks of gas; and the footlights brightened, and the rich crimson curtains were drawn back.

  There were hoots of derision and cheers of surprise when Oscar Wilde walked on to the boards. He was dressed in a braided velvet jacket and silk knee-britches, and he was carrying a tall lily in one hand. His hair reached down to his shoulders, and was fluffed up on either side of his face. But he was not the languid fop that the miners of Leadville had expected him to be. He was bigger, and burlier, and instead of affecting the ‘languid, dreamy walk’ for which he had been derided by the Denver Times, he strode up to the footlights and faced his laughing audience ‘like a giant backwoodsman’, as the Leadville Herald later reported.

  He waved his lily, and that brought more laughter; then he tossed it into the stalls, amongst the miners, who didn’t know whether they ought to catch it or stamp on it.

  ‘I exhort you,’ Wilde cried, in a clear and compelling voice, which immediately hushed the auditorium, from the miners up to the millionaires, ‘I exhort you—all of you—to study when you can and as soon as you can the Gothic school of Pisan art. You will discover in it aesthetic princ
iples which will illuminate both your minds and your souls. It represents the height of natural sensitivity; combined with the height of intellectual stylization.’

  There was baffled silence. Somebody coughed; and that set off a whole fusillade of coughs.

  ‘However,’ Wilde said, ‘I wish to speak to you first tonight of gold, and of silver, those precious metals which occupy your whole existence; from miner to mine-owner; and, most importantly, I wish to speak of those who worship gold and silver not simply as wealth, but as the raw material of great art. All of you know the market value of gold and silver, or else you would not be here, but its aesthetic value far outshines its commercial worth. Let us take one of the greatest of those who have created works of art out of precious metal—Benvenuto Cellini.’

  Henry sat in silence as Wilde recounted the outrageous life of Cellini; how he had killed the Constable de Bourbon with his own hand, and fatally wounded the Prince of Orange; how he had accidentally slain a rival goldsmith and been thrown into prison for embezzling pontifical jewels; how at last he had returned to Florence to create some of the finest masterpieces of gold and silver that the world has ever seen.

  In the front rows of the opera house, the miners sat enthralled; and when Wilde had finished they rose to their feet and applauded loudly, whistling and cheering.

  ‘This Cellini,’ one of them called out, ‘if he’s that good, and he’s that tough, why didn’t you bring him with you?’

  Wilde raised a large, pale hand. ‘I regret to have to tell you,’ he said, with the faintest of smiles, ‘that Signor Benvenuto Cellini is dead.’

  ‘Who shot him?’ another miner demanded.

  After the lecture, Henry went down to the lobby, and there Oscar Wilde was brought forward, surrounded by applauding well-wishers and curious miners, to shake Henry’s hand.