Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Isn’t there?’ he said, glancing at her sideways.

  She reached for his hand again. ‘Prayer brought us together, and kept us together. Where’s the harm in that?’

  ‘You’d never understand.’

  Hannah frowned. ‘What’s come over you, Collis? You talk as if I’ve done something terrible.’

  He stared at her. ‘Maybe you have. Maybe you’ve convinced me that as long as I believe the Lord is on my side, I can do anything I want. Build railroads over impossible mountains, ruin women’s reputations, blackmail respectable businessmen, even take innocent people’s lives.’

  ‘You’ve never taken anybody’s life.’

  ‘Haven’t I?’

  ‘Of course not. And all those other things. You haven’t done anything like that. You’re just feeling depressed, that’s all. Wait until Theo comes back from Washington. Then you’ll feel better. God does understand, you know, and forgive us our trespasses.’

  ‘That’s just as well. I’d be burning in eternal hell fire by now if He didn’t.’

  ‘Collis,’ she said. ‘Don’t talk that way.’

  He was tempted for one irrational moment to tell her about Walter, and the On Leong Tong. He even began to say, ‘You’re going to find this difficult to believe, Hannah …’ But somehow the words came out into the soft evening air like a profuse and empty apology, written in decorative scrollwork on shreds of finest silk, and the wind blew them away in front of his eyes.

  She wouldn’t want to know. Even if she had already guessed at it, she would prefer the truth to remain as it was, unspoken.

  ‘Your God,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Your wonderfully convenient God.’

  Hannah looked at him, tight-lipped. Then she turned and stalked back across the veranda to the screen door, her skirts lifted to keep them clear of splinters.

  ‘You try me sometimes, Collis,’ she said. ‘I pray to God that your railroad gets built, just to put an end to your irritability, and your moods, and your eternal dissatisfaction.’

  The screen door banged shut behind her. Collis hesitated for a moment, then sprang after her. He caught up with her at the foot of the back staircase, in a dark corner of the downstairs passage. He seized her arm and turned her around. Her face was bright, and defiant, and she looked up at him challengingly.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘What are you going to do, strike me?’

  ‘What do you think I am?’ he snapped.

  She hesitated. Her face was pale and beautiful in the shadows, as if she, too, were a dream. ‘You’re a man with a single idea,’ she said, in a gentle voice. ‘You’ve clung on to that idea because you believe you have nothing else. Now, because your credit’s spread so thin, and because Mr Lincoln still hasn’t made up his mind, you’re worried you’re going to lose your one idea for good. And then what will you do? Run a hardware business with Leland and Charles for the rest of your life? Sit in the parlour smoking your cheroots in the evening, watching me crochet? Swap tales with Theo of the days that might have been, like two old dotards, on the back porch?’

  Collis gripped the lace collar of her pink dress, and the embroidered cotton of the bodice she wore beneath it, and tore them roughly sideways, baring Hannah’s right breast. She gasped, partly out of genuine surprise, and partly as a theatrical reaction to a theatrical gesture.

  ‘I’m going to build this railroad,’ he whispered, and she could see his eyes glittering in the darkness. ‘I’m going to build this railroad, and by the time this decade’s out, you’re going to go riding on it like a queen. You just remember that.’

  He held her bare breast in his warm, dry, masculine hand, the ball of his thumb rotating softly and provocatively. She tilted her head back, as if she was expecting him to kiss her neck. He leaned forwrd, his lips slightly parted. He hesitated; then he kissed her with great tenderness and controlled passion on her mouth.

  ‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He said nothing at all. The house was quiet in the dusky warmth of the evening. The servants had left at noon for the market, and then for a few hours off, and they wouldn’t return until dinnertime. Hannah kept a pet cockatoo in the front parlour, in a white cage, and they could hear it rattling and scratching.

  Collis took Hannah by the wrist, opened the door to the back stairs, and led her up. The stairs came out by the door to their bedroom, and Collis pushed it open, so that the last reflected light of the day was diffused across the landing. Then he bent down and picked Hannah up in his arms, holding her like a new bride, except that one of her breasts was exposed, and that she was very much more attractive and magnetic to him now than a new bride ever could have been. Her pink skirts hung down like the petals of a rose mallow, and her blonde hair was shining.

  He laid her down on their wide, quilted bed and quickly stripped off his vest, his shirt, and his trousers. She watched him without a smile, although she was already feeling breathless for him. The room around them was decorative and warm, and the pink glass perfume bottles on her dressing-table sparked like magical potions.

  Naked, his body thicker now, but still muscular, Collis climbed on to the bed. He whispered, ‘Hannah …’ and the way he whispered it carried a host of implications. An implication of desire; an implication of deep and fulfilled emotion; and also an implication of determination. Hannah reached down and lifted up her skirts for him, revealing her white bloomers with their tiered flounces.

  He made love to her slowly. The enamelled clock on the mantelpiece seemed to jump whole hours. She opened her eyes every now and then, and felt as if she had been dozing, and dreaming, and dozing again. There were moments of languorous pleasure, when she lay back on the bed while Collis caressed her and touched her. There were moments of intense exertion, when they were both panting and sweating and clutching each other. Collis made her do things that she had never done before, and had never thought possible, and the sensations of that evening, as they passed, were like the charcoal-grey leaves of one of Mr Figgis’ private albums, illustrated with potent and erotic memories. She would treasure them for years to come.

  At last it appeared to be over. His anger and his passion were both subdued. He went to the chair by the window and sat there naked for nearly ten minutes, watching her in silence. Sometimes she looked back at him, and sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she closed her eyes and felt nothing but the kisses he had given her, and the contented, spent feeling between her thighs. For some reason which amused her, she thought she was probably pregnant. She laughed out loud, without really knowing why.

  Collis said, ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she told him. ‘I’m just laughing.’

  ‘Good.’ He smiled, and stayed where he was, while the moon suddenly appeared at the edge of the window behind him.

  On 12 April, Confederate mortars opened fire on Fort Sumter. Three days later, after Fort Sumter had surrendered, President Lincoln called for troops. It was war at last.

  The call to arms took days to reach San Francisco, but when it did, the response was aggressive and immediate. From the same city, and sometimes from the same street, men packed their trunks and went off to fight for the Union or for the Rebels. In the Bank Exchange Saloon, two young men from South Park, friends since school, toasted each other in champagne and wished each other well. The next day, they both boarded the same steamer for Panama City, and they played cards on the train together all the way to Aspinwall. They shook hands for the last time on the quay, in the soft tropical rain, before one embarked on a ship headed for Charleston, and the other for New York. Both died – one at Chancellorsville and the other at Fredericksburg. Both were twenty years old.

  John Frémont and William Tecumseh Sherman both sailed east from San Francisco to join the Union Army; and the Frémonts’ house was requisitioned for the defence of San Francisco Bay, so Jessie had to pack her bags, too. The glass veranda on which Collis had argued with John Frémont and Laurence Melford was demolish
ed, and brick cannon emplacements were put up in its place.

  David Terry sailed to the Southern states to join the Confederates. The volatile young William Gwin, son of Senator Gwin, was already in the Confederate Army, along with Grant Melford. Senator Gwin himself, after being temporarily imprisoned on suspicion of enlisting young men for the South, took his wife Mary Bell and his family and sailed into exile in France.

  Even Dan McReady went off to join up with the Connecticut volunteers. In Sacramento, Collis waited with almost uncontrollable impatience for news that the ‘Act to Aid in the Construction of a Railroad and Telegraph Line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean’ was at last going to be drafted, and that Congress had finally decided on the route. Theo had written to say that although Congress was looking favourably on the Sierra Pacific surveys, their old adversaries the Hannibal & St Joseph Railroad were still pressing hard for a line out of St Joe; and that James C. Stone, the president of the Leavenworth, Pawnee & Western Railroad, had now employed a professional lobbyist to pursue his route out of Missouri. Collis was seething for days, and refused to eat, even though Hannah did everything she could to calm him.

  In July, the Army of the Potomac, the greatest army ever seen on American soil, was routed at Bull Run by the Rebels, and its soldiers were still running when they reached the rutted streets of Washington. For the next three years, the war would rage backwards and forwards between the two capitals, only 110 miles apart, and out over the surrounding countryside. Collis read the reports from the East and felt as if he were being slowly consumed by fire from the inside out.

  Another winter passed. Another spring. At last, in April 1862, Collis decided to travel to Washington himself. He took Kwang Lee with him and sailed from Sacramento’s Front Street levee on the morning of 6 April. Hannah remained in their carriage, under her lemon-yellow parasol, and waved him goodbye with her handkerchief. He stood by the steamer’s rail and blew her a kiss.

  He had left her a letter under the pillows of their bed. Part of it read: ‘I know that my temper has tried you very hard over the years we have been together, but I wish you to know that I love you more dearly than my own life, and that your support and understanding have been more valuable to me than gold. When the railroad is built, many people will take credit for it, but I alone shall know that you were the inspiration for it, and the strength which ensured its creation.’

  He had to wait in San Francisco for two days for a steamer. He visited Andy Hunt, who had been making himself a healthy profit by selling supplies to the army, and ‘services’, too, with the help of Maria-Mamuska. Maria-Mamuska herself was prettier than ever, and thicketed with diamonds and pearls, and almost every gentleman in San Francisco who had a taste for high-class ladies’ boarding-houses had visited her four-storey gingerbread house on Bush Street for ‘cakes, champagne and l’amour.’

  Collis even had a drink with Arthur Teach, who had grudgingly forgiven him for l’affaire des couvertures and was even quite eager to talk about railroad investment. The news had arrived in San Francisco that the Rebels were playing havoc with the Missouri railroads. They had dynamited bridges, torn up tracks, wrecked trains, and captured engineers. They had even kidnapped the president of the Hannibal & St Joseph and threatened to blow off his head unless train services were halted. The Leavenworth railroad was just as vulnerable to the Confederate cavalry, and for all James C. Stone’s political weight, it was becoming increasingly plain that the only safe route was going to be westward from Omaha.

  ‘I think you have it in the bag,’ said Arthur Teach. ‘And once you have it, you might look to Pacific Securities for some finance.’

  ‘Considering the blankets, that’s very generous of you,’ Collis told him. He raised his glass.

  ‘Considering the blankets, that’s the only way I’m likely to get my money back,’ Arthur said and snorted.

  The morning on which Collis and Kwang Lee were due to sail for Panama City on the Gulf of California something odd and unsettling occurred. Collis was shaving in the bathroom of his suite at the Oriental Hotel when there was a knock at the door. He slung his towel over his shoulder and went with foam on his face to see who was there. It was Kwang Lee, already dressed in his grey tweed travelling suit and grey derby.

  ‘Come in,’ said Collis, ‘I won’t be ready for a while yet.’

  ‘No hurry, sir,’ Kwang Lee told him, closing the door. ‘While you shave, let me tell you some interesting news.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Collis, lifting his nose so that he could shave his moustache. He rinsed his razor and peered at himself in the mirror. Every morning he looked older, he thought. Every day the railroad was delayed, another hair turned grey. ‘There are more damned lines on my face than there are over the Sierra Nevada,’ he muttered.

  ‘I was talking to friends of mine in Chinatown,’ said Kwang Lee, taking off his hat and sitting down in Collis’s armchair. ‘They told me interesting news of Sarah Melford.’

  ‘Sarah Melford? What on earth can anyone in Chinatown have to do with Sarah Melford?’

  ‘Plenty, sir, these days. Every two or three weeks, Sarah Melford calls at the house of Hang Far, of the Kwong Dak Tong, although she wears a cloak and hood so that nobody might recognise her.’

  Collis turned and frowned at Kwang Lee through the bathroom door. In the next suite, somebody was having a shouting match with his wife; the Oriental Hotel was notorious for its paper-thin walls.

  ‘What does she go there for?’ Collis asked.

  ‘Hang Far was not eager to say at first,’ said Kwang Lee. ‘But I told him you would give his cousin Hang Ching a position in your railroad company in due time, and so he agreed to tell me what he knew.’

  ‘I hope Hang Ching doesn’t expect to be anything more exalted than tea boy in chief,’ said Collis. ‘But anyway, what did Hang Far say about Miss Melford?’

  ‘Sarah Melford has been visiting him for more than one year – ever since her father found out she was still meeting Mr Francis Bret Harte secretly. There was a great argument between father and daughter. Her father forbade her to see Mr Harte again, or any men at all without his permission. Hang Far did not know all the details of the argument, but he said that Sarah Melford was greatly distressed. She was in love with Mr Harte, you see. She went to Hang Far for something which would ease her sorrow. Hang Far did not want to give it to her, but she offered him much money, and Hang Far is a businessman, after all.’

  Collis stepped out of the bathroom and stared at Kwang Lee intently. ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘What was it she wanted? What do you mean, “something to ease her sorrow”?’

  Kwang Lee raised his hands helplessly. ‘You cannot deflect a person who is bent on self-destruction,’ he said.

  ‘You mean opium?’ asked Collis. ‘Sarah Melford goes to the Kwong Dak Tong for opium?’

  Kwang Lee nodded.

  Collis pressed his hand against his cheek. He walked across to the bureau, and then back again. My God, he thought, it’s all my fault. If I hadn’t given her that tincture of opium, she never would have known what it could do. She must have been affected by it after all. Maybe the whole reason she agreed to pose for those calotypes was that she was affected by it. And now, because of me and my railroad, she’s become an addict.

  ‘Listen,’ Collis told Kwang Lee. ‘I want you to go to Hang Far this morning and find out when Sarah Melford is next expected to visit him. Then I want you to postpone our sailing. I’m not leaving San Francisco until I’ve seen her.’

  Hang Far was round, and plump, and dressed in formal black tailcoat and white wing collar. Unlike Mr Kwang’s, his house was built and decorated in Western style, with oak dadoes and traditional furniture, and oil paintings of English foxhunts in gilt frames. He was smoking a cigar and reading a copy of the San Francisco newspaper when his servant showed Collis and Kwang Lee into his library. It was a dark room, lined with leather-bound books, and dominated by a huge partner’s desk of carved mahogany.
It smelled of ink, and books, and Chinese tea. On the wall over the fireplace was the only Chinese picture Collis saw in the whole house – a view of the Yangtze gorge in Szechuan.

  ‘What time are you expecting Miss Melford?’ Collis asked.

  ‘At three,’ said Hang Far. ‘Would you care for some tea while you wait? I have some Cloud Mist tea from the Lu Mountains, which I am sure you will enjoy.’

  Collis sat down in one of Hang Far’s club-style armchairs. ‘I’ll just have one of your cigars, thank you,’ he said.

  The three of them waited in silence. A large brass clock on the desk ticked away the minutes as if it had a speech impediment. Collis sat with his hands in his lap and looked unrelentingly at Hang Far, who smiled from time to time as if he was enjoying a mild private joke.

  It was two days since Kwang Lee had told Collis about Sarah. They had postponed their sailing on the Gulf of California, and now they were booked to leave on the Halethorpe on Wednesday next week. Hang Far had assured Kwang Lee that Sarah would be calling by on Thursday for her supply of laudanum. For a hundred dollars, he had agreed to let Collis come, too.

  At three-twenty, the library door opened, and Hang Far’s servant came in. ‘The lady is here,’ he said, looking sideways at Collis. Hang Far said something quiet and quick in Chinese, and the servant turned and went out again.

  Collis stood up, and almost at the same moment, Sarah walked in through the door. She stayed where she was, her white-gloved hand on the polished doorknob, her back straight, her face expressionless. She was wearing a striking blue overdress of turquoise silk, embroidered and decorated with braid, and a veiled hat in which three turquoise feathers bobbed; but her face, compared with the last time that Collis had seen her, was ghastly. Her cheeks were so white that she had rouged them, and now she had the appearance of a tragic clown. Her eyes were circled with livid purple, and they stared at Collis without surprise or apparent emotion.

  ‘Sarah,’ said Collis huskily.

  ‘It’s you,’ she said. ‘Why … what are you doing here?’