Silver Page 4

  Leadville was so cold in winter that the ice in the lakes was over a foot and a half thick. It had been chopped into blocks, 20 inches by 30 inches; and when the blocks had been constructed into towers and battlements within their wooden frames, they had been sprayed with water to freeze them solidly together.

  Inside the castle, the chill was penetrating, and Mr Cutforth couldn’t help shivering. All around him, electric lights were embedded in the supporting pillars of ice; and by the strange opalescent light which they cast, he saw Baby Doe quickly mounting a wide staircase just ahead of him. The staircase was carpeted with hessian to prevent visitors from slipping, but its banisters were fashioned out of perfect glacial ice. Mr Cutforth felt that he was still dreaming; a dream of panic and cold-heartedness and unrealized love.

  He followed Baby Doe as closely as he dared, his breath steaming, his fingers frostbitten, even inside his gloves, but the back of his flannel shirt soaked with sweat. At the top of the staircase, he found himself in a vast enclosed skating-rink, nearly 200 feet long and almost 100 feet wide, illuminated electrically. The spiralling scratches of those few skaters who had braved this morning’s snowstorm sparkled on the ice like threads of unravelling silver.

  The skating-rink echoed with distorted laughter. Mr Cutforth looked urgently around, his tripod under his arm, but Baby Doe was nowhere to be seen. There was an arched entrance at the side of the rink, and he decided that she must have gone through to the next room.

  He found himself in a ballroom, as large as that of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. There was no sign of Baby Doe there, either; and so he crossed the icy floor to the dining-room, which was incongruously furnished with upholstered chairs and sofas, and heated by a pot-bellied wood-burning stove to make it tolerably comfortable to sit in. No Baby Doe; and so Mr Cutforth trailed through to the long exhibition hall, lugging his camera-case and his tripod, and growing increasingly irritable.

  On either side of him, exhibits of Leadville’s wealth and industry were enclosed in brightly transparent blocks of ice. Mineral samples, soap, pickles, and even a display of frozen sewing-machines. There were frozen shirts and underwear from the T. G. Underhill company; oysters and fish and bottles of beer; and from the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, a panorama of its route from Denver to Leadville, stretching through fifteen continuous blocks of ice.

  Still there was no sign of Baby Doe. Mr Cutforth propped his tripod against an icy wall, took out his handkerchief and loudly blew his nose. A guide in a thick fur-trimmed coat came waddling up to him, all fuzzy tobacco-stained moustaches and golden watch-chain, and said, ‘Anything I can do to help? What do you think of her? Quite a place, isn’t she? Cold, though. Need your long johns.’

  ‘Did you see a woman pass you by?’ asked Mr Cutforth. ‘Brown coat, brown hat?’

  ‘Well, one of them was dressed like that,’ said the guide. He tugged at his nose and pointed towards a narrow ice staircase at the far end of the chilly exhibition hall; as if it were necessary to tug in order to point. ‘They went up there; to the north tower. You can get a fine view of not very much at all, in this weather.’

  ‘There were two of them?’ asked Mr Cutforth.

  ‘As I observed it.’

  Mr Cutforth tipped the guide a dime, and gathered up his case, and made his way as hurriedly as he could along to the far door. The stairs went up in a spiral, disappearing into the cold curved translucent heights of the north tower; and as he climbed them, Mr Cutforth could hear the wind blowing sadly across the open door at the top.

  Eventually, he came out on to the battlements. After 32 stairs, he was gasping for breath, but the air was too cold to be taken down into his lungs in anything but small sips; and he began to feel giddy from exertion and lack of oxygen. He sat on his case for a while by the doorway, shivering and sipping air, until he had recovered. The snow tumbled across the icy crenellations like dandelion clocks, and whirled around his feet.

  After a minute or two, he felt ready to go on. But this time he left his equipment where it was, and walked cautiously around the tower to see if Baby Doe and her unexpected companion were somewhere close by.

  He almost bumped into them. They were standing on the far side of the entrance; in the shelter of a small pointed turret, talking. Fortunately, Baby Doe had her back to him, and even though the other woman glanced sharply sideways and saw him, she obviously had no idea who he was, because she ignored him and carried on her conversation regardless.

  Mr Cutforth retreated, and carefully negotiated his way around the tower in the other direction, until he was only three or four feet away from the two women, but still out of sight behind one of the protruding buttresses of ice. It was piercingly cold up there, and his teeth were chattering like a Gatling gun, but over the noise of his teeth and the blowing of the wind, he could still hear almost everything the women were saying to each other.

  The woman who had seen him was plain, large-faced, with small severe spectacles quite like his own. She looked like the kind of woman who would complain about cigar-smoking in a railroad car; and would send back plates at a restaurant because there was dried food stuck to them. She wore a black coat piped with black braid, and a black bonnet which somehow contrived to look as if it had been put on upside-down. Her voice was clipped and sharp; but the words she was saying were surprisingly emotional. It sounded almost as if she were pleading with Baby Doe.

  ‘You must know yourself that there are times when passion overrides good reason,’ the woman declared. ‘You must know that there are times when rage or jealousy or love itself can blind you to sense, and even to Christian morality.’

  ‘You are not questioning my morals, I hope?’ said Baby Doe; although quite gently. ‘I did not come here for that.’

  ‘I am grateful that you came at all,’ the woman told her. ‘At least I know now how seriously ill he is.’ She hesitated, and then she added, ‘At least I know now the true measure of my blame.’

  Mr Cutforth pulled his scarf up over his mouth, and missed the next thing that Baby Doe said. But he caught the woman telling her, ‘...never face him again, not to speak to, although of course I have seen him often.’

  ‘He would not be angry with you, if you were to see him,’ Baby Doe replied.

  ‘No,’ the woman said. ‘I have thought of it, but I think I have already done enough to hurt you both. I wish only for you to beg him on my behalf to forgive me, as I have now forgiven him; so that when the time comes I may go to my grave with a quiet mind.’

  The wind whistled and whipped around the turrets; and even in his furry raccoon coat, Mr Cutforth felt as if all the warmth were gradually draining out of his bones, leaving him with a spine and a pelvis as icy as the palace itself. Why the two women had chosen to meet each other in such a freezing and inhospitable place, he couldn’t imagine; unless there was an element of self-punishment in it. The mortification of the body, as well as the conscience.

  ‘My dear, we both bear the same name, and have both loved the same man,’ said the woman in spectacles. ‘Whatever our bitterness towards each other in the past, let us at least try to accept now what fate has awarded us, while Henry still lives. I ask for nothing more but a kiss.’

  Mr Cutforth now retreated from his chilly hiding-place, and slid his way awkwardly back to the entrance, where he had left his camera and his tripod. He bit off his gloves finger by finger, and with bright crimson hands, opened up the catches of his case and took out his Fox Talbot camera. He wished very heartily that he had brought his Kodak, with its flexible film, but he had supposed when he had left Denver that he would be taking only large-scale scenic pictures, and well-posed groups.

  Numbly, he assembled the camera and mounted it on its tripod. He loaded the wetplate into it; and prayed that in this snowstorm there would be sufficient light for a reasonable exposure. Then he covered his head with his black photographer’s cape, and shuffled with his camera into a position close to the edge of the battlements.

 
He could hear the two women talking still; although from what they were saying it sounded as if they were close to making their goodbyes. He withdrew from his cape, twisted the camera around on its bezel so that it was pointing at the women, and called out clearly, ‘Mrs Roberts!’

  Both of them turned, startled. Mr Cutforth squeezed the bulb of his camera, and the shutter gave a measured mechanical click; the slowest exposure that Mr Cutforth had dared to allow himself.

  ‘Mr Cutforth! What is the meaning of this?’ Baby Doe demanded, stepping forward with her skirts raised to prevent them from trailing in the ice.

  Mr Cutforth raised his hat. ‘I thank you, Mrs Roberts. I am only doing my job. Please pardon the intrusion.’

  ‘What has he done?’ snapped the woman in spectacles. ‘What have you done, my man?’

  ‘He has taken our likeness,’ said Baby Doe, her angel-bow mouth pursed up in surprising bitterness.

  ‘Well, he has no right,’ said the woman in spectacles. ‘Sir, whoever you are, you must surrender that picture at once!’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ replied Mr Cutforth. ‘The law is quite clear on the matter of privacy; and those who stand and talk in public places cannot seek any protection in law from being photographed, no matter how compromising their meeting might be.’

  Baby Doe stared at Mr Cutforth for a moment or two, and then unbuttoned and rebuttoned her gloves in a jerky little gesture of disapproval and disappointment.

  ‘I thought you were a different kind of a man, Mr Cutforth.’

  ‘I am a recorder of historical events, Mrs Roberts, first and foremost. It is my work.’

  ‘And you consider that this event is historical? A personal meeting between two women whose lives have already been disastrously affected by public attention?’

  Mr Cutforth disassembled his camera, and knelt down to put it carefully away in its case. ‘It is the end of a great story, Mrs Roberts. If anything at all that I have seen in Leadville has been worthy of photographic record, including this mighty palace of ice, it is you and Mrs Roberts here meeting on this tower together and talking of forgiveness.’

  ‘This is quite outrageous,’ said the woman in spectacles. ‘Which is your journal, my man? I shall speak at once to your editor, and have you dismissed!’

  ‘No, ma’am, you won’t,’ said Mr Cutforth. He stood up, holding his case and his tripod. He looked at Baby Doe through pince-nez that were fogged with cold. He could see, however, that there was an expression on her face of considerable sadness; a blurry look of familiar defeat.

  ‘I’ll say good day,’ he nodded, and made back towards the entrance. As he started to climb down the spiral staircase, though, Baby Doe called out, ‘Mr Cutforth!’ and he stopped, and turned.

  She appeared, with snow melting on the shoulders of her coat. In the diffuse amber light from the electric lamps that were embedded in the tower walls, she looked even more remarkably beautiful and tragic than ever; and Mr Cutforth would have given anything to have been able to photograph her as she was then.

  ‘Mr Cutforth,’ she appealed, ‘I beg you not to publish that picture, if you have a heart.’

  Mr Cutforth paused; and then slowly shook his head. ‘It is my job, Mrs Roberts. It is what I am paid to do.’

  ‘Is there nothing I can do to make you change your mind?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘But you said you wanted to help me. Surely you can see that this is the very best way that you can.’

  ‘I did want to help you,’ said Mr Cutforth. ‘I still do. But you are not the kind of woman that most men are capable of helping, Mrs Roberts. You are somebody special, who is beyond my reach. I have accepted that, I think. So all I can do is do my job.’

  ‘Mr Cutforth, please.’

  Mr Cutforth looked up at her. Behind her, the first Mrs Roberts was standing now, her face big and serious, her hat collecting snow. He said to Baby Doe, ‘It was I, Mrs Roberts, who sent up the pie.’

  Baby Doe frowned. ‘You’re resentful of me, because I wouldn’t accept a pie?’

  ‘No, that’s not it,’ smiled Mr Cutforth, wryly. ‘I’m resentful of you for quite different reasons. Reasons that a gentleman doesn’t usually admit to a lady whom he scarcely knows. Feelings, you see, and longings. Things that might have been, and never were. I think you get my drift.’

  Baby Doe was silent for a very long time. The three of them stood at the head of the stairs as if they had been frozen into a tableau, for visitors at the ice-palace to peer at with sympathetic curiosity. Then Baby Doe whispered as quiet as a snowflake, ‘Yes, Mr Cutforth. I get your drift.’

  *

  Mr Sam Cutforth, by then a scenic photographer for the W. R. Noakes Company of San Francisco, died unmarried in 1927 at the age of 62, at his boarding-house on Divisadero Street. Among his possessions were found over 3,000 glass negatives, mostly of scenes of the mining towns of the Rocky Mountains during the 1880s and 1890s. The bulk of the negatives went to the Bancroft Library; very few of them were ever printed up. One negative, however, came to the attention of the library’s historical department because it had been deliberately spoiled by having a cross painted on it.

  When it was printed, it showed an extraordinary scene that nobody at the library could identify. Two women were standing in what appeared to be a blizzard on the tower of a Scottish or Norman castle. One of them looked surprised, the other angry, although her face was too blurred for anyone to be able to say who she was. There was no caption attached to the picture, nothing to indicate where it might have been taken or for what reason.

  The print and the negative were mailed to the Colorado Historical Society for examination, but the package failed to arrive, and had to be considered lost.

  There was no other record of the meeting on January 9, 1896, between Mrs Augusta Roberts and Mrs Elizabeth Roberts, except for an entry in Mr Cutforth’s diary which simply but inexplicably said, ‘How can she do this to me?’

  Book One: Borrasca

  ‘An unproductive mine or claim; the opposite of a bonanza.’

  One

  Doris came flying down the stairs in her prettiest cream and burgundy dress, ribbons and lace, and crashed straight into the broad hound’s-tooth bulge of her father’s well-fed porterhouse belly.

  ‘Hey, now! Whoa there!’ her father cried out. He seized her wrist and brought her around. ‘Whoa there! Where’s the fire?’

  ‘Oh, no fire, Papa, but Henry’s here!’

  ‘Henry again, is it?’

  ‘Oh, Papa, don’t disapprove! He’s taking us down to the fairground, all of us, Cissy and Eleanor too!’

  Doris’ mother came bustling out of the dining-room, where she had been arranging dried chrysanthemums. ‘Now, William,’ she admonished her husband. ‘None of your grumps on a Saturday. I promised poor Doris she could go. She’s been looking forward to it all the week. And she helped Brindle to clean the silver.’

  ‘Well, he’s a dude, that boy, that’s my objection,’ said Mr Paterson, and pouted out his thick prickly moustache. ‘He’s a dude, and a prankster.’

  ‘Please don’t make that face, Father,’ begged Doris. ‘You always remind me of a beaver when you make that face.’

  ‘A beaver, is it? My own daughter calling me a beaver! Well, all I can say is, a beaver’s industrious; which is more than anyone can allow for young Henry, with his waxy whiskers.’

  ‘Oh, Father,’ flirted Doris.

  ‘Oh, Father; oh, Father,’ Mr Paterson mimicked. ‘What’s a fellow to do in his own house, with nothing but women to contend with? Well, you run along, if it’s going to make you happy; but don’t get up to any mischief, and no drinking cider, neither.’

  Doris jumped up and kissed her father on both cheeks. ‘I’ll just get my parasol. Henry’s in the parlour; do say hello!’

  Mrs Paterson gave her husband an encouraging nudge on the elbow. He whipped his arm up as if he’d been stung. ‘Go on, dear,’ said Mrs Paterson, ‘do try to be
sociable. He’s quite the politest of boys; and you never know, he might be your son-in-law one of these days. Then you’ll have to talk to him.’

  ‘Henry What’s-his-face for a son-in-law? I’d sooner throw myself in the river. Or, better still, I’d sooner throw him in the river.’

  Nonetheless, Mr Paterson walked through to the parlour, one hand behind his back to cock up his coat-tails, pouting out his moustache for a moment until he remembered how Doris had described him, and saying out loud, ‘Damn! Beaver indeed!’

  Henry was standing in the patterned Saturday-morning sunlight which shone through the embroidered lace curtains. He was holding up an ambrotype of Mr Paterson’s three daughters at a summer picnic; and examining it with an exaggerated frown of interest. He was very tall and noticeably broad-shouldered; at least five inches taller than Mr Paterson, and he always made Mr Paterson feel portly and disarrayed and somehow squeaky. His thick brown hair was brushed straight back, and he sported a small well-clipped moustache, with waxed points which stuck up like the hands of a clock. He was dressy, all right, and Mr Paterson was quite justified in calling him a dude. He wore a buff-coloured tailcoat with maroon silk braiding around it; a high collar as stiff as cardboard with a mother-of-pearl stickpin; and his shoes were what Mr Paterson used to call ‘blasphemously shiny’. Yet, in spite of his style, there was an easy handsomeness about Henry which gave him the look of being justifiably attentive to what he wore, rather than foppish. He had a squarish, well-boned face, with a deeply-cleft chin; and deep-set dark brown eyes, with heavy eyebrows. Mrs Paterson said he reminded her of a good-looking Irish horse thief she had once seen in handcuffs at Essex Junction. Doris said he looked like Michelangelo’s David. Cissy said perhaps he wore a fig-leaf in that case, instead of combinations, and her father had made her sit in her room all afternoon, with no shoo-fly pie.

  ‘Well, good morning, Mr Paterson,’ said Henry, stepping forward and holding out his hand.