Railroad Read online

  ‘I don’t understand why you even wanted to.’

  Makepeace returned to his desk and sat himself down. He rubbed his eyes and sighed. ‘I’m not a young man, Collis. My liver is weak, and I can’t continue to work for very many more years. I wanted to make a few hundred thousand to safeguard my retirement, that was all, and ensure that your mother could live in the kind of luxury to which she is accustomed.’

  He paused for a moment, tugging at his moustache, and then he said, ‘This country is in for some bad times ahead. Maybe sooner, maybe later, I don’t know. But if the North continues to bait and persecute the South, the South is going to strike back, and that’s going to mean lean times for us all. I just wanted to make some financial hay while the sun was still shining, to store some feed up for the future.’

  Collis sat down again too, and watched his father with increasing sadness.

  ‘I guess, to be truthful, I was seeking some selfish excitement out of the speculation, too,’ said Makepeace. ‘All my life I’ve been known as a safe, middle-of-the-highway banker. I’ve been careful, and scrupulously honest, and circumspect. Mr Six Per Cent! But anyone who’s spent most of his working life in Wall Street knows what it is to take a financial risk, and win. To pull off the clever coup, that nobody else was on to, or to hold the far-sighted investment that suddenly pays off one thousand times over. Well, I suppose I wanted to do something like that just once before I thought of retiring, so that the Curb would have something to remember me by.’

  ‘You and I, we’re more alike than we even know,’ said Collis, so softly that he wasn’t even sure that his father had heard him.

  Makepeace lifted a piece of paper and then let it fall back to his desk again. ‘As it turned out, I invested in a bubble,’ he said. ‘A damned worthless scheme for building a railroad out of Sacramento, the Sacramento Valley Railroad, coupled with a so-called gold mine that turned out to be the richest vein of iron pyrites in the whole state. Fool’s gold, appropriately named. There were other speculations as well, on land and commodities, and I salvaged a few thousand dollars out of a sugar deal, but on the whole the bank and I were thoroughly scalped.’

  ‘Does Mother know?’ asked Collis.

  Makepeace shook his head. There were tears in his eyes, and he brushed them away with the cuff of his smoking jacket.

  Collis leaned back in his chair. ‘I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know what I could possibly do to help.’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said Makepeace. ‘I’m going to try to work out a scheme for saving the bank, and I’ll probably present it to my board tomorrow. They may force me to quit, or they may give me a chance to undo the damage I’ve done. It’s all up to me. As far as you’re concerned – well, I’ve told you what’s happened, and you’ve got a pretty fair idea of what could happen, and you’ll just have to be more careful with your spending money.’

  Collis stayed where he was for a few minutes, while his father went back to his hurried, scratchy writing. He closed his eyes, and he could hear skritch-skritch-skritch and then a rattling sound as his father dipped into the silver inkpot. He didn’t know whether he felt furious or sorrowful. He could understand what his father meant about the exhilaration of coups on the stock market, because he was a habitual gambler himself. But there was a difference between gambling away your allowance and gambling away your entire family fortune, particularly when that family fortune was keeping Collis in clothes, faro stakes, stone fences, and women. He couldn’t imagine what Ida was going to say when she found out.

  Collis opened his eyes and watched his father for a while. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better be going,’ he said. ‘I mustn’t be late for my dinner party, after all. And I’m sure you’ve got enough work to keep you busy.’

  Makepeace looked up. ‘You won’t tell your mother? Not until I know what’s going to happen, one way or another.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said his father. ‘I have somebody looking for your lobster, you know. An old friend of mine from Belfast, Maine. He promised to send it down on ice as soon as he could.’

  Collis took a last look around the paper-strewn library, the wreckage of his father’s career, before he went out without another word and closed the doors behind him.

  He arrived outside the Spooners’ house on Second Avenue the following afternoon, just as the bells of St Mark’s Church were beginning to ring a peal. He rode his own dappled pony, Dollar, and led behind him his sleekly groomed chestnut, Hopeful. He was dressed in a dark-green cutaway coat and tight buff riding pants, with gloriously polished brown boots and a dark-green curly-brimmed hat. He still had a pounding headache from Eli Jacobs’s dinner party, and his lean face was markedly paler than usual.

  Outside the Spooners’ fashionable brownstone on the corner of Twelfth Street, under a plane tree, a black stablehand in a white shirt and knee breeches was already holding an elderly-looking grey, which Collis presumed would be ridden by Delphine’s chaperone. He closed his eyes for a moment and prayed that she wouldn’t be too ugly. He wasn’t sure that his aching eyeballs could take it.

  Collis dismounted and handed the reins of his horses to the boy. Then he mounted the steps to the black-painted front door and knocked. While he waited, he looked along the length of the avenue, up towards Stuyvesant Square, watching the carriages and the hacks rattling between the tree-lined sidewalks. It was a warm, close afternoon, and the air was filled with dust, and with sparkling chaff from dried horse manure.

  At length the front door was opened by a lugubrious footman with shiny bear’s-greased hair, who showed Collis into the empty, echoing hallway and then into a small anteroom which smelled of stale pot-pourri. He was requested to wait, and he sat tapping his riding crop against his glossy boot, looking around at glass domes of dried flowers and stuffed birds.

  The afternoon sunlight filtered through layers of lace curtains, and he yawned in the cloyingly sweet air. Eli’s party had turned into the usual drunken debacle, with Eli walking along the table-top imitating a pelican, and the foreign composer who was his guest falling asleep behind the settee. Collis was beginning to wish he had suggested to Delphine some gentler way of spending the afternoon, like playing checkers.

  It wasn’t long before he heard the rustling of skirts, and the diminutive Winifred Spooner appeared, all purple satin and fuss, followed by Delphine and a quite pleasant-looking brunette girl dressed in grey.

  Collis rose and took Mrs Spooner’s hand. But it was Delphine whom he was watching as he kissed Winifred’s rings. She looked prettier than she had on Thursday, if that was possible; far prettier in the flesh than in his memory. She wore a plumed black hat and a riding coat of black linen, fastened with grey frogging. Her full black riding skirt was decorated with black silk fringes. The severity of her clothes only served to emphasise her beauty, however, and with her soft, radiant skin and her compelling eyes, she looked to Collis like the perfect female creature about whom every man dreamed.

  ‘You have met Delphine, of course,’ said Winifred. Collis bowed and kissed Delphine’s black-gloved hand.

  ‘This,’ said Winifred, ‘is Delphine’s cousin from Baltimore, Miss Alice Stride.’

  Alice Stride nodded. Her nose was rather too large for her face, but her eyes had that expression of human sympathy and intelligence that Collis looked for in friends. She would plainly make some man an astonishing wife one day, and meanwhile, with luck, she would probably make a discreet and obliging chaperone.

  ‘I’m honoured to make your acquaintance, Miss Stride,’ said Collis. ‘Are you related, by chance, to any of those Strides who have done so well in Congress?’

  ‘My father is Senator William Stride, sir,’ replied Alice boldly.

  Collis stared back at her, amused. ‘Then we shall have plenty to argue about.’

  Delphine asked, ‘Have you brought Hopeful, Mr Edmonds? The mare you promised to lend me?’

  ‘She’s right outside,’ said Collis. ‘In her o
wn way, she’s looking as groomed and as sweet-tempered as you are.’

  He turned to Winifred and added, ‘Mostly, when I meet a pretty and charming girl, I find it difficult to discern from her parents how she acquired her looks and her manner. But I only have to look at you, Mrs Spooner, to see where Delphine’s inheritance came from.’

  Winifred went slightly pink, gave a silly little girlish laugh, and then said, ‘Will you take sherry before you ride?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Delphine. ‘Let’s be off at once!’

  ‘Mr Edmonds?’ asked Winifred.

  Collis shook his head politely. Even that small shake was enough to revive his dull headache. ‘I am not a great drinker of wine, Mrs Spooner,’ he told her.

  Winifred fussed them all to the door, where the black stableboy brought up their horses and a set of wooden steps for the ladies to mount. Collis held Hopeful’s bridle and stroked her nose while Delphine arranged herself on the mare’s saddle, her legs elegantly crossed under her black-fringed skirts, her narrow ankles temptingly sheathed in polished black-leather riding boots.

  ‘Miss Spooner, you look a picture,’ said Collis. ‘I hope I can remember for ever how you look at this moment.’

  Delphine gave him a fey, pretty smile. ‘There will be many other times to remember, I trust.’

  ‘Now then, Delphine,’ said Alice, mounting her grey, ‘I’m supposed to be your chaperone. And that means no forwardness of any kind.’

  ‘Is it forward to wish happy times on yourself?’ asked Delphine.

  ‘The way you do it it is,’ retorted Alice.

  Collis climbed on to Dollar, and with a wave to Winifred Spooner, the three of them trotted close together uptown, through Stuyvesant Square, where the trees shimmered in the sunlight, and three men in shabby evening coats and string-tied pants played German festival tunes on trumpets and fiddles. The brassy off-key music echoed and faded as they turned west on Seventeenth Street and then turned uptown again on Third Avenue.

  ‘I have been thinking of you, Collis,’ said Delphine, as they rode side by side.

  ‘And I have been thinking of you,’ he replied. He looked across at her and was captivated by the way she sat so upright in the saddle, her black plumes bobbing in the summer breeze.

  She turned to him. ‘Pleasant thoughts, I hope?’

  ‘Delightful. And yours?’

  ‘Becoming, in the extreme.’

  ‘I’m beginning to feel left out of this already,’ Alice said, with a wry smile.

  Collis raised his hat to her. ‘The fate of all chaperones, I regret. But do tell me how your father is keeping.’

  ‘As intent on preserving slavery as ever, if that’s what you mean,’ said Alice.

  ‘And you agree with him?’

  Alice made a moue. ‘It’s not as simple as it seems. The whole of Southern life would change so much if the slaves were to be freed. Everything for which the Southerners have given their lives would be lost. My father, for one. How could he run his cotton plantations without slaves?’

  ‘Your father may have given a great deal,’ Collis pointed out. ‘But he has also received a great deal in return. He is a very rich man these days, by all accounts.’

  ‘Rich, but very agreeable,’ said Delphine. ‘In fact, Alice’s father is almost my favourite uncle.’

  ‘Is he in New York now?’ asked Collis.

  Alice nodded. ‘He goes back to Washington next Wednesday. Why, did you wish to meet him?’

  ‘I would be honoured. Could you arrange it?’

  They rode northward, past country houses and derelict Dutch farms, as far as Fifty-ninth Street, where they turned westward again towards Central Park. Along the south side of Central Park, with their stove chimneys smoking in the faint wind that blew from the Hudson, stood untidy rows of ramshackle shanties, where dirty children played, and where hard-eyed men and women stood at their doors or paused in their scratchy gardens to watch the wealthy ride by. Collis rode protectively close to Delphine and Alice as they descended the rocky slope to the lake and passed along the muddy bridle paths between the bushes.

  When they reached the shoreline, they dismounted, the two young ladies slipping down from their saddles with exquisite aplomb, and they walked along the water’s edge and talked.

  Discreetly, Alice fell a little behind, so that Delphine and Collis could talk alone. The three of them, and their horses, were reflected in the lake as they walked, and the day passed, hot and clear, over their heads. From the far side of the lake, their voices sounded muted and languorous, mingling with the hum of insects and the chip-chipping of thrushes.

  Collis said, ‘Are you forward by nature, or is it a game you like to play?’

  Delphine smiled. ‘I’m not really forward. I’m just inquisitive. There seems to be so much that young ladies are not allowed to know.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, anatomy, and things of that kind.’

  ‘Anatomy can be quite tedious.’

  Delphine gave him another of her dreamy, short-sighted looks. ‘It depends on whose, I suppose?’

  Collis coughed. He had never been spoken to like this by any young lady before in his life, whores excepted, and he found it both unsettling and arousing. If she persisted in discussing ‘anatomy, and things of that kind’, he wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to keep his composure, particularly since his riding breeches were so tight. He brought Dollar to a halt and reached out for Delphine’s hand. She paused, and then gave it to him.

  ‘You look distressed,’ she said. ‘What have I done to distress you?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing. But I’m disturbed by your conversation. Wouldn’t it be better if we talked about something else, like art, or women’s rights, or how they’re going to improve this dreadful park?’

  ‘Instead of anatomy, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But, Collis,’ she said coquettishly, ‘I know all about art, and I know as much as I want to know about the Amazons, and I was reading only yesterday what the city plans to do with the park. I want to talk about love, and the emotions of love.’

  ‘Delphine,’ Collis told her, ‘I think you’re the most appealing young lady I’ve met in my whole life. But we must consider the proprieties.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Well, because we must! We hardly know each other. We’ve talked for a half-hour over a plate of lemon ice, and that’s all. People don’t discuss topics of anatomy until they’re married, and not often then.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ she said, continuing along the path and leading Hopeful after her.

  ‘I surprise you?’ he said, following her.

  ‘I thought you were a man of the world. A sophisticate. I thought I might learn something from you.’

  ‘I surprise you? Miss Spooner, you surprise me! I have never discussed such things with a lady before, ever. When I’m with ladies, I talk about riding, and how beautiful it is in South Carolina at this time of year, and sewing. I don’t come out as bold as brass and talk about anatomy.’

  Delphine stopped again and turned to face him. He looked down at her, and whatever he felt about her frisky and wayward spirit, he knew that he could never resist her prettiness. A little way behind them, Alice stopped as well and studiously looked out towards the lake.

  Delphine held out her hand and said, ‘You may kiss me.’

  Collis swallowed. He glanced all around him, but there was nobody in sight, and it was quite plain that Alice wasn’t going to turn around for ten dollars.

  Delphine said, ‘Come along. You may kiss me.’

  He found himself breathing harder than he wanted to. He stood close to her, and she was so tiny that her plumed hat reached only up to his chest. Holding the reins of his pony in one hand, he gently lifted her chin with the other, feeling how soft her skin was, and he gazed down into those wide hazel eyes in pleased bewilderment. Delphine’s lips were moist, and slightly parted, and he could see the white tips of her
teeth.

  ‘I don’t understand you at all,’ he said hoarsely.

  She smiled. ‘You don’t have to understand me. Just kiss me.’

  Hesitantly, he bent his head and touched his lips to hers.

  ‘That’s not a kiss,’ she whispered. ‘Kiss me the way you kiss your strumpets.’

  He froze. A fleeting, upsetting thought passed through his mind, the half-seen vision of something difficult and extraordinary. It had some connection with Kathleen Mary falling off the parapet, some link with what he had thought when he had seen her lying on the sidewalk, broken and hurt. Whores were not only whores, but people. Real women, with real lives. Was it possible, then, that they were sisters under the skin with ladies? Could ladies be whorish, too?

  ‘I can’t wait here all afternoon, sir,’ Delphine said playfully.

  Collis kissed her, not as deeply as he would have kissed a whore, always provided her teeth were sound, but with considerable tenderness and affection. Then he stood straight and looked at her for a long time without saying a word.

  ‘You’re very handsome,’ she said. ‘I believe I could grow to love you.’

  ‘You don’t even know me.’

  ‘I know. But I don’t believe I have to.’

  They carried on walking. Alice, behind them, was trilling a song about a lover and his lass. Delphine glanced back and gave Alice a wave.

  ‘Do I frighten you?’ Delphine asked Collis.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Do I alarm you?’

  He shrugged. ‘A little.’

  ‘I suppose I get my personality from my grandmother. She was one of the great lady pioneers, you know. In 1796, she was the first lady to ride in John Fitch’s steamboat, on the Collect Pond. They say she was a terror, and that she used to scare her suitors so much that two of them emigrated back to England for fear of her.’

  ‘You’re a terror yourself. But a beautiful terror.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I don’t really mean to be. It’s just that I find gentlemen so interesting, provided they’re not stuffy, and I’ve always wanted to know what it is that makes them so. Is it their freedom to drink what they like, and ride where they will? Or is it their freedom to lie with whores? Is it something that I could share?’