The Bride’s House Read online

  “Aunt Lidie is not my daughter.” Charlie leaned back in his chair and added, “I will allow you to go if you have your heart set on it, but think what it would do to me. It would make me unhappy if you were to go away, and I do not think you would want to disappoint me that way.”

  So because she had always put her needs second and because disappointing her father was the last thing Pearl had ever wanted to do, she set aside her hopes for a university education.

  “Perhaps in a year or two when you are older,” Charlie said, but both knew that would never be.

  * * *

  So instead of going away to school, which might have opened up a new world and broken her father’s hold on her, Pearl became Charlie’s secretary. She handled his correspondence and searched through the volumes in his library when he needed information on ore bodies or geological formations. Although she had grown up in a mining town and was familiar with mining terms, she found much of the work foreign to her, and she set about learning what she could about mining in order to better aid her father. She kept Charlie’s accounts for him, and on occasion, she entertained his callers when he was occupied elsewhere. Her father’s associates found her knowledgeable if not especially entertaining.

  Sometimes, Pearl toured mines with Charlie, who pointed out the way a tiny vein of gold was streaked through the host rock and taught her to differentiate between real gold and fool’s gold. Although some of the miners were superstitions about women underground, they did not dare object when the woman in the mine was the daughter of Charles Dumas. Here, Pearl’s lack of artifice held her in good stead. She considered gold to be a commodity, not just a metal used for adornment, so she did not remark, as other women did when shown the workings of a mine, that the vein of ore would make a lovely necklace or teased couldn’t she have enough for a ring. She understood that gold was measured in ounces per ton, or fractions thereof, not in rings and bracelets. The young woman knew that politics and the economy, not just supply and demand, affected the price of precious metals. So the mining men who escorted her along the adits and into the drifts were comfortable with her.

  Moreover, Pearl was not afraid of heights and did not flinch when she climbed into the bucket that lowered the miners and their visitors down the shaft. Nor did she worry about dirtying her skirts in the underground muck. All this made Pearl stand out from other women who were permitted in the mines, although if she had known she was different, Pearl would not have liked it, because she did not care to be noticed.

  Several young men thought of Pearl as a special friend, but not many were attracted to her for romantic reasons. She was plainspoken and direct and far too serious. An older man might find her knowledge of mining to be good conversation, but few men her age cared for moonlight talk about the composition of an ore specimen or how long the ore body at Cripple Creek would last. Those who did court the young woman may have had ulterior motives. They were fortune hunters, or at least that was the impression the girl took from her father. While Charlie did not call them that outright—after all, he loved his daughter and was sensitive of her feelings—he managed to convey to the girl that anyone who came calling was in reality courting an heiress.

  Charlie was not wealthy on the scale of the robber barons in the East, but he was one of the richest men in Colorado. Some of his associates wondered why he remained in Georgetown, which by the turn of the century was deep in a decline from which it was clear it would not recover. Never a major metals producer, Georgetown suffered a devastating loss with the silver crash of 1893, because silver was the primary metal in its mines. When the government stopped backing the price of silver, the value of the metal plunged. Charlie knew what was coming, and he had gotten out of silver when the price was still high, investing his money in gold, copper, and other metals.

  Charlie’s associates thought it odd that he stayed on in the town when he could have bought a mansion in Denver—or in New York, for that matter, because his investments were not confined to Colorado. When asked, Charlie replied that his blood had grown thin in the high country and he’d turn sluggish at a lower altitude. Besides, he said, he was too set in his ways to resettle. Moreover, he told anyone who asked that he had a sentimental attachment to the area where he had made his early fortune. But the truth was that nothing could have lured him away from Nealie’s house, the Bride’s House. He would leave it only when he was carried out in a box and buried beside his wife under the angel in the Alvarado Cemetery.

  * * *

  Charlie kept the Bride’s House in pristine condition, the fanciful trim repaired, the façade painted. He added a fountain in the yard and a fence across the vast expanse of front lawn. A gardener cared for the lilacs and other flowers, kept the grass clipped and the fountain in working order. So it was obvious to anyone who visited Georgetown that the owner of the place was a man of some means. It was also obvious that the big house could accommodate a husband for Pearl, and the young men who did call on her were as aware of that fact as they were of Charlie’s money.

  Among Pearl’s few swains was a young violinist who had opened a music shop in Georgetown. He played duets with Pearl, lavishly praising the young woman’s performance at the piano. While Charlie enjoyed his daughter’s music, he surely knew she was no virtuoso, and he told Pearl the man was a self-seeker.

  “I have come to the same conclusion,” Pearl replied, because she had no interest in spending her life with someone who did not know an ore vein from a violin string. In fact, Pearl had discouraged two or three other would-be suitors on similar grounds, before her father could interfere.

  She thought better of Tom Glendive, the manager of a gold mine in Cripple Creek, who sought her father’s advice on a technical problem. He developed the habit of dropping in on Pearl whenever business brought him to Georgetown, staying for tea and sometimes for supper. Tom was older, somewhere in his thirties, and charming, and he made Pearl laugh.

  “Have you heard of Pat Casey, who discovered the Casey Mine in Central City?” Tom asked as he was sitting at the supper table with Pearl, Charlie, and Mrs. Travers.

  “The dumbest Irishman who ever lived. He carried a gold watch but couldn’t tell the time,” replied Charlie.

  “You have, then.” He turned to Pearl. “He once called into his mine, ‘How many of youse are down there?’ Five, came the reply. Old Pat scratched his head for a minute, then said, ‘Well, half of youse come for a drink.’”

  Pearl laughed out loud, for although she herself was not clever in telling stories, she loved to hear them.

  Another time, as Tom and Pearl sat in the gazebo, he asked if she knew the story of Silver Heels. When Pearl said she didn’t, Tom told her that Silver Hells was a dance-hall girl in Buckskin Joe, a town well to the south of Georgetown. He glanced at Pearl to see if she were offended, for surely she knew that a dance-hall girl was more likely a fallen woman. But Pearl had lived in a mining town all her life, and she accepted prostitutes as a part of Georgetown.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “Silver Heels was named for her shoes, and she was a beauty, a favorite with the miners. Came the smallpox, and all the good women quit the town, leaving only Silver Heels. She stayed to nurse the miners. Her face was the last one many of those poor fellows saw before they left this world. The pox was about done with when Silver Heels caught it, and it destroyed her beautiful face.”

  “Was she killed?” Pearl asked, caught up in the story.

  Tom shrugged. “Who’s to say? But every now and then a woman wearing a heavy veil visits the graves of the men who died. I’ve heard it happens even now.”

  “Do you think she’s Silver Heels?” Pearl asked.

  Tom studied her a moment. “What do you think?”

  “I would like to believe she is.”

  * * *

  Pearl began to look forward to Tom’s visits. He took her for carriage rides and hikes in the mountains, and invited her to visit his mine in Cripple Creek, although Pearl quickly demurr
ed, for she thought such a thing improper. Sometimes he brought boxes of pastries that could not be found in Georgetown, cigars for Charlie, and once he gave Pearl a locket made of gold from his mine. He had not been so bold as to put his own likeness inside, so Pearl fitted it with a picture of her father instead. Pearl found herself thinking of the man when she should have been reading mining journals or working on the accounts, and so it was not long before the infatuation came to Charlie’s attention.

  He said nothing at first, only writing a letter himself and taking it to the post office. Then one night at the supper table, he remarked, “This afternoon at the station I ran into a friend of mine from Butte. He’s a friend of Tom Glendive’s, too.”

  Pearl blushed at the name and stared at her plate. At first she thought Charlie would reveal some bit of flattery about Tom, but something in her father’s casual way of mentioning her suitor made her wary.

  “He’s a nice young man,” Mrs. Travers interjected, “a sticker.” She had once called Charlie that.

  “Not so’s you’d notice. It seems he’s been about a good deal,” Charlie replied. “Pearl, did he ever mention to you he’d worked in the copper mines up in Butte?”

  “Yes,” Pearl replied, playing with her fork as if she knew what was coming.

  “He worked in several mines, or so this fellow told me. Tom was fired from one for high-grading and let go at another for fighting. Seems he hit another miner with a shovel, a fight over a girl, the way the fellow tells it.”

  There was a silence while Pearl stared at her hands. It did not occur to her to speak up for Tom Glendive. She had never contradicted her father for the simple reason that she could not conceive of his being wrong.

  When Pearl didn’t respond, Charlie said, “The girl was Tom’s wife.”

  Pearl looked up sharply.

  Now it was Charlie’s turn to look away. “Of course, there could be an explanation, but the fellow said—”

  Pearl interrupted him. “No need, Papa,” she said.

  Mrs. Travers looked at the girl as if she thought Pearl had the backbone of a caterpillar and wished she would defend the young man or demand to know the truth before she dismissed him. “People tell tales. I thought he was a right smart fellow,” the older woman said. “Most likely the wife’s dead, and he can’t bring himself to talk about her.”

  “No, Papa’s right. I was never especially fond of Mr. Glendive, anyway. He was only an amusement.” She left the table and went into the study, because her eyes had turned bright. She wiped away a tear or two as she sat in her father’s chair, surrounded by the comfortable smell of tobacco and whiskey. She did not wonder that her father had been at home all day and hadn’t ventured to the depot. And later, she was not surprised to find among the bills to be paid an invoice from a detective in Butte.

  The next time Tom called, Pearl told him, “I believe you are wasting your time, Mr. Glendive.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  “I thought you and I—”

  “You have misunderstood,” Pearl said, closing the door in his face.

  * * *

  Over time, Pearl finally realized that Charlie found a way to discourage her interest in any man who courted her. But she did not question her father, because she was sure that he was only looking out for her. She believed that someday she would find a man who suited both Charlie and herself and did not give the matter a great deal of thought, although she was growing beyond the age when most women married. Mrs. Travers, perhaps, understood that Charlie was unlikely to approve of any man who courted his daughter. “Pearl’s almost twice as old as Nealie was when you met her. You ought not to stand in the way of her finding a husband,” she told Charlie.

  “I’m not,” he replied, warning, “It’s not your business.”

  “It is. I raised up that girl from the day she was born.”

  Charlie gave her a long look and didn’t reply. He was not predictable when it came to Nealie and Pearl, and perhaps Mrs. Travers feared a rare explosion of his temper, which could stir up hell with a long spoon. So she said no more.

  There was no reason, then, to think that when Frank Curry began to court Pearl, he would be any more successful than her other suitors.

  Frank was an exceptionally good-looking man. When Pearl opened the door and found him standing on the porch, she felt her breath stop in her throat, and she reached for the cameo at her neck. It wouldn’t do to let the man know she had reacted so, and Pearl swallowed twice and opened the screen, asking if he had come to see her father. Charlie was away but expected back at any moment, she explained.

  The man removed his hat and introduced himself, saying he was indeed looking for Charlie, and would she mind if he waited. He could sit on the porch.

  “Oh no,” Pearl breathed. “Please do come inside.” The man entered the house and followed Pearl through Charlie’s study into the parlor. They stood for a moment beside the library table, where Mrs. Travers had placed a white pitcher of lilacs. “I smelled them when I came up the walk—Chinese lilacs. They have the sweetest smell,” he said.

  Pearl nodded and touched one of the purple bunches. She moved the stems around a little in the jar. She had seen other women arranging flowers, standing as if in a tableau, but she herself was not any good at either placing the boughs or posing. Still, she played with the flowers, because she did not know what else to do with her hands. In a moment, she realized the man was still standing and asked him to be seated. “Would you like a cup of tea?” He said he would if it wasn’t any trouble.

  “No trouble,” Pearl breathed, and fled into the kitchen to calm herself. She added kindling to the banked fire in the cookstove, then poured water into the kettle, setting it on the stove to boil. She took out the tea things, the cups and saucers and the silver teapot, set them on a tray, then took down the tin of tea and measured out the leaves. When the water boiled, she filled the teapot and carried the tray into the parlor and set it on the table next to the lilacs.

  “It makes a very pretty picture, the silver against the purple and the white,” Frank told her. Another man might have flattered Pearl by adding that she was a part of the pretty picture, but that would have embarrassed the girl, knowing it was not true. So the young man was wise not to say too much. Pearl sat on one of the horsehair love seats and gestured to Frank to take the other. He set down his hat and walking stick and seated himself.

  Pearl hated times like this, when she was expected to be clever and charming, engage in superficial talk, and usually, she was mute. At that moment she felt acutely her inability to make small talk. She sat stiffly, clasping and unclasping her hands, pondering and discarding possible subjects for conversation.

  “You may be wondering why I called,” the man said at last, and Pearl nodded, although she hadn’t. She was used to men requesting her father’s advice. “I’ve come to ask Mr. Dumas’s opinion about molybdenite. Do you know of it?”

  “Oh,” Pearl said, forgetting her shyness. “I have just learned about the ore molybdenite—I believe the metal is called molybdenum, is it not?—and I’ve wondered what possible good it is.”

  “Oh.” The man seemed surprised that she should have heard of the mineral. “And you can pronounce it correctly, too.”

  “Why shouldn’t I pronounce it correctly?” Pearl asked, surprised.

  “Most women can’t.”

  “I never saw the sense of being ignorant about a thing.”

  “Other women wouldn’t agree.”

  Pearl blushed, wishing she weren’t always so frank, but that was the way she was. “What’s the good of it?”

  “Of not agreeing?”

  “Of molybdenite.”

  “Ah, that’s the question, isn’t it? That’s why I’ve come to see your father.”

  Pearl wondered if the remark meant the man didn’t want to talk about molybdenite with her, so she stood abruptly. “I’ve forgotten the tea. It should be ready.”
She poured the tea into cups and set them on saucers, handing one to Frank, then held out the spooner and sugar bowl.

  He shook his head and waited until Pearl returned to her seat before he sipped his tea. Pearl held hers in her lap. She did not especially care for tea, although she found sitting in the parlor in the late afternoon with her father, over the teacups, to be a pleasant habit. It was something they did often, a time she cherished, because she liked nothing more than being with him. “You know about mining, then?” he asked.

  “A little.”

  “I should say more than a little.”

  Pearl shrugged, and the two were silent, Pearl embarrassed at her lack of social grace. Frank finished his tea, then stood and began to examine the objects in the room. At the same time, Pearl studied him. That he was handsome, she had already observed, but now she saw that he was well formed, slim in the hips with broad shoulders. He wore his clothes casually, like her father, but his suit was well fitted and pressed, not wrinkled like Charlie’s clothing. Pearl liked the man’s manner; he was sure of himself although not cocky. She thought it odd that while she was ill at ease in the room she had known all her life, he was comfortable.

  Frank went to the ore case and picked up a chunk of rock and held it out to Pearl, a question on his face.

  “Cripple Creek. The Gold Coin,” she identified it.

  He selected another specimen, and she said, “A mine in Russia. Someone sent it to Papa. The quartz in it is odd, don’t you think?”

  “Unusual. I saw one like it at school. Did you go to college?”

  Pearl shook her head, knowing now that not continuing her education had been a mistake.

  “Oh, I thought maybe you’d attended the Colorado School of Mines in Golden.” It was a little joke, since women were not allowed to enroll in Mines. Pearl was not used to being the subject of a joke, however, and she thought Frank might be making fun of her. She frowned, so as if to reassure her, Frank said, “You could have gone. I’d bet you know more about mining than any girl I ever met.”