The butler again took my card and retired within, and this time opened the door for me to enter.
Amelia and her mother were seated in the parlor, Amelia bright-faced with her halo of curls, rising to greet me. Her mother, formidably bosomed, with a sour expression of disapproval and anxiety, remained seated as I was led to her.
“How do you do, Mr. Redmond. Do we have you to thank for this police gentleman on our porch?”
I said they did.
“Is it because my daughter has been followed?”
“That is part of it.”
Mrs. Brittain left the room to call for tea, and I was alone with Amelia.
“The poor creature!” she said.
“She was the one Mr. McNair was attached to.”
“Yes!”
“He was attached to you also, you see.”
Her mouth opened, but she did not speak. Her eyebrows climbed her forehead.
“Was the murdered woman the reason you broke off the engagement?”
She wet her lips. “My father insisted that the engagement be ended.” She was gripping her arms against her waist as though she was cold, elbows jutting.
I did not know how to pursue that. I had been assured that Beau McNair was eminently eligible. Lady Caroline’s millions!
“Miss Brittain, what did you mean in your note, your shadow? Your mother said you had been followed.”
“A man has followed me on several occasions.”
“What does he look like?”
“I was not able to see his features. He wore a hat that concealed his face.”
“A big man, older?”
“I think he is young. I would not call him big.”
“I don’t want to alarm you,” I said. “But you must be very careful not to be alone! Maybe it is best that you are alarmed,” I added.
“Be assured that I am!”
“You are aware that Mr. McNair has not been arrested?”
She nodded, her eyes fixed on my face.
Mrs. Brittain marched back in, preceding a maid with a tea tray.
“Cream and sugar, Mr. Redmond?”
Mr. Brittain joined us for tea, a lanky, limping fellow of about sixty, tailored in black broadcloth, arranging his coattails with a flair as he seated himself. Amelia favored her greyhound father more than her bulldog mother. We sipped tea and discussed the policeman on the porch. Amelia and Mrs. Brittain were nervous, but Mr. Brittain seemed not much concerned. He invited me to his study to view his collection of gold nuggets.
His limp, like the limps I had observed in Virginia City, reminded me that Mr. Brittain had been a mining engineer on the Washoe, and of the connection of Brittain to English.
The nuggets were in a glass case, gleaming twisted shapes, a couple of them quite large. I told him I had been in Virginia City last week, and he directed me to a leather chair and offered me a cigar from a humidor.
“Josey Devers!” he said, puffing smoke. “How was the rascal?”
I said Devers looked as though a lot of whiskey had been absorbed.
“It is a dying camp, certainly. It was very lively once!”
“Devers spouted figures of silver production and stock manipulations.”
Mr. Brittain snorted. “I don’t think there was a miner in the place who wasn’t speculating. I can tell you who the winners were, Will O’Brien, Jamey Flood, John Mackay, Fair, Sharon, Nat McNair.”
I asked if he recalled a group of investors called the Society of Spades.
He had a ritual of movements with his cigar, flourishing it, moistening it, drawing it beneath his nose, holding it up like a signal. This completed, he shook his head.
“They bought the Jack of Spades Mine.”
“Oh, the Consolidated-Ohio, yes.”
“I was told that Lady Caroline Stearns had disposed of her interest in the Consolidated-Ohio.”
“I know that is true.”
I hurried on: “It seemed there was some finagling over the discovery of a new orebody, so that she received a better price than may have been warranted. Devers called it an ‘English shuffle.’ ”
He went through his tobacco ritual again, sniffing his cigar before replacing it between his teeth. He regarded me brightly. “Carrie has always landed on her feet,” he said.
I couldn’t press him about the English shuffle because I was in love with his daughter.
“Highgrade Carrie seems to have been highly regarded in Virginia City,” I said.
Mr. Brittain frowned with reminiscence. “She was an angel in her time.”
“Devers referred to her as the Miners’ Angel.”
“She was that, she was indeed that.” Mr. Brittain nodded, his eyes hooded. “I cannot explain, I don’t think, just what a place like Virginia City is like when a camp is at full flood. The frustration, the terrible, dangerous labor in the mines. The fires, the heat, the cave-ins. The hopes; the dashed hopes! The lack of any kind of loyalty or disinterested affection. Dog-eat-dog. With no respite! Carrie was able to furnish respite. Certainly she was a madam, a woman of ill-repute. Well, you had better not call her a woman of ill-repute to anyone who was in Virginia City in her time there! She was the only touch of grace, of human feeling, of beauty—a reminder that there were, elsewhere, civilized ways of living, civilized occupations, people who intermingled with a civilized code of conduct. She was the reminder of all that. She was the sweet-smelling bouquet flourishing in a sewer! I tell you, when Carrie walked down the boardwalks of C Street, there was not a hat that did not come off a miner’s head!
“I believe she came to Virginia City to make a living selling her body and discovered that she had a higher calling. The Miners’ Fund for disabled miners; it was Carrie who started it, contributed to it, shamed others into contributing. The Miners’ Angel! Not just the Miners’ Fund. There were a hundred other ways she helped those poor men to remember they were human beings with human emotions, fears, loves, affections, decent aspirations.”
I had opened a faucet when I had brought up the subject of Lady Caroline. I asked about the woman named Julia Bulette.
“A lesser Carrie LaPlante,” he said. “A prostitute, but a decent woman.” But he was still full of Highgrade Carrie.
“In the end she married Nat McNair and became a millionairess,” he said. “There are some to begrudge it. I am not one.”
He tapped his ash into a glass tray. “I cannot be so complimentary of her son, however. Not to say that he is in any way involved in these gruesome murders. He and Amelia were great friends when they were children, but I understand she has returned his engagement ring.”
At her father’s insistence, according to Amelia. Maybe Mr. Brittain was aware of Beau’s frequenting of women of ill-repute and of the circumstances that kept reinvolving him with the murders of prostitutes.
“I have heard a rumor that he was not McNair’s son,” I said. “That he was adopted after McNair married Mrs. McNair.”
He scowled more deeply, as though I had insulted the Miners’ Angel.
“Two who might have begrudged her good fortune would be Spades who were cheated out of their shares in the Jack of Spades by the McNairs,” I said.
“Ah, well,” Mr. Brittain said. “I’m afraid that was the order of business on the Washoe.”
“There was a gunman—Devers called him an enforcer—who worked for McNair. Elza Klosters.”
“The threat of violence was of course a valid option in a mining camp, you know. Miners’ Law!”
I mentioned the murder of the man Gorton, but Mr. Brittain did not seem interested. His memories of Highgrade Carrie had been kindled.
“Someone—I can’t remember who. Sharon? Yes, Sharon. A considerable sum of money was offered to the Miners’ Fund if Carrie would do a Lady Godiva. Ride a white horse naked down C Street, on a Sunday. By God, she did it! She was a vision. Her pretty hair, beautiful hair! Her beautiful flesh! By God, she did it just right, not forward but shy, but proud too—of what she was doing! And the men cheering and waving their caps. Not in any way that was disrespectful, and not turning away like the townspeople in the Lady Godiva story either. By God, they watched Carrie ride that white horse down the middle of C Street and I will swear to you that not a man there ever forgot what he saw that day. And not a woman any of them ever saw thereafter in the altogether who didn’t suffer by the comparison!”