Heiress (23 page)

Hudson came with the place. Once a miner, he bore the years of frustration in his baggy eyes, the bow of his back, and knobby worn hands. He had long ago lost his dwindling silver claim to a pair of jumpers who paid off the sheriff’s vigilante crew of bone-breakers for protection. Esme had peeled him off her front steps, where, like a dog, he’d returned as if lost.

She’d finally offered him a job—in return for sobriety. He kept his promise on Sundays through Thursdays.

But the man could fix anything, especially a broken vise or elevator bar, and defended her as if she might be his own daughter.

“I can’t help it, Hud. I have to read the
Press.”

“Put it down. You know it ain’t nothing but gossip.”

“Only page four is gossip. The rest is the same news we print. Except this.” She turned the paper to the front page, flipped it onto the counter. Pointed to the article. “President Roosevelt is coming to town.”

Hudson, wearing a pair of overalls that betrayed the night’s scurry to put their five-hundred circulation paper to bed, leaned over and read the article. “I voted for the reverend.” He pushed the paper back to her. “Don’t get upset now, Miss Essie. Folks around here don’t care about no president coming to visit.”

“Of course they do, Hud. It’s the closest thing we have to royalty. Back in New York, there’d be balls and dinners and parades—”

“There ain’t none of that here.”

Indeed. The last party she’d attended had been a social at the Copper Valley mining camp. If one didn’t count, of course, the many wakes she’d attended, mostly out of courtesy, as a member of the press. Eulogies never seemed as lively as when told by a man with a glass of whiskey in his grip.

It seemed, however, everyone loved a good obit, and she hated the fact that a mine catastrophe meant a run into the black for her paper.

She wanted the hard news. Something that caused a rush on the paper. Something that put her in the big leagues.

Something her father might somehow see, read first sentence to last. Let himself realize that he’d been wrong.

Maybe even ask her to return.

She got up, wiping her grimy hands on her wool pants, hazarding a glance in the tarnished mirror. She’d streaked ink along her jaw.

Hud seemed to be reading her mind because from behind her, he handed over a handkerchief. It seemed clean and she did her best to wipe off the residue of her profession. “If I could just get an interview with the president, imagine how many copies we could sell. We could print double runs, maybe get ourselves some scratch money to pay for a folding machine.”

Not to mention newsprint and ink. And someday she should tally up how much she owed Ruby for her photographs. And bookkeeping. And compositing.

She handed back the handkerchief, ready to crawl under the counter and sleep for a week.

No wonder her father obsessed about Pulitzer’s
World.
No wonder he’d been so desperate to sell Esme off for a final grasp at their fortune.

She might have sold herself if she knew just how much a newspaper could consume a man—or woman’s soul. Her paper had become her child.

Her husband.

Her family.

The
Copper Valley Times
just might be her very heartbeat.

“Arty and his brother are out back, ready to start filling in the newsstands,” Hud said.

“Perfect. Will you run a bundle out to the camp?”

He pocketed his handkerchief. “If you promise to get some shut-eye. And don’t bother tellin’ me that you aren’t exhausted—you look like you spent a week huddled up with a bottle of whiskey.”

“I don’t drink, Hud, you know that. But thanks for the honesty.”

Hud winked at her, tease in his expression, and headed into the pressroom. Or file library. Or loading dock. Sometimes, when scrutinizing her two-room operation, and laying it beside her father’s glorious Chronicle Building with the angelic clock…well, she’d left divine providence long behind in New York when she traveled out west, in search of some elusive independence that had nearly starved her that first year.

She’d survived however. Barely, but with enough to keep herself and Hud fed. Enough to hire Ruby. And someday she’d file for a homestead claim, build a house, and move out of the room upstairs, next to Ruby’s.

The bell above the door jangled and like clockwork, Agnes O’Shaunessy billowed in, her red hair braided under a wide-brimmed hat, ostrich feathers tufted at the crown. She had tucked herself into a Sears & Roebuck day dress as if she fancied herself a lady, despite the mud-caked cowboy boots. Now she slapped a list down on the bar. “I got a fresh crop of catalog women needing husbands.”

Esme reached under the bar, pulled out a manila envelope, pressed a copy of her folded
Times
into it. “Agnes, we’ve been through this. The
Cop
per Valley Times
is not a social page. I am not going to advertise your mail-order brides like they were parasols, or Heinz 57 ketchup.”

“Parasols?”

“I’m not selling your women for you.”

Agnes’s mouth dropped. “I’ll have you know I screen every single one of these men who come calling. And I hardly make any profit off my troubles. But the fact is, these women have come out west to secure themselves a happily ever after, and there are plenty of lonely men here needing a good wife.”

Esme sealed the envelope. “They need someone to get the soot and grime off their pants is what they need. And tell them to shave. And maybe even get a haircut. They can get that from Cats Alley. Thank you, but I’m not in the business of selling women to the highest bidder in search of a wife. They’ll only shackle her to a life of poverty, fear, and an early death.”

“They need someone to come home to after a day twelve hundred feet under the earth, smelling the stench of hell and facing the grim reaper with only a hardhat, a lamp, and a hammer is what.”

Esme looked up at the tremor in Agnes’s voice, drew in a long breath. Agnes looked away fast, pressed manicured nails under her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Agnes. That came out wrong.” Two years after Agnes’s husband’s accident, and the wounds on her expression seemed as fresh as when Esme watched the company men lower her Clancy into the earth. Lines of grief whittled into Agnes’s face made her seem decades instead of only two years older than Esme.

Only, perhaps that’s exactly how Esme had appeared when she’d arrived in Silver City. Lined. Desperate, and more than a little ready to take on the world and make sure she never got hurt again.

“I just don’t abide arranged marriages, is all,” Esme finally said, trying for an explanation.

Agnes drew a long breath. “I think you don’t abide love. Look at you, a single girl, out here for the past five years—”

“Seven, Agnes. I’ve been here seven years.”

“Long enough to find yourself a husband, maybe have a few children.”

Esme came around the counter, wishing away, for a moment, her finishing school lessons. She wanted to snap back at Agnes—
Maybe I don’t get
a second chance at love. Maybe I had my opportunity and lost it.

But none of those words emerged. Instead, she smiled. Esme tried to soften her voice, add compassion to it. “I know you believe you are helping these girls, and perhaps I have judged you too quickly. But as long as I’m the owner, and the editor of the
Copper Valley Times,
I cannot print your advertisement.”

Agnes grabbed up the list. “Fine. You may write fancy articles, Miss Essie Stewart, but you haven’t a clue how to run a business. See you at the church social on Sunday.”

She turned and marched out, rattling the pane of glass behind her, the gold C
OPPER
V
ALLEY
T
IMES
etching on the door obscuring her exit.

“You know, Agnes has a good heart. She’s matched half the men in town—or at least, the good ones.” Ruby came down the stairs. Dressed in a split skirt and shirtwaist and with her hair in two long braids, she looked as fresh and bright as the day she marched into Esme’s office and begged for work.

She needed a job before she got married off to a man twice her age. Or worse. But what choices did an orphan girl have out here in the unforgiving West? Until that moment, when Esme had seen her quick, wounded smile, Ruby considered her only commodities her long chestnut hair, golden brown eyes, and the fact she knew every miner that worked the Silverthread Mine. Which meant she also knew how to sniff out a story.

Esme had dropped a camera in her hand and put her to work.

“Agnes O’Shaunessy is running nothing more than a glorified brothel. Or a mercantile where the women are merchandise.”

“Agnes is a good God-fearing woman who specializes in matters of the heart. Nothing but conversation and parlor games are permitted. Believe me, before Agnes took it over, the O’Donnells had a very different purpose for the place. You should give her credit for cleaning up the town.”

“Right alongside Sheriff Toole.”

Ruby picked up the envelope, studied the address on the front. Shook her head. “Take it from me, the 3-7-77 vigilante squad put the fear into the highway robbers. Whether the sheriff’s at the heart of the vigilantes or not, they’ve made the ride from Butte to Silver City survivable.” She held up the envelope. “When are you going to stop sending these?”

Esme took it from her hand. “Go find me a big story for next week’s paper. I need something that will sell ads.”

“The Copper Camp is having their annual miners’ dance in a few weeks. I’m sure I could come up with a list of women needing dates. Or perhaps a recipe or two.”

“Ruby, please—I need news. I’m not running a gossip magazine here. If I hope to compete with the
Butte Press,
I need to scoop them with something hard-hitting.”

“We’re not the
New York Chronicle,”
Ruby said softly.

Esme drew in a breath. Caught a glimpse of herself in the tarnished mirror, recognizing the blue eyes, the wisps of blond hair pulled back with a lanyard. The rest of her—from the men’s pants to the boots—seemed like something she’d only read about in one of her dime novels.

She picked up the envelope, grabbed her hat, something bequeathed to her from under the dusty bar, and headed for the post office. “No, we’re not the
Chronicle.”
She stopped at the door, her hand on the brass handle, staring at her inverted freshly painted lettering. “But with the right story, we could be.”

* * * * *

Sometimes, like now, Esme could hardly believe she lived on the edge of the frontier, in a country where she hid a pearl-handle revolver in her desk, where she rode a horse—not sidesaddle—and where she’d become a woman she’d dreamed up in the back of her Fifth Avenue mind.

But Silver City was most definitely not Fifth Avenue. Corralled in a thumbprint alpine valley, edged on all sides by a rough-hewn scattering of foothills, pinched and drawn forth around the edges like one of Cook’s Christmas pies, and liberally dolloped with sage, mountain grasses, and groves of pine, Silver City served up all manner of Wild West legend.

From gunslingers to Forty-niners to catalog girls to card-sharking black legs to Bible-thumping converters, they all found their way to Butte—and when the big city wrung them out, they crawled twenty-six miles west, over the ridge to Silver City.

Esme had taken one look at Butte, with its arsenic- and sulfur-poisoned skies blackened by the two dozen smelter stacks burning ore—courtesy of the Anaconda and Amalgamated mine companies, the sea of wooden shanty towns from Dublin Gulch to Chinatown, the row of brothels on Venus Alley, and enough saloons and breweries to slack the thirst of all New York, and decided to stay aboard the Northern Pacific Railroad.

Besides, she’d already circled Silver City on her railroad map, charmed by the way the words slid off her tongue. Silver City.

Then, she watched the plains of South Dakota turn from golden expanse of undulating ocean to ragged black hills to rolling prairies gullied out with furrows and rivulets of land and grassy buttes hacked off as if a giant shovel descended from the heavens, to finally the glorious rumble of white-painted mountains to the south and west. Halfway through Montana seemed exactly the right measurement to disembark and begin her Calamity Jane life.

Indeed, the sky overhead stretched so far she thought she might see all the way to the edge of America; and under it, a man—or woman—could rename themselves and start over.

For seven years, she barely looked backwards, barely narrowed her eyes to make out faces in the shadows, the ones that knew her real name, not the one she’d adopted for cover as well as honor. Esme Stewart.

Yet, after seven years, she could still find herself in Oliver’s arms that stolen evening as he walked her home. And, in soft dawn, with the meadowlark calling outside her window, he came to her with the taste of his kiss upon her lips.

You’re an amazing writer, Esme. I believe in you.

What would he think now, to see her in a pair of pants, mucking through the muddy streets of a mining town, the sole proprietor of the only newspaper in a town of six thousand, chronicling the lives, the deaths, the villains, and heroes of the West?

Oliver, you might have been proud.

The six blocks of Main Street, Silver City, threaded through the center of town, dividing the homesteaders where their parcels dumped into Silver Creek from the townsfolk whose tiny soot-covered, wood-framed shanties resembled in miniature the boroughs of New York City. Irish, Welsh, Italian, and Serbians all found themselves in the Copper Valley, most of them wrung out of the mines in Butte, holding onto the rumor of something better twenty-six miles away to the southwest.

They found it, for the most part, in the Silverthread Mine. Owned by a former miner, Archie Hoyt. Esme knew him as solid, fair, and dependable. And, in failing health.

The last thing this town needed was for Archie to die and for the mine to be swallowed up into the maw of the Anaconda Mining Company, or even the Amalgamated.

With their dubious working conditions and history of tragedy, the Copper Kings would only tarnish Silver City.