‘I should have known what kind of a reptile you were the first day I saw you,’ said Laurence Melford. ‘I should have trusted my nose.’

Collis said nothing. He didn’t trust himself, right at that moment, to keep Sarah’s collusion a secret. It would have silenced Laurence Melford completely — but at the risk of ruining the plan. The maître d’ came past, giving Collis a slanted glance of disapproval, and Collis lifted his empty glass for another stone fence. The maître d’ paused, but when Laurence Melford gave him a barely perceptible flicker of his eyes, he grudgingly took the glass and went to refill it.

‘What you’re asking from me is more than I can reasonably give you,’ Laurence Melford told Collis. ‘My whole livelihood depends on keeping Northern California isolated from the East; and apart from that, I am a Southerner, and I know what a transcontinental railroad route will do to the South’s economy.

‘But I will make a bargain with you, Edmonds. You’re looking for investment in your railroad. Well, I’ll make that investment myself, up to fifty-thousand dollars, but on the strict condition that it’s kept a secret. And on the condition that I don’t have to write any letters of support to the newspapers.’

Collis sat back in his chair. ‘Fifty-thousand dollars? In negotiable bonds? Or what?’

‘Fifty-thousand dollars in gold. Payable over six months.’

‘That sounds fair. But if you can’t bring yourself to support the railroad in public, why give me money in private?’

‘Because I happen to know how much railroads cost,’ said Laurence Melford. ‘I happen to know the price of rail, the price of locomotives, the price of timber, and the price of labour. Fifty thousand dollars, if you’re lucky, might buy you one trestle over one river. It won’t be anything more than a drop in an ocean, and if you’ll return those calotypes for that amount, then you’re welcome to it.

‘What I will not do, ever,’ he continued, ‘is endorse your railroad to my friends. For if I do so, I will be publicly denying my most deeply held principles. I will be publicly denying the South, and I will be publicly denying my belief in Northern California as a haven from the machinations of North-eastern industrialists. Even my daughter’s reputation is not worth that much.’

Collis got to his feet. Carlo, the maître d’, was just arriving with his second drink, but when he saw Collis’s face, he stood a little way off and waited, chewing his lip. Collis looked at Laurence Melford for a moment or two, and then he buttoned up his gloves.