Chapters (24)
Collis Edmonds sat back and took out an engraved gold pocket watch. He stared at it for a while, then said, ‘We have several hours left before we arrive in Sacramento. Would you think it impertinent of me to ask you to come to my parlour, and take a light supper?’
‘I’d be honoured,’ said Emily.
‘Good,’ Collis Edmonds told her. ‘I believe my cook is preparing a salmon soufflé, and I have some fine champagne. And while we eat, and while we drink, I shall do my best to answer your question for you, honestly, and at length. You want to know why I built the Sierra Pacific Railroad? I shall tell you. But I must warn you ahead of time that some of what occurred may shock you, and some of it may scandalise you, and some of it may make you wonder how low a human being can sink in the pursuit of glory.’
Emily blushed, but only a little. ‘I think I can bear to be shocked, Mr Edmonds, and to be scandalised. I am, after all, a reporter.’
Collis Edmonds grinned and stood up. ‘Join me just before the train leaves,’ he said. ‘I look forward to entertaining you.’
For the next three hours, as the train gradually descended the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, with the sky darkening behind it and the sun sinking ahead of it, Collis Edmonds talked to Emily Van Brugh. The champagne sparkled in lead-crystal glasses; the cutlery that shuddered on the table was solid silver. There was fresh salmon, and asparagus, and peaches, and delicious sharp cheese.
After those hours, Emily returned to her own parlour and packed her clothes in preparation for leaving the train at Sacramento. She never saw Collis Edmonds again, although after the train had reached the terminus, and she was waiting to be taken by carriage to her hotel, she saw his special Pullman car detached from the rest of the train and shunted slowly off into the darkness, its curtains drawn tight.
The story she wrote appeared in Ladies’ Home Notes on 13 October 1870. It was entitled ‘A Modern Ladies’ Companion to Railroad Travel Across the Continent, & How the Unaccompanied Lady Is to Manage in California’. It told of the marvels of the Sierra Pacific Railroad; of the deserts and mountains and towering cliffs; of what to eat, and what to eschew; of what clothes to take, and where to stay. It even mentioned the fact that there were thirty-seven miles of snowsheds through the mountains.
It told scarcely anything at all of what Collis Edmonds had said to her during that three-hour supper, because that was one of those stories whose pain and tenderness and fierceness would only have offended Emily’s readers — a story that she could only retell in the silence and the quietness of her own memory, and her own heart.