Margaret stood, walked to the table that held the tea service. In the giant square of iced light from the window, she waved away the footman who approached, pouring herself another cup.
“Do you know what they call themselves back in Denver?”
“Who?”
Margaret added a thin stream of milk to her cup, lifting the creamer expertly high and then low, her eyes narrowed, before placing it back upon the silver tray. “The elite. The leaders of Colorado high society.”
Madeleine looked at her, waiting.
“‘The Sacred Thirty-Six.’” She returned to her chair. “The thirty-six best families of the Rockies. The thirty-six who determine who is good, who is bad, and who is merely uninvited. At least here it’s only a number, and a bigger one at that. Four hundred. Plenty of room, so to speak. Out there, it’s only thirty-six, and they had to throw in a sacred. To make it all so much more special.”
“Are you a member?” Madeleine asked, but thought she already knew the answer.
Margaret smiled; for the first time, the secret mirth about her vanished, replaced with something fiercer, darker. She swirled the tea in her cup. “I was a shop girl. Did you know that, Miss Madeleine?”
“No.” She was genuinely surprised. Nothing about Margaret Brown, no matter her plain speaking, indicated anything but a background of culture and education.
“Came west from Missouri as a girl to meet my brother in Colorado. He was a miner, and we were going to make our fortune out in Leadville. But women weren’t allowed to mine, not for gold or silver or anything else. It was thought to be bad luck. I ended up in a dry goods store, and I was grateful for it, because it was decent work. Steady work, even though the pay was peanuts. Every day, I dealt with real folks in real life. Folks without a penny left to their names, desperate for a speck of anything to send home to their families back east. Desperate for any brush with Lady Luck. It turned out that Lady Luck, in the end, noticed me. I was a poor girl who fell in love with a poor man, and married him. A man who later on became rich from gold. I was nineteen when we wed. He was thirty-one, days from thirty-two.” She shot Madeleine a glance from beneath those dark lashes. “Did you know that?”
“No,” she said again.
“Nineteen. Thirty-two. But it’s different out there, you know. Out west. Fewer women by far, at least in the far-flung mountains and plains. No one raised much of a fuss about it. We were happy and poor, and then we were happy and rich. And after that . . .”
She drifted off, the tea half-lifted in her hand, forgotten. Past the closed doors of the morning room, there were maids conversing, very low. There were footsteps, and the muted, solid sound of well-oiled doors opening, closing. Letting in and out the ghosts.
“After that,” Margaret said, “I began to raise my voice. For charity, for laborers. For the rights of the miners, of women and children. To take a little—just a little, mind you—from the Thirty-Six and send it back to those who’d made their silk-stocking lives possible. The starving men dying in their tents, in the banks of snow. Their families left behind, left up there at altitude with nothing, trying to find their way in rags back to any kind of secure base.”
Margaret seemed to recall her tea. She looked at it with something like revulsion, then slowly lowered her hand to the arm of her chair. Without her mask of mirth, she seemed older suddenly, lined and fatigued.
“Those pinched-nosed biddies in Denver would sooner kiss the lips of the devil himself than invite me into their homes.”
Madeleine sat forward, tucking her feet beneath her. The fire in the hearth popped, a bright cherry burst.
“How courageous you are.”
“Courageous? No. Just saw the truth of things, that was all. Saw the truth, and tried to change it.”
“Did it work?”
“No.” Margaret sighed, resting back. “Maybe a little. Not enough. It’s never really enough. That’s not how our world turns.”
Madeleine felt, shockingly, her eyes begin to burn. A hot band of sorrow cinched her, constricting her chest. To control it, she made herself very still, exhaling silently through parted lips, her fingers curled beneath her legs. She blinked away the tears, scowling at her knees.
The fire. The maids. The hundred doors of this empty, haunted mansion, opening and closing. Men dying in tents.
It all echoed through her, over and over and over, all the ghosts rising up, taking command.
“Madeleine,” said Margaret carefully. “Are you feeling perfectly well?”