to inspect them. The two men seemed oblivious to the attention, didn’t glance from left to right, but marched directly to the bar. They looked grim, of course. And on the shirtsleeve of the man closest, I could see a smear of blood. Lippiatt’s blood. I knew it was Lippiatt’s – rather, I suspected it, because I recognized the men as having accompanied Lippiatt on his visit to Plum Street all those weeks ago. We – that is, the three men, a couple of the girls and I – had shared a few drinks, whiled away an hour or so in the ballroom before dispersing to our separate bedrooms. I wondered if they would recognize me.
I hoped so. I hoped that they would spot me and come across. They were at the centre of it all this evening, and I was curious to know what had happened since we saw Lippiatt’s body being dragged away down the street.
‘Dora!’ Inez whispered so loudly, my name echoed off the wooden floors. ‘He has blood in his sleeve! Do you suppose—?’
‘Hush!’ I said.
But he had already turned. They both had. They looked us up and down. We made an incongruous pair. The man without blood on his sleeve looked at me more closely. He turned to the other, muttered something … Yes, the other one nodded. Yes, indeed. It was me. The hooker from Plum Street. Both men raised a hand.
‘What? Do they know you?’ asked Inez, aghast. ‘Those terrifying-looking gentlemen?’
I wasn’t sure how to answer. It happened I couldn’t remember either of their names. And, until they chose to acknowledge me, I was duty bound – honour bound – to deny it anyway.
‘Dora!’ shouted the dark one.
And so it was decided.
They picked up their glasses and crossed the room towards us. ‘A sight for sore eyes,’ he said. ‘May we join you? Are you working tonight?’ They glanced at Inez, uncertain where she quite fitted in.
‘Working?’ Inez cried out. ‘Does she look like she is working? She most certainly is not working. Thank you very much …’ She studied them more closely, through whiskey-glazed eyes, and seemed to like what she saw. ‘However,’ she added, looking pointedly at the blonder one, the man with the blood on his shirt, ‘whatever your names may be, if you would like to sit yourselves down here …’ She missed the seat, patted the air around it and then seemed to lose her nerve. She glanced at me.
If I had sent the men away, how different things would be today! I didn’t do that. The excitement on her face – and the blood on his sleeve, and heck, they were two attractive men, and we were unaccompanied and a little drunk. I nodded, inviting the two of them to join us.
As they pulled up their chairs, Inez muttered something soft and briefly sobering about, ‘Aunt Philippa being worried.’ I could have called a halt to it then, I suppose. Or she could. She could have said to the men – ‘I really ought to be going.’ I might have walked with her to her home, since by then she was already canned, and certainly not able to make the journey alone. But I was canned too. I was off duty. I was having a good time. I don’t believe the thought even crossed my mind. ‘You said yourself you wanted to meet some new men,’ I whispered, and winked at her.
She swayed with laughter. ‘Oh, you’re shocking!’ she said gleefully. ‘I am in too deep now, for sure!’
Lawrence O’Neill was the taller, blonder, handsomer of the two, and the one with blood on his sleeve. He was an Irishman from Missouri; an activist, employed by the UMWA (United Mine Workers of America) to do his worst in Trinidad. Back then, of course, before the Great War and the revolution in Russia, the battle between labour and capital was mustering strength and fury in every corner of the globe. It happened that, for the time being, the UMWA had designated Trinidad its American centre. It was here, among the mines of Colorado, that the Union was concentrating its funds, its fight – and all its best people. Lawrence O’Neill from Missouri was among them, he told us. And, yes, it was Captain Lippiatt’s blood on his sleeve.
We were all where we shouldn’t have been that night. I should have been working, of course. Inez should have been at home with her aunt, playing bezique. And, on the night their friend was murdered, you would have thought those two Union men had better things to do than while away the hours with a small-town librarian and a tired old girl like me.
‘Tell me, Inez Dubois,’ Lawrence O’Neill leaned his body in towards her, his expression teasing.
‘Tell you what, Lawrence O’Neill?’ she purred back at him … A little bit of confidence and polish – the thought flipped through my mind – and she might have made a fine hooker herself. ‘What shall I tell you, Lawrence O’Neill? I’ll tell you anything you want to hear.’
‘Inez, honey,’ I interrupted half-heartedly. ‘Don’t you think we ought to be heading home?’
‘What’s that, Auntie?’ she said.
It made me laugh. ‘Just take it easy, won’t you?’ I muttered. These men aren’t like the ones who talk to you about automobiles. That’s what I should have told her.The blood on their sleeves isn’t something they smeared on for after-dinner party games.
Lawrence wanted to talk about the company-owned mining camps, or ‘company towns’, as we sometimes called them. And they were towns, really: privately owned fiefdoms, fenced off from the rest of America. They had their own stores, doctors’ surgeries, chapels and schools; their own set of rules (no hookers, no liquor allowed); even their own currency: miners’ wages were paid partially in scrip, only valid in the company town’s overpriced stores. Lawrence asked her if she’d ever visited a company town herself.
Of course she’d never visited. For that matter, neither had I.
‘I never have,’ she said bluntly. ‘But my aunt goes out to the little schoolroom at Cokedale every Friday, to help them with religious instruction. Or she used to. Before it all became so troublesome out there.’
‘It’s going to get worse now,’ he said. ‘Lippiatt changes things. You watch. It’s going to turn, now.’ He said it with a grim sort of relish. His friend nodded sagely – and I remember I felt a grim sort of chill. He was right. You could smell it – the turning point. The cold-blooded murder of a Unionist, right there, on North Commercial Street. Lippiatt’s death would change everything.
But Inez didn’t seem to be listening. She prattled on without missing a beat. ‘Aunt Philippa says it was quite the nicest little school building she’s ever visited, and far nicer than St Teresa’s here in town, which by the way I attended … And she says the company provides the sweetest little homes for the workers that are as cosy as can be. And each little family has its own little yard. And plenty of people grow their own vegetables and keep chickens and I don’t know what else. And I know what you are going to say. You are going to say that it’s perfectly all right for Aunt Philippa, who arrives at Cokedale in her motorcar and leaves again in a motorcar and goes home to a lovely house with two great furnaces and servants and honeycake for breakfast and all that – Well, I’m not saying anything about that …’
He laughed – rather gently, I thought, all things considered.
‘Aunt Philippa says she simply doesn’t know what the workers are complaining of.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m going to drive you out there, Miss Inez. How about that? I’m going to drive you out there tomorrow and you can see for yourself … The numbers of men who roam about the place with half their
