Into the Whirlwind (36 page)

Oliver looked like he’d just eaten a sour apple. “Clocks,” he sniffed. “We are watchmakers. Artisans. Any ham-fisted drudge can assemble a clock.”

“That sounds pretty arrogant,” Declan said, still fiddling with a pair of dice in his hands.

“You’re just a metal polisher,” Oliver said. “What would you know of fine craftsmanship?”

Mollie shot to her feet. “You apologize to Declan right now!”

Before she finished speaking, Declan had shoved away from the table, jostling the mugs and sloshing cider all over the table. With his hands clenched into fists, Declan stormed from the table, bumping into serving girls as he made for the exit.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Mollie snapped at Oliver before she darted after Declan. He was moving quickly and ignored her appeals to slow down. He was halfway down Cohasset Street before she caught up to him, reaching out to grab his arm. “He didn’t mean it, Declan. Don’t be upset at Oliver.”

He whirled around. His muscles were quivering and anger flared on his face. “I’m not mad at Oliver; I’m mad at you!”

“What have I done to make you mad?”

He dragged a hand through his hair, then looked up at the sky, as though the answer to a prayer were written in the clouds. “Mollie, you’ve got to quit hovering over me like I am a child. I am a man.”

She stiffened. “I know that, Declan.”

“Then why did you beg Colonel Lowe to leave me home when he went to Milwaukee?” At her indrawn breath, an aggravated look came over Declan’s face. “Oh yes, I heard about that. Do you know what it does to a man’s pride to have a woman hovering over him as if he is too fragile to stand up to a good stiff wind? I’ve had it, Mollie. I quit.”

The words were like a door slamming in her face. Before she could respond, he stalked away from her, his back rigid with tension. She pulled up her skirts to run after him. “You don’t mean that,” she said as she pulled alongside him. “What will you do without the 57th?”

He stopped, and the anger faded from his eyes. “That’s what I need to find out. As long as I keep hiding beneath your wing, I’ll never be anything more than a failure. A metal polisher who needs your pity to keep a job.”

“You’re not a failure! Are you suggesting Ulysses is a failure? Or that Frank was?”

Declan flinched. His hands trembled, and he looked like he was about to spiral into one of his mind-numbing attacks of panic, but he swallowed hard and met her gaze. “It doesn’t matter how they feel about working here. It isn’t right for
me
anymore. When I rounded up Colonel Lowe and the others after Frank was killed, it was the first time I felt like a man since the war.” His trembling eased, and a look of such stark longing
covered his face that it made Mollie’s heart ache. “I had that feeling again in Milwaukee. I need to go find what I was meant to be before I got sidetracked by the war.”

“I see,” she said softly. But she didn’t. She had been fighting so hard for the veterans, and now Declan told her she was crippling him? Smothering him? All she had been doing was fulfilling her father’s wishes in making sure his brothers-in-arms would always be provided for.

Exhaustion pulled at her, and she hugged her arms around her middle. “You can always come back,” she said. “If things don’t work out, I want you to know—”

“I won’t be back.” Fear lurked in his eyes, but so did a thread of determination. “I’m not sure what I am going to do, but I was never meant to be a metal polisher.”

She stood on the footpath, watching as Declan disappeared into the crowd. As hard as she had been fighting to restore her company to its previous glory, it felt like the 57th was beginning to slip away from her.

26

T
hank heavens Richard had built the new workshop with a surplus of space, for they needed every square inch of it. Watch technicians worked at shoulder-high tables only a yard wide, but the clock for the bank was going to be twelve feet in diameter, requiring a table big enough to feed a whole platoon of soldiers. The containers they used to store watch parts were the size of a cigar box; the bins for clock hardware were three yards wide.

The workshop smelled of pine resin as Ulysses cut timber and began assembling the new bins. Oliver Wilkes looked at the massive tables and bins, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “Large enough to assemble plowshares,” he sniffed.

The value of a watch technician was measured by a steady hand, an eye for detail, and the ability to crouch over tiny specks of metal until they had been assembled into a whirring, ticking piece of machinery. The wheel pinions in a watch were usually the size of Mollie’s pinkie fingernail. The pinions of the bank clock were going to be two yards wide.

It was anathema to a master technician like Oliver Wilkes, but Alice and Ulysses were slowly coming around to Mollie’s point of view. “Our company will either perish or we will rise from
the ashes stronger than before,” Ulysses said with his typical flair. “This gargantuan clock will be our great test. Our Thermopylae. Our Waterloo. Our Agincourt.”

He finished pounding the last nail into the bottom of a bin. “Where do you want this, Mollie?”

“It will have to go down in the basement.” Ulysses could build a bin, but with only one leg, he couldn’t carry it down a flight of stairs. “Oliver, will you take the new bin downstairs? I can help if you need.”

Oliver set his jeweler’s loupe down and scowled at the bin, refusing to get up off his stool.

“Or you can find a job somewhere else, if you like,” she snapped out. Her voice was louder than she’d intended, but it was getting so hard to keep fighting for people like Oliver. Didn’t he understand what the cheap watch in her pocket meant? Every employee in the company had seen that watch, but most seemed to think it was no competition for the quality and artistry that made the 57th famous.

In the past, Mollie had feared the wounded veterans would have trouble finding another job if her company went under. Now she feared for every single watchmaker in this workshop. Unless they wanted to become unskilled workers on a production line cranking out mass-produced watches, they had to do
something
to ensure their survival.

Oliver’s angry footfalls echoed in the silent workshop as he carried the bin downstairs, and Mollie felt the scrutiny of every employee as they watched her warily.

She tossed a watchcase down and darted after Oliver, the clatter of her feet echoing off the brick walls as she scrambled down the staircase. Narrow windows at the top of the basement wall let in dim light, illuminating the cavernous space filled with mostly empty bins.

Oliver was the best watch technician she employed, having been with the 57th since its earliest days. Her father relied on him to train the junior technicians in the exacting craft. On the night of the fire, Oliver had come here to pack up the equipment and get it safely out of the city, even as his own house was in the path of the flames. Oliver Wilkes was a bedrock in the company, but she couldn’t let him poison the atmosphere.

Her feet crunched across the gravel of the unfinished basement floor as she crossed the space to where he positioned the crate alongside the other empty bins. “I need to know if you will help make clocks,” Mollie said, her voice vibrating with urgency. “You are the best person in this company to help me make the transition. I know you
can
do it, but I need to know if you
will
.”

He braced his hands against an empty crate, the weak light making the lines and planes of his narrow face look haggard. “This is the most harebrained scheme I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “Your father made a name for this company with quality and beauty. Not monstrous clocks twelve feet across. He would rather see us make plumbing fixtures.”

Mollie winced, knowing Oliver was right about her father’s opinion, but her father never knew about the Newburgh Watch Factory. The photograph would be forever seared into Mollie’s mind. The picture showed a room crammed with machinery, with wheels and pulleys hanging from the ceiling as a handful of workers assembled the watches. Her father had belonged to a different era of watchmaking. It was her job to keep this company afloat in a world none of them had seen coming.

“We can’t compete with the Newburgh Watch Factory,” she said. “I don’t have the money for that kind of equipment, and I am afraid of what those machines can do. We need to keep one step ahead of them, and if burnishing our reputation by making public clocks will help, then that is what I will do. The
market for gold and diamond-encrusted watches will always be tricky. Not many people can afford them, and when times turn bad, we need to be able to earn a living. Even if it is through something as clunky and pedestrian as a clock.”

Oliver maintained his stance, braced against the bin, but Mollie sensed, for the first time, that her words had penetrated his thick, leathery hide. “I’ll help you,” he finally said. “But I’ll be looking over your shoulder at every move you make, because I owe that to your father. I still think this decision will be the end of us.”

Disapproval weighed every one of his words, but she would accept his reluctant help. At this point, she did not have much choice.

Mollie’s eyes widened as the soprano’s voice climbed and wavered on an impossibly high pitch. Sitting in the straight-backed chair of Mrs. Matilda Lowe Horner’s parlor alongside fifty-five of Chicago’s most elite citizens, Mollie was coming to accept how little she knew of music if this operatic singer represented the finest in vocal performance. Beside her, Colonel Lowe wore his perpetually agreeable expression even as the soprano’s voice took on great strident tones as she labored through the final notes of a Wagner aria. No one else in the room seemed to be uncomfortable, so Mollie kept her hand resting inside Richard’s warm palm rather than clapping both hands over her ears, which were beginning to hurt.

This type of gathering was standard fare for Richard’s sister, who enjoyed hosting her brother whenever he was in Chicago. Matilda had grabbed on to Richard’s coattails as he had risen to fame after the Civil War, but Richard had never minded. He had told Mollie of his profound affection for his older sister,
nurtured during the freezing winters he had endured as a young boy in the Dakota territories while building railroads. The constant stream of letters and packages filled with warm socks and homemade treats from Matilda had been his salvation during those lonely years. His sister had wanted to become an actress, but when her father forbade it, Matilda dutifully married Archibald Horner, millionaire shoe manufacturer, and nurtured her artistic impulses by hosting evenings such as these.

The soprano’s aria came to a triumphant conclusion, and the assembled guests graciously applauded. Mollie leaned over to whisper in Richard’s ear, “Is it over?”

The polite expression on his face did not waver. “Three more arias.” He flashed her a wink. “Be brave.”

Her heart sank. Only a few feet away, a pair of French doors opened onto a lovely terraced garden, allowing the evening air to cool the overheated parlor. How she longed to escape into that garden and seek the seclusion behind the rhododendrons, where she could pour out her fears to Richard. No matter the problem, Richard seemed to know a solution.

And Mollie needed help with the business. She had been slow in finding the proper equipment to make the clocks, but that wasn’t her biggest fear. It was the continuing reluctance of her workers to follow her lead. Richard Lowe was a born leader, whether the task was to direct an infantry charge or build a railroad across the state. He knew how to get men on board and working toward a common goal.

The residual loyalty most of her employees felt for Silas Knox’s daughter was fading. Every day she could sense the dwindling respect as the technicians looked to Oliver for guidance. Each time she entered the workshop, she could hear murmurs of disapproval as she moved more and more technicians away from the watch tables and into the cavernous space downstairs
to begin assembling the massive clock components. Alice and Ulysses were still faultlessly loyal, but they were artists whose opinions carried no credibility with the technicians.

The soprano bellowed through the next aria, and Mollie wondered if her eardrums could tolerate the abuse of two more songs.

Zack would cringe at this sort of music too.

She sat a little straighter. Where had
that
thought sprung from? Zack loved music, but not like this. He liked a good polka band or some rousing folk tunes. It seemed no matter how hard she tried to forget, memories of Zack still arose to haunt her at the oddest times. She had effectively burned that bridge last December. Zack wanted nothing to do with her, and she couldn’t blame him.

She had seen him only once since that terrible day by Frank’s grave. It had been at an outdoor concert in Claxton Park. She had been walking into the park with Alice and Ulysses to hear a polka band when she looked across the pathway and saw Zack with a pretty blond woman on his arm. Mollie could tell the moment he saw her. For an instant he looked surprised, then his face iced over and he turned away, cutting her dead. Later that evening, she saw him sitting on a blanket with the young lady, their heads bent close together as they studied a small book. They had been laughing.