The Lady of Bolton Hill (7 page)

A
t the knock on his front door, Daniel bounded down the curved staircase in the double-story foyer of his home. Manzetti always drove him to his downtown office each morning, but today Daniel had something he needed to discuss before the bustle of the workday.

Morning sun streamed into the house as soon as he flung open the front door. “How much will it cost to buy up all the coke on the East Coast?” Daniel asked in an impatient voice.

Manzetti took the cap from the top of his head and stepped inside. “And good morning to you, too, Daniel.”

Daniel tossed the cap impatiently on the front hall table. “Come back to the library. I’ve got a new plan I need to discuss.” Why Manzetti wanted to bother with pleasantries when they had business to strategize was a mystery, although he supposed these little social graces needed to be tended to. In the middle of the night, Daniel had snapped awake, the beginnings of an entirely new tactic in his war against Forsythe waking him from a deep sleep. Coke was a byproduct of coal that was essential to the smelting of iron ore. No steel could be made without a healthy supply of coke, and if Daniel bought all the coke available on the market, it would be months before manufacturers could produce more for Forsythe Industries.

Once inside the study, he crossed to his desk, pulled out his chair, and sat. “I want you to buy up all the coke in the Philadelphia markets and send someone to hit the Chicago mercantile exchange, as well. If Forsythe wants a pound of coke, he is going to have to go begging for it from his competitors.”

Manzetti plopped onto a sofa, dragging a ham-sized hand through his dark hair. “You don’t even have the money to finish paying for Miss Lorna’s house, and now you want to buy up all the excess coke in the country?”

“It’s not like it will go to waste. We will use it sooner or later.”

The silence was broken only by the ticking of an ormolu clock on the mantelpiece. Manzetti shifted his weight, rubbing his hands along the rough twill of his pants as he mulled over the idea. Manzetti’s instincts were good, and Daniel knew there was something about the scheme that didn’t sit well with the man.

“Spit it out,” Daniel said. “Whatever is bothering you, just say it.”

Manzetti straightened. “If we choke off the supply of coke to Forsythe Industries, his steel mills will go dark for weeks. Maybe even longer.”

“Precisely.”

Manzetti’s brows lowered. “And what about their workers? Forsythe won’t pay their wages if they aren’t making steel. I haven’t forgotten what it feels like to be hungry. Have you?”

The only time Daniel had been hungry in his life was in the weeks following his father’s death. Five days after the explosion that killed his father, Daniel learned that the safety valves on the boilers were defective. Forsythe knew about the defective parts, but he was too cheap to replace them. It was only a matter of time before one of them blew, and it was Daniel’s father who was tending the boilers when it happened. Alfred Forsythe might as well have pulled the trigger. Daniel quit his job within minutes of discovering what had happened. It was a reckless, impulsive thing to have done, but all Daniel could see was a haze of red as he stormed out of the mill. In the following weeks, Daniel had known the grinding fear of being unable to support his family. He had quietly pawned whatever he could from the home and went without meals so his sisters could eat. A few weeks later he joined forces with Ian Carr, who needed a jack-of-all-trades to keep the equipment of his small railroad company in order, but hunger was not something a man ever forgot.

“I am not unmindful to the trouble this will cause,” Daniel said slowly. “But in the long run, it will be better for his workers and this city if Forsythe is driven out of business. Let those mills be owned by someone who operates a safe shop and pays his men a decent wage.”

Manzetti rested his elbows on his thighs as he stared at a spot on the carpet near his feet. If anyone on the planet could understand Daniel’s slow-burning rage, it was Joe Manzetti. He had been with Daniel on the day of the explosion. He had smelled the scent of burning skin and witnessed Daniel’s helplessness as he clutched his father’s broken body to his chest. And Manzetti had been beside Daniel for every step as they slogged their way out of poverty and into the cool relief of prosperity.

“You know I would follow you over the side of a cliff,” Manzetti finally said. “But I won’t do something that will starve Forsythe’s workers. You’ll have to find another man for the job.”

Daniel did not let his astonishment show, but Manzetti’s blunt refusal was a rude shock. He locked gazes with Manzetti as he mentally rattled through his options to get Manzetti on board. “I’ll find jobs for any Forsythe worker who wants to cross over to Carr & Tremain.”

Manzetti rolled his eyes. “There are close to a thousand Forsythe workers in Baltimore alone. You can’t afford to hire them all without going under yourself.”

That was true. The company had embarked on a number of expansion plans in anticipation of selling shares on the stock exchange. Now that the deal was in jeopardy because of Daniel’s intransigence over licensing to Forsythe, they would have to fund the acquisition of railroad lines from their own coffers.

“Buying up all the coke will probably only slow Forsythe for a week or two,” Daniel said. “Three at the most. No one will starve.”

Manzetti’s voice was calm but emphatic. “You’ll have to find another man, Daniel.”

The breath left Daniel’s lungs in a rush. Manzetti was the closest thing to a friend he had. Well, Clara seemed to have waltzed back into his life, but it was Manzetti who was with him through those gritty, hard-bitten years as he fought for every patent, opened each new office. In the past, Manzetti had always supported Daniel’s crusade against Forsythe, but apparently there were limits as to how low Manzetti would stoop.

Not Daniel. He knew Forsythe would not go down without a fight and Daniel was prepared to lead the campaign down to the bitter end. “You know I can easily find someone else who will do my bidding.”

“Probably. You can fire me if you want, but I need to be able to sleep at night.”

Daniel made an impatient gesture with his hand. He would no more fire Manzetti than he would hack off his own right arm. Besides, he had another task he needed help with. Clara would be returning to Baltimore tomorrow, and he needed to find those old pieces of music he had written for her. He shoved talk of business to the back of his mind and rose to his feet.

“Come up to the attic with me. I’ve got some musical scores that are buried beneath some of the old equipment, and I’ll need your help getting them out.”

Clara’s sudden return to Baltimore could not have come at a worse time. He had just destroyed Forsythe’s attempt to build a college, and if he succeeded in causing a blackout in Forsythe’s steel mills, it would arouse another round of bad publicity. Not that he was ashamed of his actions, but he did not want Clara to be a witness to them. She was everything that was pure and unsullied in his life, a shining memory he wanted to protect from the ugliness in his soul.

Despite the early hour, the summer heat was palpable in the attic as he stepped into its dusty confines. The attic of his house had become the official graveyard of his company, where Daniel stored old versions of his original timing devices, routing equipment, even a couple of old railway ties. In the dim light eking through the dormer windows, the hulking silhouettes of his inventions loomed like ghostly sentinels of his past.

“Remind me what we are looking for?” Manzetti asked as his footsteps thudded on the bare plank floors of the attic.

“A couple of musical scores I want to give to Clara Endicott. I think they are in a filing cabinet underneath that old lever frame box.”

“Is this the Clara Endicott you used to moan about when you were in your cups?”

Daniel had forgotten he used to do that, but Manzetti was right. In the early days, cheap beer at O’Reilly’s Tavern was the only recreation he, Manzetti, and his partner Ian Carr could afford, and Daniel inevitably started rambling about Clara after he had a few.

“This is the Clara Endicott who worked for
The Times of London,
” he said brusquely. He reached beneath the framing of the lever box and waited for Manzetti to join him on the other side. The box weighed around two hundred pounds, and hoisting it off the cabinet was a good excuse to drop the topic of Clara Endicott. In the years since she had left, he had been able to keep his emotions about her safely stored away as neatly as the scores in this cabinet. Now she was here stirring everything up again.

With a mighty heave, he and Manzetti lifted the lever box off the filing cabinet and set it down with a thud. Relieved of the pressure, the drawers of the cabinet slid open with a rasping creak. As Daniel lifted the pages out, the distinctive scent of musical score paper brought back a rush of memories. It had been ten years since he had held these scores. Ten years since he had given up on Clara and packed these compositions into storage. If Manzetti weren’t standing three feet away, he would have pressed the pages to his face and breathed deeply of the scent of wood pulp and old memories.

Manzetti wiped the sweat from his brow. “She must be some reporter, to have put that look of pure, stupid joy on your face.”

Whatever expression had been on his face, Daniel shook it off and closed the filing drawers. Clara was not someone he wanted to talk about. These raw, unwieldy emotions were too volatile for him to discuss in a cogent manner.

“Let’s get to work,” he said as he tromped out of the attic. “We need to do a new round of tests on the heating element for the smelting process.” He continued to pour out instructions for the day, but only half his mind could concentrate on them, because in his hands he held a stack of musical scores that once meant more to him than all the inventions in the world.

Standing next to Daniel, Clara’s heart sagged when she saw the old Conservatory again. She needed to lift the skirt of her delicately embroidered eyelet walking dress well over her ankles in order to step over the tall weeds and around the broken roof tiles that littered the ground where they had slid from the top of the Conservatory. Paint curled away from the walls like scrolls of old parchment, and a gutter hung at a haphazard angle, just waiting for a good stiff wind to blow it off.

It was going to be impossible to play music today, as the instruments from the Conservatory were long gone and the building was in such bad shape it wasn’t even safe to go inside. Daniel proceeded to tell her the city was on the verge of condemning it as a public nuisance, but he did not seem upset.

“I’ve found the old scores, and you can come to my house, where we will play them. Don’t look so tragic.”

Clara shot Daniel an amused glance as she pulled a vine of English ivy from an old stone bench. She used a handkerchief in a futile attempt to swipe away the husk of an old beetle from the bench.

Daniel spared her from further misery when he brushed the rest of the debris from the bench and tossed his jacket over it so she could sit without getting moss stains on her pale yellow dress. It was a shame she would not be able to play music with Daniel this afternoon, but that wasn’t so bad. The scent of the wild mulberry shrubs that were growing rampant along the crumbling stone walls was enchanting, and she loved just being in the shadow of this beloved old building once again. Her gaze tracked along the gabled roof and the gothic arches of the windows, most of which were now broken and boarded over. It was silly, but Clara felt that if she stayed here long enough, she would be able to hear the echoes of the music and laughter that had once filled this building.

Still staring at the old gothic arches, she could not resist asking the question, “Did it mean as much to you as it did to me?”

A little wind rustled the mulberry leaves, and the drone of a dragonfly came from far away. Now that Daniel had gone on to become a great success, perhaps those stolen hours were only a trivial part of his youth, and she held her breath while she waited for his answer.