The Lady of Bolton Hill (11 page)

Clara shook her head. “I doubt that, Daniel. Somehow I think you were always meant for something beyond a steel mill. I wish your parents could see how far you have come in the world. They would be so proud of you . . . I know that I am.”

Daniel pulled the top desk drawer open and retrieved a small photograph. Clara recognized both of Daniel’s parents smiling out from the frame. His mother’s face was beaming with joy and she wore a crown of daisies on her head.

“This is the only photograph I have of my parents,” Daniel said. “They had it taken on the day they learned my mother was expecting Lorna. They had gone so long without conceiving another child, they thought there would be no more children. I remember how my mother made that crown of daisies in celebration of the new baby. She danced all around our apartment wearing that silly crown, but that was the kind of thing she used to do when she was happy. All day long she couldn’t stop smiling, and finally my dad took her out to have her photograph made.”

Daniel’s thumb traced the rim of the picture. “I try to remember her when she was happy like that, but it is hard, Clara. The dark memories always crowd in. I wish she could have lived long enough for me to take care of her.
Really
take care of her.” Daniel’s voice became very soft. “She never had a wedding ring. Did you know that? She loved my father so much, and I think she always wanted one, but there was never money for things like that.” He tossed the photograph on the desk and sank into the chair. “Now I could buy her an entire jewelry store, but it just doesn’t matter anymore.”

There was a hollow look in his eyes that tore at her heart. She knelt at the base of the chair and took his hands between her own. “You’re right, Daniel. It doesn’t matter anymore. More than anything I wish your mother had lived to see the fine things you have accomplished. But she isn’t here, and she would not have wanted you to grow hard and bitter on her behalf.”

He stared out the window and nodded slowly. “You are probably right.” When he shifted his attention back to her, there was humor lurking behind his eyes. “There are a few more things she would have wanted me to accomplish that are still a work in progress.”

“What are those?”

“I’ve got to get Kate decently married. She’s playing at a tennis match this weekend, where I have hopes some fine, upstanding man will see her and be inspired to carry her off. Would you like to attend the match with me?”

Clara eagerly agreed, as she’d never seen a tennis match.

Satisfied, Daniel continued, “Next, my mother would have liked to see
me
decently married, and on that front I’ve never bothered to make the least bit of effort. I’m thinking about changing that sad state of affairs, so I ought to put you on notice about that.”

Her heart skipped a beat. It would be utterly presumptuous to assume that she would be first on his list of potential marriage partners. For all she knew, there was already some woman he had been squiring around for years. She raised her brows and pretended a nonchalant air. “Notice for what?”

“Miss Endicott, your powers of observation are a little less than razor sharp,” he said as he strolled to a cabinet on the far side of the library. “And you call yourself a journalist.” He was using that cool, remote voice that used to frustrate her when she was a girl, but now she knew he was toying with her. And she was enjoying every moment of it.

C
lara fed a little more kerosene to the wick of the lamp, then twisted and rubbed the base of her spine. She’d been curled over these documents for the better part of two days, and it made for difficult, dreary reading.

But it had to be done. Curled up in her father’s study, she pored over several years of newspaper accounts documenting the rising hostility in the railroad industry. The entire East Coast had been engulfed in massive riots in 1877, and now, only two years later, tensions were simmering again. It was only a matter of time before the riot she had been swept up in last week became a sustained campaign of rage. And Daniel Tremain was part of it all. His workers, along with most laborers in the railroad industry, were threatening to strike should wages and conditions not improve. And when the railroads struck, commerce throughout the country ground to a halt.

“Look here, Clara,” her brother, Clyde, said. “It says that the Baltimore police used bayonets to disperse the crowd back in the labor riots of 1877. Can you believe that?” She and Clyde had been working in her father’s study every day that week. Clyde pushed the newspaper article toward her, and she was amazed that such barbarity was still in practice.

“Things aren’t that bad yet,” Clara said, “but I worry they are headed that way if something isn’t done soon.” She was convinced that the labor question should be addressed in her father’s newspaper.
The Christian Crusade
was a weekly publication, but it was sent to almost a million subscribers throughout the United States. Roughly half the articles dealt with religious topics, but the paper also tackled social issues. At first she had worried that Baltimore’s labor trouble was too provincial a topic for a national newspaper, but as Clyde had reminded her,
“Anything that puts the railroad in danger is a national topic.”

The more time she spent with Clyde, the more impressed she became. Far from the boastful, aggravating older brother of her childhood, Clyde now had a remarkably rational way of looking at the world. She pushed back from the table, and broached the topic that had been plaguing her for days.

“Clyde, do you think it’s possible to be a truly good man without being a Christian?”

Clyde looked stunned. “Given where I have chosen to live and spend the majority of my life, you ought to know my position on such a basic thing.”

“I do. The questions are about to get a lot harder.”

Clyde rubbed his hands together in delight, loving nothing better than a good academic debate. “Fire when ready.”

“When a man rises to a position of great power and influence, he is charged with protecting the innocents, correct?”

“Yes, I believe Jesus taught we have a responsibility to protect those who are weaker.”

Clara wandered to the window, where she looked out at the perfectly manicured and vibrant lawn. How far this was from the world of grinding poverty where laborers were scalded to death due to lack of basic safety of equipment. “But what if those innocents have been sinned against?” she asked. “Who shall seek justice on their behalf if not a man of great power?”

“I imagine this is Daniel Tremain you are referring to,” Clyde said. Her brother’s knowing gaze pierced straight through the calm intellectualism she was trying to maintain.

She threw a wadded-up piece of paper at him that bounced harmlessly off his forehead. “Yes, it is Daniel I’m talking about,” she admitted.

“Has Daniel been seeking justice or has he been seeking vengeance?” Clyde asked. “There is an important difference, Clara.”

She remembered the night of the riot when they had sat and talked in the kitchen. Daniel’s face was tight with anger and he proclaimed that he wanted revenge. That was exactly the word he had used,
revenge
. “Explain it to me.”

Clyde hesitated. “Well . . . let me go fetch Father.” Before Clara could stop him, Clyde had bounded from the room in search of Lloyd, and Clara rolled her eyes in frustration. It was so obvious what Clyde was doing. “
I have every hope of smoothing this little rift out before I head back to the Navajo,”
he had told her a few days ago. Leave it to the doctor to think he could magically heal a wound that ran more than a decade deep. Each day she came to use her father’s study, Lloyd gave her a wide berth. They were like polite strangers, while Clyde played matchmaker, but any hope she had of forgiving Lloyd was completely useless until her father at least pretended to be sorry.

Clyde returned with one of those maddening gloats on his face, pulling Lloyd along behind him. “So Clara has a question about the difference between justice and vengeance,” Clyde said. “I thought you could shed light on that.”

Lloyd eased himself into a chair, casting a polite smile Clara’s way. “Well, I’m glad you’ve given me the opportunity to talk about it,” he said cautiously. Lloyd was no idiot, and he knew precisely who was responsible for inviting him into this conversation. He continued, “Justice is intended to restore order. When a crime has occurred, it must be stopped and then made good in some way. We can’t restore things to the perfect order they were before the sin, but justice provides us with a system of laws and procedures for the restoration of order. Justice is administered by society, but revenge is something totally different, Clara. Revenge is not administered by society, but carried out by an individual. And the intention is purely to punish, not restore order.”

“And if it is impossible to restore order?” Clara asked. “What if the victim is dead or there is no longer any proof to convict the wrongdoer? What then, Father?”

Her father’s eyes crinkled in sympathy. “That is one of the harder lessons we must struggle with. If justice cannot be administered by man, we must wait and allow the Lord to balance the scales. He always will, but we may not be there to see it. We must surrender our will to the Lord, and know that He will do what is right.”

“It sounds like Tremain has Forsythe pinned right down the barrel of his gun,” Clyde said. “I don’t think he’s the type to ease up just because Jesus says he should.”

Funny how older brothers could still be annoying even after everyone was all grown-up. She wished Clyde had not brought Daniel’s name into this, as Daniel’s weaknesses were the
last
thing she wanted to discuss in front of her father. Undoubtedly, that was why Clyde had done it.

Lloyd smiled in sympathy. “Clara, the craving for revenge is a very basic instinct. It can be profoundly difficult to surrender the desire for vengeance. Not everyone who has been sinned against can learn to do it, but if they fail in this task, the rancor will grow and corrupt the entire spirit. You need to understand this about Daniel.”

The words were gently spoken, but his meaning rang through with the force of a clarion trumpet. No matter how strong their friendship, how great her respect for Daniel, she could not go through her life alongside a man with the stain of vengeance corroding his soul.

“Have you got the workroom cleaned up yet?”

Manzetti stood in the doorway of Daniel’s office, frustration on his face. “It would take a lot of work to even make a dent in cleaning that place up.”

Daniel vaulted from his chair. “Well, get a move on it, then. Clara will be here in less than an hour, and I don’t want this place looking like a hovel.” He glanced at his private office to be sure everything was in order. The furniture was freshly polished, the tables cleared of stray papers. Everything here looked like the office of a respectable man of business.

The workroom was another story. Carr & Tremain Polytechnic occupied the entire top floor of the downtown building, and they’d knocked out most of the interior walls to construct an oversized workroom that doubled as a laboratory. The worktables groaned under the weight of drafting tools, surveying equipment, measuring rods, and scales. The walls were covered with well-used blackboards, and much of the floor space was dominated by pieces of a hydraulic lift Daniel had designed. To an uneducated observer this room would appear to be a chaotic pile of junk, and that was not how Daniel wanted Clara to see him.

“Can’t you stash that hydraulic lift somewhere? It looks terrible.”

A half dozen employees stared at him as if some germ of insanity had taken root in his brain. Tidiness was not a prized trait among engineers, and the office looked exactly as it always did. Daniel had never fussed over his employees’ workspace like a meddlesome housekeeper before today. Then again, he’d never brought Clara Endicott to see his office.

“The central body of that lift was disassembled last week,” Manzetti said. “That thing isn’t going anywhere.”

Daniel shoved a pile of stray drafting equipment into a filing drawer and wiped away the dust stain. “Well, at least put on your suit coat and quit looking like a gypsy. That goes for the rest of you dawdlers, too.” The look of amusement that skittered among his employees didn’t escape his notice, but he hardly cared about their opinions. Clara was another story.

That she had requested to meet him in his office was good. Surprising, but good. She had taken up writing again and intended to use her father’s newspaper as her venue. If writing was what she needed to feel successful, he would do everything possible to make it happen for her, including granting her an interview about his business. Exposing himself to the glare of the public spotlight was abhorrent, but if it helped Clara, he would do it.

Carr & Tremain had always avoided publicity. There were only a handful of railroad conglomerates who could afford to license his technology, and they were all very well acquainted with his company. Any other attention only meant trouble. Trouble with the labor unions, with competitors, even trouble with regulators should their company ever go public.

Which appeared increasingly unlikely. Last week Daniel had insisted they withdraw their attempt to become a public company when he learned that the newly appointed Board of Directors was going to lift the ban on selling their technology to Alfred Forsythe. The entire purpose of the Board of Directors was to act in the best interest of the shareholders, and Daniel’s refusal to do business with Forsythe was precisely the sort of thing boards loved to overturn. Ian had been fiercely disappointed with Daniel’s decision to withdraw from the sale, but he was forced to concede. Their company’s fortune was built entirely on Daniel’s innovations, and Ian knew it. If Daniel left and took his patents with him, Carr & Tremain would be gutted.

Daniel cast another critical eye over the workroom. Not much more could be done to bring order to the wild tangle of equipment, but at least he could get rid of the bit of dust clinging to the upper panes of the windows. “Jasper, grab a broom and knock down whatever filth is on those windows.” He shrugged into his suit coat and straightened his collar. No coal-shovel boy here, he ran a respectable operation now.

He need not have worried about Clara’s reaction to the workroom. Rather than disapproving of the chaos, her eyes widened in delight as she saw the array of equipment. “You
must
explain everything to me!” she said.

He allowed his engineers to do that. As he walked her from station to station, he prompted each man to explain the project he was working on. Daniel observed their reactions to Clara. Her tiny frame was encased in a mauve dress that accentuated her delicate, feminine features. It was an obviously feminine dress, with velvet piping in her snug jacket and a modest bustle behind her hips, but the starched collar and smart little tie mimicked a man’s business suit. The effect was charming. That Clara was pretty was obvious to any man with a pulse, but how many women could ask such intelligent questions about these mechanical devices? How many women had that natural graciousness that made each man feel that he was brilliant and engaged in fascinating work? But that was the effect Clara had.

Now that she had come back into his life, it was increasingly clear he should keep her here. Her humor and optimism were simply enchanting. For over a decade, Daniel had devoted his days to his relentless compulsion to create, invent, and earn. Now he wanted a woman by his side, and no one else but Clara would do.