Toward the Sunrise (4 page)

“Miss Broeder, what an unexpected surprise.”

She jerked her fingers away from the map. Ashton Carlyle stood at the opening of a hallway leading to a suite of offices, looking as impeccable as always. His vest was made of shantung silk in the shade of carnation-red she always associated with the Chinese color of good luck. She gathered her breath and prayed for a bit of the good luck to rub off on her.

“May I say how dapper you look this afternoon?” she commented bravely. And indeed he did. His light brown hair was carefully groomed
and in perfect keeping with his finely molded face. His trousers were pressed to a knife-edge seam and broke at precisely the correct spot over his fancy leather shoes. He must pay his tailor a fortune.

He dipped his head in acknowledgment. “Thank you. I am expecting a visitor shortly, but I have a few minutes if you would care to follow me to my office.”

His office was as flawless as the man. There was no clutter in the room, but it was exquisitely decorated, with a wall of exotic maps, paintings of faraway places, and a large window overlooking Manhattan’s skyline. He offered her a chair that was lined with tufted leather and deep-set squabs and faced his desk. She sat, clenching her beaded reticule in her fists.

“What can I do for you, Miss Broeder?” His voice was pleasant, but his face brimmed with curiosity. Always so correct, so proper.

“I need help. Money and a good attorney, for a start.”

He coughed as he took a seat at his desk. He averted his gaze, adjusted his starched collar, then looked back at her again. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that, please?”

Heat suffused her body. This was awful—but had to be endured.

“I’ve been expelled from college. I’d like to mount an appeal, and I believe I need a good attorney to do so.”

There was no change of expression on his face. It may as well have been carved from stone. “Explain yourself,” he said quietly.

She owed him the truth and quickly told him about how the firemen expected her to patch up their dog so they could turn it around and fight it again. She admitted to taking the dog out of the city. She told him about the police becoming involved and her charge of moral turpitude.

“And what do you expect me to do about it?” Mr. Carlyle asked. The austerity in his tone was a surprise. He’d always been so pleasant and supportive in the past.

“Well, I know Mr. Vandermark has always taken a personal interest in my studies.”

If anything, his face grew colder. But it was true! A semester did not pass without a large gift box directly from Nickolaas Vandermark himself. At first the old gentleman had sent supplies to further her education, but over the years the contents had grown more personal. Upon learning of her desire to work as a medical missionary in the Far East, Mr. Vandermark had sent more whimsical gifts: a bolt of
batik silk, a set of calligraphy tools, even a case of Darjeeling tea from the wild mountains of west Bengal. She’d written him thank-you notes, always outlining her progress in school. Mr. Vandermark clearly read all of her letters and took care in the selection of these items to nurture and inspire her dreams.

“Do you know who Nickolaas Vandermark is?” Mr. Carlyle asked in a frosty voice.

“He is the man who has been paying my college tuition and supports my goal to become a doctor.”

“Yes, he pays your bills,” Mr. Carlyle said impatiently. “He is also among the most ruthless shipping tycoons of the nineteenth century. The ‘kindly old gentleman’ demeanor he wears like a snake skin is only an illusion, and he sheds it in the blink of an eye when angered. The man had a ten-year tiff with his only son over a violin. A stupid violin that neither one of them could even play. And yet that tiff lasted until the day his son died in a hotel fire. Even now, he is barely on speaking terms with his grandson, a man he raised from the cradle to be his heir. All of the Vandermarks are tough, driven men, and I can assure you they have no use for a woman who squanders the gift of a college education over a dog.”

Julia had known she’d have to take a reprimand over the dog but still felt confident the Vandermarks would assist her in the end. She wasn’t leaving without an agreement to get some help mounting an appeal.

“In ancient Japan, there is a practice called
seppuku
,” she said. “It is used as a show of contrition in which a man slices his belly open to spill his guts on the floor. Would you like me to do that here, or shall I step outside to avoid the mess?”

His mouth tightened. “You may find this situation amusing, but I went out on a limb for you, Julia! Nickolaas Vandermark had never heard of a woman wanting to become a doctor, but I vouched for you. I assured him you were a good investment, that the future rested with people like you and not the hidebound rules of the past. He agreed to pay, and now you’ve gone and squandered it over a dog.
A dog!
”

She flinched at the contempt in his voice. She’d thought he was her friend. A strait-laced, starchy man who moved in entirely different circles than she, but still a friend. How quickly the tide could turn.

“Is there anyone else in this firm who would be willing to help me?”

He scowled, reaching into a desk drawer and withdrawing a slim book, thumping it down on his desk with more force than was warranted. After a moment of paging through the book, he closed it. “No, no one else can help. I am the lawyer charged with administering the business aspects of Dierenpark and all its employees. No other attorney in this office has time for such details. And quite frankly, I could not recommend they interfere. Getting you readmitted to school would be throwing good money after bad. You are on your own.”

Julia grasped her reticule so hard the clasp dug into her palm. Her dreams were collapsing around her, but she kept her chin high. She stared at Mr. Carlyle even as he shifted in his seat and steamed, his face growing more flushed by the moment. She waited until he looked away first before she rose.

“Thank you for your time,” she said quietly before leaving the office. She closed the door softly behind her.

Ashton listened to the whisper-soft rasp of Julia’s skirt sweeping out of his office. The gentle
snick
as she closed the office door shamed him, but he couldn’t afford to be soft about this. He’d risked a lot in persuading Nickolaas Vandermark to pay for her college. She had no idea how hard it had been or perhaps she wouldn’t have been so careless. It was easy to be reckless with other people’s money and professional reputation.

He could still remember the appalled look on Nickolaas Vandermark’s elderly, narrow face when Ashton had first proposed sending Julia to college.

“I said to look after the financial and physical needs of the Broeder family,” Nickolaas had said. “I didn’t intend for that to mean funding a girl’s jaunt around the world.”

The Vandermarks were one of the wealthiest families in America and could afford whatever they wished, but asking for a college education for the daughter of the groundskeeper was an audacious request. Ashton had pushed for it until he’d earned the old man’s reluctant consent.

And Julia had squandered it over a dog. Did the girl have no understanding of the gift she’d been given? Ashton hadn’t had a benefactor to pick up his college tab. That burden fell entirely on
his father—and his family endured years of struggle, heartache, and debt to get him through college.

Ashton would never forget the time he made an impromptu trip home in the middle of his third year at Yale, carrying two tickets to an afternoon baseball game. It was his father’s birthday, and there was nothing the two of them enjoyed more than an afternoon watching the Brooklyn Dodgers at bat. Ashton had sensed money was tight at home, but he was working extra hours at the college library to afford the tickets and the train fare. As he vaulted up the steps to the brownstone townhouse where he’d been born and raised, he was stunned to see a
For Lease
sign hanging in the window.

He later learned his father mortgaged their home to pay his tuition at Yale. When the note was called in, his father had been unable to pay. He was evicted, moved to an eighth-story apartment, and was working two jobs in order to keep funneling money to Yale.

What did the intrepid Miss Julia Broeder know about that kind of sacrifice? Of the exhaustion that came from putting in a full day at an office and then manning a telegraph station at night? Or of seeing tears well in a father’s eyes at the shame of being evicted from his home?

Ashton drew a calming breath. Debt and financial insecurity were a long way in his past, but the lessons he’d learned as a young man would be with him forever. Yes, he liked to dress well, but he had started living well only after he’d repaid his father every borrowed dime and safely banked a healthy reserve fund. Even today, he and his father shared a modest house to economize. Only a girl who never had to work for anything would be as reckless as Julia had been.

He clenched his fist and stared at the framed drawings on the wall opposite his desk. The pictures always soothed and inspired him. Most were of the various Vandermark properties he administered. The estate at Dierenpark, even though by far the oldest, was modest compared to the other investments. Ashton was responsible for administering a rubber plantation in Sumatra, a series of warehouses in the port of Rotterdam, and a castle in the Black Forest mountain range of Germany. He administered twelve Vandermark properties, and each of them was represented on the wall before him.

But one of the framed maps belonged to him alone: the map of Marco Polo’s journey to the Far East and back. It was a humble map, taken from a book Ashton had read so many times as a boy
that the binding broke and the pages tumbled free, but he saved the map. For years he kept it tucked into a drawer, where he occasionally unfolded it to relive those boyhood dreams. Only after he began earning a respectable salary did he pay to have it properly framed and displayed where he could see it daily.

It had been Julia’s love of Marco Polo that had sparked the immediate sense of camaraderie when they’d first met all those years ago. She’d been only fifteen at the time but lively and curious and full of ambition. He had once shared her longing to see the world, but his fate had been settled long ago. He had responsibilities, and childhood dreams had been set aside when a golden opportunity at the Vandermark shipping empire became available.

Despite his prestigious job, he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life being little more than a caretaker for the Vandermarks’ far-flung properties. If he could execute the daring plan he’d been crafting for years, it would be the greatest triumph of his career. One only had to look outside his window to see the city bedecked with telephone wires, power generators, and the glowing electric lamps to see where the American economy was headed. They were no longer an agricultural nation, but an industrial one. And if his plan worked, it would give the Vanderemarks a hook into the burgeoning trade in electricity.

The clerk knocked on his door. “Mr. Stiles of the General Electric Company is here, sir.”

Ashton drew a breath, pushing dreams of Marco Polo, incense-laden caravans, and an idealistic young medical student from his mind. This deal was three years in the making, and he could afford no distractions today.

He was relieved to see Mr. Stiles was alone. It was so much easier to deal with a fellow attorney without the engineers to complicate matters.

“Come in, Mr. Stiles,” he said. “I hope we can sign those contracts today. It would serve both our corporations well if we could.”

And he smiled when he saw the nod of approval from Mr. Stiles.

Julia sat on the pier at Dierenpark, the old wooden planking hard beneath her skirts. Before her, the Hudson River unfolded like a glistening ribbon, meandering northward through miles of verdant
wilderness. The November morning was chilly despite the heavy blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She couldn’t imagine how Sophie tolerated the frigid water as she waded into the river, casually plucking oysters from the reef near the pier and collecting them in a basket slung over her arm.