Toward the Sunrise (5 page)

“I’ve never seen him so angry,” Julia said, picking a sliver from the dry wooden planking that had turned gray with age. “I know he could help if he wanted, but he wouldn’t even consider it. Shouldn’t Mr. Vandermark be the one to make this decision, not his attorney?”

Sophie’s face was closed as she leaned over to feel beneath the water, her hand emerging a moment later with another large oyster that landed in her basket with a clatter. “I don’t think the Vandermarks even know we exist,” Sophie said. “They live mostly in Europe and hardly ever come to the United States anymore.”

Julia glanced upward, where Dierenpark perched at the top of the cliff above them, so picturesque it could have been placed there by a Renaissance artist. She’d never understood why the family held on to this estate when they clearly had no interest in it anymore. What must it be like to have so much money you could collect houses all over the world? Julia rarely wasted time being envious of people who had more than she; all she wanted was to be able to control her own future. She was willing to work hard for it. She
wanted
to work hard for it, for few great things in life were easily obtained. But the way Ashton Carlyle had dismissed her still smarted.

“All I’ve ever wanted was to figure out a way to escape this valley,” she said, flinging the splinter of wood into the river. “I think I’ll die if I have to stay in this nowhere village.”

Sophie averted her gaze as she waded to the pier, setting the basket on the planking with a heavy sigh. Remorse immediately flooded through Julia.

“I’m sorry, Soph. I didn’t mean it. Really.”

“It’s okay,” Sophie whispered.

But it wasn’t okay. All Sophie had ever wanted was to become a wife and a mother right here in this village, but last winter her fiancé had died only a month before the wedding. Sophie was now twenty-six and so heartsick over Albert’s death she hid up here at Dierenpark, where she could be alone amid a universe of juniper trees and endless blue skies. Julia had often heard it said that despair of the soul was worse than pain in the body. She’d never believed
it until she saw the way Sophie dimmed and withered in the year following her fiancé’s death.

“Has there been no one since Albert?” Julia asked gently.

She immediately regretted the question. Sophie flinched and waded back toward the submerged reef, stooping over in search of more oysters, the slosh of water the only sound to fill the quiet morning.

“I still can’t talk about it,” Sophie finally said in a muffled voice, her eyes averted. “Not even with you. Most days I can pretend to be fine and go about cooking and tending the gardens, but everything is still hollow. And when I stop to think about Albert, the hollowness threatens to split wide open and sink me. So please . . .
please
, I still can’t speak of it.”

Julia had no experience with this kind of loss. She’d been too focused on her medical education to become sidetracked by a man, but she hated seeing Sophie so stricken with grief. If pretending to go about an ordinary life helped ease Sophie’s pain, Julia would help.

She scooped up the basket of oysters and stood. “Come on. Let’s go cook dinner, and you can show me how to make oyster chowder. I used to brag to my classmates about how you could make people weep over your cooking.”

Sophie managed a bit of a smile, gentle gratitude softening her face. “Thank you,” she mouthed and followed Julia up to the mansion.

Emil was waiting for them in the kitchen.

“Um, Julie? You know old Mr. Hofstad across the way from Dierenpark? The goat farmer?”

Of course she remembered Mr. Hofstad. Most of the Dutch settlers to the valley had been here for generations, but Mr. Hofstad had immigrated as a young man and never learned to speak English very well. His English might be poor, but he was a genius with goats, and they’d always gotten their milk and cheese from his farm.

“Well, he broke his arm last month, and his goats are getting ready to start kidding. He was wondering if I could help him out, but um . . . what with the twins and Claudia feeling so poorly . . .”

“I’d be happy to help!” Julia interrupted. She’d never helped a goat give birth before, but she was anxious to do something worthwhile while figuring out what to do with the rest of her life.

Because after today’s meeting with Mr. Carlyle, it didn’t look like she would be headed back to college any time soon.

Julia stood in the middle of the goat pen, wondering what she’d gotten herself into. Mr. Hofstad had a lovely farm, surrounded by a white picket fence and plenty of pens, shelters, and barns. It looked picturesque from a distance, but now that she was inside the fence, it was a little more overwhelming than she’d anticipated.

The man had sixty female goats. Sixty goats! All of them pregnant, all of them due to give birth within the next two weeks.

Mr. Hofstad rambled in Dutch while he gestured to a pen. Two of the goats had already given birth, and the little baby kids looked so precious, standing on their wobbly legs and taking uncertain steps.

She waded into the larger pen. Goats were friendly and curious animals, and they immediately crowded around, completely encircling her within seconds. The bleating, the smell, the bumping of snouts against her . . . what had she gotten herself into?

Mr. Hofstad laughed. “They just say . . . hi!”

She nodded and said “hi” back to the goats. Claudia spoke a little Dutch and came over to translate. It took a while, but Sophie learned that the pens were divided into goats who were preparing to kid, which was most of them, and three smaller pens designated as kidding stalls, since goats preferred to be alone while giving birth. Julia needed to keep her eye on the goats to spot signs of labor and then guide the doe into one of the kidding stalls.

After the birthing, the mama and baby should be moved to one of the ten pens at the east side of the farm. The few billy goats were kept completely isolated. They were more aggressive and completely useless during birthing season. Mr. Hofstad would feed and water the billy goats but would be eternally grateful if Julia could tend his female goats until birthing season was over.

Well? What else was she going to do with her time and her talents? This was shaping up to be an adventure she would never forget.

4

Ashton’s ears ached from the roar of shouts rising from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Watching from the gallery above, he had a bird’s-eye view of the pandemonium below. Perhaps nowhere on earth did stately baroque splendor contrast so sharply with aggressive men who jockeyed, shouted, and wrestled for position around the trading columns. Overhead, a massive coffered ceiling featured leaded glass skylights of arabesque design, some of which were tilted for ventilation. An ornate bronze railing lined the gallery that encircled the top of the trading floor. Such grandeur, such commotion.

Ashton clung to the railing, leaning forward to track the movements of his agent on the floor below. Every twenty minutes, Grigsby came running to him with a fresh strip of tickertape. Ashton had to lie flat on the gallery floor and reach through the railing to grab the tickertape from below. His suit had been custom made in London, but Ashton didn’t care. He paid one hundred dollars per annum for the privilege of this spot in the gallery, and he needed to see those tapes the moment they were released.

Shouts rose as another wave of orders were telegraphed in from Chicago, but Ashton didn’t care about timber, beef, or corn prices. He’d come for one thing today, and that was to corner the market on the gutta-percha trade. Such a strange name for a commodity that was about to take the world by storm . . . only most people weren’t even aware of its existence.

In the past decade, the economy of the United States had taken a steep turn from the world of agriculture into the dynamism of industry. The Vandermark fortune had been built on mighty ships carrying lumber, grain, fish, and fur all over the world, but that was not where the fortunes of the coming century would lay. Gutta-percha, the odd, milky liquid excreted by the rubber trees native to Malaya, was the perfect substance to catapult the Vandermarks into the twentieth century.

The Vandermarks already owned substantial gutta-percha plantations in Malaya, but they didn’t own it all. After today, if
Ashton played his cards right, they’d have a controlling interest in this little-used rubber.

A kind of rubber most people overlooked. A kind that was impractical for tires or raincoats or so many other uses. But gutta-percha was ideal for coating the wires of anything powered by electricity. Most of the electrical and telephone wires were currently protected by braided cotton cords that were subject to rotting, gnawing by insects, or even fire. Rubber made of gutta-percha latex was a perfect solution.

And if Ashton succeeded in pulling off this deal, soon every telephone, electric lamp, kitchen stove, and factory machine would be using wires coated with gutta-percha bought from Vandermark-owned properties.

He caught Grigsby’s attention, and the man looked up at him with alarm in his eyes. From his trading column across the floor, Grigsby flashed the hand signals for the current price of gutta-percha commodities. The price was creeping higher. Ashton had been buying shares all morning. Traders were noticing the movement and joining in the stampede.

Ashton didn’t care. It was still a gold mine.

“Buy!” Ashton shouted down. “Buy it all!”

Grigsby nodded and turned around to shout, gesture, and jostle for position in order to get the order placed.

Was it possible to feel exhilarated and tired down to the marrow of his bones at the same time?

Ashton grinned as he waded through the crowds packed along Wall Street on his way back to the law offices. By the end of the trading day, the price of gutta-percha had tripled, but he still bought everything Grigsby could get his hands on. It was enough to ensure that the largest makers of electrical machinery would need to deal with the Vandermarks if they wanted the best and safest form of coating for their wires. It was a coup beyond anything he’d ever imagined when he’d first signed on to work for the Vandermarks.

This
was the sort of deal he needed to specialize in if he was to get Nickolaas Vandermark’s attention. Thank heavens for his interest in all things eastern, or perhaps he would never have known about
the potential for the unusual type of rubber plant his predecessor had never capitalized on.