The Lady of Bolton Hill

Chapter 16





Daniel pounded on the front door of Clara’s house. He could have been polite and knocked like a civilized person, but there was very little civility left in him. Clara should have been at his office hours ago, but she hadn’t shown up. He might have understood if Clara had refused to meet with him as agreed, but Manzetti’s simultaneous disappearance was ominous. There had been some minor rioting downtown this afternoon, but that had dispersed almost as quickly as it had arisen. And still no sign of either Clara or Manzetti.


Daniel pounded on the door harder. If Clara was safely holed up in her house, Daniel didn’t know if he would embrace her or shake her until her teeth rattled. Finally the door was opened by Clyde. Or someone who mildly resembled the Clyde Endicott he had once known.

“Is Clara here?” Daniel asked bluntly.

Clyde took his time peeling an apple with a small hunting knife. “Who wants to know?”

It had been twelve years since they’d laid eyes on each other, but Daniel was certain that Clyde knew precisely whom he was speaking to. “It’s Daniel Tremain, Clyde. Clara was supposed to be at my office at two o’clock, and there was never any sign of her.”

Clyde merely shrugged. “Maybe she decided she had better things to do than listen to her supposed ‘best friend’ accuse her of inciting arson. Can’t say that I blame her.” Clyde propped a shoulder against the frame of the door and flicked the long curl of apple peel into the garden. He was about to slice a wedge from the apple when Daniel’s fist closed around his hand and wrenched the knife away.

“I sent my man to pick up Clara just after lunch, but they never showed. An hour ago my carriage was discovered abandoned near the canneries, with a broken window and shattered glass inside. Clara’s reticule was on the floor of the carriage.”

Clyde straightened to his full height, the nonchalance replaced by fierce concentration in those pale blue eyes. “What do you need me to do?”

“I need a fresh horse. I’m heading to Manzetti’s home next. I have already traced the route they would have taken to my office, and there was no sign of them. Manzetti’s is the next logical place to look.”

Clyde strode to the hallway closet and nearly wrenched the door from its hinges as he flung it wide. A moment later he had a leather satchel that he threw over his shoulder. “I’m coming with you.”

It took twenty minutes for the men to reach the three-story townhouses where Manzetti lived in one of the city’s middle-class neighborhoods. After receiving no answer to their pounding on the front door, Daniel made short work of the lock and pushed his way inside.

The interior of the townhouse was eerily silent as Daniel strode through the ground floor. Clyde vaulted up the stairs, calling for Clara. An open-faced newspaper was spread on the kitchen table and a canvas bag of laundry hung on the coatrack, awaiting the regular Tuesday pickup. Aside from that, everything was in perfect order. Manzetti took great pride in his home, keeping the hardwood floors polished with a regular fresh coat of wax and the interior immaculately tidy.

Clyde was coming down the stairs when Daniel pulled open a drawer from the front hall table. “His riding gloves are gone,” he said. Now he knew for certain that Manzetti had taken the carriage to pick up Clara, as the only time the man wore riding gloves was when he was handling a team of horses. Nothing short of an onslaught of violence would have knocked Manzetti from his mission. Manzetti wasn’t simply a bodyguard; he was a three-hundred-pound force of nature who could intimidate lesser mortals who dared to interfere with his duty. The thought that Clara could have been the victim of random violence when Manzetti was with her was unthinkable. Daniel shoved the thought away and tried to think of the only logical explanation for their disappearance.

“I think we need someone posted at both of our houses to await a ransom demand,” Daniel finally said.

Clyde’s eyes widened. “Our family is not the sort who would attract that kind of attention.”

“But I am,” Daniel said flatly. “There are enough people in my inner circle who could have guessed that Clara meant more to me than a casual friendship. They knew I would pay.” Although anyone close to Daniel would also know of his affection for his sisters, and Kate’s penchant for sporting events would have made her a much easier target. He scanned the room, looking for anything out of the ordinary, or something that could shed the tiniest light of insight into what had happened to Manzetti. But everything looked in its place. The stack of newspapers he rarely threw out, the tidy arrangement of furniture, the little lace doilies he had covering all his tabletops because he thought it looked like the way well-to-do people decorated their homes.

The roll of money on Manzetti’s desk was out of place. Manzetti had grown up in the same hollow-bellied poverty as Daniel, and would never have left money lying so casually about his home. In two strides Daniel had reached the desk and weighed the hefty roll in his palm.

“That’s a fat wad of bills,” Clyde said. “How much is there?” Daniel unrolled the stack of dollar bills and fanned them out to count them.

“Two hundred dollars.” This didn’t make sense. Daniel did not pay Manzetti in cash but arranged for a regular deposit to be paid into his bank account every two weeks. What would Manzetti need this much cash for? He knew the man had been hankering after a new horse, but that would cost less than a hundred dollars.

“What kind of purchase would require that much money in cash?” Clyde asked.

“Precisely what I was thinking.”

Clyde dragged a hand through his hair. “Could he have been blackmailed into something? Or bribed?”

The thought was repugnant. Daniel trusted Manzetti as he trusted that the sun would rise in the east tomorrow morning. He paid the man a small fortune for the unswerving loyalty he had shown to Daniel throughout the last decade. But Clara was missing, and Manzetti was the last person she had been with. Had her involvement in the war between him and Forsythe reached out to drag her down? His anger at her evaporated and it hurt to even draw a breath, knowing that Clara was in danger and even now might be struggling for her very life.

“Start looking through his desk,” he ordered quietly. Clyde began with the papers on the desk, while Daniel sat down and tugged open the drawers. He cursed under his breath when he saw so many of the documents were written in Italian, but he scanned them, looking for any words that might relate to Clara. He had moved on to the next drawer where there were primarily financial records, and thankfully, most of them were in English. If Manzetti was moving money in order to make a large purchase, perhaps there would be some indication of it here. Daniel was plowing through the second stack of documents when he realized that Clyde had not moved a muscle but was staring at a document lying on the top of the desk. His face had gone white.

Daniel stood to examine the note, written in an exact imitation of his handwriting, which was brief and damning.

She’s coming to my office this afternoon. I want her finished by nightfall. Half now, half after the job. Tremain.

When Clyde turned to face him, his eyes were murderous. “Her little articles bothered you that much?” he spat.

Daniel could not respond. He could not even breathe, seeing his deepest fears confirmed in writing before his eyes. Someone had kidnapped Clara, and he was being framed for the deed. His sweet, precious Clara had been assaulted and dragged to some godforsaken place. If she was still alive, she would be terrified and desperate for help while Daniel had been wasting time rifling through Manzetti’s house.

He closed his eyes and drew a steadying breath. Clara needed him, and Daniel would somehow find the rationality necessary to unravel this mystery and have Clara safely back in his arms. The first thing to do was calm her brother and get him working toward a common goal.

“Do you think I’d be so stupid as to sign my name to a note like that?” He closed the desk drawers and arranged the items on the desk exactly as they had been. “Leave everything here, untouched. Whoever planted these things probably didn’t expect them to be uncovered so quickly. Let’s get back to my office and start laying out a strategy for getting Clara back.”






She was thirsty.

Clara tried to move, but there must have been some sort of weight on her head, because even her eyelids seemed too heavy to lift. But nothing was worse than the thirst. It felt like her mouth and throat were filled with cotton, making her tongue thick. She wondered how long she’d been sleeping to provoke this aching thirst and why she couldn’t rouse herself to go to the kitchen for some water.

The floor was grainy beneath her cheek, and the sound of muffled voices came in the distance. Memories crashed down on Clara like the worst sort of nightmare. This nightmare was real, and she recognized the sawdust scent of the hideous warehouse she’d been brought to. She wondered if she had been restrained, as the horrific weight on her head felt unnaturally heavy, but then she remembered the drug. It had been in her tea that evil boy made her drink.

She cracked her eyelids and light streamed into them. The men were close and she could hear their voices as some sort of argument seemed to be taking place. It was probably best to keep feigning sleep, and she let her lids drift shut, leaving only a sliver open to see. If she could learn what their intentions were, perhaps she could bargain for her release.

“Please, Bane,” she heard a voice beg. It was the gravelly voice of the man called Richards, his voice vibrating with fear. “I know I messed up, but it was dark. I looked as long as I dared before people started coming out of the house and I had to get out of there. Besides, the gun can’t be traced back to us. No harm can come from it.”

“No harm? I run a clean operation, Richards, and I don’t like my associates leaving a gun at the scene of a crime.” The voice had the tranquil clarity of a crystal bell. Such a soothing tone and lovely to hear. It made the contrast with his words all the more terrible. “It could not have been all that dark if the house was on fire, now, could it? I can’t have that sort of carelessness among my crew; it sets a bad example. Back you go to the Professor,” Bane said.

Now the man looked terrified. “Please, Bane. Don’t send me back to the Professor,” Richards pleaded. “He’ll kill me; you know he will.”

Bane shrugged. “Don’t be ridiculous.” He looked at the other two men. “Get him out of here,” he ordered. Clara wondered who the Professor was, and what could be more terrible than being under the mercy of this pitiless boy.

A tear leaked from the corner of her eye, but she dared not lift a hand to wipe it away. She needed to survive this ordeal so she could return to Daniel and make amends. It was unthinkable that the last time she should lay eyes on Daniel this side of heaven would be as he raged at her in front of his burning house. That was not the way their friendship would end.

She forced the tension to fall from her face and tried to assume the slack look of a drugged sleep. The longer she could avoid interacting with this hideous boy, the better off she would be.





Clyde was a good man to have covering his back. One would never have guessed the small, wiry body could contain such a fierce warrior, but that was what Dr. Clyde Endicott was.

Exhaustion was beginning to pull on the edges of Daniel’s consciousness, but he forced the feelings away. He’d spent hours last night at the Baltimore Police Department, laying out precisely what had occurred and offering a huge bonus to the department if they could locate Clara. Not that he intended to rely on the police to solve this crime. He and Clyde had ridden directly from the police department to his offices on Calvert Street. There he was met by the small army of guards he had hired this month to secure his railroad lines during the recent unrest.

“I want Alfred Forsythe’s house watched,” he told Micky O’Shea, the foreman of the crew. “Have at least six men covering the house. If anyone leaves, I want him tailed. I want men stationed at Forsthye’s offices and steel mills, as well. The men need to be armed and ready to take action. Anyone who is squeamish about firing shots at Forsythe’s henchmen can stay home. I am demanding cold, steel-eyed determination.”

“Done,” O’Shea said.

As soon as the men were deployed to strategic locations throughout the vicinity, Daniel began the toughest part of the evening—calling on the heads of all the labor union  s in Baltimore’s tough lower south end. Eddie Maguire was captain of the local cannery union   and lived on the same gritty block where Daniel had spent the first twenty years of his life. The scent of the wet bricks and coal dust brought back sharp memories. He understood the hardscrabble outlook of the men who lived and worked in this part of town where the sun rarely shined above the bleak tenements.

It took some coaxing to get Eddie Maguire to the front door, and Daniel talked quickly once the burly man stood before him. “There is a meeting at the stockyard beside Camden Station tomorrow morning at ten o’clock,” he said. “The war between me and Alfred Forsythe just got a lot more personal. Send out the word that anyone who cares about moving the cause of labor forward should show up. I’ll make it worth your while to be there.”

As Daniel and Clyde moved from street to street, they used a list of names supplied by the Baltimore Police Department. A hefty bribe had yielded the names of all known union   organizers, ranging from the steel workers, cigar rollers, cannery workers, and ship builders. And, of course, the railroad workers.

At two o’clock in the morning, Clyde asked if they should stop until daylight, but Daniel flatly rejected the notion. “The message will carry more urgency if it is delivered under cover of darkness and with little forewarning. Trust me, I know how this will be received.”

The sun had barely cleared the horizon when Daniel finished contacting all the names on the list. When he looked at Clyde’s haggard face and bloodshot eyes, he figured he probably looked at least as bad, but this was no time for resting. They had three hours before the meeting at the stockyards and more work to do. They mounted their horses and headed back toward Daniel’s office on Calvert Street.

“That last issue of The Christian Crusade—the one with Clara’s story in it—do you have any more copies?” Daniel asked.

Clyde straightened in his saddle. “Father always holds a few copies back. I think he also has a box for shipment overseas, but those have not been sent yet.”

“Where are they?”

“The printer delivers the entire run to his house. They are in the storage shed, all boxed up for shipping.”

“Get them,” Daniel said. “I don’t care if you have to beg, borrow, or steal a wagon to get them down to the Camden stockyard, but this little chat we have with the union  s will go much better if we blanket the crowd with that rag your father publishes.”

Clyde needed no further prompting. He wheeled his horse around to head for his Bolton Hill home, and Daniel headed toward his bank on Charles Street. He’d greased a number of palms overnight, and this morning he would no doubt be offering more bribes to whoever could help him in turning this city inside out and upside down in his quest to shake Clara loose from wherever she was being held.

Shortly before ten o’clock in the morning Daniel arrived at the Camden Station stockyard and was relieved to see a healthy crowd had already gathered in the open space that was used as a holding area for cargo ready to be loaded onto the trains. Hundreds of hardened workers mingled with curious boys and other onlookers. Word about Daniel’s strange midnight communiqué had spread like a blaze through parched grasses in summer. As Daniel scanned the crowd he saw policemen lurking along the edges, and he gritted his teeth in annoyance. The sight of the uniformed men was likely to inflame the already suspicious crowd, but the damage of the police presence had already been done. He would just have to work that much harder to earn these men’s trust.


At the far end of the stockyard he saw Clyde navigating a wagon through the crowd of workers and stacks of freight containers. Daniel sprinted through the crowd, grabbed hold of the horse bridle, and helped move the wagon directly into the center of the crowd. When the wagon was positioned precisely where he needed it, Daniel sprang aboard and used a crowbar to pry the lid from the first crate of newspapers. A curious red-haired boy climbed up on the side of the wagon to watch. “My dad said you are Daniel Tremain, but I don’t believe it,” the boy said.

Daniel stared at the child. The boy was wearing the exact same type of bandanna tied around his neck as Daniel had once worn. All the boys working in the steel mills wore them to keep the sweat from their faces from staining the front of their shirt. “I’m Daniel Tremain,” he said, and the boy seemed to light up as though he had just confessed to being the president of the United States.

“I work at the Forsythe coal room in the steel mill. The men in the mill said it is the exact same room that you used to work in.”

“That’s right,” Daniel said. What an odd sensation, to look at this younger version of himself. Daniel reached inside his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill. He pressed it into the boy’s hand. “Start blanketing the crowd with these newspapers,” he told the boy. “When you finish, come back for more newspapers, and there will be another five in it for you.”

The boy had probably never seen such a fortune in his life, and within an instant the bill had been shoved deep into his pants pocket before he scooped up the newspapers and began handing them out to the crowd.

By ten o’clock the newspapers had been distributed and the workers were getting restless. Daniel stood in the center of the wagon, Clyde standing guard with a long-barreled shotgun resting on one shoulder. With his frontier garb and long braid of hair, Clyde looked more like a barbarian than a doctor, but Daniel was grateful for his presence. Daniel grabbed a railcar train horn and squeezed off a few blasts to signal that the meeting was about to begin. The throng of workers settled into an uneasy silence as they waited for Daniel to speak.

“I know these stockyards well,” he called out in a voice loud enough to echo off the brick factory walls. He pointed to the northeast corner of the stockyard. “I grew up two streets down from here, and lived under the same roofs, drank the same lousy well water, and worked for the same wages you work for.” At the mention of wages, a rumble rippled through the crowd, but Daniel didn’t stop.

“I’ve pulled myself up and out of here, and plenty of you think I’ve done so by stepping on your throats on my way up.” A smattering of applause sounded from the back of the crowd, but the men standing before him remained still, with arms folded across their chests and faces rampant with skepticism. “One of the people who thinks I have treated you unfairly wrote the cover story on the newspaper that is floating around amongst you.” There must have been close to a thousand people gathered in the yard now, and only a few hundred newspapers scattered among them. Still, even as he spoke, Daniel saw a number of the papers being passed hand-to-hand through the crowd.

“Clara Endicott wrote the story condemning the way Alfred Forsythe and I have been conducting our business, and the only reason she cared was because of the effect that it has on you and your children’s lives. Clara Endicott was driven out of England because she spent two years crawling through the underbelly of the coal-mining industry, trying to protect children from the abuses of the mine owners. She risked her safety; she risked her security on behalf of children whose names she did not know. She published stories in the London newspapers that brought the rage of mine owners down on her head.” A low murmur of approval began to roll through the crowd, and Daniel had to raise his voice to be heard.

“And now Clara has come back to the United States. Once again, she is working toward the betterment of the laboring classes, and she has taken up your cause—” Now the crowd was stamping their feet, rumbling with approval. Daniel had to struggle to be heard, his throat raw from calling out over the din of the crowd. “Clara Endicott has taken up your cause, but someone doesn’t want her to succeed, and as of last night, she has been taken from us and held without communication.”

The crowd fell silent, and Daniel could feel the heat of every gaze in the crowd focused directly on him. “Clara Endicott has only two known enemies in this city. Myself, and Alfred Forsythe. And I’m not the sort to make war on a good woman. I don’t know if Forsythe is behind this, or some other corporate titan who does not want to see Clara Endicott do to the corporations of this city what she tried to do to the mine owners in England. All I know is that someone in this town knows where Clara is and who took her. And, my friends”—Daniel leaned forward and strengthened his voice—“I will pay well for this information.” His vow was met with the stamping of feet and a few fists raised in the air.

Daniel held aloft a copy of the newspaper for all the masses to see. “Clara Endicott wrote this story for you, and now she is suffering for it. This is a woman who will fight to see that you earn a fair wage and your children have food in their stomachs every night.” Once again a roar of approval began moving through the crowd. As Daniel stared into the gritty, sweat-streaked faces of the hardened men before him, he knew they were his best chance of rescuing Clara, his generous, foolhardy Clara, whom he loved more than life itself. The pain in his throat swelled and threatened to choke off his words, but he needed to keep pushing through for Clara. “This woman is generous and valiant, and if we can save her from whatever thugs have her, this woman will turn every ounce of her glorious soul into making your world a better place. This woman is the best friend that labor has ever had, and any man who can bring me news as to where she can be found will never know a day of poverty again.”

The roar of the crowd was increasing, growing in volume and rhythm until it spilled over into a chant. “Clar-ra, Clar-ra, Clar-ra,” they chanted. Daniel met Clyde’s eyes, which were burning with confidence. If there was any union   man in the city of Baltimore who knew where Clara could be found, they were on the way to discovering it.