The Lady of Bolton Hill

Chapter 9





Clara 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 union  s, 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.

After her tour of the workroom, they returned to the privacy of his office, where she set her notepad on his worktable and he took the chair opposite her. She flipped open her notepad and asked a series of brisk, intelligent questions with ease.

They were straightforward questions, about the nature of his inventions and how they advanced railroad operations. He explained how five years ago they had begun buying railroad lines, investing a fortune to diversify their company so as to ensure their long-term viability. “Railroads are expensive,” Daniel said. “Most of my available capital has been plowed directly back into the company, but we’ve got to have them. Unless we have railroads, our company could be wiped out tomorrow should someone else patent an invention that is better than ours.”

It wasn’t until half an hour into the conversation that Clara started poking around the sensitive areas.


“And as you sink more capital into railroad lines, surely you encounter more difficulty with your laborers?”

He gave a slight nod of his head. “Naturally.”

“Have your railroad workers formed a union  ?”

“They tried during the strikes of 1877,” he said. “It was not successful.”

“Why wouldn’t you permit them to union  ize?”

He didn’t want to discuss this with her. Clara was the person who had always helped him escape the troubles of the world. He wasn’t about to allow their afternoon to be spoiled by a labor uprising over which he had no responsibility.

“I had nothing to do with what happened back in 1877,” he said. “The strike covered the entire eastern half of the country and didn’t end until federal troops went in city by city to crush it. You can’t blame it on me, Clara.”

“No one would have stopped you if you permitted your own workers to form a union  .”

Daniel folded his arms across his chest and wished she would drop the topic. “That’s a business question. My partner, Ian Carr, handles business operations and employment.”

“And yet the decision not to license your technology to Forsythe was your doing.”

“The sole exception.”

“How does Ian feel about this?”

That wasn’t exactly a secret. “He doesn’t like it. Ian knows it would be easy money to let Forsythe use our technology, but he respects my reasons for refusing. We would not be business partners were it otherwise.”

The scratching of Clara’s pencil as she took notes was the only sound in the room. Ever since she began this interview she had displayed the utmost professional competence, asking probing questions in that flawlessly polite, precise way of hers. He was fiercely proud of her, but that didn’t make being the subject of this interview any easier to tolerate. Daniel felt like a specimen under a microscope and wondered how much longer this would last.

“When Carr & Tremain becomes a publicly owned company, will you be able to continue denying your technology to Forsythe?” she asked.

“We are not going public. I won’t relent on my position regarding Forsythe, so the deal is over.”

Clara set her pencil down, her eyes troubled. “I see,” she said quietly. She took a deep breath and leaned her head back, studying the ceiling of his office as though some terrific secret was hidden up there.

He reached across the table to close her notebook. “What’s bothering you? It’s not labor union   troubles.”

She smiled a bit. “You always could read me.”

That’s because you’re the other half of my soul. “I’m not doing such a good job now. What’s troubling you?”

She met his gaze frankly. “Will you go to church with me on Sunday?”

It was the last thing he expected to hear, but he could see by the anticipation on her face how important this was to her. Clara was a believer, and it had always bothered her that he did not share the same level of commitment.

He would have to handle this carefully. “Why is it important that I should attend services with you?”

She pushed away from the table and strolled to the window, looking down into the streets of Baltimore four stories below. “Because you are one of the finest men I know, but there’s a deep, wide hole inside of you, and I want to help you fix it.”

He clenched his fist, but kept his face expressionless. If it was anyone but Clara who dared to lecture him, he would have shut them down as quickly as snuffing out a candle. Instead he forced himself to look her in the eye and try to help her understand. “If you’re referring to my quirk about doing business with Forsythe, this isn’t a shortcoming that you can fix. It is a deeply held principle that means something to me. I’m honoring the memory of my mother and father, and I hardly consider that to be a hole that needs mending.”

When she turned to face him there was hope shining in her eyes. “I wish you would become a Christian,” she said. “If you could learn about and accept the principles of Jesus, so many things would change for you.”

“And you believe these magic principles of Jesus are going to cause me to forgive Forsythe and live happily ever after?”

She had that hurt look in her blue eyes that always tugged at his gut, but there was only so much he could tolerate, even from Clara. “You’re mocking me, but yes, I believe they can,” she said.

“It will never happen.”

She whirled away from him and strode to the other side of the room, her voice angry. “In all these years of snubbing Forsythe and denying him your technology, has any of that really made you feel better? Has any of it worked to calm the roiling pit of anger inside you?”

How innocent she was. How simplistic and naive she was if she thought saying a few prayers to Jesus could solve the tragedy of what had torn his family to pieces.

“Actually, yes . . . denying my technology to Forsythe has made me quite happy,” he said. “Every time I read that Forsythe needs to prematurely replace his rails, it makes me happy. Every time I read that he has to pay a fortune to stationmen along his line because he can’t buy my timing switches, it feels good. It’s worked like a charm, Clara.”

“But would you try, Daniel? You’ve never had a chance to learn about God or Jesus and you can’t dismiss it out of ignorance.” She softened her voice. “Would you try for me?”

When she looked at him with her eyes shining in appeal, he wanted to go to the moon for her, but he couldn’t grant her this request. It wasn’t ignorance of religion that caused him to reject it. His mother had done an extraordinary job of sharing her faith with her children, and look at all the good it did for her. When he was growing up he had read some of the Bible but never found it particularly moving or helpful. Same thing for her father’s sermons. Going through the motions of attending services with Clara and allowing her to believe she could transform him into a wholesome Christian would simply raise her hopes and, ultimately, be more cruel.

He tried to sound lighthearted. “Clara, you are obviously too good-hearted to recognize an unrepentant sinner like me.”

“Please, Daniel. Please have a little bit of confidence that I know what I’m talking about. I want to help you.”

He knew she did. From the first time she had let him use her piano to the time she rushed into the middle of a riot to rescue his sister, Clara had been the epitome of selfless loyalty.

“Clara, I adore you,” he said simply but truthfully. “Back when I was a dirty-faced kid, you were like a ray of light in a very grim world. You were so fine that I never dared hope I could be worthy of a girl like you. I dreaded getting older, knowing that each day I was one step closer to losing you. One step closer to the day when you would look around and meet some man of your own class who would marry you and shut me out of your life forever. And then I would go back to the steel mill, to the boilers and coal wagons.”

Daniel moved across the office to stand near her shoulder, so close he could smell the scent of her perfume. “And then a miracle occurred. I figured a way to earn lots of money and buy a fancy house with a grand piano and suddenly that blue-eyed girl with the golden hair was no longer so far out of reach. And when I saw her again, after all those years . . .” Did he imagine it, or were tears welling in her eyes? It was impossible to tell because she turned and faced the window.


“When I saw you again that day at the Opera House, you were so beautiful you took my breath away.” Those words seemed so inadequate for the longing that raged inside him. In every hour of each day since he had seen her again, Clara had been a constant in his thoughts, a dream he fell asleep to at night and the inspiration he strove to be worthy of by day. “But now I find that another bar has been set for me,” Daniel said. “Earning money and building a fine house was easy. Now she wants me to go out and transform my entire soul.”

She turned to face him. “Yes, that’s what I want.”

He folded his arms across his chest and locked eyes with her. “I adore you, Clara. I always have, and if I live another hundred years, on my deathbed it will be you who fills my thoughts in my last hour. But I won’t be your lapdog. I’ve worked and slaved and suffered to get to this point, and I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished.” His gaze flicked over his office. His immaculate, freshly cleaned and tidied office. Not that it had mattered to her one bit. “If you can’t accept that, I need to know it now. There is no point in prolonging this misery if you can’t take me as I am.”

He could see the play of emotions flickering across her face, disappointment warring with the determination to keep fighting. He held his breath, fearing that he pushed too hard and she would turn around and walk out of his life forever. His dearest friend, his brightest dream. He clenched his fists, fearing if she left him, the scar on his soul would never heal.

She lowered her head so all he could see was the top of her glossy blond hair parted neatly in the middle and pinned in an elegant twist. So wonderfully prim, but typically Clara. How desperately he wanted to run his fingers through those silky strands, bury his nose in the softly scented hair.

“I can’t force you to change,” she finally murmured softly. “Only God can do that.” When she raised her head to look at him, her eyes were hopeful. “But will you at least listen to me? This is a huge part of my life, and if you dismiss it like it is an annoying bother, I don’t know that there is much hope for us.”

“I’ve always listened to you, Clara.” From the moment he met her, her opinion was the one that mattered most in the world to him.

At last, the creases on her forehead eased; she straightened her shoulders and looked back at him. Her voice was nonchalant when she finally spoke. “Then what time shall I meet you for your sister’s tennis match this weekend?”

And Daniel smiled. He knew he had won.