Betina Krahn Read online

Surprised, Vassar lowered the document in his hand, removed his spectacles, and leaned back in his chair. “Why, yes, it is.” He ran his gaze over Bear and nodded, clearly pleased by the improvements in his appearance. “However, the party is only four days away, and you would need evening dress.”

  “By Saturday, I’ll have it,” Bear declared fiercely.

  Vassar assessed his crackling determination and gave a chuckle.

  “I just bet you will.”

  “Well?” Halt asked when he stepped out into the street.

  “It’s all set. Saturday night I’m going to Vassar’s house to meet this rich old lady. What the hell was her name? Sparkle? Twinkle?”

  “Nah … Ruby or …” Halt squinted and scratched his bristled chin as if it helped him remember. “Diamond something. Yeah, that was it.” A bit more scratching and he had the rest. “Diamond … Wingate.”

  “Miss Diamond Wingate.” Bear winced at the name and struck off down the street. “I never thought I’d have to sink to charming money out of women.” He realized Halt wasn’t beside him, and turned to locate him. Finnegan stood on the pavement with his fists propped on his waist.

  “Yer not meanin’ to romance th’ woman?”

  “If you weren’t my partner, I’d lay you out flat,” Bear growled, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him along. “Besides, she’s probably old enough to be the ‘ol’ granny’ you’re always swearing by the grave of. Come on. We’ve got four days to get me some proper evening clothes and to figure out how to make old Miss Wingate forget how to say the word ‘no.’ ”

  “That awful rabble collected around the gates … Basil Wingate would never have stood for it.” Evelyn Stanhope Vassar sat glued to the carriage window the next day, as she and her family passed the Wingate estate on their way home from a day in the city. When the motley assortment of indigents and hopefuls loitering around the entrance to Gracemont were completely out of sight, she settled back into her seat and felt her daughter’s stare. “Sit up, Clarice,” she said defensively. “And don’t slouch. Gentlemen don’t like girls who slouch.”

  A sigh issued from behind the open newspaper beside her, and she cast an irritable look in her husband’s direction.

  “If she would just choose someone and get it over with. It’s simply not fair to the rest of the girls for Diamond to keep the eligible men in Baltimore in suspense.” Upon further reflection, however, she had to admit there was plenty of blame to go around.

  “Ridiculous men. Do they think they all can marry the same girl? You know, don’t you, Philip, that there hasn’t been a single engagement announced in Baltimore this season. Not one.” She raised her chin and looked balefully at her dimpled dumpling of a daughter. It was her one ambition in life to see her only offspring happily and advantageously married.

  The paper lowered enough for a canny pair of eyes to become visible.

  “It won’t be much longer, my dear,” Philip Vassar said.

  She started and turned to him. “What makes you say such a thing?”

  The paper crumpled toward his lap. “You will be ecstatic to know, dear wife, that your relentless wheedling has finally borne fruit.” He gave his daughter a covert wink and she blushed. “I have taken steps.”

  “Steps?” Evelyn’s eyes widened and her maternal instincts rose to a full quiver. “What sort of steps?”

  “I have invited a business acquaintance to your little party on Saturday.”

  “A business acquaintance?” Evelyn deflated.

  “A gentleman acquaintance,” Vassar clarified, giving her a meaning-filled glance from the corner of his eye.

  “A gentleman?” She brightened and glanced at Clarice. “Is he rich?”

  “About as rich as a church mouse, I believe.”

  Evelyn grew annoyed with his inscrutability. “How, pray, does my entertaining this pauper of yours help our Clarice?”

  “He needs a loan. He’s building a railroad out West and needs funds. I’ve promised to introduce him to Diamond Wingate.” He smiled with a hint of satisfaction.

  “Don’t be obscure, Philip.” She grew impatient. “How can you possibly think she’ll be interested in a penniless fellow who wants to take buckets of her money out West and pour it all over the ground in some wild railroad—” She halted, remembering the nature of the young woman in question.

  “Oh.” Her eyes widened further. “Ohhh.”

  Vassar enjoyed watching his wife discover his genius. He started to raise his paper again, but Evelyn stopped it halfway up.

  “But if he really is penniless …”

  Vassar fixed her with the long-suffering look of a prophet trapped in his native land, then returned to his reading.

  “I believe the fellow has … other … assets.”

  TWO

  The walnut-paneled boardroom was filled with the light of the afternoon sun, the scents of waxed wood and India ink, and a low, continuous drone of numbers.

  More money, Diamond Wingate realized.

  “The electrical water-bath can-sealing process … one hundred thirteen thousand. The new valve-and-jet combination for using gas in cookstoves … fifty-seven thousand this quarter. That new man-made medicine, ‘aspirin’ … only seventeen thousand. But they plan to advertise in ladies’ journals, business quarterlies, family magazines, newspapers. The Remington Company investment … profit distributions amount to—”

  A lot more money.

  “—a total of ninety-six thousand. Those ‘typewriting’ machines are selling hand over fist.” There was a corroborating murmur from around the room and a muted crackle of dry paper as a page turned in a ledger. “Swift’s refrigerator cars”—the voice droned on—“one hundred seventy-two thousand. Guardwell safety pins … twelve thousand … and branching out into other sewing notions. Proceeds from the new Baltimore glassworks … twenty-nine thousand. People seem to have taken to getting their milk from glass bottles. Ives’s photoengraving process … thus far, only eight thousand. But every major newspaper and magazine up and down the coast is clamoring for the process.”

  It was a blessed avalanche of profit!

  The litany of incomes halted as Diamond looked up from the ledger and into the faces of the men seated around the long table.

  “In short,” she said, eyeing them through the demiveil of her elegantly feathered hat, “we’ve made another pile of it.”

  “I should say so, miss.” The secretary of the board, standing by her chair, lowered the ledger he held and smiled proudly at his fellow directors. “Another whopping pile of it, in fact.” The others around the table nodded and murmured to each other in congratulatory tones.

  Diamond sat back in her chair at the head of the board table, staring at the balance sheet and considering the report. It wasn’t exactly unexpected news. She always made money. Not on every investment or venture, true; but she made a large-enough profit on enough of her investments that her fortune had grown from sizable to nothing short of extraordinary in the last eight years.

  A smothering feeling settled over her chest at the sight of those long, complex figures on the balance sheet. More … there was always so much more … She took a deep, determined breath and dispelled that feeling.

  “Excellent,” she said, with conviction. “Just excellent.”

  Smiles of relief, arm-clasps, and handshakes were exchanged all around the table … only to stop dead when she continued.

  “Now, let’s get down to business.”

  The secretary frowned. “But we have been down to business.”

  “Old business,” she said, closing the heavy book on the table before her. “I can take the general books with me and look them over this evening. I think it’s time for some new business.”

  Every man in the room tensed at those words and glanced at the door, recalling the collection of people they had waded through as they arrived for the meeting. She was going to give away money. Again.

  This had happened after each of the last several
meetings of the Wingate Company Board of Directors. Perhaps it was a reaction to the numbing recitation of accounts, or a realization of the staggering sums that her wealth involved, or simply the excessively charitable taint of her upbringing … whatever it was, something caused Diamond Wingate at the end of each glowing financial report to suffer a raging bout of philanthropy. She insisted on throwing open both the doors and the treasury of the Wingate Company and inviting the enterprising elements of Baltimore to make her a proposition.

  And the enterprising elements of Baltimore responded. Aspiring financiers, market speculators, would-be investors, social reformers, commodity brokers, charity mavens, down-on-their-luck businessmen, itinerant preachers, and get-rich-quick schemers … everyone, it seemed, had a proposition of some sort for Baltimore’s “Patroness of Progress.” Since daybreak that morning, a crowd of citizens in the grip of a determined entrepreneurial spirit had been collecting outside the doors of the Wingate Company offices … crowding into the upper hallway, clogging the sweeping staircase, filling the downstairs lobby, and spilling out into the street.

  Diamond turned to a chair by the windows where a portly older fellow with enormous muttonchops had been reduced to a semiconscious state by the combination of a comfortable chair, warm sunshine, and boredom.

  “Hardwell,” she called. “Hardwell!”

  “Whaaa …?” He snapped upright, blinking against the bright light.

  “The numbers,” she prompted.

  He rubbed his face, looked around, and scowled as he recalled where he was and why he was being called. Retrieving a glass fishbowl from under the side of his chair, he carried it to Diamond at the head of the table.

  “Are you sure you want to do this, my girl?” Her erstwhile guardian frowned as he placed the bowl on top of the ledger in front of her.

  “Absolutely,” she said, rising to address her gentlemen directors. “You’ll be relieved to learn that I’ve come up with a plan to avoid the … problems … we had after the last board meeting.” The tension around the board table was palpable. “I know you’re probably remembering that little misadventure with the soap suds in the outer office.…”

  “It took weeks to restore the files and paperwork,” the secretary declared.

  “And what about the disaster caused by that lunatic on buffalo back who wanted to start a wild animal park?” Hardwell added with a glower.

  “Well, it wasn’t his fault the poor beast didn’t take well to green corn feed,” she said, though with a bit less certainty. “And anyway, the rug was probably due for a good—” She waved it impatiently aside. “That is all in the past. I’ve come up with a much tidier and more efficient way to hear business proposals. I’ve decided to hold”—the gentlemen board members seemed to be holding their breaths—“a lottery.”

  “A lottery?” The secretary exchanged puzzled looks with the others.

  “Over the last three months, whenever I was approached regarding a business proposition, I responded by giving out a numbered business card. I informed the applicants that they should present both that card and themselves here this afternoon to participate in a lottery. The ten people holding cards with numbers corresponding to the numbers we draw from this bowl will each have a chance to present business proposals to the Wingate Companies.”

  She paused, searching their faces and finding only reserved judgment.

  “Don’t you see? This will eliminate the chaos that occurs when people feel they have to compete for the opportunity to make us a proposal.”

  After a moment, the secretary of the board looked at the others around the table and shrugged. “Well, I suppose it has to be better than … What can it hurt?” Following his lead, the others gave hesitant nods.

  Visibly pleased, she stirred the pieces of paper on the bottom of the bowl, then pulled out one after another, until ten numbers lay on the tabletop.

  “Number fourteen will be our first applicant.” She turned to Hardwell Humphrey. “If you’ll be so good as to summon our first presenter.”

  Diamond’s first lottery winner proved to be a big German meat cutter who smelled faintly of schnapps and proposed a novel method for stuffing sauerkraut inside of wieners. Number thirty-three was a pair of genteel older ladies who had come to plead the plight of “barefoot” natives in tropical regions. They wanted funds to buy and ship shoes to missionaries … shoes, in their cosmology, being somehow fundamental to both salvation and godly behavior. Number forty-seven clanked and rattled through the door with a prototype of a mechanical chopper which could be used on an astonishing range of edible material, from cow silage to cannery beets. His demonstration with a bag of said beets left a worrisome crimson-purple puddle on the floor. In every case, she wrote out a bank draft and assigned a director to oversee the project.

  Next came number sixty-four, a fellow with an idea for a mechanized bread bakery, who also left the boardroom with a bank draft in his hands. Then came an enterprising young chemist with a new formula for bug spray … which he demonstrated by attaching a jar of it to a hand bellows and pumping the room full of noxious kerosene-based vapors. The directors staggered to the windows with handkerchiefs over their noses and frantically fanned away the fumes while Diamond dabbed at her tearing eyes and wrote out another draft.

  When the air had finally cleared, Diamond looked up to find several board members standing shoulder to shoulder, staring at her.

  “Sauerkraut inside wieners … mechanical food choppers … bread from a machine … now we’ve nearly been suffocated by poisonous vapors.” Only one spoke, but they all glowered. “You’ll never see a penny from such nonsense.”

  Diamond assessed their forbidding expressions, smiled, and played her trump card. “I believe that was exactly what you said about the electrical water-bath can-sealing process. And if memory serves, it made us one hundred thirteen thousand this quarter alone.”

  That gave them pause for a moment. Then another director spoke up.

  “But five thousand dollars just to peel a few beets—”

  “Is a bargain … if it leads to an efficient new machine for peeling and processing food,” she answered, sensing that their uneasiness required a broader response. “I know it is sometimes difficult for you to understand why I feel so strongly about this. But I’ve been blessed with means far beyond my needs, and with that blessing comes a great responsibility to use my wealth for the benefit of others. Progress can be a very expensive thing. And it has to start somewhere.”

  They lowered their gazes and shifted their feet and, one by one, retreated to their chairs to see what else Diamond Wingate and “progress” had in store.

  “That’s ten,” Hardwell said with an air of finality, an hour later, ushering the tenth lucky presenter to the door. “I’ll send the others home.”

  “You see?” Diamond, feeling somewhat vindicated in her largesse, rose, checked the pinning of her hat, and began to draw on her gloves. “No major catastrophes. And you must admit, we discovered some interesting prospects in our lottery.” She looked to her treasurer. “How much did we spend?”

  “I’ll have the number for you in just a moment.” The treasurer adjusted his spectacles and began a quick bit of arithmetic, which had to be redone when something disrupted his concentration. By the time he looked up with the answer, Diamond and everyone else in the room was staring at the door in alarm.

  Noise was rising beyond the heavy walnut panels: a cacophony of voices and scuffling sounds, overlayered by Hardwell Humphrey’s beleaguered voice.

  “Please—go home! I’m tellin’ you, Miss Wingate and the board are not seein’ anybody else today!” The door flew open, admitting both the sound of the chaos from the outer office and Hardwell … who careened around the edge of the door and then planted his back against it, slamming it shut.

  “They’ve gone mad—the lot of ’em!” Hardwell panted as the other directors rushed to help him hold the door against the mob outside. “Stark ravin’ looney—wavin’
cards an’ demandin’ to see you!”

  Thuds from the other side threatened to force open the door as more directors rushed to pile hands and shoulders against it. Diamond was distraught at the demands of the unruly crowd on the other side.

  “It was a lottery,” she said in disbelief. “I told them they would have a chance … I never promised them that we would hear and fund them all.”

  The door thudded back a few inches and the people outside spotted Diamond through the opening.

  “There she is!”

  “Miss Wingate, we need yer help!”

  “Miss Wingate—you’ve got to look at my fertilizer spreader!”

  Arms and legs snaked through the opening, forcing the door back despite the gentlemen directors’ best efforts.

  “This way!” Hardwell grabbed her elbow and dragged her toward a door half hidden by a drape at the far end of the room. It was an exit onto a rickety set of fire stairs that led to the alley behind the Wingate building.

  “I have to talk to them, Hardwell.” Diamond’s resistance stopped him at the door. “I have to make them understand.”

  “They’re not of a mood to listen,” he declared with a glance past her. “She who gives and runs away, lives to give another day! Come on!”

  The board members, unused to such primal exertion, suddenly gave ground. The door swung open and people surged into the room. “There she is!” They spotted her near the exit and headed for her. The Wingate directors scrambled to re-form ranks, but their struggles bought only a short delay. It was just time enough for Hardwell to throw the bolts and plunge out onto the narrow iron scaffolding.

  Clinging tightly to the railings, they descended the precarious stairway to the floor of the alley. As they hurried toward their carriage at the far end of the narrow lane, they saw Ned, Diamond’s veteran driver, rushing around the corner beside the coach with a frantic look on his face. Behind him came a small crowd of people … carrying rolled-up blueprints, legal folios, and contraptions, and waving Diamond’s business cards. Spotting Diamond and Hardwell, Ned jerked open the door, vaulted up onto the footman step, and beckoned them on.