He’d completely forgotten issuing the invitation, or he would have warned them in advance. Of course, they might have boycotted the event had they known Margaret would be here. But this feud had gone on too long and claimed victims on both sides. It was time their family made peace.
“Aunt Margaret,” he said politely as she joined them. “It was good of you to come tonight.”
His aunt was an imposing sight. Amidst the gaily dressed people gathered for a late summer’s festivities, she was like a gothic heroine proudly wearing black silk, the ruff of her gown framing her face.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she said in a honeyed voice. Her face hardened as she turned her attention to Lucy and Colin. “I have not yet had a chance to read all the condolence letters I received after my husband’s death, or I’m sure I would have read yours, Lucy.”
Nick wished Aunt Margaret hadn’t come out swinging, but a part of him admired her gumption. She had plenty of cause to resent Colin and Lucy, and her appearance here this evening was a clear sign she had no intention of cowering away at Oakmonte.
“You aren’t welcome here,” Colin said coldly.
Nick was about to intervene, but Margaret needed no defending. “In a public park? You forget yourself. In America, the parks are open to everyone, not just aristocrats with an inherited sense of entitlement.”
Nick shot Colin an annoyed glance. “Can we hold off on the fireworks until after the speeches? Aunt Margaret is here at my invitation.” He stepped to Rosalind’s side. “Aunt Margaret, this is Dr. Rosalind Werner. She and I met while working on the water project in Jersey City. She was kind enough to accompany me here tonight.” He held his breath, praying Aunt Margaret’s frosty demeanor would thaw.
It did. “Dr. Werner,” she said in an approving tone. “There are so few female physicians. I’m fascinated to finally meet one.”
“I’m not that kind of doctor,” Rosalind said with a kind smile, and he had a hunch she had to make that clarification a lot.
As she went on to explain her work in water purification, Nick studied his family. There had been no softening from Colin or Lucy, who both glared at Aunt Margaret as though a snake had just slid into the Garden of Eden. At least Margaret was polite to Rosalind, nodding and asking questions and doing everything possible to make Rosalind feel at home. He couldn’t ask for more.
Except possibly a little cooperation from Lucy and her husband. The master of ceremonies was on the stage, checking the height of the podium. Nick was about to deliver the biggest speech of his life, and he didn’t want to leave Rosalind in the middle of a civil war.
He took the notes from his jacket and confirmed the pages were all in order. He set a hand on the small of Rosalind’s back, and she flashed him a nervous smile. “I need to go soon. Will you be all right? You look anxious.”
“I’m only nervous on your behalf, but I know you’ll be brilliant.”
He brightened. “No worries, Dr. Werner. I’m fearless.” Except when it came to his volatile family dynamics. He stepped closer to Colin and Lucy, sending them both a pointed look. “Please . . .” he entreated in a low voice.
There was no time for more words. The master of ceremonies gestured Nick up to stand behind the podium, along with the mayor and other elected officials.
“I’ll be fine,” Rosalind assured him.
He couldn’t resist. On one of the most important days of his career, she was here to share it with him, and she was kind and pretty, and it felt like she belonged beside him for the rest of their lives. He planted a quick kiss directly on her mouth. “I adore you,” he whispered, then bounded up onto the stage.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so nervous,” Lucy said.
Rosalind didn’t know Nick well enough to judge, but she was proud of him as he mingled with the other dignitaries on the stage. She tore her eyes away from him only long enough to head toward the bank of seats. She sat with Colin and Lucy on one side, and Margaret on the other. There were still a few more minutes before the ceremony began.
“Nick tells me you are a baronet,” Rosalind said to Colin. “Does that make you Sir Beckwith?”
“Yes, but please call me Colin,” he said.
“Or you can call him a backstabber,” Aunt Margaret said, calmly staring straight ahead. “Turncoat, traitor, snitch, or maybe just Sir Beckwith. They all mean the same thing.”
“It’s nice that I can always count on you to be so well-mannered, Margaret,” Colin said smoothly.
On another occasion, Rosalind might find it awkward to be seated between such warring parties, but she was too nervous on Nick’s behalf to pay them any mind. How could a plumber possibly command the attention of the thousands of people crowded into the park? The seats were filled with dignitaries who’d been invited, but thousands of ordinary citizens stood in the field behind them, waiting for the carts of free food and drink to be wheeled out.
The master of ceremonies spoke, and then the mayor said a few words, thanking some local companies for donating the food. Some hoots of expectation echoed up from the crowd, and Rosalind wished they had held this gathering in an enclosed auditorium. How could Nick be heard over this rowdy crowd?
“And now it is my pleasure to introduce Nicholas Drake, the newly appointed commissioner of the State Water Board, whose job it will be to make sure the city continues to have a bountiful supply of water into the next century. Mr. Drake?”
To her surprise, Nick put on a pair of eyeglasses before stepping up to the podium, the pages of his speech held before him. The other men had spoken extemporaneously, and she worried that reading from the page was a mistake. Public speaking was an art form, and reading a prepared speech was rarely persuasive.
“Sixty-five years ago, the Croton Aqueduct began supplying our city with water,” he said in a confident voice, echoing over the park. “It was an accomplishment beyond most people’s imagination. Instead of dipping their buckets into a local well for brackish water, people suddenly had a bountiful supply of freshwater pumped down from the pristine Hudson River Valley. The day the water began flowing was declared a public holiday in New York City. People gathered in this very park to witness the reservoir fill with crystal-clear water that had travelled through forty-one miles of pipeline.”
Rosalind’s tense muscles began to relax. He was doing well. Very well! His voice was strong and natural, even though he read from a prepared script.
“In the decades that followed, our city grew from three hundred thousand people to over four million. We began taking water for granted, because the Croton Aqueduct never let us down. Most of you passed the park’s reservoir on your way here tonight, and you can see how low the water level is. That’s why we are building a new aqueduct. The Croton Aqueduct brings us thirty-five million gallons of water per day. The Catskill Aqueduct will pump five hundred million gallons a day.”
A spontaneous burst of applause started deep in the crowd, and a couple of voices shouted through the din.
“Yo, Nick!” a voice bellowed.
Rosalind followed the voice and saw a group of tough-looking men standing atop a picnic table. They wore the clothes of ordinary laborers, but their grins were wide. Nick flashed a smile and gave them a thumbs-up. It wouldn’t surprise her if these were men he once worked with in those underground tunnels.
Nick took off his glasses and set down the pages. Suddenly he was speaking from the heart. “Back when the original aqueduct opened, all people needed was a little water for cooking, drinking, and an occasional wash from a bucket. But now? You people are taking long, hot baths—some of you every day! And those toilets we’ve all gotten so used to? They take a lot of water, ten times a day.” He looked at the men standing on the picnic table. “Twenty times a day for you, Wallenstein!”
The men howled with laughter, and it rippled through the crowd as well. Nick put on his glasses and went back to the speech.
“Our standards are getting higher. Our population
larger. The new aqueduct will require a hundred miles of pipeline and a dozen bridges. We’re going to tunnel beneath mountains, rivers, and farmland to get it here. We’ll drill through bedrock and build bridges to carry it over ravines. It’s going to take a decade to build, but we have the vision and technology to accomplish it. And once this marvel of engineering is complete, the pipes will be covered over, and most of us will never think of them again. People will build houses and businesses on top of them. They’ll raise crops, play with their children, and never realize the miracle flowing beneath their feet.”
Rosalind was awestruck, for Nick’s performance was mesmerizing. He spoke with a combination of confidence, charisma, and raw strength. As he continued speaking, she could tell exactly when he veered from Colin’s prepared speech. Colin wrote with grandiose imagery while Nick spoke with common sense immediately understood by anyone with a pulse. Both qualities were essential for a great speech, and Nick was hitting it out of the park.
“How long have you known my nephew?” Margaret whispered to her.
Rosalind didn’t want to tear her attention from Nick, but he desperately wanted to mend fences with his aunt, and she mustn’t be rude.
“Not long,” she whispered back, her attention still fastened on Nick’s speech.
“And yet you look at him as though he is God’s gift to womankind.”
Was she that obvious? She didn’t care. “He isn’t?” she whispered back with a hint of laughter.
Nick’s speech came to an end, and the crowd stood to applaud. Rosalind shot to her feet, clapping so hard the palms of her hands hurt, but she was hopelessly proud of him. No wonder he’d earned the governor’s appointment to this position. He didn’t need to be an engineer or chemist, he needed to be able to sell the most expensive building project in the state’s history to a population that hadn’t yet experienced a problem in their water supply.
“It was nice meeting you, Dr. Werner,” Margaret said as they rose. “I had best get back to my hotel, but I wanted to be here in support of my nephew’s speech. He’s worth ten of them.” She gave a disparaging glance at Colin and Lucy.
“Isn’t she a delight?” Colin said after Margaret disappeared into the crowd.
“I’m afraid I don’t know enough about her to comment one way or the other.” Rosalind did know that when push came to shove, family could be depended on. Gus had stood by her side through a torrent of abuse, and Rosalind had an instinctive sympathy for a widow who seemed to have no family left aside from a few overtures from Nick.
The moment Margaret vanished into the crowd, Colin and Lucy eased. “It was a brilliant speech, my love,” Lucy said, beaming up into her husband’s face.
“Except when he strayed from the script,” Colin said. “Leave it to your brother to bring up toilets in the middle of my scintillating prose.”
The weight of two warm hands settled on Rosalind’s shoulders. “Toilets use more water than anything else in a household,” Nick said. “Everyone was thinking it. I had to bring it up.”
“No, actually, you didn’t,” Colin said. “In my thirty-nine years on the planet, I’ve never once felt compelled to discuss toilets in public.”
While they talked, a number of men stopped to clap Nick on the back or shake his hand. There was the leader of the plumber’s union, then a congressman from upstate New York whose district would be bisected by the aqueduct. Nick spoke to both men with ease, but should Rosalind have been surprised? Since the morning she’d met him for breakfast, Nick had an easy way of communicating with people from the café waitress to the professors at the Water Association meeting. Throughout the entire evening, Nick held her arm and introduced her to each man. His declaration that they were a pair could not have been more obvious if he had held a placard above their heads.
After a while, the stream of men introducing themselves to Nick slowed. The sun sank, the moon rose, and the Chinese lanterns were lit, casting a warm glow throughout the park. Music played in the distance, and tables were laden with platters of sandwiches, pickles, and sliced fruit. Rosalind and Nick served themselves, then headed over to join his family at a picnic table beneath the boughs of a spreading oak tree.
“Tell me you are not eating a pastrami sandwich with a knife and fork,” Nick said as he sat.
Colin dabbed the corner of his mouth with a cloth. “Forks have been a welcome tool of enlightened society for hundreds of years. I shall buy you some. Tell me, Dr. Werner, how have you enjoyed your first official coming out alongside our new Commissioner?”
“Please call me Rosalind. And I loved it.”
Nick brushed away a leaf that had dropped on his shoulder. “I really hate being out in the wilderness like this.”
Colin snorted. “It’s Central Park, hardly the untouched wilds. Everything here was carefully designed by landscape architects, including the lake, the hills, and the cluster of trees under which we are sitting.”
“I don’t care,” Nick grumbled as he flicked at a ladybug crawling across the table. “Look, there are bugs. They’re nasty.”
It was surprising that a man as physically imposing as Nicholas Drake should be out of sorts from a bit of nature. Rosalind did her best to hide her smile, but his sister hooted with amusement.
“You spent twelve years working in water tunnels and sewage lines, and you think ladybugs are nasty?” Lucy challenged, but Nick gave as good as he got.
“Modern plumbing is a miracle of civilization. Nothing about it is nasty,” he said with a grin.
It was in that moment that Rosalind knew she loved him. She met his gaze across the picnic table, and he flashed her a wink. Laughter bubbled up inside her, for this was quite possibly the most perfect evening of her life. She was with a man of strength, intelligence, and character. He was as attracted to her as she was to him, and it was exhilarating.
But at the back of her mind loomed the anxiety of what would happen when he learned about the chlorine. She had to believe Nick would forgive her. He’d forgiven his aunt for some awful family drama, hadn’t he? He’d lost his temper a couple of times with her and always quickly simmered down. Once he saw how beautifully chlorine worked, he would be angry, but he’d forgive her. Everything between them was too perfect to imagine otherwise.
But in her heart, she still worried.
As they stepped off the subway on the Jersey side of the river, Nick reached for Rosalind’s hand and tugged her a little closer.
“Thank you for riding the subway with me,” she said. “You don’t have to walk me all the way home.”
“Of course I do.”
Rosalind was a grown woman who’d travelled the world and was surely capable of finding her way to her house, but he didn’t want this evening to end. Excitement still charged through his veins at the triumph of his speech, but even better were the hours afterward. He’d suspected Rosalind would fit in well with his family, and it couldn’t have gone better. He wanted nothing so much as to have a day like today happen again tomorrow. And the next day. He wanted the chance to put his skills to use building the Catskill Aqueduct during the day, then to court Rosalind in the evenings.
Instead, he needed to head to upstate on business. “I’m travelling up to the Catskills tomorrow morning,” he said. “The location of the new reservoir has been approved, but we may run into some troubles with the watershed.”
“What sort of troubles?”
He loved that Rosalind knew exactly what he meant by a “watershed” without having to explain the basics. He would be able to share this part of his life and not worry he was boring her or that she was feigning interest to lure him in.
“The owner of a limestone quarry is causing a lot of runoff from his operation. It might be polluting the watershed. Dealing with Bruce Garrett is going to be tough enough, but I’ve also got to start scoping out the land for the new reservoir. It’s going to force a lot of people off their property.”
“They’ll be compensated, won’t they?”
>
He wished it was as easy as writing a few bank checks, for the situation upstate was already getting ugly, but he blocked his misgivings from his voice. “Of course. It doesn’t mean they won’t kick up a fuss. I need to head up there and figure out what sort of work crews will be necessary for clearing the land.” And demolishing homes, rerouting railroads, destroying people’s livelihoods. The situation had been giving him an ulcer for months, but it had to be done.
He’d rather stay here and spend more long, lingering evenings squiring Rosalind around town. He folded her arm tighter alongside him, wondering if he could steal another kiss tonight.
“I live at the end of this street,” she said as she turned down a leafy, tree-lined avenue. The houses were new, with tidy front porches, clapboard siding, and gabled roofs. It was nearing midnight, and it felt like they were the only two people still awake. With grassy lawns and crickets chirping in the underbrush, it was so different than his seventh-story apartment in the middle of a city that never slept.
“It’s a nice place,” he said, leaning down to pick up a child’s bicycle that lay across the sidewalk. He propped it against the fence and took her arm again. “A lot of children live on this street?” It was important to learn if she wanted children. He already had Sadie and would be content with that, but he’d also welcome more.
“Oh yes, plenty of children.” She pointed to one of the larger houses on the opposite side of the street. “Judge McLaughlin lives in that Dutch colonial, and he has five children.”
Nick lowered his brow. The last thing he wanted to do was discuss Judge McLaughlin or anything to do with the chlorine case, but how interesting that she lived so close to the judge in the lawsuit.
“You know Judge McLaughlin well?”
“Not really. His wife sometimes visits with my sister-in-law, but that’s all.” She stopped walking and turned to face him on the narrow sidewalk. “I’m sorry,” she said in a rush. “I shouldn’t have brought his name into this conversation. I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about the ninety days or chlorine or anything that would—”
A Daring Venture Page 15
