A Dangerous Legacy

by Elizabeth Camden

  Then Nick came back. His roar of outrage was earsplitting the moment he realized what Tom had done. He flung the dumbwaiter door open and hauled her out, then lunged at Tom. A swift and brutal bludgeoning followed, and then it was Tom Jr. who was sniveling like a baby.

  Tom looked very different today, sporting a three-piece suit identical to his father’s, complete with a starched collar and gold watch chain. He even carried a walking stick with jewels set into the bronze handle, which seemed terribly pompous to Lucy, but the Saratoga Drakes were determined to use their money to buy all the trappings of class.

  Aside from a few threads of silver in his black hair, her Uncle Thomas never seemed to age. At fifty-seven, Thomas Drake was tall, whiplash lean, and had piercing gray eyes. Most women found Thomas attractive, but Lucy knew him to be as oily as a snake, even though he consistently tried to make polite chitchat with her at every meeting.

  “And how is your dear mother?” he inquired across the aisle as though this was a casual family get-together.

  “My mother is fine.” Her mother was a nervous wreck who had gone to live with her relatives in Boston to get as far away as possible from the Saratoga Drakes and this never-ending court case.

  She stared straight ahead, reluctant to speak to Uncle Thomas without a court stenographer recording every word. Finally both the judge and the stenographer arrived, and Thomas began the hearing with his usual offer to settle the case for a flat fee of ten thousand dollars. Lucy politely declined. By her estimate, the Saratoga Drakes were now worth over thirty million dollars, so ten thousand wasn’t tempting. Worse, it would do nothing to force Thomas to make the valve affordable to ordinary people. Still, the offer made Thomas appear magnanimous before the judge, while she looked like a skinflint.

  The judge’s voice was as somber as his dark robes. “Mr. Drake? The court will now hear your motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Nicholas and Lucy Drake.”

  Lucy sat calmly while Felix Moreno, the Saratoga Drakes’ lawyer, presented a motion to declare Lucy and Nick ineligible to proceed with this lawsuit due to their lack of standing in the eyes of the court. Mr. Moreno said that not only should the lawsuit be dismissed, but Lucy and Nick should reimburse Thomas Drake for the legal fees he’d paid defending against their illegal lawsuit.

  Tom Jr. smirked at her from across the aisle. “I’ll bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you?”

  Lucy stared straight ahead, refusing to let triumph show on her face. She knew all about their plans to declare her and Nick ineligible to proceed with the lawsuit, and already had a winning strategy mapped out with her lawyer. Uncle Thomas probably thought she would quake in fear at the threat to force her to pay his legal bills.

  He was wrong. Mr. Pritchard approached the podium and smoothly cited three precedents from New York law that gave Lucy standing. One of the decisions was written by this very judge to support their position. The judge seemed impressed but still turned to her uncle’s lawyer.

  “Mr. Moreno? Have you an answer?”

  Mr. Moreno asked for an extension to prepare an answer, but the judge was unsympathetic. “You brought this motion, and now you come into my courtroom unprepared?”

  Her uncle’s lawyer did his best to address the three cases but was unable to mount much of a countercharge. After twenty minutes, the judge banged his gavel. “I am prepared to rule. The Drake cousins have standing to proceed with the lawsuit.”

  Triumph flared inside. The vague accusation of bad faith had not come up, so perhaps it had just been an empty threat. She began gathering the papers stacked before her, and the judge stood to leave.

  “Not so fast,” Uncle Thomas said. “We have another, more serious issue to raise, and I’d like to call Mr. Lorenzo Garzelli to join us.”

  Lucy could not stifle her gasp.

  “We believe the plaintiffs are acting in bad faith and seeking to undermine Drake Industries,” her uncle said. “We have proof.”

  Lucy swallowed hard and wished Nick were there. The way Tom Jr. snickered made her mouth go dry. Her palms began to sweat as Mr. Garzelli made his way into the chamber, nervously glancing about the room and rubbing his hands on his coveralls. He refused to meet her eyes as he took a seat at the witness stand.

  “Please state your official residence for the benefit of the court reporter,” Mr. Moreno instructed in a clipped voice. It should not surprise her that her uncle would hire a lawyer as nasty as Mr. Moreno. A small man who always dressed very dapper and had an oily politeness in front of distinguished people, he was the kind of person who hit his servants when no one was looking.

  Mr. Garzelli swallowed twice and looked confused. “I don’t understand,” he said in his thick Italian accent.

  “Where do you live?” the lawyer said, enunciating the words as though Mr. Garzelli was a simpleton. He wasn’t. Mr. Garzelli was a proud man who had come to this country with nothing and worked hard enough to buy his own building just last year.

  Mr. Garzelli stated his address, and then the attack began.

  “How is water supplied to your building?” the lawyer demanded.

  “Through the city water system.”

  “And did you do anything to your building to alter the manner in which your tenants receive their water?”

  “Yes. A plumber friend of mine installed some fancy pumps so water flows to everyone in the building. Before that, they had to come down to the first floor and carry buckets up themselves.”

  “How many pumps?”

  “Four.”

  “And the name of this plumber friend?”

  Anxiety crossed Mr. Garzelli’s face at the accusatory tone. “Nicholas Drake,” he admitted.

  “And what did you pay for the equipment?”

  Mr. Garzelli began to perspire. “I paid for the materials and some extra copper tubes. I bought the Drakes lunch—”

  “But you paid nothing for the actual valves?” the lawyer asked in an appalled voice. “Valves that cost thousands of dollars on the open market?”

  Now Lucy saw where this was going. Uncle Thomas charged twelve times what it cost to produce the valve, but Nick knew how to make it, and he gave them to poor people for only the cost of the materials and equipment to fit them into the building. There was no law against what they were doing, but Uncle Thomas might be able to make them suffer for it anyway.

  The lawyer changed tack with breathtaking speed. “Can you read English, Mr. Garzelli?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Please read this document for the court stenographer.” He slid a piece of paper onto the witness stand.

  Mr. Garzelli’s face went white. He knocked the page away, and it fluttered to the floor. “That was a long time ago,” he stammered.

  The lawyer picked up the paper and placed it back before Mr. Garzelli. “Please read it for the court.”

  Lucy started breathing fast and clenched her fists. One of the worst things about this lawsuit was what it did to innocent people she and Nick befriended. Uncle Thomas enjoyed his systematic campaign to bully, threaten, and frighten off their allies for no other reason than it made the Manhattan Drakes’ lives uncomfortable.

  Mr. Garzelli still refused to look at the paper. “That was a long time ago,” he said. “I was desperate. I am not that boy anymore.”

  “Very well,” the lawyer said smoothly. “Since Mr. Garzelli refuses to read the document, I shall summarize it for the court. It says that Mr. Garzelli was caught picking pockets on Mulberry Street. In other words, he was a common thief. Does your wife know about this?”

  Mr. Garzelli folded his arms across his chest and glared at the lawyer.

  “Fine,” the lawyer continued. “As you say, it was a long time ago, and perhaps there is no need for your wife to know anything about it. Does she know you are a member of the Workingmen’s Union? A group known to consort with socialists and other radicals dedicated to destroying the American way of life?”

  “That’s not true,” Mr. Garze
lli sputtered.

  This hurt to watch. Lucy was accustomed to being on the receiving end of her uncle’s vile tactics, but Mr. Garzelli had done nothing wrong other than supply his tenants with clean water and the chance to rise above the squalor of their neighborhood.

  “This is irrelevant to the case,” she protested. It wasn’t Mr. Garzelli they wanted to destroy; it was her and Nick.

  “We find it highly relevant,” the lawyer said. “This man is accepting counterfeit goods, has a history of theft, and is consorting with known radical groups. We believe he is using his tenement to advertise the counterfeit Drake valves to his compatriots. Deportation from the country is a distinct possibility.”

  Mr. Pritchard stood. “Mr. Garzelli, I would advise you not to say anything else. You have the right to an attorney.”

  The hearing ended shortly after that. The judge ruled another delay for the Saratoga Drakes to gather evidence that she and Nick were selling counterfeit valves in an effort to undermine his business. Uncle Thomas had gotten exactly what he wanted.

  She was still shaking in anger as she relayed the day’s events to Nick in their apartment that evening. “Mr. Garzelli was waiting for me on the street as we left the courthouse. He wants us to take the pump and valves out of his building.”

  Nick let out a heavy sigh. He was already exhausted from a day of gritty labor, and learning that he’d be spending the entire weekend at the Garzelli tenement, uninstalling the valves, was demoralizing. “Doesn’t he understand it’s all just bluster?”

  “He’s terrified of being deported. I wouldn’t put it past Thomas to press the case just to get beneath our skin.”

  For the hundredth time, she wondered if Horace Pritchard was the right lawyer. He was a kind and loyal man who worked doggedly on their behalf, but he’d never been able to mount much of a charge against the fleet of attorneys deployed by her uncle.

  “Maybe we need a better attorney,” she said, glancing pointedly at the kitchen floor.

  Nick immediately understood the implication. “No,” he said flatly.

  The only thing of value they owned was carefully secreted beneath those floorboards. The triple-strand pearl necklace, bordered with hundreds of seed pearls woven together in a strand of unearthly beauty, had lain untouched for decades beneath that floor. It was an extravagant gift of love from a man to his wife just before leaving for war. Lucy had never worn it and wanted nothing to do with it, but Nick felt otherwise.

  “If we sell the necklace, we can afford a better lawyer. One who won’t let that man bully us or Mr. Garzelli.”

  “Someday I’m going to give that necklace to my wife,” Nick said.

  She sighed in exasperation. “We’re not the sort of people who wear a fortune on our necks, and I doubt the woman you marry will be any different.”

  It was the wrong thing to say, stoking Nick’s temper, which was never very far beneath the surface. “Do you think that because I’m a plumber I don’t want to be able to give my wife something nice? If we sell the necklace, we get a couple days of a lawyer’s time, but is that going to make any difference? That necklace is a symbol. It’s proof that our family was once something great.”

  It was true, but she didn’t need a necklace to prove it. All over the city, people enjoyed water pumped directly into their apartments because of Eustace Drake. That mattered to her more than a cluster of pearls.

  But Nick felt otherwise. She could never have built or installed the valves throughout the city without Nick, and she needed to respect his decision.

  “Okay, we keep the necklace, but we need to take the valves out of Mr. Garzelli’s building.”

  It was a terrible compromise, one that made neither of them happy. Nick didn’t say anything, but he slowly nodded. Two hundred people lived in Mr. Garzelli’s building. Today those people had plenty of clean water to drink, cook, clean, and bathe. In a few days, it would be cut off, and they’d go back to lugging pails up the stairs each day.

  Thomas Drake might have succeeded in intimidating Lorenzo Garzelli, but it only served to strengthen Lucy’s resolve.

  “I’m heading to the office,” she said. “You know why.”

  Nick nodded and let her go. She was going to do the one thing that had given them a fighting chance against the Drakes all these years. It was eight o’clock in the evening, but the AP office was still open. It operated around the clock seven days per week, and telegraphers were on duty at all hours.

  Twenty minutes later, she had settled in to her station. Shoulder-high partitions enclosed each booth to help muffle sounds from other telegraph machines, but it also provided her with much-needed privacy. She opened the circuit on her telegraph sounder and directed the line to the secret wire Nick had helped her install two years ago. With literally thousands of telegraph and telephone wires bundled into thick coils coming in and out of the Western Union building, no one noticed that she and Nick had spliced a single wire in with the rest that led to Lucy’s desk. That wire was bundled along with dozens of others that stretched across Broadway, down 6th Avenue, and directly into the law offices of Mr. Felix Moreno, her uncle’s lawyer.

  Every time the Moreno Law Office filed a motion, she knew about it. Every time Uncle Thomas wired a message or a planned strategy, she knew about it. For the past two years, Lucy had been able to eavesdrop on everything going in and out of that law office, and that wire was the lifeline that kept her one step ahead of her uncle all these years.

  It was also entirely illegal. She wasn’t proud of breaking the law, but all it took was the sort of dirty move Uncle Thomas had pulled in court this morning to strengthen her resolve.

  This wire could land both her and Nick in jail, but it could also be the key to winning the lawsuit, and she was willing to run the risk.

  Chapter

  Six

  I’m terribly sorry, sir. I take full responsibility and will gladly tender my resignation if it will smooth matters.”

  The elderly butler stood in Colin’s office, looking ready to face a firing squad.

  Colin waved his hand. “Don’t be an idiot, Denby. This is an easy enough matter to fix.”

  At least he hoped it would be. It appeared Lucy Drake’s accusation about the sluggish delivery of Asian reports to the AP was spot-on, and it was entirely his fault. Colin had appointed the old butler to a position neither of them fully understood, so he couldn’t blame Denby for the mix-up.

  Denby had been the butler at Whitefriars for thirty years, but since Colin’s sister no longer entertained, there wasn’t enough work for a butler at the estate. Denby had accompanied Colin to New York, but there wasn’t much to oversee at his Manhattan townhouse either. Sitting at home watching the plants grow wasn’t good for anyone’s soul, and Denby gladly agreed to help out at Reuters. Having a skilled butler in the office added a touch of panache that secretly amused everyone working there.

  Among the odd jobs Denby had taken over was handling the mail. All of Reuters’ outgoing mail was sent via pneumatic tube down to the sorting office in the basement. Denby failed to realize that anything addressed to the AP should have been sent by a different tube directly to the AP office two floors below. The unnecessary trip to the basement was causing a full day’s delay in the delivery of the AP’s stories received by Reuters.

  Well, there was nothing for it but to go downstairs and tender a full apology. Besides, a strange compulsion urged him to see Lucy Drake again. The urge didn’t warrant too much scrutiny, for there was nothing aboveboard about his interest in her. But then, it wasn’t as if he had any sort of formal agreement with Amelia, who was still waffling between him and Count Ostrowski, so there was technically nothing stopping him from giving in to the impulse.

  Knowing the staff at the AP were accustomed to little better than slop at the cafeteria, he had already asked Nanny Teresa to bake a batch of her incomparable lemon cream shortbread as a peace offering.

  There weren’t many female telegraphers in the office
, making it easy to spot Lucy at a work station on the third row of operators in the cavernous AP office. He studied her from behind, noting her rigidly straight posture, her tailored jacket nipped in at the waist, and her dark hair coiled at the base of her neck. Her head tipped at a charming angle toward the sounding machine as she received a message and wrote out the translation.

  What had driven a woman like her into this field? Did she work here from necessity or because she liked it? Given her intense expression as she transcribed, she seemed to be enjoying herself. There was something compelling about a woman so alive and engaged, as though she couldn’t wait to interpret the next stream of dots and dashes coming off the wire.

  He knew the feeling well.

  At last she closed the circuit and finished transcribing the message on a tablet of paper. She stood to carry it to the end of the aisle for delivery via the pneumatic tube but froze when she spotted him.

  When their gazes met, it was like a wallop to the chest. What kind of idiot was he to be affected by locking eyes with a woman across a crowded room of people? Nevertheless the mesmerizing charge did not fade as she made her way toward him.

  “What brings you into enemy territory?” she asked as she opened the pneumatic tube, slipped her story inside the canister, then pulled the lever. A sucking sound shot through the air as her report was whisked to another floor.

  “I’ve brought a peace offering,” he said, extending the tin of lemon cream shortbread. “A new staff member has been inadvertently sending AP stories to the general sorting room in the basement rather than directly to the sixth floor, which caused the delay in delivery. My apologies.”

  The corners of her mouth turned down. “Does that usually work for you? A charming smile and something sweet to paste over an appalling lack of service?”

  “I’d offer my firstborn child, but given the ferocity of your expression, I doubt even that shall suffice.”