He rose and walked to his bookshelves. Bent burst from the chair, started around the desk. "Damn you, how dare you say such a thing to Starkwether's own —"
Dills pivoted, closing a book with a gunshot sound. "I said good day."
As Bent blundered down the long flight to the street, an inner voice screamed: He meant it. The man meant it. What shall I do now?
In the office, Dills replaced the book and returned to his desk. Seated, he noticed his speckled hands. Shaking. The reaction angered and shamed him. Furthermore, it was unnecessary.
Certainly his former client's employers would want their names guarded. But Dills was confident Bent didn't know their identities. Further, Bent was patently a coward, hence could be bluffed. Of course, through certain of Starkwether's connections, Dills could easily have arranged for Bent to take a fatal musket ball. In Kentucky, it could even be made to appear that his killer was a reb. Such a scheme would only work to the lawyer's financial disadvantage, but Bent didn't know that.
That two parents with such positive character traits could have produced a son as weak and warped as Elkanah Bent confounded Dills's sense of order. Born in the meanest poverty in the Western woodlands, Starkwether had been gifted with guile and ambition. Bent's mother had possessed breeding and a background of wealth and eminence. And look at the sorry result. Perhaps force majeure was more than a legal conceit. Perhaps some illicit relationships and their fruit were condemned in heaven from the moment the seed fell.
Unable to compose himself or banish the memory of his visitor, Dills took a small brass key from his waistcoat. He unlocked a lower desk drawer, reached in for a ring of nine larger keys, and used one to enter the office closet. In the dusty dark, another key opened an iron strongbox. He drew out its contents. One thin file.
He examined the old letter which he had first read fourteen years ago. Starkwether, ailing, had given it to him permanently last December. The letter filled both sides of the sheet. His eyes dropped to the signature. The effect of reading that instantly recognizable name was always the same. Dills was stunned, astonished, impressed. The letter said in part:
You used me, Heyward. Then you left me. But I admit I shared a certain pleasure and cannot bring myself to abandon altogether the result of my mistake. Knowing the sort of man you are and what matters most to you, I am prepared to begin paying you a substantial yearly stipend, provided you accept parental responsibility for the child — care for him (although not necessarily in a lavish manner), help him in whatever way you deem reasonable — but most important, diligently monitor his whereabouts in order to prevent any circumstance or action on his part or the part of others which might lead to discovery of his parentage. Need I add that he must never learn my identity from you? Should that happen, whatever the reason, payment of the stipend will cease.
Dills wet his lips with his tongue. How he wished he had met the woman, even for an hour. A bastard would have smirched her name and spoiled her possibilities, and she had been clever and worldly enough to know that at eighteen. She had married splendidly. Again he turned the sheet over to gaze at the signature. Poor vengeful Bent would more than likely crack apart if he saw that last name.
The paragraph above it was the one of most direct interest to him:
Finally, in the event of your death, the same, stipend will be paid to any representative you designate, so long as the boy lives and the above conditions are met.
At his desk, Dills inked his pen again, pondering. Alive, Starkwether's son was worth a good deal of money to him; dead, he was worth nothing. Without interfering too directly, perhaps he should see that Bent was spared hazardous duty out West.
Yes, definitely a good idea. Tomorrow he would speak to a contact in the War Department. He jotted a reminder on the foolscap, tore it off, and poked it well down into his waistcoat pocket. So much for Bent. Other duties pressed.
Starkwether's employers had become his, and they were interested in the possibility of New York City seceding from the Union. It was a breathtaking concept: a separate city-state, trading freely with both sides in a war whose length the gentlemen could to some extent control. Powerful politicians, including Mayor Fernando Wood, had already endorsed secession publicly. Dills was researching precedents and preparing a report on potential consequences. He returned the letter to the strongbox and after three turns of three keys in three locks resumed work.
14
"What the hell did we do wrong?" George said, flinging away the stub of his cigar. It landed in front of the small, plain office building in the heart of the huge Hazard Iron complex.
"I honestly don't know, George," Christopher Wotherspoon replied with a glum look.
George's expression conveyed his fury to the hundreds of men streaming along the dirt street in both directions; the early shift was leaving, the next arriving. George didn't care if they saw his anger. Most would have heard the detonation when the prototype columbiad exploded on the test ground chopped out of the mountainside in a high, remote corner of the property. The big eight-inch smoothbore, cast around a water-cooled core by Rodman's method, had destroyed its crude wooden carriage and driven iron fragments big as daggers into the thick plank barrier protecting the test observers.
"I simply do not know," George's superintendent of works repeated. It was the second failure this week.
"All right, we'll adjust the temperature and try again. We'll try till hell freezes. They're screaming for artillery to protect the East Coast, and one of the oldest ironworks in America can't turn out a single working gun. It's unbelievable."
Wotherspoon cleared his throat. "No, George, you misapprehend. It is war production. So far as I know, this works has never manufactured cannon before."
"But, by God, we should be able to master —"
"We will master it, George." Wotherspoon weighted the second word. "We will meet the delivery date specified in the contract and do so with pieces that perform satisfactorily." He risked a smile. "I guarantee it because Mr. Stanley helped us win the bid, and I am not anxious to displease him."
"I don't know why," George growled, staring at the faces passing. "You could knock him out with one punch."
"True, but one ought to be frugal with time. That would be a squandering of it."
The dry, donnish jest did nothing to improve George's mood. Still, he appreciated the young Scotsman's effort. And he knew Wotherspoon understood the reason for his impatience. It would be impossible for him to leave Hazard's or even think seriously about Cameron's offer until he was sure the company could fulfill the contract.
He had no doubts about Hazard's doing it, provided the problem wasn't one of method. He and Wotherspoon had repeatedly gone over the calculations together — and Wotherspoon was nothing if not thorough. That was one reason George had promoted the young bachelor so quickly.
Wotherspoon, thirty, was a slender, slow-spoken, sad-eyed sort with wavy brown hair and a merciless ambition concealed behind impeccable manners. He had apprenticed at a dying ironworks run by successors of the great Darby family at Coalbrookdale, in the valley of the Severn, the same part of England from which the founder of the Hazard family, a fugitive, had fled in the late seventeenth century. As the dominance of the Severn's iron trade diminished, Wotherspoon had chosen emigration to America over a shorter journey to the new factories in Wales. He had arrived in Lehigh Station four years ago in search of a job, a wife, and a fortune. He had the first and was still in pursuit of the others. If he solved the riddle of the flawed castings, George knew he could place day-by-day control of Hazard's in the Scotsman's hands and never worry. He was certain he must leave Lehigh Station and serve; his quandary was a simple question: Where? By pulling a few wires, he could certainly obtain a field command, lead a regiment. Although he loathed combat, it was not fear that rendered the idea unappealing, but a conviction that his experience would be of greatest use in the Ordnance Department, which meant Cameron and Stanley and Isabel. What a damned, dismal choice.