“I take it you do not like them.”
“An understatement. They are fraudsters in the lowest, most contemptible way. Stole one of my most valued inventions, patented it in their name and made a fortune off my back.”
“Really. Is there any way I can help you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
A man cut in. “I must,” she said, wincing, and angling her head to her father. Pink-cheeked and smiling, she was swept away.
Zachary rolled his shoulders, his coat suddenly tight.Like dogs baying around the slaughterhouse.He watched her do several politic sets, whirling around the ballroom. With each man, he ticked off appropriate Indian tortures. Burying the walrus-mustached steel heir in the sand up to his neck and letting the fire ants eat him.
The next fellow, a well-dressed dandy, held her too close. How long would it take to cut off his fingers, and then char his soles on hot coals?
The Duke of Westerly let his hand slip from the small of her back to her bottom. Zachary took a step toward her and stopped. Under her hostile glare, she removed the duke’s wandering hand.
Good girl. Except Zachary wouldn’t have been so nice. For the duke, he considered the Apache. They had perfected torture. He’d flay the man alive, starting with his fingers and filleting him to his black heart.
Zachary bored himself with the swirling mass of men in evening dress and women in soft, swishing satin and silk, theirtalk punctuated with laughter and air around them a heady mix of scents. The smell of success.
Mrs. Merriweather busily escorted Chen and O’Reilly, introducing them to her fellow matrons, and explaining the mystical arts of Chinese medicine. Zachary chuckled. The shy, red-faced Chen abhorred his celebrity.
Zachary circumnavigated the dancers to where Elizabeth stood with her family. He moved beside her, his thigh brushing the silk of her skirt. Alva’s disapproving gaze caught Elizabeth’s, the warning more than transparent that Zachary was too close to her. He smiled as he pretended to listen the melodious strains of the “Blue Danube” while soaking up her presence. Dyer stood to the other side. He plucked a handkerchief from his vest, sniffed, caught Zachary’s gaze. His lip curled beneath his walrus mustache before he secreted the linen to his pocket. Zachary frowned, the gesture odd and not a normal compulsion for a man like Dyer, who remained fastidious in keeping his personal life guarded and opaque. Was the handkerchief a remembrance of a paramour?
“How is it you are not working?” Dyer flicked a finger in front of his nose. “One might consider it a humiliating defeat if your product never made it out the door.”
Dyer drew first blood. Zachary offered a knowing smile. “How is your purchase of the B&S railroad?” Zachary had read where Edward Spencer and Dyer might have lost the integral railroad that connected four larger ones heading south to a Pennsylvania coal mine and that would bring access to New England markets, and line the pockets of the two leviathans.
There was a faint trembling at the corners of Dyer’s mouth followed by a flush of anger on his cheeks. “Jay Cooke tried to outfox us. He will fall prey to our machinations.”
Arrogance suspended in the air.
Edward Spencer raised his glass in salute to the affair. There was an abortive movement of crystal toward mouths—stopped as the oil baron, Dyer, lifted his glass higher. “The die is cast. Jay Cooke and his dead of night Tammany machine must learn a lesson.”
“Boss Tweed is a gross and licentious man, a moral leper, a coarse debauchee.” Dyer threw back the contents of his glass and then rested the vessel on a tray to be refilled by an attentive servant.
“Must be a supreme effort to dance around Tweed’s bribery, graft and false elections. Are there differences to celebrate?” Zachary dared, lifting his hands palms up in pretended innocence of his double entendre by comparing the robber barons to Tweed.
Dyer’s features darkened as a pope receiving a vulgar admission.
Zachary’s neck stiffened. Havemeyer approached with the duke on his heels. The deafening silence broken by the snuffling of the sugar baron.
“Miss Spencer, would you like to go for a carriage ride with me in Central Park tomorrow, and then on to Mrs. March’s renowned conservatory?”
The gaslight flickered throwing shadows across Alva’s sagging face. “She’d love to.”
“I thought Miss Spencer was allergic to orchids,” said Zachary, taking a threatening step toward Havemeyer.
Havemeyer backed away with jerky marionette strides, his eyes wide with horror. Zachary could almost see the pulse of blood rushing through the sugar baron’s ears, swallowing convulsively, as his tiny brain tried to seize the danger.
“I-I just remembered. I have a conflict tomorrow,” Havemeyer said. “In fact, I have an early engagement in the morning and must beg leave.”
Elizabeth grinned behind her gloved hand.
“Whatever is necessary.” Dyer’s hard blue eyes skewered Zachary, scrutinizing his prey.
Zachary cultivated a pose of well-bred indifference. “Mr. Dyer, may I compliment you on breaking the government financing privileges of Jay Cooke? No doubt it was difficult collaborating a syndicate aimed to push Cooke out,” said Zachary, grudgingly politic and disgusted. Beasts cannibalizing their own.
The oil baron’s conspiratorial grin seemed to spread over his body and drawing everyone to share the news. “Of course, greatness is an earned experience. For me, it appears to be consistent. I suppose it depends in part upon the myth-making creativity of humanity. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the legend he becomes. He must reflect what is thrust on him.”
