Written on the Wind (The Blackstone Legacy #2)(10)
Dear Lord, please let me live long enough to reach Natalia Blackstone.
5
It was the middle of October before Natalia made good on her promise to tour a steel mill with Liam. She had been prepared for the heat. She had been prepared for the harsh orange glare of molten metal. But she hadn’t been prepared for the wall of noise that hit her the moment she stepped inside the mill. The deafening roar of machines and motors was nonstop. Chains clanked, boilers hissed, and hammers forged liquefied metal into finished steel. By the end of the tour, her eyes hurt from the glare, and her clothes were damp with sweat.
Liam had been right about the need to see the workforce in action instead of trying to learn about their working conditions from an industry report. She hadn’t even been doing any manual labor and she felt limp from the heat as she followed Liam outside. They sat at a picnic table in the blessed cool of the mill yard while Liam explained how the newly invented arc furnace meant the workers deserved a pay raise.
“I can see that the job is challenging, but is it different?” she asked. “Harder? More exhausting?”
“No,” he reluctantly admitted. “It’s not any harder than it was before, but the new furnace is making the company richer. Why should all that money go to the guys in the offices?”
Natalia desperately wanted Liam to succeed on Wall Street, but it was going to be tough. He was completely uneducated but smart in the ways of the world. Liam had been a Blackstone until he was three years old, but then he was kidnapped and held for ransom. Her uncle paid the ransom, but Liam was never returned and had been presumed dead long ago.
The people who kidnapped Liam despised robber barons like the Blackstones and took grim satisfaction in raising him in the gritty world of steel mills and street gangs. He’d been taken out of school at thirteen to work shoveling coal into furnaces, which was why he could barely read. He’d worked as a welder all his adult life until last summer, when he’d been identified as the missing Blackstone heir. After inheriting a fortune in stock from his long-dead father, Liam now sat on the board of directors of U.S. Steel. It was the nation’s largest steel company, but Liam was floundering as he tried to make the leap from being a steelworker to a man sitting in the boardroom. He wanted to revamp how the company’s labor force was paid, and she feared he would make a fool of himself. His heart was in the right place, but he lacked the ability to express it in any but the most inflammatory terms. Natalia didn’t need Liam to persuade her that the work was hard. Her ears still hurt after the two-hour assault inside the mill, and the workers endured that cacophony every day.
“You’ve convinced me,” she said. “Now you need to convince the members on the board, and they are a stern lot. You will need long-term financial projections to win your case. It will be your most powerful weapon in a war with the board of directors, and I’m good at that sort of thing. We can write the proposal together.”
“Why don’t you write it, and I’ll present it?”
She shook her head. “You can’t present it unless you understand it, and that means math class. I’ll tutor you. It will be fun.”
“We have different ideas about what is fun. I’m taking Darla to Coney Island tomorrow. Want to come with us?”
Natalia recoiled at the prospect of carnival rides and sticky candy. “Or you could spend Saturday at the bank with me and fight for the men we just saw sweating it out on the floor. Take your pick.”
Liam grimaced but gave her a good-natured grin anyway. “I respect you for coming here today, even though you hated every second of it. I’ll probably hate your math class just as much, but you’ve got a deal.”
The difference was that Natalia wasn’t expected to actually learn how to make steel. Liam was going to have to do more than “come to math class.” He had to master advanced finance and long-term planning, and she feared he didn’t have it in him.
Natalia’s visit to the steel mill was more upsetting than she cared to admit. Her life seemed so easy compared to the heat, noise, and danger the mill workers faced every day. On nights like these, she retreated to her bedroom, where music helped soothe her soul.
Her prized phonograph rested on a table beneath the window, and its flare-shaped horn pointed into the bedroom. She’d been playing her favorite Brahms symphony for almost an hour, wallowing in the wonderfully moody music.
She leaned against the window of her room, which overlooked Fifth Avenue. It had been raining most of the evening, but as the temperature dropped, bits of sleet pelted the window. Streetlamps reflected off the wet pavement, and well-heeled people huddled beneath umbrellas as they scurried along the sidewalks. It was October, and women were already wearing their sealskin furs.
Was it cold where Dimitri was? It had been a month since she’d gotten word about his terrible fate. Given the size of Siberia, he probably hadn’t arrived in the penal colony yet and was still trapped on a slow-moving cargo train lumbering across the wilderness at thirty miles an hour.
She closed her eyes and let the languid Brahms melody slowly mount with a swelling sense of urgency. She loved this part. The soaring majesty made her want to become a better person. Stronger. More valiant—
Her bedroom door banged against the wall. “How many times are you going to play that wretched song?” Poppy demanded. She strode to the phonograph and yanked the arm off the record.