“The Magruders are using chemicals to imitate vanilla,” Gray continued. “It’s a concoction cooked up in a laboratory, made of wood-tar creosote and chemical flavorings. It costs pennies to produce by the vat, so I’ll never be able to compete on price. Yes, they’re hurting our business.”
And Delacroix Global Spice was a very lucrative business. They imported the finest spices from around the world and were the most prestigious brand on the market. The Delacroix name was synonymous with quality and prestige, but the Magruders were the opposite. They made their fortune mass producing consumer staples like canned beans and potted ham. They adulterated their products with fillers and preservatives, but they kept their prices low. Now they were encroaching into the spice business, and it was a threat.
Luke pulled the edges of his coat tighter as he stared out at the gloomy January cityscape. He wore his warmest winter coat, thick gloves, and a wool scarf, but the chill was still getting to him. Even the air in his lungs felt cold, and he began shivering again.
“Luke, this isn’t a good idea,” Gray said.
If they could just get to the new office building, he wouldn’t be so cold. It had a coal-fired heater, and he’d be able to warm up eventually.
“I’ll be okay,” he said, wishing his teeth did not chatter as he spoke. “And I really hate the Magruders. Or Congressman Magruder, I now must say. Can you believe it? I heard he’s renting the fanciest town house on Franklin Square. Now that I’m back in Washington, I’ll make sure his chances for reelection evaporate.”
Gray leaned forward and opened the panel behind the driver’s bench. “Please turn the carriage around,” he instructed the driver. “We’re heading home.” He settled back into his bench, concern darkening his face. “Don’t let impatience lead you into doing something foolish. You’ll be out of the action for weeks if you come down with a case of pneumonia.”
Luke sighed. Gray was probably right, but this was about so much more than the enmity between two families or the price of spices. This was about the niggling, insatiable need to take Clyde Magruder down a peg. The man didn’t belong in Congress, and Luke could get him out.
His gaze strayed out the carriage window to where the Capitol Building loomed in the distance, its iconic white dome a symbol of the power wielded by the men of this city. Somehow he was going to figure out a way to influence what went on beneath that dome. It would probably take decades, but he’d get there in the end. Gray was right. He couldn’t afford to get sick just because he was impatient.
The carriage turned around, and he noticed a flower cart brimming with roses and carnations. The rest of the city was dreary, overcast, and covered in snow, but the splash of red caught his eye.
“I wonder how they get roses to bloom in January.”
Gray followed his gaze to the flower cart. “The Department of Agriculture has acres of greenhouses. They can force anything to bloom.”
“Stop the carriage,” Luke said impulsively. In a world blanketed by ice and snow, it was suddenly vitally important to admire those flowers. Once the carriage stopped, he bounded outside and reached for the largest bundle of roses on the man’s cart. “Can you have these delivered?” he asked.
A young boy helping at the cart eagerly accepted the task in exchange for a few coins.
“Do you want to send a message with it?” the vendor asked.
He did. The vendor handed him a card. Luke’s hand shook from the cold, but he quickly jotted a message.
Thank you for a memorable morning. Luke.
“Send them to the Department of the Interior, addressed to Miss Marianne,” he said.
He beamed with elation as he returned to the carriage.
Two
Marianne Magruder arranged her photographs on the dining room table, wishing she had more room to spread them out. She had moved into this town house when her father was elected to Congress last year. It was one of the most spacious town houses in all of Washington, but it was cramped compared to the dining room in their Baltimore mansion. Here, there was barely room for the mahogany table and sideboard. There was no natural light, but the room had electricity that provided a flood of brightness no matter the time of day, and her father wouldn’t be home until late.
This review of her photographs was a special weekly ritual. She picked the best of her work and laid them out for her father’s insight, because he understood the needs of Washington bureaucrats better than she did, and his advice was priceless. This week she selected photographs of the Washington Monument, the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station, and children playing in the snow outside the Library of Congress.
“Why don’t you add the one of that man with Sam’s dog?” her mother asked. Vera had been alternately horrified and impressed by Marianne’s adventure on the ice, and the photograph of the soaked man holding Bandit in triumph was the best picture she’d taken all week. She had been dazzled as she watched the photograph develop in the dark room. The man she knew only as Luke must have been freezing, but it didn’t dim the exuberance in his laughing gaze as he stared straight at her with Bandit hugged against his bare chest. The photograph captured a raw, heroic man only seconds after emerging from the ice, his impulsive act the embodiment of masculine courage and strength.
“It’s not the sort of picture the government hired me to take,” she said as she set out more mundane photographs.
She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Luke, especially after the arrival of a dozen red roses. They had been waiting for her when she arrived at work the day after the incident. She wished he had signed his complete name to the card so she could send a note of thanks, but just like his quick arrival and departure at the ice, he seemed to dip into her life like a whirlwind and leave just as quickly.
“The picture of the man with the dog is better than these boring shots of buildings,” Vera said as she scanned the photographs. She let out a delicate yawn and fought to keep her eyes open.
“Why don’t you head up to bed?” Marianne asked.
Vera waved her question away with a perfumed handkerchief. “Nonsense. I want to be here when your father returns.”
That probably wouldn’t be for at least another hour. Clyde Magruder had spent most of his first year in Congress at meetings, business dinners, and in smoke-filled rooms. Tonight he was dining with the chairman of the Committee on Manufactures, which was Clyde’s only committee appointment, and he was eager to impress the young chairman.
Life in Congress had been a difficult adjustment for her father. He was used to helming one of the richest companies in America, but now he was a freshman congressman who answered to a man half his age. It was rare for him to return home before nine o’clock. And sometimes he didn’t return home at all.
As much as Marianne idolized her father, she wished he could be a better husband.
Still, she wouldn’t change this past year in Washington for anything in the world. She and Vera had grown extraordinarily close ever since moving here. Her mother had been nervous about leaving Baltimore, where she was the reigning queen of high society. Now she had to start over in a new city as a mere freshman congressman’s wife, and suddenly she had grown very dependent on Marianne. They did everything together. They shopped together, planned Vera’s tea parties together, and even gossiped together. For the first time in Marianne’s life, it felt like they had a normal mother-daughter relationship, and she savored every hour of it.