“Tell me what I can do for you,” she prompted once they were seated in his study. The windows were open, making it easy to hear laughter and the faint sound of the piano from her house next door.
“I received bad news this afternoon,” President Matthews said. “Your uncle has made good on his threat to terminate funding for the college.”
Gwen bowed her head. Uncle Oscar had been threatening the college’s funding for years, but she hadn’t believed he would ever end it. Her mind reeled, unable to imagine a world without Blackstone College in it.
She glanced outside toward the people mingling in her garden. None of them knew how close the college teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.
President Matthews continued outlining their situation. “I hoped my negotiations with the senior members of the Blackstone family would be successful without appealing to you for help,” he said, his voice placating and cautious.
People on campus still treated her with kid gloves even though it had been two years since she lost both her father and her husband in the same week. She had fully recovered from both tragedies, but President Matthews still seemed worried about hurting her feelings.
“I’m afraid that without additional funding, I will be forced to close the physics department,” he said.
Her shoulders sagged. “That department was very dear to my father.”
“Other colleges in the city can take our students in physics should the worst occur. New York University has an excellent program in physics.”
“I don’t care about New York University,” she said with a sigh. “I only care about the colleges founded by Vanderbilt and Carnegie, and you know why.”
Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie had both created colleges to enhance their reputations, and soon Blackstone College would be equally prestigious. If all went well, someday the name Blackstone would stand for scientific and medical progress rather than greed and exploitation.
“Yes, yes,” President Matthews said. “Unfortunately, the physics department hasn’t yet turned a profit. At least the biology and chemistry departments have patented some of their work, but overall, we have an atrocious record of—”
His sentence choked off, and Gwen smothered a laugh. “You can say it,” she teased. “I know my father was terrible at managing money.”
President Matthews looked grateful that she took his gaffe in stride. “Your father was a great man, but not the best steward of a budget. Gwen, I’m afraid the situation is dire. Eliminating departments is only a short-term solution. If your family does not reinstate their annual donations, the college will face bankruptcy within the next few years.”
It was inconceivable. This college was her entire world. She grew up here, went to college here, got married here. She intended to spend the rest of her life on these forty acres of ivy-covered buildings and intellectual progress. For eight years she’d been the wife of the college’s leading researcher, and she taught the introductory botany classes. She hosted faculty parties and cheered up students who sometimes flagged under the weight of demanding academic rigor. This sort of work was what she was born to do, not haggle over money or tangle with the bank.
“President Matthews, please understand that I have no influence over how my uncle and grandfather parcel out the Blackstone fortune.”
The only reason her father could pressure the bank was because everyone in the family felt sorry for him. The last bit of sympathy from her family’s banking empire had died with him, and now the college was gasping for breath. Tuition revenue could never keep their research-intensive programs afloat.
“The only thing that will prove the college’s worth to my family is if we develop some magnificent scientific discovery that will garner national attention and help blot out the . . . well, the other things my family has been associated with in the past.”
It was an elegant way of alluding to child labor, unsafe business practices, and union busting. Such ugly words. But those were things of the past, and the Blackstone Bank had come a long way since the tragedy that nearly destroyed her father.
It hurt to see the anguish on President Matthews’s face. He was still young, but the sprinkling of gray in his hair had increased in the past two years. He’d inherited a financial mess from her father, and it would take a while to repair.
“You’re doing a wonderful job,” she assured him. “You have my complete, unstinting support. Tell me how I can help.”
He gave her a reluctant smile. “I know you dislike leaving campus and dealing with your uncle, but if you could appeal to him to reverse his decision, it would be a godsend.”
Appealing to Uncle Oscar meant confronting the two things she disliked most in the world: lawyers and the snarl of downtown Manhattan. There was a reason she rarely left the college campus. This secluded haven in the Upper West Side was free of the congestion, noise, and skyscrapers that clogged downtown. Gwen would happily go through the rest of her life ignoring financial ledgers or the tedium of legal haggling if she could.
But if a woman loved something, she needed to fight for it.
“You can count on me,” she told President Matthews.
His whooshing sigh of relief underscored how important it was that she succeed.
Gwen left the safety of Blackstone College to confront her uncle and grandfather first thing on Monday morning. Tension coiled tighter with each mile as the carriage rolled farther into the heart of Manhattan, with its chaotic mix of carriages, trams, and automobiles all vying for dominance on the congested city streets. She never liked it here. The towering buildings blotted out too much of the sky, and it didn’t feel natural.
The carriage finally arrived at her family’s bank on the intersection of Wall Street and Devon. She rarely came here anymore and braced herself for meeting with her uncle.
“We’re here,” she said to the two bullnecked men sitting on the carriage bench opposite her. Anytime she came to the bank, she brought bodyguards. Zeke and Lorenzo had been with her since childhood, but after her father died, she reassigned them to other positions at the college. She no longer wanted to live in a protected bubble, but life could be challenging for anyone whose last name was Blackstone. Six years ago, an anarchist tried to assassinate her uncle as he left the bank. No Blackstone felt entirely safe entering or leaving the bank since.
Lorenzo helped her alight from the carriage while Zeke scanned both sides of the hectic street. She craned her neck to look up at the marble columns of the Blackstone Bank, which had occupied this block of coveted Manhattan real estate for over fifty years. The neoclassical building had six columns on the front portico to symbolize the strength of corporate America.
Lorenzo walked beside her as they approached the bank, and Zeke followed behind. A uniformed doorman held the steel-studded copper door open for Gwen and her bodyguards as they passed into the cool hall of America’s leading investment bank.
Her heels clicked on the marble floor and echoed off the coffered ceiling. This wasn’t the sort of bank that did business with individual customers, so there were no tellers stationed behind counters. All the important business took place upstairs, where analysts made recommendations for funding the nation’s infrastructure. Over the decades, the Blackstones had financed ports, canals, and railroads that crisscrossed the nation. They floated bonds to support cities, states, and foreign governments. It was said that France would have fallen to the Germans in 1871 if her grandfather hadn’t propped up their army with an emergency loan.