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Jack Trotter’s life had become very, very strange. Having to move out was one thing, even if it had been awfully painful to leave the people who felt like his family. And then there was all the new clothes. The hotel had asked if he’d had a valet that needed a room too. As if that was something that was likely for a guy like him. But he supposed it was now, and he ought to try to get used to it.
What he wasn’t likely to get used to was getting halfway to drunk with more or less the richest man in the country. Even with three hundred thousand dollars burning a hole in his proverbial pocket, Jack was pretty sure that wasn’t something he was getting used to, not any time soon.
“So you’re staying at the Union Club?” Jack asked, because what kind of small talk did one make with a man like George Russell?
“I am,” George replied, throwing back half his glass of amber liquid in a single gulp. Scotch. Jack was pretty sure that’s what he’d ordered. Jack’d never had it before. He’s pretty sure it costs about four times the price of the bourbon he’s nursing and even then he’d rather have ordered a beer, but that didn’t seem to be the thing to do around here.
“Is it nice?” Jack asked.
George stared at Jack as if he’d grown a second head.
“It’s a fine establishment,” he said eventually.
Jack nodded.
“I’ve never been,” Jack explained, perhaps unnecessarily if the way George breathed out a derisive snort is anything to judge by.
“I would think not,” the man added. “They have rather strict standards when it comes to members.” He threw back another swallow without a care. “Not to give offense.”
Sure. ‘Course not. Jack was pretty sure George Russell could close down a factory and leave a thousand families starving and out of work and he’d still brush it off as not giving any offense either.
“Thought those clubs didn’t like new money neither?” Jack threw back. “How long’d it take them to let you buy your way in?”
It had been a dumb thing to say, Jack knew that. But the two swallows of liquor he’s managed have already gone to his head, and if the only thing his new fortune ever bought him was the chance to speak his mind every so often, he was pretty sure that’d still be more than worth it.
George raised his brows consideringly.
“You know I could ruin you if I wanted to?” George replied coolly.
“Probably,” Jack agreed.
It wasn’t Jack’s first time in a fight. Even fools knew the loser was just whoever flinched first.
George smirked, impressed.
“I can see why my son went into business with you, Mr. Trotter,” he offered, with a tip of his now empty glass. He raised his hand in the same motion, gesturing for another round.
“I’m good,” Jack said at once.
“Nonsense,” George chastised. “On me.”
He just insulted the richest man in America, and in response the guy wanted to buy him a drink. Jack’s life just kept getting stranger by the minute.
“Two of these,” George instructed to the barkeep.
“That’s kind of you, but really—” Jack started.
“And one for me?”
The lady who’d sidled up to Mr. Russell had blonde hair and pink-rouged cheeks. His lip curled in distaste.
“Not likely,” he shot back coldly.
“And how ‘bout you, handsome?” she asked Jack.
“No, thank you, Miss,” he said, unable to meet her eyes.
George huffed a snort of laughter.
“Rather certain that’s the only time she’ll be called miss all evening,” he derided.
Jack bristled. “Don’t see what’s wrong with being polite,” he shot back. “She’s just doing her job.”
“A defender of worker’s rights, are you, Mr. Trotter?” George asked, mocking humor in his eyes.
Jack scanned the room for Larry, the man who’d actually dragged him here tonight, before he’d gone off to gamble and left Jack to manage his morose father.
“So what if I am?” Jack countered.
George shrugged. “No problem of mine, so long as you’re not planning on getting into the steel business next.”
“Don’t plan on it, no,” Jack acknowledged, willing to let it slide. “Thought I might work on something for the kitchen next. A mixer maybe.”
“A mixer?”
There was that look again. Second head, re-sprouted.
“Yeah,” Jack explained. “You see, when Mrs. Bauer would be making things, she’d spend nearly all of her time on the mixing steps, you know, whipping eggs, and egg whites and whatnot, but it really shouldn’t be too difficult to rig up a way for a whisk to do that itself, with much less work.”
Jack was up to three heads by now, it seemed, if George’s face was to be believed.
“When was the last time you was in a kitchen?” Jack asked.
George snorted as their drinks arrived. He took a sip of his before answering.
“When we married, our first home barely had two rooms to speak of. Bertha—” his voice faltered, slightly, as if the liquid had gone down sharper than he’d intended “—was not a natural cook, but she did her best. That was…1860, I suppose.”
“You haven’t been in a kitchen in twenty-four years?” Jack asked, incredulous.
“I’m sure I’ve been in one,” George snapped, “but I certainly haven’t paid attention to the particulars.”
“Right,” Jack agreed, because what else was there to say?
“Bet Mrs. Russell was pleased when you all could afford a cook,” Jack added.
For a moment, Mr. Russell’s face warmed. “You’ve no idea. Happy as the day Mrs. Astor first deigned to come to her party, I daresay.”
But just as fast as it had brightened, back to dark it went, another swallow of amber liquid thrown back with abandon. Jack sniffed his own glass tentatively. It smelled like a bonfire. He lowered it back down warily.
“The little things used to make her happy,” he said, more, Jack thought, to himself than to him. It sounded like an indictment. “But isn’t that how it is? I suppose one must always move on to that next great thing.” He grimaced as he said it, throwing back the rest of his pour and gesturing immediately for more. Those words too had been said like a damning condemnation, which—Jack just simply couldn’t understand.
“But…don’t you?” Jack asked tentatively. “I mean, that’s what business is, isn’t it?”
George blinked, lost staring into space before shaking himself.
“But I’m not speaking of business, am I, Mr. Trotter?” George shot back, annoyed.
But wasn’t he?
“But that’s what ladies do, isn’t it? The ones who don’t work for money, I mean,” he clarified. “Mrs. Van Rhijn and Mrs. Forte and all, they certainly treat it as serious as if it’s business.” In fact in his experience they treated it a great deal more seriously than Mr. Oscar treated his actual business, but there was no use adding that.
Jack shrugged and attempted to take a sip of his drink simply to have something to do that would make Mr. Russell stop glaring at him.
“Fools,” George proclaimed simply, taking his new drink as it arrived.
“Larry said you was both at the union because you’re upset with Mrs. Russell and how she married his sister to that Duke?” Jack pressed.
Mr. Russell must have had more to drink than Jack realized because even at that he didn’t do more than keep glaring.
“Did he now?” George grumbled. “My son seems remarkably frank with you, Mr. Trotter.”
“What am I frank about?” Larry asked, swinging into a seat next to his father’s and gesturing for another drink for himself.
“Our feelings about your mother,” George replied, glaring now at his son.
Larry shrugged it off with the same ease he seemed to take much of everything, so far as Jack could tell.
“That’s hardly a secret, is it?” Larry scoffed. “It’s all over the gossip columns.”
“Is it?” George gaped.
Larry merely smiled, though with more than a bit of condescension, at least to Jack’s eyes.
“It’s alright, father. You needn’t care about that now,” he cheered. And then when George continued to glower he added conspiratorially, “That’s mother’s problem, isn’t it?”
George smirked.
“True enough,” he answered, clinking his glass against Larry’s newly arrived one.
“I can’t imagine people writing ‘bout me in the papers,” Jack mused.
“You get used to it,” Larry assured him casually.
“And anything really terrible,” George started, before apparently, his mind caught up to his words, “well, Bertha usually heads that off.”
“Russell!” a man called out from the craps table.
Both men turned to look, but George quickly realized his mistake, turning back to his scotch, his face darker than before.
“Our luck went to shit when you left!” Larry’s friend continued. “Get back here!”
Larry’s answering grin bordered on a smirk.
“Excuse me,” he offered them, before taking his drink and leaving them once more.
“He does seem to be a lucky one,” Jack mused, again trying to sip his drink, and again wondering why anyone wanted to drink wildfire turned liquid.
He thought of his mother and his stomach turned still further. He pushed the glass a bit further away, and pulled his water closer.
“Does he?” George asked idly.
Jack considered the evidence. Larry certainly seemed lucky, so far as he could tell, but he wasn’t sure what bits of that were worth explaining.
“I don’t know, just seems like it, I guess? I mean, the copper mines? That seems a good stroke of luck.”
“He thought to ask for the land to be surveyed again,” George protested. “That’s skill, not luck, Mr. Trotter.”
“Not meaning no disrespect. Larry’s been good to me,” Jack assured him quickly. “Just that, you know how some people the universe seems to favor, and others not? Feels like Larry’s in that first camp, so far as I can tell.”
George’s glare softened infinitesimally.
“And have you’s all for parents,” Jack continued. “Surely, that’s gotta be a real stroke of luck.”
At that George snorted.
“I’m not quite sure Larry would agree.”
Jack gaped at him.
“You think he’d rather not be a Russell?” Jack asked in shock.
“Well, no, of course not,” George replied. “Only that his frustration with his mother’s meddling has certainly pushed him to the brink.”
“All I know is you seem to have set him up real well,” Jack pressed. “Both of you, I mean. Between Harvard, and all his friends, and these parties? He knows all the right people.”
And Jack wasn’t no idiot. He’d spent more than half his life a stone’s throw away from every word Agnes Van Rhijn had ever said. Three years ago Larry and George Russell were just rich nobodies that she’d’ve treated like dirt on her shoes. And now, look at them. Staying at the Union Club and Larry welcome to marry Miss Marian, at least until it all got messed up. And Jack was pretty sure none of that was due to the Russell parent he was currently seated across from. Not that he was going to tell him that.
“I suppose he does at that,” George agreed, gesturing for yet another drink. What was that, his fourth. His fifth? “And what of your parents, Mr. Trotter? They must be proud of your success.”
“I’m sure they would be, if they were still alive,” Jack mused sadly.
“I’m sorry,” George replied, more earnestly than Jack would’ve given him credit for a moment ago. It was strange: seeing the real man behind the robber baron mask. He knew he had to exist, of course, from how Larry talked about him, but it was different to see it up close like this.
“It was a long time ago,” Jack offered. George nodded, accepting the gesture of politeness as it was intended.
“I don’t know that that makes it any easier,” George replied, and again, with more understanding than Jack would’ve guessed before he’d said it.
“You lost somebody too?”
“Everyone,” George replied simply. “My mother first and then everyone else in the war.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack echoed, raising his glass and managing to stomach some of the liquid inside it in tribute.
“It was, as you said, a long time ago,” George said with a sad smile. “And when I came home at last, I had a son, already almost four years old. A new family, born from the ashes.”
His face brightened at the memory. Jack tried to imagine it: going off to war, then losing—what? A father? A brother? More? —and fighting for your own life too, and with a woman and baby at home, knowing they need you to come back, and a woman you clearly loved so dearly. It gave him chills just thinking about it.
“And I’d made my start,” George continued. “War’s a profitable business, Mr. Trotter, if you know what you’re doing.”
And just like that, that mask was back in place, albeit a little crooked now, put on a bit askew perhaps after too much liquor.
“That’s how you got started?” he asked, trying not to sound too horrified.
George nodded. “Lots of steel needed in a war. And tracks to move it on. And a few other things, here and…you know.”
Jack wasn’t sure he did know, but he was just as sure George Russell as he was right now was in no fit state to tell him.
“Right,” Jack demurred.
“Buy me a drink, handsome?” a brunette asked, one arm sliding around Jack’s shoulders. She smelled like lilacs and cigars.
“No, thank you, Miss,” he repeated. He wished there was some kind of sign he could put out for this sort of thing. Not interested in that if I’ve got to pay for it, thanks , it might read.
She took it in stride.
“And what about you?” the woman asked, aiming at George. “You look lonely. Your missus not treating you how she should?”
“Do you know what?” George drawled, sliding back in his chair. “I don’t think she is.”
“Well, I sure will,” the brunette responded, moving to sit on the table in front of George, her skirt sliding up, blocking Jack’s view of him.
“Buy me a drink?” she asked, her voice just audible over the sound of the music.
“What sort of gentleman would I be if I didn’t?” George replied, with only a few of his words lost slurred into the others, his arm already rising to signal another round.
The woman didn’t seem to mind. Jack assumed she must’ve seen far worse than a man who’d had a few too many.
“But then I might expect you to be a lot more thankful for my generosity,” he continued, patting his lap, the movement just in view to the side of the woman’s leg.
She slid off the table at once, sliding onto his thigh with ease.
“Well then,” she started looking up at him coyly, “I might expect you to buy me a bit more than a drink.”
He snorted. “What now, an opera house?”
The woman didn’t understand the joke. Jack wasn’t entirely sure he did either. But Mr. Russell seemed to find it funny enough for all three of them, his eyes closing as he seemed to sway with humor.
Or sway with something else maybe. His hand slid up the woman’s waist, until it rested far higher than was proper, even in this sort of establishment. There were backrooms for that sort of thing, surely.
But Mr. Russell was too far gone for a back room even, it seemed. He could barely keep his eyes open now, his head lolling forward onto the woman’s neck.
Jack could just barely make out him saying, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” to God knows who, before he conked out.
The woman grimaced, pushing Mr. Russell away and back into his chair and standing up.
“Sorry about that,” Jack offered.
Her eyes narrowed in suspicion and then confusion as she took Jack in properly, less as a customer, it seemed and more as a person.
“He your employer?” she asked.
“Nah,” Jack demurred. “Friend’s father. That one, over there?”
Jack gestured to Larry, still at the table with his friends.
“Larry Russell?”
The woman looked back down at George, still passed out cold.
“That’s George Russell?” she said, shocked. “Jesus, papers don’t do him no favors, do they?”
Jack knew what he meant. Caricaturists certainly never wanted to draw their subjects as handsome, not when they also wanted to draw their subjects as the devil, or near as that.
“Not usually,” Jack agreed. “Jack Trotter,” he added, because it seemed rude not to introduce yourself after this long a conversation.
“Maggie Cooper,” she offered in return. “Can’t believe I nearly landed George Russell.”
“Probably best you didn’t,” Jack offered. “No telling what he’d do to yous when he sobered up come morning. Or what his wife’d do to you if she ever found out.”
Maggie snorted.
“With the money he can pay? Would’ve been worth the risk.”
Jack wasn’t sure that was true, but then, Jack wasn’t in her shoes, was he?
“What happened?”
Larry it seemed had finished with his gambling.
“Think your father had one too many,” Jack explained.
“I can’t imagine that,” Larry dismissed immediately. “But he has been working so hard on this new railway. I probably shouldn’t have insisted he come out with us.”
Jack had privately thought that since about the time George had appeared, but it hadn’t been his place to protest of course.
“Could you see him back to the Union?” Larry asked Jack. “I’m supposed to meet some friends here in a bit and I wouldn’t want to stand them up.”
Jack frowned.
“I’m not sure they’ll let me in there,” he explained. Larry looked perplexed. “You know, as I’m not a member?” he added.
“Nonsense,” Larry replied. “You’ll be with my father. For all they know, you could be his valet.”
Jack knew Larry didn’t mean nothing by it. ‘Course he didn’t. Larry was a nice guy. But it still stung.
Jack eyed the glass in Larry’s hand. Maybe Mrs. Forte had had a point about that temperance business after all. Jack wasn’t planning on abstinence, but still—maybe there was a point in there.
“Sure, I can take him,” Jack agreed.
Larry clapped him on the shoulder.
“And thank you, for explaining things to Marian for me,” Larry added. “You’re a good man, Jack Trotter.”
“‘Course,” Jack demurred. “Just telling the truth.”
“Right, that’s all I ask,” Larry agreed.
And then he was gone.
“I’ll have’m call you a cab,” Maggie said. She must’ve been listening to the whole exchange.
“Thank you,” Jack said, with a nod. He felt around in his pocket to pay his tab.
“All settled,” the barkeep assured him. “On him,” he added, nodding towards the dozing Mr. Russell.
Jack pulled out the money he’d set aside for tonight anyway. More money than he once scraped together just to get his patent.
“Here,” he said, holding it out to Maggie.
“Don’t be silly,” she protested.
“I’m not,” he returned, entirely sure. “Goodnight, Miss Cooper.”
He wasn’t silly. And he wasn’t a fool. And something told him tonight was only the start of strange nights he had in store going forward.