From This Moment (16 page)

Evelyn smiled as she made notations in the ledger. Oh yes, she did love the juggling act of keeping this magazine afloat. She liked Stella, too, and she would gladly recalculate the next few months of expenses to make room in the budget for her. Stella was a safer bet than Clyde Brixton had ever been. Stella was an investment, whereas Clyde had always been a gamble.

And if she’d learned nothing else, Evelyn had come to accept she had no tolerance for gambling.

Romulus scrupulously avoided the third floor while Stella began working on the first fertilizer advertisement. He knew she’d already prepared a zinc-lined plate to be used as the template for printing because Evelyn had to put in an order for more zinc powder. Etching the design onto the plate was the longest part of the process and would take her several days to complete.

He’d caught a glimpse of Stella the very first day, wearing a white artist’s smock over one of her plain dresses, her hair tied up in a charming scarf. She had her sleeves rolled up and looked like a peasant woman. A radiant, beautiful peasant woman. Stella working at her trade. It was a whole other side to her he found wildly appealing.

But he wouldn’t let himself be tempted. For the past two days, he had stayed firmly rooted on the top floor, avoiding any accidental meetings with Stella that would throw his concentration into chaos.

And concentration was especially important this afternoon. He was meeting with a pair of astronomers writing an article on Jupiter and its moons. He’d commissioned them to write a three-page article, and they had submitted eleven pages of single-spaced text far too detailed for his general readership. They had been insulted when he’d asked them to trim the article, but he had finally convinced them to do so by telling them he would work alongside them, so they could approve every paragraph he cut or sentence he translated into intelligible English. It was going to be a long afternoon.

They were two hours into the process when a clerk knocked on his door to hand him Stella’s page proof of the fertilizer advertisement. It was in blazing full color, with Mona Lisa in the foreground and a valley of verdant fields behind her. He stood in the open doorway of his office, a stupid grin on his
face as he gazed at the advertisement. Both astronomers were dazzled when they saw it.

“Brilliant!” one said.

The other leaned in closer. “Full-color advertisements? My, my . . . quite impressive. Might we have a color illustration for our article, as well?”

This was
exactly
the response he was hoping for. Getting Stella permanently added to his staff would be a complete stroke of brilliance. “I’ll see what I can do,” he replied. If all went well, maybe he could get Stella to meet with the astronomers and create images of the moons of Jupiter.

The only problem he saw with the ad was some minor bleeding of ink along the bottom edge, but it could be solved by a bit of border work. It was a message best delivered in person. Artists could be notoriously prickly, and he didn’t want his message bungled by a clerk.

He glanced at the clerk. “Please tell Miss West I’ll be down shortly to discuss the advertisement.” He could hardly interrupt his meeting with the astronomers. The three of them had a long way to go editing this article to make it suitable for a lay audience.

By the time the meeting was concluded, it was past five o’clock. Everyone else in the managerial office had gone home for the evening, and he wondered if Stella had left in a pique. He sprang down the staircase as quickly as possible. He’d meant to go down earlier, but he’d completely forgotten she was waiting. It was easy to become distracted when editing a good science article.

He should not have doubted her. As he stepped inside the artists’ wing, the air was laden with the scent of wet ink and turpentine solvent. Stella still wore her smock, her sleeves rolled up as she sat curled on the oversized windowsill, a sketchpad
on her lap. She turned her head to smile at him. The way the fading sun illuminated her profile made her lovelier than any Vermeer painting.

He mustn’t let her get to him. Stella was an employee—or at least he hoped she would become one soon. He was here to examine her work and authorize her to proceed with printing 160,000 copies of a color advertisement. He was supposed to be here on business, yet he couldn’t resist taking a peek at her sketchpad.

“May I see?” he asked as he crossed the room like a moth getting dangerously close to a flame.

She tilted the pad for him to see. It was a simple charcoal sketch of three sandhogs working in the street below. One man sat on the edge of the subway trench, and two others leaned against shovels as they took a rest from the backbreaking work. There was a rough dignity to their faces, a strength of character in the musculature of their necks, faces, and strong hands as they held the shovels. It was tough, gritty work that garnered little respect, yet Stella had imbued them with the dignity and heroism rarely afforded such men. They were men working to forge the future, laying a foundation for generations to come. Long after these men were dead and buried, their children and grandchildren would be riding on the subway they had built.

It was an oddly moving sketch, and not something he had expected to see from Stella. It revealed a surprising depth of compassion, stirring feelings deep inside him that were better left untouched.

He cleared his throat and tried to get back to business. “Forgive my delay,” he said. “It seems astronomers are fated to speak in a language that flies over the heads of regular people. Your advertisement is brilliant. I noticed a bit of feathering at the—”

“At the bottom,” she said. “I’ll add a border.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Great minds and all that . . .” She smiled again, and his mind went blank. How could she do this to him so quickly?

He turned away and scooped up a chunk of Caribbean coral sitting on one of the artist’s tables. It had been sent by the Smithsonian to illustrate an upcoming article. He scrambled for something to say as he toyed with the coral. “What are you going to do with the picture?” he asked, nodding to her sketch of the sandhogs.

“I’ve done a whole series on the subway. I’m taking them to my parents the next time I visit them. They will be curious about the subway, and it’s easier to describe in pictures.”

“You visit them often?”

She sobered, leaning her head against the frame of the window as she gazed outside. “Not as often as I’d like. They mean everything to me. I’ve always thought they were the best parents any girl could ever ask for. My heroes, for want of a better word.”

He couldn’t help but be curious. His own family was such a disaster, and it was rare to hear such forthright praise from someone as worldly and sophisticated as Stella. “How so?”

She took a moment before answering. He dragged a chair to sit opposite her.

“They did all the usual things,” she said. “They gave my sister and me a foundation in faith and a good education. They taught us to be self-reliant and respectful and curious. Every summer, we used to go upstate to visit my grandparents’ farm because my father wanted to teach us about the natural world. We’d tramp through the countryside, and he’d show us how a caterpillar changed into a butterfly, or we’d track the progress of tadpoles in a puddle behind the barn. Nothing extraordinary, but it meant the world to me. Why do you ask?”

Because his own childhood had been so starkly different. He
had no fond memories of his father, only fear and intimidation. “No reason,” he said, looking away and pretending fascination with the blob of coral still in his hands.

Speaking of his parents was something he never did, even with Evelyn. She’d been there. She knew of the monumental fights, the thrown crystal, and the broken promises. He’d rather submit to dental surgery than talk about his father. The man had been dead for three years and could still cause a rush of anxiety in his gut. “Let’s just say you are lucky to have such parents,” he finally said. “Not everyone is so fortunate.”

“Given the expression on your face, I gather you did not. It still seems that you survived quite well.”

Looks could be deceiving. His fingers pressed hard against the cratered surface of the coral, his fingertips beginning to sting. He wished she wasn’t so perceptive, but that was the problem with artists. They noticed everything. Making a conscious effort, he forced his fingers to relax. It was ridiculous to damage a piece of rare coral over a few childhood scars.

After all, it wasn’t as if he’d suffered a terrible childhood. The dark hours of heartache had usually been shot through with periods of wonderment and discovery. “My father was a colonel in the army,” he told Stella. “He always assumed I would follow in his footsteps, but I wasn’t what he hoped for in a son.”

She looked confused. “But why?”

He glanced away. It was hard to look at a woman while baring his soul, but he sensed Stella would understand.

“My father commanded a battery at Culp’s Hill at Gettysburg,” he said. “He took a bullet that broke his arm but kept fighting until the end. He held that hill for two solid days and was a legend before the battle was even over. And I was interested in monarch butterflies. Do I need to explain more?”

Was there any wound more painful than one caused by a
parent? Colonel Samuel White was dissatisfied with his son, neglected his wife, and died in his mistress’s bed.

“My father died three years ago, so he lived long enough to see
Scientific World
achieve prominence. I finally earned a grudging respect from him, but I don’t think he ever read a single issue.”

Stella smiled gently. “Maybe that’s why God made us all so different. The world needs warriors like your father, but it also needs men who have the curiosity to look at a butterfly and wonder where it came from. Your magazine does a good job of encouraging that sort of curiosity, but you can’t expect everyone to adore it. You should be very proud of what you have accomplished with
Scientific World
.”

He shrugged. Of course he was proud of the magazine, even though he lacked the skill to actually be a scientist himself. He couldn’t build a subway like Clyde or manipulate a high-speed lithographic press like Stella. If the magazine ever went under, he had no idea what he’d do.

He turned the clump of coral in his hands, studying it from every angle. “You’ve said I am brash and overconfident, but I’m not. It’s all just a disguise. Someday the mask will slip, and I’ll be exposed for what I really am.”

“And what is that?”

“Someone who can’t concentrate on a topic for more than a few minutes without getting distracted. Not really suitable for any job other than the one I have.” How had he let himself get drawn into a mortifying conversation like this? It served no purpose, and it was well after closing time.

He set down the lump of coral and reached for her advertisement. “In all the years I have dreamed about our first full-color page in the magazine, I never imagined it would be an advertisement for manure, but I couldn’t be happier with the results.” He tried to sound lighthearted. He wanted to project
confidence and the right degree of artistic appreciation, because his smokescreen was slipping, and he wasn’t comfortable letting Stella any farther inside. She was dangerous to him. “Please proceed with a full production run tomorrow.” He flashed a nonchalant wink he hoped would communicate the irreverent humor he was most comfortable with. “And fix that sloppy border, will you?”

He could not escape the room fast enough.

It didn’t take Stella long to correct the feathering at the bottom of the fertilizer advertisement. Thickening the bottom border solved the problem, but she intended to get Romulus’s approval before moving on to the printing. The cost of producing 160,000 full-color images was not something to take lightly, and it wasn’t her money she’d be spending as she loaded up the lithograph’s rollers and cylinders with ink and paper.

Before last night, she never would have considered the cost of ink or paper, but now she’d had a glimpse behind the gleaming façade Romulus wore so well. She’d assumed he came from money, but the son of an army officer was unlikely to have a family fortune. She knew enough about the publishing industry to know that no matter how profitable a magazine, costs were high, and only those with additional sources of revenue were truly safe.