Unrivaled (7 page)

“I need you to add a few drops of that rose water to this. S
lowly
. And then follow it up with that butter that’s on the windowsill. And after that, I’ll need a couple dashes of salt too.”

He complied well enough with the rose water and the butter as I beat them into my mixture. But I pulled the bowl from him when he took up the salt cellar and dipped into it with a teaspoon. “A couple of
dashes
!”

He set the salt down and took the bowl from me along with the whisk. “If you’re going to be so persnickety about it, then you do it.”

I added a couple pinches and grabbed the bowl back. Once it began to ribbon again, I poured it out onto the tray. After rubbing the saucer that had held the butter across my fingers to grease them, I pressed the nougat into a thin, flat layer. “There! Now we can let it rest the night.”

“The whole night? You mean I can’t have
any
? After I worked so hard?”

Good grief. “Can you butter a knife for me, then?”

Sam rummaged through a drawer, found a knife, then opened the icebox and plunged it into a bowl of butter.

Mrs. Hughes let out a cry.

“Sorry. Just doing what Lucy said.”

It wasn’t near being set, but I pried out a piece and handed it to Sam. “Try this and tell me what you think.” I gave one to Mrs. Hughes as well.

He took the piece I offered. Chewed for a moment and then stopped. Swallowed. Once. Twice.

“Well?”

“It tastes fine.”

“Fine?”

He shrugged. “It’s fine.”

“I don’t want fine, Sam. I want wonderful. Delicious!”

“It tastes like . . . roses.”

“I know. I used rose water.”

He dug furiously in his pocket for something and came out with a handkerchief. Then he stuck his tongue out and scrubbed at it. “If I wanted to eat roses, I’d have picked some of Mr. Carleton’s when I walked by.”

“So . . . you wouldn’t buy this sort of thing?”

“If I were going to take a lady flowers, don’t you think she’d appreciate the normal kind?”

“You wouldn’t buy
any
of this ever for yourself?”

“And have everyone down at the confectionery laugh at me? For eating roses?” He sniffed at his fingers. Scowled. Wiped them off on his shirt.

“I think it tastes just fine, Miss Lucy.” Mrs. Hughes put another piece into her mouth. “And it smells divine. My mother would devour a tray of these.” She gave Sam a long look as she spoke.

“Here.” I passed the tray to her. “You can take these home to her, then.” I wasn’t interested in creating a candy for old ladies. I wanted to make a candy that everyone wanted to eat. Something unrivaled. Something like Royal Taffy, the candy I wasn’t supposed to mention, let alone eat.

But it was a candy that haunted me, the same way it haunted my father. He had spent the last ten years of his life trying to create a candy that could top its chewy sweetness, match its glossy sheen, and surpass its creamy texture. And I had lived those same years wanting to help him. Even when I had tasted the finest confections Europe had to offer, Royal Taffy lurked in my thoughts.

Everyone loved it. Standard claimed it was the bestselling candy in America. Though I didn’t trust them for one minute, I had to believe they weren’t lying about that. Certainly, it had
the broadest appeal. Newsboys spent their hard-earned money to buy it. Schoolgirls saved their pennies for it. I’d even seen men eat it without any apparent embarrassment.

I needed a candy that could compete with creamy, chewy, melt-in-your-mouth Royal Taffy. Not even our sweet, colorful, candy-coated nuts could do that. And rose-water nougat wasn’t going to be able to do it either. I nibbled at a piece and closed my eyes as I analyzed the texture. It was light and chewy, dense and airy, just as I’d hoped.

It was perfect.

But it didn’t compare to Royal Taffy. I’d have to come up with something else.

I wished that girl would run into me again. The one down on Olive Street. She was the best thing I’d seen since I’d been in the city. And when I’d smiled at her, it was the first time I’d felt like myself in a long time.

And then that woman had accused me of being some thief.

Not in so many words, of course. She’d been much too polite for that. Those fancy people always were. And God knew I’d done worse. Still, I wished I’d gotten the girl’s name. Then I’d know who it was I’d been daydreaming about.

I sighed.

Better not to think about her at all. When that girl had gone on down the sidewalk without me, it was all for the best.

I looked over at Mr. Mundt, my father’s secretary, but he was trying hard to ignore me. I crossed my legs at the ankles and folded my arms across my chest as I sucked on a piece of candy.

It was already Tuesday, and though my father had mentioned placing me on his personal staff, I had no idea whether
he intended that I work for him at the house or from his office. I’d never yet overslept, but I hadn’t woken early enough to join him at breakfast either. And aside from some winks and a pat or two on the back as he and Augusta went out in the evenings, I hadn’t really seen him. I asked Augusta if there was something I should be doing, but she only told me that I would be sent for the moment he wanted me.

I might have wandered the city, but my new clothes didn’t fit the places I normally would have gone, and I didn’t know where rich people spent their time. Besides, I didn’t want to stray too far from my father. After another day spent waiting, I asked Nelson to take me to the factory.

I couldn’t say for sure that I surprised Mr. Mundt. Truth be known, I don’t think anything ever surprised him. Pale to a fault, he might have been thirty or sixty or anywhere in between. He only blinked as I walked in, then held up a box filled with candy. After taking a couple pieces, I’d sat in an uncomfortably stiff leather chair reading the newspaper and examining the company’s brochures. But my father never came out of his office, and he never rang the secretary. I’d been waiting my entire life for him, in one way or another, and I was tired of it. If I was going to work for him, then I needed to learn about his business. I finished off the candy, balled up the wrapper, and pitched it toward the dustbin. “Mr. Mundt?”

After marking his place in a ledger with a finger, he looked up at me. “Yes, sir?”

“I wonder if I could have a look around. Over in the factory, maybe?”

He blinked, offering blessed relief from his pale blue eyes. “Now, sir?”

I shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”

He frowned. “The boss never goes over there.”

I winked at him. “The boss brought me here to help him, so I figure I should know how things work around here.”

After a moment, he nodded. “I’ll telephone the superintendent and have him come up to escort you.”

The superintendent appeared not five minutes later. He came in through the door, red-faced and panting. “The boss wants me?”

Mr. Mundt shook his head. “Not the boss. The boss’s son. Mr. Clarke.”

“Oh! Well, that’s a relief.” He fanned his face with the hem of his apron, then used it to dab at the sweat that had broken out on his brow.

I put a hand out once he’d finished. “I’m Charli—es. Charles. I’m Charles Clarke.”

He brushed his hand off on his apron before extending it to me. “John Gillespie, sir.”

“Mr. Gillespie, I hear you’re just the man to show me what it takes to be successful in this business.”

“The business? You mean . . . you want to go down to the
factory
?”

“Why not?”

“The boss won’t mind?” He asked the question of Mr. Mundt.

Mundt gave Mr. Gillespie the smallest of shrugs.

Mr. Gillespie sighed. “All right. Fine.” He untied the apron and pulled it off over his head, handing it to me. His sleeves and trousers had gone gray where the apron had not covered them. “Might not help much, but you’ll not want to dirty that fancy suit of yours.”

I put it on and followed him out the door and down a staircase at the back of the long, dark hall. We went through a maze of halls and up and down stairs before emerging into the sunlight
alongside several sets of railroad tracks. He nodded across them to a long bay of doors in the building on the opposite side. “That’s where the supplies come into the factory.”

“From . . . ?”

“Just about everywhere. New Orleans, Chicago, Cincinnati.”

I looked up and down the track. “What railroad is this?”

“It’s a private spur. Boss had it built. It connects with the main railway back toward Union Station. Once the supplies are taken off, then we load the cars up and ship our crates out.”

“Where to?”

“Pretty much everywhere. Royal Taffy’s the bestselling candy in the whole United States.” There was a note of pride and satisfaction in his words.

I ate Royal Taffy all the time, but I hadn’t realized everyone else in the country did too. “So . . . the supplies come in and then what happens to them?”

“Well, now, that’s when it starts to get interesting.” We crossed the tracks to the factory building that stood on the other side. He motioned to a loading dock that jutted from the wall. Trying to forget that I’d ever met Mr. Dreffs, I took a step backward and then leaped forward to vault up onto the platform.

The superintendent climbed a ladder I hadn’t seen on the other side of the dock.

That would have been handy to know about. “I just thought . . .” Now my hands were dirty, and there was no other place to wipe them than on the apron.

The superintendent sent a questioning look my way. “Might have thought you’d worked on a dock a time or two yourself—if I hadn’t known you were the boss’s son.”

I hadn’t really ever worked
on
a loading dock, though I’d seen my share of them, delivering messages on the South Side. I cleared my throat. “After the supplies are delivered?”

Gillespie took me across the bay and through a door that opened into an enormous room. It was filled with light and sound and motion. “It depends on what part of the process they’re for,” he shouted over the clatter of machinery.

I leaned close to him. “Give me a for instance.”

“Well . . . over here are the melting pots. That’s for the sugars—brown and white, vinegar, and water. Butter gets added later.” He walked toward a raised concrete grid work. Huge kettles hung from metal bars. Beneath the kettles, fires danced, throwing off a scorching heat. Between the kettles, men walked on a precarious treadway peering into the huge pots.

A trickle of sweat slid past my collar and down between my shoulder blades.

“For the melting, we use men. Boys aren’t tall enough. And girls can’t take the heat. After a couple hours, once it gets hot enough, we pour the syrup off into those buckets.” He gestured toward a line of wheelbarrows that were filled with pails. As we watched, two men wearing masks and padded mitts tipped a kettle, pouring off some of the contents into the pails in one of the wheelbarrows. A boy wheeled it away, head turned from the steam, as another one came to take his place. “The boys take the pails over there, to the mixer where the flavoring gets added.”

“Over there” was halfway across the room, where several men on ladders were shaking the contents of jugs into huge vats. At least . . . that’s where the procession of boys steering the wheel barrows was headed. But they had to dodge a parade of carts that were being pushed along some sort of track that had been set into the floor.

The traffic inside this building was the worst I’d seen since I’d arrived in St. Louis. With the open flames beneath the kettles and the dusty powder that covered the room, the place was a firetrap.

Gillespie gestured past the mixer to a different machine. “And
then, once everything’s been mixed in, the boys bring over trays, and the men pull that plug there at the bottom of the mixer. The taffy pours out, and then it’s wheeled over there to cool.” He was pointing away from the mixer to one of the corners of the room. Trays that had been placed on what looked like tea carts were being pushed in that direction. “It’s got to cool for a while, but not for too long. Then those trays get wheeled over to the pulling machines.”

He didn’t have to point those out. The mechanical arms were waving like madmen.

“After it’s been pulled, we throw it back into the wheelbarrows and take it to the tables. Couple of the men size out the ropes, then cutters take over. They dump their pieces back onto the trays, and they get wheeled off to be packed.” He pointed to the fourth corner, where I could see a dozen white-capped women plucking the log-shaped pieces from the trays, folding red waxed wrappers around them, and pushing the rectangular candies farther down the tables. At the end, a small army of girls swept the pieces into boxes, then placed the boxes into crates.

“From there?”

“Got some boys who load the crates onto carts.” He nodded in the direction of one of those track-bound carts that rolled past us. “Then they push the crates out to the docks, where I’ve got some fellows who put them onto a pallet.”

I looked at the far corners of the building where Royal Taffy made its way through a number of steps in its dizzying path around the factory. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to have the packers near the docks? And the mixer next to the melting pots?”

He shrugged. “But then where would you put this?” He gestured to an enormous funnel that was pierced with all kinds of pipes that hadn’t had anything at all to do with the process I’d just watched.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a grinder.”

“What does it have to do with Royal Taffy?”

“Nothing. It’s for something different. Something new. But the powder has to be pushed out and taken next door.”

This was one of the largest buildings I’d ever seen, and there was another one next door? “If it has to go next door, then why isn’t this grinder next door too?”

The superintendent shrugged. “This was the only space available.”

We parted the procession of children pushing wheelbarrows and walked past packers, out the door, down a few steps, and into the next building. It looked newer than the previous one and just as big. It should have been brighter, too, but a murky haze hung like a cloud over the room.

The superintendent handed me a gauze mask.

I tied it on. “Why is it like this?” It wasn’t as noisy in this building, but there was a thumping vibration that seemed to pound my words back into my chest. I had to make an effort to force them out.

“It’s the pulverizer.”

I could tell this was the domain of children, though the powder-coated ragamuffins looked more like phantoms. “Are there any other buildings?”

“No. It all takes place here. And back where we were.” He pointed the way we’d come, and we walked in the direction of that first building. “Let me show you out.”

With the haze and the strange sight of children marching through the gloom, I might have wandered there for hours before finding the door I’d come in through.

As we approached the railroad dock, a train puffed up. We pressed ourselves against the wall while men rushed forward to
unload it. They swarmed the cars, pulling off boxes and carrying them into the building. Once the train left, I gave the apron back to Mr. Gillespie, walked across the tracks, and eventually found my way to the front of the office building.

I could do a lot worse for myself than work for my father. But from what I’d just seen, I knew he could do a lot better.