A Dangerous Legacy

by Elizabeth Camden

  “Plans for a canal moving forward. TR signed a treaty with Colombian diplomat to proceed, but Colombian Senate refuses to ratify. Standoff continues.”

  “Bully!” someone along the wire keyed.

  A lively debate ensued among half a dozen operators sharing the line, with Roland on Midway being the most vocal. Lucy could only imagine the boredom of a man stuck on a desolate island, which might explain his eagerness to chat. He carried on a spirited discussion about presidential politics for a full ten minutes before another operator entered the line.

  “Breaking in with story from San Francisco.”

  Lucy immediately shifted her attention away from gossip and back to her job. She grabbed a notepad to write out the incoming bulletin about a shipwreck off the coast of California. The rest of the afternoon was busy as she transcribed a series of reports from Pittsburg about the ongoing strike of mineworkers, revolutionary sentiment in the Balkans, and the story of a man in Miami who crawled six miles in order to win a two-dollar bet.

  The AP had over two hundred correspondents spread throughout the world, and they were encouraged to submit at least one story daily—more, if they were stationed in a major city. It didn’t matter what Lucy thought of the stories as they came over the wire. She transcribed them into careful script, then sent them through the pneumatic tube to another floor, where each story would be made available to all of their subscribers.

  She was transcribing an article about the arrival of a new diplomat from Mexico when a disturbance at the window caught her attention.

  A bird seemed to be in distress. It flapped against the window glass and attempted to land, but the ledge was too narrow. It was strange for a bird to fly this high up, but she was too busy transcribing a message to spare a second glance at the bird.

  Leonard, the operator at the booth next to hers, noticed and stood. “What’s that bird doing?” he asked.

  Another agent whose wire had gone silent stood and rapped on the glass to frighten the bird away.

  “Something on the ledge is attracting it,” Leonard said. “Dirty pigeons. They make a mess of the city.” He joined the other agent at the window and rapped on the glass as well.

  Pigeon? Lucy glanced at the window while trying to keep up with the incoming message from Mexico. The bird looked exactly like the homing pigeon she’d seen at Colin Beckwith’s office, but her sounder continued to rattle out the message, and she had missed several words.

  She opened her key to break the circuit. “Please repeat last line.” Lucy almost never needed to ask an operator to repeat or slow down, but that pigeon was distracting her. The operator obliged and rekeyed the last sentence. When the transmission was complete, Lucy closed her circuit and hurried to the window. The bird still struggled to land on the narrow ledge, and sure enough, she spotted a tiny canister attached to its leg. There was a layer of suet and seed spread on the windowsill. Had this bird been trained to come here? She opened the window.

  “Don’t let it in,” Leonard said, aghast. “Pigeons carry filth and disease.”

  “I think this one is trained.” Lucy extended her hand the way she’d seen Colin Beckwith do last week.

  Oh heavens. She was a city girl, and the leathery feet of the pigeon were unexpectedly cold and strong as it clasped her hand. The bird was heavy, too! She held her breath as she walked it back to her booth, the other operators watching in amazement.

  “Yes, I have remarkable powers,” she said in a nervous voice, feeling every eye in the office on her.

  She had no perch, but the pigeon seemed game for being passed off onto the back of her chair. She carefully untied the tiny canister on its leg and wiggled the message out. It was in Morse code, but she read it quickly.

  Greetings, Miss Drake. I send congratulations on the triumph of the Reliance in the America’s Cup yachting race. The Shamrock was clearly no match for the American yacht. C.B.

  Had the US won the America’s Cup? Fancy yachting races weren’t normally something she followed, but if America beat the British at something, she wanted to know. Reuters knew about the win, so someone in this room had probably gotten the story as well.

  “Have we won the America’s Cup?” she asked the room of telegraphers.

  Ralph Boylston in the back of the room raised a slip of paper. “It came across the wire five minutes ago. The Reliance beat the UK yacht three to nothing.”

  A cheer went up from the room. Ever since Reuters moved in, there had been plenty of conflict between the rival agencies. Ralph proceeded to read the rest of the story aloud. The Reliance was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt with the sole intention of winning the America’s Cup. It was a skeleton yacht, entirely unfinished below decks and had nothing aboard other than what it took to sail fast. It made the Reliance lighter and faster than any other ship on the water because it was nothing but a hollow shell.

  “That doesn’t seem too sporting,” one of the older telegraphers said.

  “All I care about is that we beat the British,” Lucy replied. Colin Beckwith’s smug attitude still stung, but at least he’d written a gracious note. She read the message to the assembled people in the office.

  “Reuters is using homing pigeons?” Leonard asked in a voice as stunned as if they had gone back to using smoke signals. It did feel like stepping back in time, but in a fun way.

  “I don’t think it’s a Reuters initiative, I think it’s a Colin Beckwith quirk.” She’d never used a homing pigeon before and wanted to try it. Flipping the strip of paper over, she wrote as small as possible in a series of dots and dashes.

  Thank you. Strike a point for faster, better, and cheaper.

  After attaching the canister back onto the pigeon’s leg, she carefully walked the bird to the open window and cautiously extended her arm. The bird needed no coaxing and lifted off to disappear from view somewhere above her window. Would it find its way home?

  She shouldn’t have worried, for less than five minutes later, the bird was flapping at the window again. She read the note for the office.

  Vanderbilt cheated with the hollow yacht. They are changing the rules next year so he can’t do it again.

  A chorus of groans mixed with snickering filled the air. A few men suggested replies liberally laced with obscenities, but Lucy needed no help penning her one-word reply.

  Bitter?

  The bird returned two minutes after she sent it off.

  Not bitter, just wish our civilized manners had rubbed off on America. England’s crew drank from crystal and slept in beds with proper linen, while Vanderbilt’s crew lived like cattle in an empty hull.

  He’d gotten her with that one, for there was nothing she could say to defend Vanderbilt. She guided the pigeon back to the open window, leaned out, and looked up. Colin Beckwith was leaning out his window two floors up and grinning down at her.

  “Hey, London!” she called out. “Here’s your bird.” She released the pigeon, and he lowered a hand to receive it.

  Lucy was still smiling as she headed to the ladies’ room to wash her hands. She’d never handled birds before, and it seemed a sensible thing to do.

  Nellie Billingsford from the accounting department was straightening her hair before the mirror as Lucy walked in. “I just paid the bill for a copy of those photographs the Harper’s reporter took of you,” she said.

  “Who?” Lucy turned on the tap and began lathering her hands with a bar of soap.

  “Don’t you remember?” Nellie asked. “That fellow from Harper’s Magazine who did a profile about the AP. He took pictures all over the office.”

  Now Lucy remembered. Last month a photographer had set up his camera at several spots throughout the suite of AP offices and had asked to photograph her in particular because he wanted to show a woman operating a telegraph machine.

  Nellie continued babbling as she adjusted the pins in her hair. “Mr. Tolland said he wanted copies of all the photographs for the company archives. We’ve been pestering the photographer
incessantly because he never turned over copies, but I gather he’s been sick. We finally got ahold of his assistant, who couldn’t be nicer. He made copies of all the photographs and brought them right over.”

  Nellie turned to face Lucy and lowered her voice, even though they were the only people in the ladies’ room. “Just between you and me, I think I know why the photographer was reluctant to turn them over. You appear in so many of the pictures that I think maybe he fancies you!”

  Lucy remembered sitting for the Harper’s photographer, but he’d only taken two pictures of her before moving on to take photographs elsewhere in the office. “Can I see?” she asked.

  Two minutes later, she was in the accounting office, and everything Nellie said was correct. The pictures were almost all of her. Even when he was photographing from across the office, Lucy was in the center of the shot. Other photographs showed lunchtime at the cafeteria, employees waiting to board the elevator, and using the pneumatic tubes to send stories. She was in all of them.

  She was ready to believe Nellie’s assertion that the photographer might have a crush on her until she saw the pictures at the bottom of the stack, and her blood ran cold. One photograph showed her and Nick waiting at a streetcar stop. Another showed them at a German delicatessen a few blocks from their apartment.

  An uncontrollable shiver raced down her arms. Someone was spying on her. He’d spent hours following her around, and she never even noticed.

  A telephone call to Harper’s Magazine confirmed her fears. The editor said there were no plans to feature the AP in any upcoming issue of the magazine, nor had they commissioned anyone to take photographs of the office. Someone had lied to gain access to her.

  Lucy thanked the editor, hung up the telephone, and blew on her icy fingers to warm them. This had all the hallmarks of her Uncle Thomas, although his intention with these pictures was a mystery. It was frightening that but for the illness of the photographer, she never would have known anything about it.

  Lucy met Nick at their lawyer’s office. They’d already had a meeting scheduled to go over their plans for the next day’s court hearing, but now Lucy needed to know her rights about those disturbing photographs. She and Nick sat in flimsy wooden chairs before their lawyer’s desk, noise from the fishmonger’s stall on the street below floating through the open window.

  “There’s no law against someone taking photographs on a public street,” Horace Pritchard said. He was not New York’s finest attorney. He was overworked and understaffed, but he was the best they could afford. At least he was willing to meet with Lucy and Nick in the evenings, for neither of them could afford to take much time off work. “Unless he enters your home or other private property without permission, the photographer may take whatever pictures he likes.”

  Lucy folded her arms and scowled. She suspected the photographer might have violated the privacy of her apartment, but she had no proof other than the unnerving sense that someone was watching her. These photographs meant she couldn’t even feel safe at work anymore.

  Horace didn’t seem worried about the photographs. All he wanted was to prepare for Uncle Thomas’s latest motion. “So you know nothing about why your uncle filed a motion accusing you of bad faith?”

  Lucy could not give him an honest answer, for if he had any idea of the “bad faith” she and Nick had been practicing, he would be duty-bound to report it to the judge. Besides, she couldn’t imagine the Saratoga Drakes knew anything about her secret weapon. If they did, Uncle Thomas would have thrown her in jail long ago.

  “I can’t think of anything,” she replied.

  “Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t just walk away,” Nick said in a tired voice.

  A stab of fear tugged at her. This wasn’t the first time Nick seemed to be losing heart, but they couldn’t give up. Theirs was a case of David versus Goliath, and in battles like that, the honorable people were supposed to persevere until they finally won.

  She and Nick were part of a dispute that had begun decades before they were born, but some of her earliest memories were of watching her father wade through mounds of papers stacked on their apartment floor, the determination of a gladiator stamped on his grim face. So far they had lost every legal battle in the forty-year war, and with each appeal their prospects for winning grew dimmer, but Lucy could not stop. This lawsuit was in her blood and every breath she drew, because more than money was at stake. It was about decency and humanity and quality of life for millions of people packed into the burgeoning cities of the modern world.

  It all began with two brothers who foolishly went into business together back in 1861. Jacob and Eustace Drake could not have been more different in character, ambition, or talent, but their unique skills combined to create what ought to have been a profitable business. Growing up in the shadow of Wall Street as the world’s largest technological revolution was under way, Jacob wanted a piece of it. He had a natural aptitude for business and capitalizing on new technology. His brother Eustace was a plumber who had a knack for inventing things. Eustace designed a drain that was easier to clean and an enameled faucet that resisted rust. Jacob tried to market the inventions, but none produced more than a modest income. Eustace didn’t care. He enjoyed tinkering, and Jacob gave him enough money to pay his rent and buy whatever technical equipment he needed to keep fiddling.

  Jacob dreamed big and encouraged his brother to tackle a problem that bothered every single person in the overcrowded city of Manhattan. People in cramped urban environments needed water, requiring millions of gallons to be piped into the city. New York was already developing miles of underground tunnels to move water in and out, but the challenge was how to get water to move up.

  As buildings got taller, it took a tremendous amount of pressure to send water to the upper stories, and most water systems usually failed. After the third or fourth floor, water barely dribbled from the tap. The challenge was in figuring out how to provide enough pressure to send water up ten, fifteen, or even twenty stories in a safe and reliable manner. Eustace Drake solved the problem by designing a pressure-regulating valve that was wildly successful.

  Jacob provided the funding to mass produce the valve and sold it wherever he could. Eustace, meanwhile, turned his erratic attention to a new project, a hand-cranked auger that could be inserted down drainage pipes to unclog them.

  Jacob became obsessed with selling the valve, the only one of Eustace’s inventions likely to make a fortune. He needed Eustace to sign contracts to authorize the sale of the valves, but it was hard to get Eustace to pay attention to business matters.

  Especially once the Civil War broke out. As the war dragged on, more and more men were called to serve, and Eustace’s number came up in the autumn of 1863. Eustace wanted to complete his new auger before joining his regiment, but Jacob could not sell the valve without Eustace’s approval. Eustace had no interest in reading exhaustive legal contracts as he raced to complete his newest invention.

  “Tell you what,” Eustace had said. “I have a hankering to buy my wife something nice before I head off to war. How about you give me enough money to buy a fancy pearl necklace, and in exchange you can do whatever you want with the valve while I’m at the front? We can straighten it all out when I get back.”

  That evening Jacob presented Eustace with enough money not only for a fine pearl necklace, but a pair of matching earrings as well. Eustace signed the half-page contract granting Jacob complete authority over the valve, and three days later Eustace joined his regiment.

  He served until the war was over, enduring sweltering battlefields, deafening artillery charges, and crippling blisters from endless marches. He never once thought about the valve until he returned to Manhattan in the summer of 1865 and learned his brother had formed a separate corporation, Drake Industries, and its sole product was the pressure-regulating valve. Jacob split the proceeds of the valves sold in Manhattan on a fifty-fifty basis with his brother, which delighted Eustace, for the valves had been installe
d in hundreds of buildings in New York. As skyscrapers rose higher, they didn’t merely require a single pressure-regulating valve—they needed six, eight, twelve, or more in each building, making them more profitable than Eustace could ever have imagined.

  It took a while for Eustace to realize how badly he was being swindled, for while he earned a respectable profit from the Manhattan valves, Jacob claimed one hundred percent ownership of any valve sold outside of Manhattan. Jacob had begun selling the valves in every major city in the United States, as well as exporting them to Europe, Russia, and Latin America. While Eustace sweat and toiled on the battlefield, his brother had grown rich beyond all imagination. By the 1870s, Jacob had moved to an estate in the rolling countryside outside of Saratoga, where he built a mansion, raised quarter horses, and diversified his fortune into new industries.

  Eustace hired a lawyer to sue, claiming he never intended to grant Jacob full ownership over the valve in perpetuity. He claimed he intended to deal with the legal aspects relating to the valve after the war, but the half-page contract technically granted Jacob the right to do whatever he wanted with the valve. The courts were generous with veterans and permitted the lawsuit to proceed, but it was hard to argue that Jacob had not fulfilled his part of the bargain. Eustace still possessed the pearl necklace, proof he had been compensated in precisely the manner he asked.

  Eustace lost the lawsuit, but the appeals process dragged on until his dying day in 1893. Jacob Drake was still alive, but he was ninety-two and had long ago turned the business over to his son. Thomas Drake was even shrewder than his father. Uncle Thomas had been denying the Manhattan Drakes any part of their grandfather’s legacy for decades. What was worse, Uncle Thomas jacked up the price of the Drake valve so high that it was out of reach for poor people.