by Maya Rodale
25 West Tenth Street
One week later
Beatrice sank into the settee in a state of utter despair. Ava pressed a cup of tea into her hand. She hadn’t been aware how trying things had been until she arrived at the weekly meeting of the Ladies of Liberty. Though many of the women were only recent acquaintances, Beatrice still felt safe enough to relax.
Harriet, who had devoted her time to the Ladies of Liberty and opened her home to the members, had created a magical space in her drawing room.
“How goes your adventures in commerce?” Harriet asked, obviously hoping for word of success.
“Not well, I’m afraid.”
The women made sounds of commiseration, urging her to tell them everything, to share her burdens with them.
“I have managed to obtain this position,” Beatrice began. “I have done my research on the other department stores and their innovations in pricing, merchandizing, and service offerings. I even braved Dalton’s and an encounter with the man himself.” Here, she paused, still a little shaken from the experience. “I believe I know what needs to be done for Goodwin’s to become competitive again. Yet I can’t seem to command the staff to do it. I speak, and it is like I have not even spoken.”
Once she began, she felt the tension in her chest ease, as if she’d loosened her corset at the end of a long day. Chasing that feeling, Beatrice continued. “But I am the president. Or perhaps they don’t listen because I haven’t much experience? And yet how is any woman supposed to get sufficient experience to lead if she’s expected to marry and stay home? I simply don’t know what I need to do.”
“It is because you are a woman,” Harriet said sagely. “I have noticed that some men seem unable to hear our voices.”
“You can say that again.”
“And again and again, if a man’s listening,” Daisy said and they all laughed.
“We need an invention that makes our voices sound like men’s.”
“Someone tell Mr. Edison,” Adeline quipped.
“But will he even listen if a woman tells him the idea?”
“Perhaps we ought to have a man follow us around, repeating everything in a loud, booming male voice so that other men will listen. Like a human microphone,” Ava suggested.
“A male translator.”
The ladies were laughing now, so hard that teacups rattled in their saucers and women drew handkerchiefs from their pockets to dab at the tears in their eyes.
Some women paused to consider it.
“I daresay it has potential,” Harriet said. “Think of what we could accomplish if we had men to announce our ideas as their own?”
“Yes, imagine if we had men declaring that women ought to have the vote or equal wages.”
“Oh, but a man is so high maintenance,” Ava said. “A man must be fed and watered. And like a horse you must provide for it. They cannot seem to manage it on their own.”
“My own husband can scarcely find his own shoes without assistance from myself and the maid,” one woman said.
“Maybe I ought to dress as a man,” Beatrice mused. She started to envision herself in trousers, started to wonder how it would feel to have that much freedom of movement. It would certainly make riding her bicycle to work a much easier task.
“I highly recommend it,” Eunice said. She wore trousers. Unapologetically. But then again, she worked in the theater and they were a bit more tolerant than the rest of society.
“It would certainly make riding a bike easier.”
“An excellent idea if you want to have everyone in town talking about you. We saw what happened when women wore bloomers,” Ava said, sounding glum at the truth of it. But this made Beatrice smile.
“The thing about being a divorced duchess who openly displays the ambition to run a department store is that there is nothing more scandalous that I can do. Dressing in male attire and riding a bicycle to work will be the least of it. So perhaps I ought to do all of it.”
“Well, bicycle riding is all the rage. And it is becoming less scandalous by the day!”
“Now, if only we had fashionable cycling attire . . .” Adeline, the dressmaker, said with a gleam in her eye.
“Did you know I asked them to create a display of bicycles made for women, in order to sell the bicycles themselves and appropriate ladies cycling attire?” Beatrice said. “At first they told me it was impossible, then they said they could not manage it, and then they simply did not do it.”
“I would love a friendly store where I might inquire about a bicycle. I dream of riding one but getting one is another matter entirely.”
“The problem is that I cannot implement my improvements if the people who work with me won’t listen.”
“Did they listen to your brother when he was in charge?”
“It’s hard to say. I don’t think he ever asked anything of them, other than to show up and do what has always been done. Honestly, I wish to just fire them all.”
It was an audacious, tyrannical thing to hear coming from the mouth of a woman. Why, she ought to have just suggested burning the whole building to the ground and starting all over.
And then Harriet, daring Harriet, surprised her. “Why don’t you?”
She had reasons.
“I think of the families that they must all support,” Beatrice said. “And their loyalty. Some have been employees since I was a girl. Mr. Roger Stevens, in particular. He has been there since I was ‘yea high.’”
Harriet was having none of it.
“I bet their wives would do a better job and be loyal to the person who hired them. Which is to say you.”
“There are so many women in the city who would excel at retail work,” Adeline added. “And do they not deserve a clean, safe, well-paying, and honorable job, such as the ones you would provide?”
There it was again. Be the beacon for all the girls. Be the one to rescue them all. Be the one to blaze the path and set an example and change the world. She was supposed to do all that yet she could not get her own employees to listen to her.
Beatrice sighed, exhausted from the prospect of it, and sipped her tea.
“I would love to but . . .” She did not intend to finish that sentence, just let it hang there and let the others explain why not. But then she realized that would make her no better than Mr. Stevens, dismissing women’s ideas out of hand.
So Beatrice thought for a moment why not, and instead ended up thinking why she should.
She could hire wives and women, dozens of them. Scores of young women were leaving farms and small towns and coming to the city to find work and, perhaps, independence and time to find true love rather than marrying the richest man who would have them. Could Goodwin’s give them the chance she had never had?
She could hire people who shared her vision and wanted to work with her rather than resist her at every turn. And they, too, had families to support or lives to live.
She had no good reason why not.
“I would love to. Full stop.”
Harriet beamed at her. “A store by women, for women. Imagine that.”
“There would be decent facilities, if you know what I mean,” Daisy declared. “And I’m not just talking a private place to reapply their lip paint.”
“That was the first thing on my list!” Beatrice exclaimed. She got the idea after Dalton’s was the only store to provide clean, sufficient space for women. It grudgingly earned her respect and, if she were another shopper, her endless devotion. “But Mr. Stevens told me that ladies should not stay out long enough to need them or better yet, they ought to stay home.”
“Outrageous!”
“You really must fire him, Beatrice.”
“He inadvertently has an excellent business point, though,” Ava mused. “If you are going to provide facilities, then women can stay awhile longer. It would afford them more time to shop.”
“You could have a restaurant or tearoom. A place for women to go and enjoy being served by someo
ne else for once.”
“And delivery of packages so she might buy more than she can carry, of course.”
“A place to leave the children so a mother might shop in peace for Lord’s sake,” another woman said.
“Perhaps a space to just be. For a moment.”
The ideas were coming fast and furious by women who had never been asked what kind of experience they wanted to have from the world. Being a woman at large meant always adapting to a world built for men, which meant always contorting themselves to fit. But what if they had a space that was built for them to enjoy? Someplace safe, clean, elegant, and built for them to linger in comfort. None of these suggestions were incredibly novel or particularly impossible, but taken all together—and with the right merchandise—she could create something new and wonderful. Something more than a department store, a destination store.
Or she could fail spectacularly in front of everyone in New York City—especially all the girls watching her ascent with bated breath.
That was if she could even bring herself to do what she knew needed to be done.
Chapter Thirteen
Goodwin’s Department Store
A few days later
Beatrice knew what she had to do. But . . . oh, she was not looking forward to it. There would be greener pastures on the other side, just as soon as she traveled through hellfire and agonies to get there.
It was not unlike how she’d felt when she’d decided to pursue a divorce from a duke. But that was a testament to how bad things had become; she would rather crawl through hellfire and agonies on the chance that she might survive rather than remain for the all but assured death of her spirit.
So she had summoned her courage with the last spark she had left.
She had succeeded.
So she could do this.
Beatrice approached Mr. Roger Stevens, a man who had helped her father run the store, who had known her since she was yea high, who had attended her wedding, who had loyally served her brother, and who had simply always been there.
“Mr. Stevens, if I might have a word with you.”
“I’m busy at the moment, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. Like she was a mere barmaid or secretary and not the president of the establishment that employed him.
Her confidence faltered. Slightly.
But then she remembered she had survived the hellfire and agonies before. She had taken on a duke and won; this man was one she could certainly manage.
“Now,” she said firmly.
And then, involuntarily the words “If you please” fell out of her mouth and drifted into the air. Worse, they came out softly when she needed to sound firm. If she had to say them at all, then it must be in the voice of the dowager duchess which made if you please sound like if you care to keep your head attached to your body.
Beatrice took a deep breath and summoned her inner dowager; in other words, her inner woman who was too old and too rich to care what any man thought.
“Mr. Stevens.”
Finally, he looked up. She turned and went into her office and waited at the open door for him to hastily join her. He did.
She shut the door.
They were alone.
Her nerves were on edge.
They both took seats on opposite sides of the desk.
“Mr. Stevens, things I have requested have not been done. Why?”
He smiled at her. Patiently. As if she were a simpleton and he had to explain the basics.
“They have not been done because I have not ordered them to be done. Because that is not the way things have been done here. I wouldn’t expect you to understand that since you’re . . . new.”
New. He was going to go with new.
She nodded.
“So you have deliberately not implemented my orders.”
“For your own good. And for the good of Goodwin’s. I didn’t want you to have regrets when it was too late.” He didn’t say the words “you’re welcome” but the meaning was plain in his expression and his voice: she was a woman, and as such she was silly and frivolous and had to be protected from herself.
Beatrice swallowed her anger and said, “You think I don’t know my own mind.”
“Well, you are very . . . new.”
On the marriage mart, she was too old. But in this position she was too new. It seemed she would always be the wrong age for whatever she wanted to do. What traps the world had set for women! She gave a harrumph of laughter, which had the effect of startling him and sparking a fire in her.
Of course. He expected her to wilt like a delicate flower on a hot day.
“You seem very firm in your opinions.”
“Yes,” he boasted because a man ought to be firm in his opinions.
“Very set in your ways.”
“Yes.” He said this less firmly now because “set in one’s way” implied old and unyielding and unyielding things often broke.
Beatrice summoned the memory of the dowager duchess, particularly the way she held her shoulders back, her spine rigid. She held her head high, like she had the entire hardbound collection of Shakespeare’s works, both the comedies and tragedies, upon her head and it was no burden upon her movements whatsoever.
“Well, Mr. Stevens, we must do things differently around here.” She sat tall, spine straight and rigid, her hands folded in a ladylike way on her desk. Her heart was thundering like the horses at Ascot. “Since you are, admittedly, firm in your opinions and set in your ways and unwilling to change, I think it’s best that you explore other opportunities for employment.”
“I’m quite comfortable here at Goodwin’s.”
“I’m not asking you, Mr. Stevens.”
He could be hired by another department store. Or perhaps he might retire. Either way this he had managed to hear. She watched his cheeks flush with shame and his eyes flash with anger, the particular look of a man who could not tolerate being challenged by a woman. She knew it well. Her heart began to race. It took all of her training to keep her hands clasped on the desk and not fidgeting with her skirts.
“Are you saying what I understand you to be saying?” Mr. Steven replied hotly.
“Yes. Thank you for your years of service to Goodwin’s but—”
Now her heart was thundering like the horses at Ascot during the final stretch of the race, all while an earthquake was happening. Nothing like being alone with an angry man to get one’s pulse racing. And he was angry. Red faced, nostrils flaring, deathly calm voice.
“You cannot fire me. I worked for your father. Your brother. They trusted me to execute their orders.”
“All true. But I cannot trust you to execute my orders. And I can fire you.”
Her instinct was to storm out, make a dramatic exit. Then she remembered this was her office and she had asked—no, ordered—him to leave. Every nerve in her body was twitching for escape but she would not give him the satisfaction. She’d have to try another tactic instead.
Beatrice rose to her feet, a ruthlessly simple demonstration of her power. By anyone’s definition of etiquette, a man ought to stand when a lady did, and Mr. Stevens, out of habit, stood, as well. Ha! She was now halfway to elegantly ejecting him from her office.
She remained standing behind the desk making every effort to project an unwavering courage of her convictions. She did know she was right. She was just terrified and exhilarated at the same time.
He did not move.
Neither did she.
But Mr. Stevens did not know that if there is one thing women are trained to do, it is to stand still and quiet and let the world rage around them, regardless of the hellfire and agonies they endured. Discomfort was nothing new.
She had lived in discomfort for years; she could wait a few more minutes.
Finally, Mr. Stevens realized that she was firm. Unyielding.
He gave her a withering look that would have made tigers roll over and roses drop their thorns.
“I won’t forget this,
sweetheart. And make no mistake, I will make you regret this.” And then he muttered, “Bitch,” on his way out.
The door slammed behind him. It rattled the door frame, it rattled her bones. He rattled her carefully constructed equilibrium.
Beatrice promptly sat down and cried.
These hot tears were not of sadness or fear, but relief. Because she had gone to battle and won. Because she had stood firm and now could be at ease for a moment. She let the tears fall.
She was alone.
After crawling through hellfire and agonies again.
This was the other side.
And here, she sat down and cried.
Beatrice hadn’t cried like this since she stole away from London to meet with solicitors who gave her the news she had desperately hoped to hear: she had a chance in hell of obtaining her divorce. Her freedom. Her future.
That was all she needed, a chance in hell. A long shot was still a shot.
Victory was wet cheeks, heaving sobs. When she was done, she felt lighter and a hell of a lot stronger.
Chapter Fourteen
A ballroom uptown
The following evening
Wes Dalton had waited his entire life for a moment like this, to be on the inside of a ballroom when Beatrice arrived. To be sure, he was still considered “new money” but at least he was in the damned room.
What an impressive room it was, with Old Masters and society portraits clinging to the walls, and crystal chandeliers dripping from the ceiling. The room was full of women dripping in diamonds and ropes of pearls, gossiping with one another and jockeying for social prominence. Men in stark black-and-white evening clothes stepped onto the terrace to trade stock tips and light imported cigars with flaming hundred-dollar bills.
People were starving in the streets.
Dalton had once been one of them.
He wouldn’t be in this ballroom at all if it weren’t for a little windfall, once upon a time. That, and his hard work and high risks and his ruthless determination to succeed meant he was here. Which meant he was finally worthy of her.
Beatrice.