Carved in Stone Read online

  Books by Elizabeth Camden

  THE BLACKSTONE LEGACY

  Carved in Stone

  HOPE AND GLORY SERIES

  The Spice King

  A Gilded Lady

  The Prince of Spies

  The Lady of Bolton Hill

  The Rose of Winslow Street

  Against the Tide

  Into the Whirlwind

  With Every Breath

  Beyond All Dreams

  Toward the Sunrise: An Until the Dawn Novella

  Until the Dawn

  Summer of Dreams: A From This Moment Novella

  From This Moment

  To the Farthest Shores

  A Dangerous Legacy

  A Daring Venture

  A Desperate Hope

  © 2021 by Dorothy Mays

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2021

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4934-3373-5

  This is a work of historical reconstruction; the appearances of certain historical figures are therefore inevitable. All other characters, however, are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Cover design by Jennifer Parker

  Cover image of woman by Lee Avison / Arcangel

  Contents

  Cover

  Half Title Page

  Books by Elizabeth Camden

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  Historical Note

  Questions for Discussion

  Coming 2022

  About the Author

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  1

  APRIL 1900

  NEW YORK CITY

  How could a man buy a new suit with a dozen eggs?

  Patrick O’Neill sighed, protecting the basket of eggs as he navigated through the crowd of pedestrians to the tailor’s shop on Mulberry Street. He should have earned a bit of cash from drawing up Mrs. Donovan’s last will and testament, but the old woman paid him with eggs instead. She’d come to this country during the Irish Potato Famine, and Patrick had a soft spot for folks like her, so he settled for the eggs.

  Life would be cheaper if he could buy ready-made suits like most people, but broad-shouldered men who stood six feet four inches tall rarely had that option. Everything Patrick wore had to be made to order, and it got expensive. Still, the tailor owed him for staving off an eviction last month.

  A bell above the shop door dinged as Patrick entered, and the tailor greeted him warmly.

  “There’s the Lower East Side’s most famous lawyer,” Mr. Collins said. “I figured we’d be seeing you.” The tailor continued stacking bolts of cloth on the cramped shelving over the only sewing machine in the overstuffed shop.

  “What makes you say that?” Patrick asked, his Irish accent a little thicker than normal. He left Ireland when he was fourteen, but his natural brogue came back strong when he was among his own.

  “Your ma was bragging about the big case you’ve got coming up,” Mr. Collins said. “What sort of man would battle the Blackstones in a rumpled old suit like the one you’re wearing?”

  Patrick tried not to wince. “Let’s not go tossing that name around, okay? No one is supposed to know about this yet.”

  Even the Blackstones didn’t know about it yet. They were the most powerful family in New York City, and they would come after him the instant they found out what was brewing. Surprise was one of the few advantages Patrick had, and he wanted to keep a lid on this case until the last possible moment.

  “Fiona, come out here and take Mr. O’Neill’s measurements,” the tailor called toward the back of the shop.

  Patrick braced himself. He’d hoped to escape this appointment without the tailor’s daughter waiting on him. Fiona was a pretty nineteen-year-old who looked at him with hot eyes and a hungry expression. She approached him with a tape measure, and Mr. Collins brought out a few bolts of cloth for Patrick to choose from.

  “Those people are going to make mincemeat of you, boy-o,” Mr. Collins said in a worried tone. “They’ll send you running straight back to the seminary.”

  “No!” Fiona tossed a measuring tape over Patrick’s shoulders and ran her hands across his back to straighten the tape. “Nobody wanted to see you become Father What-a-Waste. Turning away from the priesthood is the best thing you ever did.”

  Last year Patrick had balked only two weeks shy of his vow to enter the priesthood, and guilt still plagued him. Father Doyle had paid for him to go to college and law school. They let him practice law the entire time he’d been in seminary because everyone assumed he would become a lawyer for the church. He owed them, but as his final vows loomed, so had his incessant, unquenchable longing for a family.

  He wanted a wife. He wanted children of his own, not just the chance to minister to others. He wanted a huge, rollicking family with kids climbing all over him when he returned from work and a pretty wife waiting for him at home.

  Patrick was thirty-four and still unmarried, which caused people in the neighborhood to hurl their daughters in his direction. At the moment, Fiona’s hands were traveling in a dangerous direction as she measured the length of his inseam.

  “Fi,” he said, feeling his face flush, “a little decorum, please.”

  Mercifully, her father grabbed the tape measure and shooed Fiona to the other side of the shop.

  Patrick nodded to the basket of eggs. “The eggs and my help with getting the landlord off your back last month will make us square for a new suit, won’t it?”

  Mr. Collins nodded as he continued taking measurements. “That it will. Now, tell me, boy, what germ of insanity prompted you to take on a seedy client like Mick Malone?”

  Mick Malone was the most contemptible man Patrick had ever represented. Mick had escaped convictions for kidnapping and murder, but everyone knew he was guilty. Now he was hoping to cash in on his notoriety by penning a memoir, and the Blackstones’ reaction was going to be savage.

  “Mr. Malone is entitled to legal representation, same as any man,” Patrick replied.

  “You’d better take a bath after dealing with that one,” Mr. Collins warned. “Your mother said Mick was drunk as a skunk when you met with him last week.”
The tailor spoke quietly, but news of Patrick’s mother’s gossiping was worrisome. They lived in the Five Points, a rowdy Irish slum where secrets spread like wildfire. Patrick needed to know exactly what his mother had blabbed all over the neighborhood.

  “What else did Ma tell you?”

  “Oh, you know, how proud she is of you. How she wishes you’d marry and start giving her grandbabies, now that the church won’t get you. Don’t blame your ma. She’s bursting with pride whenever she talks about you, Patrick lad.”

  That might be, but she needed to stop running on about his clients. His typical cases battling evictions or bailing someone out of jail were as dull as watching paint dry. Not the Blackstone case. Defending Mick Malone against the Blackstones was the most important case of his career.

  “Come for a fitting next week,” Mr. Collins said. “You’ll look as smart as any of those shifty Blackstone lawyers. You are Ireland’s and America’s finest!”

  Patrick nodded, wishing he was half as confident as his tailor.

  Patrick bought his mother a bouquet of daisies on the way home. The flowers would help soften her up before he read her the riot act over the way she was jabbering about his cases. Birdie O’Neill’s greatest hobby in life was bragging about her son, and it had become a problem.

  When Patrick first began practicing law, he’d asked her not to discuss his cases. She’d pinched his cheek and promised to behave, but inevitably he’d hear about her nattering whenever he visited the barbershop or a pub. It was usually harmless, but this case was different.

  It had all started when Father Doyle showed up at their apartment two months ago, pleading for Patrick’s help with the infamous Mick Malone case, and Birdie overheard everything. Patrick didn’t want the case, but how could he turn down his old benefactor?

  He walked up to the fourth-floor apartment he shared with his mother and let himself in. Birdie lay sprawled on the sofa at a strange angle, watching the pigeons feed on the lump of suet she set on the windowsill for them.

  “You okay, Ma?” he asked.

  Birdie turned her face toward him and sent him a smile. “Daisies! How nice.”

  She still made no move to rise. Patrick crossed to the other side of the room, where they kept a pitcher filled with water from the pump that served everyone in the building. On the way, he noticed the cake his mother had brought home from the bakery. It looked like a basket. The bottom half used interlocking strands of chocolate frosting to look like wicker, and real strawberries were mounded atop the cake. If he didn’t know better, he’d have mistaken it for a genuine basket of strawberries.

  “Those cakes sold out before I even finished them,” she said with pride.

  Birdie O’Neill’s cakes made the Gerald Bakery famous. Crowds of people came to the bakery window each day to admire her whimsical creations. Sometimes they were towering layer cakes built to resemble city landmarks like Grand Central Station or St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Other times she imitated the natural world, like this strawberry basket cake. Once or twice a week, she brought a cake home to share with the neighbors. It made them one of the most popular renters in the building.

  “Nice cake,” he said, picking out a ripe strawberry and popping it in his mouth.

  Birdie still hadn’t gotten up from the sofa, and there was nothing on the stove for dinner. That was odd. She usually took great pride as a housekeeper. Her day started at four o’clock each morning when she headed to the bakery to start the ovens, and she finished by early afternoon, which left her plenty of time to prepare dinner. Their apartment usually smelled like heaven when he arrived home.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, since she wasn’t the sort to complain.

  “I fell while lugging in a sack of flour from the wagon this morning,” she said. “It was dark, and I slipped on a loose brick.”

  He closed the distance between them and hunkered down before her. “And you worked the rest of the day?”

  “Don’t worry, it was nothing,” she teased while pinching his cheek. He didn’t complain. He’d finally persuaded her to stop pinching his cheek in public, but he didn’t have the heart to ask her to quit at home. “The pain went away for a while, but now it’s bad again.” She had a bandage on her forearm too.

  “Did that happen when you fell?” he asked with a nod at the bandage.

  “I scraped the wagon wheel on my way down. It’s nothing. Mr. Gerald patched it up as soon as I got inside.”

  “Mr. Gerald ought to lug his own sacks of flour.”

  “Don’t be taking that tone,” she said. “Mr. Gerald is a fine man who has always treated me well.”

  Maybe, but Birdie was too old for lugging heavy sacks and tending hot ovens before the crack of dawn. No man should have to worry about his mother collapsing under the weight of a thirty-pound sack of flour.

  “You can quit, Ma. I’m making decent money these days.”

  “Please don’t make me point out that Mr. Gerald always pays in cash.”

  Patrick looked away. When they’d first arrived from Ireland, they were so poor that Patrick had to beg on the streets. That sort of shame never fully went away, and depending on his mother for steady income was humiliating. He would start getting tougher with his clients. Some of them could afford to pay in cash, and he needed to start demanding it.

  But first he needed to win the Mick Malone case.

  “Ma, you’ve got to stop talking about my cases in public,” he said. “Keep quiet about the Mick Malone case. It’s important that his book gets published before the Blackstones find out about it.”

  “They’ll get wind of it sooner or later,” she pointed out.

  “Let it be later. The book will hit the shelves in September. The closer we get to that date without anyone knowing about it, the better our chances.”

  No one in the city wanted to take on the Blackstones, but sometimes a man didn’t have much choice.

  2

  The Friday evening soirees at Gwen Blackstone Kellerman’s home were famous. She originally started hosting them as a way for the professors at Blackstone College to relax and unwind after a week of classes, but over the years they had grown into much more. Artists and intellectuals from across the city vied for a chance to attend her soirees, which could last until dawn. The informal gatherings became a place where professors debated new ideas and artists mingled with academics. It was said that Mark Twain was inspired to write a short story based on a conversation he had with an aging English professor in the corner of Gwen’s garden.

  These weekly gatherings were Gwen’s proudest accomplishment, since she would probably never become a botany professor like she’d once hoped. Dreams of a successful marriage and motherhood had also passed her by, but her soirees made Blackstone College a thriving intellectual community.

  So far tonight she had consoled a professor whose latest experiment didn’t pan out, listened to a musician play his new composition on her piano, and toasted the birth of a baby boy to a physics professor. It was a brilliant, moonlit summer evening . . . which was why the gloomy expression on the college president’s face seemed so strange.

  President Matthews had been appointed two years ago and was still struggling to find his footing among this tight-knit community. He lived next door to Gwen on a tree-shaded street where most senior faculty lived. Not everyone on campus appreciated the new president, but Gwen understood the challenges he faced better than most and did her best to support him.

  “Gwen, if it isn’t too much trouble, I’d like to go next door for a brief discussion,” he said.

  She was in the middle of listening to a visiting professor from Japan discuss his research on undersea volcanic activity. “Can it wait a few minutes?” she asked, eager to hear more about how molten lava could occur underwater.

  President Matthews shook his head. “It is a matter of some delicacy. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”

  Gwen nodded and headed across the crowded parlor toward the front doo
r. There were sixty people here tonight. Most had spilled onto her terraced garden to enjoy the warm summer evening, but a group of the oldest professors had staked their claim to the upholstered furniture in her front room.

  “Gwen, what is with this amazing tree?” a chemistry professor asked, holding up the dwarfed Himalayan cedar in its ceramic pot.

  “It’s called a bonsai tree,” she said. “Professor Watanabe brought it to me as a hostess gift tonight. Isn’t it darling?”

  Over the years, people had brought her flowering shrubs, herbs, and bulbs from across the world, making the two-acre garden behind her house a showpiece. It was a green-scented world where science and beauty converged. Her happiest hours were spent in the calm oasis of her garden, and she loved sharing it with the people of Blackstone College each Friday evening.

  Two more people tried to intercept her before she made it outside. The gentle hum of crickets sounded in the distance as she and President Matthews walked across the lawn to his house next door. A light on the front porch glowed as he led her inside.

  “You added new wallpaper,” Gwen said as she stepped into the foyer of the president’s house.

  “It was my wife’s idea,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind the change.”

  “Of course not. It’s your house now.”

  President Matthews still seemed ill at ease whenever he invited her inside because this had once been her father’s home. Theodore Blackstone was the college’s founder and had served as its president for twenty-eight years. Gwen had been born in this house and lived here until she married Jasper and moved next door.

  Or perhaps the new president’s deference to her was because of her maiden name. Everyone knew she was a Blackstone by birth, and the name tended to inspire awe, fear, and ghoulish curiosity.

  “Tell me what I can do for you,” she prompted once they were seated in his study. The windows were open, making it easy to hear laughter and the faint sound of the piano from her house next door.

  “I received bad news this afternoon,” President Matthews said. “Your uncle has made good on his threat to terminate funding for the college.”

  Gwen bowed her head. Uncle Oscar had been threatening the college’s funding for years, but she hadn’t believed he would ever end it. Her mind reeled, unable to imagine a world without Blackstone College in it.