The Lady of Bolton Hill Read Online Free PDF

many talents. “So,” he said casually. “Have you kept in touch with Daniel Tremain?”
    The name was a cherished echo of the past. Once it was impossible to believe she could live a life without Daniel in it. Of course, those days were more than a decade old. “Did Father put you up to asking that?”
    “Nope,” Clyde said. “I’m simply dying of curiosity to know whatever happened to the princess and the pauper.”
    Anxious to appear as if his question did not rattle her, she tried to make her voice sound casual. “I’ve followed him in the newspapers, of course,” she said.
    It was hard to believe that a boy who started out shoveling coal into furnaces would grow up to become one of the most powerful industrialists in America, but Clara had never doubted that Daniel was destined for something great. She could still remember the day she had seen a tiny mention in the business section of The Times , announcing a patent filed by a young inventor in America for a new alloy of steel that would improve the strength of railway lines. That single invention had been the basis for a technological empire, and Daniel Tremain was at its helm. She had nothing to do with Daniel’s success, but that did not stop her from being immensely proud of him. The pressure in her heart swelled when she thought of all he had accomplished.
    “I wrote a few letters to him after I got to London,” Clara confessed. “I never heard back from him.”
    But it had been more than just a few letters. She and Daniel had begun composing music together before she left Baltimore, and he had begged her to keep sending him her piano compositions so he could write the accompanying music for the cello. Of course, that was before his mother had died. Clyde had written her a few letters that let her know of Mrs. Tremain’s death, and that Daniel had taken up additional jobs to support his sisters. How could he have had time for something as frivolous as composing music?
    “I had assumed that since Tremain is now rolling in riches, he would have figured out some way to come see you in England,” Clyde said.
    She turned to face him. “Why is it you never liked Daniel?”
    “Have I ever said such a thing?”
    “You don’t have to. You can barely say his name without wincing.”
    Clyde continued to whittle, and Clara waited patiently, the sound of the rushing waves swirling below filling the silence of the night. “I’ve always thought him a bit too hotheaded,” Clyde finally admitted. “There is no doubt he is brilliant, but he was always so arrogant about it. Pushy, I suppose.”
    Clara bit back her uncharitable thoughts. Clyde had come halfway around the world to rescue her, and she wouldn’t chastise him for not understanding her adolescent fascination with Daniel Tremain.
    “Perhaps it was Daniel’s brashness that Father objected to, as well,” she conceded. “We all know I was not sent to London simply to broaden my education.”
    Clara always suspected her father’s ambition for her musical career was why he initially encouraged her unlikely friendship with Daniel Tremain. Daniel encouraged her to compose, nourished her love of Chopin and Beethoven, and helped her reach new creative impulses as she played on the piano and he accompanied her on the cello. But what Clara truly wished to do was write, like Margaret Fuller or many of the other women who were just beginning to be allowed to write for newspapers. And when Daniel encouraged her to follow her own dreams of writing rather than music, her father saw it as a threat and sent her to London.
    Clara watched the chips of wood drift into the swirling waters below. “I wonder if Father will object to Daniel, now that he is rich as sin.”
    “The short answer is a resounding yes ,” Clyde said without hesitation. “Tremain is still a nutcase over that whole business with Forsythe Industries. Any man who can keep a grudge stoked for twelve years is a little off-kilter, Clara.”
    She