Page 115 of By Any Means

“Gotham is Gotham. I’m tired of being someone else half the year. Being away from you.”

“I’m glad I get you at all. I’m still grateful you’re a free man.”

Laurie smiled and tilted his head back. “Thank God for closed trials, lawyers, and a lack of corroborating witnesses. Kiss me, please?”

Chary obliged.

“Oh,” Laurie said, after. “Y’know what else. I picked this up in the mailbox. It’s for you. I’m sorry I was grumpy at you first thing instead of giving it to you.”

Chary opened his eyes. “It’s for me?” Who would send him letters besides August and the ladies at St. Michael’s? They seemed to yet regard him, at least, if only because of the stained glass.

Laurie chuckled. In four fingers, held up to Chary’s level, he splayed envelope and letter-opener.

Chary took them gingerly. “Who… Hmm. Return to… offices of the National Child Labor Committee, Broadway. Care of—” He nearly dropped it. “No! The Florence Kelley? What could she want with me?”

Laurie laughed. “Well, open it! Actually, wait. Now, don’t stab me with that thing.” He swiveled his chair around, nudged Chary close, then wrapped arms around his corseted waist and pulled him down into his lap. “Okay. Read it.”

“Why didn’t she write to you?” Chary whispered. “You’re a member.”

Laurie bit him gently on the arm. “I’m just a writer. They want the source. Open it.”

“Oh, Lord. Undo m-me, please. I find I can’t breathe.”

Laurie was very good at this by now. He shifted Chary forward, leaned back, and had the laces’ bow free in a second; those laces above the waist and below loosened; at last, he brought his hands to the corset’s top edge, insinuating rough fingertips in the soft, warm space of skin and shirt and boning, and in a few back-and-forth tugs had the front busk unhooked.

“Are you undone?” he whispered.

Always.

“Thank you,” Chary breathed. He set the letter opener aside with a shaking hand and unfolded the letter. “You didn’t dare pull any strings for me, did you?”

“No strings!” Laurie said; he flung the corset onto the Chesterfield. “’cept those. Promise.”

Chary laughed until he got past the letter’s polite niceties, and then he gasped and had to hang on to Laurie’s forearm.

“Oh, Laurie. Ms. Kelley would like me to attend the annual meeting of the Committee as a speaker. Oh gosh—practically next week. Thursday the thirteenth, in Cincinnati. ‘The Scope and Progress of the Child Labor Movement,’” he quoted.

“Oh, damn,” Laurie said appreciatively.

“You really did not do this? They should be asking you.”

“I really did not, and they really should not. A dozen reporters have been putting out the same as I did, in less-progressive magazines. It’s been thoroughly done.” He squeezed around Chary’s waist. “That’s a good thing, means folks are catching on. But no one has your perspective on it, Chary. You’re a progressive, industrialist philanthropist who worked in his own factory for almost a decade, practically eliminated boys’ work with machines, and then turned ownership of the whole damn thing over to his fellow journeymen. Journeymen whom he thereafter convinced the Local Sixty-Eight to accept. I think you might could have one or two things to contribute.”

Laurie, of course, left out all of his own influence, particularly the part where, being a man of a thousand useful connections, he’d interceded with the Local. And where Chary had kept legal ownership of the blueberry-jam side of things, the rights to the jar-mold that finally sealed—which had turned out to be a fairly profitable thing on its own. And August, who had not patented his semiautomatic so that everyone could implement it without a lease.

“I’m only twenty-six! They cannot think I have anything sage to say.”

“Pfft. Nobody knows that.”

That was true. To the public, he was still Charles Edward Wright, Jr., the eldest son; the intrepid Sarah had not gone back on her word to keep the secret—he hoped not only because she now shared an office with Laurie and Mr. Sumner.

Laurie liked to joke he’d live a very, very long life.

“They,” Laurie said, “see a businessman who turned his company on its end after a mere year of ownership and made a difference. And an example.”

“But—four thousand estimated attendance, including a US Senator!” Chary shuddered. Why on earth would they give that figure at all? “I’m going to be sick. And… next week? I-I don’t think I can.”

“Nonsense,” Laurie said. “Of course you can. I’ll write you a speech.”