The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [81]
“There’s wool,” I said. “That’s competition.”
“Yes, but wool will only keep you warm to about thirty degrees, and it has real trouble standing up to mud. Nothing keeps one as warm or wrapped in luxury as fur,” Olea said. “Mud just dries up and flakes right off of it.”
They were open and honest about the pitfalls and demands, but in my analysis of their business, I felt they missed something, a part they might have more control over than they did, a venture that would make any investment—my investment—show greater return.
The infamous Franklin Doré stood in the center of our hotel suite in New York City, bookended by the beaming Olea and Louise. The noises of Manhattan’s drayage firms making daily deliveries and the occasional honk of one of those new Ford automobiles rose up to our seventh floor rooms through the open windows. I’d left this city with my mother five years before. This view of Central Park was a far cry from the scene she and I’d had from our small Brooklyn room. I didn’t let myself think of that pain. Olea and Louise had been out of the country when all those choices were made.
“I’m pleased to meet you at last,” I said to Franklin. I put out my hand to shake his.
“And you’re the infamous Miss Doré,” Franklin said. His eyes were the color of sable and just as warm. Instead of shaking my hand, he lifted it to his lips, soft as mink when they brushed my fingertips. His own hands remained gloved. “It’s my pleasure to meet you after all this time. My women give you many compliments,” he said, his voice slightly accented as though he’d spent time in the Canadian provinces. He dropped my hand and bent to kiss Louise, then Olea, on the cheek. He removed his fine camel coat, with the collar trimmed in the soft underhairs of skunk.
“I thought we were going out to lunch,” Louise said.
“Oh, let’s get acquainted here before I go out on the town with my women,” Franklin said. He’d entered the room like a dancer, lithe and agile. I had expected Franklin Doré to be large, muscled, with dark hooded eyes squinting from years of trapping and blinking against frozen snows piled up along cold northern rivers. Surely he’d done all that before he graduated to brokering, bargaining, traveling with pelts to France, speaking foreign languages as he bowed over tea tables at auction houses in Hong Kong. I had not imagined he would turn heads with his good looks. I didn’t think he’d turn mine.
Louise fluttered around us now, urging us to sit, taking Franklin’s coat. Judging by the lines flowing out from his eyes and the hint of gray streaking the sable-colored bangs he brushed back with his fingers, he was a good fifteen years older than I.
“My women,” Louise said. “How you talk.” He tweaked her cheek and she grinned.
Olea said, “Proprietary men claiming they own women puts you out of touch with this modern time, Franklin.”
He feigned shock. “Not possessive,” Franklin said. “ ‘My women’ is a term of endearment, nothing more.” He pulled tight leather gloves one finger at a time from his wide hands. They were red and marked with scars. Two fingers on his right hand, the ring and little finger, were shortened. “Frostbite,” he said to me as he noticed my stare. Then returning to the subject of his women, he added, “Mere terms of endearment that allow me a smidgen of authority working for two women who are flames to my buttery soul.”
“You see, Clara,” Louise said. “You’ll have to watch him; he’s such a charmer.” She giggled like a schoolgirl. I thought of my father and of Olaf’s warning about Erik Elstad, and I wondered for a moment if there were safe men.
“Fortunately for us, he puts most of that charm to use with manufacturers, and thus he keeps us in coin,” Olea said, “as well as in compliments.”
“You’re my family,” he said.
“Clara wants to talk business,” Louise said.
“Yes, but it’s always best to separate family from finances if one can,” Olea