[Draft letter on Blackwell Iron Works letterhead, single sheet, foolscap. Cornelius's hand in black ink. No envelope; unsent. Word "DRAFT" written and underlined at top right corner in his own hand.]
BLACKWELL IRON WORKS Established 1854 — Cornelius A. Thorpe, Proprietor
411 The Crescent, Port Hume, September the Ninth, 1919.
Charles Reddick, Esq. No. 12 Harborview Terrace, Port Hume
Reddick —
I write in a matter I do not wish to put to you by telephone, and which I will bring in person to your offices on Wednesday morning the 17th if you can give me an hour. Before that conversation I would like your mind to have had some days to work on what I am about to say.
I have in the past fortnight established to my own satisfaction, beyond the possibility of mistake, that my son Julian has drawn, over a period I now count as running from late in 1917, a sum of not less than twenty-six thousand dollars from the operating accounts of the Company, by means that would not withstand an independent audit. I have the ledgers and the corresponding bank traffic. I have, in addition, information as to the disposition of these funds that I will lay before you at our meeting — it is sufficient to state here that a man known to you in your police-court practice by the surname Rizzo and a saloonkeeper called Doyle figure in the matter.
I intend the following and will require your help in the drafting:
First. The trust instrument of 1908 is to be revised so that the chief operating control of the Company, upon my death or withdrawal, passes not to Julian but to my daughter Augusta, in concert with my wife, with such provisions as you think prudent to prevent the entire edifice being dragged into widow's legal difficulty.
Second. Julian is to be required to repay, by deeded conveyance of his residence and any other assets, an agreed portion of the deficit. The remainder the Company will absorb as my private loss, not Blackwell's.
Third. I intend, at the Directors' meeting of the 4th of October, to make a limited disclosure — limited to the Board — of what has occurred. I will do this so that no man on the Board can claim afterward he was deceived. I will not make a disclosure outside that room.
Fourth. Julian is my son. Whatever else he has become, he remains that. He will keep his name, his house, and the habit of his table. He will not keep the Company.
I am not writing this in heat. I have been too many weeks in this matter for heat. I am writing it because it has to be written. If you think of a better course than this one, tell me when we meet. I do not expect you to.
Yours, Cornelius Thorpe
[Unfolded and flat upon the study blotter as found. No postmark. No fingerprint on the reverse beyond the writer's own. One small unevenness — a single drop of water, or of something else — blurs the final letter of "Cornelius."]