Mrs. Astor rolls her eyes. “Oh. That.”
She rises with a sigh, motioning for everyone to join her.
“We may as well get the vulgar bit over with. Come on.”
Alice, the least bewildered among her crew, follows behind her godmother, treading a track from her childhood, down the back corridor of the house, into the servants’ stairway and down to the kitchens, where she and Cal used to hide with the Astor children to steal any treats left cooling from the oven.
The treats in question today are spread about the wide servants’ dining table. Stacks upon stacks of money. Béa stands counting the last of it, clutching Alice’s old ledger, a charcoal pencil pressed between her lips. Absolutely adorable.
Surrounding Béa, Dagmar and Konrad—both swilling beer from pewter mugs—are the half dozen newsies they employed, all happily tucking into jam tarts and milk, just as Cal and Alice used to when they were about that age.
Béa’s eyes spark with happiness as she looks up and sees Alice. “Thirty-two million one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. All here, cash in hand.”
Dagmar lets out a long, low whistle.
“The emerald itself has gone amiss, I’m afraid,” Béa continues, “but with this amount of takings, I should hardly think it matters.”
Alice’s eyes dart to Cora, who stands staring at the ground, a small smile playing over her face. Perhaps she kept the stone for herself as an unsanctioned bonus?
She’d look the other way, if so. But she suspects Cora has used that stone to help defray the cost of all this to her own stung conscience.
Ward steps forward, irate. “Like hell it doesn’t matter. I want every bit of our winnings accounted for.”
“Oh, shut up, Ward,” Mrs. Astor says. “Surely by now you can see that you’ve won nothing.”
“I’d have happily given you half,” Alice says calmly. “If you’d only refrained from threatening me, I’d have honored our agreement and bid you farewell as a friend. But now?”
She shakes her head.
His face goes white with indignation. “I say—”
“Isay,” Mrs. Astor cuts in, “that if you stay quiet, like the sycophantic little worm you always were and always now will be, I will stay quiet as well. I shall not tell the truth about your role in all of this to my friends in society. I shall not turn you away or shun you, much as I now long to. All will remain exactly as it is. Picnics in Newport, Patriarch’s Ball in January, evenings at home with your lovely wife. How is dear Sarah, anyway? You hardly mention her lately. It’s almost as if you’vedesignedit so that she’s sick all the time.”
Her glare says it all. Alice knows that with Mrs. Astor’s own husband forever “off on his yacht,” the older woman holds a strong opinion or two about marital neglect.
Ward swallows. “She... she sends her regards.”
Mrs. Astor rolls her eyes. “Come now. Leave them to conduct their business now that you’re out of it. I have some curtain patterns I want you to look at for the east guest room. I simply cannot decide on my own.”
Ward glances over his shoulder in desperate, ineffectual entreaty as Mrs. Astor drags him out of the kitchen and back upstairs.
“Leave him two hundred dollars,” Alice says. “For the use of his carriage.”
“Maybe he can finally buy himself a suit that fits,” Cora suggests.
And Alice lets out a laugh so big, it startles even herself.
They bid goodbye to Dagmar and Konrad downtown. Other than the German woman’s insistence that she “earned her place in thees city and will not be geeving it up for anybody,” none of the rest of them are any the wiser about what she plans to do with her winnings.
“Perhaps she’ll open a theater,” Alice muses as Mrs. Astor’s carriage drives away from the bar down on the Bowery. At Cora’s incredulous expression, she grins. “She’s quite the dancer, and she didn’t break character for a second at the embassy. I could see a future.”
“Nothing compared to Cora’s groveling act, though,” Cal says fondly. “Right here’s the true actress.”
“Never again,” Cora groans.
She motions down at the outfit she’s now wearing—simple gingham and a straw hat, to all appearances a Midwesterntourist heading home from her idyll in the big city, just like the rest of them.
“From now on, I am plain old Coraline O’Malley. I never want to see a fine gown again for as long as I live.”
