She’d hoped to do it tonight, but it will be another week at a minimum before the commissioned replica is ready to be collected. Even had she been prepared, it wouldn’t have mattered, as it happens. Mimi, dressed as a Florida flamingo, declared the gem too much a mismatch with her fuchsia gown tonight, Mrs. Vandemeer told Alice, almost but not quite apologetic.
“She’ll wear it to the opera on the seventeenth,” Mrs. Vandemeer dreamily announced. “It’sCarmen, so nothing is too showy.”
To which her husband hastily added, “Say... now that abdication looks all but inevitable, perhaps you might finally afford yourself a night out. We’d be very happy to host you in our box.”
Alice had graciously accepted. She does the math in her head now. Two weeks remain for her to take possession of the false necklace she’s commissioned. She’ll have to set the date to meet Ogden for the week following, which puts her intolate March, leaving April for emerald valuations, last-minute financial machinations, and formal hush-hush invitations being doled out for the event itself.
No sense in agonizing over every step between today and the first of May, however, only the very next one: How to retrieve the actual emerald without anyone the wiser?
Sleight of hand has never been a strength of hers. It is, however, a particular skill of Cora’s. One that Alice did not until now anticipate requiring.
She’ll have to speak to the girl. Not at present, though, not with everyone filing in to dinner, the happy couple veritably swarmed with well-wishers.
Not at dinner either. They’re stationed at separate tables—a blessing, given the desperate look Cora fixes Alice with as she passes her on the way to be seated.
Not as they leave the ball either. Alice rides away with Ward just as Cora and Harry emerge from the Ameses’ mansion to claim their own carriage.
She plans to use the ride to lay out her plan to Ward, but he’s imbibed too much madeira and brandy to make any truly cogent suggestions. By the time she’s reached her home, her mind may be more muddled in its fevered thoughts than his.
Inside, she goes straight to her study and shuts the door.
The journal Cora gifted her sits on the desk, tempting her to fall prey to the cardinal sin of committing her machinations to paper.
She’s not such a fool as to succumb but remains too anxious to take herself off to bed, so she runs sums instead, using the book as a ledger, as she’d originally planned.
She enters a figure for the newest projected expense, acounterfeit necklace. Offset against the group’s likely earnings of twelve million, as best estimated, it’s nothing. A drop in the bucket.
And Mr. Vandemeer willing to write a check for a cold million right there on the spot.
Alice hears the front door open. Footsteps stomping steadily toward her. She turns her attention back to the ledger and braces for the inevitable.
Chapter 18
Queen Rook Pawn
Cora bursts into Alice’s private study without knocking, momentum and fury twin stallions hurtling her into the center of the room.
Alice pushes back from her desk, all sure mannerisms, carefully calculated gestures. “By all means. Enter.”
“No, I willnotbe made to feel like a fool by you! Every time I attempt to speak with you, there’s something more important, and surely there can be nothing more important thanthis.”
Cora brandishes her new engagement ring as if she’s gesturing with a very different finger. Closing the door behind her, she begins pacing alongside Alice’s settee on the far wall. “Not that this is news to you. You obviously saw what happened at the ball.”
“Of course. Congratulations.”
Alice coolly resumes writing—in the notebook Cora gave her for Christmas. Is she using it as aledger?
“Need I remind you that isgoodnews—”
“Harry wants to get married right away.Right away, at his father’s estate. He mentioned a wedding Easter weekend, which obviously changes everything.”
This finally stops Alice’s hand.
She looks up again, her face controlled, but Cora can see the glimmer of a frown. “You’re certain that’s what he said?”
“I’m certain I didn’t hallucinate, if that’s what you’re implying.”
Alice places her pencil down, sighs thoughtfully, and stands, positioning herself at the window. Outside, the huge elms lining Madison are still blanketed in snow, the streetlamps turning the winter wonderland luminous, all of Manhattan coated in a gilded shimmer. “I don’t consider that a problem.”
