“Alice, you cannot force the girl to getmarried. To take vows, to change the course of her life like this. It’s too much, it is ridiculous, and you know it is.”
“What’s ridiculous is how much you’re both blowing this out of proportion.” Alice rolls her eyes. “What is the difference, really, between a marriage and a long engagement, if at the end of each, you run off, never to be seen again?”
“A legal remarriage, for one,” Béa suggests softly.
Alice exhales apah, muttering, “Not you too.”
A knowing glint lights up Béa’s eye as she draws closer. “It’s different for Cora than for you. You would never marry a man, so you cannot conceive of anyone else legitimately wishing to do so.”
Alice reels with the plain truth of that. She’s never understood the appeal of marriage. And yet...
She peers up into Béa’s warm hazel eyes, taking in her high cheekbones, her sweet smile, the scar that cuts through it all. A wave of tenderness washes over her.
She blinks hard and looks away, pointlessly straightening the assorted objects on her desk. “I admire your attempt to instill empathy in me, Béa, but it’s a question of practicality, not emotion. A new element has been introduced into our plan, and we must adapt to it. It’s that simple.”
“Adapt in a different way, then.”
“How?” Alice’s voice takes on a hard tone. She hates the way Béa flinches at the sound of it, but she cannot help herself. “If you’re so clever, you tell me.”
“You’re the planner and we all know it.” Béatrice drifts like a feather into the nearest chair, her energy for this argument plainly flagging. “Dagmar has her hundreds of Bowery connections, and I have my assorted skills. And Cora... is the beauty.”
The quick-fingered beauty, Alice thinks, remembering what else she needed to talk to the girl about—but this is clearly not the time to bring that up.
“But that’s not the only reason you brought us in, Alice,” Béa goes on, her eyes piercing in their raw affection. “I remember the day we met. Two years ago, in April. Montreal’s Bonsecours Market. You saw me pocket that cruller, saw that the vendor saw it too, called out to me by the wrong name and bought it for me on the spot rather than see me get thrown in prison yet again, this time for desperate hunger. Brought me to a tearoom, heard my story, pathetic as it was, and took me in, then and there. I still don’t know why youwere down in the city’s old town that day, butgrâce à Dieu, you were.”
I was there to find accomplices to bring with me to New York, Alice remembers dully. And Béa’s story was far from pathetic. She’d been a seamstress’s assistant, yes, but she’d also worked for years as a forger and fence before being caught and imprisoned up in Montreal, then released into a world that would never employ an ex-convict, no matter how capable. Alice didn’t care about her record. She simply wanted someone useful on the payroll who could also pose as a housemaid to sell the lie of nobility.
She’d taken Béa in because she could use her.
It was only later that she’d become more. Her home. Her person. Even if she couldn’t say it out loud.
“You have a good heart,” Béatrice says. “I see it. It’s real. Not counterfeit.”
She smiles, her mouth quirking shyly upward in the way that always stops Alice’s heart for a beat.
“Speaking of counterfeits,” Alice says, clearing her throat. “It’s imperative that I have the replica of the Württemberg solitaire in hand as soon as possible.”
A frown line forms between Béa’s delicate brows. “Yes. They’ve said—”
“I’ll need you to go down first thing tomorrow and check on their progress. I fear some people need to be overseen closely in order to perform their work to a satisfactory degree.”
Béa looks stricken by the change in tone. She swallows hard. “I’ll leave before dawn so as not to be seen.”
“Good,” Alice says, standing briskly. “I’m off to bed. You’d best get some sleep as well, as you’ll be off so early.”
She breezes past her maid—the woman who cannot, mustnot be anything more, not while all of this is swirling in her mind, not while they are so damned close to the first of May.
“You know...” Béa’s voice rises quietly behind her. “Sometimes I wonder if the person you’re bent on punishing the most is yourself.”
Alice’s eyes burn. She closes the study door behind her as she goes with a bit more force than necessary.
Chapter 20
Bottoms Up
Cora digs her head into her pillow, past the point of letting the coarse feathers muffle her sobs that came in the first flush of her outrage last night. She hadn’t let herself go like that since Da’s funeral, eyes aching, nose wet, a dull headache that consumes her whole face.
She’s stayed like this all day, since returning from the ball. As the sun rose soon after, she took to her room. At the soft rap on her door, Béatrice offering lunch, then tea, all ignored. As a pair of pigeons decided to have a noisy squabble just outside her window, Cora remained buried under her blanket and slept.
