She stops Alice as the others take their leave. “I wanted to apologize again for my earlier accusations.”
“Heavens.” Alice laughs. “There is no need, dear Priscilla. For we are friends now, are we not?”
“We are, but you see...” Mrs. Ogden glances behind her, as if wary of her husband’s hearing. “There was another friend, years ago. I’d thought she was a lady of good virtue like the rest of us, but she turned out to be no better than the basest of whores. The temptations she dangled before my husband.” Her lips press together in a white line. “Well, it was a miracle he never succumbed. And in the end, she got what was coming to her. I’ll spare you the gory details, Your Grace, and I’m afraid they are rather gory.”
She titters.
A chill runs up Alice’s spine at the sound.
“What happened to her?” Alice asks, as if amused.
“She was run out of town with her disgusting spawn, penniless, friendless,” Mrs. Ogden says with thick satisfaction. “We never heard from her again, good riddance. God’s justice, I say. Although why the Lord would grant a strumpet like her children and leave me barren, I’ll never know.”
“Well,” Alice cannot resist getting in, squeezing Mrs. Ogden’s gloved hand, “at least you have your dogs.”
And in the moment of the loathsome woman’s momentary shock, Alice smiles and takes her leave.
Out on the sidewalk of Fifty-First, Alice seizes a moment to gather herself, breathing in the fresh night air, while Ward holds the door for Cora to step inside his carriage.
Another lure set and bitten. But she knows what restraint, what absolute control it will take to reel them all in at last.
Alice wanted to slap that woman, right then and there, for saying such vile things about her mother. But she didn’t. She wanted to flee from Ogden’s touch. And yet she didn’t; she held firm and even managed to reel his attentions safely away from Cora and back to her.
That yodeling! Alice can’t help it. She breaks into a smile at the memory. She wishes Dagmar and Béatrice had been there to hear it. Once the girl gets over her obvious resentment of the trick Alice played and understands the reasoning behind it, she might even be convinced to give an encore performance back at home.
“McAllister!” Ogden’s baritone voice rises from the marble stairway behind her. “You go on with Miss Ritter. Her Grace and I will follow.”
Ward looks to Alice in momentary perturbation as Ogden approaches from behind her, clasping one of her hands in his and whispering, “You are among trusted friends. You need not worry for your reputation. No one will breathe a word.”
“Cousin?” Cora calls tightly from the carriage, her face peeking out from the window. But before she can voice any argument to this plan, Ward taps his hat with his cane, enters the carriage, and shuts the door behind him.
“I saw you lingering,” Ogden says, spinning Alice around to face him as her ride home rolls away without her. “Unwilling to let the night end.”
“I was taking the air,” Alice says, careful not to directly contradict him. “Needed to catch my breath.”
“As do I, mydearestMarietta, as do I.”
“I am rather fatigued.”
“Fear not, I’ve sent for my brougham.” He lifts a hand as the two-seat, single-horse carriage is brought out from the stables. Then he slides his hand around Alice’s waist and whispers, “Fewer windows.”
Apprehension begins to creep up Alice’s spine, growing ever-lengthening tendrils. This is a wrinkle she cannot think how to iron. Not this quickly, not while he opens the door for her and offers her a hand to step inside.
It is a short drive back to her home on Thirty-Eighth Street, she reminds herself. Surely he can’t think to make a move that quickly.
In fact, he can. And does.
The wheels of the carriage have barely begun moving before he falls to his knees in front of her. “I’ve longed for this moment since the first time I saw you. That Night of Illusions, the lamplight shining on your golden hair, the sadness in your eyes that I longed to erase with my touch—”
“Mr. Ogden, we c-cannot,” Alice sputters. “You are a married man.”
“And you unmarried at twenty-eight, the crime of the century—”
She startles at the expression, then at the feel of his hands, steadily hunting for her legs beneath her skirts.
“You are royalty, my love, living independently, like noother woman in the world,” Ogden practically moans. “You set your own rules, your own mores, and inside here, we are merely two humans desperate with want. Why should we not have what we desire?”
Those last set of lines sound practiced. Decades practiced. Alice wonders whether he tried them on her own mother.
