As they pull around a narrow corner and to their supposed destination, Cora grows reminiscently queasy but attempts to buck up.I’m not going in, after all. Don’t even have to smell the ale.
Below the saloon’s Beer signage, in the folds of the alley, she spies a burly, mustached man smoking a cigarette.
Ah, that’s right.Cora places his face now. Dagmar’s sweetheart, who was tending bar the last time they were here, the reason Cora was crawsick for the entire next day.
Dagmar’s face alights at the very sight of him. “Konrad,” she murmurs, voice now soft as cotton down. “Come on, zen,” she tells Cora. “We go.”
But before the cook can kick open the carriage door, Cora grabs her wrist.
“Oh, Dagmar, I am a goof.” She winces. “I only just remembered I’ve got an errand first.”
As evidence, she holds up the bracelet she tinkered with for this very occasion, a gold wristlet with three counterfeit emeralds and a now-broken clasp. “I don’t want to delay you from your, um,fellow, so go on without me. I’ll just be a quick trip to the jeweler and back.”
Dagmar glances hungrily at Konrad and then again at Cora, narrowing her beady eyes. “You zaid you needed to drown sorrows wis a morning maroon—”
“I did.Do!But you know Alice. She’ll shoot me with that pocket pistol of hers if I don’t get this fixed before Mrs. Witt’sball.” The Witt gala has been crassly billed as a “poverty ball,” hardly the place for jewelry, but Dagmar doesn’t need to know that detail. “I won’t be but an hour, and then we can get to the real matter at hand.”
Dagmar studies her, finally offering a grunt. “Not a word of zis to Alice.”
“Naturally.”
“Soot yourself.” Dagmar saunters out of the cab, whistling.
In ten minutes’ time, Cora has fixed the bracelet herself, slipped it back on, and arrived at the corner of Park Row and Spruce known as “Printing House Square,” home to the many various presses that uncover and distribute—and these days, even apparently fabricate—New York’s front-page news. Tall, looming facades border the sprawling gravel forum, pockmarked in hidden corners with dingy clumps of lingering, soiled snow. The buildings, all more than ten stories tall, are still dwarfed by the engineering marvel of the Brooklyn Bridge shining in the distance, a true feat of architecture, a sprawl of monumental towers and great sweeping wires. Cora heard Alice and Béa speaking of the design only a few nights past, sharing rumors that awomanoversaw the design, her credit stolen by the prominent men around her.
Cora allows this rumor to rouse and embolden her now. If those stories are true, surely she is capable of merely crossing this square, one boot in front of the other, and confronting the less-than-prominent man who owes her some honest answers.
She strides into the marble foyer of the lobby ofThe Heraldbuilding, greeting a bellman who directs her to take an elevator, of all things, to the eighth floor. Within a spacious freight platform lined with wood paneling, its uniformed attendant stands ready at the pulley with a vacant smile.
“Eighth floor, sir,” Cora says, her voice wavering. “Please.”
They lurch upward, and Cora has to stifle an alarmed cry—but the ride itself is nothing compared to the frenetic madness that’s revealed when the elevator stops and the door clanks open.
Cora looks around, aghast. Is this a regular day for Cal Archer? Dozens, if not hundreds, of frantic-looking young men donning sweat-stained shirts and waving notepads like little white flags run back and forth through a labyrinth of desks. Bells ringing—telephones?—warring conversations, desperate shouts about Wall Street and President Arthur overtake her in a cacophonous symphony, gray-haired gentlemen opening and slamming wooden doors along the open floor’s perimeter as added percussion.
Maybe this was a mistake, she wonders hastily. Chasing Cal down for her own scoop. What was she thinking?
Abashed, she turns to leave.
“Miss Ritter?”
She turns to find Cal Archer standing in the center of two long rows of desks, his face hitched in confusion as his eyes meet hers.
She hasn’t seen him since he waltzed into Alice’s living room, demanding her delivery from a loveless marriage with a side of spice cookies. Orpfeffernusse, rather (sorry, Dagmar). Was his intervention motivated solely by pity? she wonders now. And yet she remembers, exquisitely, the way he looked at her that night in the Bowery (one of the very few things she actually remembers).
Does he think of her as often as she thinks of him?
“Hello,” she says, suddenly feeling foolish.
Cal steps closer with a strangled laugh. “What are you doing here?”
Cora lifts her chin, careful to inflect, in a perfect Württembergian lilt, “I have some questions of my own, Mr. Archer. Some concerns. And I hope you might enlighten me.”
He glances around at the frenzied scene, almost sheepish. “All right. But how 'bout somewhere else.”
After he grabs his coat and hat, they depart, firmly in the midst of the lunchtime rush. The freight ride downward is packed with reporters, thick with bodies pressed panel to panel.
Cora tucks herself into the platform’s far corner, Cal attempting to give her berth. As soon as the doors close, though, the freight lurches. She reaches out to prevent herself from falling, hands landing on Cal’s impressively firm chest.
