Cora’s cheeks warm. “Apologies.”
Cal clears his throat. “Quite all right.”
They step out into the lobby and then the brisk late March air, Cal offering an arm as they fall in stride across the square.
He finally breaks the loaded silence. “Does, ah, my sister know you’ve come to see me?”
“No. And I’d like to keep it that way, especially as she is the reason for today’s inquisition.” Cora stops walking. “I’m... well. I am actually quite worried about her. Something happened last night and I...” Cora trails off, searching for the right words. “I’m concerned that she is in over her head, only I can’t be positive because she never tells me more than the barest essentials, and I was hoping...” She huffs. “I was hoping you might trust me with the truth, Mr. Archer.”
“Come on, it’s Cal by now.”
Her cheeks turn hot again.
Focus, Cora.
“Thefullstory, as it were, Cal. I know she prefers to hold people at arm’s length—me, it seems, especially—but that isn’t how I want to live my life. Call me a fool, but I care about your sister very much. I desire to help, however I can, and... I cannot do that if she insists on shutting me out.”
Cal stays quiet for a long while. So long that their stroll has returned them to where they started.
“I understand,” he finally says. “And lord knows I can relate. I can provide context, I suppose, take you back. Maybe too far back, I don’t know.” He sighs. “Once upon a time, our family was old money, if you can believe it. Dad came from Puritan stock and Mama was Dutch New York, that kind of old. It was all inheritance, investments, that type of thing. We lived in a brownstone not far from where Alice is living now, although there was always talk about moving uptown, keeping up with the fashionable crowd. Never happened, obviously.”
While he offers his hand, assisting her around a particularly ghastly looking smear of coal-colored snow, his eyes look distant, fixed on the past.
“Dad had this aversion to the men he’d grown up with,” he goes on. “Something about being bullied at boarding school; he never went into details. Didn’t stop him from hauling me off to good old Maidenhead Academy, same as him, but it did make him seek out friends among the newer crowd. The industrial rich. Businesspeople. Men who were, if I’m completely honest, much wilier than him. Men like—”
“Ogden and Ames,” Cora supplies. “Vandemeer. Witt and Peyton, too, I suppose?”
Cal smiles ruefully. “Not Peyton. No, not him. The others,though... yes. They were Dad’s nearest and dearest. Or so he thought.”
Cora shivers as they take another turn about the square.
“They were all in some way involved in the railroads. They all sat on various boards, held motley investments, hedging their bets, and Dad... well, he grew intrigued. Felt like an outsider. Until the day they brought him in.”
Cal blinks, looking away. It takes him a second to shake his head and continue the story.
“I wasn’t home.” He says it bitterly. “I was off at school. But Alice tells me that was the happiest she’d ever seen our father, the day he breezed in from a meeting he’d had down on Wall Street. Popped a bottle of expensive champagne he’d been saving for a special occasion and whirled our mother around the parlor in a mad dance. Said he was a ‘railroad man’ now. Principal investor in Midwest Railroads, and yes, he’d put every bit of the family’s holdings into the company’s bonds, but it wasn’t a risk. Far from it! Because his dear friends, his closest companions, they’d told him this railway was due to be bought by Manifest Rails the very next day for far, far more than what he’d put in. A key acquisition to fill a gap in their transatlantic line.”
“Manifest?” Cora frowns, realizing. “That’s Harold Peyton’s company.”
Cal points at her wryly. “Well, dear old Dad waited for the arrival of the papers the next morning, or a telegram, or a courier announcing the grand news. Nothing. Days passed. Still nothing. Not only that, but no invitations out to dine. Nobody home when they went out to visit, which was especially strange, as the wives of these men were some of Mama’s closest friends since childhood. Something was wrong. They just didn’t know what.”
Cal scratches his face, sadness sweeping clean his storyteller’s expression.
“It all became clear on Monday, May 1, 1871, when the papers ran their morning headlines, announcing the completion of the Manifest transatlantic line—and the collapse and bankruptcy of Midwest Railroads.”
Cora shakes her head. “I don’t understand—”
“Neither did he. Neither did Alice, not until years later. You see, our friends Ames, Vandemeer, Witt, and Ogden weren’t just deep investors in Midwest Railroads; they were in the pocket of an even wealthier man—Harold Peyton himself. After negotiations to sell their line to Peyton failed, they scrambled to invest in Manifest instead. One problem: They knew damn well their bonds in Midwest would be worthless in a few weeks’ time... unless they could sell it all off to some dupe. Some old-money Knickerbocker pal without a lick of business sense.”
“They conned your father,” Cora breathes, understanding hitting her in a cold wave.
She and Alice really are more alike than she ever realized.
“Took it all.” Cal nods. “Never looked back.”
He clears his throat, gaze turning toward the horizon, the magnificent bridge standing sentinel beyond. Cora has the gutting suspicion he won’t get through the next part without looking away from her. “Alice was the one who found his body. Came home from her finishing school and found Mama in the parlor, sobbing in a ball on the ground, too distraught to go find out the source of the sudden thud she’d heard, the whining, persistent creaks in the rafters. So Alice did. She found Dad hanging in the study. She was all of fourteen years old. She was the one to cut him down, try toshake breath back into him, when he was... who knows, hours past help.”
“My God.” Cora’s eyes well up with tears. “I cannot imagine—”
