“Care to illuminate me?”
“Why, none other than my dearest friend,” he says. “Mrs. Caroline Astor.”
Ward turns before Alice can hide her alarm. He smiles, eyes crinkling, at the unconscious confirmation in her pinched expression.
“The one woman everyone in New York society is desperate to claim as an intimate, and you, Duchess, avoid her like Valjean avoids Javert, if you’ll allow me the literary reference. And why is that? Whynotinclude her on your little list of marks? Or at least pay her a visit, enlist her help in deepening your ties to high society? Yes, yes, you’ve told me. You worry she’ll recognize you from when you were a little whelp of a thing in white lace dresses. But I wonder if it’s something else, something... more recent.” Ward taps his head, playful. “I’ve often wondered, dear Alice, if you’ve already hit this particular mark. Perhaps before we had the happy occasion to meet?”
Alice lets out an impatient sigh. “In what direction are you pointed with this, Ward? It would be a relief if we could arrive there before daybreak.”
“I propose to increase my take,” he answers, leaning jauntily on the wall, “from fifty percent to... let’s call it eighty-five and shake on it?”
Alice is too proud to laugh in incredulity. Her expression doesn’t change one bit.
Ward blinks, squirms a little in his too-tight jacket.
“Our team has increased in number,” she counters. “At your urging.”
“All to the benefit, you must admit. The more the merrier.”
“They’ll each need to be paid their agreed-upon share. Even in our wildest calculations, we wouldn’t be able to arrive at figures that would make a divided fifteen percent add up to what I’ve offered them.”
“I’m afraid that’s your concern, not mine, dear Alice. You see, I’m in a particularly strong position here. The closest personal friend of Lina Astor there is, ready and willing—nay, duty bound!—to tell her just who you are and what you’re planning to do.”
“I see.”
Now Alice does laugh. Bitterly. “So my actual options, as you have just outlined, are to allow you to tell Mrs. Astor that I’m planning to defraud several members of elite Manhattan society, thus risking imprisonment, or to call the whole thing off due to an untenable financial situation of your making.”
“Oh, Alice, tsk-tsk! I’d have given you credit for more creative flexibility than that. We’ve got weeks to go. Plenty of time to rope in another mark. Or two. Or three. As I said, I’mnot even averse to taking my Mystic Rose for all she’s worth, if that idea appeals.”
“The more the merrier indeed,” Alice says.
“Now you see the point!” Ward crows. “You’ve been too limited in your ambitions, my dear, hobbled by this petty revenge plot. It’s beneath you. Now, I don’t like turning brutish like this, notentirely, anyway—I have grown rather fond of you over this past year—but at the end of the day, one has to look out for the bottom line. I’m doin’ you a favor,Your Grace. Widening your horizons.”
“We’ll call it a widened horizon ofthreechoices, then.” Alice counts them on her fingers. “One: Cancel it all and walk away. Two: Bring in more dupes in order to pay you what you demand. Three: Refuse and risk you telling Mrs. Astor, whatever the consequences.”
“I’ll give you a moment to mull it over,” Ward says with a bow, as if the soul of graciousness.
What Alice mulls as she turns away, her fingers digging into her pocket for the reassuring solidity of her derringer pistol, is why exactly she feels so stung by this entirely predictable turn of events. She certainly wasn’t under any illusion that Ward was a truthful person. But perhaps she did believe he was on the right side of dishonesty and for the right reasons.
For all his talk of infiltrating high society, of setting himself apart from them, condemning them... he is every bit the self-serving mountebank that they are.
So now she can take a risk, out of righteous anger. Call his bluff. Burn it all down if necessary.
Or she can continue to steer the course.
“Would you accept seventy-five percent?” she offers.
“Eighty,” Ward counters.
“Done.”
Ward brightens. He extends a hand.
They shake. Ward’s palm is surprisingly sweaty. For all his bravado, he wasn’t sure how this would play out himself. Perhaps she should have held out for seventy-five.
Not that it will matter in the end.
“I’ve left my driver idling out there long enough, wouldn’t you say?” Ward perks up. He juts out his elbow in offering for Alice to take it. “Allow me to see you home.”
