Cora drifts down the table, watching her mentors work with resigned remorse.Thisshe will miss. Not Mr. McAllister, obviously, nor her mounting crises of conscience, but the team. The notion of being part of something bigger than the sum of its parts.
Alice’s crew has become... well, her sanctuary, she supposes, a family she has made for herself. A family that will disband mere days from now, Cora realizes soberly, given Alice’s unwavering vision. Despite what Alice had insisted upon, time and again throughout the season, Cora honestly believed her mentor’s mind would change somewhere along the way. She feels like such a dupe even thinking it, but the emerald con seems far less valuable a score when Cora imagines herself alone at its end.
She laughs bitterly into her glass. Oh, the irony. To finally get Long Creek Farm, have the last laugh, only to realize that who she’s with matters a far sight more than where she’s going.
“Did you make a last-minute change?” The question startles her.
Cora turns to see Arabella standing before her, a faint blush across her cheeks. She gestures down toward Cora’s dress. “I recall you were planning to come as a scullery maid.”
Ah yes, the little white lie in Lord & Taylor. Cora glances over at Ward, who still stands gossiping, now a ways down the drawing room.
“He fired her,” she says simply. “I had to pivot.”
“Well,” Arabella says brightly, “you are the loveliest pauper I ever saw.” The girl winces, cringing at herself. Perhaps realizing she sounds like her obsequious mother? “I’m a bit out of sorts. Again, sorry. And this party is overwhelming. Hardly helping the matter.”
Cora smiles, looking around pointedly, venturing, “Mrs. Witt has really outdone herself.”
“It is all... a bit off-putting, is it not?”
“Ghastly.”
“In terrible taste!”
Both girls burst into relieved laughter. For a moment, Cora conjures another reality, one where she and Arabella are actual debutantes, true friends.
“I want to apologize for the other day, Cora,” Arabella says. “I really am very eager to marry your cousin—”
“You do not have to explain yourself to me.”
“I just... I struggle to picture my future life abroad. When I try to imagine my home in Württemberg, with Prince Wilhelm, or the wedding, or even the gardens the duchess speaks so fondly of, I... well, I find I cannot conjure anything. It is as if my future is merely... blank.”
Perhaps Arabella is more intuitive than Cora ever gave her credit for.
If ever there was an opening for her planned conversation...
“Something has been weighing on my mind too,” Cora confesses. “I was hoping we might have a private word?”
Arabella’s thin brows pinch, but still, she nods gamely. “Of course, dear friend. Lead the way.”
The pair navigate through the crowd, Arabella trailing, with Cora bound for the one space she knows intimately in the Witts’ grand home. On their way to the private theater, they pass a sprawling dice game spilling out of the adjacent parlor.
“Cora! Bella!” Harry leaps up, looking goggle-eyed between them. “Are you enjoying the party?”
He begins swaying. Is he tippled? Cora leans closer, catching a gag-inducing whiff of whiskey. Oh, most certainly.
“The game of craps is ever so much fun.” Harry guffaws. “There seems a surprising inverse correlation between frivolity and affluence—”
“Do win one for Württemberg, won’t you, darling?” Cora says kindly. “We’ll join you shortly.”
As soon as they reach the theater, Cora ushers Arabella inside and closes the wide double doors behind them. The large space is mercifully free of partygoers, as she anticipated, empty but for the long rows of wooden chairs, the majestic walls spangled in woodwork, and the wide, red-curtained stage. A room primed for her own performance.
“So grand,” Arabella marvels.
Cora nods. “I thought it a fitting place to talk.”
“Have you been here before?” Arabella says curiously.
Cora’s breath catches.
