Chapter 17 Shuffle the Deck
Shuffle the Deck
As inconspicuously as she can walk in a songbird costume, Alice cuts her way through the gathered crowd, following the encouraging
chill of a draft of night air. Passing the grand dining room, she sees that final preparations to the table have been made,
the servants standing ready. Perhaps Harry’s proposal delayed the schedule somewhat, but they’ll call for the meal within
minutes, leaving Alice only the space of a few breaths to herself to gather her thoughts and form a new game plan, now that
the hand they’ve been dealt has been altered.
Out in the garden, the air is thick and cold, threatening more snow rather than delivering. It’s enough to make for a lonely
setting, which is just as Alice wants it. She walks the boundary of the courtyard past wintering plants and silent statues.
Leaving aside the newest development—that marriage proposal was not on her list of possible events tonight—Alice has been
anxiously preoccupied with what she and Ward were discussing all the way up to the Ameses’ front door tonight.
Thanks to her gesture of amity at the Vandemeer dinner party, Mrs. Ogden has felt compelled to issue an invitation of her own to her new bosom friend via Ward McAllister, who had popped by to talk emeralds with her husband.
To move forward with an investment in the mining company, Ogden will want one of two things.
One: an emerald to have valued. Or two: something Alice is not going to give him.
Before their next meeting, Alice will have to supply him that Colombian gemstone for valuation. As she cannot afford to purchase
another, she had determined there was only one option. She will have to replace that necklace with a credible fake so she
can remove the stone from its setting and present it to the potential investors as another example of Württembergian riches.
She’d hoped to do it tonight, but it will be another week at a minimum before the commissioned replica is ready to be collected.
Even had she been prepared, it wouldn’t have mattered, as it happens. Mimi, dressed as a Florida flamingo, declared the gem
too much a mismatch with her fuchsia gown tonight, Mrs. Vandemeer told Alice, almost but not quite apologetic.
“She’ll wear it to the opera on the seventeenth,” Mrs. Vandemeer dreamily announced. “It’s Carmen, so nothing is too showy.”
To which her husband hastily added, “Say . . . now that abdication looks all but inevitable, perhaps you might finally afford
yourself a night out. We’d be very happy to host you in our box.”
Alice had graciously accepted. She does the math in her head now.
Two weeks remain for her to take possession of the false necklace she’s commissioned.
She’ll have to set the date to meet Ogden for the week following, which puts her into late March, leaving April for emerald valuations, last-minute financial machinations, and formal hush-hush invitations being doled out for the event itself.
No sense in agonizing over every step between today and the first of May, however, only the very next one: How to retrieve
the actual emerald without anyone the wiser?
Sleight of hand has never been a strength of hers. It is, however, a particular skill of Cora’s. One that Alice did not until
now anticipate requiring.
She’ll have to speak to the girl. Not at present, though, not with everyone filing in to dinner, the happy couple veritably
swarmed with well-wishers.
Not at dinner either. They’re stationed at separate tables—a blessing, given the desperate look Cora fixes Alice with as she
passes her on the way to be seated.
Not as they leave the ball either. Alice rides away with Ward just as Cora and Harry emerge from the Ameses’ mansion to claim
their own carriage.
She plans to use the ride to lay out her plan to Ward, but he’s imbibed too much madeira and brandy to make any truly cogent
suggestions. By the time she’s reached her home, her mind may be more muddled in its fevered thoughts than his.
Inside, she goes straight to her study and shuts the door.
The journal Cora gifted her sits on the desk, tempting her to fall prey to the cardinal sin of committing her machinations
to paper.
She’s not such a fool as to succumb but remains too anxious to take herself off to bed, so she runs sums instead, using the
book as a ledger, as she’d originally planned.
She enters a figure for the newest projected expense, a counterfeit necklace. Offset against the group’s likely earnings of twelve million, as best estimated, it’s nothing. A drop in the bucket.
And Mr. Vandemeer willing to write a check for a cold million right there on the spot.
Alice hears the front door open. Footsteps stomping steadily toward her. She turns her attention back to the ledger and braces
for the inevitable.