Chapter 23 Water Tank #2
“Here in America, you have the expression ‘voice of an angel,’” Alice says. “In Württemberg, we say, ‘Stimme einer Schleiereule,’ which means ‘voice of a barn owl.’ Much more highly prized. Well done, Miss Ritter, Stimme einer Schleiereule, indeed.”
“Thank you, cousin,” Cora says sweetly, sitting beside Mrs. Ogden once more. “Where are the dogs? Oh, they’ve fled, haven’t
they.”
Ogden now watches Cora with a mix of amusement and disgust. Objective achieved.
“Returning to our earlier discussion,” Ward begins.
“Yes.” Ogden pivots back to Alice with renewed enthusiasm. “The mines. My dear friend . . . I hope I may be informal in calling
you by your own given names, Marie . . . Charlotte . . . Gabriella . . .”
He draws each name out like a caress. Ridiculous man.
Alice slowly lifts her eyes to peer at him through her thick lashes. “My intimates call me Marietta. And so may you.”
With a swift glance to check that his wife is occupied—she is, as the dogs have deemed the room safe to return to—Ogden takes
Alice’s hand and presses a kiss to it, murmuring against it, “Darling Marietta.”
“As to the mines,” Ward cuts in, thankfully breaking the moment in two. “I think it’s fair to say there is nobody on our fair shores Her Grace
would rather be financially entangled with than you, Mr. Ogden. Not even yours truly, though goodness knows I’ve tried.”
“We may yet come to an arrangement.” Alice laughs dotingly. She widens her eyes as she turns to Mr. Ogden. “And if my brother,
the grand prince, does see the value as I’ve expressed it of forming stronger alliances abroad, opening up our company to
a very select group of American investors, you would be my very first and most essential . . . partner.”
A look of almost sensual rapture overtakes Mr. Ogden’s marble statue of a face.
Before he can act on it further, Alice stands.
“Oh, Cora, you’re looking very fatigued since your performance.
Perhaps you are growing ill. Come, let us take our leave.
” She hurries across the room to Mrs. Ogden, kissing her fervently once on each cheek.
“You have honored us beyond words with this invitation. It was a night we will not soon forget.”
“Nor will I,” Mrs. Ogden says, her eyes bugging a little as they dart to Cora, no doubt in reminiscence of that “stirring”
performance.
Their hostess sees them to the door, her fingers picking idly at the seam on Alice’s sleeve.
She stops Alice as the others take their leave. “I wanted to apologize again for my earlier accusations.”
“Heavens.” Alice laughs. “There is no need, dear Priscilla. For we are friends now, are we not?”
“We are, but you see . . .” Mrs. Ogden glances behind her, as if wary of her husband’s hearing. “There was another friend,
years ago. I’d thought she was a lady of good virtue like the rest of us, but she turned out to be no better than the basest
of whores. The temptations she dangled before my husband.” Her lips press together in a white line. “Well, it was a miracle
he never succumbed. And in the end, she got what was coming to her. I’ll spare you the gory details, Your Grace, and I’m afraid
they are rather gory.”
She titters.
A chill runs up Alice’s spine at the sound.
“What happened to her?” Alice asks, as if amused.
“She was run out of town with her disgusting spawn, penniless, friendless,” Mrs. Ogden says with thick satisfaction. “We never
heard from her again, good riddance. God’s justice, I say. Although why the Lord would grant a strumpet like her children
and leave me barren, I’ll never know.”
“Well,” Alice cannot resist getting in, squeezing Mrs. Ogden’s gloved hand, “at least you have your dogs.”
And in the moment of the loathsome woman’s momentary shock, Alice smiles and takes her leave.
Out on the sidewalk of Fifty-First, Alice seizes a moment to gather herself, breathing in the fresh night air, while Ward
holds the door for Cora to step inside his carriage.
Another lure set and bitten. But she knows what restraint, what absolute control it will take to reel them all in at last.
Alice wanted to slap that woman, right then and there, for saying such vile things about her mother. But she didn’t. She wanted
to flee from Ogden’s touch. And yet she didn’t; she held firm and even managed to reel his attentions safely away from Cora
and back to her.
That yodeling! Alice can’t help it. She breaks into a smile at the memory. She wishes Dagmar and Béatrice had been there to
hear it. Once the girl gets over her obvious resentment of the trick Alice played and understands the reasoning behind it,
she might even be convinced to give an encore performance back at home.
“McAllister!” Ogden’s baritone voice rises from the marble stairway behind her. “You go on with Miss Ritter. Her Grace and
I will follow.”
Ward looks to Alice in momentary perturbation as Ogden approaches from behind her, clasping one of her hands in his and whispering,
“You are among trusted friends. You need not worry for your reputation. No one will breathe a word.”
“Cousin?” Cora calls tightly from the carriage, her face peeking out from the window. But before she can voice any argument
to this plan, Ward taps his hat with his cane, enters the carriage, and shuts the door behind him.
“I saw you lingering,” Ogden says, spinning Alice around to face him as her ride home rolls away without her. “Unwilling to let the night end.”
“I was taking the air,” Alice says, careful not to directly contradict him. “Needed to catch my breath.”
“As do I, my dearest Marietta, as do I.”
“I am rather fatigued.”
“Fear not, I’ve sent for my brougham.” He lifts a hand as the two-seat, single-horse carriage is brought out from the stables.
Then he slides his hand around Alice’s waist and whispers, “Fewer windows.”
Apprehension begins to creep up Alice’s spine, growing ever-lengthening tendrils. This is a wrinkle she cannot think how to
iron. Not this quickly, not while he opens the door for her and offers her a hand to step inside.
It is a short drive back to her home on Thirty-Eighth Street, she reminds herself. Surely he can’t think to make a move that
quickly.
In fact, he can. And does.
The wheels of the carriage have barely begun moving before he falls to his knees in front of her. “I’ve longed for this moment
since the first time I saw you. That Night of Illusions, the lamplight shining on your golden hair, the sadness in your eyes
that I longed to erase with my touch—”
“Mr. Ogden, we c-cannot,” Alice sputters. “You are a married man.”
“And you unmarried at twenty-eight, the crime of the century—”
She startles at the expression, then at the feel of his hands, steadily hunting for her legs beneath her skirts.
“You are royalty, my love, living independently, like no other woman in the world,” Ogden practically moans. “You set your own rules, your own mores, and inside here, we are merely two humans desperate with want. Why should we not have what we desire?”
Those last set of lines sound practiced. Decades practiced. Alice wonders whether he tried them on her own mother.
She slides down the bench, almost, but not quite out of reach. A light sparks in his eyes like a flint match. A predator enjoying
the chase. But ready for the kill.
He pounces. Not genteel, not seductive, nothing now but brutal impatience.
Before she can block him with her arms, his hands have found her underskirts and lifted them high, his mouth shoved hot against
her neck as he growls, “You want this as much as I do.”
“Mr. Ogden,” she protests, terror a vise around her neck. “Brett!”
His left hand flies from her skirts to cover her mouth as he scrabbles with the other to shove her drawers aside. Alice feels
the fabric begin to rip.
And something within her shifts. Her fear rises into white-hot rage. And then . . . nothing. Emptiness.
She’s like a magician in a water tank, the trick gone wrong, the lock holding fast, only one option left for escape.
She kisses the hand that’s pinning closed her mouth. He glances up at her in delighted shock, then dives in again, kissing
her neck, suckling her ear, all the while desperately positioning himself between her bunched skirts.
Alice feels nothing at all except her unpinned hand as it reaches smoothly into her inner jacket pocket, its fingers wrapping around the grip of her derringer pistol. She closes her eyes, her lips curling into a snarl, and cocks back the hammer.
The carriage stops with a jolt that sends Ogden flying off her, glassy-eyed and wild.
Breath held, Alice keeps her hand and weapon concealed, hearing the sound of approaching footsteps.
A rap rattles the door before it opens.
Alice manages to shove her skirts down, but the look on her face—the bald rage on Ogden’s—must say it all. McAllister’s face
goes sheet white for a stunned moment. Then he recovers himself.
“I’m afraid my carriage has thrown a wheel. Lucky you were following after. Bit of a squeeze, but might Miss Ritter ride with
you while I see to repairs?”
Ogden blinks hard, his jaw working angrily. “There’s hardly room. I—”
Cora runs over, breathless, her dinner party dress flouncing. “What a misadventure!”
To Ogden, no doubt, Cora appears perfectly oblivious, but Alice can see through the girl’s acting by now, the tightness with
which she clutches her skirts.
“As I say, rather too much of a squeeze for me.” Ogden abruptly rises to exit the carriage. He slides past Cora, then offers
her a hand inside. “I’ll bid you both good night. A walk in the cold air will do me good.”
Alice stares at him, still incapable of speech, her teeth clamped tight to keep them from chattering.
Before he shuts the door, he seizes at her hand and leans into whisper, “We shall have another chance. Soon.”
She’s unsure whether in his mind it’s the promise of a sworn lover or the threat of someone who knows himself to be a monster.
The door shuts and then the carriage starts away again with a crunch and rumble.
Cora’s facade crumples into concern. “We suspected this wasn’t on the up-and-up. Ward ordered his carriage to be stopped.
Please tell me we weren’t too late. What hap—”
“I nearly killed him.” Alice’s voice feels muffled to her own ears. Very distant. She draws out the gun. “I was going to shoot
him in the head. Just like this.” She lifts the weapon, demonstrating. “It would have ended it all, right here and now. All
our plans, everything I’ve worked so hard for.”
“You were . . . you were defending yourself.” Cora inches away from the gun barrel. “You—”
“I wanted to,” Alice says, fixing her eyes intently on Cora’s. “I wanted to see him bleed, watch as life left him. I wanted so badly
to murder the man. I think I always have.”
The carriage stops. Alice and Cora sit in sickly silence, listening to the movements of the driver as he hops from his seat
and opens the door for them.
Alice erupts from the carriage and starts quickly up the stairs. The moment the house door closes safely behind them, she
begins to shake.
“Alice? Alice!” Cora jogs to catch her, resting a tentative hand on her shoulder. “Wait, please! Talk to me. What happened
to you?”
Alice flinches away. “I’ll not speak of it.”
“I don’t mean tonight,” Cora persists, a desperate hitch to her tone as she continues down the corridor. “I mean earlier,
before, before . . . all of this.”
Alice turns to face the girl, eyes aflame. “I will not speak of it! Least of all to you!”
Cora flinches in turn. It’s as Alice intended, but she still feels the insult as if she’s launched it at herself.
She runs to her room and locks the door for good measure, protecting herself against any kind of intrusion against her person.
Her mind, her body—what’s the difference?
Outside the door, she hears Cora’s rustling skirts. Pacing footsteps. And finally, silence.
Alice places the derringer on the floor between her bed and the door and stares at it, unmoving.
She begins to cry but forces herself to be quiet. She can hear that Cora has returned and is now speaking in a low voice to
Béatrice outside. She waits, knowing the gentle knock will come, and when it does, it hurts more than anything else she’s
experienced tonight.
“Alice?” Béa’s sweet voice seeps through the door. “Are you all right?”
She doesn’t answer. Half of her wishes Béa would knock again, perhaps try a bit harder, but she doesn’t. Alice can feel her
standing there, however, keeping silent vigil, as Alice balls up in her undergarments, not bothering to change further, and
falls into a shaky dreamless sleep.
She rises early. Before the others. She is dressed, ready. She can rely on Dagmar not to say a word beyond, “Coffee?” which
feels to her the most beautiful word in the world at the moment.
She is seated upright and alert by the time Cora rouses herself enough to poke her head into the study. Alice doesn’t look up from the letter she’s penning.
“Good morning,” Cora ventures.
Alice lets her squirm for a minute before acknowledging her. She’s not even sure why. “Can I help you with something?”
Cora’s smile drops off completely. “No. Just letting you know I’m stepping out for a bit.”
“Bring Béa with you,” Alice blurts, her foolish heart pumping wildly all of a sudden.
Cora shakes her head. “She’s at the dressmaker’s. Picking up—”
“Dagmar then.”
Cora’s face softens with understanding. “Alice, you don’t need to worry for my safety—”
“For appearance’s sake,” Alice snaps. “Can’t have rumors spreading about Miss Ritter’s lack of propriety. Not now, when we
are so very close.”
Cora nods, the image of practiced possession, despite the new shine to her eyes. “I understand. You can rely on me. Entirely,
Alice.”
She turns away and shuts the door quietly behind her before Alice can gather her defenses once again.
Not now, Alice repeats to herself, spreading her fingers wide to keep them from shaking as she returns to her letter. Not now, Alice. So very close.