Chapter 24 Chasing Headlines
Chasing Headlines
Cora shifts awkwardly as Dagmar lets out a loud, late morning yawn, stretching her thick legs across the hansom cab.
“Comfortable?” Cora asks.
Dagmar, always a lady of loquacity, simply shrugs.
Cora gathers her jade velvet skirts, edging closer to the window, covering her mounting, soul-consuming vexation with a practiced
smile. To say something is going on with Alice would be a colossal understatement, and even still, Alice expects Cora to merely
nod and smile demurely and obsequiously obey her every command.
Well, that ship has long sailed away. Cora has grown to deeply care about the woman—as a mentor, as a friend—and moreover,
she suspects the fondness might even be mutual. If Alice will not let her in, she simply needs to find another door, another
window. She will get access, insight, today, unforeseen complications be damned—all it will take is a very slight detour to shed her culinary
keeper.
The carriage careens around Washington Square Park, bustling now with promenading ladies, a rainbow of fashionable dresses and parasols, businessmen striding purposefully across the gravel walks ribboned through the green oasis.
The palette turns rather sharply into monochrome as they venture into the Lower East Side, the soot-stained tenements and tight alleys grayed by shadows and overcast gloom, as if even the sky is leached of joy south of First Street.
As they pull around a narrow corner and to their supposed destination, Cora grows reminiscently queasy but attempts to buck
up. I’m not going in, after all. Don’t even have to smell the ale.
Below the saloon’s Beer signage, in the folds of the alley, she spies a burly, mustached man smoking a cigarette.
Ah, that’s right. Cora places his face now. Dagmar’s sweetheart, who was tending bar the last time they were here, the reason Cora was crawsick
for the entire next day.
Dagmar’s face alights at the very sight of him. “Konrad,” she murmurs, voice now soft as cotton down. “Come on, zen,” she
tells Cora. “We go.”
But before the cook can kick open the carriage door, Cora grabs her wrist.
“Oh, Dagmar, I am a goof.” She winces. “I only just remembered I’ve got an errand first.”
As evidence, she holds up the bracelet she tinkered with for this very occasion, a gold wristlet with three counterfeit emeralds
and a now-broken clasp. “I don’t want to delay you from your, um, fellow, so go on without me. I’ll just be a quick trip to the jeweler and back.”
Dagmar glances hungrily at Konrad and then again at Cora, narrowing her beady eyes. “You zaid you needed to drown sorrows
wis a morning maroon—”
“I did. Do! But you know Alice. She’ll shoot me with that pocket pistol of hers if I don’t get this fixed before Mrs. Witt’s ball.
” The Witt gala has been crassly billed as a “poverty ball,” hardly the place for jewelry, but Dagmar doesn’t need to know that detail.
“I won’t be but an hour, and then we can get to the real matter at hand. ”
Dagmar studies her, finally offering a grunt. “Not a word of zis to Alice.”
“Naturally.”
“Soot yourself.” Dagmar saunters out of the cab, whistling.
In ten minutes’ time, Cora has fixed the bracelet herself, slipped it back on, and arrived at the corner of Park Row and Spruce
known as “Printing House Square,” home to the many various presses that uncover and distribute—and these days, even apparently
fabricate—New York’s front-page news. Tall, looming facades border the sprawling gravel forum, pockmarked in hidden corners
with dingy clumps of lingering, soiled snow. The buildings, all more than ten stories tall, are still dwarfed by the engineering
marvel of the Brooklyn Bridge shining in the distance, a true feat of architecture, a sprawl of monumental towers and great
sweeping wires. Cora heard Alice and Béa speaking of the design only a few nights past, sharing rumors that a woman oversaw the design, her credit stolen by the prominent men around her.
Cora allows this rumor to rouse and embolden her now. If those stories are true, surely she is capable of merely crossing
this square, one boot in front of the other, and confronting the less-than-prominent man who owes her some honest answers.
She strides into the marble foyer of the lobby of The Herald building, greeting a bellman who directs her to take an elevator, of all things, to the eighth floor. Within a spacious freight
platform lined with wood paneling, its uniformed attendant stands ready at the pulley with a vacant smile.
“Eighth floor, sir,” Cora says, her voice wavering. “Please.”
They lurch upward, and Cora has to stifle an alarmed cry—but the ride itself is nothing compared to the frenetic madness that’s
revealed when the elevator stops and the door clanks open.
Cora looks around, aghast. Is this a regular day for Cal Archer? Dozens, if not hundreds, of frantic-looking young men donning
sweat-stained shirts and waving notepads like little white flags run back and forth through a labyrinth of desks. Bells ringing—telephones?—warring
conversations, desperate shouts about Wall Street and President Arthur overtake her in a cacophonous symphony, gray-haired
gentlemen opening and slamming wooden doors along the open floor’s perimeter as added percussion.
Maybe this was a mistake, she wonders hastily. Chasing Cal down for her own scoop. What was she thinking?
Abashed, she turns to leave.
“Miss Ritter?”
She turns to find Cal Archer standing in the center of two long rows of desks, his face hitched in confusion as his eyes meet
hers.
She hasn’t seen him since he waltzed into Alice’s living room, demanding her delivery from a loveless marriage with a side
of spice cookies. Or pfeffernusse, rather (sorry, Dagmar). Was his intervention motivated solely by pity? she wonders now. And yet she remembers, exquisitely,
the way he looked at her that night in the Bowery (one of the very few things she actually remembers).
Does he think of her as often as she thinks of him?
“Hello,” she says, suddenly feeling foolish.
Cal steps closer with a strangled laugh. “What are you doing here?”
Cora lifts her chin, careful to inflect, in a perfect Württembergian lilt, “I have some questions of my own, Mr. Archer. Some
concerns. And I hope you might enlighten me.”
He glances around at the frenzied scene, almost sheepish. “All right. But how ?bout somewhere else.”
After he grabs his coat and hat, they depart, firmly in the midst of the lunchtime rush. The freight ride downward is packed
with reporters, thick with bodies pressed panel to panel.
Cora tucks herself into the platform’s far corner, Cal attempting to give her berth. As soon as the doors close, though, the
freight lurches. She reaches out to prevent herself from falling, hands landing on Cal’s impressively firm chest.
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.
“The full story, 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,