Chapter 25 The Scorpion and the Frog
The Scorpion and the Frog
“I do declare.” Ward removes his hat as if in church, strolling about the soon-to-be Württembergian embassy, taking in the
reception room’s curtains, sofas, tables, and other furnishings—all included, thankfully, in the rental fee. “It is all falling
into place.”
“Béatrice is working on finding a flag,” Alice says. Her footsteps echo across the hardwood floor as she walks toward the
“consulate’s” office and motions upward. “I thought to hang it here. And we’ll have to find a way to install a double-sided
wall safe. Directly beside the door of the ambassador’s office.”
“Perfection!” Ward cries, striding over to rap the edge of the marble fireplace. “Perhaps the mantelpiece for the market ticker,
as the embassy has only brought it in for this rare occasion. I suppose you’ve got someone in mind to read it off to the assemblage?”
“Our ambassador himself,” Alice answers.
“Quite right,” Ward says with a smirk. “I’ll look forward to meeting the esteemed gentleman. I thought I’d take on the task
of marking down bids, unless you have any objections. One thing my unfortunate state of relative penury has afforded me is
a gift for numbers.”
“I’d be very glad for you to do that,” Alice says. “I’ve a fair head for numbers myself, but I don’t suppose anyone will trust the accounting of a woman on the day.”
“I, for one, would trust nobody so much as I trust you, my dear,” Ward says.
Alice looks away to hide her smile. After all the annoyances and setbacks she’s faced of late, she must admit to a certain
growing warmth in her chest tonight. Hope, exhilaration—but more than that, pride. No small feat, all this, and rather invigorating
to stand here, on the invented ambassadorial grounds of a nation she has never set foot in.
And to have Ward McAllister by her side to witness it feels appropriate. Cora, Dagmar, Béa: They may live in her home, but
the stakes are different for someone like Ward, who has no criminal record, no wolves snapping at his heels. He jumped aboard
this little endeavor purely because he believed in the brilliance of it. And he’s proven at every turn a stalwart and upstanding
partner.
She’s forming the right sort of words to express those thoughts without undue sentimentality when Ward turns to face her again.
And Alice sees a glint in his eye that over the past year has become a familiar warning signal.
Though never before has it been pointed in her direction.
“Well, my dear duchess,” Ward says. His grin widens like the Cheshire cat’s. “Seems as good a time as any to revisit our arrangement.”
Alice remains cool, her own porcelain smile fixed on her face. “In what sense?”
Instead of answering directly, Ward begins to prowl the edge of the room, trailing his pointer finger around the top of the
wainscoting as if marking it all as his own.
“Yes, it is indeed all in place,” he says.
“Might not have been if I hadn’t warned little Cora not to broadcast her nefarious intentions to the entire Metropolitan Opera House.
” He glances smugly at Alice. “And if I hadn’t faked a faltering wheel on my carriage to prevent a catastrophic escalation of your flirtations with Brett Ogden, he might have lost his interest then and there once he’d gotten what he wanted. ”
Alice feels a chill from the calculation in his words. No concern for her welfare, no. Only for the plan.
“No, all of that was fixed,” he croons. “But when I look ahead, puttin’ myself in your shoes, as it were, I can identify a
weak spot. Only the one, really, which makes it all the more remarkable.”
“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? Why not include 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’m not 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, not entirely, 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 of three choices, 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.”
“I’ll stay a bit longer,” Alice says, turning away. “A few more things to see to.”
“At eleven o’clock at night?”
Alice doesn’t answer.
Behind her, Ward sniffs.
“Very well, then, Your Grace, I shall see you at our next social occasion.” He slips from the door and escapes onto the darkened
street.
And Alice’s knees grow too weak to hold her upright.
She sits on the reception room floor for a long while before finally picking herself up and seeing herself out, locking the
door behind her. Her door. Her embassy.
The thought is a cold comfort, the thrill of achievement all but eviscerated now.
She’s glad, at least, that she never entered her brother’s name into her confidence with Ward McAllister. Still, the scoundrel
knows far too much. She cannot risk him learning all of it.
A church bell rings as she passes the southern border of Central Park. Eleven o’clock, as Ward said. If there is ever a time when it would be acceptable for a lady of high station to walk alone on a city sidewalk, it certainly isn’t now.
That’s why I have this gun, she recalls, patting her pocket again in reassurance. In her early days in the city, she’d lived in places where women frequently
walked alone and were subject to potential muggings, harassment, or worse. The gun was an investment against those possibilities,
one she thankfully never had to use. Funny how it’s here among the wealthiest that she’s been forced to draw it.
But not to fire it.
She breathes slowly, walking against the blustery wind, and reminds herself that she is a person of free will, not to be battered
about by the fates. No, not her. She is in control.
As she reaches the corner of Third Avenue and Forty-First Street, at this late hour entirely devoid of pedestrians, carts,
and carriages, there comes a sound above her that sends the hairs rising on the back of her neck.
A crackling.
She looks up with a wild gasp. An electrical wire, the kind they use for the trolleys, has broken loose. One end is sparking
madly, all of it shaking like a trapped serpent. Another barreling wind cuts through the narrow street, strong as a train
itself.
Impulse reaches into Alice’s gut and propels her backward, sprinting for the other side of the block. She turns in time to
see the live wire touch down right where she was standing, sending a hiss of angry steam rising from the pavement.
Heart hammering, she doubles back to Lexington, coming at her house from a different angle. She’s heard of the wires coming
loose—they’re assembled in such haphazard fashion, it’s a wonder they stay up at all—but never has she come so close to being
struck by one.
The lights are lit in her little apartment on Thirty-Eighth Street.
Before she crosses to come inside, she watches the silhouettes in the window.
Three women, all laughing. Singing issues from the windows—Cora’s yodeling folk song.
She’s performing it for them at last. Dagmar is slapping her knee, doubled over with laughter.
Béa’s hands are pressed to her lovely face as if to stopper the giggles.
And Cora is dancing between them with pure, joyful liveliness.
I could have died tonight, Alice thinks. Forget Ward. Forget the embassy. No matter who I was or what I was doing, it all could have ended right there on Third Avenue,
just the way it does for so many others. Abruptly. With no resolution, no justice, no revenge.
I keep waiting to live. Why not do it now?
Feel something other than this endless . . . anger?
As she slips inside the house, she’s careful to be quiet, to not interrupt their merriment.
Rather than joining in, she goes to her room and closes the door, shutting out good cheer, affection, all sentiment apart
from that which is immediately useful.
Only ten days remain now.
This plan is a train, she reminds herself. And anger is its fuel.