Chapter 31 All In
All In
The morning sun winks beyond the pastures, the hardened soil track that leads to the school cutting like a muted pink ribbon
through a swath of golden silk. From her vantage at the window, Cora can just spot where the wheat fields crest into rolling
green pastures in the distance, and just beyond, the sparkling, serpentine creek where she learned to swim, fish, and scheme.
This very image, serving as her motivation and beacon for years—although now, Long Creek Farm is far more than a birthright
or a conquest. It’s just home.
She fixes her hair, pressing her school mistress dress just so as she admires herself in the mirror. Gone are the days of
rented ball gowns, costumes, tailor-made ensembles for private dinners and affairs. Today’s dress suits her far better.
She takes the stairs down to the open first floor, where she’s surprised to find Cal still sitting, hunched over his notebook.
She raises a quizzical eyebrow at her husband.
He drops his pen, leaning back with a tired sigh.
Cora clasps her hands behind her back, dancing over to him. “I believe I left you in this very same position last night.”
“I’m on a roll.” Despite his heavy-lidded eyes, Cal rallies a smirk, rubbing his hands together like a schoolboy. “I’ve crossed
the midpoint of the novel and can’t seem to stop. Words are just pouring out of these puppies.”
He waggles his fingers like a two-bit magician.
She laughs, closing the remaining space between them, delighting as Cal puts his arms around her.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were having an affair with this story.”
“Funny you should mention. I just introduced the heroine, a strawberry-blonde, beguiling, mischievous creature that I can’t
stop writing about. Or thinking about. Even when she’s right upstairs.”
“Are you ever going to tell me what the devil this book is about?” Cora asks, hands on her hips in mock outrage.
“I’d have thought you’d have guessed it,” Cal says, leaning back, boasting in his very serious literary voice. “A story uniquely
of our time. A tale of two brilliant women beating the cheats at their own game, and me, but a humble narrator bearing witness
to the spectacle.”
Cora arches an eyebrow. “Sounds familiar.”
He winks. “Don’t worry. It’s a hugely fictionalized account. No one could possibly trace it back, with all the details I’ve
altered. Trust me.”
“I trust you entirely,” she says, and means it.
He kisses her then, his scent a delicious and decidedly odd mix of coffee and pencil shavings, and whispers, “I’ll make it
up to you tonight. I promise you’ll have me in time for dinner.”
“And you can have me for deezzzert,” she says, with perfect flirtatious Württembergian inflection. She rustles his hair as she goes. “Make one of the ladies a secret pickpocket and I’m yours forever.”
She takes the path toward the school, passing the second of the three new farmhouses they had built on the lot after buying
the farm back from Ross only a month later, two fraudulent
brokerage firms went under, sending the entire economy slipping under the waves in their wake.
The so-called Panic of 1884 was welcome news to Alice, who saw the ensuing financial chaos as not only further assurance of their scot-free getaway but an unbelievably close shave.
Upon reading the newspaper, Alice granted Cora a fervent hug, in thanks for, as she put it, “Setting us all on the right timeline. If we’d stuck with my original plan, we might have been sunk!
” The banking scandal also managed to move the glare of opprobrium away from Ward McAllister, Mrs. Astor reported, allowing him to step back into his timeworn role as Manhattan’s social arbiter with renewed, if chastened, enthusiasm.
Mrs. Astor’s latest register was particularly interesting to Cora, as it included news of the recent nuptials and decidedly
modest wedding between spoiled Mimi Vandemeer and seventy-eight-year-old lifelong bachelor and leather manufacturer Matthias
Turner (Cora couldn’t suppress a triumphant guffaw at reading that, having recalled Mimi’s very lofty suitor standards—and
fellow debutante sabotage—at last year’s Patriarch’s Ball).
The post also included in welcome detail the latest goings of Mr. and Mrs. Harold Peyton Jr., the new couple last reported
to be rounding out their delightful, yearlong honeymoon somewhere along the southern coast of France, at least if Mrs. Ames’s
crowing is to be believed. As society’s grand dame, Pearl Ames has grown wincingly desperate in her boasting around town,
ever since circumstances have forced her to rely on an allowance provided by her generous daughter—who came into a surprise
inheritance from a mysterious godmother in Chicago soon after Cora and Alice skipped town, fancy that! Apparently, when the
young couple returns, Harry will be formally enrolling in medical school—although a facility will be providing care for his father now, one better equipped for the old man’s very particular needs and extremely
limited budget.
Cora steps onto the front stoop now with a shiver. The school year is flying by, the brick building already decorated with
pumpkins, a class-made scarecrow, papier-maché ghosts hanging from the apple trees.
Upon entering, Cora is immediately warmed by the sound of chatting and giggles—the halls full of eager students, despite class not starting for more than twenty minutes. She spies Alice in her front office, brow stitched, hovered over a new ledger.
“Care to dance?” Alice asks her flatly.
Cora blinks. “I believe we’re both spoken for.”
“With the girls.” Alice sighs, leaning back in her chair. “Frivolous as it may be, they keep asking for instruction, so I
was thinking about a new studio. Ballroom dancing, ballet. Even—dare I say—Irish jig?”
“I think it a fine idea.” Cora smiles. “Count me in.”
Alice beams in return—the expression no longer a rarity. In fact, her new headmistress position has unlocked something within
Alice, Cora has noted, like a key to a secret heart chamber. She’s a lot kinder and gentler with these little ladies than
she ever was with Cora.
Cora tries not to take that personally.
She climbs the stairs to her second-floor classroom, where some of the students are already sketching on their easels, gossiping
and laughing in the corners, their typical blouses and skirts exchanged today for costumes, given the All Hallows’ Eve festivities.
For today, they’re not the daughters of shopkeepers, farmers, and factory workers, but fancy princesses, goblins, ghouls,
whoever they want to be.
“Mrs. Archer!” One of her favorite students practically leaps out of her seat, auburn pigtails flying wild. “Mrs. Archer,
what are you supposed to be today?”
“The grandest costume of all,” Cora says, bowing dramatically. “Myself!”
Truth be told, she forgot this morning . . . but no matter, Alice has thought of everything, per usual. She spies a black
witch hat waiting on her desk and puts it on.
“By which I mean . . . the most terrifying witch in all the land!”
All the girls giggle and shriek, feigning fright. Cora begins stomping down the aisle between desks, sending her wards into
laughing fits. A different sort of costume ball, she supposes, the most rewarding one she can imagine.
And, at last, a home—her home—full of people she would follow anywhere.
After lunch, as the girls of the Archer School spill giddily outside, Alice takes a little stroll along the dusty cart path,
gazing out upon that horizon—all natural, just as Cora had described it. She was right about the farm. It is restorative.
The sun glitters on the creek that stretches through the farmland, and the handful of low-maintenance animals they keep on
hand for eggs and milk punctuate the birdsong with charming calls of their own.
In the far distance, Alice can hear the long insistent whistle of a train passing by, a reminder that beyond this honest oasis
they’ve carved out for themselves, the great wheel of the nation keeps spinning, the railroads expanding, the wide lands east
and west filling up with dreamers and schemers, all driven forward by “manifest destiny,” to no real end but bigger and greater
and more.
Alice leans against a fence post and takes her braid down from its pinned bun for a moment, letting it hang loose while the
students play. She feels the breeze sweeping by to say hello, the sun enlivening fresh freckles on her skin.
It’s life, this feeling, she realizes. One hundred percent genuine, actual real life.
She’s still wily enough to know that this land, however beautiful, is far from immune to deception. Look at Cora’s father,
after all, defrauded by those bankers—Ross & Calhoun—who, at the end of the day, were paid off for this land and went away
perfectly satisfied with the outcome of their swindle. Alice read in the paper just this morning of a local mayoral candidate
who campaigns by standing on a wooden crate, promising free ponies and electric lights for every house in town. He’s projected
to win, of course. She saw another story about a preacher touring the area with his little daughter, whom he swears has been
blessed with the power of healing. Folks are lining up to donate any amount just so she’ll lay hands on them.
But for the first time since she was a child in pretty dresses, Alice Archer feels some relenting of her cynicism, a small
measure of trust in the future. It doesn’t seem entirely impossible that truth and fairness will win out over glitter and grift in the end. Maybe not in her own lifetime, no. But
she has the next generation to consider.
She looks at them now, these twenty girls, running and chasing and laughing in the sunlight, freer than she ever got to be.
But it’s up to her and Cora to make sure they’re no less savvy for it.
Alice pins her hair briskly back into its bun, brushes the prairie dust from her cotton skirts, and heads homeward again.
Back to work.