Friday, November 9, 1883
TENSIONS ESCALATE IN GERMANIC KINGDOM OF WÜRTTEMBERG FOLLOWING RATIFICATION OF “TRIPLE ALLIANCE”
Calvin Archer, New York Office
The historic defensive “Triple Alliance” treaty between the German Empire, Italy, and Austria-Hungary, when initially proposed last year, was met with widespread resistance in the Kingdom of Württemberg, a resource-rich Germanic nation that has suffered both politically and economically since Reich unification. Opponents decried the treaty as overreaching and particularly unfair to Württemberg, and contended that ratification would surely sound the death knell for the southern state’s sovereignty.
King Charles I’s capitulation to the empire’s pressures to ratify subsequently spurred a growing nationalist movement within Württemberg’s borders, with key nobility rumored to be setting the stage for a resistance . . .
Coraline O’Malley—known as “Cora Mack” to her current troupe and company—stands at the ready as assistant stagehand, watching from behind the scenes as her aging boss, Prospero the Great, performs feat after feat of manufactured wonder for tonight’s enraptured audience. A parade of ghosts slinking through his labyrinth of onstage mirrors. A kaleidoscope of butterflies spiraling out from the floor and over the crowd. A tree growing in rapid time from a plot of dirt, a sprout unfurling and blooming into an orange plant taller than Prospero himself in a matter of minutes.
But the most confounding magic of the night, at least in Cora’s opinion, lies offstage: the wealthiest, most afternoonified audience she has ever encountered, currently seated in Mrs. Iris Witt’s two-hundred-guest-capacity private auditorium housed inside her palatial Madison Avenue home.
Incredibly, Prospero’s show is only one of the evening’s many diversions, a themed “Night of Illusions,” which seems intended to herald the arrival of November and another New York social season. The Witts’ foyer has been transformed into a circus, complete with fire-eaters. Their ballroom, a ribboned carousel of real live zebras and giraffes. Partygoers decked in costumed gowns riddled with brilliants, skirts swathed in lace, fascinators of gems and exotic feathers. Mrs. Witt’s own peacock headpiece is so enormous that it blocks the views of the ill-fated dozens seated behind her.
Cora swallows. The sheer overwhelming excess, the unfairness of so much concentrated wealth in one room in one corner of one city—
Just breathe, she tells herself. Breathe and reset the stage. Jealousy won’t get her back Long Creek Farm, after all—but picking this audience’s gilded pockets postshow certainly might.
“Are you sure you can handle her?” Maeve, the show’s lead stagehand, sidles breathlessly beside Cora. A hefty magnet—usually Cora’s responsibility during performances—is balanced precariously across Maeve’s back, further rounding the old woman’s stooped shoulders. “Dinah can be a handful, ye know, so if you’re having second thoughts—”
“Maeve, I’ll never manage a raise if I can’t master all the tricks,” Cora says.
Maeve’s crinkled lips pull into a worried frown. “Told ya, love, Prospero don’t give raises.”
“And I told you, I’m gonna be the exception.” Cora sighs, hiding her frustration with an assuring smile. “I can handle her, honest. You can trust me.” Although, come to think of it, Dinah should certainly be out of the dressing rooms by now.
“All right, love. Break a leg.” Maeve flashes Cora a small smile before glancing at the stage. “That’s my cue.” Readjusting the large magnet across her shoulders like a donkey pole, Maeve hurries down the backstage stairs and into the trap room.
Onstage, Prospero welcomes his latest volunteer. “Mr. Vanderbilt, would you consider yourself a man of great strength?”
The volunteer flexes his muscles, and the crowd laughs.
Prospero lifts a small box, opening the container for the audience to see. “You all bear witness, evidence that this box is empty.”
Cora peers around the backstage area, her concern beginning to mount. Dinah is a handful indeed. She has been Prospero’s assistant since the Grant administration and fashions herself a true star—dismissive of Cora and Maeve, generally abrasive, and habitually late. Cora considers dragging her out of the dressing rooms when a high-pitched voice sounds behind her.
“Well, don’t just stand there!” Dinah spins around in her glittering stage dress, giving Cora access to the unbuttoned back. “Hitch me up!”
Cora bites back choice words and jumps to, affixing the wooden plank to Dinah’s corset, just like Maeve showed her during dress rehearsal. If she can somehow prove to Prospero that she deserves to make as much as
Maeve—maybe even work onstage alongside him, split the stage tricks with Dinah—well, she’ll be that much closer to getting back her home.
Onstage, meanwhile, Prospero has placed the empty box on a small table before him. “Mr. Vanderbilt, please, if you might lift the box . . . with your unparalleled vigor.”
The volunteer pulls on the trick box’s handle. It doesn’t budge, thanks to Maeve now standing sentinel with the magnet in the trap room below the stage. Mr. Vanderbilt mutters to himself, pulling, yanking, cursing, much to the crowd’s delight.
“That box must be made of steel!” he crows, returning to his seat. “I couldn’t lift it an inch!”
Onstage, Prospero smiles and bows. “And now, for my final demonstration!”
“Are you finished yet?” Dinah hisses. “Tonight needs to go perfect for this smart set! Why are you here anyway? Where on earth is Maeve?”
“She’s got the magnet downstairs,” Cora huffs, working fast. “Which leaves you to me. Not to worry, you’re in good hands, Maeve trusts me—”
“Her first mistake,” Dinah scoffs. “This is taking twice as long as it should—”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Prospero cries, “please welcome back my lovely assistant, Miss Dinah!”
Hearing her cue, Dinah attempts to hurry onstage, but Cora yanks her back into the curtains. “I’m not finished!”
Prospero laughs uneasily while the crowd titters. “Come, my darling Dinah, now don’t be shy!”
“Just hold still.” Hands shaking, Cora finally hooks the mechanical crane’s thin metal rod, meant to lift Dinah into the air on Prospero’s command, onto the plank’s clasp. She fumbles to cover it with Dinah’s dress buttons.
“You trying to make me look bad?” Dinah shrills. “Think you’re gonna steal my spot?”
“Stop squirming—”
“I know your type, always plotting and scheming. Don’t think I don’t know about your own act, little thief. If I had my way, we’d have left you in Charleston.”
“You’re ready, go!”
Dinah disentangles herself from Cora, strutting onstage to more applause.
Prospero’s finale, his showstopping “levitating
woman,” brings down the house.
Cora watches the trick with detached, dread-filled certainty.
“Little thief.” Forget a raise. She might have just lost her job, and her own home, for good.
“Did you tell her?” Cora demands, cornering Maeve in their makeshift prop room after the show, Prospero and Dinah both having retreated to this evening’s dressing quarters, a series of ornate parlors right off the Witts’ private theater.
Maeve cocks her head. “Tell who what, love?”
“Dinah!” Cora blinks back tears. “My methods are flawless. There’s no possible way she could have caught on, unless you specifically ratted me out.”
“I . . . I had no choice!” Maeve’s sunken cheeks flush. “Dinah was going through your things one day and—”
“My things?”
“Found a stack of cash and didn’t understand how you came into so much money, given what you get paid is . . . well, you know.” Maeve clears her throat. “She accused you of far worse vices, Cora. I was only defendin’ your honor.”
“Hell’s bells, Maeve.” Cora flops onto a trick box. Just breathe. “She’s going to tell Prospero. She’s going to have me fired.”
“No, Cora, no.” Maeve hurries toward her. “There’s nothing to worry about. I told her I’d handle it, on my honor, set you straight.” Maeve takes Cora’s hands. “Dinah promised she wouldn’t tell the boss—not unless you do it again, anyway. I swear, everything’s going to be right as rain.”
Cora shakes her head. “Listen, Maeve, you really don’t understand . . .” How can Cora possibly explain that at three dollars a week, without her subsidized earnings, her unique style of sleight of hand—pickpocketing, purse-lifting, sneak thievery, all conducted discreetly on select patrons after the show—she might be Maeve’s age before she can take back Long Creek Farm? A lifelong dupe, just like her father. Forever a pawn in a smarter player’s game.
Maeve keeps staring at her, looking about to cry herself.
“All right.” Cora sighs. “Yes, fine. I’ll stop the filching, Maeve. Honest.”
A cacophony of impatient knocks sounds from the door before Prospero thrusts it open. The magician is now dressed in a clean, crisp white shirt, his face freshly painted, his haughty showman veneer still firmly affixed. “Our hostess desires some parlor tricks. Come. Out we go.”
Cora and Maeve follow their boss, Dinah, and the rest of their crew past the temporary dressing rooms. They soon reach the main artery of the stately home: a long marble hall awash with sculptures, decorative armor, and massive oil paintings, where black-clad waiters are busy bussing champagne and canapés through Mrs. Witt’s crowd of glamorous party guests, the warm light from her three giant tiered crystal chandeliers coating the entire scene with a dreamlike glitter.
“The smart set,” Dinah had called them. For once, Cora must agree. The “haves” of this country versus her current company of “have-nots.” By dint of what? she wonders. Inordinate family wealth hailing back to the Mayflower? Else gained through merciless business practices or duping easy marks—like those Ross & Calhoun bank lenders, preying on her father’s financial ignorance. What shiny American victors they are, with their fancy balls and private shows and homes large as city blocks.
Cora feels the whole world slipping from her fingers as she trails her troupe into the festive melee. What if she never rises above her current station, playing backstage lackey to a troupe of fools? What is she to do now if she can’t pickpocket on the road? Cora needs three thousand dollars more to approach the bank with a credible offer for Long Creek Farm, and that’s assuming no one else offers first. Absent thieving, that kind of money will take her twenty years to put together.
Twenty. Years.
“Pardon me, kind friends, please do excuse us.”
Cora watches as a bearded, stout gentleman with a cane expertly threads a tall blonde woman through the crowd. The lady on his arm is pretty, dressed to the nines, if a little bit somber in her choice of deep blue velvet. Middle, possibly late twenties, and appearing quite faint.
“Dear Duchess,” the man says,
“perhaps some air might do you good?”
The blonde woman shakes her head, as if to clear it. “Just a bit taxed from all the excitement, is all,” she says in a harsh, thick accent Cora can’t quite place.
Mrs. Witt slides between the pair, a superior tilt to her chin. “I cannot imagine the House of Württemberg throwing parties like this, hmm? Allow yourself some respite, Duchess. In my sitting room. Ableton!” Mrs. Witt beckons one of her footmen standing ready in the wings.
The bearded man nods in gratitude, steering his female companion out of the fray as a portly middle-aged woman and a mousy-looking young lady sidle beside their hostess.
“Mrs. Witt, do you really think it proper for the duchess to retire alone with Mr. McAllister?” Frowning, the larger woman glances at her younger intimate—her daughter, Cora assumes. The pair have the same dishwater-brown hair, the same narrow-set eyes. “Arabella and I find it quite concerning that the duchess is without family or friends on these shores looking out for her well-being, and thus we consider it our duty—”
“You have no duties yet, Pearl.” Mrs. Witt rolls her eyes. “Now stop angling for the Württemberg crown and let me see to my party.” She waves above the crowd, clearly annoyed. “Mr. Prospero? Mr. Prospero, come here!”
Mrs. Witt summons the performer forward, eyeing the man like a new toy she longs to break. “My ball cannot be complete unless you share the methods behind your tricks. I command you to do so at once.”
“Ah, but what is magic if not the keeping of guarded secrets.” Prospero smiles grandly, deflecting. He drops his voice to a stage whisper. “And if I may say, madame, I do believe you’re keeping secrets of your own.”
Prospero steps forward, trailing his fingers across Mrs. Witt’s monstrous headpiece. A moment later, a dove bursts forth from the bloom of feathers and soars toward the chandeliers.
The surrounding partygoers gasp, erupting into another round of applause.
“I wish the whole dratted thing would fly away.” Mrs. Witt adjusts the piece with a groan. “We do what we must for la mode, but this headdress is a true cross to bear.”
A team of harried-looking footmen rush forward to assist.
From the edges of the gathered crowd, Cora
watches as the servants remove Mrs. Witt’s dwarfing headpiece—carefully withdrawing, one by one, a series of ornate pins holding it in place. Four pins, to be precise. Each pin a shaped helix of at least two dozen diamonds.
One footman holds out a silver tray while the other lays the pins down in a perfect row.
Cora creeps through the crowd, angling for a better look. The pins are delicate, the bases sparkling silver, and the diamonds are of a significant size—half a carat each, maybe more.
Good God, how much could one possibly fetch for a set like that?
She watches the footmen head down the hall with the headdress and tray, her mind fully racing now. Is this a gift from above, a stroke of incredible luck, right when she needs it? She doesn’t have a professional’s eye for jewelry, admittedly—her family’s treasures were of the cereal and corn variety—but she can appreciate the finer things, always has, and taken as a set, those pins must be worth at least a few thousand. More than enough to walk away from the show forever, cash out, and finally take back her family’s land.
All she has to do is follow those footmen, wait for the right time, and swipe the whole lot.
As Prospero pulls a deck of cards from inside his lapel for his next parlor trick, Cora inches farther backward. Ignoring Maeve, who is also standing on the crowd’s fringes and currently giving Cora a very pointed, bug-eyed stare. Although Cora is just being paranoid—there is no way the older stagehand could possibly sense what she is planning. Besides, Maeve has left her no other choice; without thieving on the road, Cora’s future is as empty as Prospero’s trick box.
As the crowd shifts, closing in for a better view of Prospero, Cora seizes her moment, slipping away from the commotion, retracing the steps of the footmen. Behind the scenes all night, and dressed in black herself, no one should mistake a young stagehand for anything but additional hired help for the evening’s festivities.
Cora rounds the hall into another narrow corridor.
A wrinkled woman in an apron stops her short.
“Ah, finally. My kingdom for a free hand!” The woman thrusts a heavy box into Cora’s chest. A sewing kit? “Run this to Adelaide, girl.”
Cora pastes on a manic smile. “Right. Adelaide.” She nods across the corridor. “Saw her go that way—”
The servant thrusts her chin in the direction from which Cora came. “Thataway! Guest has a tear, yes, yes. It’s a parade of fashion emergencies. Out you go—”
“To Mrs. Witt’s quarters?”
“Ha, are you mad? They’ll be in the guest room upstairs.” The woman all but shoves Cora back into the hall.
All right, Cora, reset. Time for a new plan.
She returns to the marble hallway, then stealthily crosses over into the empty theater. Once inside the space, she spies a luxurious velvet shawl discarded on a seat. Perfect. She nabs the piece and heads backstage for Dinah’s dressing room.
After closing the door, Cora hastily exchanges her black shirtwaist and skirt for one of the assistant’s gaudy, floor-length gowns. As a final embellishment, Cora opens the sewing kit she’s been saddled with and, with a few swift stitches, secures one of Prospero’s black silk scarves into a waistband that matches the shawl.
Next, she helps herself to Dinah’s mess of rouges and powders stacked on an end table, then tugs down her hair and, with a couple of deft moves, retwists it into a piled tousle of curls.
Cora studies herself in the room’s opulent mirror.
“Not quite Madison Avenue. But it’ll do.”
She hurries onto the stage, stopping for a moment to look out at the empty theater, imagining, for just a moment, those elusive spotlights finally shining on her.
In another life, perhaps. In this one, Cora is running out of time.
After leaving the theater via the far entrance, she enters the main hall on its opposite end. From there, she walks swiftly into the Witts’ grand foyer, holding her head high, as if she owns the place. Disregarding the quizzical tone of a butler asking if she’s lost.
“Just taking a break from the festivities,” Cora
says airily. “These events can be so demanding, do you not agree?”
“Yes, madame, but if I could—”
Ignoring him, she glides headlong past, rounding another hall peppered with marble busts and tapestries. Mrs. Witt’s dressing rooms must be somewhere in this expansive maze.
The hall soon dead-ends, and Cora makes the swift decision to turn left, and . . . Voilà. She’s rewarded with the sight of the two footmen and a lady’s maid now holding the feathered headpiece and tray of pins, the lot of them idling and chatting down the other end.
Cora tucks herself into an alcove, waiting, watching as the servants share a quiet joke. The footmen finally disappear into a doorway on the right as the maid takes the bounty, passing two rooms before turning into the third door on the left.
Cora hangs back for one heartbeat, two . . . and then sneaks in behind her.
Mrs. Witt’s private quarters.
The room is dark, but Cora can still see enough that pure envy closes around her, stifling, like a spell box. Such luxury, extravagance. Excess. A canopy bed, damask-patterned walls, a sitting room, a moonlit vanity, and an elevated dressing stage.
She retreats into the shadows, feeling even more determined now.
The lady’s maid carefully lifts each diamond pin from the tray and places them one by one inside a jewelry box on the vanity, then crosses the room and lays the feathered headpiece down like a sleepy child into a long velvet box at the foot of the bed.
Finally, the maid returns to the hall, shutting the door with a satisfying click.
Showtime.
Cora hurries toward the vanity and opens the box, lifting one of the pins for inspection. The delicate, intricate piece glimmers like a promise under the tall casement window’s swath of moonlight. Twenty-four beautiful diamonds.
She swallows a triumphant squeal. No more waking up in one city and falling asleep the following night on the way to the next. No more toiling away in the shadows for her weekly pittance or slinking through the vaudeville crowds, always on the prowl like a famished hyena.
Cora conjures the image of her old clapboard farmhouse, the endless stretch of wheat, the way the sun glints off the winding creek at sunrise. Then, even more satisfying, she pictures the stunned, defeated faces of those avaricious lenders when she walks into their offices and slaps a stack of bills on the table.
Coraline O’Malley, victorious. Nobody’s fool.
n she attempts the door, however, she finds it locked. Good God, nothing is ever easy.
Slightly panicking, Cora surveys the whole of the room, her gaze soon falling on a second door—this one narrow and latched—on the adjacent wall beyond the sitting room.
Her body wilts in relief. Another way out.
It’s hard to tell where the pocket door leads as Cora inches it open, given that the adjoining room is dimly lit. Another sitting room, perhaps? A parlor? Regardless, Cora slides through, emerging in a narrow space between two tall bookshelves. But just as she’s about to make her exit . . .
She realizes she is not alone.
“I’d say that was a success, dear Duchess,” a male voice quietly crows. “If a brief one.”
Cora presses her back against the wall. There are two people here, in fact—the bearded man with the cane and the pretty European noblewoman with ice-blonde hair.
Damn it all. Maybe Cora won’t be noticed, wedged between these high shelves. Safer here, in any case, than utterly exposed in the middle of the hostess’s bedroom.
She’ll simply have to wait them out.
From her shielded vantage, Cora watches the man stride, cane-assisted, across the room. He makes himself right at home with the drinks cabinet, where a decanted bottle of sherry waits to be poured.
“I’m not taking unnecessary risks, Ward,” the woman answers in a low, flat American accent—a very different elocution than she had used earlier during the party, Cora notes.
“Time’s a’ticking,” says the man—Ward? “We don’t set this in motion soon and we might forfeit half the season.”
He hands his companion a glass of sherry.
The woman swirls it before sipping, scowling a little, as if in deep thought, while Ward sits back down with a contented sigh.
“And we can’t risk letting this play into the summer, Alice,” Ward says. “Only so long before word gets out about secret mines.”
Cora’s heart ticks like a metronome. Forfeit the season? Secret mines?
How . . . fascinating.
Also . . . none of her concern!
She’s hiding on her person a collection of stolen, hopefully exorbitantly expensive diamond pins. Whoever these people are, if they catch her, they’ll no doubt rat her out to Mrs. Witt. She’ll not only lose the score, but she’ll also lose the farm and likely her job, low-paying as it is. Perhaps she could even wind up in jail.
Cora focuses her entire being on willing their departure. Leave, you wretched interlopers!
“An excellent point,” says the duchess—or Alice, as this Ward fellow just called her. “And four of the five families are now at play, thanks to this social outing, so you were right about that as well.”
“As to the fifth . . .” Ward strokes his impressively pointed beard. “Are you dead set on Peyton? We could—”
“Peyton is nonnegotiable.” The tall woman’s voice has gone stiff. “He’s the worst of them.”
“As well as the most intractable,” Ward mutters. “I laid the groundwork with his business manager, but no dice. Silas posed the proposition, told him about the mines. Peyton shut him right down: ‘Not interested.’ I fear he’ll need a more subtle form of persuasion, but I’m unsure as to how to achieve that without an actual tête-à-tête. And like I said, Alice, the man’s a veritable hermit. No one other than Silas—and I mean no one—has seen him for years.”
“We’ll simply have to find a way to draw him out.” Alice sits up straighter, eyes sharpening. “Perhaps we could approach him at his ch—”
“Church? What church?” Ward laughs. “The man’s the devil himself, as you said. What use has he got for God? He hardly lets his own son see the light of day anymore.”
“His son. There—that’s an angle. The son has got to be, what? Twenty-three by now?” Alice paces the room, thinking.
Cora feels her own heart pounding.
“Twenty-two, I believe,” Ward answers quickly. “Now, what are you pondering, Alice? That the younger Peyton might be lured into—”
You are very beautiful.” On the bearded man’s lips, it feels more like a clinical observation than a flirtation. “And twenty-eight is hardly elderly.”
“How kind,” Alice says with a sardonic glint in her eye. “But I’m afraid you have more faith in my charms than I do. Twenty-eight may not be elderly, but it is decidedly spinsterish, not exactly the prime attraction for a young man. Even if it were, playing him off Ogden would risk losing them both.” The woman waves her hand, exasperated. “It’s not worth muddling over tonight. I’ll find a way to drag Peyton out of his house and into our trap. Within months, he’ll be left without a rag to wipe his forehead.”
Cora flattens herself against the shelves. A magic trick would really prove opportune right now. She’s learned quite a bit about deception from watching Prospero’s acts, but an escape stunt remains far outside her current capabilities. Her mind free-falls through increasingly outlandish possibilities: Could she fold herself in half, stuff herself between the books?
“And we’ll be filthy too,” Ward chuckles. “Filthy rich!”
“Precisely.” Alice nods in a way that suggests punctuating the end of the conversation. “The plan is in place. The through line of it, at least. All that’s left are mere details.”
Cora closes her eyes, shifts her legs, which are starting to turn numb from remaining in place so long. Praying for reprieve, until finally, finally, those prayers are answered.
She hears the door to the main sitting room open and close. They’ve left.
Cora bursts toward the door.
And collides straight into the waiting duchess.
“Isn’t this an interesting magic trick?” Alice says in a decidedly German intonation, gripping the younger woman’s elbow. “Levitating into our hostess’s private quarters. I don’t suppose you’ve received a personal invitation.”
“Whereas you got yourself a plum one, ...
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