In the summer of 1873, when the smoke of industry had begun to hang about Philadelphia like a second, less reputable atmosphere, Miss Alina Landau sat in her father’s library and attempted, with the obstinacy particular to nineteen-year-old heiresses, to pretend that the world was still arranged according to the old, comfortable geometry of before.
It was a respectable room for a respectable fortune: tall shelves in dark walnut, their books aligned in ranks as disciplined as a Prussian regiment; a great desk of such seriousness that one felt it ought to sign treaties on its own; a globe swollen with empires; and, everywhere, the subtle gleam of money that had learned to disguise itself as taste. Outside, the street-hawkers yelled, the carriage wheels rattled, and somewhere along the Schuylkill a locomotive exhaled a long, iron sigh, as if tired from dragging the Republic behind it.
Alina had opened a window—scandalously wide, in her aunt’s opinion—so that the breeze might stir the lace at her wrists and chase away the faint tightness in her chest. The morning had begun with a weight there, nothing more than a stone the size of a coin, lodged beneath her sternum. She had attributed it, in a reasonable, modern fashion, to the previous evening’s over-rich supper and the emotional exertion of parting from her family as they set out upon their grand journey westward.
The newspaper lay folded to an article about the triumphs and perils of the transcontinental line, which journalists had taken to describing in terms usually reserved for the Almighty: spanning the continent, binding together the nation, a steel artery of commerce and progress. A flattering sketch of a wooden trestle bridged an impossible canyon, all cross-hatched heroism and perspective.
Alina regarded it with a faint, amused severity.
“Arrogant thing,” she murmured, tapping the engraving with one gloved finger. “You look as though you mean to outlive God.”
She had her father’s voice in her ear as she spoke, precise and faintly ironic: Never trust anything that exists solely on paper, little one. Ledger balances and newspaper praises will both swear the moon is made of dividend coupons, given sufficient incentive.
“Quite so,” she said aloud, to the trestle and the morning, and leaned back in the leather armchair.
The cough came then—so minor an event that, had the universe been better schooled in narrative propriety, it would have chosen some other gesture as a herald of catastrophe. It was the sort of cough one gives behind a gloved knuckle in a warm room: dry, polite, economical. It caught at the back of her throat, shook her once, and left the metallic taste of dust in its wake.
She drew out her handkerchief, the one with the small embroidered A in the corner, a birthday gift from her mother two years before, and pressed it, more from habit than from need, to her lips.
When she drew it away, there was the faintest blush of red upon the linen. Not a stain, not even a spot; rather, one might have said that some modest quantity of colour, having fled her cheeks, had attempted to make amends by hiding in the cloth instead.
Alina stared at it, and a curious amusement rose in her—sharp, almost giddy.
“Oh, we are not doing that,” she informed the universe, very distinctly. “I refuse.”
For she had read enough novels to know precisely what that little fleck of crimson traditionally signified. Consumptive heroines never blew their noses, never spilled ink, never dropped a meat pie—no, they coughed once into linen, and the next three hundred pages unfolded in a graceful decline of lace and sighs. It was all very edifying on paper and utterly intolerable in real life.
She folded the handkerchief so that the mark disappeared, as though folding away the omen itself, and rose from her chair. The room swayed very slightly; not enough to alarm, only enough to reassert the existence of gravity.
“Alina?” came a voice from the doorway, accompanied by the soft rustle of bombazine.
Her aunt, Mrs. Henrietta March (née Landau), stood framed by the carved door, her expression composed in that particular arrangement of concern and censure that widowed gentlewomen adopt when they have taken it upon themselves to shepherd other people’s fortunes through the treacherous shoals of society.
“You are pale,” Aunt Henrietta observed, as though the pale thing in question were an unexpected item of furniture. “You have been reading too long. The city air is disagreeable when one sits still. You should take a turn in the carriage.”
“I coughed,” Alina said, because she could not yet decide whether the incident was important enough to conceal.
Her aunt’s eyes narrowed.
“Coughs,” she said, “are fashionable this year. Every girl in town is determined to have a delicate chest. If you value my peace of mind, you will not join them in affectation. Remember your father has trusted me with you.”
This was perfectly in character. Aunt Henrietta believed firmly in robust health as a matter of moral duty, and regarded illness as a sort of social faux pas, excusable only in the very young and the very rich, and then only briefly.
“It was merely a tickle in the throat,” Alina allowed. “The air is close. Perhaps a drive would do me good.”
“It will, and the sight of you in a carriage will reassure the neighbourhood. They have all grown earnest and funereal since the family departed, as though you had already installed crape on the door.”
Alina managed a smile at that. It was still new, the sensation of being the Landau who had stayed behind. Their departure two days prior had left peculiar hollows in the house—empty chairs at breakfast, a silence in the hall where her younger brother usually collided with the furniture, a new echo in her mother’s sitting-room. Her father’s study, the one next door to the library, remained closed, the key resting on Aunt Henrietta’s chatelaine like an accusation.
“They will be back by autumn,” Alina said, with the serene conviction of one who has never yet been seriously contradicted by fate. “Father promised. There is that new spur line in Colorado to inspect, and the mines, and then I suppose Mama will buy half of San Francisco out of pity, and they will all come home quite satisfied with themselves.”
She felt them as she spoke—her father’s dry amusement, her mother’s serene energy, her brother Edgar’s restless laugh. The Landau presence was not easily banished from any room it entered. It seemed inconceivable that the continent itself would do what society, politics, and war had all failed to do: put an end to them.
Aunt Henrietta sniffed.
“America will swallow itself one day with all this digging and building,” she said. “I am sure of it. There is no need for your parents to go shoveling away at the edges of creation to hasten the event. Still, your father has his investments. We must all endure something. Go and have Mrs. Kemp fetch your hat. I shall send word to the coachman.”
She paused, her gaze lingering for a heartbeat too long on Alina’s face.
“You are quite certain it was only one cough?”
“Yes, Aunt,” Alina lied cheerfully. It had, in fact, been three. But one did not report every stray bullet of the body to one’s former governess turned chaperone, unless one wished to spend the afternoon under mustard plasters.
When her aunt had gone, Alina glanced again at the folded handkerchief. It seemed smaller now, diminished in its pocket, as though embarrassed by its earlier theatrics.
“Oh, very well,” she said to it, and to the vast, unseen author of her days. “We shall behave as sensible people and refrain from turning a trifling symptom into a serialized tragedy.”
The June afternoon wrapped itself around Philadelphia with the warm, damp insistence of an over-familiar acquaintance. From the carriage window, Alina watched the city pass in a series of little tableaux: a boy chasing a dog, a woman shaking a rug out of an upper window, a street vendor arranging oranges so carefully one might have supposed each fruit capable of lodging a complaint if mishandled. Above everything, like a god with poor manners, hung the soot.
The horses’ hooves struck sparks from the cobbles as the Landau carriage rolled past brick townhouses and shopfronts. Ladies in tasteful half-mourning nodded just enough to acknowledge her without risking social entanglement; gentlemen raised their hats with that air of sobered cheerfulness appropriate to someone greeting a girl whose father’s fortune financed half the street.
She was conscious, today, of being looked at. Not merely as Alina—tall, dark-haired, with the Landau eyes (too large, her mother always said, as though they had been ordered for a bigger face and delivered by mistake)—but as the representative of Landau & Co. Her parents had been gone scarcely forty-eight hours, and already the city was rearranging itself around her.
They passed the offices of several railway companies, their brass plates polished to sermons about prosperity. One façade in particular caught her eye: a new building, all confident plate glass and pale stone, its name etched in fashionably stark letters upon the door:
PEMBROKE, HOLLIS & LACY
Investment, Speculation, Consolidation
“New money,” Aunt Henrietta sniffed, following her gaze. “The sort that grows like mildew in damp weather, and vanishes when the sun comes out. They have been all over your father to allow them a larger share in his western ventures.”
“And did he?”
“Your father,” said Aunt Henrietta, with a certain satisfaction, “did not accumulate the Landau fortune by handing it to every clever young man with an inkstand. No. He took their luncheon—always accept a free luncheon, Alina, providence is not infinite—but not their advice.”
Alina smiled faintly. “Mr. Pembroke must dislike him very much.”
“Mr. Pembroke dislikes anything he cannot buy,” her aunt replied. “You may expect to be introduced to him at some tedious function or other before the summer is out. Men of that type are invariably drawn to fortunes, like flies to conserves. You will, I trust, apply flypaper where necessary.”
“Yes, Aunt,” Alina said obediently, though she found, to her annoyance, that the name Pembroke had made itself comfortable in some little corner of her mind and refused to vacate.
As the carriage turned towards Rittenhouse Square, she felt the weight in her chest again, that small, unreasonable stone. Not pain, exactly, but the suggestion that, somewhere in the intricate architecture of rib and lung, something had shifted infinitesimally out of place.
She drew a slow breath. The cough that followed was softer than the first, more an objection than an event, yet it tugged at her all the same. She pressed the handkerchief to her lips with a practised little motion, as though this were something she had done all her life instead of twice in one day.
No stain showed this time.
“There,” she told herself. “You see? Merely the city attempting to inhabit one’s lungs. Nothing tragic, nothing poetic. You shall live long enough to be bored, which is more than most heroines can say.”
By evening the heat had broken. A line of clouds had encamped along the horizon, dark and orderly as an invading army. The air in the Landau house felt oddly suspended, as if all the furniture were waiting for instructions.
Alina dined with Aunt Henrietta at the long table that had been designed for eight and now seemed to resent the reduction in occupants. In deference to the season and the absence of Mr. Landau’s stern eye, the cook had produced a lighter supper: cold chicken, salads, a modest pudding. The conversation was similarly attenuated—supper talk dwindled quickly when it had to do without its usual contributions of paternal irony and adolescent complaint.
“Your father will be in Chicago by now,” Aunt Henrietta remarked, as the maid cleared the plates. “From there, they say, the trains and the hotels all smell of money and slaughterhouses.”
“Mama wrote that she means to send me a hideous piece of jewellery from every state they pass through,” Alina said. “She says I shall have a full map of the Union about my person by the time they return.”
“Your mother has always equated affection with ornament,” her aunt replied. “It is a harmless habit in her case, because she has taste. Do not imitate it in dealing with your own children. I have no wish to see the next generation buried alive in trinkets.”
“My children?” Alina laughed softly. “You advance me quickly, aunt.”
“In this world, if one does not advance, one is trampled,” Henrietta said. “Besides, you are nineteen. You must reconcile yourself to the fact that society is already composing matrimonial schemes in which you and your dowry play the starring roles.”
Alina opened her mouth to reply, felt the familiar tightness, and closed it again to surrender to the cough. It came more forcefully this time—still dry, but from deeper in the chest, as though the lungs had decided to contribute their opinion to the dinner conversation.
Her aunt looked up sharply.
“That is the third time today,” she said.
“The fourth,” Alina corrected, before she could stop herself, and then wished she had not.
“Ah.” Aunt Henrietta’s lips thinned. “You will see Dr. Carswell tomorrow.”
“I do not need a doctor,” Alina protested. “I am merely… breathing too earnestly. It has been a trying week.”
“Breathing is not something to be done earnestly,” said her aunt. “It should be done inconspicuously and in moderation, like religion and patriotism. Tomorrow.”
There was no arguing with that tone. The Landau fortune had never quite forgiven Henrietta for marrying out of it, but it had rewarded her loyalty in exile with a certain authority. She had been brought back into the fold when Alina’s mother declared, somewhat dramatically, that she would rather entrust her daughter to a relative dragon than to the tender mercies of Philadelphia’s more fashionable but less intelligent matrons.
As they rose from the table, the first growl of thunder rolled in the distance, a deep, speculative sound, like a throat clearing before making an announcement.
“Storm coming,” Aunt Henrietta said. “You always sleep badly in storms. I shall have Mrs. Kemp leave the door between our rooms open.”
Alina began to reply, then stopped. There was a sound in the hall—the rapid, unsteady clatter of small boots on polished wood—and a second later one of the footmen appeared in the dining room doorway, his usually impassive face unsettled.
“Beg pardon, ma’am,” he said, bowing first to Henrietta and then, as an afterthought, to Alina. “There is a boy at the front door. From the telegraph office. He says it is urgent.”
The room shrank. The thunder outside, which had been a civilised distance away, seemed suddenly directly overhead.
“Bring it,” said Aunt Henrietta. Her tone remained level, but her hand tightened on the back of her chair.
The footman disappeared, then returned with a small yellow envelope on a tray, as though offering an unappetising second dessert. The address was written in a clerk’s heavy black hand:
MISS ALINA LANDAU
LANDAU HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA
Her own name looked strange there, as if it had wandered onto the envelope by mistake and would shortly be corrected.
Aunt Henrietta took the envelope, weighed it in her palm for a moment, and then, with a firmness that Alina suspected was more for her own sake than for her niece’s, handed it across the table.
“It is for you, child,” she said. “You are not made of glass.”
Alina’s fingers were not steady as she broke the seal. She had received only two telegrams in her life: one announcing the death of her grandfather; the other, six years before, informing the family that they had acquired a certain mine in Nevada at what her father called “a price so favourable I fear we may go to hell for it.”
This envelope felt heavier than either, though the paper within was thin as always, its words pared by cost to the bone.
She unfolded it.
The message was in that brutal, breathless idiom peculiar to the telegraph, in which one’s life may be dismantled for the price of a sentence:
REGRET TO INFORM YOU
WESTBOUND TRAIN NO. 47 DERAILED THIS MORNING NEAR EAGLES GATE CANYON STOP
BRIDGE FAILURE STOP
NUMEROUS CASUALTIES STOP
YOUR FATHER MOTHER AND BROTHER AMONG THE DEAD STOP
DETAILS TO FOLLOW
RAILROAD OFFICE CHEYENNE
For a long, dislocated instant, the words refused to make any sense at all. They were bits of language from three different conversations, spliced together by a drunk editor.
Bridge failure.
Casualties.
Among the dead.
The paper blurred.
“Alina?” Aunt Henrietta’s voice came from a surprising distance.
She looked up, not at her aunt, but at the far wall of the dining room, which had acquired a peculiar unreality. The portrait of her father above the sideboard—the one painted only a year before, in which he stood with one hand upon a ledger and the other resting lightly upon a globe—seemed to have become a parody, a theatrical prop left behind after a play about railroads and respectability.
Her chest tightened. The little stone beneath her sternum swelled into something larger, jagged-edged. Her body tried to draw breath around it and failed.
“Among the—” she began, and then the cough took her.
It came in a sudden, violent spasm that bent her double. The handkerchief leapt to her mouth of its own accord; she felt the tearing, rasping protest of her lungs as though they resented being made to function in a world whose foundations had just been withdrawn.
When it subsided, she was on her knees, one hand gripping the edge of the chair as though it anchored her to the room. The thunder outside cracked in earnest now, rattling the windows.
“Alina!” Aunt Henrietta was beside her, solid and trembling. “My love, what—?”
The handkerchief was no longer modestly stained. It was blooming, vividly, a deep unnatural rose where her breath had struck. The sight of it struck her as absurdly symbolic, and some tiny hysterical part of her wanted to laugh and declare that at least the story had the decency to coordinate its metaphors.
Instead she drew a ragged breath that tasted of iron and salt and the bitter ash of something burning very far away.
“They are dead,” she said. The words felt like stones dropped one by one into a well. “The train. The bridge failed. They are all—”
Her voice broke.
She let the telegram fall. It landed face-up upon the polished floor, its black-lettered lines staring up at the ceiling as if appealing to some higher authority for correction.
For several minutes the house was nothing but sounds: the storm, the hurried tramp of servants’ feet, her aunt’s voice calling for the brandy, the doctor, the smelling salts—whatever artillery of civilisation was at hand to throw against the onrush of catastrophe.
Alina heard it all from a strange distance, as though listening through a door that had been quietly closed. Grief, it seemed, had an anaesthetic phase. The mind, being a fastidious creature, elected to process impossible information in small, digestible segments rather than all at once.
She clutched the bloodied handkerchief as if it were a rope thrown to a drowning person. The red on the cloth mesmerised her.
“Very well,” she thought, with a clarity bordering on madness. “If this is to be a story, we shall make it an accurate one. No simpering, no flinching. We shall stare at every dreadful thing until it blinks first.”
Lightning forked outside, severing the sky. In the instantaneous daylight, the library door across the hall gleamed, and beyond it she imagined—absurdly—that she could see trestles and timbers and a canyon’s black mouth; could hear the distant shriek of steel failing under a burden it had sworn it could bear.
Somewhere far to the west, among broken rails and splintered wood, dust was settling upon the still forms of what had once been her family.
In Philadelphia, Miss Alina Landau straightened slowly, wiped her mouth with a ruined handkerchief, and understood that she was now, in the cruel arithmetic of the age, not merely a daughter and a sister, but the sole heir to everything her father had built—and to whatever had destroyed him.
She pressed the handkerchief flat in her palm, as one might press a document before signing it.
“Send for the railroad’s local office,” she heard herself say, her voice hoarse but lucid. “And Dr. Carswell, if you must. But the railroad first. I wish to know precisely how a bridge fails.”
Thunder applauded grimly overhead.
It was not, perhaps, the declaration the universe expected from a girl who had just coughed blood and been orphaned by telegram. But Alina Landau had never been inclined to grant the universe the satisfaction of predictability.
Outside, the first great drops of rain began to fall upon the slate roof of Landau House, ticking like the opening lines of a very long, very grim ledger.
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