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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alina had opened a window\u2014scandalously wide, in her aunt\u2019s opinion\u2014so 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\u2019s over-rich supper and the emotional exertion of parting from her family as they set out upon their grand journey westward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alina regarded it with a faint, amused severity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cArrogant thing,\u201d she murmured, tapping the engraving with one gloved finger. \u201cYou look as though you mean to outlive God.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She had her father\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cQuite so,\u201d she said aloud, to the trestle and the morning, and leaned back in the leather armchair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The cough came then\u2014so 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alina stared at it, and a curious amusement rose in her\u2014sharp, almost giddy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOh, we are not doing that,\u201d she informed the universe, very distinctly. \u201cI refuse.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014no, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAlina?\u201d came a voice from the doorway, accompanied by the soft rustle of bombazine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her aunt, Mrs. Henrietta March (n\u00e9e 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\u2019s fortunes through the treacherous shoals of society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou are pale,\u201d Aunt Henrietta observed, as though the pale thing in question were an unexpected item of furniture. \u201cYou have been reading too long. The city air is disagreeable when one sits still. You should take a turn in the carriage.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI coughed,\u201d Alina said, because she could not yet decide whether the incident was important enough to conceal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her aunt\u2019s eyes narrowed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCoughs,\u201d she said, \u201care 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt was merely a tickle in the throat,\u201d Alina allowed. \u201cThe air is close. Perhaps a drive would do me good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014empty chairs at breakfast, a silence in the hall where her younger brother usually collided with the furniture, a new echo in her mother\u2019s sitting-room. Her father\u2019s study, the one next door to the library, remained closed, the key resting on Aunt Henrietta\u2019s chatelaine like an accusation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey will be back by autumn,\u201d Alina said, with the serene conviction of one who has never yet been seriously contradicted by fate. \u201cFather 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She felt them as she spoke\u2014her father\u2019s dry amusement, her mother\u2019s serene energy, her brother Edgar\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aunt Henrietta sniffed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAmerica will swallow itself one day with all this digging and building,\u201d she said. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She paused, her gaze lingering for a heartbeat too long on Alina\u2019s face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou are quite certain it was only one cough?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYes, Aunt,\u201d Alina lied cheerfully. It had, in fact, been three. But one did not report every stray bullet of the body to one\u2019s former governess turned chaperone, unless one wished to spend the afternoon under mustard plasters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOh, very well,\u201d she said to it, and to the vast, unseen author of her days. \u201cWe shall behave as sensible people and refrain from turning a trifling symptom into a serialized tragedy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The horses\u2019 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\u2019s fortune financed half the street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was conscious, today, of being looked at. Not merely as Alina\u2014tall, 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)\u2014but as the representative of Landau & Co. Her parents had been gone scarcely forty-eight hours, and already the city was rearranging itself around her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They passed the offices of several railway companies, their brass plates polished to sermons about prosperity. One fa\u00e7ade 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PEMBROKE, HOLLIS & LACY<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Investment, Speculation, Consolidation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNew money,\u201d Aunt Henrietta sniffed, following her gaze. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnd did he?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYour father,\u201d said Aunt Henrietta, with a certain satisfaction, \u201cdid not accumulate the Landau fortune by handing it to every clever young man with an inkstand. No. He took their luncheon\u2014always accept a free luncheon, Alina, providence is not infinite\u2014but not their advice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alina smiled faintly. \u201cMr. Pembroke must dislike him very much.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMr. Pembroke dislikes anything he cannot buy,\u201d her aunt replied. \u201cYou 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYes, Aunt,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No stain showed this time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere,\u201d she told herself. \u201cYou see? Merely the city attempting to inhabit one\u2019s lungs. Nothing tragic, nothing poetic. You shall live long enough to be bored, which is more than most heroines can say.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s stern eye, the cook had produced a lighter supper: cold chicken, salads, a modest pudding. The conversation was similarly attenuated\u2014supper talk dwindled quickly when it had to do without its usual contributions of paternal irony and adolescent complaint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYour father will be in Chicago by now,\u201d Aunt Henrietta remarked, as the maid cleared the plates. \u201cFrom there, they say, the trains and the hotels all smell of money and slaughterhouses.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMama wrote that she means to send me a hideous piece of jewellery from every state they pass through,\u201d Alina said. \u201cShe says I shall have a full map of the Union about my person by the time they return.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYour mother has always equated affection with ornament,\u201d her aunt replied. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy children?\u201d Alina laughed softly. \u201cYou advance me quickly, aunt.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn this world, if one does not advance, one is trampled,\u201d Henrietta said. \u201cBesides, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014still dry, but from deeper in the chest, as though the lungs had decided to contribute their opinion to the dinner conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her aunt looked up sharply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat is the third time today,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe fourth,\u201d Alina corrected, before she could stop herself, and then wished she had not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAh.\u201d Aunt Henrietta\u2019s lips thinned. \u201cYou will see Dr. Carswell tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI do not need a doctor,\u201d Alina protested. \u201cI am merely\u2026 breathing too earnestly. It has been a trying week.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBreathing is not something to be done earnestly,\u201d said her aunt. \u201cIt should be done inconspicuously and in moderation, like religion and patriotism. Tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s mother declared, somewhat dramatically, that she would rather entrust her daughter to a relative dragon than to the tender mercies of Philadelphia\u2019s more fashionable but less intelligent matrons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cStorm coming,\u201d Aunt Henrietta said. \u201cYou always sleep badly in storms. I shall have Mrs. Kemp leave the door between our rooms open.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alina began to reply, then stopped. There was a sound in the hall\u2014the rapid, unsteady clatter of small boots on polished wood\u2014and a second later one of the footmen appeared in the dining room doorway, his usually impassive face unsettled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBeg pardon, ma\u2019am,\u201d he said, bowing first to Henrietta and then, as an afterthought, to Alina. \u201cThere is a boy at the front door. From the telegraph office. He says it is urgent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The room shrank. The thunder outside, which had been a civilised distance away, seemed suddenly directly overhead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBring it,\u201d said Aunt Henrietta. Her tone remained level, but her hand tightened on the back of her chair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s heavy black hand:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
MISS ALINA LANDAU
LANDAU HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her own name looked strange there, as if it had wandered onto the envelope by mistake and would shortly be corrected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s, handed it across the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt is for you, child,\u201d she said. \u201cYou are not made of glass.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alina\u2019s 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 \u201ca price so favourable I fear we may go to hell for it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This envelope felt heavier than either, though the paper within was thin as always, its words pared by cost to the bone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She unfolded it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The message was in that brutal, breathless idiom peculiar to the telegraph, in which one\u2019s life may be dismantled for the price of a sentence:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bridge failure.
Casualties.
Among the dead.
The paper blurred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAlina?\u201d Aunt Henrietta\u2019s voice came from a surprising distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014the one painted only a year before, in which he stood with one hand upon a ledger and the other resting lightly upon a globe\u2014seemed to have become a parody, a theatrical prop left behind after a play about railroads and respectability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAmong the\u2014\u201d she began, and then the cough took her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAlina!\u201d Aunt Henrietta was beside her, solid and trembling. \u201cMy love, what\u2014?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead she drew a ragged breath that tasted of iron and salt and the bitter ash of something burning very far away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey are dead,\u201d she said. The words felt like stones dropped one by one into a well. \u201cThe train. The bridge failed. They are all\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her voice broke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For several minutes the house was nothing but sounds: the storm, the hurried tramp of servants\u2019 feet, her aunt\u2019s voice calling for the brandy, the doctor, the smelling salts\u2014whatever artillery of civilisation was at hand to throw against the onrush of catastrophe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She clutched the bloodied handkerchief as if it were a rope thrown to a drowning person. The red on the cloth mesmerised her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cVery well,\u201d she thought, with a clarity bordering on madness. \u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lightning forked outside, severing the sky. In the instantaneous daylight, the library door across the hall gleamed, and beyond it she imagined\u2014absurdly\u2014that she could see trestles and timbers and a canyon\u2019s black mouth; could hear the distant shriek of steel failing under a burden it had sworn it could bear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014and to whatever had destroyed him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She pressed the handkerchief flat in her palm, as one might press a document before signing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSend for the railroad\u2019s local office,\u201d she heard herself say, her voice hoarse but lucid. \u201cAnd Dr. Carswell, if you must. But the railroad first. I wish to know precisely how a bridge fails.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thunder applauded grimly overhead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the summer of 1873, when the smoke of industry…<\/p>\n