Chapter 1 The Will and the Winter

Cornelia Hollingsworth came home to New York on the last Thursday of November, when the harbor was the color of cold iron and the ferries moved through the fog like patient ghosts. Eleven months in Europe had taught her the names of a hundred paintings and the worth of almost nothing at all, and she stood at the rail with her gloved hands on the cold metal and tried to remember whether she loved this city or merely obeyed it. Her father's letter had reached her in Naples three weeks late, in the square careful hand of his secretary: *Mr. Percival Hollingsworth died on the ninth of October. The funeral was private, at the family's request. You are asked to return at once.* At once. As though the Atlantic could be crossed at once, as though she were a clerk expected back at her desk by Monday. The carriage that met her at the dock carried her north through streets she had known since childhood. Men in wool coats hurried along the pavements with their collars up. A woman sold roasted chestnuts from a brazier at the corner of the square, and the smoke of it hung low and sweet over the cobbles. Every few blocks a new building stood half-finished, its iron frame open to the sky, and men crawled across it like ants on a dropped crust. The city was always building something, tearing something else down, and it never once asked her permission. The house on the square was cold. Cornelia had expected the cold; what she had not expected was the quiet. Her father had filled rooms the way he had filled columns, always with a great deal of noise and a great many opinions, and now the house held its breath and waited for her to notice that he was gone. Hortense met her in the front hall. Her father's sister had been a beauty once, and she still arranged herself for the light as though someone might be watching from a doorway, but grief had drawn her mouth thin and she did not embrace her niece so much as touch her and step away. "You are thinner," Hortense said. "They did not feed you in Italy." "They fed me very well. I walked a great deal." "Walking is not eating." Hortense turned toward the stairs. "The solicitor comes at four. He would not tell me what the will says. He would only tell me that it concerns you, and that it concerns the paper, and that he would not discuss it with a woman of my age and nerves." Cornelia followed her aunt up the stairs, past the portraits of Hollingsworth men who had looked down on four generations of this city and found it wanting. The last of them hung at the turn of the landing: her father, painted at forty, one hand on a roll of galleys, his eyes fixed on something outside the frame. She stopped and looked at him a long moment. He had been so certain of everything. He had been so certain of her. --- Mr. Wyndham arrived with his papers at four exactly, as a man arrives who has never in his life been late and does not intend to begin. He was thin, dry, and careful, and he sat in her father's study without looking once at the empty chair behind the desk. The will was long. Wills such as this were always long; they had to name every bank, every acre, every cousin, and every charity that might otherwise have been forgotten and become a lawsuit. Cornelia listened with her hands folded and her face still, the way she had listened in Naples to men explain why a painting she had admired was not for sale. Then Wyndham came to the part that mattered. "The controlling interest in the Clarion Printing and Publishing Company passes to you, Miss Hollingsworth. Forty-one shares of the sixty. The remainder is held in small parcels by your aunt, by Mr. Thorndike, and by two of your father's oldest friends." "Forty-one of sixty," Cornelia said. "A majority." "A bare majority, and a costly one. You also inherit the debts attached to it. Your father borrowed heavily in his last years. The presses are mortgaged. Wages are owed to the men through the end of October, and the men are owed further against the new machines." Wyndham turned a page. "The notes come due in March." She had spent eleven months studying the light on old canvases. Now she studied a column of figures, and the light in the study seemed to change. "What does Mr. Thorndike want?" "Mr. Thorndike has been good enough to say that he wants whatever is best for the family name." Wyndham's tone made it clear that he had heard this sentence many times and believed it none of the times. "He has also been good enough to say, to several people, that the Clarion would be worth more to him if it were sold." "To whom?" "To the Morning Bugle." Cornelia did not move. The Morning Bugle was the other morning paper, the louder one, the one that printed the scandals first and the corrections never. Its editor, Selwyn, had spent the autumn running a series of pieces about her father's last months, pieces full of unkind hints and unnamed sources and words like *senile* and *reckless* arranged so carefully that no lawyer could touch them. "I see," she said. "There is a second condition in the will, Miss Hollingsworth, and I will read it to you plainly because I have found that plain reading prevents lawsuits." Wyndham cleared his throat. "If the controlling interest is sold within one year of your father's death, it must first be offered to Mr. Thorndike at its assessed value. If it is not sold, you must run the company yourself and draw a salary from it. The will does not permit you to keep the shares and pay another to manage them. Your father wrote, as his own instruction, that the paper must have a Hollingsworth at its head." The room was very quiet. Outside, a cart went past on the cobbles, and someone shouted at the driver, and the city continued about its business as though nothing whatsoever had just been handed to a woman of twenty-six who had been raised to pour tea at her father's table and to say nothing that could be quoted. "He believed I could run it," Cornelia said. "He believed you would have to." Wyndham gathered his papers and did not look at her. "Whether you could is another matter, and one the men in the press-room are already debating in a manner I do not recommend you go and hear." "Will you tell me the truth of that, at least? What are the men saying?" "Miss Hollingsworth." Wyndham stood and buttoned his coat. "The men are saying that the new machines will put half of them out on the street by spring, and that an heiress who has never set foot in a press-room will care about as much as her father did. They are saying that if the company will not hear them, they will make the company hear them, and there is a man who is helping them learn how." "Who?" "A former reporter of your father's. His name is Cormac Kavanagh." --- Cornelia sat alone in the study after Wyndham had gone. Her father's chair was still there, the leather cracked at the arms where his hands had rested for twenty years. She did not sit in it. She sat in the smaller chair across the desk, where visitors sat, where she had always sat, and she looked at the room the way she had learned in Europe to look at a painting: first at what it showed, and then at what it chose not to show. The desk was crowded with papers. She found a bound volume of account books, and beside it a stack of galley proofs marked in red. She found a drawer of pens and a drawer of cigars and a drawer that held nothing at all. And she found, tucked between the blotter and the wood, a single sheet in her father's hand, undated, unfinished: *The new machines are the future, whatever the men say, and I will not be remembered as the man who stood in its road. But I will not—* The sentence stopped there. There was no second side to the page. Whatever he had meant to write, he had died before he wrote it. Cornelia folded the sheet and put it in her pocket. Then she opened the account book to the last column and began to read, slowly, the way she had once read a difficult page of Italian, one word at a time, until the words began to make a sentence, and the sentence began to make a meaning. It would take her most of the night. By the end of it she knew three things: that the paper was in worse danger than Wyndham had admitted, that her father had been afraid of something he had not written down, and that half the men who set his type had not been paid since October. At dawn she folded the book shut. Downstairs the household was waking; a maid crossed the hall with a lamp, and somewhere a door closed. Cornelia put on her coat and her plainest hat, and she went out into the cold to find the man Wyndham had named. ---