Chapter 12 The Forged Sale

The trouble arrived, as all the worst trouble in a newspaper did, on somebody else's front page. **CLARION SOLD — Heiress Bows to Bank: Men Left Waiting at the Gate.** Cormac read it standing on the corner of Rookery Row, in the cold, with the paper spread flat against the wind. The story was in the Bugle, under Selwyn's own byline, and it stated, with the confidence of a man who has been given a document, that Miss Cornelia Hollingsworth had agreed to sell her controlling interest to Mr. Thorndike, that the sale had been signed on the last day of December, and that the workers of the Clarion would therefore find their promised share of the company dissolved before it had ever been issued. There was a photograph of a signature at the bottom of the page. It was set small, in the way that forgeries are always set, so that the reader sees the shape of the thing and not the thing itself. But Cormac had spent three weeks in that woman's office, reading her signature on a hundred pages of the account book, and he knew before he had finished looking at it that the signature on the page was not hers. The second thing he knew was that two hundred men would not have looked at it as closely as he had. He found Scanlon in the assembly hall, and Scanlon was already telling the men that he had been right, that the heiress had sold them, that Kavanagh had been her clerk all along, and the room was in the mood that makes organizers afraid, which is not violence but a kind of excited agreement, the agreement of men who have found out that their worst suspicion was true and are relieved to have something simple to feel. Cormac climbed onto the crate. "You will all read the story," he said. "I have read it, and I will tell you what it is worth. It is worth nothing. The signature is a forgery. I know it, and the man who made it knows that I know it, which is why he printed it yesterday, before I could say so." "How do you know?" It was Scanlon who asked, with his arms folded and his chin up, and the whole room turned to hear the answer. "Because I have seen her write her name every day for a month," Cormac said, "and because I asked her, on the morning we opened her father's box, whether she would sign anything without reading it line by line, and she said that she would sooner cut off her hand." "That is a fine story," Scanlon said. "It is the story of a man who has spent too long in a rich woman's office." "Then ask her yourself." Cormac turned toward the door. "She will be here in an hour. I have sent for her. You can put the question to her face, in this room, in front of every man, and if you find one word of what she says to be false, then I will stand down from this assembly tonight and you may lead it wherever you please." There was a long silence. Then Brogan said, from the back, "Let the woman come. I would like to see her answer it." And the room agreed, and Scanlon had no choice but to sit down and wait. --- Cornelia came in an hour, on foot, through the cold, without a carriage, exactly as she had come the first time. She had the Bugle in her hand, folded, and she walked to the front of the room and stood beside the crate and faced two hundred men. "I have read it," she said. "It is a forgery. I have not sold my shares. I will not sell my shares. The signature in that paper was made by a hand that has never held a pen I own, and I can prove it, not by my word, but by three documents that are at this moment in the hands of my solicitor, one of which is the register of the bank on Nassau Street, and another of which is the minute book of a company board that has not met since November." "Prove it now," Scanlon said. "I cannot prove it now, because a court proves it, and a court takes weeks, and Selwyn knows that as well as I do." She lifted the Bugle. "But I will tell you what he does not know. He thinks this will break you. He thinks you will read it and say that the heiress is like every other owner, and that the Clarion is like every other paper, and that there is no point in the settlement, and that you may as well strike and be done. And if you do that, he wins. He wins the paper and he wins the strike and he wins the pleasure of watching two hundred men do his work for him." She looked out at the room. "I am asking you to do the harder thing. I am asking you to keep your faith in the settlement until the court has looked at the paper, and in return I will give you something better than my word. I will give you the minute book. I will give you the register. I will give you my account of every payment for the last two years, printed in the Clarion whether or not the advertisers stay. If I am lying, the documents will show it, and you may do what you like with me. If I am telling the truth, then you will know, before we ever reach the table, that the man across from you has never once told you a lie." Afterward, in the cold outside the hall, Brogan found him and stood beside him without speaking for a while, watching the last of the men go home. "She is better at this than you are," Brogan said at last. "I know." "That is not an insult. You are better at the fight and she is better at the truth, and a paper needs both, and a trade needs both, and if either of you ever decides the other one is unnecessary, you will both be the worse for it." Brogan pulled on his gloves. "I have watched a hundred men come and go in this trade. Most of them wanted to be right. You want to win and she wants to be honest, and those are the only two of the three that are worth anything at all." "And the third?" "Wanting to be loved." Brogan laughed, a dry old sound. "You will find out about the third when it finds you." The room was quiet for a long moment. Then someone at the back began to clap, slowly, and it was not a cheer; it was the sound of men deciding something, one pair of hands at a time. Scanlon looked around the room, saw that he had lost it, and said nothing. And Cormac, standing at the side with his hat in his hand, watched her hold two hundred working men by nothing but the truth and an account book, and understood that whatever this was between them, it was too late to call it a bad idea. ---