Chapter 5 A Bargain Struck in Daylight

Cormac waited at the corner of Rookery Row and the wide avenue where the printing district gave way to the shops, and he watched the heiress come toward him on foot through the morning crowd. She had done what he asked. No carriage, no maid, no velvet; a plain gray coat and a hat that any clerk's wife might have worn, and a pair of boots already smudged at the toe from the wet. She walked like a woman who was used to walking and had merely been out of the habit, and she did not slow when she saw the men on the corners turn to look at her, and Cormac noted that and filed it away. "You came," he said. "You told me to. I am capable of following an instruction when it costs me something." She looked past him down the narrow street, where the buildings leaned toward one another and the gutters ran black and the smell of coal and cabbage hung in the air. "Is this where they live? The pressmen." "Some of them. The rest are two streets over, in the rooms over the stable. You may come and see, if you have the stomach for it, but I did not bring you here for a tour of the slums. I brought you here so that the men could see you come here on your own feet." He turned and began to walk. "Whether they believe it is another question, and it will not be settled today." They walked to the Clarion building together, and along the way he watched her watch the district. She asked questions. She asked what a compositor did all day, and what a pressman breathed, and how many men the new machine would displace, and whether the men had families and how many children apiece, and when he answered she did not look away and she did not say *how dreadful*, which he had heard from charitable ladies often enough to have grown to hate the sound of it. She said instead, "Then the fund for the displaced men is not charity. It is a debt." "That," Cormac said, "is the first sensible sentence anyone of your name has said to me in ten years." --- They worked all morning over the account book in the empty newsroom, with the city editor Trafton glaring at them from across the room and the typewriter girls pretending, badly, not to listen. Cormac read the last column the way he had once read a suspicious statement, looking for the place where the numbers did not quite meet. It took him an hour to find it. When he found it, he sat back and looked at the heiress across the desk. "The machines were not bought with the company's money," he said. "I know. My father borrowed for them." "From whom?" "From a bank. Mr. Wyndham has the papers." "From a bank," Cormac repeated, "or from a group of men who also issued a railway prospectus and took a widow's savings and put your father's name on their shares? Look at the interest rate. Look at the date. That is not a bank loan, Miss Hollingsworth. That is your father's friends lending your father money so that he could buy machines that would cut the wages of the men who printed their prospectus. It is one scheme, and it has one set of hands in it, and I would wager my coat that one of those hands belongs to your Mr. Thorndike and another belongs to Selwyn of the Bugle." She was silent a long time. He watched her do the arithmetic on her own, without help, and saw the moment when it came out. "If that is true," she said slowly, "then Selwyn's attack is not an attack on my father. It is a warning. He is telling me what he can print, so that I will sell, quietly, to the man who owns the debt." "Now you see the game." "I see that I have been playing it without knowing the rules." She closed the account book. "I want it printed." "What printed?" "All of it. The contract, the interest rate, the men who signed it, the machines and what they will do to the men who worked them. I want the city to read in my own paper that my own father took money from men who ruined widows, and spent it on machines to ruin the men who set his type. I want it printed with my name at the top of the page." Cormac did not answer at once. He had spent ten years learning to distrust grand gestures from people with more money than he would see in his lifetime, and every instinct told him this was a grand gesture, the kind that looks brave on the day and vanishes when the first advertiser telephones. "You know what that will cost you," he said. "Tell me." "Thorndike will call your note. The board will turn on you. Half the city will read the piece and decide you are confessing to a crime your father committed, and the other half will read it and decide you are too weak to keep a family secret. The men will not thank you. Many of them will not believe you. And by spring you will be poorer than you are now, and the paper will be smaller, and the Bugle will print that you destroyed your father's life's work to make yourself feel clean." "That is a fair list," she said. "Now tell me what your piece will say, exactly. I will not print an accusation I cannot stand behind in a courtroom." So he told her. He told her about the tenement fire and the paragraphs that had been cut, and about the men in the assembly room, and about the fund for the displaced, and about the small rule that no man should be turned out for belonging to his assembly, which was the smallest thing anyone had ever struck over and the hardest thing to win. He told her that he would name the machines and the men who had paid for them, and that he would not name a single worker without that worker's consent, because he had seen what happened to men whose names got into the papers against their will. When he finished, she looked at him for a long moment, and then she did something he had not expected. She offered him her hand, as one man offers another, to seal a bargain neither had the power to enforce except by keeping it. Cormac took her hand. Her grip was warm and firm and entirely without shyness, and he released it sooner than he needed to. "Terms," he said, to cover the moment. "I write it. You print it whole. If your lawyer wants a word changed for the law's sake, I will listen. If your board wants a paragraph cut for the advertiser's sake, I walk, and I take the men with me, and you will have won nothing." "Agreed." "And one more. If any man of mine so much as lays a hand on you or yours, I will break the strike myself and send him home. I will not win this by making you afraid." "Then we understand each other," Cornelia said. Before either of them could say more, the door of the newsroom banged open and a copy boy burst in, out of breath, cap in hand, with the news that the men on the night shift had been sent up to clear a jam in the new machine and that one of them had gone under the feeder and that they had carried him out on a board. Cormac was already moving. ---