第3章 An Heiress Comes to Rookery Row

The room smelled of tobacco and cold iron and the ghost of a hundred suppers, and Cornelia stood in the middle of it and refused to be afraid. She had decided on the walk over that she would not sit down. A woman who sat down in a room full of men had already begun to make herself smaller, and she had spent enough of her life making herself smaller for her father's friends. "You came alone," Kavanagh said. "I came in a carriage. The driver is on the street. Do you want to inspect him?" "I want to know whether you intend to stand there all night making speeches, or whether you came to talk." He indicated a bench. "Sit, if you like. Or do not. I do not care either way." She sat. She told herself it was because her feet were cold and not because he had invited her to do the opposite of what he wanted, and she knew even as she thought it that both were true. Kavanagh sat on the crate across from her and folded his arms. He was not handsome in the way she had grown up understanding the word, which meant smooth and barbered and expensive. He was tall and lean and looked as though he had been rained on more than once and had stopped minding. There was a small scar across one eyebrow, and his coat was old, and his hands were the hands of someone who worked with them and did not apologize for it. "Ask," he said. "Nine dollars to five. That is the part of your letter I understand. What I do not understand is what you want me to do about it. The company cannot pay what it does not have." "The company has it. The company has just bought four machines at eight hundred dollars each. That is thirty-two hundred dollars for machines while it owes its men three months of wages. The money exists, Miss Hollingsworth. It has simply been spent on something the company prefers." "On machines that will make the money back and pay better wages in the end." "In whose end?" Kavanagh leaned forward. "The machine does not pay wages in any end I can see. The machine pays *less* wages and makes *more* paper, and the profit of that goes to the owner, who then buys a fifth machine, and calls it progress. I have watched this argument in six shops. It always ends the same way, and it always ends with a man who has worked forty years standing in the street with his hat in his hand." Cornelia had come prepared to be lied to. She had not come prepared for a man who spoke to her as though she were capable of hearing an argument and answering it. It unsettled her, and being unsettled made her sharp. "You speak as though I built the machines and hired the men and set the wages," she said. "I have been in this city four days. I inherit a debt I did not make, a paper I have never run, and a quarrel between you and a man who is dead and cannot answer you. And now you wish me to believe that I am the cause of all of it." Kavanagh was quiet a moment. Then he did something she did not expect: he nodded. "That is fair," he said. "You did not make the quarrel. But you own it now. A man who inherits a house inherits the rats in it. That is not a moral judgment, Miss Hollingsworth. It is a fact about houses." "Then help me to be rid of the rats." She said it before she had decided to say it, and she heard how it sounded the moment it left her mouth — like a bargain, offered too early, by someone who had more need of it than she wanted to show. Kavanagh heard it too. She watched him hear it, watched something come and go behind his eyes, some quickening, some calculation, and then a wariness that put the wall up again. "Why would you want my help?" he said. "I am the man your father fired." "And yet the men trust you. I have just watched two hundred of them walk out of this room and go home to sleep on a decision you asked them to make. My father could not have got two hundred men to agree on the time of day. I need someone who can speak to them and be believed, and you need someone who owns a press. It seems to me that the two needs might be introduced." "You want me to stop the strike." "I want to know what would stop it. There is a difference." He stood up. He walked to the window and stood looking down at the street, and for a while he did not speak, and Cornelia had the strange sensation of being graded, like a schoolgirl's exercise, by someone whose opinion she had not intended to care about. "There is a man named Selwyn," he said at last, not turning. "He edits the Morning Bugle. You know him." "I know of him. He has spent the autumn printing that my father died mad and my father's money is dirty." "Selwyn has been printing other things, too." Kavanagh turned. "For three weeks he has been printing, in small pieces, with no names attached, that the Clarion is about to break its own men — that it will cut wages and hire scabs and stand beside the machine sellers against the whole trade. He prints it as rumor. He prints it so that when you do break us, he can say he told the city first, and the city will believe every word he ever prints about you afterward. He is not attacking your father now, Miss Hollingsworth. He is attacking you, and he is using us to do it." The stove ticked as it cooled. Cornelia sat very still. "You are telling me that the Bugle wants a strike," she said slowly. "That a strike is good for him and bad for me." "A strike is the best thing that could happen to Selwyn. It gives him three months of headlines and it makes your paper look like a scab and it drives your advertisers away, one by one, until the Clarion is worth nothing, and then he buys the ruins for the price of the debt. That is not a plot. It is simply the arithmetic of a man who wants your paper and has found the cheapest way to take it." "And you know this how?" "Because he offered to pay me to write it for him," Kavanagh said, and his voice was flat. "He wanted a piece from the inside. A labor man who would say the Clarion's men were unreasonable and greedy and led astray. I told him what I thought of it, and he told me I would regret it, and I have no doubt I will." Cornelia looked at him for a long moment. In the lamplight his face was tired and unreadable, and she understood suddenly that she was being trusted with something — that this man who had every reason to hate her name had just handed her a weapon and was waiting, with the patience of someone who had been disappointed before, to see whether she would use it on him. "Why would you tell me that?" she asked. "Because I want to win the strike," he said. "And I cannot win it against a man who owns both sides of it. Selwyn wants to bleed your paper. Thorndike wants to sell it. Neither of them wants to pay my men. You are the only person in this quarrel who wants to keep the paper and therefore cannot afford to let it burn. That makes you, for the moment, the closest thing to an ally I have." "That is not flattering." "It is not meant to be." He picked up his hat. "Come back tomorrow, and I will show you the thing you should really be asking about. There is a matter in the company's own books. Bring the account book your father kept, the one with the red binding. I want to see what he wrote in the last column, because I do not believe he bought those machines with clean money, and if I am right, then Selwyn already knows it, and the Bugle is going to print it, and it will not be your father it ruins." He put on his hat and walked to the door, and at the threshold he stopped. "Miss Hollingsworth," he said. "Tomorrow, do not bring your carriage to Rookery Row. Walk the last two blocks like a person. The men will be watching, and what they see will decide whether any of this is possible." Then he was gone, and Cornelia sat alone in the cold assembly room with her hands in her lap and her heart going faster than she had any intention of admitting, and thought: *he is testing me, and I do not know which answer he wants.* ---