As I gathered up my things, I asked Mr. Cartier what he was planning to do with the paste version of the Hope.
“I’m going to give it to whoever buys the real one. I’m sure they’ll appreciate having it for the same reason I had it made, as a decoy. So many of our clients request them. I’m going to have a hard time, though, finding someone new to produce them.”
“Someone new?” I looked up from my satchel.
“Mr. Asher has left the shop and sworn off paste. It’s a shame, too, because no one was as good as he was.”
“What do you mean, he left the shop?”
“He’s going back to Paris to work for a friend of mine, a Russian jeweler named Orlov. I didn’t want him to go, but he said he was ready for a change. He’s never really stayed in one place for long,” Mr. Cartier said.
I walked home, feeling lost. Inside my apartment, the loss turned to anger that Jacob had left without telling me. And then the anger turned to loneliness. But I was used to that, wasn’t I?
I considered this notion of fortune that I and so many others I knew had been fixated on for months. Was it good luck that Jacob had survived the robbery, or bad luck that he’d been hurt? Good luck that I had met him and had even those brief moments with him, or bad luck that I had failed so miserably?
I couldn’t help but wonder if Mr. Oxley was thinking about luck that night, too. If he’d thought about it after leaving Mr. Cartier’s office when his plan had backfired and mine had succeeded.
And I wondered about it again a week later.
I had gone to the World office to meet with Ronald Nevins and talk about going back to full-time reporting. I was ready to work for a real newspaper, not a rag like Oxley’s. And as a return offering, I had the Oxley exposé in my bag. Mr. Cartier had given me carte blanche to publicly unmask the publisher’s scheme using the jeweler’s story as the main example.
As I walked through the World’s city room, I smelled the welcoming scent of fresh ink, stale cigarette smoke, and energy. I said hello to the reporters I passed, stopping to exchange a few words with those I knew best. I was thankful for their heartfelt welcomes. I hadn’t realized until then how much I’d missed the camaraderie of being on staff during the long, sad months I’d been away.
I’d felt even more lost than usual for the last eight days since learning that Jacob had gone to Europe, but that morning, with each step I took toward Mr. Nevins’s office, the more it seemed I was on the right path and back where I belonged.
Mr. Nevins looked up when I knocked on the door, smiled, and waved me in. His desk was filled with papers, and he had a pencil in his hand.
“Have a seat, Miss Swann. Let me just finish proofing this story, and I’ll be right with you.”
As I sat down, I glanced at what he was working on. I could read the headline upside down.
Thelonious Oxley Dead at 72.
Chills went up and down my arms.
“Mr. Oxley is dead?” I blurted out. “But I have an article about him. I was bringing it to you. An exposé.”
Mr. Nevins looked up. “He died of food poisoning last night. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want your story. I know it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, but he was a bastard.” He held out his hand.
I opened my satchel, retrieved the piece I’d been working on, and handed it over to him.
“I think this will be a perfect follow-up to the story you’re going to write covering his funeral,” he said after skimming it. “Do you think you’re up for that?” he asked with a discernible twinkle in his eye.
“Does that mean you’re taking me back?”
“That was never in question, Miss Swann. So tell me, do you have any ideas for what you’d like to tackle next?”
“More pieces on the garment industry’s factory conditions for women workers. Too many establishments like the Triangle Shirtwaist Company are ignoring basic safety conditions and putting their employees at risk every day.”
I managed to put Mr. Oxley’s death out of my mind while Mr. Nevins and I worked out the details of my return to the newsroom. But after my meeting, as I walked back uptown, I couldn’t help thinking about the magazine mogul. I kept picturing him the week before, grabbing the fake Hope Diamond with all that false bravado.
I wondered if he thought about that moment when he suddenly felt so ill he had to call for help. If he thought about it in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. How ironic that he’d died from food poisoning—the very cover- up for my own uncle’s death. If I could have asked Thelonious Oxley anything while he lay dying, it would have been if he believed that touching the Hope Diamond had brought him the bad luck that had felled him. Or if it was something much more substantial than luck, if it was his own need for power, his own greed, and his own actions that had destroyed him.