The Midnight Bride

A dew-kissed ingénue from the hinterlands, Jeanne Sterling, perches on a Central Park bench at gloaming, her gingham naïveté a lantern amid Manhattan’s sooty chiaroscuro. Fortuitously, Forrest Chenoweth—velvet-clad, champagne-addled, heir to a coal-and-rail fortune—lurches into her orbit, still clutching the marriage license he had blithely filed with Helen Dorr, a platinum-haired adventuress whose pupils glitter like mercury whenever banknotes flutter. In the hush between gas-lamp flickers, Forrest is spellbound by Jeanne’s lambent sincerity; within minutes he has cajoled a tipsy alderman—his poker crony—to swap Helen’s name for Jeanne’s on the parchment, sealing a union that exists only because ink is cheaper than conscience. Midnight tolls, champagne turns to ether, and the groom, half-phantom, half-marionette, tumbles down a mahogany staircase, neck snapped on a finial’s cruel curve. Morning headlines scream of ‘the Park-Avenue Corpse Bride,’ branding Jeanne a gold-digging Jezebel though she has not yet shed her country calico. Back home, her steadfast beau Robert Pitcairn—engineer of bridges and believer in banns—receives her confession like a gut-punch of ice. Meanwhile Helen, draped in sables of hubris, swans into the Chenoweth solicitors’ office claiming widowhood, waving the original license like a privateer’s flag. The alderman, threatened with exposure by his own black-sheep son (Helen’s co-conspirator), insists the marriage ledger is gospel and Jeanne a mere ‘footnote in fountain-pen.’ Reputations combust, stock prices shudder, and the city’s tabloids gorge. Yet conscience is a trick candle: under the vaulted nave of St. Anselm’s, the alderman’s trembling hand amends the record, restoring Jeanne’s name and toppling Helen’s cardboard empire in a single stroke of ink that smells of fear and absolution.