Читать книгу The Mistress - Сьюзен Виггс - Страница 12

“Can’t go that way, miss,” yelled a passing merchant who staggered along, weighted by a stack of goods from his shop. “It’s burning worse’n hell.”

Kathleen acknowledged him with a nod, but ignored his advice and continued along Van Buren Street toward the bridge. She had gone this way a thousand times over the years, making the journey from the opulent prosperity of the North Side to the chaotic neighborhoods of the West Division. She always knew, once she reached the river, that the bridge was more than a way to cross the water. It seemed to span two worlds—the world that she’d come from, and the world she yearned to inhabit.

Tonight, for a cruelly short period of time, she had been there, in that world where she desperately wanted to be. Her brother Frank often teased her about her longing and ambition, and he swore that once she sampled the good life, she would find it as stale and artificial as faded silk flowers.

Frank was wrong. Her first taste of high society had been…delicious. Dylan Kennedy had made it so. Imagine, Dylan Kennedy singling her out for his attention, flattering and kissing her as if she were the most desirable woman on earth.

She wanted to savor the memories, but at present it was all she could do to survive the night. There was no use pretending she wasn’t afraid. She was. Everything she could see on the other side of the river was in flames. Wind and fire were one and the same, turning buildings and trees to dizzying towers of fire. The heat reached across the water, searing her cheeks.

Struggling against the crowd, jostled and buffeted like a leaf on the wind, Kathleen tried to pick her way to the bridge. The very sky itself rained flaming brands down on the twin arch supports of the span. In the river, boat whistles shrieked for the bridge to be opened on its pivoting pier, but the walkway was crammed with frantic people, every one of them fleeing directly toward Kathleen. They came on in a solid wall of humanity, and the fire behind them roared like a live thing, a dragon.

She fell back at the bridgetender’s house. She’d never get across here. Choked by frustration, she turned north, praying the Madison Street Bridge would be less crowded. In order to get there she would have to pass the gasworks, a frightening prospect given the rain of fire.

But not nearly as frightening as the situation she discovered in the middle of the street. A hail of cinders spattered her, and she cringed within her cloak. She stopped and stared at a police paddy wagon lurching along the roadway. A red-faced driver, his cheeks puffed out around a whistle, stood high on the box, his whistle shrieking. They came to an impasse, where the macadam road was blocked by stacks of crates and trunks someone had abandoned.

The driver and a man on the back had a hurried conversation, then unhitched the horse. People passing by took one look at what was happening and picked up their pace.

Blessed be, thought Kathleen. They’re freeing the jailbirds.

The lieutenant opened the back of the wagon, then joined the crowd rushing toward the north and east. Men poured out into the middle of the street. She recognized their striped garb, but even more, she recognized the harsh, deep lines in even the youngest faces. Their eyes were hard and darting, even when they looked up at the flaming sky and, suddenly aware of their freedom, dispersed like sparks in the air.

She did not know any of these men, but the look of them was familiar to her. These were the faces of men who had grown up as poor as she, but rather than toiling for a wage at the stockyards or a lumber mill or a varnishing factory, they had taken to crime. Some of the men had the very look of violence in their gleaming eyes and badly healed broken noses, while others might have been altar boys in church in their younger years. A body just couldn’t tell, she thought, keeping to the side of the street, away from all the commotion.

Appearances could be so deceiving.

She concentrated on forging a path through the smoldering debris to the nearest bridge, and tried praying through her gritted teeth. But the words to even the simplest prayer simply would not come. She did not know how to ask for all that she wanted—for her family to be safe, their home to be standing. Forgiveness for seeking beyond her means for a life not meant to be hers. Safety for her friends, whom she had abandoned in order to make the desperate dash across the city.

Some of the newly freed convicts started looting the shops and businesses that lined the street. They helped themselves to jugs of liquor, lamps, bolts of cloth, anything that wasn’t nailed down. Despite her understanding of these men, the pillaging shocked her, and she hurried faster. Even so, she was not quick enough to elude a heavyset, mean-eyed convict who shoved himself up against her on the walkway. He was a black man with a sculpted mouth, a bald head and a thin, raised scar under one eye.

“Let’s have a look at those jewels now, sister,” he said, his meaty paw reaching for her borrowed necklace.

There was no time for fear or hysteria. Kathleen had been raised in the rough West Division, and she didn’t hesitate. “Over my dead body, boyo,” she said, and at the same time, she brought up her knee. The mean eyes bugged out, and she felt the rush of his hot breath as he doubled over, wheezing, leaning against the concrete base of the bank building. Kathleen knew she had only seconds before he recovered, angrier than ever, so she darted down a side alley.

Away from the bridge. But there was nothing else for it. Too many of the convicts overran the vicinity. She preferred the unknown perils of the fire to the very familiar dangers of newly freed prisoners. She hoped the narrow, smoke-shrouded alley would lead to another westbound street, but instead found herself in a maze of walled-off mews. After a few sharp turns to the right, she became disoriented. She passed no one; the area had been evacuated. Stable doors hung open to empty stalls, the stores of hay fueling the conflagration. Only the occasional rat streaked past, seemingly as lost as she.

Suddenly a crashing sound ripped through the air. Looking back the way she had come, she saw that the walls on either side of the alley had caved in on themselves. A fountain of dust and ash rose from the sky. But out of the ashes came something…someone. A man. Staggering, wounded. She blinked and squinted against the stinging smoke.

There was another crash, and she lost sight of the man. Then the wind screamed through the alley, scouring the air so that, for a few seconds, she could see clearly.

He wore prison stripes and a look of hideous fury.

He had a bald head and a scar under one eye.

And he was hopelessly pinned by a fallen roof beam.

Kathleen wheeled around and started to run away, for the first time truly afraid for her life. After a few yards, she dared to turn and look. He fought with the charred, smoking beam, desperately trying to drag himself out from under its weight. With one arm, he reached toward a shadowy doorway. Bright embers and sheets of tarred roofing wafted down, setting fire to all they touched.

Kathleen hurried away, expecting to feel a rush of relief.

Instead, she kept thinking of the way the Negro man struggled, the twist of his open mouth. She imagined his bellows of pain and rage, drowned by the roar of the storm. She wondered if he knew how to pray.

And against all common sense, she stopped running and turned back. He was a convict, a thief and possibly a murderer, but was it for her to condemn him to the flames of eternity?

She trembled as she returned to his side, crouching down and tugging at the huge beam. Tears of hot sap spurted from the wood, burning her hand. She flinched, but kept pulling at the beam.

“Best get on out of this place,” the man said in a low voice.

She didn’t pause. “You can’t stay here,” she said. “You’ll burn like Saint Joan if you do.”

He managed to push one leg out from under the beam. His foot was clad in a cheap China canvas shoe with holes cut for his toes. His arms were still pressed to the ground.

“Can’t move,” he said with a rough sneer. “An’ that ought to make her ladyship happy.”

She swallowed hard, tasting a dry grittiness in her throat. “Hush up. I’m trying to help you.”

He eyed her with suspicion. “Help me what? Burn like the sinner I am? You done enough already, thank you very kindly.”

Realizing that she lacked the strength in her arms, Kathleen sat down in the roadway and pressed her feet to the beam. “Look, I don’t have time to argue with you. Push from below, and I’ll push with my feet until we move this thing off you. Unless you prefer to sit here and caterwaul like a bleedin’ infant until you suffocate.”

He seemed to respond to her sharpness more than her compassion. With a nod, he indicated that it was time to push. With him heaving from below and Kathleen pushing with both legs, the beam finally moved. Crawling inch by inch, the convict freed himself. Kathleen jumped up with a shout of triumph. Then, seeing that he might be injured, she stuck out her hand.

He closed his soot-blackened hand around hers, nearly pulling her down as he levered himself to a standing position.

“There now,” she said, “I’ll help you walk. But keep your greedy mitts off the necklace.”

“You’re no bigger’n a minute,” he said. “How you going to help me?”

She angled a glare up at him. “Didn’t I just? It’s not the size that matters,” she reminded him. “Come, and be as quick as you can.”

He settled a big, heavy arm across her shoulders and they started along the smoke-filled alley. Kathleen could feel him wince each time he put weight on his injured ankle. His bald head, shining with sweat, had a gash across the right side. Still, he drove himself to match her pace.

“Why?” he rasped, wheezing with the rhythm of their hurried footsteps.

She knew what he meant. “You’re a bully and a thief, but so are most men. That doesn’t mean they should all be burned alive.”

He coughed out a laugh. “I can name a dame or two who’d disagree.”

The injured man smelled, and he weighed heavy against her, but Kathleen just wanted to get the two of them to a place of safety. The fire pursued them like a deadly enemy with a mind of its own. The wind drove the flames to lick at their heels. They needed to find a place of relative quiet, where the air was at least breathable. They walked for what seemed like hours, encountering dead ends and blocked passageways. Sometimes the smoke blinded them utterly.

“Do you know where we are?” she asked the convict.

“Not a blamed notion.” He grunted as his foot struck a stray brick in the road. “My name’s Eugene, by the way. Eugene Waxman. Friends call me Bull.”

She didn’t have to ask why. He was as big as an untrimmed side of beef, and just as muscular. Her back and shoulders ached under the weight of him even though she sensed his effort to support himself as much as possible.

“Kathleen O’Leary,” she replied.

“It’s good we should know each other’s names,” he said.

Somewhere overhead, a window exploded outward. He tucked her head under his arm to shield her from the falling glass. When she looked up at him, she could see flecks of blood on his head where he’d been hit.

“Why?” she asked, chilled despite the heat of the fire.

“So we don’t die among strangers.”

But they didn’t die. They fought and struggled through the maze of streets and faintly, between the bellow of the flames and the howl of the wind, they heard bells. The courthouse alarm or a church bell, perhaps. They followed the sound, and finally emerged at an intersection overrun by people racing to and fro, encountering barriers everywhere they turned.

Kathleen didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. After all her struggles, she had wound up in Courthouse Square, not four blocks from the salon where the evening had begun so pleasantly.

“Shit,” said Bull, drawing out the syllable in disgust. The huge, gothic building housed the jail in its basement. “I just left this place.”

“I’ll save you from that monster, miss!” hollered an earnest-looking man. He raised a tasseled horsewhip high overhead, aiming it at Bull.

Kathleen realized that the man assumed she was being mauled or abducted by the convict.

“Stop!” she yelled. “Leave him alone!”

The earnest man retreated, shaking his head.

“Take off your shirt,” she ordered Bull. At the look on his face, she gave a harsh laugh. “Modesty is no virtue on a night like tonight,” she added. “I’d best find you something to wear that doesn’t make people so suspicious.”

He looked mortified as he peeled off the horizontally striped shirt. In the heated glow of the fire, she saw that his back was marked with a furious crosshatching of scars. He might have been a slave at one time, she realized.

Half a block farther, a flatbed wagon, overloaded with salvaged goods, rumbled by. She made no apology as she helped herself to a wicker laundry basket. Rifling through a jumble of clothes and linens, she found what appeared to be a man’s nightshirt.

“Put this on,” she said, tossing it to him.

She caught his look of wary gratitude as he tugged on the stolen shirt. It stretched taut across his massive shoulders but was far less conspicuous than the prison stripes.

Kathleen scanned the area, craning her neck toward the west. “I need to get across the river,” she said, thinking aloud.

“Best get to the lakeshore, miss. Nowhere else is safe—”

“My family’s in the West Division. I have to find them.”

“Be like finding a needle in a haystack tonight.” He gestured at the press of humanity surging through the streets.

She felt a twinge of exasperation. “I won’t be arguing over it with the likes of you.” She took a deep breath, wincing at the harsh, sooty flavor of the air, and started up the street toward the bridge.

But tonight, the world was clearly against her. She could not take two steps forward without being shoved three steps back. A hose cart crew rushed past, forcing her to plaster herself against a stone wall in order to avoid being trampled. An open tar tank from a roofing plant had caught, and the whole area was wreathed in flame.

A marshal in a peaked hat and long coat put a brass speaking trumpet to his mouth. “Clear the area,” he boomed. “We can’t save the gasworks. Clear the area.”

Kathleen looked fearfully at the gasworks complex. At least one huge gasholder blazed with eye-smarting brightness. Men with buckets climbed to its top, while others led horses away from the company barn.

“Why can’t you stop the fire, for pity’s sake?” Kathleen demanded. She recalled Lucy Hathaway’s politician friends, promising that the new waterworks could pump the whole of Lake Michigan over a fire if need be.

He halted, just for a moment, while the false light of the fire played over his grimy, sweating face. “Don’t you see, miss?” He was panting in ragged gasps. “We’d sooner stop the wind.”

She forced herself to accept what she had not dared to see until this moment. The very sky itself roared with flame. Windblown sparks rained down in a deadly storm. This was different from the other fires that had plagued the city throughout the dry season. In the summer, a good neighborhood blaze might attract spectators like a baseball match at the White Stockings stadium.

Tonight, curiosity had turned to terror.

“Move along, miss,” the fire marshal said, his brass buttons flashing importantly. “You don’t want to be around when the gasworks blow. See if you can flag down a hack.”

She moved out of the way so he could direct his crew toward the blazing Hinkler’s Stage and Omnibus Company. With a deepening sense of dread, she headed north to the Lake Street Bridge, ever aware that her options were running out.

She felt a tingling at the back of her neck, a presence, and she whirled around. The man called Bull loomed like a shadow over her.

“Why are you following me?” Kathleen demanded.

“You all alone and the city’s going crazy. Somebody might take a notion to grab you. Rob you, maybe.”

“A shocking idea,” she said, leveling a look of accusation at him. But she could not cling to her anger. She was too desperate to find her family. “You’re right about the robbing,” she conceded. Without slowing her pace, she unclasped the precious Tiffany necklace and removed the matching earrings and bracelet. She had a fleeting memory of Dylan Kennedy putting the earring on her. Even now, in the middle of mayhem, she felt a sweet, melting sensation deep inside her. She wondered why she hadn’t thought to hide away the valuables before. She simply wasn’t used to wearing anything of value. She would have put the jewels in her reticule, but she had managed to lose that somewhere. A bad sign, losing Gran’s mass card. It was supposed to have been her good luck token.

“Don’t look,” she said to Bull, and turned away.

“You just a skinny little thing, anyway,” he grumbled.

She stuffed the jewels down her bodice, grimacing at the sharp feel of the priceless stones next to her skin. He was a convict, guilty of Lord-knew-what heinous offenses. He had tried to rob her. Yet now, with him limping along beside her, bleeding from the head, she felt unaccountably safe.

The next bridge was impassable. Seeing it, she had a sinking sensation in her stomach. Carts, buggies, wagons and pedestrians poured across the span.

Bull said nothing, but she could feel his “I told you so” emanating from him as if he had spoken it aloud. Shouts and the clatter of wheels filled the air and she had to jump back to make way for the fleeing populace. In their arms, people carried the things they could not bear to leave for the fire to devour.

Some looked grateful to escape with the clothes on their backs. Others wore layer upon layer of clothing despite the heat. There was one old lady in a fur coat and hat with so many layers beneath that she appeared as swollen as a tick. One nervous, suspicious woman grasped at her valuables, looking over her shoulder and hovering over her treasures like a hen with a clutch of eggs. In contrast there was a man wearing nothing but a nightshirt and a silk top hat. In one hand he held a bottle of brandy, in the other a cigar. He sat calmly in a crowded hack, watching the mountain of fire beyond the bridge. A woman hurried past on foot, pushing a baby carriage. From the expression on her face, it was clear that everything important to her lay within the carriage.

Kathleen wondered what she would save if she stood to lose everything. And she discovered, with a flash of resentment, that the answer eluded her. She had nothing of her own, nothing worth saving. Unlike the woman with the pram, she had no idea how to cherish what she had rather than wishing for something different.

Her gaze fixed on a man clinging to the tailgate of a stout insurance patrol wagon. She squinted through the smoke and—

“Pegleg!” she yelled, pushing toward the street. “Daniel! Mr. Sullivan!”

Daniel Sullivan, known to all as Pegleg for his wooden prosthesis, lived in her family’s neighborhood. At the sound of her voice, he glanced around, craning his neck.

“It’s me, Mr. Sullivan,” she cried. “Kathleen O’Leary!”

“Lord bless you, child, so it is.” The man shifted on the cart. Crammed with too many passengers and driven by Commissioner Benjamin Bullwinkle himself, the wagon lumbered along at a snail’s pace. “Can you climb aboard, then?”