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“Sir!” Phoebe shrieked at a man hurrying past.
He swung around to face her, and even Lucy felt intimidated. He was huge, clad in fringed buckskins, with long, wild hair. Even more terrifying was the large knife he took from the top of his boot. Phoebe’s knees buckled and she shrank against Lucy. “Dear God, he’s going to—”
The wild man cut the leather reins of the team. A second later, the horses galloped away, disappearing into a bank of smoke along with the stranger.
“He—he—the horses!” Phoebe said.
“At least they have a chance now.” Lucy grabbed Phoebe’s hand. “This way. We’ll go on foot.”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort.” Phoebe dug in her heels. “I won’t get half a block in these shoes.”
Lucy was losing patience, but the sight of bellowing flames, marching like an army toward them, kept her focused on escape. She spied a flatbed wagon and hailed the driver, yanking off a ruby brooch as he approached. “Can you give us a ride?” she asked.
He snatched the jewel, swept his gaze over her and jerked a thumb toward the rear of the cart. “Don’t let anything fall off,” he said.
The load of rolled carpets, gilt paintings and furnishings teetered precariously as the wagon lurched along the road. The sky burned so brightly that Lucy had to squint to look at it.
She was doing just that when Kathleen jumped off the back of the cart and ran toward a bridge to the West Division. Lucy screamed her name, but this time it was Phoebe who was the voice of reason. “Let her go.” Phoebe coughed violently. “She won’t rest until she gets home, and we must do the same. Our way is north, Lucy. You know it is.”
Shaken, Lucy clutched her friend’s hands and tried not to wonder if they would ever see Kathleen again.
The Chicago River cut a line from east to west across the city before turning south, where the conflagration had started. The howling windstorm had fanned an ordinary fire into a holocaust riding a gale, moving with voracious speed, devouring everything in sight.
Lucy had never seen such a powerful force of nature. The fire smashed through whole neighborhoods at a time, destroyed reputedly fireproof buildings and then did the unthinkable—it leaped across the south branch of the river.
The wind was the fire’s greatest ally, driving the flames from rooftop to rooftop. Wooden shingles offered fuel for the blaze to feast upon. In the famous shopping district known as Booksellers Row, the buildings burned from the ground upward.
All those lovely books. Lucy winced at the thought of them being incinerated.
A towering dervish of flame reared at the end of the block, illuminating and then overtaking a throng of people.
Phoebe’s face turned pale in the angry light. “Did you see that?” she asked Lucy.
“I did.” As far as Lucy could tell, they were on Water Street, heading eastward toward the lake. She supposed that the driver would attempt to cross the river at the State or Rush Street Bridges into the North Division.
“The flames are moving faster than a person can run.” Phoebe craned her neck and shouted over the stacked bundles in the wagon, “Driver, do hurry! The fire is closing in!”
“I can’t go any faster than the crowd in front of me,” he yelled in a hoarse voice, ragged from the smoke.
The closer they came to the lake, the denser the mob grew. The river was choked with boats and barges trying to get out onto the open water. The taller ones couldn’t clear the bridges, and many caught fire as they waited for the bridges to rotate. As Lucy watched, a boy climbed the rigging of a sloop and scrambled up to the bridge, hoisted by someone in the crowd. But for the most part, people stampeded across in heedless terror, dropping things along the way, pushing strangers aside in ruthless terror.
Lucy’s father, Colonel Hiram B. Hathaway, always said that a disaster brought out the best and worst in people, and she realized that she was witnessing the truth of it—timid men performing acts of heroism, pillars of society trampling the wounded in their haste to get to safety.
Her parents lived in the tree-shaded splendor of an elegant neighborhood to the north, but that didn’t mean her family was safe. Aggressive, blustering and imperative, the Colonel, as he was known even though he was retired, had a public spirit that would not rest. If the city was burning, he was bound to launch himself into the thick of things.
A decorated war veteran, he was an expert in ammunition and explosives. This would make him particularly useful to those in charge of fighting the fire. The fire companies had resorted to blowing up the buildings in the path of the fire, robbing it of fuel. No doubt the Colonel would be directing the operations, his bewhiskered face ablaze with energy as he planned strategy to battle the flames.
In the midst of danger and mayhem, the thought of her father brought Lucy a needed measure of fortitude. Though he often grew exasperated with his outspoken daughter, the Colonel never treated her with anything less than respect. From a long line of old New England blue-bloods, he was a gentleman to his core. He’d attended West Point, married the most socially prominent girl in Chicago and had distinguished himself in battle at Kenaha Falls, Bull Run and Vicksburg.
But as she grew up, Lucy came to realize that his love and devotion to her and her mother manifested itself in a protectiveness so fierce it was stifling. The Colonel tried to shield his daughter from everything—hunger, hurt, ugliness. He didn’t understand that, in protecting her from what he considered life’s ills, he was walling her off from life itself.
When she asked after the state of his business affairs, he would brush aside her queries, declaring that she needn’t worry her pretty head about such vulgar matters. While her mother was ready enough to accept his patronizing ways, Lucy was indignant.
“For one thing,” she once said to him, “my head is not pretty. For another, I can decide for myself what is worrisome and what is not.”
Yet for all their differences, they shared a deep love and respect for each other, and Lucy said a silent prayer for her father’s safety.
Reflecting on the evening at the Hotel Royale, she felt more foolish than ever. Of all the social outrages she had committed, tonight’s faux pas had been the worst. When people looked back on this date, they would recall it as the night Chicago had burned to the ground.
But not Lucy. For the rest of her life, she would remember a far different disaster—this was the night she had brazenly propositioned a married man.
Chapter Four
“Did you see what Mrs. Pullman was wearing?” Diana asked as she and Rand left the Hotel Royale. Brushing impatiently at a flurry of sparks that flew around the hem of her gown, she added, “Her jewels were positively vulgar. She wasn’t nearly as vulgar as that snippy little suffragist you were entertaining, though. If not for her family name, she’d be a pariah, wouldn’t she, Randolph?”
Knowing she didn’t expect a response, Rand tucked her hand more firmly into the crook of his arm and scanned the roadway. They had only been in Chicago for a short while, so he was unfamiliar with the city. But the streets were laid out in a neat grid, and he knew they had to head north to Water Street, where Sterling House was located.
An express wagon rattled by, but the driver ignored Rand’s raised arm. A few hansom cabs, crammed with occupants, passed them without slowing. “We’re wasting time trying to hire a ride,” he said. “We’d best go on foot.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Randolph. I never walk anywhere.” She drew her mouth into the sweetest of pouts. “Let’s wait until something returns to the livery stables.”
He clenched his teeth in frustration. On the one hand, he didn’t want to alarm her about the fire. But on the other, he wanted her to understand the need to hurry. They had to get to their daughter and make sure she was all right.
The one option he never considered was leaving Diana. He’d sling his wife over his shoulder like a caveman if he had to, but he would never leave her. “We’re walking,” he finally said, pulling her along. “You can yell at me on the way.”
Diana apparently decided that silence was a better punishment. She didn’t speak to him, though she clutched his arm and leaned on him every few steps. Her fashionable, imported shoes were unsuited for walking any distance.
It was just as well she didn’t speak, for he wasn’t all that kindly disposed to his wife at the moment. He’d counted on her to stay with Christine. Instead, she’d grown bored and joined him at the lecture. Some men might have been flattered, but Rand knew Diana all too well. She hadn’t come looking for him. She’d come seeking a diversion from her boredom and had left their daughter in the care of someone they barely knew. Becky Damson seemed a fine young woman, but he had learned long ago not to trust appearances.
After this night was over, Rand decided, he would find a way to turn Diana’s attention and enthusiasm to the needs of her family. He wasn’t certain how to go about it. Some women derived fulfillment from their duties as wives and mothers. He’d seen it himself, though not in his own mother.
The memory ignited a bitterness in Rand that never seemed to mellow. When he was ten years old, Pamela Higgins had walked away from her husband and young son, never to return. Rand had been raised by Grace Tem-pleton Higgins, his paternal grandmother.
But his mother’s departure had left a hidden wound in his soul that he’d carried around all his life. When he’d started a family of his own, he had sworn he would never have the sort of wife who would abandon her family.
A blast sounded in the next block, and a fountain of sparks mushroomed in the sky. Whipping off his frock coat, Rand covered Diana’s head and shoulders with it. She huddled close against him, and despite their annoyance at each other, he felt a surge of tenderness toward her.
“We’ll be home soon,” he said. “I imagine it’s only a few more blocks.”
“That’s what you said a few blocks ago.”
Another blast ripped through the neighborhood, tearing the awnings from buildings and leaves from the few trees still standing. In the smoky distance, Rand made out a crew of militia men with a two-wheeled cart loaded with explosives.
“What on earth is happening?” Diana asked.
“They’re blasting away buildings to create a firebreak.”
In the road ahead, the fire spun and whirled across rooftops. His gut tightened, and he quickened his pace. His instincts screamed for him to run toward his baby daughter, but he couldn’t leave Diana.
People jostled one another in a mad dash for the river or the lakefront. Family groups moved in tight clusters—men with their arms around their wives, women carrying babies or clutching toddlers by the hand. The sight of the children tore at him. He heard Christine’s name in the hiss of the wind.
He thought about how casually he’d left her tonight, how casually he always left her, certain that he would return. Now, as he fought and jostled his way through the packed street, he was haunted by images of his daughter.
On the day she was born, his heart had soared. At last he had what he’d always dreamed of—a family. He’d created something enduring and true. That very day he’d bought two cases of rare champagne, packing them away to bring out on the occasion of her wedding. It was a sentimental gesture, though he was not a sentimental man. But Christine had found a place in his heart where softness dwelled, and he cherished her for finding that part of him.
Tightening his grip on Diana’s hand, he felt his wife’s mounting fear, heard it in the little gulping breaths she took. As he forged ahead, Rand bargained with fate: He would devote more time to Christine. He’d work harder to please Diana, quit flirting with women no matter how provocative he found them and find a way to make Diana more content in her role as wife and mother. If only he could save his child.
Everything came to a standstill at a jammed intersection near Courthouse Square. Too many streets converged here, and chaos ruled. Disoriented, Rand wasn’t sure of the way north.
“Which way to Water Street?” he bellowed at a passing drayman with a lurching, overloaded cart. The man didn’t look at him but pointed. “You’ve got three blocks to cover and it’ll be hard going. There’s a bad flare-up ahead.” A gap opened up and he drove his cart through it.
Rand pressed on. He noticed that Diana had fallen silent again, and he slipped his arm around her waist. “We’ll get there,” he promised, but a sudden explosion drowned his words.
“Look at the sky.” She pointed at the wavering, burnished horizon ahead. “The whole city is on fire.”
He led the way up a side street. In the middle of the roadway, a police paddy wagon had broken its axle. Swearing, the driver opened the wagon and fled while the conveyance disgorged a dozen convicts in striped shirts and trousers. Some of the prisoners swarmed into burning shops, but one of them advanced on Rand and Diana. Firelight flashed in his flat, dangerous eyes as his gaze traveled over Diana’s gown and jewels.
He raised a rocklike fist. “Give me all your valuables. Now.”
Diana gave a squeal of alarm and buried her face in Rand’s shoulder.
Rand pulled away from her. In an instant, his fear for Christine and frustration with the crowds crystallized into a pure and lethal rage. He didn’t will himself to act, but the next thing he knew, he had the convict shoved up against a concrete wall, his hand clamped over the man’s windpipe.
“Get the hell away from us,” Rand said, his voice harsh with a deadly purpose.
The looter gagged, clawing at the hand on his neck. Rand let him go and backed off, sick at the thought of what he’d nearly done. The convict staggered away and disappeared into the crowd.
“Heavens, Randolph, I’ve never seen you like that,” Diana said.
The breathless admiration in her voice did not please him. He took her hand again. “We’re almost there. Hurry.”
“I can’t see a thing through this smoke.”
Rand pulled her along as fast as he could. Buildings burned from the roof down and others from the ground up. People dropped bundles from windows and exterior staircases. A ladder crew helped women trapped in a tall building, and the rescued ladies scattered like ants when they reached the street.
“Surely Sterling House has already been evacuated. Becky Damson would have fled to safety.” Diana’s eyes streamed as she spoke between panting breaths. “Yes, Becky’s got a good head on her shoulders. She is probably already at the lakeshore with Christine, waiting for us to find them. That is where we must go—to the lake.”
Rand could think of no reply and she didn’t seem to expect one. He prayed Diana was right about the nursemaid. Miss Damson had been recommended by the concierge of the hotel. But Rand had assumed she would be an adjunct to Diana, not a substitute.
He ground his teeth together, for he knew if he spoke they would be words of recrimination. And what was the point of that, especially here and now?
The wind picked up, and there was no way to stay ahead of the flames. He could hardly see his own wife in the thick curtain of smoke. For a few detached moments he felt adrift, his sense of direction unseated by a force too huge to control.
Rand didn’t like things he couldn’t control.
He drove himself harder, pulling insistently at Diana, who by now was so exhausted that she lacked the energy to complain. He focused on one thing and one thing only—getting to Christine.
They passed Ficelle’s Paint and Varnish Factory, a long, low building that covered half a block. Firebrands rained down on the roof of the factory, and an ominous glow throbbed behind its small, square windows.
“I think we’re almost there,” Rand told his wife. “Only a block to go.”
Diana coughed. “I can’t see anything.”
“It’s just there, see?” His heart lifted as he spotted the distinctive dome of Sterling House.
Then a roaring gust of wind cleared the smoke like the parting of a curtain. It gave Rand a glimpse of hell. Sterling House, where he’d left his baby daughter, was engulfed in flames.
“No!” he bellowed, and for the first time, he let go of Diana’s hand.
As he started to run, an unnatural and toxic burst of white heat flared inside the varnish factory. A flash, followed by an earsplitting explosion, shattered the night. The detonation sucked the oxygen from the air, from his lungs, even.
The force of it picked him up off his feet and blasted him backward. The landing broke his arm; he could feel the dull snap of the bone, the stunning pain. Gritting his teeth, he dragged himself up and dove for Diana, who lay slumped on the pavement.
As he covered her body with his own, chunks of brick from the collapsing building rained over him. With his good arm, he tried to hold on to his wife and pull them both away, but the shower of bricks turned to a deluge. Rand could feel the breaking of his ribs, and then his shoulder was struck numb. The falling rubble kept coming in a thick, deadly avalanche, burying him and Diana.
No oh no oh please…The disjointed plea was drowned by the lethal crash of the building. Diana made a sound—his name, perhaps—and her hands clutched at him. Something hard and sharp struck his skull.
He had the sensation of floating, though he could not have moved amid all the falling bricks. There was no pain anymore. Only light. A hole in the sky, its edges burning, a white glow in the center.
And then there was nothing.
Chapter Five
“Look at that,” Phoebe said, indicating a building by the river. “The hose crew has simply abandoned Sterling House.”
The fashionable hotel’s distinctive glass dome glowed bright yellow as flames licked up its walls. In the smoke-filled street in front of the residence, a cart was reeling in its hoses and moving on.
“I imagine they realized they could never control the fire,” Lucy said. They’d seen so much destruction on the slow journey to the bridge that she began to feel as beaten down as the crew. “Let’s pray the building was evacuated,” she added. Most of the hotel’s windows disgorged mouthfuls of flame. But on the second story, a single window stared at her like a blank, dark eye.
As they drew closer to the river, she spied an elderly man struggling along the roadside with painful slowness. When a woman bumped him in her rush to the bridge, he stumbled.
“Driver, stop for a moment!” Lucy jumped out of the cart. “I’m going to give my seat to that gentleman,” she said. Phoebe opened her mouth to deliver the expected protest, but Lucy held up her hand. “Don’t waste time arguing,” she said, pulling the shaken, wheezing man to the cart and tucking a saddle blanket around him. “You’ve got to get across the river before the bridge gets even more crowded.”
“But if you do something noble, then I shall have to,” Phoebe wailed.
“Dear, you must stay with the cart,” Lucy said, accustomed to mollifying her friend. “The most noble thing you can do is hold fast to this gentleman and keep him in the cart. I’ll follow on foot.”
The elderly man shuddered and closed his eyes. Lucy put Phoebe’s arm around his shoulders and signaled to the driver to move on. Just then an earsplitting explosion knocked her to her knees. Phoebe squealed and the cart lurched forward, disappearing into a wall of boiling smoke. Someone shouted that a varnish factory had just exploded.
Lucy stayed down on hands and knees, trying to recover the breath that had been knocked out of her. Her lungs seized up, unable to fill. She was suffocating. Lightheaded, half-mad thoughts shot through her mind, but her air-starved brain couldn’t grasp them.
The firelit images around her left a trail through the night sky, like the tails of bright comets. The wind had an eerie voice all its own, keening through the flaming row of doomed buildings. Flying debris—paper, clothing, sheets of metal—littered the air. Everyone else had disappeared. The last of the stragglers had gone to the bridge and there was no one in sight. Focus, she told herself. She stared at a burning building across the way. She’d gone to the very exclusive Sterling House for tea a time or two, her stomach in knots from the lecture her mother had given her on acting like a lady, sipping her tea demurely, nodding in agreement with anything a man cared to say, keeping her scandalous opinions to herself.
She wasn’t sorry to see the last of that place.
What she saw next reinflated her lungs with a gasp of terror. The second-story window, the one she’d seen earlier, was now filled with flame—and a woman holding a bundle, screaming.
Without any conscious effort, Lucy propelled herself across the street.
