When We Caught Fire

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When We Caught Fire Page 16

by Anna Godbersen


  Meanwhile, her heart was with Anders. The dusty barn where he had waited for her to arrive—might still be waiting, for all she knew—was more vivid than her own wedding. She hoped that he was still waiting, although she knew she shouldn’t. That was a cruel thing to hope for. He must have realized, by now, that she was not coming. At the very least, it must have occurred to him that this was more than a small hitch in their plans. How long would he wait? And would he be full of sorrow, or full of rage, when he finally understood that she had abandoned their plan? She had not thought of that. He might wander the street; he might not be careful of his safety. Gil Bryce might find him, and . . .

  “Please do smile, Mrs. Tree!” the photographer called from beneath his black cloth, and she responded with a mechanical uptick at the corners of her mouth, and held still until he appeared again. “Thank you, ladies, you may return to your dancing,” he said, dismissing Ada and Daisy and Cora. They rose from the places where they had posed, and began to drag their long, citrus-colored skirts across the lawn.

  “Is it my turn yet?” Freddy asked, approaching the photographer. Another gentleman, wearing a dun suit and bowler, had arrived with him.

  “Oh, certainly, Mr. Tree, whenever you are ready.”

  “Emmeline.” She heard Freddy’s voice as though from a great distance. “My darling.”

  Emmeline lowered her gaze from a few distant clouds—she had been wondering if Anders could see those same clouds from wherever he was—and blinked at Freddy and his companion as they walked toward her.

  Freddy pressed, “Mrs. Tree?”

  “Yes?”

  Her husband laughed through his nose. “You see, only a few hours of matrimony, and she only responds to her married name!” He appeared so pleased by this that she felt a little sorry she didn’t think she’d ever be Mrs. Tree in her heart. But not as sorry as she was for having given up the chance to be Emmeline Magnuson.

  The man in the bowler laughed, too. When he saw that Emmeline wasn’t laughing, he stopped and offered her his hand. “May I congratulate you? I am Felix Dray of the Evening Journal . . .”

  Emmeline nodded and removed her hand.

  “Mr. Dray is here to write a little piece on our wedding,” said Freddy.

  “We plan to run it on the front page, actually. A few details of the lovely ceremony and exquisite décor, the bride’s dress—”

  “And the groom’s,” Freddy put in.

  “Yes, of course, and the groom’s.”

  “And he wanted a quote from you.”

  “From me?” Emmeline replied faintly. She was trying to remember when the Evening Journal arrived in the neighborhood, when the boys started shouting the headlines from the corners. She imagined Anders hearing the news from a corner barker, and beating his fists against brick walls in fury. She hated that. Her mind went quiet, and she felt the terrible permanence of what she’d done.

  “Are you crying?” the reporter asked.

  “No, of course not.” Emmeline brushed away the tear. She could hear the seconds ticking by now, and she was finding it once again easy to pretend. “Only happy tears. You see, I’ve been overwhelmed with emotion all afternoon. It’s the most important day of my life, and there’s nothing about it I will ever forget. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy.”

  Mr. Dray scribbled on his small writing pad.

  “Mr. Tree,” she went on, lowering her chin and lifting her gaze flirtatiously. “Would you excuse me just a little while? The maid misplaced my engagement ring while I was getting ready, and we had already kept everyone waiting so long, but I am sure I can find it now, and of course it must be on my finger when we take our picture.”

  Freddy’s face was all smug contentment. “Yes, my dearest, you are absolutely right.”

  “Pleasure to meet you,” she said to the reporter. Then she crossed to the house, moving as fast as she could without drawing attention to herself.

  The guests were dancing already. The shadow of the house was becoming longer at that hour, but supper would not be served for some time. Emmeline should have taken off the enormous confection of white silk and lace, but she did not think she had the time. Instead she picked up the heavy skirts with bunched fists and half crept, half ran to the back side of the house, where the guests’ carriages were blocking Clark Street.

  “Fiona!” she cried, and all the chauffeurs who leaned against their vehicles in waiting glanced at her, and she could see that some of them were trying not to laugh. But Emmeline’s whole being was trembling with the terrible mistake she’d made, and embarrassment seemed like the very least of her worries. “Fiona!”

  “Fiona!” sang out one of the liveried drivers who waited along the street.

  “Fiona, Fiona!” chorused another. “Where are you, Fiona?”

  Emmeline’s face went scarlet and she shifted on her feet, trying to see if Fiona was there, with the cab, waiting. But she wasn’t. She was gone. The girl who had been Emmeline’s faithful shadow all these years had disappeared into the unknown. A howling loneliness came over Emmeline, and threatened to knock her to the ground.

  The band was still playing on the lawn—she could hear it even from the back corner of the property. Emmeline moved in the direction of the orchestra, the tent, the hubbub of a fete in full swing. But all that looked strange now, as unreal as a dream.

  Later that night she would have reason and time to again wonder over what might have been. How her life would have been different, if Freddy hadn’t been standing there, at the edge of the lawn, a little apart from the party as though he had been there the whole time waiting for her to turn and see him. Would she have found her own way off the property? Or gone straight to her bath, and never been seen by anyone ever again?

  But he was there, like the picture of everything she thought her life should be, dressed in his tails and tie, making a gracious little bow, and extending his hand for her to take.

  “Don’t worry about the ring,” he said. “We’ll hold hands in the picture, and no one will notice.”

  The sadness of Fiona’s disappearance, of perhaps never seeing Anders again, was overwhelming, and the prospect of a hand to grab hold of, any hand, was too tempting. “I’m tired,” she told her husband, sounding like a dull girl.

  “It’s been an exciting day, my dear. But we’ll just stay a little longer. Our guests want to see you dance. We will give them a little more of a show, and then I will take you home.”

  Twenty

  Tree Family Scion Weds Society Newcomer in Lavish Ceremony!

  —Chicago Crier, Special Late Edition, October 8, 1871

  At Water Street a breeze touched her face, but the air it stirred was warm, and made Fiona’s skin prickle and blush. The Illinois Central Depot was only a few blocks east, south of the river by the lake, but she had practically memorized the train schedule when she had helped Emmeline plan her escape, and knew that the next New York train was a midnight departure. That if Emmeline and Anders had missed the two o’clock, they could take the late train. Again, she checked her watch: It was not yet five o’clock. She had plenty of time to say one final goodbye.

  On the West Side, folks had given up doing work. The heat had not mellowed with the slow sinking of the sun. On DeKoven, they had retreated to the shade of the porch, and the street felt abandoned. In daylight, she saw things she had not noticed before. The wooden sidewalk was farther from the dusty ground than she had realized, and the alley that separated the barn from the neighbors’ shack narrower. Dry weeds crunched underfoot as she approached, but she glanced right and left, and saw no one who might be alarmed by her presence. At last she could not stand the racket in her own chest, and went inside.

  “Hello?”

  Bits of hay drifted in the fading daylight that shot through the roof in rays. Her blood was moving too fast; for a moment she was sure she’d faint.

  “Ah,” he said.

  She tried to make her eyes adjust to the dimness. He was on the far sid
e, up in the loft, lying on his stomach, his head propped up on his fist, like he had been watching the door a long time.

  “Anders?” she asked, although she knew him by one syllable of his voice. She would have known him anywhere.

  “So she sent you? Sent you to say she won’t be leaving with me after all.” He sounded so weary, she did not need to see his face to know what he had been through that afternoon.

  “No,” she murmured. She had not meant to keep quiet, but nerves cinched her throat.

  “No?” The word contorted with irony, as though he had no hope left.

  “No . . . she won’t be leaving with you after all. But that isn’t . . .” Fiona’s thoughts were confused, and she had to shut her mouth and try to remember what she had wanted to say to him. In a moment or two, she had the words. After that she forgot to be nervous. “That isn’t why I came.”

  “Oh?” He sat up, swinging his legs so that his feet hung over the loft’s edge. “Why did you come, Miss Byrne?”

  When he said her name like that, she sounded like a stranger, a stranger to both of them, and her heart tightened, and she wished that they were as familiar as before.

  “Because I love you.”

  He exhaled as though by force. For a while he was silent, unable or unwilling to reply.

  “I always have. I didn’t come to try to convince you of anything, or tell you that I am better for you than Emmeline. But I’ve always loved you, and I’m leaving, maybe for a long time, and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t tell you the truth.”

  “That night, after the funeral, when I . . .” Anders’s eyes searched the ceiling. “Well, I worried I’d confused things for you.”

  She shook her head.

  “I worried you didn’t want me like that. Because you avoided me after. I thought I’d treated you wrong somehow. Thought you were insulted by me.”

  “I hope you see now. How it really was. I’ve felt this way a long time, I think. It was just that I realized it, that night. When you—” Her pulse slowed, and she was there again, on the street where she grew up, with the wall of the Madigans’ place at her back and Anders’s nose brushing against her nose and the smell of his skin up close.

  But the Anders before her seemed far away. He gazed into the rafters, and the line of his mouth was tense. “But you always kept me off to the side. Since I can’t remember when. I always wanted to be where you were, do what you did, but you always had something important to take care of, something that couldn’t wait. Kate and Brian needed you, or you had a job to do. And then Emmeline came, and you said she looked like a princess, and I should be sweet on her so she’d be our friend, and you kept insisting on it, and insisting on it, until I was. Until I was sweet on her.”

  Fiona flinched, hearing herself described this way. She sounded like a cold little girl, the first one to disregard her own true feelings. Was that her? How it had been in the early days came back—slowly, and then in a rush. She had caught a glimpse of Ochs Carter’s daughter—the fair Emmeline—who even in the lowness of the neighborhood walked like a person of royal lineage. And what did poor, plain Fiona have to make the exquisitely blond and dainty Emmeline her friend? What did she ever have, except Anders? “Anyway,” she went on, wishing to forget all that. “I only wanted to tell you the truth. I am leaving. I couldn’t be Emmeline’s maid anymore, but I’ve learned some things, and I have it in me, now, to make my way in the world. I love you,” she said again as she turned for the door. There was so much more she wanted to tell him, but she added only: “I hope you will be happy somehow.”

  She faced the door, and the door faced her back. In a matter of seconds, she had said out loud a thing she’d forced herself not to say for half a year, and in speaking it, she had become a new person. But she hardly knew what this person should say, what this person should do.

  There was a whoosh of air, and a crunch of hay, and she imagined a stranger, lurking outside. That they were about to be discovered, that she’d be the old Fiona again, just like that.

  But it was Anders, behind her. He had jumped from the loft and landed on the hay-blanketed ground. “Fiona, Fiona—I can’t remember a time before you. It wouldn’t be the world without you. It got all mixed up. But it was always you.”

  “I have a train to catch,” she said stupidly.

  He was closer when he spoke again. “When does it leave?”

  “Midnight.” Suddenly the hours of the clock seemed like a strange way to measure the contents of a day. She rested her fingertips on the weathered wooden door, as though she’d push it and go out to the street. The hay made a soft sighing sound as Anders approached. He lifted her braid, and lay it over the front side of her shoulder.

  The next thing she knew was his lips on her spine, traveling upward to just below her hairline. “Where are we going?”

  She didn’t care anymore. “New York,” she said. “But . . .”

  “New York will do fine.”

  Her chest was ecstatic with breath as she revolved into him. When his bright blue gaze met hers she felt the smallest parts of herself begin to hum.

  “I love you,” he said, so simply and sweetly that she felt he had said so before, and this was only the first time he’d said it out loud.

  She was smiling with her whole self when she said the words back. “I love you.”

  Twenty-One

  In the heat of the fire, the true nature of the soul is revealed.

  —Reverend Swing’s sermon, North Side Methodist Church, Sunday, October 8, 1871

  “Where am I?” Emmeline was being carried. Her arms tightened around Freddy’s neck as she lifted her gaze to him.

  “Home.”

  “Oh.” He meant the place on Terrace Row. Behind them was the white landau with the red velvet cushions that he ordered especially for the day, and had decorated with bunches of white lilies. Her eyelids were heavy, and her tongue thick.

  “After the dance, you fell asleep on the bench in the kitchen, and one of the servants came to tell me that you’d had enough for one day. I’m sorry, my dear, I realize today was a bit much excitement for such a young lady.”

  She peeked over his shoulder and saw the lake, vast and lurid in the fading light, on the other side of an empty avenue. To her surprise she also saw Georgie, following along with Emmeline’s suitcase. Although Emmeline tried to catch the girl’s eye, she remained steadfastly focused on her own shoes as they climbed the stoop.

  A butler greeted them wordlessly at the door, and they continued up the main staircase.

  “Wait here,” Freddy told Georgie, when they reached the third floor, and took the suitcase from her hand. Then he continued carrying Emmeline all the way up to the top.

  They crossed the threshold of the master suite, and he set her down. The sun had streamed through the windows when she saw this room for the first time, and the view had seemed to offer up all of Chicago for her pleasure. At nightfall, illuminated by the gas wall jets, the ice-blue wallpaper and the pale oak furnishings appeared stark, and she was afraid to go close to the windows, for fear of discovering how perilously far she was from the street.

  “Shall I have your maid come and help you undress?”

  The word “undress” sent a shivery shot of electricity up her spine. “No,” she said instinctively. “Not tonight. She can help me in the morning.”

  “As you wish. I’ll go tell her she can retire for the evening.” He moved toward the hallway, tripping on the edge of the carpet as he went. He cursed, and stamped it back in place, as though it had been trying to humiliate him on purpose.

  “Are you all right?” she whispered, but he didn’t seem to hear.

  At the threshold, he said her name, and she lifted her gaze slowly to meet his. “You love me, don’t you?” he asked. “As a wife loves a husband.”

  Emmeline forced herself to nod. Neither spoke for a few moments, and she wondered if he was going to tell her that he loved her, too. Look happy, she admonished h
erself, but before she could summon a smile, he’d closed the carved oak door. Emmeline looked around the room, trying to remember how impressive it had all been only yesterday. But the magic was gone from the elegant furniture and extravagant decorations.

  The only object she found reassuring was the suitcase, the old black leather one that she had planned to take with her when she and Anders left for New York. She drew her fingertips over its surface and fiddled with the brass latch. As though it had been waiting for her, the latch sprung open, and she saw the items that she had chosen for a different life. On top was a folded piece of white paper.

  Dear Emmeline,

  I’m sorry to say goodbye like this. After I saw you go through with it, with something you knew wasn’t true, I knew that I couldn’t serve you any longer. I have been false too in my own way and must try to be different. Thank you for all you have done for me.

  ~Fiona

  Perhaps Emmeline had already known the reason for Fiona’s defection, but she shuddered to have it put so plainly. Of all today’s hard things, this was the worst: that Fiona should no longer be impressed by Emmeline, and was in fact so disappointed by her that she just walked off.

  The matrimonial bedroom that was to be Emmeline and Freddy’s looked as peculiar as a stage set. She could hear the seconds ticking by. How real Anders had looked in the ring! The memory surged in her mind’s eye. She wanted that, wanted it so badly she ached.

  She had gotten stuck comparing a life of prestige with Freddy to a life of adventure with Anders. But what she had lost was not really the adventure, but Anders himself—Anders who had loved her when she was just plain Emmy, and who she had loved with the same simple purity.

  If she did what was true, her path would be easy, and she would not be noticed going down the stairs, out the front door. Some guardian angel would make sure of it. Wherever in the city Anders now was, she would find him.

  “I love you,” Anders said again, and then he and Fiona repeated it, back and forth, every time with greater wonder, until she lost count. Then he crouched, picked her up below the waist, and carried her toward the ladder. They seemed to move too slow, and halfway across the floor she stepped down, took him by the collar, and pulled him onward, her fingers nimble as they undid the buttons of his shirt. He stumbled a little and caught hold of her, so that they fell clumsily against the ladder, and his mouth breathed into her mouth. As they ascended, he stepped on her skirt, and—not wanting to untangle herself from him—she simply undid the sash. They reached the loft, each grasping for the other as though they couldn’t stand being apart for even a second, and he laid her down upon the spread blanket. Through the thin cotton of her knickers, she could feel his thigh pushing open her thigh.

 

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