When We Caught Fire

by Anna Godbersen

  “Fiona?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  Under his shirt his skin was slick with a glistening sweat. Her hair had come loose, and her mouth sought his like she was hungry for him. He held her, pushing gently, and there was at first a pain that spread from deep down to behind her eyes; but it subsided and she felt only that Anders was so close within her that they’d always be together.

  “Fiona?” he asked again.

  “Don’t stop,” she said as he buried his face in her hair. “Please don’t stop.”

  “I love you,” he whispered, and did as she had told him.

  When Emmeline last stood in front of the old barn, she had been happy and young. Now she felt sick over what she’d done, and had no one to blame but herself. If only she had been braver, earlier, then she might now be full of reckless joy, she might be with Anders already, and not doubtful of his devotion. Anyway, what did it matter, what she had already done? She could only listen to her own insistent pulse and move onward from now. She could be just as true and sure of purpose as Fiona.

  Inside the barn, there was no light, but the air was thick and smelled of wood, earth, and straw. She heard a shifting of a body against the hay, and remembered the old cow, and felt afraid to call out. Anders must have been careful, over the days he hid here, not to be noticed by the neighbors, and she was hesitant to make any noise lest she, too, be discovered. As she moved cautiously onward she was startled by a distant murmur—it might have been a cooing bird in the rafter, but in her belly she knew the sound was human. Emmeline took an uncertain step backward, and her foot met with a metal object. She bent, heart-racing, suddenly afraid of who might be hiding in the dimness of the barn, and felt the lantern that Fiona had taken away a few nights before.

  Her hands sought for the matches, found them, and worked quickly to get the thing lit. Once the wick was ablaze she stood and went forward triumphantly, as though warding off a ghost.

  For a few seconds, she believed it was a ghost. The pale form hovered above her head, a being half flesh and half spirit floating in the middle of the barn. She blinked, and the being became two, and then her eyes began to see what was really there. Two figures asleep in the hayloft. The arm of one wrapped around the other as they lay partially undressed upon a blanket that Emmeline recognized perfectly well. It belonged to the Carter residence. The figure closer to the edge turned her face, revealing the dreamy smile of Fiona Byrne, not quite awake.

  The mad rushing that carried her across town was gone. Emmeline felt as though she were a mile under the ocean, crushed by its weight and certain to drown.

  No. Her mouth moved, but made no sound.

  She wasn’t sure if she could even make a sound.

  Her best friend looked so happy there, in the arms of the boy Emmeline’s heart had called for all afternoon, for days, and years before that. They were tangled up with each other, as though she—Emmeline—had never existed. As though Fiona had never been her friend, as though Anders had never proclaimed his eternal love and devotion for Emmeline.

  No, she thought, no.

  And no matter what she did her mind could not make sense of how this came to be.

  But it was, it most certainly was. And Emmeline, her bones fragile with shame, her eyes stinging with hurt, dropped the lantern so she wouldn’t have to see any more. She picked up her heavy skirts so that she could get away, as quickly as possible, from this terrible place.

  After

  Twenty-Two

  Let the Great Fire that destroyed four square blocks of the West Side and was still burning as of this morning be a warning to all Chicago.

  —Chicago Crier, October 8, 1871

  Anders was coughing.

  Fiona, eyes closed, smiled at this wondrous notion. Any sound he made would have pleased her ears. As her mind awoke, she comprehended that it was Anders’s arm thrown around her waist, it was Anders’s chest pressed against her back. Anders Magnuson, the boxer, beloved of the neighborhood; Anders who, when they were children, had taught her to climb up to the rooftops where the air was fresh. Anders—for months she had yearned for any glance from him. Now she knew that she had been hoping for too little, and her lips curled with the memory of what they had done. Soon they would be on a train, with hours and hours together, and she could ask him when he had started falling in love with her. They would be passing through towns they hadn’t known existed, and they could talk and talk until they were sleepy again.

  The train! Earlier, she had been aware of every minute before its departure, but her sense of time had become funny since that miraculous crashing into Anders. She fumbled for the pocket watch with the gold chain, but she was dressed only in her underclothes, and could not immediately locate her skirt. When she sat up, she, too, began to cough, and tears stuck in her lashes.

  The scene was purplish and hazy, and no matter how she squinted she couldn’t make out any objects below. There was a distant roar, like the chaos of a downtown street jammed with traffic—wheels crunching over refuse, whips cracking in the air, horseshoes clattering on pavement. But they were far from any street that busy. She blinked, but nothing appeared out of the murk. Another cough seized her lungs, and she doubled over in a fit. Once she managed to take in a full breath, she hurried down the ladder, finding her skirt on one of its rungs.

  The ground was glowing. A streak of vivid orange light reached from one side of the barn to the other. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks, but then a knot formed in her belly. These were flames spreading from near the door—where the lantern was overturned—all the way to the far wall. It was strange—she couldn’t remember igniting the lantern. But then, everything had happened so quickly.

  “Anders!” she called as she stepped into her skirt and tied it at the waist.

  He coughed, and leaned over the edge. His sideways smile played on his face only for a moment. “Oh no,” he said, and the smile fell away.

  The smoke was thicker than she’d thought, and it obscured her view of him. He pulled on his pants as he came down the ladder, dragging the blanket behind him.

  “Is there any water left in that jug?” she asked.

  “No,” he managed through another fit of coughing. He moved past her, pushing her gently toward the rear of the barn, and began to swing the blanket down over the flames, snuffing them where he could. A gloss of sweat clung to his shirtless torso. The temperature inside the barn had not at first seemed peculiar—it had been so warm for so many days. But now she noticed how the heat rose up and warped her vision.

  “Anders,” she called.

  He turned to her. She involuntarily covered her mouth with her hand, and felt a sudden panic that she would not be able to explain to him that it was not a little patchy fire after all, but rather a wall of intense heat that stretched from end to end, blocking their path to the door. The door itself was indistinct as a mirage, bent by the atmosphere. But he saw her panic in an instant, and revolved toward the flames.

  The blanket was all burned at the edges already, and discolored by smoke, but Anders set about beating the flames with even greater force. He went at them angry, like he was fighting them in the ring, the muscles of his back and arms taut, his feet quick. In a few moments the spot he attacked was blackened, and the flames seemed to retreat. Hope shot through Fiona—they could beat a path to the door. But then she saw that he had fanned the flames to his right, and before she could cry out to him, they reached the hay bales stacked against the far wall. Fast, so that it seemed unreal, the bales caught, exploding with sparks and embers, engulfing a support beam of old fir. The flames traveled easily after that—in a matter of seconds they had reached the rafters.

  Anders bolted backward, taking her by the waist as though to shield her from the heat with his body, and urging her toward the ladder. At the top rung she glanced back, terrified that they’d be trapped up there. The air close to the ceiling was so hot it singed the tip of her nose, and the smoke made her eyes run.r />
  “Hurry.” He was coming up behind, pushing her into the loft.

  Everything beneath them was burning. She had the sensation of staring into a large fireplace, which seemed, briefly, like a comfort. Then she realized that if they were looking down on a hearth, that meant they were cornered in its chimney. Her heart raced and she reached for Anders, wanting to convince him they must go back down immediately. But he was dragging the ladder up behind them.

  “What are you—”

  “We’ll never make it out otherwise,” he said.

  “But . . .” Fiona could hardly breathe. The old beam had carried the fire to the roof, where flames engulfed the old planks.

  The bottom of the ladder was smoldering. Anders threw it on the ground, and pounded the wooden ends with the sole of his shoe until they were out. Then he lifted it again and began to bash the outside wall with force. He blinked drops of sweat out of his eyes, and his hair became slick with effort, but he grimaced and kept on until a weak spot in the wood gave way, and he was able to bend back the surrounding boards.

  “Go on,” he said once he had managed to force the ladder through and down to the ground. She must have hesitated, because he added, “I’ll be right behind you.”

  The air felt cool and delicious on her skin, although she knew it was a hot night. They had all been hot nights as of late. It was only refreshing compared to the inside of the barn. As she climbed down the ladder, her skirt snagged on a shard of wood. Her eyes—shiny with terror that she would not be able to untangle herself, that he would be trapped within—met his.

  “Here.” He held her gaze as he carefully freed her skirt. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded and hurried down.

  As soon as her feet touched the ground, she looked up, but there was no sign of Anders, only the gaping hole in the side of the barn. Now the sound was unmistakable, a roar like a furious, shrieking mob. She was too frightened to call for him, and didn’t think he’d hear in any case. A few seconds passed and the pain of not knowing whether Anders was all right became too much to bear. She was halfway up the ladder when a shoe flew through the opening, hung in the air, and thudded on the dead grass below.

  Another shoe followed, then two more, two shirts, her jacket, and finally, to her enormous relief, Anders. Anders moving nimbly down the rungs until he reached her, pulled her tight; Anders grabbing fistfuls of slip at her low back, and kissing her as though he needed her to teach him how to breathe again.

  When they released each other, he brushed his hand over her hair, smoothing it with his fingers, as though in apology for the passion of the previous moment.

  She asked, “I look a wreck, don’t I?”

  To her relief, he grinned. “No. Let’s get out of here.”

  They dressed in a flurry. But by the time they reached the street, they had managed to affect the appearance of calm. Anders held her hand, and they walked in as unobtrusive a manner as possible away from the barn.

  The street was full of gawkers, their heads tilted to assess the flaming roof of the barn. Everyone shouted contradictorily about what should be done. No one took particular notice of Fiona and Anders as they hurried along DeKoven toward the river.

  “The firemen will be here soon.” Anders squeezed her hand.

  “You think everything will be all right?”

  “As long as the fire doesn’t jump to another roof. Don’t worry, they’ll get it,” he said, though he didn’t sound entirely sure. “Are we going to miss our train?”

  To her surprise, the watch was still solid in her pocket. The face showed a quarter past nine. Her step was light with relief. Her life savings was still carefully sealed in her jacket pocket.

  They might have perished, but instead they had escaped.

  She might never have told Anders how she felt about him, but now they were together, on the verge of a great adventure. She thought how she must be the luckiest girl in the whole city tonight.

  “We’ll make it,” she whispered, and they broke into a run toward Canal Street.

  Twenty-Three

  Once wed, a woman will tend to the feminine realm of house and home, where she naturally thrives, and let her husband see to the complicated and dangerous world outside their door.

  —Cressida Marr, Advice for the Young Bride, Ostrich Press Publishers, 1870

  “My great-aunt was called away quite unexpectedly, and I thought it was only right that I see her to the station,” Emmeline said as the hansom rattled along Van Buren. “Since she came all this way to see me married, and all.”

  The driver sat stoically on his perch and did not respond to Emmeline’s obvious lie. She had flagged him on a street by the lumber docks, a good distance from any train station where a society lady might depart in a rush. And even in the unlikely event that a bride of the beau monde did personally attend to such a mission, at this advanced hour, she would have certainly been accompanied by her own personal chauffeur. But Emmeline’s heart was strangely quiet and cold, and she was finding it easy to once again bend the truth to her own purposes.

  “It was a rather sensitive matter, with my great-aunt,” she went on some minutes later. They had arrived at the house she had wanted so much, and the driver stood waiting to help her descend from the cab. “I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention my little excursion to anyone.”

  “Course not, miss,” he replied too quickly to credit.

  “Thank you.” She smiled gloriously for his benefit, and handed him a ten-dollar note.

  Once he was gone, she let the smile fall away. She gave the Terrace Row house, which she had not thought she would be coming back to, a wary glance.

  As Emmeline contemplated the cold and impressive facade, Georgie went around the inside of the place, taking advantage of the mistress’s absence to investigate every luxurious detail. Of course, Mr. Tree expected her to be looking for Emmeline, but he was distracted by his own frantic search for his bride. So Georgie, having concluded that he would not find her here, went into the dressing room on the top floor and sat at the vanity to examine her reflection.

  She was pretty, truly pretty, with her dark eyes and long lashes and small, upturned nose. Whenever she looked at herself, in a fine mirror in a well-appointed room, she was reminded of this fact, and thought how she might, by leveraging her fine face and figure and sharp mind, live a very different kind of life. She had been close in England. And though it had gone terribly wrong, and been the reason she had had to leave in haste, the whole episode had proven what she was capable of.

  Such were Georgie’s thoughts when Mr. Tree burst in, his face all comical with panic. For a second or two, Georgie thought he was handsome, and that if Emmeline did not come back, he might be the one to deliver her from her temporary poverty. But then he stumbled on a little stool, and Georgie realized that he was precisely the same type as the future Duke of Langham, who had loved her for a season and then been bullied by his family into giving her up. Americans were more naïve than in the old country, Georgie reflected, and were blind around anyone who dressed flashy and was known to have money. They were not as quick to recognize that Freddy, like the future duke, was a fool who would never be good at anything, and was laughed at behind his back, even by the staff, and would always be dependent upon his family’s whims for status and money.

  Oh well, Georgie thought, and felt a little sorry for Emmeline for not realizing the kind of man she had married until after the fact.

  Freddy—distraught over Emmeline but not yet able to admit that he had lost his bride—was blabbering incoherently. After a moment Georgie realized he was distracting himself by accusing little innocent Georgie of having stolen precious family heirlooms.

  “The crown,” he said, not for the first time, “the engagement ring—you took them.”

  Georgie sighed, and stood, and gave him her most penitent face. “I am very sorry. I should have told you sooner. I noticed that your grandmother’s crown, and the engagement ring, and severa
l other fine pieces, were missing this morning when I was helping Miss Carter—Mrs. Tree—get ready. I’m just a kitchen girl, you know, but her lady’s maid, Fiona, was nowhere to be found. Isn’t that strange? What with the jewelry missing?”

  Georgie was relieved she didn’t have to spell things out further. Mr. Tree’s features twitched with rage. “Fiona?”

  “Yes.” Georgie nodded vigorously. “Fiona Something Irish. Byrne, I believe.”

  Freddy did a strange turn about the carpet, his shoulders flaring dramatically.

  “There was a boy, too. She had him hiding in the greenhouse. I did tell Emmeline that part, because I thought she’d want to know, but she said she’d take care of it herself. She seemed like she knew already, to tell the truth, but I didn’t want to go sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong. . . .”

  “A boy?” Mr. Tree’s eyes were shadowy, and his features were drawn down as though he were in pain. “What kind of boy?”

  “A man, really. Rough-looking. Handsome . . . if you like that sort of thing.”

  By then it was clear Mr. Tree’s anger had found other people, and Georgie was able to have a private thought to herself, which was that it was a true shame that one never came across rich, seduceable young men who had a look like that boy of Fiona’s.