Emmeline, for her part, felt so alone that it would not have occurred to her for even a flickering second that anyone in the world was thinking of her. Anyway, if there had been someone to tell what she had seen, up on the roof, she would have burst into tears trying to describe it. Perhaps it was right that she be here, she thought, and belong to no one. So she lay on the bed, and let the tide of rotten helplessness wash over her.
Thirty
The fire department of this city is woefully underfunded. They have requested for some time a few boats equipped with hoses to patrol the lumberyards on the river shore. Those who would save a few pennies in City Hall argue that the downtown is populated more and more by fireproof buildings, but these are really only fireproof facades cloaking wooden interiors, and we must pray that the claims of their builders are never truly tested.
—Chicago Evening Journal editorial, October 8, 1871
They were heading north, after several detours to avoid new outcroppings of fire, and approaching Courthouse Square, when they heard a sound like a giant anvil dropped from heaven. The nearby buildings shook, and bricks fell from high stories, and the popping of glass windows shattering from their frames was heard on every side. The blaze was so intense that in all the surrounding streets it was bright as noon. Fiona could no longer control the pair of horses. They reared and raced, so that the landau jerked and swayed, and she was thrown from the driver’s perch.
The ground smacked her face, and her hands smarted, but she was otherwise unharmed. The carriage, however—with Anders and Freddy still inside—was overturned and dragged by the frightened horses.
On any other day, an accident like this in the middle of the broad intersection would have brought people running to help or to watch, and police would have descended to clear the obstruction. But tonight theirs was only one of many overturned vehicles. Collisions seemed to occur by the minute, as wagons packed with the inventory of entire stores rattled past hackneys and wheelbarrows pushed by boys no older than Jack. A broken-down steamer lay in the middle of the intersection, and those people who were not consumed with their own escape stood gawking at the flaming ruins of the courthouse. Someone had thought to let the prisoners out of the basement jail—they were easily identified by their striped smocks—and they ran wild through the square, grabbing for the valuables that had been abandoned here and there. As Fiona rushed to see if Anders was all right, Freddy climbed through the landau’s window onto the street, holding the shotgun by the barrel.
“Idiot!” he shouted as he approached Fiona. He had lost his hat in the fall, and his hair fell, stringy and unkempt, around his face. “Why didn’t you stop them?”
It took a few seconds for her to realize that he meant the horses, which had by then fled into the night. The world was on its head, and there was no fighting nature, now—but such reason would have been lost on Freddy, so Fiona stared at him in hostile silence.
“Don’t look at me like that!” he screamed.
Frightened as she was, Fiona could not allow herself to be cowed. “Like what?”
“I will not be made a fool!” he ranted on. “I know what they say—Frederick, the fop, Frederick who can’t do anything right, Frederick who has no mind for business, Frederick who is useless on a hunt. They shall not say that Frederick flopped as a groom, too. That his marriage was a sham. That he chose badly and was tricked. You will not humiliate me. You will do what I want!”
If he were not holding a gun, Freddy’s wild and blabbering speech might have been laughable, as though the wounded and hapless child he carried in his man’s frame were suddenly free to throw a tantrum for all to see. Later, she heard of such stories—how, when the whole world went up in flames, many showed their true and ugly natures. Freddy’s frustration was making a comical mask of his face, and he came at them with his weapon, striking Anders in the face with the butt of the gun. Anders’s head was knocked back with the blow, but in a moment he had recovered sufficiently to give Freddy a placid smile, as though it had just been a little accidental push.
Fiona’s body was weightless with rage. “Don’t you ever,” she warned, advancing toward Freddy. “Don’t you ever do that again.”
She felt the butt of the shotgun in her belly almost before she saw what he intended to do with it, and doubled over in pain. Anders lost his taunting manner, and rushed Freddy, knocking him backward. If his hands had not been bound, she knew, he would have beat Freddy like he beat the man on Market Street, after she’d sold the jewels. But, things being as they were, Freddy regained his footing and put the muzzle of the shotgun into Anders’s chest.
“Would you like to try again?” Freddy had somewhat regained his composure, and affected the dry manner popular in drawing rooms. “I think I’d enjoy hurting something right now.”
Although Anders’s teeth were bared, he heard the ferocity in Freddy’s tone and heeded it.
“Good,” said Freddy. He reached for a cigarette from the interior pocket of his jacket, and crouched to light it with a live coal that had fallen nearby. “We continue à pied.”
They began to walk west on Washington. A tornado of wind and fire howled above the smoking skyline. “We’ll get ourselves killed going to Gorley’s,” she murmured. “The fire is everywhere now.”
“Are you afraid?” Freddy called from behind. Fiona glanced over her shoulder and saw that Freddy, some paces behind them, had the gun aimed at Anders’s head. “I don’t suppose courage is something your kind understand very well. That crown was in my family four generations.” Until then he had sounded rather reserved, almost mocking, but at the mention of the crown, his voice spiked. “I suppose you don’t understand that, either. What it is to come from a proud family, a storied family with great responsibilities, a family that stands for something. Do you know how many people like you live off the Tree family?” He cursed under his breath. “Not that any of them appreciate it, and I see you don’t, either. Common people who work with their hands, knowing nothing of their origins, leaving nothing for the next generation, ignorant of manners, refinements . . .”
Actually, in the days when they were new to the North Side and Emmeline had no friends, Fiona had studied manners and refinements as an explorer studies maps. She knew a few things. But Freddy was fuming to himself, and would have taken it badly if she corrected him.
“The ring I gave Emmeline for our engagement is from France. It was made by the finest jeweler in Paris, but you couldn’t comprehend a treasure like that, could you? A symbol of love and devotion. You just saw something that was easy to pocket, and turn into tawdry cash.”
After that, Fiona tried not to hear him. She marched stoically through the streets and listened to the sound of Anders’s feet as they struck the pavement. She listened to his breathing, sharp through his nostrils, and knew that Freddy’s speech infuriated him, too.
The heat was terrible. Although they had passed away from the inferno of the courthouse, and though the fire seemed to have blown north and east of them, the stones of the buildings they passed and the pavement of the roads they walked gave off warmth like metal tools left too long in the sun. It was not her city anymore. This was a new and monstrous territory. Instead of rain, gold sparks fell from the sky, and unless they were larger than a silver dollar, she was not even afraid of them. One such cinder drifted into the loose weave of her braid, and she did not heed it until Anders clapped it out with his hands.
“I suppose I’m lucky to have no family left to worry about on a night like this,” he said, and she suddenly felt very selfish for having made him run all over town to make sure her people were all right. He kept his thoughts to himself; he was sad, that she knew for certain. He couldn’t look at her, so she let her fingers slip down his forearm, and over his bound hands.
Freddy had noticed. “You like him, don’t you? He must be quite a charmer, to have deceived Emmeline—however briefly—and when she came to her senses and realized she would much rather be Mrs. Frederick Tree, co
nvinced you to whore yourself in consolation.” Freddy laughed his grating laugh. “And you might have been a great boxer! Now see how low you’ve stooped. Ruining servant girls.”
Anders wheeled around and charged Freddy. Freddy flinched, and his hands grappled awkwardly with his weapon, but before Anders reached him, he stopped short.
“Here it is,” he said. “Gorley’s block.”
The hordes had been through this place. A gang of looters rushed past, but the stretch was otherwise abandoned. Merchandise from furniture stores and dry goods stores, dress shops and furriers was strewn across the street, already trampled by horse hooves and wagon wheels. But the quiet was eerie, temporary. Soon the roar of flame would rush through here, too, like an angry storm.
Ash and cinder fell like rain over what was once a city, as though Chicago were the center of a meteor shower. Her people had become deft at knocking burning bits from their bodies, and glanced habitually upward, fearful of what might fall from on high. They hurried in all directions for information changed almost as quickly as the skyline, and there was no clear directive of where they could be safe. Maybe there no longer were safe places.
Like a litany, people said the names of great structures that were no more:
“The Opera House.”
“The post office.”
“The First National Bank.”
Rumors were contagious, but there was no longer anything that sounded too bad to be believed. A whole section of downtown had been destroyed in a matter of minutes. The State Street Bridge was thronged with frightened refugees one moment, and the next it was an arch of flame. Soon thereafter a brand carried on the gale found its way to a train car loaded with kerosene, and then the North Side belonged to the fire, too. The fire by then seemed to have grown its own mind. It seemed, almost, to know where to go. Later, it was known that only a short while separated the felling of the courthouse and the destruction of the waterworks. After the water failed, people were not sure what to pray for.
On the South Side, a soldier who was trying to quell the hysteria by the riverbank noticed the business leader Ochs Carter loudly demanding to know what had happened to the wind. He had emerged from a skiff, a ride for which he had paid exorbitantly so that he might avoid the hordes on what remained of the bridge crossings, and was furious to see that the wind had no clear direction. So consumed had he been with getting across the river, he had not at first noticed that the wind no longer moved exclusively north and east. Meanwhile, the whirl of fire howled, and stone turned to powder, and trees exploded from the heat of their own resin.
“Where’s it going?” Ochs Carter demanded of the soldier.
“Everywhere,” the soldier replied, shocked to have a person of such importance address him at all, much less in such obvious panic.
“To the south?”
“Everywhere. But General Sheridan’s coming, don’t worry—he will bring explosives from the army’s stores, and plans to blow up a section of South Side buildings to make a line the fire cannot cross, because without those buildings, it will have no more fuel.”
Ochs Carter seemed to shrink with this news. “Where?”
“He’s coming up from the south . . . starting somewhere along Michigan Avenue, I’d think.”
“What’s the fastest way to Michigan Avenue from here?”
“Oh, there’s no way, sir, it’s all burning between here and there.”
The soldier had never seen an expression as wretched as the one Ochs Carter wore just then. He would recall it later, when stories of the fire were being told, all the strange happenings, the way fine folk had been brought low. But at the time, the great man was just gone quickly, and there were other hard cases to worry about.
The rain of ash and cinder fell on Fiona and Anders too as they made their way slowly up Gorley’s block. When she was last here, it had been a heavily guarded place. Eyes had peered from every window, and Gorley’s people had threatened from every stoop. She wondered where they were now. As they passed the stonecutter, she gasped to see a boy of about Jack’s age, with the sweet and delicate face of a fox, lying on the ground, mouth open, a trickle of blood down his chin. A great marble slab, which may have come from the second story, had crushed him. He wore white kid gloves, and his hands still clutched the gilt candelabra that he must have stolen—perhaps from a fleeing family, or maybe from Gorley himself.
“Don’t look,” Anders whispered to her.
She nodded, but the image kept flashing in her mind, and she shuddered to think that that could happen to a child. “There it is,” she told Freddy, and pointed to the storefront with the plate glass busted out.
Freddy groaned in anguish and rushed inside.
Fiona and Anders, stunned to see the place so transformed, followed him. The walls, which had been covered in paintings, trophies, fine rugs, antique rifles, were now just a pockmarked field of hooks, nails, and holes. The case, which had displayed watches and cuff links and brooches, writing implements of rare origin, ruby buttons and sapphire pendants, was entirely emptied out.
“Where is it?” Freddy screamed.
Anders turned away from him, and tried to usher Fiona out of the shop. But the shot split their ears, and the transom shattered, raining glass over the already destroyed doorframe.
“Where is my ring? Where is my crown?” Strands of spit flew from Freddy’s lips, and his face went crimson. “What have you done with them?”
“They’re gone,” Anders said. Fiona was amazed at the evenness in his voice. She was shaking all over. “They’re gone now.”
“Get down. Get on your knees. On your knees!”
As they sank down, Fiona heard the terrible metallic shift, the click, as Freddy reloaded the gun. The smell of buckshot mingled with all the other smells: burning hair, burning pipe, burning sawdust, burning silk.
“Now tell me, which one of you would be most pained to see the other die? It’s you, isn’t it, Fiona? She was just a romp in the hay for you, wasn’t she, young Anders? She might as well have been anybody.”
Through this long night, this parade of horrors, this reversing of all goodness, Fiona had felt Anders at her side, his fierce gaze and light touch. But when Freddy put it that way, she couldn’t help but wonder if it weren’t a little true. Even if it were mostly a lie, that little shard of truth would crush her heart.
“In a barn,” Freddy muttered in disgust.
“How did you—?” Anders began. But Fiona did not have to ask. That broken lantern, which should never have been lit—Emmeline really had been there. She had, somehow, been in the barn. She had seen them together. The barn itself was gone now—it had been reduced to a thousand flying, burning specks—but the image of what happened there would still be solid in Emmeline’s mind’s eye.
“He knows,” she whispered. “Because Emmeline told him. Emmeline knows.”
“He doesn’t know anything,” Anders said, and the way he held her gaze banished the fear that he had used her.
“Very noble of you to reassure the lady. But you’ll die as you lived—a slum rat.”
The floorboard creaked, and Freddy sucked air through his teeth.
Every tiny thing screamed in her ear. The soreness of her feet, the ache in her throat, the sting of her eyes, the way the heat had made her underclothes stick to her skin, Anders beside her, his smell, the places on her body where his lips had been. In a moment it would all be gone—her city, her Anders, her Emmeline, all the yearning and secrecy, all the striving and seeking. She only hoped she would not have to see him hurt.
The shot exploded in her ears. A sob choked its way up her throat, and the color left her face.
But when she glanced at Anders, he was in one piece. Shocked, but unharmed. His chest rose and fell, and his gaze swung to meet hers.
“Put that down,” a man said. His voice, which carried from the street, became more urgent the next time he spoke: “Put your gun down!”
Freddy must not have obeyed, be
cause the next shot came from in front of them. Fiona raised her eyes to see, through the shattered doorframe and scrim of gun smoke, the familiar figure of Mr. Carter, wearing the coal-colored velvet jacket that he always donned for special occasions. His face was ruddy and pained, and he stepped into the shop almost without acknowledging Fiona and Anders. His eyes blazed, and seemed to see only Freddy, who had fallen to the ground. The bright red stain was spreading across his dress shirt, and his breath had become short.
“You,” Mr. Carter growled.
“What?” Freddy whimpered through labored breaths as he tried to get hold of the shotgun.
Mr. Carter kicked his gun away. “Emmeline Carter is not some piece of trash, some girl you bought to make you seem like a man. She’s my daughter.”
“No, I—but . . .” The garbled words were Freddy’s last.
Emmeline’s father faced Fiona, grimacing. In his hand he clutched the envelope, the one she had demanded from Gorley, with its itemized receipt and the fancily scrawled address of the proprietor.
“Mr. Carter,” Anders said, scrambling to his feet. “He’s dead.”
Mr. Carter shook his head. Blood had soaked the side of his trousers, where Freddy’s shot had nicked him. “He locked up my Emmeline. That girl who works in the kitchen—Georgie—she told me. I thought she’d be safe there on Terrace Row, while I got the key, while I showed Frederick Tree that we Carters are not to be pushed around . . . but I made a mistake. Oh, what a mistake. I could have gotten to her, if I’d gone that way immediately, but now there’s no way, no way . . . they’re going to blow up the South Side, did you know that? They’re going to blow up my Emmeline, to stop the fire. Anyway, what does it matter, we’ll all soon be dead. . . .” Anguish had made his face unrecognizable. “He destroyed her, my perfect Emmeline.”
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