by Susan Wiggs
She disregarded his insulting skepticism. “Their daughter Kathleen is in my employ as a personal maid.” She nervously curled the edge of the newspaper. “The whole city will be against them.”
“I reckon so.” He folded his large arms on the table. “Folks like to lay blame.”
“The O’Learys are decent, hardworking people. Mrs. O’Leary goes out with her milk wagon to make deliveries before most people are awake. And Kathleen is much more to me than a maid. She is my friend.” She fixed Tom Silver with a determined stare. “I absolutely have to get back to Chicago.”
He laughed humorlessly. “Lady, you’re in no position to be giving orders.”
She tried to keep her anger in check. “The O’Learys could be dragged into public hearings or official inquiries. Possibly legal action. Kathleen will need me.”
“She’ll have to do without you.”
Deborah wanted to scream in frustration. There was power behind her desire to get to Kathleen, and it was far stronger than her desire to return to her father. Being needed was a strong force, something she had rarely felt in her life. She believed with all her heart that her appearance at any sort of public hearing on the matter of the fire would help the O’Learys. It was one of the few benefits of being the daughter of the wealthiest man in Chicago.
She remembered the first day she had seen Kathleen O’Leary. They had both been ten years old, and Kathleen had been pulling a cartload of cream and butter along the boardwalk in Canal Street. Deborah had been in her carriage, forbidden to go out into the roadway where, her nanny insisted, the riffraff gathered. While Deborah stared idly out the window, a gang of boys had descended upon Kathleen, upsetting her handcart, stealing the butter and drenching the little girl with cream. They left her sitting on the sidewalk, as forlorn a creature as Deborah had ever seen.
She had managed to cajole her driver and nanny into allowing the Irish girl to come home with her, and there she had given Kathleen a bath and a clean set of clothes. The stern British nanny had protested all the while, but for once, Deborah stood firm. It was so much easier to stand firm on behalf of someone other than herself.
Rather than ducking her head in humble gratitude, Kathleen O’Leary had accepted the kindness matter-of-factly. Rather than weeping over her lost butter and cream, she convinced the Sinclairs’ cook to take dairy deliveries from her mother.
Deborah’s father believed French maids were the best—the most lively, intelligent and de rigeur for a young lady of the highest class. But Deborah would have none of it. She wanted Kathleen. “If you wish for her to speak French,” she informed her father, “she can come to tutoring with me.”
A week later, while Deborah paced her room in nervousness, her father had sent someone to convince Mr. and Mrs. O’Leary to let Kathleen hire on as Deborah’s personal maid. Right from the start, a special friendship formed between the girls. With no mother to share the secrets of her heart, Deborah shared them with Kathleen. Having never known what it was like to have a bed all to herself, Kathleen learned a new way of life. And so it went, year after year, their girlhood intimacies tightening into the mature bonds of womanhood.
Ah, Kathleen. So feisty, so proud, so diabolically clever. These histrionic reports in the press would be devastating to her.
“Did you never have a true friend, Mr. Silver?” Deborah asked softly. “Did you never have a friend who meant all the world to you, someone you would do anything for?”
She heard him take in a sharp breath.
“Well?” she prompted, certain he had no understanding of the depth of her devotion and concern. He said nothing, just sat like a rock.
“Read this bit, here.” Jack stabbed a finger at the middle of a newspaper column, clearly trying to divert her attention.
She had no intention of being distracted, but the words snared her attention. “‘Chicago’s leading industrialist and mining baron, Arthur Sinclair, is engaged in a search for his only daughter, Miss Deborah Beaton Sinclair, who was set to leave Miss Boylan’s School in order to marry Mr. Philip Ascot IV. Mr. Sinclair is offering a handsome reward for information about the whereabouts of his daughter….”’
Deborah pressed her hands together, closed her eyes and offered up a brief prayer of thanks. The fact that her father had placed the notice meant he had lived through the fire. Oh Father, she thought. You survived. Thank God you survived.
“‘Miss Sinclair was seen in the alley behind the Sinclair mansion in Huron Avenue. In the small hours of the morning, Miss Sinclair was found near Lincoln Park by Mr. Ascot. She was being most egregiously beleaguered by a stranger who assaulted Mr. Ascot, who described the assailant as a “great brute, better than six and a half feet tall, with wild eyes, long untidy hair, no whiskers.” Mr. Ascot reported that the savage might be of Indian extraction….”’
“That’s my favorite part,” Silver cut in.
“Did it ever occur to you,” she asked, folding the paper, “that you are performing an illegal act?”
“I went to Chicago to commit murder.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “You saved me from myself, Princess.”
“Your bickering bores me,” Lightning Jack said with a long-suffering sigh. “I am going out to have a smoke.”
Both Deborah and Tom ignored him.
“You’re an outlaw. A wanted man. I can help you,” she offered, leaning across the table, “but only if you let me go.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“Once you’re caught, you will be thrown in prison.”
“I won’t be thrown in prison,” he stated.
“What makes you so sure?”
“That’s not something that happens to folks like me and Lightning Jack.”
“You presume to know a lot about kidnaping. Tell me, have you done this before?”
“Can’t say as I have,” he conceded. “Never had the call to.”
“But your feud with my father gives you call,” she said.
His face turned stony. “This is no feud. He can end this by coming for you.” He glanced down at the densely printed papers on the table. “If he comes.”
“Your heart is made of stone. You have no idea what love and friendship and family are.”
Tom stood up from the table, and his broad shoulders blotted out the daylight. The expression on his face was pure thunder, and for the first time since he had seized her on that terrible Sunday night, she looked directly into his eyes. They were a deep rich brown. Dark, with lashes that would have looked girlish on a less imposing, rugged man.
And in that moment, she saw in those brown eyes a pain so keen that it made her flinch and look away. She didn’t want to know the source of his hurt, didn’t want to think of Tom Silver as a man who could feel pain.
TWELVE
Lake Superior was so deep, its color did not even reflect the blue of the sky. When Deborah leaned over the side of the Suzette to look at it, the wide, flat water was some dark, impenetrable steely hue that made her uncomfortable. The vast and empty wilderness gave her the sensation that she had crossed through the rapids to another planet far removed from anything she had ever known.
She took to sitting out on deck, even though the wind from the north carried the icy promise of the coming winter. She wore the woolen clothes Tom Silver had provided, though she had not yet thanked him and didn’t intend to. She finished reading Gulliver’s Travels and delved into a preposterous and powerful adventure novel, something called Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, which required her to sit on her hands to keep from biting her fingernails to the quick. Silver had a new copy of Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger, but after reading only a few pages, Deborah put it aside. She had no need to read a book about achieving the Great American Dream. She had only to consider her father, and she knew the entire story.
More and more, she knew the dream had its dark side as well as its light.
Silver and Lightning Jack believed her father’s mining company had caused a terr
ible tragedy. Whether they were right or wrong was debatable. But one thing Deborah knew for certain was that her father’s company was hugely successful, though she had only a vague notion of its day-today operation. Sinclair Mining maintained locations all over the northern Great Lakes. From time to time her father went on inspection tours, but she had never been invited. If she thought at all of the industry that had made her father one of the richest men in America, she thought of it in only the most abstract of terms—faceless workers tearing ore from the earth, taking it away to be smelted and then shipped all over the country.
They passed Copper Harbor on the tip of the Michigan peninsula. Deborah recalled hearing the place mentioned in her father’s business dealings, but that was all. She was vaguely ashamed of her ignorance.
With the best of intentions, her father had shielded her from knowing the nature of his business. In his view, women had no need to clutter their minds with vulgar matters of industry and commerce. She was not so naive as to believe her father was saintly in all his business transactions, but at his core, he was a decent man, and Tom Silver was obviously mistaken about his role in causing a disaster at one of his mines.
It was no use trying to convince him of her father’s innocence. Her hope now was that she would survive this ordeal long enough for her father to come for her and the authorities to deal with Tom Silver.
Dark-winged cormorants swooped overhead, diving for fish. Deborah put aside her book and watched for a while, feeling the chill wind pluck at her bonnet strings.
Something flickered on the horizon. Shading her eyes, she looked more closely and discerned a long, thin strip of deep gray-green. A sense of mystery shrouded the sight, yet Deborah instinctively knew it was land.
She got up and patted her thigh, inviting Smokey to follow her down to the stern deck. “Have you the spyglass?” she asked Lightning Jack.
He nodded and passed her the glass. “Do you see it already?”
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“Not yet, not with these old eyes,” he said, passing a hand through the white streak in his hair.
She stood up on a crate and put the glass to her eye. “It’s so indistinct.”
“It is Isle Royale,” Jack said, giving “isle” the French pronunciation of “eel.” A hush of reverence softened his voice. “She will reveal herself to us slowly, in her own time.”
She could tell from the way Jack spoke that the remote island was special to him. Often during the voyage, she’d had the urge to ask him—and even Tom Silver—about how they had come to settle on the wild island, and what it was they had found there. But she didn’t want to know these men any better than she already did. Instinctively she understood that she must keep distance between herself and her captors. The moment she started seeing them as human and individual, she was in danger of coming even deeper under their power.
“It is not just one island,” Jack explained as the dark shape dead ahead widened. “There are many small islands surrounding the main one. Many harbors.”
Bit by bit, the jagged shoreline of the island materialized through the pervasive mist. Flocks of ducks and herring gulls swarmed around the steamer. Smokey yapped wildly at the birds, running from deck to deck on the trawler. In the wheelhouse, Tom Silver kept his eye on the burgeoning sight of the huge island.
No longer needing the spyglass, Deborah put it aside. The island reminded her of a fortress, mist-shrouded and impenetrable, surrounded by a chevaux-de-frise of jagged rock outcroppings. Fir trees formed slender spires against the pale afternoon sky, and the breeze now carried on it the unmistakable fresh scent of pine. The birch trees gave off a blaze of gold from groves and clusters on the slopes and high ridges of the island. Bright orange lichen banded the rock above the waterline.
As the steamer moved into a deep, sheltered cove where the restless water pounded at the rocky edge, Deborah felt a clutch of alarm. This was a fortress, surrounded by sharp rock and icy water, and once she went ashore, she would be as much a prisoner as Rapunzel in her tower.
This place was so remote that perhaps no one would ever find her. How odd, she thought, her whole being filling up with fear and desolation. How terribly odd. The night of the fire, that very thought had occurred to her. She remembered thinking that a disaster of such proportions could divide families forever, separate husbands and wives, parents and children. Friends might lose track of friends, never to find each other again.
No. She didn’t believe she would be staying here long. First of all, she’d heard Silver and Lightning Jack talking about “ice-up,” an event that came in late November, forcing the islanders to take refuge on the mainland. Second of all, Tom Silver despised her. Not just because he blamed her father for a mining accident, but because he resented who and what she was. He called her “Princess” as if she considered herself some sort of royalty. He made no attempt to hide his scorn for the fact that she had been raised in the traditions and conventions of the very wealthy. He looked at her and saw something he had no use for—except as a hostage.
She had spent hours debating with herself whether or not to reveal the truth to Tom Silver. He believed he had kidnaped an innocent bride-to-be from the protection of her powerful father. In truth she was something else entirely.
She shut her eyes against the mystical, lovely scene of the long, deep bay, and her thoughts dissolved into blackened memories. With cold deliberation, she turned her mind to other matters. Now was not the time for thoughts of the past. She was arriving at her new prison. She had to concentrate on survival, perhaps escape. Tom Silver had seized her, snatched her from the flames at the most dreadful moment of her life, and he didn’t even seem to know that. Or care.
A man like Silver could never care about anyone, she decided resentfully. He was too gruff, too mean, too savage. He held nothing but greed in his heart, and he viewed Deborah as a means to feed his hunger for riches and revenge.
During the voyage, he had done nothing to make her change her mind. Even providing better food, clothes and a bath was an act not of kindness, but of control.
The two men tied up at a long, rickety wooden dock that projected out over a tumble of ridged rocks covered in lichen. A weather-beaten building that reeked of fish projected out over the water. Lightning Jack put the dog ashore, and Smokey raced along the dock to dry land, ecstatically marking territory everywhere he went. Deborah followed, showing considerably less exuberance. Her legs felt wobbly and weak on the unmoving planks. The pervasive mist muted all sound.
When she stepped off the dock and onto the island, a peculiar sense of anticipation gripped her. For the first time since the fire, she understood in the most concrete way that she had left her former life behind. A new exploration lay ahead. She knew little of expeditions and adventure, only that they were dangerous and inappropriate activities for a young woman.
She didn’t think Tom Silver would care whether or not he thrust her into danger and adventure. But perhaps here she would find someone who might help her. In fact, she got the feeling he would take great delight in subjecting her to unknown discomforts and terrors. If the voyage from Chicago gave any indication, that was exactly what he intended.
Hearing a tread behind her, she spoke without turning. “There’s no one here.”
“There is now,” Tom Silver replied.
Deborah watched Smokey scampering to and fro, sniffing out the lay of the land. Then he disappeared into the underbrush.
She turned to glare at her captor. “He’ll get lost. You’ll have to go after him.”
“Shut up. I’m not one of your servants.”
“You’re too offensive to be anyone’s servant.”
Laughing, he turned away to help Lightning Jack load a hand truck with supplies. When the hand truck was piled high, the men steered it along a path leading around a broad marsh and into a wooded area. Deborah followed, because she didn’t know what else to do.
She had the feeling she had tumbled down a hole to a
place where nothing was as it seemed. She walked through an emerald kingdom of towering evergreens. Paper birch trees formed stands of white columns. Sugar maples, aflame with deep pink and amber leaves, painted the rise of the ridge ahead. Huge ferns unfurled beneath the trees. Secret scuttlings went on in the underbrush, and Smokey reappeared. The forest floor, damp and fecund with fallen needles and leaves, muffled their tread.
The pathway formed a long green tunnel, and at the end, a misty light glimmered. Deborah trudged toward that light. The path ended at a ridgetop, and from there she found herself looking down at a…She wasn’t certain what to call it. Too small to be called a town or even a village, the cluster of buildings stood around a rough roadway formed of split logs. It was a settlement of some sort.
She glanced over her shoulder at Tom Silver. “Now what?”
“We’re here,” he said. “We’re home.”
“You might be home.” To Deborah, it resembled a desolate, foreign land. She scanned the log houses and clapboard buildings, pleased to see that smoke curled from nearly every chimney or stovepipe. She intended to form alliances with these people. Engage their sympathy. She would find someone here to aid her escape.
Leaving the men to struggle with the overloaded cart, she hurried along. The cabins and cottages were, for the most part, small and neatly if crudely built. In addition to the dwellings, there was one long, low building and another with a tall, flat front. Yet a curious sense of impermanence pervaded the settlement, as if the inhabitants of the houses might pick up and move at any given moment.
Smokey reached the settlement first, and was immediately set upon by a large shepherd dog. Deborah cried out in alarm, but she needn’t have. The scruffy little mongrel held his own against the bigger dog, intimidating it into submission with a snap of his jaws. Within a few minutes, both dogs loped off together.
The barking shepherd had alerted some of the people of the settlement. Doors opened, curtains parted in windows and a herd of children tumbled out of one of the larger houses.