Susan Wiggs Great Chicago Fire Trilogy Complete Collection

by Susan Wiggs

  Alice turned, her thick strong arms forming wings as she set her hands on her hips. “What do you mean?”

  “I want to help you with the work. I’d not expect any pay,” she added hastily. “I simply wish to do something useful around here.”

  Henry gawked at her. “This ain’t no work for a lady,” he pointed out.

  “Your wife does it every day,” said Deborah.

  “Aye, but she’s no—” With belated diplomacy, he broke off before he got his ears boxed.

  “I’d be grateful if you’d show me how to do that,” she said.

  Anna and Alice motioned her over. “Here’s a barrow full of fish. You wheel it into the plant and dump it into the processing trough. When everything’s in, we’ll show you how to dress the fish for transport.”

  Deborah was certain that “dressing the fish” didn’t mean what it sounded like. She gripped the handles of the barrow and took it inside. Already the work was harder than she had imagined. Who would have thought a barrow with one wheel would be so unstable? She wobbled and wove as she staggered along the dock. At one point she strayed almost fatally close to the edge, nearly dumping her load back into the lake. In the nick of time, she managed to angle away from the edge and made it inside the warehouse.

  Then the wheel of the barrow caught on something, and before Deborah could stop it, the load twisted to one side and then sank inevitably to the floor. Silver trout squirmed across the knotty planks. “Eek,” she cried, jumping back in horror of the half-dead, flopping fish.

  Anna stepped into the doorway and muttered something in Norwegian. She picked up a large, scoop-shaped shovel and scraped the fish into a pile. Then she handed the shovel to Deborah. “Accidents happen,” she said, not unkindly. “Here you go. Scoop them back into the barrow and get them over there.” She pointed at a long plank table.

  Deborah gritted her teeth and took up the shovel. How hard could it be? she asked herself. How hard could it be to dress, weigh and pack the trout in boxes?

  The fishermen and the women got down to work. Alice stood next to Deborah and the heap of long silvery trout. “So here is the way of it,” Alice said. She grasped a fish in one hand and a slender-bladed fillet knife in the other and slit the trout along the belly. Deborah forced herself to watch, study, to imagine against all odds that she herself could do this.

  Alice showed her how to gut the fish, taking care to toss the trout heart to the corner of the table. “The little ones,” she said with a smile, “they like to fish for sculpins under the dock.”

  A small girl with a shy smile and a missing tooth grabbed the slimy heart and ran outside to bait her hook.

  Deborah swallowed hard. A cold, clammy sweat broke out on her forehead. Alice sent her a knowing grin. “That’s the way Mama looks when she’s expecting.” She rinsed the fish and tossed it lengthwise into a wooden crate on the scale. “Hundred pounds to the box,” she said. “Then we chop the ice and put it over the fish, nail the box shut. This’ll go to the fish companies in Duluth.”

  Deborah perked up. “How does the catch get to Duluth?”

  “Steamer out of Grace Harbor, usually. Grace is up island a ways.”

  A week ago, Deborah would have been desperate to find the place called Grace Harbor, to beg transport to Duluth. But now she had no reason for haste. Now her father didn’t want her back.

  Alice held out a knife, handle first. “Ready to try cleaning your first fish?”

  Deborah gulped back her revulsion and took the fillet knife. “I might need some help,” she admitted.

  “I’ll help you.”

  Deborah eyed the pile of fish and gingerly picked one up by the tail, holding it delicately between thumb and forefinger. The thing was a lot heavier than it looked.

  “Lay it on its side and take a good grip on it,” Alice advised. “Like so.” She grasped a fish and demonstrated.

  Deborah forced herself to do the same, pressing her splayed hand on the fish. Its flesh felt cold and slick, and she could not tell whether it was still alive. Dead, she told herself firmly. The fish was dead, as dead as the truite au bleu she ordered at Sheppard’s Restaurant on Michigan Avenue.

  To her horror, the fish moved beneath her hand. With a yelp, Deborah jumped back.

  Alice calmly picked up a wooden mallet and whacked its head. “There,” she said. “It’ll hold still now.”

  Deborah would not let herself look the trout in the eye as she followed Alice’s instructions. She laid the fish down on the plank and pressed her palm upon its side, then used the knife to make the incision.

  Except that it wouldn’t cut into the fish. Alice’s blade had sliced smoothly and cleanly along the fish belly, but Deborah’s slid uselessly along, removing nothing but a couple of scales.

  “You have to cut in,” Alice advised. “Cut deep. When you think it’s deep enough, you’re probably halfway there.”

  Deborah felt runnels of sweat course down her neck. Here it was November, and she was sweating in a cold fish house. “Deeper,” she said under her breath, and tried again. And again. The third or fourth time, she managed to make a slit in the fish belly.

  “Try not to be timid,” Alice said. “Try not to hesitate, there you are.”

  As Alice spoke, Deborah’s knife made a deep, long cut, and she found what she sought: fish guts. She gave a little scream as the innards spilled. Without saying a word, Alice handed her the scraper.

  I can do this, Deborah told herself between gritted teeth. I must do this. She wasn’t sure why, but it was something she needed to do.

  “None of us knew a thing about working the fish house before the summer,” Alice said, seeming to read Deborah’s thoughts. “We left it all to the menfolk.”

  “You had to learn to work here after the mine started up, didn’t you?” asked Deborah. It helped to talk as she worked, though she knew the conversation was headed to a place of discomfort.

  Alice nodded, tossing a cleaned fish into the box. “The hired men took off. Mining company promised them better wages. Never did get it, on account of the explosion.” She worked in silence for a while. Deborah did better on her second fish, yet the guts made her nearly faint with revulsion.

  “Made us all sick, too,” Alice said, giving her a sideways glance. “Worse than dressing a chicken, you know?”

  Deborah didn’t know, so she said nothing.

  “When the hired men left, there was nothing else for it but for us to pitch in. So here we are. Not the best shorework I can think of, but we’ll get along ’til the season ends.”

  Deborah rinsed a fish and added it to the box. “You must be looking forward to winter.”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  The big woman shrugged. “Here on the island, I know my place. Know where I fit in. Off island, I always feel a bit lost.”

  “Then you know how I feel on the island.”

  * * *

  Tom was sure the afternoon in the fish house would defeat Deborah entirely. He worked on building a new set of shelves for the trading post, but kept one eye out for his hostage. He expected her to come running back, horrified by doing actual work for the first time in her life.

  An hour passed, then two, then three. And still he saw no sign of her. He found himself wandering, with elaborate casualness, out along the boardwalk, trying to catch a glimpse of her. Down at the dock, the scene at the fish house appeared as it did every single day the boats went out. Men washing down the docks, cleaning seines. Others moving the iced-down fish to the small warehouse for transport. A few children running here and there, lying belly-down on the dock as they gigged for suckers and specs.

  After a while, curiosity got the better of him. He walked down to the fish house. Jens Eckel, a fisherman who planned to retire at season’s end, sat on a barrel smoking his pipe and asking the usual questions—How was the wind? How many fathoms deep were the fish?—as the women worked at the long plank tables.

  For a moment
, Tom didn’t recognize Deborah. She wore a big oilskin apron and tall rubber boots, a kerchief over her hair. Her arms were red to the elbows with fish guts and her face was paper white.

  Against his will, Tom felt a flash of emotion for her. Pity, he told himself. That was it. Pity, maybe tinged with reluctant admiration. He had dragged her from a millionaire’s mansion to an Isle Royale fish house. A lesser woman would have curled up into a ball and given way to despair. Instead she seemed determined to prove that Arthur Sinclair’s daughter could meet any challenge. Sinclair didn’t deserve her.

  “Hey, Tom, how is it with you?” asked Jens in his subtle Nordic accent.

  Deborah turned sharply from the plank table. She said nothing but went back to work as if she hadn’t seen him.

  “Thought I’d buy a fish for the table tonight,” he said. “Looks as though you can spare one.”

  “That’s a fact,” Jens agreed, taking Tom’s coin. “Help yourself.”

  He deliberately selected the fish Deborah had just cleaned. “Hope you didn’t make friends with this one.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’d give new meaning to having a friend for supper.”

  “I will never let a bite of fish pass my mouth,” she vowed.

  “Everyone says that at first. You’ll get over it.”

  “I won’t. I swear I won’t.” She turned away and pulled another trout off the pile.

  Chuckling, Tom went back up the hill to the post.

  * * *

  There was an expression Deborah had heard often enough in her life, but never had she pondered its meaning. Bone-weary. Laborers often claimed the affliction. The occasional traveler, delayed on a long train trip, might make use of it. Anyone who worked long and hard was qualified to make the declaration. “Sure and I’m bone-weary entirely,” Kathleen O’Leary used to say. “Thought I’d never see the end of the ironing.”

  Now, at this late stage in her life, Deborah finally understood. Bone-weary meant you had worked so hard that the hurt and fatigue of all the hours of labor had worked into the very center of your shoulders, neck, back, legs and feet—into your deepest marrow. It meant a dull ringing in your head, because your head was weary too. There was no pain, not particularly, although she had cut and scratched herself repeatedly throughout the day. This went beyond pain. This went into the realm of numb shock, not so very different from the way she had felt in the aftermath of the great fire.

  Somewhere along the way she had come to think of the laboring classes as mental dullards who were capable only of menial work. Now she knew how foolish she had been. Menial work had its own challenges and she was woefully unprepared for them.

  Yet at her very center, she felt quietly triumphant as she trudged up the hill from the fish house. No one had thought she could do it. No one had believed Arthur Sinclair’s pampered daughter capable of doing anything but sitting around fanning herself, making a fancy hat for a lady to wear to Sunday meeting. She had proved them wrong, all of them.

  And so, her boots slick with fish refuse, her curls springing wildly from the edges of her kerchief and a defiant look on her face, she stepped into the house behind the shop. Smokey greeted her with whimpers of ecstasy.

  “I’ll thank you to leave those boots outside,” Tom Silver said without even looking up from his ledger books. “They stink.”

  Deborah said nothing, but turned to the door.

  “Be sure you hang them from the line,” he called. “Otherwise the critters might get to them.”

  She ground her teeth together as she pulled off the work boots. They weren’t so horrible, really, for Jens had thrown a bucket of water on them before she’d left the fish house. As she strung the boots up on the line, she scowled through the screen mesh door at Tom Silver. She had not expected an open-armed welcome tonight, but a little civility might not come amiss.

  While he worked at his bookkeeping, he wore delicate gold wire-rimmed spectacles. Fascinating.

  She went back inside to find him still absorbed in his work. She kept sneaking glances at him, drawn to his unexpectedly scholarly look. Her father’s assumption that Silver had compromised her was absurd. He had never liked her; he thought she was a blond runt, and now she wasn’t even worth a ransom to him.

  In a soft, distracted voice he asked, “When’s supper?”

  “Pardon me?” she asked, certain she had heard him wrong.

  “When’s supper?” he repeated.

  She was too incredulous to be angry. With excessive calm and patience, she said, “I’m afraid I don’t understand. You seem to think I’m going to fix supper tonight.”

  “You claim you can fit in on this island, live and work like other folks.”

  She spread her arms. “I believe my labors today prove my capability.”

  He pushed back his sleeves. His forearms looked aggressively muscular as he rested them on the writing table. “I don’t deny you worked damned hard at that fish house today,” he conceded. “But what makes you think your work ends when the last crate is iced down?”

  “Because we finished, that’s why.”

  “Do you really think Alice and Anna are home sipping sherry and eating bonbons right now? This might be a game to you, but it’s not to them.”

  “Ah,” she said. “I understand now. My friend Lucy tried to warn me about men like you. I should have listened.”

  “Men like me.”

  “Those who believe they are superior by virtue of their se—gender. Who would make slaves of women and force them to do their bidding.”

  “Lady, I don’t need to force you to do anything. You do a good enough job of that on your own.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You drive yourself like a fool. No one said you had to prove a thing to me or to the people of this island. And believe me, no one’s going to forget or forgive who your father is just because you turn out to be a good woman.”

  She stared at him, then sniffed disdainfully to cover her confusion. “I simply wanted to do something more in this godforsaken place besides sit on the porch and pray for deliverance.” She pondered his words for a moment. “So you think I turned out to be a good woman.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “It sounded as though you did.”

  He shrugged, turned up his lamp and went on with his work. The contrast of the thin gold rims of the spectacles against his rough-hewn face struck her with a secret warmth she didn’t quite understand. Glaring at him resentfully, she felt unbearably smelly and crusty. She longed to peel off her clothes, to dive into the icy cold lake and never come up for breath. Perhaps deep beneath the surface of the water lay another world, a secret world where people behaved in a caring way, where—

  “You’re swaying on your feet, Princess,” Tom Silver pointed out helpfully.

  Her eyes snapped open. “I’m fine,” she retorted. “I must change into a clean frock.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him but said no more. Then she went into her bedroom—and nearly bumped into the tall-sided zinc tub by the small stove. Wisps of steam rose from the tub and she shut her eyes for a moment, inhaling the moist, clean aroma of hot water. A little cry broke from her as she peeled off her soiled clothes and settled into the tub. It was a tiny one, no more than a hip bath like the one on the Suzette, but the steaming water felt heavenly as she sank into it, took up a cake of soap and began scrubbing, humming a little. She washed herself clean of the vestiges of guts and scales and other unmentionables. Only when she was half finished with the bath did she pause to think about the fact that a hot bath was waiting for her at the end of a hard day.

  Tom Silver had drawn her a bath. Again. Drat. That meant she would have to thank him. Again.

  She finished washing, and after a while the stench was gone even from her hair. She wrapped herself in towels and an old blanket she’d found in the box at the end of the bed, then used the bath water to
wash out her clothing. She wrung out the garments and strung them up to dry. Her bone weariness had become something else entirely. It was now a fatigue so all-pervasive and deep that it pounded through every part of her, moving like warm syrup through her veins.

  When’s supper?

  Indeed, she thought, her stomach growling with hunger. The nerve of him, demanding supper from a woman who was half-dead of overwork. She’d show him where supper was.

  * * *

  Tom tried not to notice how quiet it had grown in the next room. At first he had contented himself with listening to the slosh and swish of water as she bathed in the tub he had readied for her. More than any thanks she might—or might not—tender, her indulgence in the bath and the sound of her humming told him she appreciated his efforts. Lord knew, having a hot bath waiting was more than most women at the fish houses of Isle Royale came home to.

  But long moments after the sloshing and humming had ended, it had grown unnaturally quiet. “You didn’t go and drown on me, did you?” he asked, calling out across the room.

  No response.

  “Princess?”

  Silence.

  “Miss Sinclair?” He took off his spectacles and got up. “Deborah?” It was the first time he had used her name. It tasted of the forbidden, of something he must not say. So he said it again. “Deborah?”

  When the silence drew out, he went to the door of her room and tapped. He hesitated a beat, then pushed the door open. In the dim twilight, shadows hung throughout the room, and at first he couldn’t find her. Then he realized the untidy mound that lay upon the bed was her—wrapped in linen towels, sound asleep.

  The sight of her shook him. She was always on her guard, always keeping her distance, and he preferred it that way. But fast asleep, with her damp hair swirling across the pillow and her hand turned palm up and defenseless beside her face, she no longer resembled the snippy, annoying heiress he had dragged kicking and screaming into his life.

  Simple murder would have been so much easier.

  But here she was, living in his house, sleeping in Asa’s bed, and he had no idea what to make of her. She seemed to belong to another species, and according to his reading of Charles Darwin, it would be against her very nature to survive in this remote wilderness. Yet she was determined to make the best of it. Maybe she was bored or needed to forget what her bastard of a father had done to her. As soon as the novelty of the island wore off, though, she’d be more than ready to go back to Arthur Sinclair. If the old son of a bitch knew what was good for him, he’d welcome her back, no questions asked.