Susan Wiggs Great Chicago Fire Trilogy Complete Collection

by Susan Wiggs

  So, she took a deep breath and began.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Tom waited patiently. He didn’t allow himself to move, for he sensed she would bolt like a hare if he pushed her any more.

  And then, very slowly, moving like a wounded soldier, Deborah turned her head and stared out the window. The words came reluctantly, from the hidden places inside her. “The night before the fire,” she said, “I attended the opera with my fi—with Philip Ascot. We watched from Father’s private box at the opera house.” Her fingers knit together with nervousness.

  Tom didn’t know much about opera—some stage act with a lot of singing and hollering. Fancy costumes and fake sword fights, the sort of thing city folks liked to pay money to watch and dress up to attend. He could easily picture Deborah Sinclair, done up like a fairy-tale princess, escorted by a swell in a fancy suit.

  As these thoughts went through his mind, he stayed silent, waiting. She would get the confession out in her own time, in her own way. Instinct, and the storm of sobs that had preceded the conversation, convinced him not to push her.

  “It was a Mozart opera, Don Giovanni, the story of an immoral man who uses his charm and handsomeness to seduce women.”

  She was skirting the issue, setting the scene for what she probably considered an unspeakable act. He wanted to interrupt, to reassure her that it was a wholly natural thing for a man and a woman to be eager for the delights that would seal their commitment to one another. But he held silent, trying to fill in the gaps in what she was saying.

  “Our wedding had been all planned out, down to the last detail,” she said, not looking at him as she spoke. She stared out the window, but he knew she wasn’t seeing the raw, white field of snow. “I suppose that was why I…we…” She bit her lip and stopped.

  He waited some more, wondering how it had played out. Had she looked at her pretty man and been overwhelmed by carnal desire? Had he plied her with champagne and compliments?

  Tom gritted his teeth, hating the fact that he could never be that sort of man for her. Hell, she was probably ashamed that she could want any man in a passionate way. Or maybe what she wanted and what she’d experienced had turned out to be two different things.

  “During the course of the opera…Zerlina rushed off stage to escape Don Giovanni. That was when Philip asked me to…retire to the salon with him. Each private box, you see, has an adjacent private salon where the men go to smoke or the women to socialize. That night it was just Philip and me. His sister was supposed to accompany us as chaperon, but she fell sick at the last moment. Now I realize he probably asked her to beg off so that we could be alone. He was amorous that night. I…I have no idea why.”

  Tom held in a snort of disbelief. Why? To begin with, she had a face and body that made a man want to rediscover original sin. Yet she was also favored by a fragile melancholy in her big eyes that made a fellow want to take her in his arms. Or maybe it was the shiny waterfall of pale blond hair that made her look like a Christmas angel. Or the quiet, gentle quality of her presence he found more compelling than the lively, lusty women of the outposts and towns he passed through in his travels. Or the combination of disdain and vulnerability that made him wonder what lay in her heart. Or—Tom stopped himself. He was developing a bad habit of thinking about Deborah Sinclair in ways that he shouldn’t.

  “He’s male,” he said, choosing the simplest answer to her quandary. “Even the weak ones tend to get…amorous, especially with a woman like you.”

  She paled, and he had the sense that he’d said the wrong thing, and he had no idea why.

  “So I reckon,” he said, trying to help her out, “you were feeling amorous, too.”

  Her white throat worked as she swallowed. “I believe, looking back, that Philip thought so. And like you, he was wrong.”

  Tom felt the subtle sting of her censure. He didn’t like the idea that he had anything in common with this Ascot character. He didn’t like the idea that, for all he had been in the company of this woman for weeks, she was still a puzzle to him. Deborah was like the mysterious ice floes that blew across the lake in the teeth of the wind. She had a bright white surface he could see and touch, but he had no idea what lay beneath.

  “So he was feeling amorous, and you weren’t,” he prompted quietly. Now the picture sharpened at the edges and began to make sense. When that was the case, as it often was between lovers, the man generally got his way. At least, in Tom’s experience, he did. A man knew of any number of ways to persuade a reluctant woman that he would bring her joy if she would simply let go and obey the urges of her body. He wasn’t proud of using insincere speeches and clever caresses to get his way, but he, like most men, was not above such methods.

  “That is correct,” she said, and he felt her slipping away from him, back into the shadowy remembrances of the night that had so clearly become a dark obsession with her. “He, um, held me and kissed me. Through the drapes of the salon I heard the soprano’s voice soar, and there was a long high note so piercing I thought it might be me, screaming.” She took her gaze from the window and looked down at her white-knuckled hands. “But I wasn’t screaming, of course. That would be too absurd. Rude, even. I have never been a rude person, and that night was no exception. So I simply…lay there. While he…Philip…shoved and pressed and made me—” She broke off, her face burning with color. “There is probably a word for this, but I don’t know what it is.”

  Suddenly Tom’s understanding of the situation changed. With a lurch of his gut, he realized that Ascot hadn’t merely seduced his bride-to-be. He had forced himself on her. Tom had heard of cowards who resorted to force but he had never heard it described by the victim, particularly a victim who seemed to have no idea she had been violated. Tom pictured Deborah in a fancy dress, on a cushioned chaise with the opera music wailing through the building. Ascot grabbing her, maybe cupping his hand over her breast and tasting those soft, silent lips, his hand pushing up under those frilly skirts. Tom clenched his jaw to keep from swearing in helpless anger.

  He could tell it was beyond her to give voice to precisely what the son of a bitch had done. His mind filled in the parts she would not speak of. This woman was painfully naive, sheltered. She had been raised without a mother, by an army of caretakers bowing and scraping to her every whim, but never giving her the one thing she needed—a sense of herself. A knowledge of what she would and would not tolerate.

  Ascot probably understood that. And like most men, he probably used it to his advantage. She was young, beautiful and unimaginably wealthy, and she was about to become his bride. He saw no wrong in helping himself to something he regarded as his due. Tom had known men like Ascot in the Union army. West Pointers who thought they owned the world. They made him sick.

  “You say he shoved you,” Tom said. “Pressed you. Was it in a…rough way?” He had no idea how to do this. All he knew was that he had to pull the truth out of her. He had to draw the words from her like extracting venom from a snake bite.

  She cleared her throat. “He was…fast,” she managed to say. “I really didn’t have time to think. My mind went blank, and I simply didn’t know what to say. And so I did nothing, said nothing, and finally…it was over.”

  Tom let her words hang unanswered. In some strange way he understood that she had described to him an abomination, but she had done it with such delicacy and control that it simply underscored the horror.

  A dark fury welled up in him. He didn’t question why it was his task to delve into her secrets. He was responsible for getting her into this fix, but not for what Philip Ascot had done. Concern for her had awakened in him, and he couldn’t steel himself against her now. Suddenly all her strange behavior over the weeks began to make sense. She acted like a battle-scarred soldier because she was one. She had not been wounded on the field but by a man she trusted.

  “One thing I’ve asked myself ever since that night is why, afterward, I simply sat through the rest of the opera with him. I did that
, you know. I simply…tried to put my hair to rights and then took my seat beside him for the last act.”

  The image of her, primly seated in the gilt opera box beside the man who had raped her, ripped across Tom’s mind. Maybe that was the worst of all, that after Ascot had forced himself on her, she had gone on as if nothing had happened. They didn’t teach a girl such things in finishing school, he reckoned. Didn’t teach her what to do when a man she trusts violates her.

  “My memories are a bit confused after that,” she admitted. “I went home and went to bed, and the next day I slept a great deal, and stayed in my bed. There was an important function to go to. An evangelical reading. My friends at Miss Boylan’s had been anticipating it for weeks. Philip was to meet me there. But when the time came to get ready, I realized I could not go. That was when I drove into the city to see my father.”

  “You were going to tell him what happened.”

  She looked appalled. “No. How could I…” She cleared her throat. “I told him only that I had changed my mind and wasn’t going to marry Philip. My father didn’t take me seriously, of course. This marriage meant the world to him, and the fact that I was absolutely terrified of Philip didn’t matter.” For the first time, she looked Tom in the eye. The stark misery on her face made him want to turn away, but he wouldn’t let himself. He had brought her to this moment with his questions and his prying, and he owed it to her to stay with her.

  “So there is the answer to your question,” she concluded. “Yes. It is possible that I am with child because I was too polite to stop Philip from—to stop him.”

  A leaden foreboding haunted him. “Ever since…that night,” he began hesitantly, venturing into unknown territory, “there’s been no—ah, you haven’t had your monthly…” At a loss, he let his voice trail off. He had no idea how to talk to a woman about such things, especially a woman like Deborah.

  Her cheeks reddened. “I have never been reliable in that respect, so until you asked your question, I didn’t think a thing of it.” She stood and turned away. “Excuse me. I feel tired all of a sudden.” She went into the bedroom and lay down, facing the wall.

  The knowledge of what she had suffered smoldered inside Tom. He felt a dark, violent clamor of outrage and fury, and it had no outlet. Surging to his feet, he went outside, not even bothering with coat and gloves. He lit into the firewood, splitting log after log with the long-handled ax, but the rage wouldn’t go away. Here was a woman who had trusted a man, who did not realize immediately what was happening and who failed to speak up for herself because society would condemn her for it.

  The fact that Philip Ascot had raped her explained so much. Her long, tense silences. Her nervous response to being touched. Her lack of self-confidence stemmed from being forced to service a man like a two-bit whore.

  It was one thing to understand, and another matter entirely to help her. Trying to force the fury to abate, he ceased his chopping and stared down at his big, sore, peeling hands. His breath came in loud, white puffs. The damage done to her was not the sort of wound that would mend with liniment and bandages. It was a wound to the self, to the soul, and he had no business poking around in Deborah Sinclair’s soul.

  Yet he wanted to. He wanted her to stop hurting. She didn’t deserve what had happened to her.

  He wondered if he would have taken her prisoner in Chicago if he’d known what she had endured. If he would have forced that kiss on her aboard the boat. Probably, he conceded. His anger and hatred for Sinclair had left no room for compassion. Now, though, she was more than simply a bargaining chip to him. She had become a person with hopes and dreams and fears, just like anyone else. Except in the case of Deborah Sinclair, he cared what happened to her. He cared far more than he should.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Deborah pressed both hands to her middle and tried to imagine that a baby grew there, under her heart. No matter how hard she tried, she could not picture it, nor feel it, nor imagine it. Just as well, she told herself. Perhaps if she didn’t dwell on the matter, it would not be true.

  But true or not, she was certain of one thing—the night at the opera was real. After so many weeks of hiding from the truth, she had been forced to face it. She was surprised at how deep the hurt had gone. She knew with unerring instinct that Tom Silver would never look at her the same way again.

  The day after her unforgivable breakdown and confession, she recalled the conversation with shame and a touch of horror. How could she have spoken aloud of what occurred between her and Philip Ascot? It was the most private of matters, that intimate act, and she had no business confessing the secrets of her soul to a stranger.

  But Tom Silver was no stranger, she conceded as she drew a brush through her hair. Tom was…Tom. Her captor. Her protector. The only living soul she would see until spring.

  She could not think of him as a stranger because she was coming to know him in a way that she had never known another.

  Still, did that give her the right to speak to him of the most private of moments between a man and a woman? Right or wrong, she had confessed. The words had flowed from her in a torrent, in a cataract. Once she’d started speaking, she hadn’t been able to stop. And amazingly, she felt better for it.

  What must he think of her? He knew her secret now. He knew she could never be like other women, knew she could never enjoy the act of intimacy between a man and a woman.

  She finished brushing her hair and didn’t bother braiding it. She impatiently tied it with a scrap from her quilting basket, making a tail at the nape of her neck.

  Finally, she knew she could put off seeing him no longer. Brushing her hands over her skirt, she longed for a new dress as armor. A heavily corseted ballgown to protect her from his scorn.

  She found him sitting at the table, tying a fishing fly. Smokey yapped a greeting. She had a sudden memory of her father, who pursued fly fishing with a vengeance. Each summer he would take the steamer yacht up to Three Rivers to go fishing with the Palmers and Higginsons. As a tiny child, Deborah had amused them all when she had stood watching the fishing from the riverbank and upon seeing the small object at the end of her father’s line had clapped her hands and shrieked, “You’ve caught one! You’ve caught a fly!”

  That was the last time he’d allowed her to accompany him. He didn’t even particularly enjoy the sport, but practiced it with the grim relentlessness with which he conducted his business affairs. He went fly fishing because the people he yearned to befriend went fly fishing. She understood this now.

  Deborah was not certain when she had first noticed this about her father. He did not enjoy life so much as pursue it. House parties, gala events, art shows, pleasure tours. He attended such things because it was expected, not because he wanted to.

  The happiest she had ever seen him was when he’d taken her out on the lake in a little cat boat one summer. They’d flown along in a warm wind and had not encountered a soul he wanted to impress. She still remembered the spray on his face and the happiness in his eyes, reflecting the fluffy white clouds of summer. Sometimes when she closed her eyes, she could still hear his laughter on the wind. But as she grew older he did things less and less for the pleasure, concentrating instead on what was expected. That was exactly what she had been brought up for, she realized, and she had conformed unquestioningly. Now for some reason, she wanted to know the point of all the posturing.

  She mentioned none of this to Tom Silver. She feared the fury she saw in his eyes at the very whisper of her father’s name.

  “There’s coffee,” he said without looking up.

  She couldn’t tell if it was contempt or the usual gruffness she heard in his voice. With slow, deliberate movements she helped herself to the coffee. The silence drew out unbearably, until she flushed with shame and forced herself to voice the matter that had been troubling her. “If it turns out that I am…” She searched her mind for some delicate way of putting it. “That I am in the family way, what will you do?”

 
He didn’t stop working, but wound a delicate thread around a wispy feather, his brow knit with concentration. “I reckon I lay awake all night thinking about that.”

  The admission that she had caused him to lose sleep had a curious effect on Deborah. She didn’t think she had ever caused anyone to lose sleep before.

  “And?” She closed her eyes and waited. As she did, she tried again to imagine what it would be like to be with child. She had no idea, none whatsoever. She had never even seen a visibly pregnant woman before. From what she could glean from the servants’ backstairs whispers, unmarried women who found themselves expecting were dismissed before their condition was apparent.

  This is what you were made for. Philip’s voice came out of the shadows of memory. This is the whole duty of a woman.

  She shuddered and opened her eyes. “I’m not sure there is anything one does, particularly.”

  He looked as uncomfortable as she felt. “If you need help with…your condition, I suppose I could try to get up to the camp at Rock Harbor, see if there’s a woman who would come.”

  She shuddered, assailed by a vision of a shadowy midwife from the north woods. “I don’t want you to leave me,” she said before she could stop herself. “We should wait and see if…if it’s true.”

  He took in a sharp breath, then grimaced as the barb of a hook stuck his finger. “Then we can’t do anything but wait for spring to come.” He extracted the hook and wrapped a bandana around his finger.

  She forced herself to drink a cup of cider, although she had no appetite for anything. As the moments passed, a strange feeling overtook her. She could sense the old Deborah flowing away to nothingness, spilled out of herself by something new and different.