Susan Wiggs Great Chicago Fire Trilogy Complete Collection

by Susan Wiggs

  Her life had changed so much; she was a stranger to herself. She could scarcely believe she was the same person as the carefree girl who had spent summers at the lake, attending dances and musicales, going into the city for the theater or opera, laughing with her friends late at night and planning a grand tour of Europe so that Phoebe could meet the duke or earl she swore she was destined to marry.

  Deborah’s spiral had been nothing short of dramatic. She had begun the month of October at the pinnacle of Chicago’s social whirl, scheduled to marry a prince of society and give her father entree into the innermost circle of the elite. Now she was stranded for the winter, possibly with child.

  “You all right?” Tom asked.

  She studied the floor, pushing the toe of her shoe at a knot in one of the planks. “I was just wondering how my father would react to all this.”

  “You reckon a child from Philip Ascot would have made the old bastard happy?” Tom Silver asked.

  She hesitated. “I’m not certain my father is the sort to concern himself with happiness. He is a man of goals and accomplishments. When he reaches a goal, he is satisfied. I believe that’s what is important to him.” She refilled her cider cup. “So you, too, should be satisfied, because you have thwarted his most cherished goal. He has only one daughter, and circumstances have rendered me entirely ruined and unmarriageable.”

  “You don’t seem to regret that too much.”

  “I don’t.” A lightness rose in her chest. “I feel…liberated, in a strange way. I don’t have to marry Philip. I don’t have to move to New York and attend stuffy society events. I can become a pioneer in the west, or a missionary in exotic lands.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I’m not sure. But until the fire…and…what happened after, I had no choice. Heaven knows, I was not suited to be a wife.” She spoke in a breezy fashion, hiding the devastation and disappointment she felt inside. It was not so easy to give up on a dream or to accept her own limitations. True, she had experienced a stifled feeling each time she considered a future as the Mrs. Philip Ascot of Tarleton House, New York. The thought of using her father’s millions to rebuild Philip’s fortune had filled her with distaste. Yet at the core of it all, she had wanted to be married. She had wanted a husband to hold her close, to cherish her and share her deepest thoughts, to raise a family and finally to grow old and mellow side by side.

  What a stupid, ignorant dream that had been. She should have known better. From what she could see of marriages within her circle, the husband and wife went their own separate ways. But of course, like any naive girl, she used to feel certain that she would be different. Hers would be a love match.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, you’re not suited to be a wife?” Tom asked.

  She ground her teeth in frustration. “I told you things last night that I should have kept to myself. Am I to believe you weren’t listening?”

  “I heard every word you said.”

  “Then you must have heard me say that my…experience with my fiancé, a man I have known and trusted for years, made me aware of a fundamental flaw in my character.”

  “Wait a minute. In your character?”

  “The very act that makes a man and woman married is repugnant to me. The only explanation I can think of for my failure is that I had no mother to—”

  “Goddamn it, you don’t get it, do you?”

  She jumped at his sharp tone. He had abandoned all pretense of working and his full, fierce attention was fixed on her.

  “I beg your pardon?” she said faintly.

  “The night you told me about—”

  “Please, I don’t wish to discuss it anymore.”

  “We’re going to discuss it until you understand, damn it.”

  “What is there to understand? Perhaps I should count myself lucky to have discovered my inadequacy before Philip was trapped into marriage with me.”

  “I don’t believe you.” He pressed the palms of his hands to the table and stood up. “You’re blaming yourself because the son of a bitch raped you.”

  Rape.

  She knew the word. It was a curt, ugly little word spoken in whispers, even by her Sunday school master when they had studied the Bible stories of Amnon and Tamar, Shechem and Dinah. She had read history and the classics—Visigoths and barbarians committed rape, along with pillaging and burning. In each case, the rape had been an act of hatred or violence that had left the victim either dead or hopelessly maimed. In Ovid’s classical tales, women committed suicide as a result of being raped. The attackers were always deranged strangers lurking in the shadows. And of course, in the forbidden novels she and her friends had read at boarding school, the women who were raped were those of the lowest moral character anyway.

  “No,” she said slowly. “You don’t understand. Philip was my fiancé. There was no r—” She couldn’t bring herself to say it. “He didn’t do what you say he did.”

  “He didn’t force you, push you down, interfere with you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Did he lift your skirts, tear at your underclothes, put himself inside you—against your will?” Tom Silver’s words struck her with the bluntness of physical blows.

  A painful pulse beat at her temples. “I will not speak of it again.”

  “Then just answer me this, Deborah.”

  That caught her attention. He almost never called her Deborah. “Yes?”

  “Did you tell him to stop?”

  “In a whisper,” she admitted. “But—”

  “The fact is, he forced you to do something you didn’t want to do. It was an act of violence. It was rape, goddamn it, and you keep on blaming yourself.”

  “Philip has never been violent with me. He never struck me in anger, or hurt me—”

  “Not even that night?” Tom persisted. “Can you swear you weren’t hurt that night? Just because he left no bruises doesn’t mean he didn’t hurt you.”

  Philip had left no mark on her. If he had, she could have called his behavior an act of violence that had wounded her. So in a way, what he did that night was worse. He had left his mark upon her soul, upon the most invisible part of her, the part that could hurt and bleed and no one but she would ever know.

  She wanted to run and hide, but Tom Silver held her riveted to the spot with his intense gaze and unrelenting questions. She fired back a question of her own. “Why are you asking me these things? Why is it so important to you?”

  “Because I see you hating yourself for something that bastard did to you.”

  “All he did was show me a woman’s duty to her husband. It’s not his fault I felt—” She clamped her mouth shut and went to the door, wishing there was a place she could escape to.

  “You felt what? Betrayed? Violated? Hell, woman, of course you did. He attacked you and acted without your consent. You hated the experience because he raped you, not because of some failing on your part.” Tom stood up and paced the room like a restless wild animal. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice your reaction to being touched?” he asked. “You can’t stand it. The son of a bitch taught you to be afraid of a man’s touch.”

  “So my fiancé is a brutal, violent man who would do me injury.”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is supposed to make me feel better?”

  “The way I see it, you couldn’t be feeling any worse.”

  She pressed her hands to her mortified face. “You don’t understand,” she said.

  “Then explain to me. I’m listening.”

  She took a long, shaky breath. “If he is a rapist, then that means I am too stupid to know whom to trust. And if he is not, then that means I would be inadequate as a wife. Either way, I lose.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Tom threw himself into work. There were a hundred things to be done in order to provision the cabin for the winter, and it was up to him to make sure nothing was overlooked. Besides, work gave him something to do. Chopping wood, clearing a pat
h to the storeroom, making a snowmelt for fresh water, setting snares for rabbits and catching fish through the ice were demanding tasks, but they demanded things of him that he knew how to give.

  Deborah Sinclair was a different problem altogether. He couldn’t just fix her like a leak in the roof. He didn’t know how.

  A fortnight after he had shocked and infuriated her by informing her that her intended was a rapist, they behaved like wary strangers trapped under the same roof. She clearly regretted having told him what had happened to her. Although forced to take their meals together and to face the fact that they weren’t going to see another living soul until spring, they managed to go for long periods of time without speaking or even looking one another in the eye.

  It was better that way, he told himself. When they spoke, he said what was on his mind, and he always managed to offend her.

  Which was an odd thing, because in spite of who she was, he did not much care to give offense to a woman like Deborah Sinclair. What an idiot he had been, trying to convince her that her fancy man was not the debonair gent she thought she was getting. And he could be wrong. He hadn’t been there. He knew only what Deborah had told him. It was none of his business.

  But his gut told him exactly what had happened. He didn’t know whether she had come to believe his explanation or not. He kept telling himself he shouldn’t care, but they had gone beyond that. An injustice had been done and she was the victim. He wished he knew how to make her see that. He had felt this same sick, boiling rage when the mining accident occurred. If he wasn’t careful, he knew the fury would make him crazy—crazy enough to do what he had almost done in Chicago.

  He knew now that venting his rage wouldn’t help. Only one thing would, and that was to make Deborah understand what had happened so she wouldn’t be haunted by it. He wished he knew how to explain to her that the act of sex, when done with mutual caring, was a fine thing indeed, not something hurtful, not something to be feared. It infuriated him that she believed the rape was her fault, that there was some defect in her.

  She had taken it dead wrong, of course. She generally took everything he said wrong. He just didn’t know how to talk to a female like her.

  He muttered under his breath as he shoveled the snow away from the storeroom door of the shop. It had snowed for the past four days, stopping only in the middle of the night last night, when a high cold moon had suddenly burst through the clouds and lay in milky blue splendor over the ripples and hummocks of snow.

  At night, the sight had been beautiful beyond words. By day, it meant work to do, and Tom was damned grateful for the diversion. It took him a good two hours to dig out the sloping cellar doors. The hinges had frozen, and creaked when he opened the door. Clear winter sunlight streamed over a few barrels of wild rice, flour, sugar, coffee beans and milk powder. There wasn’t much, since he hadn’t planned on needing winter provisions, but he hoped it would be enough. He took his time prying open the barrels and laying in stores. Then he resealed the kegs with care to guard against vermin and shut the doors behind him.

  In the house, Deborah sat in her usual spot by the stove, working on her quilt while the dog slept on the hearth rug at her feet. Light from the window slanted over her. The quilt had grown to cover her lap and drape to the floor, and when she looked up at him, his breath caught for a second.

  Damn. Somewhere, hidden in his heart, was a picture just like this. It was something he had wanted ever since losing his family when he was so young he almost couldn’t remember them. It was a sharp yearning that swept over him at odd moments—like now.

  “Brought some supplies from the cellar,” he said, gruffness covering up what he was feeling. He set the cloth sacks down on the table. “Rice and such.”

  Her needle flashed in and out of the quilt. “That’s good. Do you want your supper now?”

  “No. I’d best check my snares while there’s still light.”

  “All right.” She glanced out the window. “It’s pretty as can be outside when the weather’s calm.”

  “That it is.” Plain words. An unremarkable conversation. Yet, like the current under the ice, other meanings flowed beneath their words.

  She sighed. “I wish—” She cut herself off and sighed again.

  “What?”

  “It’s silly.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Sometimes I wish I could take a walk,” she confessed. “When the sun is out, and everything is so beautiful, I get the urge to go out into that white world.” A wry smile tugged at her mouth. “But my hands and feet get cold when I step out to fetch firewood. I wouldn’t last two minutes in the snow.”

  She didn’t seem to desire an answer, so he added a log to the stove. Then he went to the door, turning up the collar of his big coat.

  “Tom?” she asked softly, tentatively, from her chair.

  He turned back, too quickly. “Yeah?”

  Her gaze held his for a moment that drew out until it turned awkward. Her teeth worried her lower lip. “Nothing,” she said, her cheeks turning pink as she looked down at her quilting. “I forgot what I was going to say.”

  “I’ll be back before dark,” he said, and left the house. His heart was beating hard, and he knew the reason why. For the first time ever, she had called him by his given name. She had called him Tom.

  * * *

  On Christmas day, Deborah spent two hours bent over a washboard, scrubbing clothes and bedding. Gritting her teeth, she wished she did not know what day it was, because the notion that she was spending Christmas as a washerwoman was simply too pathetic to be borne. But like a fool, she had kept track of the days she spent on Isle Royale, and this morning when she had awakened to an empty cabin, she had known it was Christmas.

  Tom Silver was, as usual, nowhere in sight. She told herself she should be grateful that he was so strong and that he worked so hard to keep the place warm and comfortable, to keep food on the table for her. But every once in a while, she just wanted his company. Not a rabbit for the stewpot or a log for the fire, but a pleasant conversation.

  She knew she should not be so curious about him, but she couldn’t help herself. She would look at him and wonder so much. She wanted him to talk about Asa, and about the war, and what it had been like growing up here. But she never quite knew how to ask.

  She scrubbed extra hard at her bloomers and petticoats, letting the tepid water run down her arms. The lye soap stung her hands, which bore small scratches from all the housekeeping and needlework she had been doing. But the small wounds were preferable to the alternative—boredom and idleness. She had discovered an agreeable calm in the soothing rhythm of sewing, stitch by stitch, and an unexpected satisfaction in the feeling of finishing a section of the quilt. At the rate she was working, the quilt would not be completed for ages, but it didn’t matter. If she just kept stitching, eventually the job would be done.

  Washing did not impart that quality of serene gratification, she noted sourly, but it had to be done. Particularly today, she noted with a small lift of nerves in her stomach.

  She finished her clothes and bed linens, hanging them across the room to dry. Against her will, she remembered other Christmases. Stringing cranberries and popcorn had been the most daunting tasks she had faced. Servants always festooned her father’s mansion with swags of pine boughs and holly wreaths. Bayberry candles glowed everywhere, and a great noble fir, hung with tinsel and glass stars, presided over the formal drawing room.

  The season had consisted of one glittering party after another, and excitement mounted higher and higher as the holiday drew near. She loved the secrets, loved the sense of anticipation, the caroling and merrymaking. Her father’s extravagance knew no bounds when it came to Christmas. Over the years he had given her a pony, a rare white canary in a gilded cage, a hand-painted troika imported from Russia, a diamond tiara, silver combs for her hair and other presents too numerous to recall. She had reciprocated with a walking cane studded with gemstones, a silver-rivet
ed saddle from Morocco, dozens of silk cravats and a fine gold watch.

  She looked back across the years and recognized a disturbing emptiness in the gestures. Receiving gifts from her father was not nearly as important as gaining his complete, undivided attention. For him, her enjoyment of the gifts was secondary to showing them off. Arthur Sinclair had a personal secretary whose sole job it was to make certain his name was put before the people who mattered. Thanks to Milford Plunkett’s breathless letters to the newspapers in Chicago and New York, all the world knew what Arthur Sinclair had given his daughter for Christmas.

  The year she turned ten, something—excitement, anticipation—had awakened her very late one Christmas eve. Tiptoeing through the house, she had spied her father in the winter parlor. He sat alone, a crystal snifter of brandy in one hand and a small oval framed photograph in the other. There was no light in the room except the glow of the fire. Deborah didn’t make a sound. She recognized the photograph. It was usually kept on a highboy in her father’s private dressing room, for his eyes only. He never knew how often she sneaked into that room to peer secretly at the picture of her mother, wearing the lavaliere and serenely smiling out from eternity. Deborah used to stare at it for hours, trying to will life into the unmoving, flat image, trying to recapture the scent of her mother, the sound of her voice, the essence of her smile.

  Until this moment, Deborah had no idea her father had the same awful yearning. She wanted to go to him, to say something, but she couldn’t. Because she could see her father was crying.

  She had never seen him cry before, and she knew then that there was no gift she could give to fill the empty places inside him. Perhaps that was the night she had decided to obey her father in all things, to please him in any way she could.

  Restless, Deborah willed her thoughts back to the present as she climbed to the loft. So long as she was doing the washing, she might as well do it all. She felt a forbidden tremor of intimacy as she handled his bedding and clothes. Then she chided herself for a goose, rolled up her sleeves and got to work.