by Susan Wiggs
“…mistake. He loves you. He loves you.”
Even now, she thought, her heart sinking. Even now, as he lay dying, her father believed in Philip Ascot, not her.
“Please, Father, save your strength. Help is coming.”
“Too late for me. You were right. You were right all along. I didn’t do…what you think…” He pushed the lavaliere at her, and she closed her hand around the legacy from her mother. In a strange, terrible moment she remembered the day from her childhood when she had seen the happiness in his eyes, reflecting the fluffy white clouds of a summer sky. That was her father, not the bitter, dying creature in her arms.
“I didn’t…” He tried again and coughed, spraying blood. “You…were right.”
At last his words made sense. Her eyes flooded with tears. “About Tom,” she whispered, understanding.
Arthur’s chest jerked, and then he fell still. The flow of pooling blood slowed; perhaps it stopped.
Deborah didn’t have time to absorb the moment of exquisite grief. She felt the caress of the gun barrel at her temple, brushing her hair out of the way with deceptive gentleness. The gunmetal still held the heat of the shots that had killed her father.
“Fancy that,” said Philip in a whisper, “you’re his sole heir. Your dowry is even bigger than I’d hoped, my darling.”
Tom was gone. Her father was gone. The vicious suddenness of her losses made her careless. With a strength she didn’t know she possessed, Deborah shot to her feet. But Philip was prepared this time. He pressed the gun to her neck.
“You learned the ways of a savage,” he said through gritted teeth. “Shall I be rough with you, then? Shall I treat you like a savage’s whore?” His free hand twisted into her hair, yanking her head back so that her throat went taut. He shoved her toward the bed. She reached for the gun but he held it away from her. She felt the edge of the bed against the backs of her legs.
The last time she had been with Philip, she had been too polite to object to his bullying. No more, she thought. No more.
“Murderer,” she yelled, hurling her fists at his chest, kicking out, heedless of the gun. She knew he wouldn’t dare kill her, for he needed her money.
He grunted in pain as she struck him.
Then a huge shadow darkened the doorway and an unearthly bellow, like the roar of a wounded bear, filled the stateroom.
Disbelief froze her for a split second. “Tom!” Deborah strained toward him.
Philip shoved her back at the same moment he started shooting. Earsplitting reports and yellow-gray smoke filled the air. She could see nothing as she picked herself up. Each second was an eternity of confusion. At last two hollow, frantic clicks signaled that Philip had run out of bullets.
“Your aim’s no better than your timing,” said a deep voice. Out of the smoke stepped Tom Silver, arms extended to gather Deborah against his chest. She felt his strong, vital warmth surrounding her. A moment later, the Pinkerton men rushed into the stateroom.
“Seize him,” Philip said in a shrill, frantic voice. “I tried to save Mr. Sinclair but the devil shot him! Then he attacked me!”
She faced the detective with the eyepatch. “Philip Ascot killed my father,” she said. “You know. You know.”
“The savage is making her say that,” Philip insisted, edging toward the door. He seemed to have forgotten that he still held the gun in his hand. “He made a whore of her, drove her mad over the winter—”
The man with the eyepatch gave the slightest of nods. His companions backed Philip up against the wall, and one of them plucked the pistol from his hand like a toy from a child.
“Take him away,” Tom said. “Get him out of her sight.”
Coughing on the smoke, Deborah clung to Tom. Cautious, painful joy welled up in her. “I thought they’d shot you,” she whispered. “I thought you were dead.”
“That’s what they meant for you to think. They fired into the air.” He stared down at the bloodied floor. “Your father wanted it that way, wanted you to think there was no hope for us. But he didn’t want my blood on his hands. Even he didn’t want that.”
They stood together amid the devastation of the stateroom. Bullet holes pocked the walls and shattered the lamp chimneys which lay in pieces on the floor. In the struggle the bed drapes had been ripped down, the heavy silk coverlet torn from the bed. The frightened mongrel shivered amid the ruins. And her father lay dead, the blood from his wounds already thick and cool.
She sank down beside him, touched his graying hair with trembling fingers. Then she pulled the drapes up over his ruined body and ran her hands over him, knowing that in the end, his love had been stronger than his hate.
“He knew. At the very end, he knew—about us and about Philip. But it was too late.” She picked up her father’s hand, wincing at the stiffness of the fingers, and pressed it to her mouth. Arthur Sinclair had been an intense, complicated man. He had done many hateful things in his life, but he had loved her in the only way he knew.
Gently she put down the lifeless hand and stood.
“Are you hurt?” asked Tom.
She shook her head. “I’m…all right now.” Her voice broke, and she couldn’t speak anymore.
He cradled her head against his chest. “I know, honey,” he said. “I know.”
She let his embrace swallow her as she grieved, while brief warm memories of the past flowed through her. She remembered her father as he would have wanted her to remember him—as a loving man whose only flaw was that he had tried to give her the world, even though that wasn’t what she’d needed. In the end, he had given her the one simple thing she would cherish forever—her mother’s lavaliere, and all the precious memories it evoked. In those long, quiet moments, she was seared by a powerful sense of sorrow, cleansing in its purity.
Tom regarded her with a long, searching look. “Come,” he said. “Let me take you from here.”
They stepped outside together, escaping the taint of gunsmoke and blood in the stateroom. The pine-scented lake wind swept over them, cold and clean, blowing steadily toward the west.
EPILOGUE
Chicago
8 October 1872
It was the coldest October anyone could remember. The lake made its own weather, bringing chill fog in great hovering sheets borne on water-cooled winds. Livestock grew thick winter coats and huddled in the windbreaks, standing close together for warmth. The unseasonable chill made women fire up their ovens early on baking day. It made small children rosy-cheeked and rowdy from the freshets blowing off the water. Laboring men paused in their work, turned up their collars and remarked to each other that they’d surely need to lay in extra wood chips and scraps from the new lumber and planing mills.
It was hard to believe, folks said, that of Chicago’s three hundred thousand residents, only one hundred eighty-seven lives had been lost in the Great Fire. Many more found themselves homeless, but a home could be rebuilt.
With feverish energy and bootstrap determination, Chicago had risen from the smoldering rubble. No mere pile of brick and lumber, the city managed to retain its character despite the devastation. The lake, fringed by busy harbors bristling with masts and smokestacks, lay open to navigation. The vital arteries of the railways came back to life. Relief money and supplies poured in from a sympathetic nation, and within days of the fire, reconstruction had begun. The city meant to make the Queen of the Prairie more regal than ever.
From her sixth-storey suite in the brand-new Hotel St. George, Deborah could see the skyline of the emerging city. She sat up in bed, her back against a bank of lace-edged pillows, and studied the remarkable skeletal ribbing of the Walker building, destined to become the tallest in the city. She admired the sight, but felt no affinity for the place. She missed the towering firs and cedars of the north woods.
A soft tapping came at the door. Smokey, who had been lazing by the fire, scrambled up and gave a yap of warning.
“Come in,” Deborah said. Her face lit up as Lu
cy, Kathleen and Phoebe came in, their arms laden with pink-and-white parcels.
“Look at you,” Lucy said, beaming. “You’re absolutely blooming with health.”
“Of course I am.” Deborah smoothed her hand over the quilt. It looked incongruously homely in the opulent bedroom, but she insisted on taking it everywhere she went. “I haven’t been sick, but—” She lifted the tiny, precious bundle in her arms so they could see.
Phoebe burst into tears. “That is so beautiful! That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s not a thing, you goose,” Lucy scolded laughingly. “It’s a baby.”
“Her name is Hannah,” Deborah said.
Kathleen held out her arms. “May I?”
“Of course.” Deborah’s friends gathered close to admire the baby. What a blessed wonder her life had turned out to be. Though she hadn’t known it, she had been three months gone with child by the time she had reached the mainland the previous spring.
Like fairy godmothers, her friends bestowed their gifts on the new baby. An angora receiving blanket from Phoebe, a silver beaded crucifix from Kathleen, and from Lucy, a book of La Fontaine’s fables with hand-colored illustrations.
“Something for her body, something for her soul and something for her mind,” Deborah said. “Thank you.”
“Well,” Lucy asked, looking around the room. “Where is he?”
Her friends hadn’t met Tom yet, though they’d had a reunion with Deborah a week before the baby’s birth. They had hung on every word of her remarkable story, from the moment she had been taken hostage in the thick of the fire to the wrenching, terrible scene aboard the Triumph. She had taken grim satisfaction in relating that Philip Ascot, for all his social standing and family connections, had been hanged as a murderer three weeks after he’d shot her father. Her friends wanted to meet this Tom Silver, who had swept her away to the heart of the wilderness and transformed their friend into a wife, a mother, a woman who knew exactly who she was. With Tom and Hannah, she had found a fulfillment that had eluded her all her life.
Deborah smiled as her husband came striding into the room from the study next door.
“My God,” Phoebe whispered, her awed gaze traveling slowly upward. “He is Paul Bunyan.”
“Tom Silver,” he said easily, taking each woman’s hand and kissing it. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last.”
Deborah watched him with a surge of pride. Though he wore a tailor-made suit of what he termed his “city clothes,” he would always retain an air of wildness from the north woods. As if sensing his uncompromising, earthy maleness, Lucy, Phoebe and Kathleen blushed while congratulating him on his daughter—and his marriage.
It was an arrangement no one could have predicted for the wealthiest heiress of Chicago. Deborah and her new husband were determined to live life as it pleased them. They would spend the warm summer months on Isle Royale among the people she had come to know so well. When Hannah was older, she would run wild and free with the island children. And in the winter months, the family would return to Chicago to see old friends and tend to the affairs left behind by Arthur Sinclair. Deborah had sold her interest in most of his industries, concentrating instead on funding charitable foundations dedicated to housing the poor displaced by the fire. A special secure trust fund provided for the miners and their families on the far north island of Isle Royale, where a new church was being built.
After a half hour of visiting, Deborah couldn’t stifle a yawn. New motherhood was an exhausting, exhilarating business. Taking his cue, Tom bade the three young ladies goodbye and took Hannah from Kathleen. The baby looked impossibly small in his big, rough hands, yet they were the most gentle hands Deborah had ever known.
“Come here, my love,” she said, reaching for him. She felt his lips warm upon her hair, and she settled easily against him, curving her arm around the sleeping baby.
* * * * *
AFTERWORD
Dear Reader,
If everything were taken from you in one night, how would you begin again? If you lost all you hold dear, what is the one thing you would fight to keep? These are the questions faced by the people of Chicago on the night of October 8, 1871, and by the fictional characters in my novels, The Hostage, The Mistress and The Firebrand.
Why does the Great Chicago Fire live on in memory? Other disasters have been more devastating, but they’ve been forgotten while the Great Fire endures. By destroying the heart of a city, it took away lives, property, even identities. Condemned men were set free that night. Unhappy wives left their husbands. Children were separated from their families. People reinvented themselves.
When fire sweeps everything away, the stage is set for one of the most enduring fantasies in the human imagination—Who would you become if you could start all over again?
I hope you enjoyed the story of Tom Silver and his hostage, Deborah Sinclair. Please watch for The Mistress, featuring Kathleen O’Leary in a very unexpected situation.
Susan Wiggs
P.O. Box 4469
Rolling Bay WA 98061-0469
USA
ISBN: 978-1-4592-4795-6
THE HOSTAGE
Copyright © 2000 by Susan Wiggs.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, MIRA Books, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
MIRA and the Star Colophon are trademarks used under license and registered in Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.
Visit us at www.mirabooks.com
Praise for the novels of Susan Wiggs
“Susan Wiggs paints the details of human relationships with the finesse of a master.”
—Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author
“Wiggs provides a delicious story for us to savor.”
—Oakland Press on The Mistress
“Susan Wiggs delves deeply into her characters’ hearts and motivations to touch our own.”
—RT Book Reviews on The Mistress
“Once more, Ms. Wiggs demonstrates her ability to bring readers a story to savor that has them impatiently awaiting each new novel.”
—RT Book Reviews on The Hostage
“A quiet page-turner that will hold readers spellbound as the relationships, characters and story unfold. Fans of historical romances will naturally flock to this skillfully executed trilogy, and general women’s fiction readers should find this story enchanting as well.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Firebrand
“Wiggs is one of our best observers of stories of the heart. Maybe that is because she knows how to capture emotion on virtually every page of every book.”
—Salem Statesman-Journal
“Susan Wiggs writes with bright assurance, humor and compassion.”
—Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author
Also by SUSAN WIGGS
Contemporary Romances
HOME BEFORE DARK
THE OCEAN BETWEEN US
SUMMER BY THE SEA
TABLE FOR FIVE
LAKESIDE COTTAGE
JUST BREATHE
The Lakeshore Chronicles
SUMMER AT WILLOW LAKE
THE WINTER LODGE
DOCKSIDE
SNOWFALL AT WILLOW LAKE
FIRESIDE
LAKESHORE CHRISTMAS
THE SUMMER HIDEAWAY
Historical Romances
>
THE LIGHTKEEPER
THE DRIFTER
The Tudor Rose Trilogy
AT THE KING’S COMMAND
THE MAIDEN’S HAND
AT THE QUEEN’S SUMMONS
Chicago Fire Trilogy
THE HOSTAGE
THE MISTRESS
THE FIREBRAND
Calhoun Chronicles
THE CHARM SCHOOL
THE HORSEMASTER’S DAUGHTER
HALFWAY TO HEAVEN
ENCHANTED AFTERNOON
A SUMMER AFFAIR
The Mistress
THE CHICAGO FIRE TRILOGY
SUSAN WIGGS
To my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Marge Green,
who taught me cursive writing
and told me the story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.
One dark night,—
when people were in bed, Old Mrs. Leary lit a lantern in her shed; The cow kicked it over, winked its eye and said” There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.”
Anon.,
quoted in the Chicago Evening Post
CONTENTS
Prologue
The Contact
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
The Mark
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
The Setup