Susan Wiggs Great Chicago Fire Trilogy Complete Collection

by Susan Wiggs

  Things grew more chaotic as he headed toward the lake. Crowds surged along the Van Buren Street rail line, fleeing from the West Division. Dylan hurried, his long strides putting ten city blocks behind him as he made for the bridge that spanned the mouth of the river near Lake Michigan.

  On the sloping bank under the bridge, he stood still for a few moments, reluctant to seek shelter in the miserable boat. The wind held the shrieking promise of a tornado, somewhere out on the prairie beyond the stockyards. Horses in the roadway shied as their drivers laid into them with whips.

  Dylan tried to decide whether or not he was afraid, and realized with no surprise that he was not. Things like firestorms and waterfalls didn’t scare him. Never had, which was probably why he had done a brisk business performing daredevil acts. He had a knack for learning tricks and a flare for the dramatic. His first stunt had taken place right in the train station where his mother had abandoned him.

  With nothing left to lose, he had climbed to a steel girder in the terminal. He had no thought but that he wanted to be up high, like a bird, where nothing could touch him. He still remembered the faces of the onlookers. No one dared move or look away. Their riveted expressions of awe and dread had given him a keen sense of power. So long as they watched, he held them in the palm of his hand. Their attention went wherever he commanded it. With a heady feeling of complete control, he could make them gasp, cause their hearts to pound, force them to weep or sweat with worry for him. When he leaped down and stood unscathed on the platform, coins had showered him and he knew he was made for this life.

  Not long afterward, he had apprenticed himself to a saloon owner in the bowery where he had performed stunts of increasing complexity. He quickly graduated to confidence games, tricking people out of their money by convincing them that a painted brick was solid gold, or that his Colombian parrot could tell the future, or that he was a direct descendant of an Egyptian king. In his lonely search for a place in the world, he had donned every persona except his own. He didn’t even know who he was anymore, and didn’t much care.

  Hoping he’d left a bottle of spirits in the boat, he decided to seek shelter instead of standing around watching the chaos. The wind whipped viciously at the opera cloak he had helped himself to, temporarily covering his face with the expensive fabric. At the same moment, someone—a very large someone—jostled him, and he found himself shoved back against a timber bridge support.

  “You move pretty fast for a dead man,” growled a deep, unpleasant voice.

  The cloak was pulled out of his face. “Nice threads, Dylan,” said the voice, rich with sarcasm. “But you weren’t wearing it the last time I saw you. Seems I recall you were wearing ten thousand dollars in bank notes strapped around you.”

  Damn it. He was hoping to avoid this. What a fiasco. He thought his daredevil escape over the falls meant he’d seen the last of Costello. Within hours of fleeing Niagara Falls, he had donned a new identity and hopped a train, knowing his former partner was likely to track him down in due time. As smart as Dylan and even less scrupulous, Costello had a special gift for getting what he was after.

  “Vince,” he said, staring down at Costello’s meaty fingers, which clutched the cloak at his throat. “How did you find me?”

  “I followed the smell, you low-bellied slug.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Yeah, I was tickled pink when I read in the papers how a certain Mr. Kennedy just got back from hobnobbing with the Vanderbilts all over the Continent. The bit about your being granted the Studleigh Prize by Queen Victoria was a dead giveaway.” He snorted. “Studleigh was the name you took for card-sharping in Albany.”

  Dylan didn’t bother playing dumb. “How have you been?” he asked, and since Costello had not killed him yet, he dared to add, “How’s Faith?”

  Vincent Costello dropped his hands. His face, which resembled a very healthy russet potato, with interesting knobs and creases, closed in a furious scowl. “You broke her heart, Dylan. She thought you were going to marry her. Even though I just about spent my last breath trying to convince her you’re no damned good, she’s got it in her head that she wants to marry you.”

  “Well,” he lied, “the feeling was mutual.”

  “Then do you mind explaining why you simply disappeared? With, I might add, our entire capital strapped to your waist.”

  “Oh,” said Dylan, tensing to flee. “That.”

  “Yes,” said Costello, pulling a gun. “That.”

  * * *

  “What’s blocking the roadway ahead?” Lucy Hathaway asked the driver. Their coach, a bulky rockaway with an extended front and the school crest painted on the doors, had rolled to a halt. She had to lean out the window to speak to him. Kathleen could see the roaring wind snatch at Lucy’s jet-black hair.

  “A horse car,” the driver yelled. “Someone cut the horse loose and took the fare box. I can see the thief heading on foot for the river.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Lucy pulled her head back in and flopped against the leather seat. “At this rate it’ll take half the night to get back to Miss Boylan’s.”

  Phoebe used the speaking tube rather than risk mussing her hair. “Driver, go around the horse car. We really must be getting back.”

  Kathleen cast a worried glance at the Randolph Street Bridge behind them. The railed span overflowed with people, livestock, horses and mules hitched to all manner of conveyance.

  “Saints and crooked angels. The fire must be even worse than it looks,” she said. In all the excitement and traffic she had not even told them her news—that Lucy had won the bet. Dylan Francis Kennedy had invited her to Crosby’s tomorrow night. She said nothing, though, for the victory seemed a trivial matter now.

  Phoebe impatiently rapped her fan at the speaking tube. “Driver, did you not hear what I said? Go around the horse car at once.”

  They could feel the coach swaying as the team strained in the traces. But there was no forward movement. Kathleen looked out at the crowded street. With a cold clutch of nervousness she saw the reason they had made no progress.

  “Our driver has fled,” she told the others. She dropped her cultured manner of speaking and unknowingly echoed the thick brogue of her mother. “Sweet heaven, preserve us, we have no driver.”

  “Don’t be ridicu—” Phoebe half stood, her hand on the door handle.

  At the same moment, an explosion split the air. The fire had reached a store of gunpowder somewhere. The coach jerked forward with such force that Phoebe was slammed against the seat. With a scream, she plopped down. Kathleen felt her head snap back with the motion. The driverless horses scrambled ahead in full panic. Not only did they draw the coach around the abandoned horse car, they headed in a new direction entirely.

  “We are going directly toward the fire,” Lucy said. Her voice was thick with fear.

  “We’re going to die,” Phoebe wailed. “Dear God, we’re going to die and I never even had the chance to marry a duke. And I never saw Pompeii. And I’ve never eaten an oyster. And I’m still a virgin—”

  “Can you shut her up?” Kathleen asked Lucy.

  Lucy clutched at Phoebe’s shoulders and shouted “Shut up!” in her face.

  Kathleen battled the rocking, lurching motion of the uncontrolled coach as she yanked the expensive silk skirts up between her legs and tied the fabric to fit like bulky trousers.

  “Do be careful,” Lucy shouted, realizing her intent. “Please, be careful.”

  Kathleen nodded grimly. She unhooked the stiff leather windshield of the coach. Immediately smoke and blowing sparks streaked into the interior. Phoebe started to scream again, but Kathleen ignored her and climbed. She was able to grasp the underside of the high seat where the cowardly driver had perched.

  The hot wind roared over her face, carrying the scent of the terrified, sweating horses. By the age of eight, Kathleen had learned to drive her mother’s milk wagon and she was determined to control these beasts. “Ho there,” she sh
outed, hoping they would respond to a verbal command. “Ho!” Then she yelled, “Please, ho!” and finally, “Ho, damn it!”

  The team ignored her. They churned along a broad avenue flanked by burning buildings. Their long manes streaked out behind them. Straining every muscle in her body, Kathleen managed to hoist herself through the windshield to the driver’s perch. The speed was dizzying, terrifying. So was the knowledge that the crazed horses were drawing them deeper and deeper into the heart of the fire.

  The reins. She had to get hold of the reins. The trouble was, the driver had dropped them and they now snaked uselessly along the street.

  She kept shouting Ho and they kept ignoring her. She spied a length of leather that had not come entirely loose, but had become fouled around part of the undercarriage. Perhaps she could reach that. Holding the seat with one hand, she stretched down and forward with the other.

  A groan came from her throat. She couldn’t reach. Kathleen wanted to sob in frustration, but she had never been one to cry and saw no point in starting now. She kept reaching. Stretching. The leather slapped tantalizingly against her hand again and again. She finally grabbed hold and gave a shout of triumph. With all her might she hauled back on the single rein.

  At first the horses fought her control, but eventually responded to the desperate tugging.

  Another explosion sounded. It was terrifyingly close, the heat of it sucking the air from her lungs. With the force of a blow, the blast knocked Kathleen from her seat. She was slammed against the pine block roadway, stunned, unable to draw a breath. People rushing toward the lakefront veered to avoid the racing coach. The horses turned sharply in the middle of the street. The tongue of the coach unbalanced the vehicle and it went over on its side. While she watched in helpless horror, the horses reared, protesting the resistance, struggling to free themselves.

  The impact of her fall reverberated through Kathleen’s teeth and bones. With slow determination she hauled herself to her feet and hurried over to the coach. The straining horses were dragging it on its side, but the big rockaway barely moved. Kathleen grabbed for the half door just as it banged open.

  “We’re all right,” Lucy said, hiking back her skirts to clamber out.

  “Thank God.” Kathleen took her hand, helping her, then reached for Phoebe. White-faced and clearly shaken, Phoebe was battling tears. “Hurry,” Kathleen said. “The whole neighborhood is burning around us.”

  Phoebe’s beaded gown tore on the door latch as she scrambled out. “Help,” she shrieked to a man and woman hurrying past. “You must help us!” The passersby clutched their bundles closer and ignored her. She exhorted a man on a horse for assistance, and shouted to a hose cart driver, but no one stopped.

  “Help me free the horses,” Kathleen said.

  “No, we must get the coach up. It’s our only hope of escaping,” Phoebe wailed. “Sir,” she yelled at a huge man in fringed buckskins. “We need help with the coach—”

  He said nothing but took out a gleaming knife. Phoebe shrank back as he pushed past her. With two easy slices, he cut the traces. Then he slapped the horses on the rumps and they raced away.

  “He…he…the horses!” Phoebe yelled.

  “At least they have a chance now,” Lucy said.

  Kathleen fixed her gaze on the hose cart crew. On the side of the conveyance she could make out the number 342. Her blood chilled, for that was the fire district that encompassed her parents’ home. Suddenly the rushing crowd, the blinding heat, the bellowing roar of the fire all faded away. She stumbled on the broken pavement and lurched around a light post, approaching the crew.

  “Have you come from the West Division?” she shouted.

  One of the men kept the hose stream aimed at the building that had exploded. “You bet. Nothing left there to save, miss.”

  A whistle sounded and the hose cart crew drew away. Sick with fear, Kathleen stumbled back to rejoin her friends.

  Lucy grabbed Phoebe’s hand. “This way. We’ll go on foot.”

  “I’ll do nothing of the sort,” Phoebe objected.

  “We’ve wasted enough time squabbling already. Come along, Kathleen.”

  As it turned out, Phoebe had her way. By trading a ruby brooch, Lucy found seats for the three of them on the back of an express wagon. The vehicle, laden with rugs and furnishings from a law firm, lumbered along Washington Street, heading toward the Sands at the edge of the lake. Kathleen felt dazed, unable to think or speak. Her legs dangled off the back of the wagon, and she realized she was facing west.

  Nothing left there to save.

  She wondered dully how long the area had been burning. Had flames consumed her parents’ house while she was laughing and flirting with Dylan Kennedy? Had her little sister Mary and baby brother James fled in terror while she was drinking champagne at the Hotel Royale?

  The knot of guilt in her stomach tightened. She clutched at her middle, only vaguely aware of her friends’ anxious discourse as they sifted through the rumors that sped through the night. Field and Leiter’s six-storey retail emporium was in flames. The gasworks and numerous substations stood directly in the path of the fire. The waterworks was threatened. If it failed, there would be no water for the hose crews.

  None of it mattered to Kathleen. She couldn’t bear to think of anything but her family and what might have become of them.

  And then she acted without thinking, doing exactly what instinct told her to do. Without looking left or right, she jumped off the back of the cart. Through the steady roar of the fire and the howl of the wind, she could hear her friends calling her name but she didn’t turn, didn’t pause, didn’t flag in her determination. In seconds, a wall of smoke and flame swallowed the retreating express wagon. It occurred to her that she might never see her friends again.

  Between her and the West Division lay a fiery maze only a fool would try to cross. But she had to go anyway. She had to find out what had become of her family.

  FOUR

  “Can’t go that way, miss,” yelled a passing merchant who staggered along, weighted by a stack of goods from his shop. “It’s burning worse’n hell.”

  Kathleen acknowledged him with a nod, but ignored his advice and continued along Van Buren Street toward the bridge. She had gone this way a thousand times over the years, making the journey from the opulent prosperity of the North Side to the chaotic neighborhoods of the West Division. She always knew, once she reached the river, that the bridge was more than a way to cross the water. It seemed to span two worlds—the world that she’d come from, and the world she yearned to inhabit.

  Tonight, for a cruelly short period of time, she had been there, in that world where she desperately wanted to be. Her brother Frank often teased her about her longing and ambition, and he swore that once she sampled the good life, she would find it as stale and artificial as faded silk flowers.

  Frank was wrong. Her first taste of high society had been…delicious. Dylan Kennedy had made it so. Imagine, Dylan Kennedy singling her out for his attention, flattering and kissing her as if she were the most desirable woman on earth.

  She wanted to savor the memories, but at present it was all she could do to survive the night. There was no use pretending she wasn’t afraid. She was. Everything she could see on the other side of the river was in flames. Wind and fire were one and the same, turning buildings and trees to dizzying towers of fire. The heat reached across the water, searing her cheeks.

  Struggling against the crowd, jostled and buffeted like a leaf on the wind, Kathleen tried to pick her way to the bridge. The very sky itself rained flaming brands down on the twin arch supports of the span. In the river, boat whistles shrieked for the bridge to be opened on its pivoting pier, but the walkway was crammed with frantic people, every one of them fleeing directly toward Kathleen. They came on in a solid wall of humanity, and the fire behind them roared like a live thing, a dragon.

  She fell back at the bridgetender’s house. She’d never get across here. Choked by f
rustration, she turned north, praying the Madison Street Bridge would be less crowded. In order to get there she would have to pass the gasworks, a frightening prospect given the rain of fire.

  But not nearly as frightening as the situation she discovered in the middle of the street. A hail of cinders spattered her, and she cringed within her cloak. She stopped and stared at a police paddy wagon lurching along the roadway. A red-faced driver, his cheeks puffed out around a whistle, stood high on the box, his whistle shrieking. They came to an impasse, where the macadam road was blocked by stacks of crates and trunks someone had abandoned.

  The driver and a man on the back had a hurried conversation, then unhitched the horse. People passing by took one look at what was happening and picked up their pace.

  Blessed be, thought Kathleen. They’re freeing the jailbirds.

  The lieutenant opened the back of the wagon, then joined the crowd rushing toward the north and east. Men poured out into the middle of the street. She recognized their striped garb, but even more, she recognized the harsh, deep lines in even the youngest faces. Their eyes were hard and darting, even when they looked up at the flaming sky and, suddenly aware of their freedom, dispersed like sparks in the air.

  She did not know any of these men, but the look of them was familiar to her. These were the faces of men who had grown up as poor as she, but rather than toiling for a wage at the stockyards or a lumber mill or a varnishing factory, they had taken to crime. Some of the men had the very look of violence in their gleaming eyes and badly healed broken noses, while others might have been altar boys in church in their younger years. A body just couldn’t tell, she thought, keeping to the side of the street, away from all the commotion.

  Appearances could be so deceiving.