by Susan Wiggs
“You just said you weren’t my husband.”
In truth, he didn’t know for sure. It just seemed safer to assume the marriage wasn’t valid.
“Then what do you want with me?”
She smiled with a sweetness that almost fooled him. “The larceny in your heart.”
* * *
Maybe it would amount to nothing, or maybe for once in her life she would get lucky. Kathleen hoped she could remember the way to the roofless building she had passed. She prayed it was the building she thought.
While marching across Chicago to reclaim her errant husband, she had encountered a still-burning building. From its location, she guessed that it was the Hotel St. George, the place Dylan had acquired just before the fire destroyed it. At the time, she had been enchanted by his whimsy in the midst of a disaster. But what she had seen today inside its gutted skeleton was far from whimsical.
“Three blocks south of the river,” she murmured. “That would make it Randolph Street. And then four and a half blocks west of that. LaSalle Street.”
Dylan had stopped protesting. He seemed resigned, though she suspected he’d bolt as soon as he could conveniently do so. However, she understood him well enough now to know he could not resist an illicit opportunity. He appeared to be the sort of man who thrived on such things. For the time being, he belonged to her.
She used anger and outrage to build a defensive wall around her more tender feelings and hoped it would work. She hoped she appeared as cold and clever as he, hoped that one day this terrible yearning would stop. Yet it walked with her every step of the way. He had been the perfect, storybook bridegroom. If she had drawn him straight from her dreams, he would have turned out the exact man she had married in the courthouse with the sky raining fire.
But like a dream, he faded away as reality intruded. And like a dream, he was too wonderful to be recaptured. She prayed one day she would be able to think of that night, and the days that followed, with fondness. For now, she could only feel the searing, empty hurt left by his betrayal.
Gran always used to say no good ever came of a lie. Kathleen wished she had listened. Instead, she had rashly dived into a world where she didn’t belong. Within a matter of hours, she had destroyed her own life. God alone knew what would become of her now. She was a ruined woman, no longer fit to be anyone’s virgin bride. Probably not fit to work as a lady’s maid anymore, either, when people heard what she had done. Phoebe Palmer, who loved a ripe bit of gossip, would see to it that everyone knew the tale of the Irish maid who had crashed a society party. But that wasn’t even the worst Kathleen imagined for herself. What if she found herself with child? No respectable household would take her then.
She caught herself thinking of the molls and saloon girls of Conley’s Patch. Ruined women, all, suffering the uncertainty, abuse and diseases common to their profession. Mother Mary and Joseph. What if she became like them?
The thoughts only heated the hurt inside her, and she quickened her steps, reminding herself to be cold, calm. “What is your association with Mr. Costello?” she asked him. “The truth, please.”
“We’ve been business partners off and on over the years. We put together a traveling stage act that did extremely well for us. Better, I found out, for Costello than for me. He was skimming the profits, right from the start, while I did all the work. Took all the risks.”
“What sort of risks?”
“Nothing illegal at first. We had some Java sparrows trained to do card tricks, a learned pig that could spell, a pair of horses that could do sums. I lacked the patience for performing animals,” he confessed, “and besides, they ate too much. So I stuck to my own feats of daring and illusion. I performed as an escapologist, a quick-change artist, a contortionist.” He winked. “My most popular stunts were being a human frog and playing the fiddle with a bulldog suspended from my bowing arm.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“I don’t blame you,” he replied. “They were all cheap illusions, but I gave people a good time, and they were willing to pay for it. Look, where is this place? We’ve been walking for half an hour and you’ve shown me nothing but smoke and rubble.”
She didn’t address his question. She kept thinking back to the first night of the fire. He had moved like a gymnast, climbing up to the peak of the church. With a stunning lack of fear, he had mounted the steeple, showing no more concern for the height than a man going out to the morning milking. She remembered his almost comical bow after he had dispatched the wooden steeple. He was a showman.
“Why was Mr. Costello so angry with you?”
He took her arm to help her avoid a deep crevice in the roadway. She wished she could recoil from his touch, but instead, she caught herself liking the evocative intimacy of it.
“I made off with the till,” he said mildly. “It annoyed him.”
In spite of herself, she felt a reluctant admiration for his audacity. “I can see how it would.”
“He tracked me all the way from Buffalo. I thought I’d lost him, but he turned up Sunday night.” He drew her tight against him as they squeezed through a narrow alley. “Still annoyed.”
“Did you give him back his money?”
“It isn’t—wasn’t—his. He just thought it was.”
“Where is it now?”
“I don’t know. It’s…complicated.”
“So that’s where you come from?” she asked. “Buffalo?”
“That’s one of the places. We had an act at Niagara Falls.”
“What sort of act?”
“I walked a tightrope over the Falls.”
“Oh,” she said. An improbable story, yet it made a crazy kind of sense. She recalled a set of stereograph pictures she had seen of the majestic cataract. “Wasn’t that dangerous?”
He laughed, still holding her although the road had widened. “Sweetheart, that’s the whole point.”
“How did you steal the money and elude Mr. Costello?”
“Well, one night just before the show, I strapped the cash to my chest and back, under my costume.”
“You wore a costume?”
“Of course, ninny. Haven’t you ever seen a daredevil act before?”
“No.”
“My character was the marquis de Bontemps. I dressed like a French nobleman.”
She couldn’t help herself. The image made her giggle. “All right. So you’re all tricked out like a peacock, with a fortune strapped to you.”
“And then, in the middle of the tightrope, teetering above Niagara Falls, the unfortunate marquis fell to his death. His body was never found.”
Kathleen stopped in her tracks. “You lie.”
He shrugged. “I often do, but not about this.”
They started walking again, and somehow, her hand found its way into his. As if to make up for the burned, hideous wasteland of Chicago, the sunset was spectacular, a fan of slanting pink fronds through the smoke-laden air. A feeling of isolation pervaded this section of the city. There was no one about, not even a watchman or fire patrol looking for new flare-ups.
She tried to picture Dylan falling in, struggling against a raging current. What sort of man was he, to take a risk like that?
“Why were you so desperate to get away from Mr. Costello?”
“He’s a cheat.”
“I see. And that makes you his moral superior?”
He shrugged. “Let’s just say I choose my marks more carefully than he does.” He gave her a lingering look. “Most of the time. Anyway, I decided I could do better on my own. And then Faith—” He paused.
“What about Faith? She seems a fine and virtuous girl.”
“She had this crazy idea that I would marry her.”
She took her hand from his. She was beginning to understand. He regarded marriage as more dangerous than crossing Niagara Falls on a tightrope.
This man, she thought, was a walking disaster. And a bundle of contradictions. So why did she find him so f
ascinating?
At the corner of Randolph and State, she noticed a ruined building with ornate cornice work and beautiful gothic windows, empty as a huge ghost. She studied it for a moment, and then, despite her fury, fatigue and broken heart, she started to laugh, almost weeping with mirth.
Dylan stepped back, regarding her as if she had gone mad. “What the devil’s wrong with you?”
“It’s the opera house.” She hiccuped her laughter away. “Crosby’s. We were supposed to attend the opening night together, remember? I must tell Miss Lucy that she won the wager.” She paused. “But perhaps the wager’s not settled after all, for they did say I was to be invited by a gentleman.”
“Then clearly I’m not your man,” he said peevishly.
She caught his arm before he turned on his heel. “Wait,” she said. “It’s just another block or two.” He grumbled, but she kept hold of him, and in a few moments found the fallen building she was looking for. She stopped and glanced from side to side, making sure they were alone. “There,” she said, pointing.
He squinted through the smoldering murk. The remains of the interior lay in complete disarray, everything crashed into the basement. An iron stove lay on its side, and the outline of a fireplace marked the only wall that remained standing. Everything else was unrecognizable.
“What is it?” he asked.
“The Hotel St. George. Your property,” she reminded him.
“Lucky me.”
She was growing exasperated at his recalcitrance. “Come with me. Watch where you step, there are still live coals everywhere.” She led the way over the chunks of rubble and brought him to a pile of bricks in one corner. “I passed this place as I crossed the city this afternoon. When I saw it was the St. George, I decided to look around a bit.” She didn’t want to admit that she had been desperate to do something to please him, perhaps report that something on the property had survived. Now she didn’t care a fig about pleasing him. She just needed his help.
“I found something,” she admitted with a mysterious smile. “When it turned out to be what I thought, I covered it up,” she said, proud of her forethought. “Here, help me move the bricks.”
He picked one up and pitched it aside. “Ouch. That’s still damned hot.”
Showing no sympathy, she covered her hands with two handkerchiefs and set to work. With a sigh of resignation, Dylan helped out, working as slowly as a schoolboy at lessons. But after a moment, when he saw what they were uncovering, he began to work faster. Shortly thereafter, all the bricks were moved.
Dylan grinned. “A safe. You found a safe in the building I own. Kathleen, I could kiss you.”
Then do it. Her cheeks burned with the shame of wanting him. She couldn’t believe she still wanted this man who lied with every breath he took, who had told her he loved her, who would have walked away from his marriage without a second thought.
“Can you get into it?” she asked.
“With both eyes closed.” He hunkered down beside the heavy safe and touched the hot metal of the dial. “I hope it isn’t melted.”
“What if—”
“Sh, I’m concentrating.” He spun the dial first one way, then the other, his features sharp with concentration.
“Wait,” Kathleen said.
Frowning, he stopped fiddling with the dial. “What is it?”
“Before you go on, I think we should come to an agreement.”
“What sort of agreement?”
“Well, about how we’ll split the money.” As they’d crossed the city, she had thought about it long and hard.
“The place is mine and mine alone,” he said. “The contents of this safe belong to me.”
She said nothing, but everything she asked was in her eyes. She could feel it all there, like unshed tears.
Somehow, she must have touched a sympathetic chord. “Fifty-fifty,” he said curtly.
“No,” she objected. “You must swear you’ll split it three ways.”
“Three ways?” He looked offended. “I own the damned place.”
“And I found the safe. So. A third for you,” she explained patiently. “A third for me and my family. And a third for St. Brendan’s.”
A scowl darkened his brow. “Why the hell St. Brendan’s?”
“You promised, remember?”
“No. Remind me.”
“You said you’d reconstruct the steeple.”
He laughed. “I only hoped to take up a collection so I could pocket it. Kathleen, you know what my promises are like. They’re very fragile. I break them. Happens all the time.”
His blunt, frank words hit her like a blow. “Not this time. This is one promise you’re keeping.”
“Very well,” he conceded easily. Too easily.
“If you don’t, I’ll…” Her voice trailed off. What would she do? She had no power over him. “I’ll tell Mr. Costello I’m not your mistress but your wife. Then he’ll be so furious that he’ll hunt you down and shoot you.” She had no idea if Costello would do that, but judging by the look on Dylan’s face, it was a very real possibility.
“Three ways,” he said angrily. “Have it your way. Now, be very quiet. I need to concentrate.”
She stood back and watched him work. It seemed to take forever as he sought every subtle nuance of the workings inside the lock. He had wonderful hands, she thought. They were big, with long fingers, yet they worked with a delicacy that surprised her. Without warning, a memory came back of those hands touching her, skimming over her bare flesh, seeming to detect her inner reaction the same way he read the tiny movements of the lock.
She dabbed at her brow with the handkerchief, dreading the next time she went to confession. Wherever would she begin to recount her transgressions?
They had started, she admitted, long before the night she had donned an heiress’s evening gown and jewels. Way back in her childhood, she had coveted a rich girl’s fine things. That yearning had only intensified as the years went by.
She had never actually stolen anything from Deborah Sinclair, not anything that could be seen and touched. But she had been a thief nonetheless. Lingering in the schoolroom during lessons, she had stolen the education of a privileged girl. On pretext of helping Deborah with her deportment and dancing, she had filched the graces and refinements of a genteel lady. She had stayed up until the wee hours, night after night, poring over books and magazines, secretly appropriating all the things that made her mistress a woman of privilege. She had learned to distinguish a fish fork from a salad fork. She knew the rules of piquet and understood the nuances of every social ritual from leaving calling cards to the high-class marriage market known as the white ball.
She had allowed herself to forget her place in the world, allowed herself to dream that there was a life for her beyond the workaday world of the West Division. That had been a foolish mistake. If she had stayed tucked into her little niche in life, she never would have known there was something bigger, better, more exciting out there for her.
“Cheer up, dear,” Dylan said, breaking in on her thoughts. “I think I’ve got it.”
She cast away her shadowy regrets and squatted down beside him. His face ran with sweat. Though there was nothing left to burn, the building was still as hot as an oven. The heat was a hungry beast, looking for something to devour.
“Ready?” asked Dylan with a gleam in his eye.
“Open it,” she urged him.
Using a broken pipe as a lever, he pried open the door.
For a fraction of a second, she saw a fortune before her eyes. In the blink of an eye, she saw stacks of green-backs loosely bound by paper strips. In the blink of an eye, she saw the salvation of her family.
But before she could blink a third time, it was gone. There was a flash, a whooshing sound and a roar of flames in the belly of the safe. Dylan grabbed her and flung them both backward, away from the small, fierce conflagration. He ripped off his frock coat and tried to beat out the flames, but the fabric caught and
his sleeve started to burn.
“Stop,” Kathleen cried out. “Stop, you’ll burn yourself.”
It was over in seconds.
For a very long time, they sat together amid the smoking rubble, dull-eyed and as silent as the burned-out city. Finally Kathleen asked, “What happened?”
“The paper went up the minute the air hit it.” He poked his foot at the fragile black leaves. “Amazing. Never saw that coming.”
“Obviously not.”
Using a piece of brick, he scraped all the charred notes and ash out of the safe. He held up the remains of a fifty-dollar bill, watching the red edge devour itself. Before it went completely out, he took a cheroot from his waistcoat pocket and held the glowing greenback to the tip, lighting it.
“I’ve always wanted to do that.” He sifted through the fragile black flakes and managed to find some coins. But the metal burned his fingers and he dropped most of them. They fell down into the cracks between the bricks.
Kathleen braced herself, expecting him to fly into a rage. Instead, he laughed that wonderful laugh. “Darling, if you bring me any more good luck, I won’t need to fear a worse retribution in the afterlife.”
Bleak hopelessness washed over Kathleen. Each moment she spent with Dylan, she gained new insights, but they were things she did not want to know. Nothing lasted. Everything could go up in smoke in an instant. Gran always used to say, if something came too easily, it wasn’t worth having in the first place. She wondered if that applied to her as well. She had given her entire self to Dylan in a single night.
“Now what?” she asked.
“It’s getting dark. We’d better get out of here.”
She glanced at the sky, trying to judge whether or not she’d be able to make it home before dark. Home. She pictured herself arriving alone at the house on de Koven Street, bedraggled, defeated, empty-handed. Her family had sent her out to reclaim her husband, and she had failed in every respect. She didn’t even know if she had a husband, for he’d hinted at a prior commitment. When her parents found out he was penniless, they would know what a complete failure Kathleen was.
She pushed herself to her feet. “I’d best be going.” She couldn’t think of what else to say. Farewell? Thank you for the adventure? At a loss, she turned and walked out of the building.