Crackling leaves and bits of litter, scattered by late-September gusts, swirled beneath hooves and wheels. Other vehicles hurried past, but we crept along at a walk, keeping to the very edge of the street. The reins felt quite comfortable in my hands now; in fact, I didn’t want to give them up. I liked being able to direct our travels.
“How did you come across the name Balder?” I asked.
“Balder the Beautiful? He’s a character from Norse mythology. Apparently he owned a horse who broke a leg. By tying a knotted black thread around the fracture and reciting a charm, he cured him. Let’s see if I remember how it goes. ‘Balder rade’ (that means ‘rode’), ‘his colt slade’ (that means ‘slipped’). ‘He lighted and he righted, set joint to joint and bone to bone. Heal in Odin’s name.’” Smiling, he said, “In a way, Balder was the world’s first veterinary.”
That made me think about his work in the livery. “Aren’t you worried about keeping Balder with all those sick horses?”
To my surprise, he chuckled. “Balder? He’s built of bricks. Besides, you’ll no doubt recall from your manual that if a horse survives distemper he can’t get it again. Balder had it when he was a yearling.”
The distance to my house was all too short, and well before I was ready, I had to pull Balder to a final halt. He stopped on a dime and Mr. Stead, misplacing the credit, nodded approvingly. “A fine job. I should hire you as my private driver.”
I swelled with pride and glanced toward the parlor window to see if Mother or Grandmother was watching. The lamp shone yellow behind the new glass. But silhouetted above it was Father’s glowering face.
Mr. Stead didn’t see him. “I’ll just wait here for you to help me down,” he joked until, noticing my stricken look, he turned toward the house.
Reluctantly I handed him the reins. He wrapped them around the whip post and hurriedly climbed out of the buggy to help me down with the utmost propriety. Father came out of the house to meet us at the bottom of the stairs. Extending his hand, he said, “Mr. Stead, isn’t it? The veterinary?”
“Yes, sir. How are you this evening, Mr. Selby?”
“Fine. Just fine. Lovely autumn weather, isn’t it?” A particularly chilling gust of wind raked the street, but Father stood by his words. He waited, rocking back and forth slightly, enjoying our discomfort. “Are you here to attend to that horse in my stable … or to something else?”
My face burned like a flame was being held to it.
“Oh, she’s made remarkable progress, sir,” Mr. Stead replied. “The Girl, I mean. The Governor’s Girl.”
“Yes … well then, I’ll have my son, James, return her to the fire station and to her duties.”
My heart plummeted. No!
“Begging your pardon, she’s better off here for the meanwhile. You see, there’s this nasty business of distemper—”
“I’d heard that,” Father interrupted. His newspaperman’s instincts for a story were aroused. “Is that why a man can’t get a horsecar these days?”
“Well, yes, and-”
“And a lot of the other workhorses around the city are absent with it?”
“Yes, but-”
“And”—he was just like a cat, I thought, a smug one that toys overlong with a mouse before whomping it flat with a decisive paw—“and you don’t want that burned horse back at the fire station because this distemper’s flared up there. Is that true?”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” Mr. Stead answered innocently.
Oh, no.
“Wait until the populace learns about this!” Father crowed. “Take me over there. Now.”
Mr. Stead didn’t know what to say. He glanced toward me, but I was no help: Father was already brushing past us and climbing right into the buggy. His brash behavior came as no surprise. What did put me on my toes, however, was the sharp odor of kerosene on his clothes. That made my mind spin wildly.
With guarded generosity, Mr. Stead climbed into the buggy as well and unwrapped the reins. Just as they started to drive away, though, the fire alarm jangled. Balder was pulled to the side of the street and, out of habit, we all paused to listen for the response. Around the corner and down the street, men could be heard shouting orders. The dalmatian was barking, as were other dogs in the neighborhood, but there was no clatter of hooves. We looked at one another in wonderment and waited.
Time took a strange turn and everyone sensed it. Up and down the street people came to a stop and waited. They ceased their sweeping, their chatting, their hurrying. They cocked their heads and listened for the reassuring response of the horses galloping forth to quench yet another upstart fire. But it didn’t happen.
At long last, hooves were heard and three horses did round the corner. But at the sight of them my hand flew to my mouth: These creatures were mere ghosts! Although they were the engine team, chosen for their combined strength and speed, this trio was struggling to go at a shaky trot. While the steam engine hissed menacingly, the horses stumbled, coughed, and gamely struggled forward. A whitish phlegm seeped from their nostrils. I looked past them. No hose cart, no ladder wagon.
“Oh, that’s murderous!” Mr. Stead protested. “Those horses are sick. They shouldn’t be made to work!”
“Let’s follow them,” Father urged.
Out of the dusk, James came running up the street, easily besting the sickly animals dragging the engine. He gasped for breath. “It’s your newspaper building,” he called to Father. “It’s on fire!”
Time took another strange turn and, again, everything happened too slowly. I watched Father cock an apparently interested ear to James’s words. He digested them with a composed face. And then, as if his cue had been whispered to him offstage, he suddenly responded, “It is? No, it can’t be.” Leaning forward on the edge of his seat, he motioned to Mr. Stead. “Hurry!” he shouted. “You have to drive me there. I have to save my newspaper.”
TWENTY-FOUR
THE WORDS KEPT RINGING IN MY EARS: “THEY SHALL hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat.”
It was the reverend’s graveside farewell to the two young men killed in the newspaper building fire. They were brothers, valiantly trying to carry out the trays of type when a wall collapsed on them. Father called them heroes. A sickening feeling inside me moaned that they were sacrifices.
A fretful wind swirled leaves around our feet. Grandmother coughed and leaned more heavily on my arm. Ironically, the widow’s weeds she’d worn ever since Grandfather passed away were finally appropriate. As the reverend droned on, bandaging the few mourners with his Scriptures, she stared into the two holes with such a wistful gaze that I worried she was going to leap in before the caskets were lowered.
I sneaked a glance at Father. He was standing a little apart from the circle, an equal distance from his surviving employees and their families and from Mother and the rest of us. A journalist might describe him as pensive, but he didn’t seem sad.
Maybe that was my own misinterpretation, based solely on something I’d overheard last night. It was late and I was on my way to bed after checking on the Girl one more time. I was so worried she’d somehow catch the distemper that was spreading like wildfire that I’d gone out to see her between each one of my chores. A basket with my neatly folded laundry sat at the bottom of my stairs, and as I bent to pick it up, I heard Father and Mother talking in their bedroom. Their words were as starched as the laundry, the pauses between them heavy with meaning. I didn’t want to listen, and yet I did.
Mother was opening and closing the dresser drawers, putting away their laundry. “I found a large stain of kerosene on your gray trousers,” she said matter-of-factly.
With knee-jerk speed, Father had replied, “I spilled some when I was refilling a lamp.”
There was a pause.
“It was a lot of kerosene,” Mother said.
“I spilled a lot.”
Another, longer pause.
“Yes, you did.”
A blue jay shrieked from a tree limb right above my head, scolding me back to the service. “Yea, Lord God, the Almighty,” the reverend beseeched before setting off on another long verse.
A pair of squirrels, unmindful of the solemnity in their midst, came dashing around and between the weathered headstones, across the twin piles of fresh dirt, and over by the two black horses waiting patiently in front of their hearses. I was sure that the nearer vehicle was the one I’d seen at the livery, only the black plumes had been freshened and the silver polished to a gleam.
The two horses stood as still as stone, with their heads slightly bowed. It occurred to me that the reverend’s words could just as easily mark the passing of the brave firehorses. Only this morning James told me that Chester and Major John, who had risen to their feet to pull the steam engine one last time, were dead. The third horse, the gray gelding who had replaced the Girl, was down in his stall.
“It’s as quiet as midnight inside the station,” he’d said. And the men, not normally of a religious bent, were muttering uneasy prayers that no more fires start before they could get some healthy horses brought in and properly trained.
I cast an eye over the street running beside the cemetery. The fire station was not alone in its silence. With so many horses absent from the streets, a funereal pall had settled over the entire city. I’d heard it rumored that four thousand horses had died already. My stomach ached every time I heard someone talk about it; but it was all anyone could talk about, because the horses’ services affected everyone’s lives. Without healthy horses to pull the wagons, stores couldn’t get their merchandise, and goods were piling up at the wharves and railway stations, and clogging warehouses and alleyways. Without healthy horses, homes couldn’t get their regular deliveries of milk and ice and coal.
Yesterday, a man with a weasel’s face came hollering his way down our street, prodding a team of oxen ahead of him. Oxen! He had coal for sale, but at triple the usual price. Mother told him she’d go without a fire in the stove before she’d kneel to such blatant extortion, and Grandmother had shouted after him that he was a miserable sinner on his way to meet the devil. He’d only let out a brassy, gap-toothed laugh and called back that he’d made enough money off this horse sickness to buy out the devil himself.
Having stood so long in the cemetery, I began to shiver. Grandmother squeezed my arm. Almost overnight, the air had turned frosty. A gust of wind riffled the drying leaves, making them rustle and quaver, turning them inside out so that they flickered orange and yellow. Just like flames, I thought, and shivered again. When would the next fire start? I wondered. More important, who would fight it?
For the next seven days Father had the excuse of resuscitating his newspaper to miss our evening meals, but on the following Monday he arrived home early. He was bursting with pride that the Argus hadn’t missed a single edition all week—even with the fire—and allowed himself a small beer to celebrate. While Mother rummaged through the cellar, he stood at the top of the stairs and explained to her again how he’d rented office space in a neighboring building and made arrangements to borrow the presses of another newspaper, a morning one. Then, as Mother and I carried the small plates and saucers of pickled and preserved foods to the table—foods that didn’t require ice— Father took his place at its head, still talking. James rushed in through the back door just before we sat down, stirring the air with the intoxicating aromas of harness oil and fresh straw. He made a face at our meager spread: pickled beans and asparagus, applesauce, hard-boiled eggs, and bread. Mother added a bowl of dusty dates to the table. Grandmother remained in her room with another sick headache.
“We’ve struck a spark tonight,” Father stated happily as soon as we finished saying grace and before the first plate was passed. He leaned back, beaming.
“How is that?” Mother responded politely. She was trying hard not to look at the half-empty glass of beer in front of him and therefore drawing all the more attention to it.
“This horse sickness, this distemper. It’s wider spread than anyone thinks, which makes for a wonderful column. Listen to what I have to say in this evening’s edition.” With a great show of snapping the paper to attention, Father began reading select passages from his column.
“‘Further illustrating the fact that this city is teetering on the brink of a fiery disaster, this newspaper has uncovered a terrible secret. That secret relates to the sickness invading Boston’s working horse population. The presence of this disease will come as no surprise to those of you with blisters on your feet, as the dearth of horsecars has made walking the new fashion.’”
Grandmother surprised us by lumbering wordlessly into the room as he read. She looked mothy white and tired. Muttering something akin to an apology, she pulled out her chair with a reckless scrape and plopped into it. Father looked momentarily irritated, but once he had our attention again, recovered.
“Now,” he told us, “here’s the meat of the article. By the way, Mrs. Selby, that’s something we could use a little more of here.”
“There’s no meat for the icebox because there’s no ice for the icebox,” Mother explained. “We’re having to make do.”
“Yes, well,” he grumbled, “that’s going to have to change. Now,” he snapped the paper again and read on, “‘What the general populace may be surprised to learn is that this horse disease has crept into the city’s own fire stations, and while we don’t wish to alarm you unnecessarily …’”
Grandmother snorted.
“‘… we feel it only right to inform you that most, if not all, of Boston’s firehorses are currently lying dead or dying in their stalls.’”
My stomach flipped. I laid my fork across my plate.
“It goes on here,” he said, “with some facts and figures that my men assembled. Seems this sickness goes from Boston all the way to New York and back. And,” he scanned further, “they’re estimating that as many as thirty thousand animals will be afflicted before we’re through with this business.”
Nausea scratched a finger up my throat.
“Let’s see … here it is: ‘Our valued readers are urgently warned that the horses may not be the only victims of this disease. While its stealth cannot take human lives directly, one careless spark—and one alarm gone unanswered—will certainly result in the loss of property, of valuables and—quite likely—of human life itself.
‘“As we have stated before, the city of Boston is ill-prepared to defend itself against any major fire. Our situation has only become more dire now that the firehorses are dead. And so, dear readers, the stage is set. We, like you, await the play with bated breath and hope the third act isn’t a fiery finale.’”
He looked over his newspaper, grinning smugly. “How do you like that? That will have them talking, I tell you.”
Them, maybe, but not us. No one said a word.
“Come now. James, what do you think?” He held his knife in midair.
“I think Captain Gilmore will have my head on a platter,” James replied. “He didn’t want anyone to know about the sick firehorses, and he’ll think I told you.”
“Nonsense.” Father dismissed James’s concern with a brandish of his knife. “The health of the firehorses is a topic for public knowledge. It must be. We depend on them too much not to be made aware of their illness. Besides, it was Captain Gilmore’s own veterinary, Mr. Stead, who informed me.”
Though he’d done so innocently.
“And as long as we’re on that topic … Mrs. Selby, are you aware that your daughter has been accompanying this Mr. Stead all over the city?” He didn’t so much as glance in my direction while he spoke. I watched his eyelids flutter behind his spectacles like trapped butterflies. “I have it on good authority that he’s taken her inside liveries, and you know the sorts of scoundrels one finds there. It’s not seemly by any means, and it’s liable to harm my reputation, so from now on please confine her to this house unless she’s in your company.”
That jolted me into speech. “You can’t do that!”
He calmly transferred some asparagus to his plate, ignoring me completely. “Pass the salt, please,” he said to James. “Honestly, Mrs. Selby, you have to put some meat on this table. Do you hear me? A man can’t sustain himself on these weeds.”
Mother folded her napkin and laid it on the table. She pushed back her chair and stood. “Do you hear yourself, Mr. Selby?”
“What? What is this? Sit down.”
“I am not a dog, Mr. Selby, to be ordered to speak or stay quiet at your command. Nor is your daughter. Her mind is every bit as capable as yours, and you must stop dismissing her as if she didn’t exist.”
Mother was surprising me again, surprising us all. With Grandmother murmuring a mutinous “Amen,” Father looked as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water in his face. His mouth opened and closed, but for an instant, no words came out.
He leaned toward James, rolling his eyes exaggeratedly. “They’ve all taken leave of their senses,” he whispered in a loud, conspiratorial voice that was meant to be heard. “Yes, the Selby women have gone mad. Berserk. They’ve—”
Grandmother lunged to her feet, jostling the table. “I’m not a Selby,” she proclaimed, “but I’ve spent enough time with this family to understand who has their senses and who wouldn’t recognize good sense if it bit him in the leg. If you’d ask your daughter why she’s accompanying the veterinary, you’d learn it’s because she wants to become a veterinary.”
“Ridiculous!” Father thundered. “She’s a girl. Girls don’t become veterinaries.”
“Why not?” I demanded, rising to my feet as well. I braced my calves against the chair to keep from shaking.
Behind his spectacles, his eyes narrowed. On the table, his fingers closed into a fist. “Well, for one thing,” he said, “you can’t even light a lamp without trying to burn down my house.”
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