Darling Jack

All things considered, it had been an amazing day, Anna thought when she had finished packing, then donned her cotton nightdress and finally slid beneath the covers of her bed. She laid her spectacles carefully on the nightstand, as was her habit, closed her eyes and crossed her hands over the counterpane, with every intention of falling asleep instantly, as she always did.

A second later, she was sitting up, staring wide-eyed into a moonlit corner of the room.

“Dear Lord, how did this happen? What in the world have I done?”

She knew precisely when it happened—that moment in Mr. Pinkerton’s anteroom this morning when Johnathan Hazard’s gaze met hers and sent her heart skittering up into her throat and her stomach plunging to the soles of her feet. It had been as if the man had hit her. She hadn’t been able to catch her breath; she had even feared she might faint. Then he had walked out of the office, and for a second Anna had been tempted to run after him. She had stood there, her fingers clenched in the folds of her skirts, every muscle in her body about to explode with motion, every nerve screaming for speed.

Even now Anna wasn’t sure what she might have done if Miss Quillan hadn’t clapped her hands just then. “Ladies, it’s time to get back to business,” the secretary had proclaimed. Then, after conferring briefly with Mr. Pinkerton, Miss Quillan had added, “Oh, Mrs. Matlin. Would you be so kind as to remain here a moment, please? Mr. Pinkerton would like to have a word with you.”

“Me?”

She had felt her face burning then, believing that somehow her employer had read her thoughts, that Allan Pinkerton, master detective, had detected her explosive heartbeat and was about to fire her for such inappropriate behavior.

But, instead, once Anna was in his office, the first words out of his mouth had been, “Mr. Hazard needs a wife.”

After that, although he spoke at length, Anna had barely comprehended his meaning. She remembered nodding solemnly. She remembered saying yes and taking the railroad pass from Mr. Pinkerton’s extended hand.

“Be at the depot at 8:30,” he had told her. “Hazard will fill you in on the particulars.”

The rest of the afternoon was a blur. Word had gotten out in the office, despite the fact that Anna hadn’t breathed so much as a syllable. How could she have? She’d still been hard-pressed to catch her breath.

“Why did he pick you?” someone asked. Anna could only shake her head.

“Some people have all the luck,” Mayetta had said with an indignant sniff.

Some people did, but Anna Matlin had never considered herself one of them.

And this wasn’t lucky at all, she thought now as she stared at the packed trunk in the corner of her room. This was insane. Whatever had possessed her earlier, and made her agree to this preposterous adventure, suddenly and completely escaped her reckoning. And yet…

Anna lay back and closed her eyes. There had been that magical moment this morning, when Johnathan Hazard’s eyes met hers. She couldn’t even have said now just what color those eyes were. Gray, perhaps. Or a deep, disturbing blue. They were beautiful, though, like all the rest of him, and they had sent a shocking, nearly electric message all through her.

Even now, hours later, her heart began to beat erratically in her breast. Come, those eyes had said. Risk it Yes.

“No.” The word left her lips as little more than breath as Anna dug deeper into the familiar warmth of her bed.

The only risk she’d ever taken in her life had turned out badly. She’d come to Chicago with Billy Matlin, even when her father had warned her, “If you go, girl, don’t bother coming back.” She had married a young dreamer—sweet Billy—who had pursued his dreams beyond her and who had perished—somewhere in the mountains of Colorado in his quest for gold.

She’d never been a dreamer. It didn’t make sense that now, at the age of twenty-six, she had suddenly allowed herself to be swept up in a dream. But she had been. In a single moment. At a single glance Come. Risk it.

Not that she’d had much of a choice. Mr. Pinkerton had never said in so many words that there was one, though his manner had been hesitant somehow, and there had been enough pauses in his speech that Anna could have stopped him at any time. But she hadn’t. There she had been in Mr. Pinkerton’s office, not collecting papers before or after hours, or dusting, as she occasionally did when he was out of town, but having been invited in by the great Mr. Pinkerton himself. And there he had been, looking the way God might have looked sitting behind a desk, asking her to act, if only for a while, as a Pinkerton detective. She had been astonished beyond words and flattered beyond belief. It had never occurred to Anna to say no.

Until now.

Still…there was him. Johnathan Hazard. Mad Jack as he was so often called. As a file clerk, Anna was privy to a great deal of information about the Pinkerton employees. It wasn’t that she snooped, exactly. It was just that it was difficult not to read papers as she put them in their proper folders and files. She knew, for example, that Nora Quillan was thirty years old and divorced. And she knew that Johnathan Hazard was the fourth son of an English earl, and that he had come to America after being asked to leave Oxford for “behavior unbecoming,” whatever that meant.

He had begun working for Mr. Pinkerton ten years ago, and by the time Anna started with the agency, Johnathan Hazard had already been somewhat of a legend in the Chicago office. Back then, of course, in 1863, the war had been going on, and most of the agents, Mr. Pinkerton included, had been working as spies for President Lincoln and the Union army.

She remembered the day when word had come that Hazard and his partner, Samuel Scully, had been captured in Virginia and been condemned to hang as spies. A dark cloud had settled over the office, not to lift until the men received a stay of execution. Hazard had appealed to England, the country of his birth. It wasn’t known just what Scully had done to escape the hangman’s noose, but there had been talk of his giving information to his captors, especially when another Pinkerton spy was arrested and summarily hanged.

After four years, the gossip had died away. So had Samuel Scully, Anna thought. No one, it seemed, knew for certain what had happened in that Virginia prison. No one inquired anymore. Mr. Pinkerton stood staunchly behind agents, whether they were dead or alive, and he would have fired anyone who dared to suggest that Scully had been a traitor.

It had been after the war that Johnathan Hazard truly earned his nickname—Mad Jack. He had gone after and brought in the most daring of thieves and counterfeiters, all the while sending in the most outrageous expense reports Anna had ever seen. His file was thick with them, as well as with dozens of written reprimands from Mr. Pinkerton. They never seemed to hamper his career, however, or his dazzling reputation.

Still, in the past five or six months, Anna couldn’t recall having filed a single paper in the Hazard file. A year ago he had been assigned to recover some jewels believed stolen by the Baroness Chloe Von Drosten. He had simply disappeared after that— from the office and from the files. There had been rumors. Rumors aplenty. That he had fallen into drink and dissipation. That he had retired. That he had been fired.

And then, suddenly—today—he was back. Dark and tall and elegant. Swaggering, even when he was standing still. Anna felt her lips curling up in a smile now as she pictured that. Johnathan Hazard’s absence seemed to have made all the secretaries’ hearts grow fonder. Maybe even her own.

She thought once more about her astonishing day. From the moment that man looked at her, it had been as if she were moving in some odd spotlight, being noticed by people who ordinarily ignored her. And not merely noticed, but cared for. She felt, well…quite special.

She had never wanted to be special, though. Quite the opposite. She had planned to live her life quietly, retiring from the Pinkerton Agency when her hair was gray and her bones were bnttle, moving to the seaside, perhaps, where she would spend her remaining days taking quiet walks on the beach and reading all the books she didn’t have enough time for now.

Of course, she still would. But now, when she retired, she would have one dazzling memory to savor. And that, Anna supposed, was worth a bit of risk.

In a month or so, she would be back in the file room, and invisible again. But no one would be able to take away the memory that for one bright and splendid month, she had been not only a Pinkerton spy, but Johnathan Hazard’s wife, as well.

She was going to have an adventure. After that Anna thought as she drifted into sleep, she would return—to this room, to her filing, and to her comfortable oblivion.

It was well after midnight when Ada Campbell, the madam of the city’s foremost house of pleasure, determined that all was well in the parlors downstairs and that she could at last retire to her personal quarters on the second floor, where Mad Jack Hazard was waiting for her.

Not that she was anticipating an evening of love, she thought as she climbed the ornate staircase, stopping once to peer at a nick in the oaken banister and then again to pick up a feather from the Oriental runner that led to her rooms.

Jack had been back for nearly a week. The handsome Pinkerton agent was one of the few men whom she permitted in her rose-brocaded sanctuary and to whom she gave her favors gratis. Only on this visit, Jack Hazard was behaving more like her guest than her lover. He hadn’t touched her once. Damn it.

Ada frowned as she neared her door, questioning her own abilities at seduction. She’d never had to seduce this man before, though. Not Hazard. Not any other man, for that matter, but particularly not Hazard. He’d always been more than eager to join her in her bed, and more than creative once there. Masterful, in fact. The best. What the devil was wrong with him now? And how was she going to fix it? For, if she didn’t, the madam decided, there was really no use in having him around.

She paused to adjust the frame of a French watercolor that had cost her a small fortune. If there was anything that Ada Campbell, the city’s foremost madam, didn’t need at this juncture in her career, it was a constant, live-in reminder that her personal charms were on the wane.

His head snapped up as soon as she stepped into the room, and he flashed her that cavalier grin she’d come to adore over the years. Good God, the man was handsome. It would be a pity to have to kick him out.

The bottle of sour mash—full as far as Ada could see—still rested on the draped and swagged table. Hazard’s fist was still clenched around it.

“Hello, love,” he said in a voice at once soft and sad and annoyingly sober. “All done downstairs?”

Ada sighed, fearing she was done upstairs, as well, unless she took some drastic action that would bring her former lover to his senses. She plucked her ear bobs off, tossed them in the direction of her jewel box and proceeded to take off her clothes.

With his fist tightening around the bottle, Jack swallowed a groan. Ada, it seemed, had reached the end of her tether, not to mention her patience. He had expected that. He was surprised it hadn’t happened earlier—last night, for instance. Or the one before that, when he’d kissed her, then promptly turned his back and fallen asleep—or, more exactly, feigned sleep for both their benefits.

“What’s the matter with you?” the madam had hissed into her pillow.

“Everything,” he’d wanted to say. “Nothing. Dead men can’t feel pain or passion. Aren’t they both the same?”

He sat now and watched her undress—sinuously, seductively—sorry he had reduced the notorious madam to using tricks she hadn’t had to resort to in years. Not that they did any good, he thought sourly.

She stood before the pier glass, having tilted it to give him a perfect and unobstructed view as she peeled away various layers of satin and lace. Down to her red corset now, she unhooked it slowly, held it closed a moment, then shed it the way a jeweled snake might rid itself of useless skin, letting it drop, forgotten to the floor. In the mirror, her breasts had a silvery sheen. Small, yet succulent. Not a feast, by any means, but a delectable dessert.

He ought to get up, Jack told himself. He ought to move toward her, to offer the palms of his hands like warm salvers, to take the delights the famous Ada Campbell was offering. A year ago, he would have, only it wasn’t in him now. He couldn’t move.

“I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” he said in response to the frown that was digging between her eyes and darkening her beautiful face.

“All right.” Ada snatched up her corset and strode to the wardrobe, where she grabbed a silken dressing gown from a hook and shoved her arms through its sleeves. “You can sleep here tonight, but don’t bother coming back,” she said on her way to the door. “Ever.”

She stood there a moment, shaking her head, her expression wavenng between fury and dismay. “You were a lot more fun when you were drinking, Jack. In fact, I think I liked you better that way.”

The ensuing slam reverberated through the room, probably throughout the house, but Jack didn’t blink. His fingers merely tightened on the bottle.

It was a game he played every night. A test. He told himself he hadn’t quit. He was in training—like an athlete preparing for a competition, like a Thoroughbred doing evening workouts around a track.

He was going to win, God damn it. And that sweet prospect was worth every insult and humiliation he’d had to endure, including begging Allan and suffering Ada’s current disgust.

Nothing mattered except bringing the baroness down. Killing her would be too easy. Jack felt his lips sliding into a feral grin. He had imagined murdering her a thousand times, playing out a variety of scenarios in his head. But each time he pictured Chloe Von Drosten dead, it gave him no pleasure, because in death she looked so peaceful, so far beyond earthly pain.

The sad truth, he had to admit, was that he wasn’t so certain he could do it. To murder the baroness, he’d have to be alone with her. It hadn’t been so long since their last encounter that he couldn’t imagine all his hard-won sobriety and all his rage shuddering and collapsing at the crook of a red-tipped finger or drowning in one of Chloe’s wine-colored smiles. He was a damn drunk, but he wasn’t a fool.

He needed a wife—a buffer. What a choice he’d made! A mouse to cower between him and the devil. Mrs. Matlin, the plain, bespectacled widow. The nonentity.

Ah, well. In a month, the little clerk would have served her purpose, and she could come back to the haven of the agency and fade into the woodwork. While he…

His fingers loosened on the bottle of sour mash now, moving slowly, caressing the warm, handheated glass. In a month, this would be his reward, and like little Mrs. Matlin, he could slip back into his own brand of oblivion.

His gaze swung to the door the madam had slammed with such disgust. “Ada, love, when I was drinking, I liked me better, too.”

Chapter Three

Anna was late getting to the train depot the next morning, first because she’d taken too much time brushing her hair and subduing it into a sleek bun at the nape of her neck, and second because the Misses Richmond had been intent upon giving her the benefit of some crucial, lengthy last-minute advice. In her efforts to disengage herself from her landladies and to escape from the house, Anna had nearly forgotten her spectacles and had to rush back up to her room on the third floor to retrieve them.

Up there, she had looked around the little room almost wistfully. “Don’t be silly,” she’d said to herself. “You’ll be back in a few weeks, with memories. Memories galore.”

The omnibus had gotten her to the depot with only a minute or two to spare. Then, after seeing that her borrowed trunk was properly stowed—“Keep a sharp eye on your luggage, dear,” the Misses Richmond had cautioned—Anna herself had had a mere second to clamber aboard through a billowing cloud of cinders and steam. By the time she located a forward-facing seat—“Never ride backwards. It’s bad for the digestion.”—and settled into it, Anna’s carefully tamed hair was wildly corkscrewed and her glasses were steamed up and sliding down her nose.

She extracted a hankie from her reticule, and was wiping the wet lenses when the train gave a long hoot and then, with a lurch, moved away from the depot. Anna planted her glasses back on and gazed over the rims in search of a familiar face among the passengers.

He wasn’t there. Johnathan Hazard wasn’t there!

Turning toward the window now, she scanned the wooden platform as the train moved slowly past it. She half expected to see the famed Pinkerton agent vaulting over a baggage cart, then sprinting alongside the train. A little smile touched Anna’s lips as the image flourished in her brain.

Hazard would toss a valise through an open window, then time the rhythm of his stride perfectly as he reached for a metal handrail and levered his long, supple body onto the moving vehicle. He would stand in the doorway then, casually brushing the sleeves of his fine-fitting frock coat and straightening his waistcoat with a subtle tug. All the while, without even appearing to move those gray-blue eyes, he would be gathering information, and by the time the last car passed the depot, Johnathan Hazard would know just how many passengers were on board and their disposition in the various seats—and specifically, he would have found hers.

Easily, then, as if the train were standing still, he would move along the aisle to arrive at the vacant seat beside her. His breathing would be even, despite his race against the mighty locomotive. And, when he sat, there would be the faint aroma of bay rum and hearty exercise. He would cock his head in her direction, take her measure in a glance, and say…

“Ticket, madam?”

Anna’s gaze jerked to the patent brim of the conductor’s cap and then to the empty seat beside her.

“Conductor, you must stop this train. Immediately.”

“Beg pardon, ma’am?”

“I said…” Anna was rummaging through her handbag now for the official pass Mr. Pinkerton had given her the day before. She hadn’t lost it, had she? Or left it behind? Where the devil—? Her fingers gripped the cardboard pass, and she flashed it at the conductor. “I order you to stop this train.”

The man smiled. “Ah. A Pinkerton, are you?” He looked at her more closely now. “I never would have guessed.”

“My partner hasn’t arrived,” Anna told him, trying to subdue the plaintive note in her voice and the flutter of panic in her chest, attempting to sound more Pinkerton than pitiful. She was a representative of the world’s foremost detective agency, after all. She had credentials.

“A lady, is she?” The conductor had to widen his stance as the train picked up speed. His gaze wandered around the car.

“No. A gentleman. A man by the name of Johnathan Hazard. He’s…”

“Well, now, why didn’t you say so before? Mad Jack’s back in the smoking car.” He angled his head toward the rear of the tram. “Been there at least a couple of hours.”

“Oh.” The word broke from Anna’s throat with pitiful relief. She smoothed her skirt then, adding a calmer, more authoritative, “Indeed.”

“We’ll be stopping in Coal City in about an hour to take on more fuel. I expect you can connect with him then.”

“Yes. Thank you. I will.”

“Have a pleasant trip, ma’am. My regards to Mr. Pinkerton.” The man touched the brim of his cap and proceeded to make his way along the aisle.

Anna turned back to the window. The buildings dwindled in size as the train approached the city limits; the crowds of people thinned and eventually disappeared. She lowered her chin to consult the watch pinned to her bodice. It was 8:48. It occurred to her that she was eighteen minutes late for work. And then a wild little giggle roiled in her throat when she realized she was at work, right here, speeding south-southwest at thirty miles an hour.

Toward what? she wondered bleakly now. Anna sighed so hard, her breath clouded the window.

“Hazard will fill you in on the particulars,” Mr. Pinkerton had told her. Suddenly, to Anna, those particulars loomed hugely, even vitally important.

In the smoking car, Jack bit off the tip of a thin cigar, lit it, and leaned back in his seat, smiling. He wondered now exactly what he would have done if he hadn’t seen the little mouse scurrying toward the train at the very last moment. Stalked off, no doubt, and stormed into Allan’s office, demanding a replacement for the missing Mrs. Matlin, giving his old friend another opportunity to call him obsessed, and possibly even to deny him not only a partner, but the assignment, as well.

Mrs. Matlin was on board, though, and Jack breathed a sigh of relief at the same time he cursed himself for needing her at all. He hadn’t needed anyone in years. Not after Scully Not professionally, anyway. As for needing anyone personally…well, there was his sister, Madelaine, of course. And then there had been Chloe, hadn’t there? If one could call that sick and soulless dissipation need.

He blew a hard, thin stream of smoke toward the ceiling. Allan had been right, of course. He was obsessed. There was no other word for it. But he planned to use that obsession well—as the light at the end of his long, dark tunnel, as the fuel that would burn and sustain him until he did what he had to do.

Had Allan refused him, Jack thought now, he would have gone ahead anyway, merely paring down his plan to fit his own bankroll. It still would have worked. He wouldn’t fail. Not at this. But with Pinkerton money behind him, his plan was a guaranteed success. It had “legs,” as they said at the track. Especially now that the mouse was on board. “Bless you, Allan,” Jack murmured under his breath.

He let his gaze travel aimlessly through the haze of smoke. Two women—one in acid-green satin, her cohort in royal blue—caught his attention. They sat flanking a scrawny, bald-pated fellow in a triple row of seats, leaning toward him and pouring their attention, as well as their sultry shapes, all over him. The little bald man was lapping it up. Poor sap had probably never been the focus of one female’s ardent attention, let alone two, and Jack had been a Pinkerton agent too long not to recognize a bit of larceny in progress.

It was almost second nature for him to rise, clench his cigar in his teeth and move in on the bustling, hustling dollies.

When Anna got off the train in Coal City, a second blast of steam curled whatever hairs the first one had missed, in addition to nearly scalding the skin from her face. Good Lord, she’d be lucky to get to St. Louis alive. Right now, however, her immediate destination was elsewhere.

She approached the conductor, who was stretching his legs on the platform while winding his watch. Anna cleared her throat. “Excuse me, sir. Would you please direct me to the smoking car?”

The man dropped his watch. It draped over his belly by its thick gold chain as he peered down at Anna. “Sorry, madam. You startled me. I didn’t notice you standing there.”

“The smoking car,” Anna repeated as her chin came up a determined notch. “Which one is it, if you please?”

“Oh, the Pinkerton lady. Looking for Mad Jack, are you?” He grasped her elbow firmly. “You just come along with me.”

She hadn’t really wanted an escort, Anna thought, or needed one. She had to trot to keep up with him, and when they reached the second-to-last car of the train, the conductor gave her a boost, which Anna wasn’t quite prepared for. She stumbled headlong into the acrid, smoke-filled coach, stopping at a pair of high-glossed boots that shone even through the murk. Anna’s eyes jerked up.

“Mr. Hazard?”

He sat, or rather reclined, with a female on each knee. He appeared to be wearing them, actually. Like trousers, one leg blue and the other a garish green. And he was also wearing a wide white grin that, under the circumstances, struck Anna as altogether brazen and shocking and, well…beautiful.