The Mistress

She didn’t have to ask why. He was as big as an untrimmed side of beef, and just as muscular. Her back and shoulders ached under the weight of him even though she sensed his effort to support himself as much as possible.

“Kathleen O’Leary,” she replied.

“It’s good we should know each other’s names,” he said.

Somewhere overhead, a window exploded outward. He tucked her head under his arm to shield her from the falling glass. When she looked up at him, she could see flecks of blood on his head where he’d been hit.

“Why?” she asked, chilled despite the heat of the fire.

“So we don’t die among strangers.”

But they didn’t die. They fought and struggled through the maze of streets and faintly, between the bellow of the flames and the howl of the wind, they heard bells. The courthouse alarm or a church bell, perhaps. They followed the sound, and finally emerged at an intersection overrun by people racing to and fro, encountering barriers everywhere they turned.

Kathleen didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. After all her struggles, she had wound up in Courthouse Square, not four blocks from the salon where the evening had begun so pleasantly.

“Shit,” said Bull, drawing out the syllable in disgust. The huge, gothic building housed the jail in its basement. “I just left this place.”

“I’ll save you from that monster, miss!” hollered an earnest-looking man. He raised a tasseled horsewhip high overhead, aiming it at Bull.

Kathleen realized that the man assumed she was being mauled or abducted by the convict.

“Stop!” she yelled. “Leave him alone!”

The earnest man retreated, shaking his head.

“Take off your shirt,” she ordered Bull. At the look on his face, she gave a harsh laugh. “Modesty is no virtue on a night like tonight,” she added. “I’d best find you something to wear that doesn’t make people so suspicious.”

He looked mortified as he peeled off the horizontally striped shirt. In the heated glow of the fire, she saw that his back was marked with a furious crosshatching of scars. He might have been a slave at one time, she realized.

Half a block farther, a flatbed wagon, overloaded with salvaged goods, rumbled by. She made no apology as she helped herself to a wicker laundry basket. Rifling through a jumble of clothes and linens, she found what appeared to be a man’s nightshirt.

“Put this on,” she said, tossing it to him.

She caught his look of wary gratitude as he tugged on the stolen shirt. It stretched taut across his massive shoulders but was far less conspicuous than the prison stripes.

Kathleen scanned the area, craning her neck toward the west. “I need to get across the river,” she said, thinking aloud.

“Best get to the lakeshore, miss. Nowhere else is safe—”

“My family’s in the West Division. I have to find them.”

“Be like finding a needle in a haystack tonight.” He gestured at the press of humanity surging through the streets.

She felt a twinge of exasperation. “I won’t be arguing over it with the likes of you.” She took a deep breath, wincing at the harsh, sooty flavor of the air, and started up the street toward the bridge.

But tonight, the world was clearly against her. She could not take two steps forward without being shoved three steps back. A hose cart crew rushed past, forcing her to plaster herself against a stone wall in order to avoid being trampled. An open tar tank from a roofing plant had caught, and the whole area was wreathed in flame.

A marshal in a peaked hat and long coat put a brass speaking trumpet to his mouth. “Clear the area,” he boomed. “We can’t save the gasworks. Clear the area.”

Kathleen looked fearfully at the gasworks complex. At least one huge gasholder blazed with eye-smarting brightness. Men with buckets climbed to its top, while others led horses away from the company barn.

“Why can’t you stop the fire, for pity’s sake?” Kathleen demanded. She recalled Lucy Hathaway’s politician friends, promising that the new waterworks could pump the whole of Lake Michigan over a fire if need be.

He halted, just for a moment, while the false light of the fire played over his grimy, sweating face. “Don’t you see, miss?” He was panting in ragged gasps. “We’d sooner stop the wind.”

She forced herself to accept what she had not dared to see until this moment. The very sky itself roared with flame. Windblown sparks rained down in a deadly storm. This was different from the other fires that had plagued the city throughout the dry season. In the summer, a good neighborhood blaze might attract spectators like a baseball match at the White Stockings stadium.

Tonight, curiosity had turned to terror.

“Move along, miss,” the fire marshal said, his brass buttons flashing importantly. “You don’t want to be around when the gasworks blow. See if you can flag down a hack.”

She moved out of the way so he could direct his crew toward the blazing Hinkler’s Stage and Omnibus Company. With a deepening sense of dread, she headed north to the Lake Street Bridge, ever aware that her options were running out.

She felt a tingling at the back of her neck, a presence, and she whirled around. The man called Bull loomed like a shadow over her.

“Why are you following me?” Kathleen demanded.

“You all alone and the city’s going crazy. Somebody might take a notion to grab you. Rob you, maybe.”

“A shocking idea,” she said, leveling a look of accusation at him. But she could not cling to her anger. She was too desperate to find her family. “You’re right about the robbing,” she conceded. Without slowing her pace, she unclasped the precious Tiffany necklace and removed the matching earrings and bracelet. She had a fleeting memory of Dylan Kennedy putting the earring on her. Even now, in the middle of mayhem, she felt a sweet, melting sensation deep inside her. She wondered why she hadn’t thought to hide away the valuables before. She simply wasn’t used to wearing anything of value. She would have put the jewels in her reticule, but she had managed to lose that somewhere. A bad sign, losing Gran’s mass card. It was supposed to have been her good luck token.

“Don’t look,” she said to Bull, and turned away.

“You just a skinny little thing, anyway,” he grumbled.

She stuffed the jewels down her bodice, grimacing at the sharp feel of the priceless stones next to her skin. He was a convict, guilty of Lord-knew-what heinous offenses. He had tried to rob her. Yet now, with him limping along beside her, bleeding from the head, she felt unaccountably safe.

The next bridge was impassable. Seeing it, she had a sinking sensation in her stomach. Carts, buggies, wagons and pedestrians poured across the span.

Bull said nothing, but she could feel his “I told you so” emanating from him as if he had spoken it aloud. Shouts and the clatter of wheels filled the air and she had to jump back to make way for the fleeing populace. In their arms, people carried the things they could not bear to leave for the fire to devour.

Some looked grateful to escape with the clothes on their backs. Others wore layer upon layer of clothing despite the heat. There was one old lady in a fur coat and hat with so many layers beneath that she appeared as swollen as a tick. One nervous, suspicious woman grasped at her valuables, looking over her shoulder and hovering over her treasures like a hen with a clutch of eggs. In contrast there was a man wearing nothing but a nightshirt and a silk top hat. In one hand he held a bottle of brandy, in the other a cigar. He sat calmly in a crowded hack, watching the mountain of fire beyond the bridge. A woman hurried past on foot, pushing a baby carriage. From the expression on her face, it was clear that everything important to her lay within the carriage.

Kathleen wondered what she would save if she stood to lose everything. And she discovered, with a flash of resentment, that the answer eluded her. She had nothing of her own, nothing worth saving. Unlike the woman with the pram, she had no idea how to cherish what she had rather than wishing for something different.

Her gaze fixed on a man clinging to the tailgate of a stout insurance patrol wagon. She squinted through the smoke and—

“Pegleg!” she yelled, pushing toward the street. “Daniel! Mr. Sullivan!”

Daniel Sullivan, known to all as Pegleg for his wooden prosthesis, lived in her family’s neighborhood. At the sound of her voice, he glanced around, craning his neck.

“It’s me, Mr. Sullivan,” she cried. “Kathleen O’Leary!”

“Lord bless you, child, so it is.” The man shifted on the cart. Crammed with too many passengers and driven by Commissioner Benjamin Bullwinkle himself, the wagon lumbered along at a snail’s pace. “Can you climb aboard, then?”

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