Praise for the novels of Susan Wiggs

“Susan Wiggs paints the details of human relationships with the finesse of a master.”

—Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author

“Once more, Ms. Wiggs demonstrates her ability to bring readers a story to savor that has them impatiently awaiting each new novel.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Hostage

“A thrilling blend of adventure and romance…Wiggs provides a delicious story for us to savor.”

—Oakland Press on The Mistress

“Susan Wiggs delves deeply into her characters’ hearts and motivations to touch our own.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Mistress

“A quiet page-turner that will hold readers spellbound as the relationships, characters and story unfold. Fans of historical romances will naturally flock to this skillfully executed trilogy, and general women’s fiction readers should find this story enchanting as well.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Firebrand

“Wiggs is one of our best observers of stories of the heart. Maybe that is because she knows how to capture emotion on virtually every page of every book.”

—Salem Statesman-Journal

“Susan Wiggs writes with bright assurance, humor and compassion.”

—Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author

The Hostage
Susan Wiggs

The Chicago Fire Trilogy

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Also by Susan Wiggs

Contemporary Romances

HOME BEFORE DARK

THE OCEAN BETWEEN US

SUMMER BY THE SEA

TABLE FOR FIVE

LAKESIDE COTTAGE

JUST BREATHE

The Lakeshore Chronicles

SUMMER AT WILLOW LAKE

THE WINTER LODGE

DOCKSIDE

SNOWFALL AT WILLOW LAKE

FIRESIDE

LAKESHORE CHRISTMAS

THE SUMMER HIDEAWAY

Historical Romances

THE LIGHTKEEPER

THE DRIFTER

The Tudor Rose Trilogy

AT THE KING’S COMMAND

THE MAIDEN’S HAND

AT THE QUEEN’S SUMMONS

Chicago Fire Trilogy

THE HOSTAGE

THE MISTRESS

THE FIREBRAND

Calhoun Chronicles

THE CHARM SCHOOL

THE HORSEMASTER’S DAUGHTER

HALFWAY TO HEAVEN

ENCHANTED AFTERNOON

A SUMMER AFFAIR

For Lisa and Bruce, with love

Part One

And the wind raging, and the fire burning, and London and Paris and Portland outdone, and no Milton and no Dante on earth to put the words together.

—Chicago Tribune

(burned before distribution)

Prologue

Chicago

8 October 1871

It was the hottest October anyone could remember. Less than an inch of rain had fallen in three months. Livestock died of thirst, their bloated carcasses splayed beside sunbaked mudholes. The unseasonable warmth made women regard baking day with special loathing and small children cranky with prickly heat. Laboring men paused in their work, looked up at the sky and remarked to each other that they’d surely welcome a breath of winter.

Drought and dry windstorms kept the fire companies frantically busy; engineers and pipemen were called on to put out as many as six fires a day, battling the flames that fed on unpainted frame cottages, rickety shanties with roofs of tar and shake, and the endless supply of woodchips from Chicago’s lumber mills.

Into the restless stream of hot prairie wind floated a single spark.

Later, some would say the spark came from a stove chimney. Many believed the gossip that the unfortunate placement of a lantern near a cow in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn had caused the mayhem. Others would swear, in the terrible aftermath, that the hand of God himself started it all, while still others accused the Devil. Some even blamed a hail of comets that rained from the night sky. In the great charred ruin of the city, fingers would point and recriminations would echo across courtrooms, in the city hall and at hearings before the Board of Fire.

But the fact was, a single spark, dipping and swirling like a drunken ballerina, rode an updraft of wind that night. It sailed high over a neighborhood of wood frame houses, barns packed with timothy hay, sheds full of coal and wood shavings for tinder, sidewalks constructed of knotty spruce and pine-block roadways.

The West Division neighborhood was a rabbit warren of narrow, miserable alleys and makeshift shanties, a place no respectable person would ever visit. But it was home to day laborers and women with too many babies, to shopkeepers and immigrants, to drunks and dreamers, loose women and strict Catholics. And in the tacked-together neighborhood they bore their children, worshiped, ate, drank, fought, loved and buried their dead.

The dry, blowing heat prompted some folks to find their beds early, while others tried to drown their discomfort in drink and song. The thin, lively whine of fiddle music and the thump of hobnail boots on plank floors emanated from some of the cottages. Noise flooded through open windows and caused flimsy walls to reverberate with the hectic celebration.

And high in the wild night sky, the spark looped and changed direction, pushed along by the wind blowing in from the broad and empty Illinois prairie.

The spark entered a barn where five milk cows and a horse stood tethered with their heads lowered, and a calf lay curled on a bed of straw.

The tiny ember dropped onto a store of musty hay, and when the wind breathed on it, a small circle of orange appeared.

No one saw the pool of flame spread like spilled water, dripping down and over the stacked hay, igniting the crisp, dry wood shavings from Bateham’s Planing Mill. No one saw the river of fire flowing along the worn plank floor. No one noticed the horse’s nostrils dilate in fear or heard the animal emit a high-pitched whistle of alarm.

Finally, a drayman with a wooden leg, who happened to be loitering across the street, noticed the deep-toned, unnatural light and headed clumsily for the barn. The cows, tied by their halters, stood unmoving even when Pegleg Sullivan came crashing into the barn and untied them. The calf, with its hide on fire and its tether hanging in the wood shavings, plowed into Pegleg and half dragged him out into the yard.

Tall, graceful fronds of flame bloomed at the side of the barn. Stark orange light licked across the beaten earth of the yard between house and shed.

Finally, a man’s voice broke the night. “Kate, the barn’s afire!”

In Box Number 342, at the corner of Canalport Avenue and Halsted Street, the first alarm sounded.

And over the sleeping faces of the children in the West Division of Chicago, a strange and rusty glow of light flickered.

Chapter One

“What’s the matter with Deborah?” asked Phoebe Palmer, standing in the middle of a cluttered suite of rooms at Miss Emma Wade Boylan’s School for Young Ladies. Lacy petticoats and beribboned unmentionables littered the divans and ottomans of the fringed, beaded and brocaded salon. “She won’t even let her maid in to attend her,” Phoebe added.

“I’ll see what’s keeping her.” Lucy Hathaway pushed open the door to an adjoining chamber. Deborah’s dress, which she had worn to Aiken’s Opera House the previous night, lay slumped in a heap of tulle and silk on the floor. A mound of sheets lay scattered over the bed, while the smell of expensive perfume and despair hung in the air.

“Deborah, are you all right?” Lucy asked softly. She went to the window, parting the curtain to let in a bit of the waning evening light. In the distance, some of the taller buildings and steeples of distant Chicago stabbed the horizon. The sky was tinged dirty amber by the smoke and soot of industry. But closer to Amberley Grove, the genteel suburb where the school was located, the windswept evening promised to be a lovely one.

“Deborah, we’ve been pestering you for hours to get ready. Aren’t you coming with us tonight?” Lucy persisted. Though the engagement bore the humble name of an evangelical reading, everyone knew it was simply an excuse for the cream of society to get together on the Sabbath. Though weighty spiritual issues might be discussed, lighter matters such as gossip and romance would be attended to with appropriate religious fervor. Tonight’s particular social event had an added drama that had set tongues to wagging all week long. The intensely desired Dylan Kennedy was looking for a wife.

“Please, dear,” Lucy said. “You’re scaring me, and ordinarily nothing scares me.”

Huddled on the bed, Deborah couldn’t find the words to allay her friend’s concern. She was trying to remember what her life had been like just twenty-four hours ago. She was trying to recall just who she was, tallying up the pieces of herself like items in a ledger book. A cherished only daughter. Fiancée of the most eligible man in Chicago. A privileged young woman poised on the threshold of a charmed life.

Everything had fallen apart last night, and she had no idea how to put it all back together.

“Make her hurry, do,” Phoebe said, waltzing in from the next room with a polished silk evening dress pressed to her front. “Miss Boylan’s coach will call for us in half an hour. Imagine! Dylan Kennedy is finally going to settle on a wife.” She preened in front of a freestanding cheval glass, patting her glossy brown hair. “Isn’t that deliciously romantic?”

“It’s positively barbaric,” said Lucy. “Why should we be paraded in front of men like horses at auction?”

“Because,” Kathleen O’Leary said, joining them in Deborah’s chamber, “Miss Boylan promised you would all be there. Three perfect young ladies,” she added with a touch of Irish irony. She reached for the curtain that shrouded the bed. “Are you all right, then, miss?” she asked. “I’ve been trying like the very devil to attend to you all day.” The maid put out a pale, nervous hand and patted the miserable mound of blankets.

Deborah felt assaulted by her well-meaning friends. She wanted to yell at them, tell them to leave her alone, but she had no idea how to assert her own wishes. No one had ever taught her to behave in such a fashion; it was considered unladylike in the extreme. She shrank back into the covers and pretended not to hear.

“She doesn’t answer,” Lucy said, her voice rising with worry.

“Please, Deborah,” Phoebe said. “Talk to us. Are you ill?”

Deborah knew she would have no peace until she surrendered. With slow, painstaking movements, she made herself sit up, leaning against a bank of Belgian linen pillows. Three faces, as familiar as they were dear to her, peered into hers. They looked uncommonly beautiful, perhaps because they were all so different. Blackhaired Lucy, carrot-topped Kathleen and Phoebe with her light brown curls. Their faces held the winsome innocence and anticipation Deborah herself had felt only yesterday.

“I’m not ill,” she said softly, in a voice that barely sounded like her own.

“You look like hell,” Lucy said with her customary bluntness.

Because I have been there.

“I’ll send for the doctor.” Kathleen started toward the door.

“No!” Deborah’s sharp voice stopped the maid in her tracks. A doctor was unthinkable. “That is,” she forced herself to say, “I assure you, I am not in the least bit ill.” To prove her point, she forced herself out of bed and stood barefoot in the middle of the room.

“Well, that’s a relief.” With brisk bossiness, Phoebe took her hand and gave it a friendly, aggressive tug. Deborah stumbled along behind her and stepped into the brightly lit salon.

“I imagine you’re simply overcome because you’ll be a married woman a fortnight from now.” Phoebe dropped her hand and smiled dreamily. “You are so fabulously lucky. How can you keep to your bed at such a magical time? If I were engaged to the likes of Philip Ascot, I should be pacing the carpets with excitement. The week before my sister married Mr. Vanderbilt, my mother used to joke that she needed an anchor to keep her feet on the ground.”

Deborah knew Phoebe didn’t mean for the words to hurt. Deborah was a motherless daughter, the saddest sort of creature on earth, and at a time like this the sense of loss gaped like an unhealed wound. She wondered what a young woman with a mother would do in this situation.

“So,” Lucy said, “let’s hurry along. We don’t want to be late.”

Through a fog of indifference, Deborah surveyed the suite cluttered with combs, atomizers, lacy underclothes, ribbons, masses of petticoats—a veritable explosion of femininity. It was the sort of scene that used to delight her, but everything was different now. Suddenly these things meant nothing to her. She had the strangest notion of being encased in ice, watching her friends through a wavy, frozen wall. The sense of detachment and distance hardened with each passing moment. She used to be one of the young ladies of Miss Boylan’s famous finishing school, merry and certain of her place in the glittering world of Chicago’s debutantes. It all seemed so artificial now, so pointless. She felt alienated from her friends and from the contented, foolish girl she used to be.

“And what about you, dear Kathleen?” Phoebe asked, aiming a pointed glance at the red-haired maid. Phoebe took every chance to remind Kathleen that she was merely the hired help, there at the sufferance of more privileged young women like herself. “What do you plan to do tonight?”

Kathleen O’Leary’s face turned crimson. She had the pale almost translucent skin of her Irish heritage, and it betrayed every emotion. “You’ve left me a fine mess to be tidying up, miss. And won’t that keep me busy ‘til cock-crow.” Saucy as ever, she exaggerated her brogue on purpose.

“You should come with us, Kathleen.” Lucy, whose family had raised her to be a free thinker, didn’t care a fig for social posturing, but she knew that important people would be attending. The politicians, industrialists and social reformers were valuable contacts for her cause—rights for women.

“Really, Lucy,” scolded Phoebe. “Only the best people in town are invited. Dr. Moody’s readings are strictly for—”

“The invitation was extended to every young lady at Miss Boylan’s,” Lucy, who was both wealthy and naive enough to be an egalitarian, reminded her.

“Stuff and nonsense,” Kathleen said, her blush deepening.

“Perhaps you should attend,” Phoebe said, a calculating gleam in her eye. “It might be fun to surprise everyone with a lady of mystery.”

The old Deborah would have joined in the ruse with pleasure. Lively, intelligent Kathleen always added a sense of fun to the sometimes tedious routine of social climbing. But it was all too much to think about now, and she passed a shaking hand over her forehead. The celluloid hairpins she hadn’t bothered to remove last night exaggerated the headache that made her grit her teeth. The pain hammered so hard at her temples that the pins seemed to pulse with a life of their own.

“Phoebe’s right, Kathleen,” Lucy was saying. “It’ll be such fun. Please come.”

“I’ve not a stitch to wear that wouldn’t mark me as an imposter,” Kathleen said, but the protest failed to mask the yearning in her voice. She had always harbored an endless fascination with high society.

“Yes, you have.” Deborah forced herself out of her torpor. “You shall wear my new dress. I won’t be needing it.”

“Your Worth gown?” Phoebe demanded. At her father’s insistence, Deborah’s gowns all came from the Salon de Lumière in Paris. “For mercy’s sake, you’ve never even worn it yourself.”

“I’m not going.” Deborah kept her voice as calm as she could even though she felt like screaming. “I must go into the city to see my father.” She wasn’t sure when she had made the decision, but there it was. She had a matter of utmost importance to discuss with him, and she could not put it off any longer.

“You can’t go into the city tonight,” Phoebe said. “Don’t be silly. Who would chaperone you?”

“Just come with us,” Lucy said, her voice gentle. “Come to the reading, and we’ll take you to see your father afterward. Philip Ascot will be in attendance, won’t he? He’ll be expecting you. What on earth shall we tell him?”

The name of her fiancé rushed over Deborah like a chill wind. “I’ll send my regrets.”

“You aren’t yourself at all.” Lucy touched her arm, her light brush of concern almost powerful enough to shatter Deborah. “We shall go mad with worry if you don’t tell us what’s wrong.”

Phoebe stuck out her foot so Kathleen could button her kid leather boot. “Was it last night’s opera? You were fine when you left, but you stayed in bed all day long. Didn’t you like Don Giovanni?”

Deborah turned away, a wave of nausea rolling over her. The notes of the Mozart masterpiece were forever burned into her.

“It’s your bloody flux, isn’t it?” Kathleen whispered, ignoring Phoebe’s boot. “You’ve always suffered with the heavy pains. Let me stay behind and fix you a posset.”

“It’s not the flux,” Deborah said.

Lucy planted her palm flat against the door. “This isn’t like you. If something’s wrong, you should tell us, dear.”

Nothing’s wrong. She tried to eke out the words, but they wouldn’t come, because they were a lie. Everything was wrong and nothing could ever be the same. But how did she explain that, even to her best friends?

“It’s of a private nature,” she said faintly. “Please. I’ll explain it all when I return.”

“Oh, so you’re going to be mysterious, are you?” Phoebe sputtered. “You’re just trying to make yourself the center of attention, if you ask me.”

“No one asked you,” Lucy said wearily.

Phoebe sputtered some more, but no one was listening. Though she had come up through school with the rest of them, Phoebe had set herself apart from the others. Nearly as rich as Deborah and nearly as blue-blooded as Lucy, she had concluded that the two “nearlys” added up to much loftier status than her friends enjoyed. She was a terrible and unrepentant snob, generally benign, though her remarks to Kathleen O’Leary sometimes brandished the sharp edge of malice. Phoebe alone understood that one did not simply abandon an exclusive social event. But this merely proved the inferiority of a girl like Deborah Sinclair. New-money people simply didn’t understand the importance of attending the right sort of functions with the right sort of people.

“I’d best go ring for my driver,” Deborah said.

Lucy moved away from the door. “It won’t be the same without you.”

Deborah bit her lip, afraid that the sympathy from her best friend would break through the icy barrier she had painstakingly erected between control and madness. “Help Kathleen with the gown,” she said, hoping to divert everyone’s attention to the masquerade.

After sending for her coach, Deborah buttoned on a simple blue serge dress and tugged a shawl around her shoulders. Pushing her feet into Italian kid leather boots, she didn’t bother with the buttoning. Instead, she wound the ribbons haphazardly around her ankles and then jammed on a hat.

In the main salon, the others dressed more carefully. Eyes shining with forbidden pleasure, Kathleen stepped into the French gown, her homespun bloomers disappearing beneath layers of fancy petticoats. The gown of emerald silk and her Irish coloring gave her the look of a Celtic princess, and her face glowed with an excitement Deborah could no longer share.

Before leaving, Deborah stepped back and surveyed the scene, seeing it for the first time through the eyes of an outsider. Over her father’s protests she had left his opulent, gilded mansion for the solid gothic halls of Miss Boylan’s. Her father believed the very best young ladies were educated at home. But once he learned a Hathaway and a Palmer would be in attendance, he had relented and allowed Deborah to complete her education with finishing school. She looked with fondness upon Lucy, Kathleen and Phoebe, who were her closest companions and sometimes, she thought, her only friends. The four of them had shared everything—their hopes and dreams, their broken hearts and romantic triumphs.

Finally Deborah had encountered something she could not share with her friends. She could not. It was too devastating. Besides, she must tell her father. She must. Please God, she prayed silently. Let him understand. Just this once.

“Have a wonderful time this evening,” she said, her hand on the door handle. “I shall want to hear all about Kathleen’s debut when I return.” She forced the words past a throat gone suddenly tight with terror.

Kathleen rushed to the door. “Miss Deborah, are you certain that—”

“Absolutely.” The word was a mere gust of air.

“Let the poor thing go,” Phoebe said in a distracted voice. She lifted her arm with the sinuous grace of a ballerina and drew on a silken glove. “If you stand around arguing all evening, we’ll be late.”

She and Lucy launched into a squabble over how Kathleen should wear her hair, and Deborah took the opportunity to slip out into the tall, cavernous hall and down to the foyer, where her driver waited. Outside, she saw the school’s large, cumbersome rockaway carriage being hitched to four muscular horses. The school crest adorned the black enamel doors.

Deborah’s private Bismarck-brown clarence, with its gleaming glass panes front and rear, waited at the curb. Thanks to her father’s habit of flaunting his wealth, the expensive vehicle, with its experienced driver and Spanish coach horse, was always at her disposal. Within a few minutes, she was under way.

She gripped a leather strap at the side of the interior of the coach, bracing herself against the rocking motion. As they pulled away from the school, with its ponderous, pretentious turrets and wrought iron gates, she felt like Rapunzel escaping her tower prison. Small farms sped past, squat houses hugged low against the prairie landscape of withered orchards and wind-torn cornfields. Lights glimmered in windows and the sight of them pierced her. She pictured the families within, gathering around the table for supper. She had only seen such families from afar, but imagined they shared an easy intimate warmth she had never felt growing up in the cold formality of her father’s house.

She cast away the yearning. All her life she had enjoyed the advantages most women never dared to dream about. Arthur Sinclair had crafted and aligned his daughter’s future with the same precise attention to detail with which he put together his business transactions. His rivals vilified him for his aggression and ambition, but Deborah knew little of commerce. Her father preferred it that way.

The drive into Chicago was swift. Jeremy, who had served as her personal driver since she was three years old, drove expertly through the long, straight roads that crisscrossed the city. Jeremy lived in a garden cottage along the north branch of the Chicago River. He had a plump wife and a grown daughter who had recently wed. Deborah wondered what Jeremy did when he returned home to them, late at night. Did he touch his sleeping wife or just light a lamp and look at her for a moment? Did she awaken, or sigh in her sleep and turn toward the wall?

Deborah knew she was using her meandering thoughts to keep her mind off the ordeal to come. She shifted restlessly on the seat and cupped her hands around her eyes to see through the glass as Chicago came into view. Ordinarily, the air was cool closer to the lake, but this evening, the day’s heat hung well past sundown.

The whitish fuzz of gaslight illuminated the long, straight main thoroughfares. The coach crossed the river, rolling past the elegant hotel where the reading party was to take place. Well-dressed people were already gathering. Liveried doormen rushed to and fro beneath a scalloped canvas awning that flapped in a violent wind. Huge potted shrubs flanked the gilt-and-glass doorway, and inside, a massive chandelier glowed like the sun. The gilded cage of high society was the only world Deborah had ever known, yet it was a world in which she no longer felt safe. She couldn’t imagine herself walking into the hotel now.

Traditionally set for the second Sunday of the month, the lively readings and discussions ordinarily held a delicious appeal for her. She loved seeing people dressed in their finery, happily sipping cordials as they laughed and conversed. She loved the easy pleasures of glib talk and gossip. But last night the magic had been stolen from Deborah.

No matter. Tonight she vowed to reclaim her soul.

She shivered, knowing that skipping the social engagement was only the first act of defiance she would commit tonight. She had never before carried out a rebellion, and she didn’t know if she could accomplish it.

As the carriage wended its way up Michigan Avenue, Jeremy had to slow down before an onslaught of pedestrians, drays, teams and whole family groups. They seemed to be heading for the Rush Street bridge that spanned the river. Despite the lateness of the hour, crowds had gathered at the small stadium of the Chicago White Stockings.

Rapping on the curved windshield, Deborah called out, “Is everything all right, Jeremy?”

He didn’t answer for a few moments as he negotiated the curve toward River Street, heading for the next bridge to the west. They encountered more crowds, bobbing along in the scant illumination of the coach lamps. Deborah twisted around on the cushioned bench to look through the rear window. The pedestrians were, for the most part, a well-dressed crowd, and though no one dawdled, no one hurried, either. They resembled a dining party or a group coming out of the theater. Yet it seemed unusual to see so many people out on a Sunday night.

“They say there’s a big fire in the West Division,” Jeremy reported through the speaking tube. “Plenty of folks had to evacuate. I’ll have you home in a trice, miss.”

She knew Kathleen’s family lived in the West Division, where they kept cows for milking. She prayed the O’Learys would be all right. Poor Kathleen. This was supposed to be an evening of pranks, pretenses and fun, but a big fire could change all that.

She wondered if Dr. Moody’s lecture would be canceled because of the fire. Probably not. The Chicago Board of Fire boasted the latest in fire control, including hydrants, steam pump engines and an intricate system of alarms and substations. Many of the stone and steel downtown buildings were considered fireproof. The city’s elite would probably gather in the North Division to gossip the night away as the engineers and pumpers brought the distant blaze under control.

She stared out at the unnatural bloom of light in the west. Her breath caught—not with fear but with wonder at the impressive sight. In the distance, the horizon burned bright as morning. Yet the sky lacked the innocent quality of daylight, and in the area beyond the river, brands of flame fell from the sky, thick as snow in a blizzard.

Apprehension flashed through her, but she put aside the feeling. The fire would stop when it reached the river. It always did. The greater problem, in Deborah’s mind, was getting her father to understand and accept her decision.

The coach rolled to a halt in front of the stone edifice of her father’s house. Surrounded by yards and gardens, the residence and its attendant outbuildings took up nearly a whole block. There was a trout pond that was used in the winter for skating. The mansion had soaring Greek revival columns and a mansard roof, fashionably French. A grand cupola with a slender lightning rod rose against the sky. A graceful porch, trimmed with painted woodwork, wrapped around the front of the house, with a wide staircase reaching down to the curved drive.

“You’re home, miss,” Jeremy announced, his footsteps crunching on the gravel drive as he came to help her down.

Not even in a moment of whimsy had Deborah ever thought of the house on Huron Avenue as a home. The huge, imposing place more closely resembled an institution, like a library or perhaps a hospital. Or an insane asylum.

Squelching the disloyal thought, she sat in the still swaying carriage while Jeremy lowered the steps, opened the door and held out his hand toward her. Wild gusts of wind pushed dead leaves along the gutters and walkways.

Even through her glove she could feel that Jeremy’s fingers were icy cold, and she regarded him with surprise. Despite a studiously dispassionate expression, a subtle tension tightened his jaw and his eyes darted toward the firelit sky.

“You’d best hurry home to your wife,” she said. “You’ll want to make certain she’s all right.”

“Are you sure, miss?” Jeremy opened the iron gate. “It’s my duty to stay and—”

“Nonsense.” It was the one decision she could make tonight that was unequivocal. “Your first duty is to your family. Go. I would do nothing but worry all night if you didn’t.”

He sent her a grateful bob of his head, and as he swept open the huge, heavy front door for her, the braid on his livery cap gleamed in the false and faraway light. Deborah walked alone into the vestibule of the house, feeling its formidable presence. Staff members hastened to greet her—three maids in black and white, two house-men in navy livery, the housekeeper tall and imposing, the butler impeccably dignified. As she walked through the formal gauntlet of servants, their greetings were painstakingly respectful—eyes averted, mouths unsmiling.

Arthur Sinclair’s servants had always been well-fed and -clothed, and most were wise enough to understand that not every domestic in Chicago enjoyed even these minor privileges. To his eternal pain and shame, Arthur Sinclair had once been a member of their low ranks. So, though he never spoke of it, he understood all too well the plight of the unfortunate.

She prayed he would be as understanding with his own daughter. She needed that now.

“Is my father at home?” she inquired.

“Certainly, miss. Upstairs in his study,” the butler said. “Would you like Edgar to announce you?”

“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Marlowe. I’ll go right up.” She walked between the ranks of silent servants, surrendering her hat and gloves to a maid as she passed. She sensed their unspoken questions about her plain dress and shawl, the disheveled state of the hair she had not bothered to comb. The stiff, relentless formality was customary, yet Deborah had never enjoyed being the object of the staff’s scrutiny. “Thank you,” she said. “That will be all.”

“As you wish.” Marlowe bowed and stepped back.

With a flick of her hand and a jingle of the keys tied at her waist, the housekeeper led the others away. Through the doors that quickly opened and shut, Deborah could see that valuables were being packed away into trunks and crates. A precaution, she supposed, because of the fire.

Standing alone in the soaring vestibule, with its domed skylight three storeys up, Deborah immediately and unaccountably felt cold. The house spread out in an endless maze of rooms—salons and seasonal parlors, the music room, picture gallery, dining room, ballroom, conservatory, guest suites she had never counted. This was, in every sense of the word, a monument to a merchant prince; its sole purpose to proclaim to the world that Arthur Sinclair had arrived.

Dear God, thought Deborah. When did I grow so cynical?

Actually, she knew the precise moment it had happened. But that was not something she would reveal to anyone but herself.

Misty gaslight fell across the black-and-white checkered marble floor. An alabaster statue of Narcissus, eternally pouring water into a huge white marble basin situated in the extravagant curve of the grand staircase, greeted her with a blank-eyed stare.

Beside the staircase was something rather new—a mechanical lift. In principle it worked like the great grain elevators at the railroad yards and lakefront. A system of pulleys caused the small car to rise or lower. Her father had a lame leg, having been injured in the war a decade ago, and he had a hard time getting up and down the stairs.

To Deborah, the lift resembled a giant bird cage. Though costly gold-leaf gilding covered the bars, they were bars nonetheless. The first time she stood within the gilded cage, she had felt an unreasoning jolt of panic, as if she were a prisoner. The sensation of being lifted by the huge thick cables made her stomach lurch. After that first unsettling ride, she always chose to take the stairs.

The hand-carved rail of the soaring staircase was waxed and buffed to a high sheen. Her hand glided over its satisfying smoothness, and she remembered how expert she had been at sliding down this banister. It was her one act of defiance. No matter how many times her nanny or her tutor, or even her father, reprimanded her, she had persisted in her banister acrobatics. It was simply too irresistible to prop her hip on the rail, balance just so at the top, then let the speed gather as she slid down. Her landings had never been graceful, and she’d borne the bruises to prove it, but the minor bumps had always seemed a small price to pay in exchange for a few crazy moments of a wild ride.

Unlike so many other things, her father had never been able to break her of the habit. He governed her sternly in all matters, but within her dwelt a stubborn spark of exuberance he had never been able to snuff.

Deborah started up the stairs. The study housed Arthur Sinclair’s estate offices, and he worked there until late each night, devoting the same fervor to his business as a monk to his spiritual meditations. He regarded the accumulation of wealth and status as his means to salvation. But there was one thing all his money and influence could not buy—the sense of belonging to the elite society that looked down on his kind. Acquiring that elusive quality would take more than money. For that he needed Deborah.

She shuddered, though the house was overly warm, and took the steps slowly. She passed beautifully rendered oil portraits in gaudily expensive gold-leafed frames. The paintings depicted venerable ancestors, some dating back to the Mayflower and further. But the pictures were of strangers plucked from someone else’s family tree. She used to make up stories about the stern-faced aristocrats who stared, eternally frozen, from the gleaming frames. One was an adventurer, another a sailor, yet another a great diplomat. They were all men who had done something with their lives rather than living off the bounty of their forebears.

She would never understand why her father considered it less honorable to have earned rather than inherited a fortune. She had asked him once, but hadn’t understood his reply. “I wish to have a feeling of permanence in the world,” he had said. “A feeling that I have acquired the very best of everything. I want to achieve something that will last well beyond my own span of years.”

It was a mad quest, using money to obtain the things other families took generations to collect and amass, but he regarded it as his sacred duty.

She reached the top of the stairs and paused, her hand on the carved newel post. She glanced back, her gaze following the luxurious curve of the banister. Through the inlaid glass dome over the entryway, an eerie glow flickered in the sky. The fire. She hoped the engineers would get it under control soon.

But she forgot all about the fire on the other side of the river as she started down the hall toward her father’s study. A chill rippled through her again, carrying an inner warning: One did not contradict the wishes of Arthur Sinclair.

Chapter Two

Tom Silver arrived in Chicago with murder on his mind. Heaved up by wind-driven waves, the deck of the steam trawler shifted under his feet. He knew it would be hard going to get to shore in the dinghy, but he didn’t care. He had a job to do.

Yet when he saw the city in flames, he paused in putting spare cartridges in his belt loops and gaped at the fiery orange dome over the sky. The unnatural arch of light and flame was so eerie that, just for a moment, he forgot everything, including the deadly purpose in his heart.

“Hey, Lightning,” he called, thumping his foot on deck to summon his companion, who was in the engine room. “Come have a look at this.”

The lake steamer Suzette chugged toward its final destination at Government Pier. Its point was marked by a lighthouse beacon, but Tom had a hard time keeping his mind on navigation. The sight of the burning city clutched at his gut, made his heart pump hard in his chest. He couldn’t help thinking about the tragedies that would strike tonight with the swift, indifferent brutality of fate. Fire was like that—random and merciless.

And damned inconvenient, given his purpose tonight. He had come hundreds of miles, from the vast and distant reaches of Lake Superior, to hunt down Arthur Sinclair. He wouldn’t let a fire stop him.

The smell of steam and hot oil wafted up through the fiddley, and the clank of machinery crescendoed as a hatch opened. “What the hell is going on, eh?” asked Lightning Jack, emerging through the narrow opening. He shaded his eyes and squinted at the city. “Parbleu, that is one big fire.”

“I guess I’ll get a closer look tonight,” Tom said, making his way down to the engine room.

Drawing back on a lever, he tamped down the boiler and then climbed abovedecks to help Lightning Jack drop anchor in the deep water. Though it was late, he had to shade his eyes against the light of the conflagration. People had gathered on the long fingerlike pier. Boats shuttled between the mouth of the river and the long dock. At the Sands, the fire reared so close that people drove wagons into the lake to escape the leaping flames. But their backs were all turned to the lake. Like Tom, they were mesmerized by the spectacle of the city in flames.

The skeletal tower of the Great Central elevator, surrounded by smokestacks, threw a long black shadow on the churning water. The fire tore across the city with the prairie wind, hot and muscular, feeding on the close-set structures.

Tom had seen any number of fires in his lifetime, but never one like this. Never one in which the wind seemed to bear the flames in its arms. Never one that moved with such furious speed. Flames covered the homes and businesses like blankets, building by building, block after block. He could see the deadly veil of crimson covering the West Division and pushing relentlessly at the edge of the river.

Tom Silver did not know Chicago well, for he had spent little time here, but it was the largest city he had ever seen. It was shaped by the lakefront and the branches of the river, which were constantly busy with commercial traffic. Ten railroads converged on Chicago, sixteen bridges spanned the river and canal, and hundreds of thousands of people made their home there.

Now its heart was on fire. This was the inferno, like the dreaded one in the Old Testament stories he used to read to Asa.

The thought of Asa brought Tom’s grim purpose back into focus. Tonight he would have his revenge. Nothing—not even the flames of hell—would stop him.

“You going to wait this out?” Lightning Jack asked, seeming to read Tom’s thoughts.

“Makes no sense to wait,” Tom pointed out. “If the fire spreads to the North Division before I get there, I’ll lose him for sure.”

“Then you had best be quick. It could be a convenience, eh? If the house burns, you won’t have to worry about evidence being found.”

Tom studied his oldest friend, his mentor, the man who had raised him. Lightning Jack duBois had found Tom, a five-year-old abandoned in a cabin in the north woods, sitting blank-eyed next to the stiff corpse of his mother. She had died of starvation, and Tom’s fate was not far behind, except that the tough old voyageur had intervened.

Since that long ago day, Tom had given Jack all his loyalty and trust. Just as Asa had trusted Tom.

“What is that look, eh?” Lightning Jack made a face. “You want to abandon the plan?”

“You know better than that.” Tom felt hard, driven. The killing would be a purification ritual, a way to wash his soul clean of the black rage that consumed him. At least, that was what he kept telling himself.

Lightning Jack’s brow drew down in a scowl. “It is no crime, but retribution.”

Arthur Sinclair was a murderer, though no doubt his soft white hands were unsoiled, even in his own eyes. He employed underlings to do his work for him, but he was just as guilty as if he had slain seven souls with his bare hands.

“I still think you should let me go with you,” Lightning Jack said, resting his hand on the handle of his hunting knife.

“No.” Tom buckled on his cartridge belt. Truth was, Lightning Jack lacked a cool head. He tended to let passion get the best of him, and rage made him reckless. He despised Arthur Sinclair with a virulence that poisoned his heart, for his heart was the thing Sinclair had taken from him.

Tom’s hatred for Sinclair was different. Colder, more precise. The clarity of his hatred made him better equipped to kill. Lightning Jack was too volatile. He wore his grief for Asa like a hair shirt, and it made him wild and vulnerable.

“Shipping traffic’s heavy,” Tom pointed out. “You’d best stay here and look after the Suzette.“

“Spectators, I’m guessing,” Lightning Jack said. “Refugees. Like ants swarming in a flood. They have nowhere to go.”

Tom scanned the shoreline, picking out a train depot by a breakwater, towers and smokestacks, all pulsating in firelight. People trapped at the lakeshore waved their arms, signaling to the passing boats.

Lightning Jack watched as Tom holstered the Colt police revolver they’d bought at the Soo Locks. “Do you have enough cartridges?” Lightning asked.

“Jesus, how many times do you want me to shoot him?” Tom opened his buckskin jacket to reveal the row of ammunition in his belt loops.

“Seven,” Lightning said as Tom tied the thin leather strap of the holster around his thigh. “Go now. Time is short. I’ll keep the Suzette ready to weigh anchor.”

Tom lowered the dinghy into the water and began to pull toward the shore. The lake boiled with wind-whipped waves that crested and sloshed over the sides. Some of the boats he passed were gearing up to rescue refugees from the fire. If he were a better man, he would join the rescue effort. But he wasn’t here to save anyone. He was what circumstances had made of him, and in his heart there was no room for anything but hatred.

Every now and then he glanced over his shoulder at the waterworks north of the river. The structure still seemed to be intact, its gothic spire a black arrow against the noxious orange sky. Maybe the tower was close enough to the lake to survive the fire. So long as the pumps and bellows of the waterworks remained safe, the flames could be brought under control.

Yet he could not help noticing it was a losing battle. The high wind howled and stormed with hellish fury. Firebrands rained harder and thicker from the sky, sparking up blazes each place they touched. By the time he found the Sinclair mansion, the fire would not be far behind.

Tom tied up at a rubble-built bulkhead, securing the dinghy beneath an outcropping of rock. Under the circumstances, he had to be cautious. A panicked victim of the fire would not think twice about stealing a rowboat, and it was a long swim back to the steamer.

He hauled himself out and scrambled up the embankment. Emerging onto a brick-strewn street, he immediately felt a blast of the fire’s hot breath. His caribou hide shirt and trousers would protect him from the flying sparks—for a while, at least.

A couple of distant explosions startled him as he made his way along the north bank of the river. He passed banks and hotels, McCormack’s Reaper Works, shops and theaters, parks and boulevards. People looked out the windows of nearly every tall building, their gazes turned toward the fire. Eerily, the night grew lighter with each passing moment. He could pick out street signs and people standing in groups, talking excitedly. A short distance away, tugboats on the river screamed for the bridges to be turned to let them through, but the huge crowds gathered on the shore prevented the bridge operators from doing their job. The fire from the west blew toward the forest of masts and rigging. Good thing Lightning Jack had agreed to lay-to offshore. There was no safe place in the city tonight.

This was unfamiliar territory to Tom, but he knew where Sinclair lived. He had studied the location on a map, and the route was branded on his memory.

He had not reckoned on having to navigate a sea of humanity, though. Men, women, children and livestock surged along the main thoroughfares, pushing toward the lake. Overloaded carts, drays, mule trucks and express wagons clogged the roadways. In his entire life, Tom hadn’t seen so many people. Some were dressed in nightclothes, others in evening wear. Carts and carriages clattered past with little heed for the safety of the pedestrians. Men dragged trunks behind them; women clutched quilts and kettles and drawers stuffed with belongings. People fled, their arms filled with books and mementos, bundled clothes, odd-shaped bags and even a metal safe or two.

What did a person save when faced with losing everything? Tom wondered. Priceless antiques, irreplaceable photographs, quilts and curios made by the hands of loved ones long dead. And money, of course. There was always that.

The rumble of collapsing buildings drowned out the shouting and caused children and horses to panic. Everywhere he looked, Tom saw carts running out of control or crashing into buildings or trees and left abandoned. One carriage, with a crest on its door that read “The Emma Wade Boylan School,” lay on its side, the team still struggling in its traces.

Three young women, dressed in silks and lace, quarreled on the boardwalk near the fallen carriage.

“I say we leave them,” the brown-haired woman said.

“We’ll not abandon the horses,” the black-haired one retorted. “We must—”

“Move aside.” Tom yanked his bowie knife out of the top of his boot. Feminine gasps greeted the sight of the glittering blade, and they fell back, clearly horrified. He sliced through the traces that bound the horses to the coach, then slapped the beasts’ rumps to drive them off down the street.

The well-dressed woman gaped at him. “He…you…the horses!”

Her companion said, “Now what shall we do?”

The redhead lifted her gaze to the flaming sky. “Pray,” she said.

Tom didn’t wait around to see the outcome of the argument. He had a job to do.

As the crowd and the smoke pressed upon him, he felt a sharp hunger for the harsh, empty majesty of the north woods wilderness. Soon, he told himself. In just a short while, he would be back where he belonged. But first he had to find his target—the house on Huron Avenue. Then he could head home to Isle Royale. There, he would try his best to endure a life that had been irrevocably changed by Arthur Sinclair.

He wondered what it would feel like to kill the man who had killed Asa. Would his heart exult in dark, cleansing joy? Would he be filled with pure glee? Would the satisfaction of revenge drive away the loss and betrayal that had consumed him since the disaster? Perhaps he would feel nothing at all. He would welcome the numbness. Feeling nothing would be a blessing after the months of suffering through soul-killing grief.

Tom had killed in the war. As a courier, he’d been used by General Whitcomb of the 21st Michigan in the way a hunter used bloodhounds. But being in the war had not given him a taste for murder.

He pressed on harder, faster, seared by the blowing heat. He passed a lanky boy burdened with a shaggy dog that kept trying to escape its young master’s arms. The boy was about fourteen, the age Asa had been when he died. Tom tried not to see the struggling youth, tried not to hear the kid saying “Easy, Shep. Take it easy. I’ll keep you safe.” He tried not to remember the way a boy’s rounded face could look so damned earnest and protective. Tom felt relieved when the youth and his dog veered off toward the lake.

If he had lived, Asa would have been fifteen in the spring. He would have had his birthday in March, and maybe Tom would have given him a bowie knife or deer rifle to mark his step toward manhood. The two of them would have sat by the stove, tying flies or playing checkers. Even now, months after the accident, Tom could picture the complete absorption in Asa’s face when he worked on a fishing fly. He could still hear Asa’s laughter in his heart.

I miss you, Asa.

Turning down a nearly deserted side street, he walked faster, breathing hard as anticipation built, tasting smoke and ash in his throat. The smell of burning timber and the sight of falling cinders reminded him of being in the thick of battle. He never should have gone to war. Lightning Jack had warned him that it would steal his spirit.

Just as he had warned Asa about working at the mine.

Asa hadn’t listened any better than Tom had, in his youth. Bored by the routine of island life and winters spent under the tutelage of a demanding scholar, Tom had run away to join the fighting. What he had seen and done during those dark years had turned his soul to ice. Only the gift of Asa had dragged Tom back into the light. Now that Asa was gone, there was nothing to keep him from falling into darkness once again.

Firebrands and cinders rained thickly over the streets, and each brand ignited a new fire. Men posted on rooftops tried to defend some of the larger buildings, but the bright dervishes of flame made a mockery of their efforts. Distant explosions pocked the night, each greeted by frightened screams.

At a broad street, the crowd flowed northward, following a long strip of green space bordering the lake. Family members shouted at one another to hurry. Tom broke off from the surging refugees and headed in the opposite direction.

“Hey, mister,” someone hollered in a hoarse voice. “You don’t want to go that way. The fire crossed over the North Branch.”

Tom ignored the warning, though the news startled him. Only a fire of demonic proportions could cross a river as wide as the branches of the Chicago. The fire department would have no hope of stopping it now. He wondered if he would be able to reach the Sinclair mansion before the fire did.

He felt mildly startled to find himself alone on a deserted street. The fire raged through buildings on either side—one appeared to be a woodworking mill, the other a brewery. Strange, he thought dispassionately. The city was burning and no one was sticking around to defend it.

He passed into darkness as he headed north, away from the fire, and sensed a change in the atmosphere as he emerged onto Dearborn. The wide boulevard, flanked by stone pilasters and tall wrought iron fences, lay in perfect splendor, though smoke lay thick in the air. Broad lawns, some with coach houses and outbuildings, surrounded the opulent mansions. The homes resembled majestic fortresses with handsome gables and half-wheel windows three storeys up. Skylights and cupolas graced the rooflines. Through a broad bay window he saw a family sitting in a parlor, playing cards while a woman played piano. At some of the other houses, people gathered at the windows to watch the fire.

Yet the sky behind the sedate facades glowed with that ominous and unnatural orange tinge, spangled by flying sparks. These fine houses were not long for this world. He hoped like hell he’d have no trouble finding Sinclair’s house, and that his quarry would be at home. He had to consider the possibility that Arthur Sinclair had evacuated his house, but there was a good chance the wealthy industrialist might stay put. Judging by the spectators watching out the windows of the grand mansions, the rich felt safe from the flames. Men like Sinclair thought they were invincible, that their money could buy them anything, even protection from death.

Stupid fools.

Chapter Three

“Deborah, what the devil are you doing here?” Arthur Sinclair demanded, looking up from the large metal safe in the wall of his office. Grasping the open door of the safe, he stood, lurching a little on his bad leg as he turned to face her. His cane rested against the broad wall map behind the desk. The map depicted the Great Lakes and surrounding territory, with markers where his mines and timberlands were located. Standing before the map, he resembled a king surveying his realm. “It’s late,” he added. “You had an engagement tonight.”

“Hello, Father,” she said, crossing the plush carpet of Persian silk. Like everything else in the house, his estate office was self-consciously ornate and filled with antiques that were supposed to look as if they had been in the family for generations. The long Regency period bookcases housed leather-bound volumes he had never opened. The artwork on the dark green walls depicted hunting scenes in places he would never be invited. And the Louis XIV desk was littered with the work of a man who intended to muscle his way into society by brute strength rather than privilege of birth.

He was depending on Deborah to vault him to the next level of acceptance. And that was precisely what she had come to talk to him about.

She embraced her father lightly, kissing his cheek and then stepping back. As always, he smelled of bay rum and cigars. The scent evoked the feeling of security she always associated with her father and made her heart squeeze with fondness for him. Lord, she didn’t want to disappoint him. That was not what she wanted at all.

“I’m sorry I interrupted you,” she said.

He gestured at the open satchel on the floor that was stuffed with greenbacks and negotiable securities. “Getting my stock and insurance certificates together in case the worst happens.”

“The fire, you mean.”

“Yes. If they don’t get the blaze under control soon, I’m driving up to the lake house.” His handsome, craggy face creased into a scowl of disapproval as his gaze swept over her. “What the devil are you wearing? Was Dr. Moody’s appearance canceled due to the fire?”

“I don’t know,” she said, braiding her fingers together. Though accustomed to managing servants, maids, drivers and tradesmen, she doubted her ability to stand up to her father, who had been known to crush railroad magnates and mining barons in order to get his way. “I decided not to attend tonight. I needed to see you instead. To tell you—”

“Your fiancé’s already been to see me,” he said.

Her mouth went dry. All the blood seemed to drain out of her hands, leaving her fingers cold and numb. “Philip was here?”

Her father’s eyes held the sharp blue chill of shattered ice. “Earlier this evening. So I imagine I already know what you’re going to say.”

Dear God. What had Philip told her father?

Bile rose in her throat, and she could not speak until she managed to swallow. “What did he tell you?”

Arthur spread his hands. “He told me about the way you behaved at the opera last night. I’m ashamed of you, Deborah. Purely ashamed.”

This was the last thing she had expected. She hadn’t imagined Philip would complain to her father, of all things. She gaped at him, then found her voice. “Ashamed of me? But what did I—”

“Philip says he’s willing to overlook your outrageous behavior, thank God,” Arthur said. He turned away from her and began pulling boxes of bills and certificates out of the safe.

“My behavior?” she asked. She tried to cling to a sense of outrage, but in spite of her resolve, shame crept in. She had no idea what to say. All her life she had been provided with the best governesses, tutors, teachers and companions in the country. Yet not one of them had prepared her to deal with her own father.

“Your immaturity and foolishness are going to cost me dearly,” he blustered. “He wants me to double your dowry settlement. And I have no choice but to do as he asks.”

She forced out a dry, bitter laugh of disbelief. Philip Ascot IV had laid waste to her dreams last night, and as a reward, he expected twice the bride price he and her father had settled on. “Then you will be pleased to know that you won’t have to pay him a cent,” she said, keeping her voice firm even though she wanted to die. She loved her father, honored him, on occasion felt close to worshiping him. The times she had crossed him were few and far between, but now was one of those times.

“What in tarnation do you mean by that?”

“I’ve decided not to marry Philip,” she stated.

That got his attention. He froze in the midst of ramming notes and certificates into the leather satchel and turned to face her. “That’s not amusing, Deborah.”

“I’m not trying to be amusing. I’m trying to—” She paused. What was she doing? Her future, indeed her entire existence had been defined by the fact that she was going to be the wife of one of the most socially prominent men in the country. Without that, who was she? Until now, that question had never occurred to her but suddenly the answer seemed vital. Closing her eyes, she took a leap in the dark. “I won’t marry Philip Ascot.”

“You’re getting cold feet before the wedding,” her father said reasonably, his face softening with an indulgent smile. “Common enough in a bride, or so I’m told.”

She tried again. “It’s not a matter of cold feet. My mind and my heart have changed. Irrevocably. Until yesterday…I thought marrying Philip was the future I wanted. I didn’t know any better. I…I’m sorry.”

“The wedding will go forward as planned,” he snapped, his temper pushing through fatherly indulgence. “You’ll learn to govern your infantile tantrums and behave like a true woman. Everything is settled. The guest list includes everyone up to Mrs. Grant herself. You don’t simply tell the First Lady—”

“I’ll tell her myself,” Deborah promised, though the prospect terrified her. “We’re talking about the rest of my life, Father. I won’t live it with Philip Ascot.”

Anger blazed in his eyes. “You’ll live your life as I say,” he stated. “I have always acted in your best interest.”

“I know you believe you have,” she conceded. “But this time, I must trust my own judgment.”

“You will trust me. Haven’t I always given you the best of everything? Haven’t I spent a fortune turning you into the sort of young lady a man of quality dreams of marrying?”

“What about my dreams?” she asked, but she spoke so softly that he didn’t hear.

“You have no understanding of what your life would be if I simply let you have your way,” he went on, his face flushing a deep, unhealthy red. “You’d be hopeless, no better off than a saloon girl or a farm wife. Thanks to me, you’ll never know struggle, never know hardship. Your children will have the world at their feet. But only if you provide a proper family background—as an Ascot.”

Deborah began to pace the long, carpeted room. “You arranged this marriage with no regard for my wishes. Do you realize I was never asked? You and Philip met over brandy and cigars, and the next day I was presented with this.” She held up her hand, pale in the gaslight, a very large diamond winking obscenely.

“You seemed perfectly delighted,” he pointed out.

“Because you were, Father. I should have objected long ago.” But she hadn’t. She had been as dazzled by Philip’s good looks and charming flattery as her father had been by his social standing. “Don’t you see that when human hearts are involved, you can’t simply make things happen?”

“Balderdash. What are they teaching you at that school?”

“Clearly not enough to help me make you understand,” she said.

“Arranged marriages are the hallmark of a civilized society. Love doesn’t happen overnight. You must show patience and understanding, and above all, obedience to those who know what is best for you.”

“I will never love Philip. Ever.”

“The opportunity to marry into the Ascot family doesn’t arise very often. Philip’s an only child, and he has no cousins. You need this marriage, Deborah.”

“No, you need it. And Philip needs it. For all his blue-blooded pedigree, he is nearly destitute. He has the name. You have the fortune. Together the two of you have everything you want. I can’t imagine why you even need me. Just make him your son and be done with it.” The words burst from her, and the moment they were out, she wished she could catch them from the air and somehow make them disappear. But it was too late.

Her father stood staring at her, and his face bore the shocked expression of a man who had just been stabbed in the back.

Although he would never admit it, Arthur Sinclair had always felt inferior because his money was considered “new” by the upper crust. And to her father, the opinions of the socially prominent mattered greatly. He yearned for the one thing his money could not buy—the patina of generations-old gentility. In his mind—and in the minds of those he strove to impress—there was a particular quality to inherited wealth that was lacking in the fortunes of a self-made man. He would never be able to achieve that quality, but he could take a step closer by marrying his only daughter and heir to the flawlessly aristocratic Philip Widener Ascot IV.

They had never spoken of this, of course, and the fact that Deborah had brought it up was a measure of her desperation. Remorseful for having hurt him, she said, “You’re a good man, Father. The best there is. Whether or not I marry Philip will not change that.”

Slowly his coloring returned to normal. He no longer looked harsh or angry, just immeasurably disappointed.

“Father, I didn’t come here to quarrel with you,” she said quietly.

Moving as if his bones hurt, he lowered himself to his chair. When Deborah looked at him, she always saw a titan of industry, a man who was larger than life, larger than legend, even. Yet tonight, something was different. He simply looked like a man worn down by weariness. She couldn’t tell if the change was in her, or in him.

“Did I ever tell you what your mother said to me the day she died?” he asked after a long pause.

Deborah didn’t follow the sudden switch in topic, but he seemed calmer now. She owed it to him to let him make his point. “You’ve said so little of that day,” she said. “I know it must have been painful for you.”

She had been just three when her mother died giving birth to a stillborn son. Deborah had exactly one memory of her mother. It was just a flash of awareness, not really a full-blown memory. She had been too young for that. But that made the faint, flickering awareness all the more important to her.

Sometimes, when Deborah closed her eyes and emptied her mind, she could call up that memory, achingly vivid and scented with violets. She could feel the gentle touch of her mother’s cool hand on her brow, could recall being awash in her mother’s love. Even now, so many years later, she remembered the sweet whisper of a soft voice, saying, “Go to sleep, my precious girl. Go to sleep.”

And there it ended. Perhaps the moment had never really happened, perhaps Deborah had fabricated it out of her own yearning for just one tender memory of the mother she had never known. But no matter. She believed the moment had happened, and would never let the memory go. She held it clasped to her heart, stubbornly and tightly, like a pearl in a closed fist.

Her father had not remarried because, by then, pride and ambition held him in their grip. He would only accept a wife of the highest social distinction…yet such a woman would never have him, a vulgar upstart. Frustrated, he put all his energy into raising Deborah to achieve the one thing he never could—class. He never asked her if she wanted it; he just assumed she craved social prominence as intensely as he did.

He and Deborah only had each other. He regarded her as his most priceless ornament, and would settle for no less than a fourth-generation Ascot for her husband.

“What did she say, Father?” she asked gently.

“She knew she was…going,” he said gruffly, turning back to the safe. “She was…bleeding. The last thing she said to me was ‘Make her life perfect. Make everything perfect for her.’”

Deborah’s vision blurred with tears. She tried to imagine what those final moments had been like for her mother, holding her stillborn son and knowing she would never see her small daughter grow up. And all the while, her father had stood vigil, suffering the loss of his wife and only son.

“That’s all I’m trying to do,” Arthur explained. “I’m trying to make everything perfect for you, trying to give you the life your mother wanted for you. And by God, I intend to see it done.”

Gaslight hissed gently into the silent house. Deborah knew her father meant well, but she also knew she could not marry Philip Ascot or anyone else, for that matter. She must make her father understand and, in time, possibly even forgive her. After a lifetime of existing only to please Arthur Sinclair, crossing him in this one all-important matter would daunt even strong-willed Lucy or sturdy, practical Kathleen. Phoebe would be just as appalled as Deborah’s father, for she could not imagine anything more perfect than marrying the handsome, dashing heir to one of the oldest families in the country. Part of the marriage arrangement specified that the famous Ascot residence, Tarleton House in New York City, would be restored as their principle residence. Everyone at Miss Boylan’s thought it sounded like a dream come true, so much so that Deborah had forgotten to ask herself if it was what she wanted.

Deborah had no allies in this struggle of her will against that of her father. “Please,” she said. “Can we just discuss—”

“Certainly not,” he said, speaking brusquely. “I have said all I have to say on the matter.”

The look that crossed her face prompted him to add, “Go to bed, my dear. We’re both tired. In the morning you will apologize to Philip and pray he forgives you for being such a ninny.” Drawing the buckles tightly around his important papers, he walked to the door of the study. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must dismiss the help early tonight on account of the fire.”

A loud blast, like a gunshot, exploded in the night. Deborah sat up in her bed, already screaming before she was fully awake.

Her gaze darted to the lace-draped French windows. Judging by the angry scarlet glow of the sky, she thought morning had come. But then the sky flickered uneasily, and she remembered the fire. Dear heaven, hadn’t it been brought under control yet?

“Father,” she shrieked, leaping from her bed and yanking open the door.

To her relief, she spied him rushing down the hall toward her, satchel and cane in hand and kerosene lamp held high.

“What was that terrible noise?” she asked, shaken.

Gripping the head of his cane, he strode to the window. “The gasworks substation. Coal gas,” he added, his hand shaking just a little as he moved the drapes aside. “Highly explosive. I’m sure that was it, because there’s no gaslight in the house.”

Deborah joined him at the window and caught her breath in shock. The fire, which had caused her only a glimmer of concern earlier, had made hideous progress. Everything to the south and west was a sea of flame.

“Dear God,” she said. “It’s crossed the river. The whole city is on fire.” The incessant shriek of ships’ whistles pierced the roar of the wind. Boats crowded behind the bridges, demanding to be let through. The clear bong of a bell tolled a steady alarm. Shouts and the clatter of hooves could be heard in the neighboring streets. She pressed her fingertips to the window pane; the glass felt unnaturally warm.

“It’s that infernal wind,” her father said. “I went to bed thinking it couldn’t possibly spread the fire across the river, but there you are. It’s in the North Division.”

Whirlwinds and swirling gusts carried flaming brands from one building to the next. Structures ignited as if a torch were being touched to each, one after another. Dervishes of flame spun across rooftops with furious speed. The pine-block roadways and boardwalks fueled the inferno. In the main thoroughfares, people fled on foot or in overloaded conveyances manned by frantic drivers.

A shattering sound drew her attention to the upper-storey windows in the house across the street. As she watched, the windows blasted open, one after another, all in a row. It was as if someone had taken a gun and shot them out. Then, from an alley behind the house came a teamster, beating the horses of a cluttered cart, and as the team roared past, she could see that the very contents of the cart were in flames.

Huron Avenue itself lay in a shroud of smoke. Deborah turned to her father, clutching his sleeve. “This is a nightmare,” she said. “We must go!”

“Of course.” He glared out the window. If his ill temper could not douse the flames, nothing could. “The phaeton’s waiting in the mews behind the house. I had it readied before sending the hired men home tonight. Can you be ready in five minutes?”

“Less,” she said, already snatching her dress from the upholstered clothing stand in the corner. “Where will we go, Father?”

“To Avalon,” he said, referring to his summer estate in Lake View as he hurried out to ready himself.

Deborah had rarely dressed without help. On formal occasions, her corset was so stiff and tight that she couldn’t even bend to do up her own shoes. Tonight, the sense of impending danger made a mockery of the vanity that used to delight her so much. Her white batiste nightgown served as chemise and petticoat, for she tugged the dress right over the garment. She left her hair in its untidy braid, pulled on stockings and shoes, and grabbed her shawl.

Her nerves wouldn’t settle until she reached Avalon. Situated on the north shore overlooking the lake, the estate would provide a tranquil oasis from the flames, where they could wait out the fire. Perhaps, in the calm after the firestorm, she could bring her father to see reason in the matter of her marriage.

Firelight streamed through the windows, illuminating the suite of rooms where she had spent her childhood. All her costly, beautiful things were here, in a chamber redolent of verbena furniture polish and fresh-cut flowers. What if this magnificent house burned to the ground, and all its contents with it? She found, to her surprise, that she felt curiously indifferent about the notion of never seeing it again.

What sort of person was she, Deborah wondered as her father reappeared at her door, that she could be so calm about losing everything?

She noted that he had donned his best Savile Row suit and kid leather spats. Even in the face of disaster, he seemed determined to keep up appearances. He held his cane and the bulging case containing his most important documents. “Are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes, let’s go,” she said briskly. “And I’m glad we’re together,” she added.

They hastened to the door, and her father stopped. He put out his hand and cupped her cheek. She froze in surprise, for he rarely touched her with affection.

“I’m pleased that you came to see me tonight,” he said with the gruff tenderness that never failed to remind her that she was all he had in the world. “This matter with Philip—we’ll find an accord. You’ll see that marrying him is the proper course of things. The proper course indeed.”

“Oh, Father.” She bent her cheek into the cradle of his hand. “We really must go.”

She stepped out of the room and he turned, his hand on the door handle. A look of pure and utter desolation settled over his craggy face. In that moment, she realized that, although there was nothing for her in this house, nothing for her to clutch to her chest and go running through the streets with, it was different for Arthur Sinclair. This vast mansion was his dream, his place in the world, built by his own hard work and ambition.

“Come,” she said gently. “This pile of wood and stone isn’t worth your life.”

Together they went to the head of the main stairway. Then Deborah stopped and glanced over her shoulder toward her private suite of rooms.

“What is it?” Arthur asked. “Did you forget something?”

“Mother’s lavaliere,” she replied, suddenly remembering the one thing she wanted to keep. “I know just where it is. Wait for me outside, Father. I’ll be right behind you.”

He nodded and went to the elevator cage. Deborah dashed back to her suite and hurried to the dressing room. She had no need of a lamp, for the ominous glare of the fire turned the darkness to unhealthy noon. An entire large chamber was devoted to her wardrobe, a forest of Worth gowns and Brussels lace bodices on wire forms, cuffs and collars of every description, stacks of bandboxes containing hats. In a tall narrow armoire that smelled of lavender sachets, she found what she sought—her mother’s lavaliere in a red velvet pouch tied with silken cords. Stuffing the treasure into her bodice, she rushed back to the stairs.

Her father waited in the foyer, brightly illuminated by fireglow streaming through the skylight. Arthur Sinclair looked as neat and precise as the black-and-white checkerboard pattern on the floor. It was hard to believe that outside this elegant sanctuary, throngs of Chicagoans ran from the fire. But the clanging of alarm bells and shouts from the street hinted that the flames were racing ever closer.

“I’m ready, Father,” she called.

Just then, the heavy front door slammed open.

Deborah froze at the top of the steps, one hand on the newel post. A huge man, covered in soot, with blackened holes burned into his fringed buckskins, stood at the threshold. Behind him, the blaze flared up and roared with an inhuman howl. The wild man burst into the house, crossing the foyer with long, purposeful strides. Even from a distance, she could see the fury in his eyes and the smoke that rose from his smoldering garments.

A looter, she thought, her stomach clenching.

His relentless stride, his swirling dark hair and the gun in his hand made him the most frightening spectacle she had ever seen. She could not even manage to scream.

Arthur Sinclair didn’t move, but stared at the five-shooter in the stranger’s huge hand. Her father did not look up at her, and it took her only a second to realize why. He didn’t want her to make her presence known to the looter.

She bit her lip to keep from calling out.

“See here now,” her father said sternly. “If thieving’s your aim, you’ll find baubles a-plenty throughout the house. No need to harm me or—No need to harm me.”

“I’m not here to rob you, old man.” The looter’s voice was low and harsh.

Deborah’s father gestured with his brass-tipped cane. “The liquor and wine are kept in the basement. Just take what you want and be gone.”

“I want you to look at me, Sinclair,” the looter said. “I come from Isle Royale.”

Her father stiffened, and his knuckles whitened as he gripped the handle of his cane. His jaw began to tic as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. He took an uneven step toward the narrow hallway that led to the alley in the back, where the phaeton waited. “Look,” he said, “if it’s about the copper mine, my claims adjusters will settle—”

“Yes, that’s why I’m here.” The man took a step closer, planting himself between the stair rail and Sinclair. “To settle with you. And it’s not about money.”

He planted his feet wide and brought his arm up, pointing the revolver at Arthur’s chest.

Sinclair raised the satchel like a shield. “Don’t be a fool. I can pay—”

“With your blood, you son of a bitch.”

Deborah didn’t give herself time to think. As nimble as she had been as a little girl, she propped her hip on the gleaming, waxed stair rail and shoved off. The much-polished surface was as slick as grease. In the blink of an eye, she zipped down the rail, seeing things only in flashes of awareness: her father’s astonished, openmouthed face, the man half turning, even as the gun went off.

She felt a terrible blow as her body collided with that of the intruder, and all the air rushed out of her lungs. The glass skylight over the vestibule shattered with an explosion of noise. The gun went sliding across the floor, then spun like a top in the middle of the foyer. Arthur grabbed a marble cherub from the statue in the curve of the stair and brought the white stone down on the intruder’s head. The wild man gave an animal bellow of pain and rage, then sank with a groan.

“By God, you saved my life,” Arthur said, regarding Deborah with astonishment.

“Father,” she said, gasping for air as she picked herself up off the floor. “Do you think you killed him?”

“It would be no more than he deserved. May he burn in hell.” Moving quickly despite his infirmity, he headed for the rear of the house.

Deborah put a hand to her bodice, and with a sense of dismay discovered that it was empty. There, at the foot of the stairs, lay the velvet pouch with her mother’s lavaliere. She went to snatch it, then moved to follow her father out to the phaeton.

But she felt a tug of resistance. Looking down, she saw the hamlike fist of the wild man clutching the hem of her skirt.

Chapter Four

His head pounded like a fist-sized heartbeat. The ringing agony made him want to puke.

The woman with the yellow hair stood like Joan of Arc over him. Her image blurred and melted around the edges, and for a moment he thought he was going blind from the blow to the head. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again and let out a shuddering breath. His vision was sharp and clear once again, but he didn’t like what he saw. The woman’s mouth formed a red O of abject horror. This was no Joan of Arc. He could see the uncertainty flickering in her eyes, could practically read her mind. Should she scream and alert Sinclair, or keep mum so he could get away?

“Go ahead and holler for him,” he said, letting go of her dress and giving her a shove. “You’d be doing me a favor.” She stumbled back against the stairs, lost her footing and fell like a broken doll, sinking in a puffy tangle of skirts.

Standing up, he grabbed the newel post as his vision swam and reeled. He forced himself to focus on his goal: retrieve the pistol, pursue Sinclair, shoot him dead.

His boots crunched over shards of broken glass as he crossed the checkerboard floor. Bad shot. The woman had slammed into him at the precise moment he had squeezed the trigger. Damned revolver. Five-shooters were for killing folks, and until now that had never been his business.

Aware of the woman scrambling to her feet behind him, he bent, staggering with dizziness, and scooped up the Colt. Then he ran after Sinclair down a narrow hallway. A back door gaped open to the service alley behind the house.

He stepped out into an inferno. Every rooftop in sight was in flames. A brooding burnt orange stained the smoke-laden sky. Flaming debris flew in a hot blizzard over the city. A brickwork wall along the side of the alley had sustained a huge crack, and great chunks of brick and mortar rained down into the narrow roadway.

Arthur Sinclair had climbed to the box of a phaeton and sat holding the leather ribbons. There was no driver in sight. Sinclair had clearly been expecting the blond woman to follow him out of the house, for his face registered alarm when he saw Tom rather than the woman.

Tom strode toward him. There was no time for the confrontation he had envisioned during the voyage to Chicago. Sinclair would never know exactly what his connection to Tom was, what crime he would die for. No matter. Let the bastard burn in hell on general principle.

Tom stepped to the middle of the alleyway and raised the five-shooter, holding it steady with both hands. The roaring heat of the fire stole his breath. His world narrowed to a florid-faced, well-fed Arthur Sinclair viewed over the notch of a pistol.

“See you in hell, you son of a bitch,” Tom said in a voice he knew was too low to be heard. Just as he tightened his forefinger around the trigger, he caught a glimpse of the woman running out of the building.

Above her, a huge section of the roof gave way. A tarred sheet of flame wafted down over the unsuspecting blond head.

Tom swore between his teeth, moving even as he spoke. He lunged at the woman, knocking her out of the way just as the burning roof crashed down upon the spot where she had been standing. Beams and timbers rained down, filling the narrow alleyway. The wind shifted, and a geyser of sparks erupted. The horses reared and whistled in panic. The carriage surged forward, racing out of control.

Holding fast to the reins of the runaway team was Arthur Sinclair. Flaming debris filled the alley behind the cart, forming a giant pyramid of fire. The cracked wall across the way crumbled with a crash of dust and rubble.

The entire rear section of the house teetered on the brink of collapse. The service alley was impassable, and so was the house itself. Tom’s only option was to go in the opposite direction and hope the narrow roadway cut through to the main thoroughfare.

He barely thought of the woman, this shrieking blond banshee who had cost him his chance at revenge. Almost as an afterthought, he grabbed her by the upper arm and hauled her to her feet, pulling her out of the way of burning wreckage. Only after he had dragged her to safety did his mind register the word she kept screaming over and over.

Father.

Deborah wrenched her arm this way and that, but the wild man held her fast. She kicked out, stubbing her feet on his iron-hard legs. He didn’t even flinch. It was like fighting a wall of solid rock.

The murderer was a force of nature, as determined and unstoppable as the marching fire she and her father had so foolishly underestimated.

Father.

Dear God, what would become of him? Her last glimpse had been of a runaway phaeton with its canvas hood in flames. Now the wild man was dragging her off in the opposite direction. “Please,” she sobbed, unable to keep from pleading. “Please, let me go. I’ve done nothing to hurt you.”

He thrust his gun in its hip holster and stalked on, showing no indication that he heard her.

“I can pay you.” She tried to claw off her blue topaz bracelet. “Take my jewelry.”

“Lady, I don’t want your damned jewelry,” he said between his teeth. The alley angled to the left. He hauled her down the center of it as stinging sparks rained down on them.

Deborah dug in her heels and leaned back, rebelling with every ounce of strength she possessed. Admittedly, that was not much, but fright and fury added power to her resistance. She had never before fought anyone for any reason.

“Woman, I’ll drag you if I have to,” her captor said, barely slowing his pace. “Your choice.”

Her strength ebbed fast, and she went limp. Before she crumpled completely to the cinder-strewn pavement, he caught her against his rough, smoky buckskin chest. “Damn it,” he said between clenched teeth. “You can come with me, or stay here and burn. What’ll it be?”

“I’d rather burn in hell than go with you.”

“Fine.” He let go of her.

She staggered back, catching herself before she collapsed. The heat from the inferno battered her head. Sparks and cinders rained down from every rooftop. She could smell the scent of burning hair, could see small blackened holes appear in her full skirts. With the fringe of her shawl, she beat out a glowing ember. Casting a frantic glance backward, she could see nothing of the mansion that had been her father’s house, nothing but rubble shrouded in a thick fog of eye-smarting smoke. On both sides of her, the buildings burned out of control, turning the alley into a tunnel of fire. Her throat and lungs filled with hot smoke.

In the roadway ahead, Paul Bunyan marched heedlessly forward, not even looking back to watch her burn like a martyr. She hated that he didn’t look back. She hated him for not looking back. Most of all, she hated having no choice but to flee the fire in one direction—toward her captor. After last night, Deborah reflected, she had not been able to stop shivering. She had pulled the covers over her head and, lying in the dark, reflected that she had reached the bottom of a black pit of despair. Now that she found herself confronted by a crazed murderer, she was beginning to think there were worse things than that pit.

When she reached his side, choking and sputtering on smoke and outrage, he barely acknowledged her except to seize her by the arm and yank her roughly along with him. She tried to demand what he wanted from her, what malice he bore her, but she was coughing too hard.

They emerged onto the main street, and finally she grasped the full force of the conflagration. A river of humanity flowed along the street, bobbing and surging forward like boiling rapids. She called to passersby for help, but no one responded. They were all too preoccupied with their own survival. Besides, the fire blazed with a deafening roar that made it seem almost alive. Deborah coughed and wheezed, starving for a breath of air. She staggered with dizziness, and only the oak-hard arm of her abductor held her up. Rushing people, smoke, cinders, flaming buildings, explosions—all filled her senses. But as she was pulled along, her larger view of the crowd narrowed and focused down to individual and heartbreaking detail. A mother holding a screaming baby and running down the street. A child standing on a street corner, turning in circles and crying until someone grabbed him and hurried off. A single shoe in the gutter. A tired old rag doll underfoot. Everywhere she looked, she saw the horrifying evidence of loss and destruction. A drunken man stood atop a piano, declaring the fire the friend of the poor man and exhorting people to help themselves to liquor. A thrown bottle struck him, and he stumbled and fell.

Armageddon had arrived, she thought. And Satan himself had come to escort her through the flames. To what purpose, she had no idea. Terror swept through her with the same swift and unrelenting fury of the firestorm.

Caught up in the flow of humanity, they surged with the crowd past grand buildings and residences with flames shooting out of the windows. Bundles of blankets were being dropped from upper storeys. To her horrified amazement, she realized that the hastily bound bundles of mattresses and bedding contained valuables. And some of them, insanely, contained children.

A little girl in a red nightgown fought her way free of one of the bundles and raced blindly into the street, wailing in terror. Panic-stricken, she headed into the path of a careening express wagon.

The wild man made a sound of impatience. He dropped Deborah’s arm and plunged into the middle of the road, snatching up the child with a single bear-paw swipe. Moving quickly for a creature of such immense size, he bore the crying child to the walkway.

For a moment Deborah was so surprised that she simply froze, though rushing people jostled her. Dear heaven, a kidnaper. He was a deadly madman, preying upon helpless women and children.

Deborah watched as he set the hysterical child on his shoulder. With his free hand he grabbed a black wrought iron light post and stepped up on its concrete base, rising high above the throng. The girl in red waved her arms frantically, and a man with a sweat-stained face broke free of the crowd and rushed toward her.

“Poppa,” the little girl squealed as the looter surrendered her to her father.

Deborah gathered her wits about her, covered her bare head with her shawl to conceal her blond hair and plunged into the thick of the crowd. She had no thought but to flee, to lose herself in the ocean of humanity surging through the streets. The maelstrom of noise thundered so loudly that her senses seemed to shut down, filtering out the chaos. Her only awareness was of the thin, high-pitched sound that came unbidden from her own throat. She had never seen a rabbit hunted down by a wolf, but knew now what the rabbit sounded like, felt like, when fleeing a predator. Two days ago she had understood her life. She had known who she was and where she fit in. And if, from time to time, she had felt a small, traitorous prodding of discontent, she had quelled it easily enough by reminding herself of all the unearned privileges she enjoyed. The past two days had disengaged her from that comfortable spot like a snail being pried from its shell. And like the snail she was uprooted, lost in an alien world, longing to crawl back into her shell but unable to find the way back.

She forced herself to look ahead to the open square of the intersection. Hurrying in that direction, she slammed into a stout, screaming woman wearing a housekeeper’s black muslin dress and a white lace cap. With a feather duster clutched in her hand, she stood paralyzed by terror except for the misshapen, screaming mouth. Instinctively Deborah grabbed the woman’s hand and propelled her along the walkway. She felt a strong urge to rush away, but the frightened woman clung to her. Ahead of them, a man pushing a heavily laden wheelbarrow slowed their progress.

Deborah spoke aloud, but she couldn’t even hear herself. She gritted her teeth and sucked in breath after breath of the hot, filthy air. They reached an intersection where the crowd thickened. A runaway cart, driverless and pulled by a panic-stricken horse, careened into the crowd. Deborah felt the maid’s hand torn from her own, and for a moment a gap separated them. Then a flood of people flowed into the gap, engulfing the lost woman, and Deborah could only go on.

She recognized the street that ran along the edge of the Catholic cemetery. Two blocks beyond that lay the lakefront park. People hurried faster, eager to reach the safety of the water. Deborah kept her head down, the shawl pulled up over her hair. She darted glances here and there, praying the wild man would not see her. Perhaps she had managed to elude him. If so, it was the only lucky thing that had happened to her in days.

She wondered what in heaven’s name the man could have been thinking. What would prompt him to burst upon her father, intent on murdering him in the midst of a catastrophe? Her father had assumed the man was a looter. No doubt there was plenty of that going on in the city tonight. But the insane man had not shown any interest in robbing the Sinclair house. He seemed focused only on killing her father. He had known her father’s name. Had mentioned a place…an island?

The memory of the intruder made her recoil, and bitter bile rose in her throat. She fought down the need to be sick, wishing, not for the first time in her life, that she was made of sterner stuff. No one had ever taught her how to contend with matters such as how to escape an insane murderer in the midst of a fire of Biblical proportions. Or how to find her father, borne God-knew-where in a runaway carriage. Or how to survive the night.

Each time she heard the clop of hooves or the grind of cart wheels, she checked to see if it was her father. But she never saw him. She could do no more than hope he had brought the team under control and headed toward the lake. From there, he would travel northward to his summer estate. The trouble was, the streets were clogged with fallen rubble and fleeing people. Landmarks crumbled even as she passed.

She wondered what he thought had become of her. In the sudden confusion of the collapsing roof, the gunman and the spooked horses, he might be imagining any number of fates. She hoped madly that he had not tried to fight his way back to the house on Huron Avenue to search for her. The whole district, once a tree-lined bastion of fashionable mansions, was now engulfed in flames.

“I’ll be all right, Father,” she said under her breath, then nearly choked on the irony of her own words. “If tonight doesn’t kill me, I’ll be all right.” She intended to get to the lakeshore and work her way northward. Perhaps she would find a driver to take her to the summer place. She would find her father at Avalon. She had to believe that.

She hoped he would believe it, too. But there was no reason for him to consider her capable of surviving. Arthur Sinclair had raised her to be as useless and ornamental as a rose in a corn patch. All she was and all she knew were those things useful to the wife of a wealthy man. She was known to be accomplished, according to the glowing reports from Miss Boylan’s. But those accomplishments had to do with ballroom dancing or doing needlepoint or reciting poetry in French. None of which was likely to help her survive the fire destroying a whole city.

Her thin-soled Italian shoes were not made for trudging any distance, and her feet quickly grew blistered and sore on the rubble-strewn roadway. She had little sense of direction, having been chauffeured all her life, so she simply followed the general direction of the surging mob. A man leading a brace of horses thrust her aside. Something in the way he pushed at her shoulder made her jump back and scream with panic, slamming against a building. She shut her eyes as the horses passed, telling herself to calm down.

At a fork in the road, she saw people rushing along each branch of the split. A decision. She had to make a decision. What a remarkably novel notion.

She had no idea which was the quickest path to the lake. It was dark up ahead, indicating that the fire had not yet reached the north shore. For no particular reason, she took the left branch and found herself hurrying in a crowd of people, some of them in nightclothes, their arms burdened with hastily snatched possessions, their sooty faces pinched with fright. No one had been prepared for a fire of this speed and intensity.

Keeping her head down, she hurried along a street lined by older buildings that housed shops and saloons burning from the roof down. A street-level window shattered as she passed it. Ducking instinctively to avoid the flying splinters, she felt a rush of heat and the sting of stray shards of glass on her face. Choking, her eyes streaming, she wiped her bloodied hand on her skirt and moved on.

A high-pitched yelp pierced through the roar and din of the fire. She peered into the window of a dry goods shop and saw a mongrel dog scratching frantically at the glass pane. For some reason, in the midst of this rush of humanity, Deborah’s heart went out to the creature.

Darkness shrouded the abandoned shop, yet at the back of the room she detected the hungry glow. Within moments, the shop would be afire. She urged herself move on, but the dog’s frenzied barking caught at her. She tried the shop door and found it locked.

“Help,” she said, turning to the first man who came along. “You must help this poor creature!”

The man, burdened with a clock and a bottle of liquor, glanced into the window. “It’s only a dog,” he said, not even slowing his pace. “Best worry about saving yourself, miss.”

“Please—” she began, but he was already gone.

Deborah was not sure what to do. She had never rescued a dog from a fire before. She had never even met a dog before. Her father had commissioned her eighteen-year-old portrait to be done with her holding an ugly little pug dog, but she had posed with a porcelain model, not the real thing.

The trapped mongrel scratched at the window with undiminished vigor. Deborah gave a sob of frustration, then took off her shawl, wrapped it around her hand and pounded at the window. The panes rattled but didn’t crack. The dog feinted back and cringed in confusion, then started yelping again. Nearly weeping in desperation, Deborah shut her eyes, turned her face away and whacked the window with all her might. The glass shattered and a blast of heat exploded from the building. The dog came out as if shot from a cannon. She caught it in her arms, hardly able to believe it had survived her bumbling rescue attempt.

The dog leaped out of her grasp and shied away in a panic. She put out her hand, but the creature just snapped at her finger.

“Come on, then,” she said. The dog hesitated until a coal dray clattered past, nearly crushing it beneath an iron-banded wheel. Then the mongrel sprang back into Deborah’s arms. It was a smelly, scruffy thing, but she savored its lively warmth as she struggled on through the street. She had gone a full block before she became aware that somewhere along the way she had lost her shawl. She’d probably dropped it after breaking the window.

She cast about furtively, looking for the wild man, and to her relief she did not see him. She pushed on, still holding the little dog. Nothing felt real to her. It was a night out of hell. It was what she had imagined war to be. Terror and wounded refugees and the sense that the world was being ripped to pieces. Only the hope that she might find a way to her father and their home on the lake kept her going.

At last she reached the rockbound shore of Lake Michigan. The water stretched out endlessly before her, a churning field of ink. The howling wind whipped up wavelets that reflected the towering fire. The water itself resembled a sea of flame. The lake bristled with ships’ masts and the smokestacks of steamers. Hundreds of vessels had gathered to witness the spectacle. Boats plied back and forth between the lighthouse and the pier, rescuing people and belongings.

For as far as the eye could see, the lakeshore teemed with refugees and conveyances, barnyard animals and pets running willy nilly through the night. People had waded out into the water to escape the blizzard of sparks and flying brands of flame. Deborah had no idea what to do. She tried to press northward, but it was a struggle hampered by the crush of humanity, the chilly water sloshing at the shore and various landings and piers jutting out into the lake. At last she could go no farther, for the way was blocked by a jetty of sharp black rocks.

She simply stood still, hemmed in by family groups clinging together amidst an outer circle of coaches, carts and barrows. She hugged the small mongrel dog to her chest, then, lifting her face, observed the burning city with a solemn sense of shock and awe. The flames formed a vast inverted bowl of unnatural light over a huge area. There was something mystical and magnificent about the conflagration. Others around her seemed to share her hushed awe, her openmouthed silence. There was simply nothing to say. There were no words to speak in the face of a disaster so vast and so all-consuming.

What had become of her father? His beautiful mansion? His business offices in the city? What had become of the only world she had ever known?

Shaking free of the spell cast by the giant fire, she looked around, scanning the crowd for a familiar face and keeping an eye out for the murderer. She wondered who these people were, where they all came from. Chicago was a city of three hundred thousand souls. Most of them had probably lost everything. Would they simply pick up and go on? How would they ever sift through the rubble of the fallen city and find their former lives?

Like phoenixes rising from the ashes, survivors would emerge from the wreckage of the burned-out city. Criminals awaiting hanging might run free. Wives who hated their husbands might escape their torment. Rich men would find themselves suddenly penniless. A poor man might come into wealth he never imagined. In the face of a fire, everyone was equal. It put her on the same level as the criminal who had abducted her, she thought with a shudder.

A tantalizing notion came to her, subtle as a whispered suggestion. What if Philip Ascot never found her again? What if she was lost forever to Arthur Sinclair? Then she would never have to battle her father over marrying Philip.

Deborah tried to imagine what it would be like to be nothing, nobody, to belong to no one. Immediately a wave of resentment washed over her. In running and hiding from an unwanted marriage, she would forfeit her father. Her friends. Her life. No man should have the power to do that to her. Yet still the fantasy held a bizarre appeal. If she were to simply disappear, would she even be missed? What would it do to her father? She honestly didn’t know. She had the sense that he valued her as a commodity, but as a daughter? She remembered back to their moment of connection in the study and thought perhaps he loved her in his blustering, bombastic fashion. Even so, losing her would not change the shape and color of his world. Her father would grieve for a time, then give himself over to business ventures. Philip would find some other heiress to marry. Her friends might honor her memory, but they would find paths of their own to follow.

The fact was, she was not a necessary cog in the wheel of anyone’s life. Remove her, and everything would go on uninterrupted. She wondered what it would be like to be needed in the way this small lost dog needed her. To be the single element necessary for its survival was an awesome thought. She quite doubted that she was equal to the task.

She shivered, feeling a chill wind off the lake, and pulled the dog closer. She thought about her friends, Lucy and Phoebe and Kathleen. It seemed a lifetime ago that they had been getting ready for the evening’s entertainment. Where were they now? she wondered. She prayed they had survived, that unlike her they had realized the danger of the fire and stayed safe away from the city.

Somewhere in the crowd, a baby cried and a woman’s voice spoke in soothing tones. Gradually people began talking, planning, worrying aloud. Prayer and speculation. Arguments and accusations. The babble of voices crescendoed, became deafening. With no one to talk to, Deborah felt more alone than ever. Still holding the dog, she picked her way up and over the rock and rubble jetty, wondering how far she would be able to walk before exhaustion claimed her.

Her clothes were tattered, her feet sore, her hands bleeding. Every part of her ached, right down to the roots of her hair. She wondered when the dawn would come, and what the day would bring. Staggering along the shore, she had to make a wide bow around the mob. She found herself wading into the surf and felt lake water swamp her, swirling around her ankles, stinging and then numbing her raw and wounded flesh.

Then, through the babble of German, Polish and Norwegian, through the brogues of Irish immigrants and the flat accents of native Chicagoans, she heard her name being called in a clipped, educated voice. “Deborah! Deborah, is that you? Deborah Sinclair!”

Her head snapped up and she scanned the lakeshore drive. A tall sleek coach was parked amid the drays and farm carts. A slender man in disheveled evening wear stood on the box, a long quirt in one gloved hand, the other hand cupped around his mouth. The wind stirred his blond hair and in the sky behind him, fire blossoms glowed.

Philip.

Chapter Five

The moment Deborah recognized her fiancé, everything seemed to be sucked out of her. She stood unmoving, so wracked by dull astonishment that she had frozen solid. Unable to reason. Unwilling to feel anything. There was Philip, looking as handsome and commanding as he had—was it only Saturday night? Now he was calling to her again, ordering her to come to him.

Only seconds earlier she had been thinking of a new life, a new start, unencumbered by expectations, promises and obligations, and her own sense that she had no purpose in life other than fulfilling her father’s intentions for her. Now she conceded, with a humble sense of defeat, that she had no idea how to make a life on her own.

As if in a trance, she picked her way toward Philip, her thoughts dissolving into a confused muddle. Shock and fatigue pushed her toward him, the only familiar face in a world gone mad. She felt as helpless as the dog had been, trapped behind the glass in a burning building, at the mercy of the only person willing to rescue her. The brief fantasy about disappearing swirled away; it had no more substance than the wisps of smoke hovering over the lake. It was time to go back to the life she had planned and to the man who would direct it for the rest of her days.

Chill gusts of lake-cooled wind chased after her as she moved slowly up the steep bank to the place where Philip waited, perched on the running board of a carriage. Numbing exhaustion closed over her. Lines began to blur. Resignation dulled her thoughts. Anything, she told herself, anything was preferable to the hellish night she had just endured.

At last Deborah reached him, reached this man she was scheduled to marry. This man who was regarded by polite society as the American version of royalty. This man who would give Arthur Sinclair grandchildren who would be accepted in the same circles as the Guggenheims and Vanderbilts.

Philip’s handsome face, so refined it was beautiful in the firelight, was her beacon. He extended a gloved hand. “Thank God I found you, darling.” He spoke in the mellifluous lazy drawl of a Harvard Porcellian clubman. “What a stroke of luck!”

She stared at the black leather hand reaching for her.

The long, elegant fingers twitched with impatience. “Come along, then,” he said. “I don’t intend to sit among riffraff all ni—damn!”

The small dog snapped at him. He glared at the creature, then at Deborah. “Where the devil did you get that?”

“From a shop. A burning shop…” Her mind was a screaming jumble. Disjointed thoughts flew past and disappeared before she could grasp them. She felt numb; she could barely speak.

“Never mind,” Philip said. “Just get rid of the filthy creature and take my hand. There’s a girl.”

The screaming in her head grew louder, yet like a sleepwalker, she obeyed. This was Philip, for heaven’s sake. Philip, whom she’d known since she was tiny. Who had suffered through ballroom dancing lessons with her, who had sat stiffly in her father’s study and promised to offer Deborah entree into the highest circles of society in exchange for her hand in marriage—and a staggering dowry.

She thrust aside the instinctual resistance that held her back. At Miss Boylan’s she had learned to dread scandal over all else—bodily injury, personal insult, wounds to the soul. Only the lowliest of breeds would make a scene. This lesson had been hammered into Deborah, so she set down the little dog. It danced about her feet and scrabbled its paws desperately at the hem of her skirts, but she ignored it, refused to look down.

Philip gave another expert flick of the whip. The dog yelped and scurried away, scampering under the carriage. Finally coming to her senses, she tried to go after the mongrel, bending low to peer beneath the conveyance. Philip reached for her, and his gloved hand closed around hers, tugging upward.

“Not so fast,” said a rough and terrible voice behind her. “She’s coming with me.”

The madman. Wild dark hair, battle in his eyes, he towered over the crowd gathered in the roadway.

Philip dropped her hand. “Clearly you’re mistaken,” he said with an incredulous bark of laughter. “Stand down, man. You’re in the way, and I’m in a hurry.”

“Philip, this man is a menace,” Deborah babbled. “He tried to murder my father!”

When the buckskin-clad man moved in closer, Philip swore and brandished the whip. The braided leather lashed out, but unlike the dog, the outlaw didn’t flinch, didn’t even blink. He merely put up a fist the size of a joint of roast beef and caught the whip in midstrike.

He hauled back with the motion of a seasoned fisherman, reeling Philip in like a trout. Philip spat a curse even as he fell forward off the carriage box. It was hard to tell if he collided by accident with the other man’s fist, or if the man actually threw the punch that knocked him cold. All Deborah knew for certain was that Philip Ascot IV gave an unhealthy groan and crumpled to the ground like a dropped sack of feed corn.

She stared at him for a moment. The fine frock coat had twisted awry, revealing a small pearl-handled handgun protruding from his cummerbund. How odd to think of Philip carrying a gun. Yet after last night she realized she didn’t know him at all. Reflexively, she reached for the gun.

A large, soot-smudged hand closed around her wrist. She cried out and tried to pull away, but her abductor’s hold on her was implacable. She was a fool for not being quicker and grabbing Philip’s gun when she had the chance. Not that she knew the first thing about using a handgun. But now she had nothing, not so much as a hatpin with which to defend herself.

The man pulled her away from the road and down toward the lake.

“No!” Numb inertia gave way to defiance. She dug her heels into the grassy embankment by the roadway. “Let go of me!”

He ignored her protest, dragging her along behind him with callous brute force. Dear God, what had she done? Why had she hesitated to join Philip in the enclosed safety of the carriage?

It occurred to her, in a flash of new awareness, that she’d had a third choice. She could have—should have—fled by herself. Yet she’d failed to seize the opportunity. Independence had never been an option for her.

“Help,” she called to all the people they passed. “Save me! This man is trying to kidnap me!”

Some within earshot stared at her curiously but most merely shook their heads and went back to their own struggles. No doubt they had seen more bizarre sights this night than a hysterical woman.

“Please,” she tried again. “I don’t know this man. He’s abducting me. For the love of God, please help!”

A workman in knickers and shirtsleeves stepped into their path. The wild man said nothing, only gave him a burning look, and the man stepped out of the way. The brute’s towering height and the breadth of his shoulders made him a fearsome spectacle, Deborah realized with sinking hopes. Still, she kept screaming, and a priest in a long cassock approached, rolling back his voluminous sleeves to reveal surprisingly beefy forearms.

“See here now,” he said in a thick Irish brogue. “The poor lass is out of her head with fright.”

“That’s a fact, mon frerè,” said the big man. “My poor wife lost everything tonight, and she’s not herself.”

“Wi…wi—” Deborah was too shocked to get the words out.

“I reckon she’ll be all right by and by,” her abductor said, grasping her insolently around the waist. He held her so tightly she could scarcely breathe. “We could use your prayers, mon frère. We surely could.” He pulled her quickly away, heading down toward a wide wooden pier that jutted out onto the lake.

“But he’s not…I’m not his wife—” she called, but she was dragged relentlessly along, and the Irish priest had already vanished into the throng on the beach. Deborah opened her mouth to call out again, but before she could speak, her captor pressed her roughly against one of the wet timber piers upholding the dock. He put his angry, frightening face very close to hers. She could smell the leather and smoke scent of him—the essence of danger and strangeness.

“Quit your caterwauling,” he ordered. “I’m out of patience.”

She forced herself to glare up at him. He was a giant of a man. She had never seen a man so tall. She was terrified, but she had nothing to lose. “And patience is such a gift of yours, I’m sure,” she spat with far more bravado than she felt. “What will you do? Sock me in the face? Shoot me?”

“Tempting offers, both of them.” He took her upper arms in a bruising grip and lifted her bodily off the ground. The sensation of being entrapped between his strong hands raised a havoc of panic in her. The blood drained from her face and dry screams came from her throat, but he didn’t seem to be bothered by her protests. Handling her like a longshoreman with a timber bale, he bundled her into a small wooden dinghy tied up at the pier and cast off the ropes.

“What are you doing?” Deborah shrieked. “You can’t—”

He shoved off with such force that she fell backwards, hitting her shoulder painfully on something hard and sharp. The impact drove the breath from her lungs. By the time she righted herself, he was pulling strongly out into the lake. The hot glow from the burning city made him appear more fierce and frightening than a dark angel.

He glared at a spot over her shoulder. “What the hell is that?” he muttered, laying aside his oars.

“What is what?” she asked.

“Something in the water.”

She grabbed the side of the boat and twisted around. “Philip?”

“Close. I think it’s a rat.” He reached down, the fringe on his sleeve brushing the surface of the water, and scooped up the animal, holding the dripping, shivering creature aloft. “Yours?”

She grabbed the dog and gently cradled it to her breast. The smell of smoke and wet fur nearly made her gag, but just for a moment, she felt a flood of hope and relief. Then she looked at her captor, his huge form lit by the glare of the burning city, and the terror and confusion returned. Without taking her eyes off him, she set the dog in the bottom of the boat. The mongrel shook itself violently, spraying water. Deborah knew she had to act. Her hesitation on the shore had cost her dearly and she must not make the same mistake again.

No longer worried about the indignity of making a scene, she seized one of the oars. Drawing back, she swung it at the big man. Being violent was harder than it looked, she realized as he ducked. Frustrated, she swung it back the other way. He put up a hand and caught the oar, wrenching it from her grasp. He never said a word, just took up rowing again.

Deborah slumped down on the hard, narrow seat. She had gained nothing by trying to fight back, yet the very idea that she had dared made her feel slightly better. Very slightly. Within moments, fright and uncertainty returned with a vengeance.

The stranger’s simmering silence alarmed her far more than any tirade of threats. He had a hard look about him that frightened her, yet she found herself studying his shadowed face with something more than fright. There was a large swelling on his head where her father had struck him with the marble statue. The blow probably would have cracked the skull of any other man. His bear-paw hands gripped the oars with easy certainty, and his smooth, rhythmical strokes told her he was an experienced waterman.

She had no idea why she was speculating about this stranger, so she forced herself to stop. She held fast to the wet, smelly little dog as each powerful stroke of the oars bore her farther from shore.

Finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. “What do you want with me?” she demanded.

He gave no answer, and the look he shot her made her doubt whether or not she truly wanted to know.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked. She definitely wanted to know the answer to that.

He simply kept rowing. The small boat pounded through the choppy water, riding up the crest of each wave, then slapping down in its trench, one after the other. The dog trembled in her lap.

She bit her lip, trying to hold in a rising panic. Even after all she had seen this night, she still felt no easing of her terror. With each passing second, she slipped farther and farther away from all that was familiar. She felt numb, yet beneath the numbness lay a banked hysteria beckoning her to madness. If she gave vent to it, she might never stop screaming.

Drawing in a deep breath, she asked, “Are you a white slaver?”

“What?”

“A white slaver,” she repeated. “Is that what you are?”

“Yeah,” he said, flashing her a predatory grin that was even more intimidating than his thunderous scowl. “Yeah, that’s me. A white slaver.”

She shuddered, resentful of his sarcasm. The idea of white slavers had been planted by the forbidden novels the young ladies of Miss Boylan’s giggled over late at night. In the books, the adventure seemed to befall innocent, usually fair-haired girls, though what became of them after being taken by their brutal captors was always left to the imagination. Deborah had always envisioned a shadowy place, the air spiced with incense, exotic music emanating from the unseen corners.

The stranger brought the dinghy alongside a larger boat. The firelight picked out the low-browed profile of a small steam freighter. In the pilot house a single lamp burned, swinging with the motion of the waves.

He tied the dinghy to the stern. Without bothering to ask permission, he bent and scooped up the dog, which immediately bit him.

“Ouch! Damn it!” He brought the dog over the side, practically flinging it into the trawler. He swung around to glare at Deborah. “Climb aboard,” he ordered.

She clutched the sides of the rowboat. “No.”

He let out a long breath that sounded of repressed fury. “Do you really want to fight me on this?”

“I refuse to go.”

“Climb aboard or I’ll heave you over, too,” he said.

She stared at him, all six and a half feet of him. The fringed buckskins of a savage. The dark, lank, sawed-off hair of a backwoodsman. The bear-paw hands that could snap a person in two. The reflected glints of fire and rage in his eyes. No. She did not want to fight him.

For the first time in her life, she was going to have to think ahead, to plan. She would wait for the right opportunity, and then she would act.

Bracing her hands on the hull of the trawler, she pulled herself up. The churning water made her lose her footing, but she clung tenaciously to the ladder. Her foot snagged in the hem of her skirt, and she heard a ripping sound. It crossed her mind that climbing a ladder in front of a gentleman was a risky and unladylike thing to do. Another swift glance at Paul Bunyan reminded her that he was no gentleman, and that ladylike qualms would not be tolerated.

Then a moment of utter clarity came over Deborah. She held the ladder with one hand while a wave lifted the stern end of the trawler, bringing the molten glass water up to her knees. She had it in her power to end this here, now.

Before she could change her mind, she simply opened her hand and let go of the ladder. A brief sensation of falling, then the cold shock of the water stunned her. She felt her wet skirts bell out, trapping air momentarily before pulling her down, down…

It was the worst possible moment to change her mind, but Deborah couldn’t help herself. Something deep within her protested and rebelled. She didn’t want to die at all, no matter how miserable she was. She wanted to live. She scissored her legs, trying to kick toward the surface, so hungry for air that she feared her chest would explode. She wasn’t going to make it, she thought, seeing blackness through her slitted eyes. She’d failed at suicide, and now she would fail to save herself.

Her arm brushed something hard and rough—a floating log or part of the ship, perhaps—and felt herself being dragged up to the surface. She coughed up water, then sucked in air with explosive breaths. Only then did she realize her captor had gone in after her. Looking even more forbidding soaking wet, he grabbed the ladder with his free hand and hauled her up and over the transom, manhandling her as if she were livestock. In the open cockpit of the trawler, the wild man regarded her with disgust.

“What the hell’s wrong with you, woman?” he demanded.

She knew he didn’t want a response, and for a long time, she couldn’t speak anyway. Her legs felt weak and rubbery with fatigue. The ecstatic dog greeted her, turning like a dervish on the cluttered deck and yelping joyfully. She felt too numb to do any more than sit down heavily amid her wet, tangled skirts and stare at nothing at all. After a while, she managed to catch her breath. “Smokey,” she said, addressing the dog. “That will be your name.”

The wild man secured the dinghy to the steamer.

“You mean you don’t even know this dog?” he demanded. “We took on a stray?”

“If you don’t like strangers on your boat, then let us both go,” she challenged him.

“If that critter gets on my nerves, he’s cutbait,” her captor promised, pulling in the ladder. Without a word of warning, he peeled off his fringed jacket and then his shirt, revealing the deep chest, narrow waist and giant arms of a lumberjack. Then he unlaced his trousers.

Deborah gasped and looked away. “How dare you? It’s indecent.”

“I’ll tell you what’s indecent. Jumping into Lake Michigan in October. On second thought, that’s not indecent. Are you crazy, or just stupid?”

When she dared to look back at him, he was dressed in denim jeans and a bleached shirt, and was lacing on another pair of boots.

The big boat smelled of dampness and fish. It had a broad deck behind the raised pilot house, and rows of crates lashed along the periphery. A narrow hatch covered by wooden louver led below.

Deborah had spent plenty of time on the lake, but never in a craft like this. She had enjoyed endless summer afternoons flying along in her catboat, or long lazy days cruising aboard her father’s steamer yacht, the one he had bought from Mr. Vanderbilt of New York City, just so he could have something once owned by a Vanderbilt. Sometimes they steamed as far north as the locks at Sault Sainte Marie.

But this was not a pleasure cruising boat, she knew.

The man crossed the deck with heavy, thudding footsteps. The small gray dog backed against her skirts and growled.

A thump came from below, where she imagined the cabins and the boiler room to be. As Deborah watched, the louvered hatch opened and a small, wiry man with sleek black hair emerged. He took one look at Deborah and his eyes widened, then sharpened with astonishment.

“A visitor, eh? I thought I’d heard someone,” the man said. The faint flavor of French tinged his words. As he hoisted himself up and out of the hatch, Deborah saw a streak of pure white against the black strands of his hair. Though not young, he was fit and muscular. An Indian. She had never seen an Indian at such close range before.

“You are very wet,” he observed, glancing from her to the pile of damp buckskins on the deck. “The fire, she is a bad one, eh?” He shaded his eyes and faced the city. “I figured it’d be out by now.” He peered at Deborah. “So. Who the devil are you?”

The dog growled, and she snatched it into her arms.

“Name’s Jacques duBois,” the man said with a trace of Gallic courtesy that surprised her. “Commonly called Lightning Jack. Welcome aboard the Suzette, mademoiselle.”

She stood up and cleared her throat, tasting grit and smoke. Her damp skirts hung in disgrace. “My name is Deborah Beaton Sinclair.”

His congenial grin disappeared. He threw a glance at the other man. “You brought a Sinclair aboard my boat?”

“He’s crazy,” she said in a rush, praying duBois would understand. “He forced me to come with him, though I offered him a fortune to set me free. I am here against my will.”

“Aren’t we all, chère. Aren’t we all.”

“He abducted you, too?” she inquired.

“No.” Lightning Jack gestured at the flaming night sky. “But I have no liking for Chicago. Pile of dry sticks, railroad slums and smelly stockyards. Pah.” He spat over the side.

“Please. This is a terrible misunderstanding. You must take me back to shore. Your friend is not right in the head.”

“Friend.” Lightning Jack winked at the tall man. “Tom Silver was my foster son. Now that he is grown, he is my partner in commerce. Did he not tell you?”

“He told me nothing.” She turned the name over in her mind. Tom Silver. A simple name for a savage man. “Has he always been insane?”

Lightning Jack hooked his thumbs into the rope sash around his middle. He regarded her with a narrow-eyed harshness that made her take a step back. “Mademoiselle, I assure you he is not insane.” He moved past her to join the man called Tom Silver, who was loading wood from a tender tied to the boat. Silver moved with a peculiar ease for one so large. As he bent and straightened with the rhythm of his task, she saw that he had one vanity, something she hadn’t noticed before. Within the strands of his long dark hair, he wore a single thin braid wrapped with a thread of leather. Secured to one end of the braid was a feather, perhaps from an eagle.

Looking at him, she felt an unaccustomed lurch of…not fear, exactly. Trepidation, yes, but it was mixed with an undeniable curiosity. She was alone with two savages, and so far she had not been injured or terrorized. Perhaps they were saving the torture for later.

With a shudder, she turned to look back at the city. Her father, one of Chicago’s most enthusiastic promoters, had always called it “Queen of the Prairie.” But everything had changed in just one night. From the deck, she could see the whole extent of the conflagration. Nothing in her experience approached the terrible majesty of this sight. The fire raged from the southwestern reaches of the city to the north shore of the lake. It spanned the river and its branches, cutting a deadly swath through the entire city, right up to the lakeshore railroad lines. The tower of the waterworks stood like a lonely, abandoned sentinel flanked by the fire. The heart of the city had been burned out.

Flames spun upward from the high rooftops. From a distance they resembled orange tornados, the sort that sometimes whirled across the prairies far beyond the city.

Government Pier bristled with people crowded close together. Deborah imagined they were as dumbstruck and battle-weary as those at Lincoln Park had been.

She wondered about her father, and her friends from Miss Boylan’s. And Philip. How close she had come to taking his hand and driving off into the night with him. She kept picturing that black leather hand reaching for her, kept hearing his refined voice, promising to take her to safety.

Instead, here she was with a skin-clad barbarian, being dragged away like a hunting trophy in his smelly boat.

Like Tom Silver, Lightning Jack wore the skins of dead animals and his hair indecently long. Unlike Silver, he wore a pleasant smile. He caught his partner’s eye. “Alors, mon vieux. We stoke the boilers,” he said and they started climbing down a hatch.

“What about me?” Deborah asked. Her voice rose on a note of hysteria.

The two men looked back at her and Tom Silver narrowed his eyes dangerously. “Don’t you get it, Princess?” he asked in annoyance.

“Get what?”

“You’re a hostage.”

Chapter Six

“I guess you got some explaining to do, mon copain,”

said Lightning Jack.

With desultory motions, Tom checked the pressure gauges on the boilers. His head throbbed where Sinclair had hit him. “I reckon.”

“So talk. Start with the devil’s bastard, Sinclair. I was afraid you might lose him in the confusion of the fire.”

Tom drew on a pair of hide gloves and fed wood to the fire, building up heat as they prepared to get under way. He glanced over his shoulder at Jack.

“I found him,” Tom said. “I found Sinclair.”

“And did you kill him?” Jack’s onyx eyes glittered. The look on his face indicated that he already knew the answer.

Tom finished stoking the boilers. He slammed the steel hatch shut and rotated the dial. Then he turned to face his friend, the man who had raised him.

“No,” Tom repeated, taking off the thick gloves. “I didn’t kill him.”

“Merde.” Jack believed in simple, direct justice. He had been a voyageur in his younger years. His mother was Chippewa, his father French Canadian. He had earned the nickname “Lightning” years ago when he’d been struck by lightning during a spring storm on the lake. The wound had left a permanent jagged patch along the side of his head where only white hair would grow.

Lightning Jack spoke French, English and Chippewa, and he swore now in all three, slipping easily from one tongue to the next.

“Parbleu,” he grumbled. “If you found him, why didn’t you shoot him?”

Tom was too bone-weary to go into detail. And maybe he didn’t know the answer himself. There had been that split second, that brief hesitation, when his resolve to murder Arthur Sinclair had wavered. What had seemed so simple in the planning turned out much different in the execution.

“The city’s on fire,” he said to Jack. “We picked the wrong night to hunt down Arthur Sinclair.”

“You found him. You had him dead to rights. Were you waiting for a formal invitation?”

Tom didn’t reply.

“I should have done the deed myself. I would have slit the devil’s throat from ear to ear, comme ça.” He traced the motion with a finger. “And what do you bring me in return? His yellow-haired runt of a daughter.”

Tom took a long swig from a stoneware jug of cider, balancing the vessel on his bent elbow. Even the motion of tipping back his head to drink made him dizzy from the goose egg. Deborah, he thought. Deborah the debutante.

“I would take no joy in slitting the throat of such a one as her,” Jack said.

“We’re not going to kill her.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

Tom thought about the huge house, filled with paintings and antiques and trophies of a rich man’s toils. “We’re going to get her father’s fortune in ransom.”

“I don’t want his fortune.”

“Because you don’t need it,” Tom pointed out. “But what about the others? They sure as hell could use the ransom money.”

“Hostage. Pah.” Lightning Jack took the jug from Tom and drained it. “What sort of revenge is that?”

“A better sort. I saw the way he lives, Lightning. I figured out what’s important to him.” Tom spoke the words with a new insight—some things were worse than dying. It was a hell of a thing, figuring that out, but seeing Sinclair like a king in his castle had opened his eyes. Tom wasn’t surrendering his need for revenge, just changing his methods.

“Sinclair’s failed mine left folks destitute. His money could bring them some relief.”

“That is not good enough.” Steam drove the pistons, and Lightning Jack raised his voice over the boiling hiss. “Arthur Sinclair must suffer for what he did.”

Tom didn’t answer. Now that the boilers were stoked, he led the way abovedecks to the pilot house. Miss Deborah Beaton Sinclair still stood astern, holding her shaggy dog and watching the fire, her wet clothes dripping. He couldn’t figure out if she had fallen into the lake deliberately or by accident. He had no idea what was going on in her head, and didn’t care to know, but for some reason he kept wondering. She looked small and slight, her dress and hair bedraggled, her delicate features limned by firelight, her face vulnerable and inexpressibly sad.

She reminded him of a broken china doll. It occurred to him that the city was her home, and here she stood watching it burn. Before her eyes, her own father had taken off in a runaway carriage. She had lost all that was familiar to her. He did not want to think of this young woman’s sadness, but he couldn’t help it. She had the sort of fragile, melancholy countenance that evoked things he was not used to feeling. Like sympathy. Protectiveness.

It was stupid, he told himself. She was the spoiled daughter of a man who did not blink at wiping out a whole town. At Arthur Sinclair’s knee, Miss Deborah had probably learned that in the pursuit of profit, there were no rules or restraints.

When she looked up at him, he noticed a smudge of soot on her cheekbone. Her hair had come loose, and there were large black-ringed holes burned in her damp dress. She kept stroking the dog with one small hand, over and over again.

He bent to the windlass at the bow and cranked in the anchor. He raised the dinghy and made it fast astern. Then he gave a whistle. The engines ground, the twin screw propellers churned and the trawler lurched forward.

The motion made Deborah Sinclair stagger back against the rail. “Where are you taking me?”

He didn’t answer.

“What is your intent?” she demanded, sounding loud and testy now. “I demand to know.”

Her shrill tone evaporated his sympathy. Seizing her had been an act of pure impulse. He had not looked ahead to moments like this, had not considered what it would mean to have a female aboard. They did female things. They had female needs. And this was not just any female. This one probably had a maid just to button her shoes for her. A servant to sprinkle sugar in her tea. A footman to open and close the carriage door for her.

“Well?” she asked. “Have you gone deaf or are you simply being rude?”

“Quarters are below,” he said. “Follow me.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort.”

He gave a snort. “Fine. Spend the night on deck. Makes no difference to me.”

She took two steps back and tilted up her head to look him in the eye. “I don’t plan on staying,” she said.

“Who was the tenderfoot with the horsewhip?” he asked, ignoring her statement.

“That was Philip Widener Ascot IV,” she said. Her voice was flat, her face expressionless. “He is my fiancé.”

Tom mimicked a limp-wristed parody of Ascot wielding the whip. “Charming fellow. You’re a lucky young lady.”

“You may be sure he will remember you from last night, and all the papers will be filled with a description of you.”

“Will he remember that you refused to go with him?”

“I did not refuse. There was no time—”

“You had time. You could have grabbed his hand and jumped into his coach.”

“You would have pursued me.”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “Maybe not. You’ll never know, will you? Because you chose me.”

She recoiled. “I did nothing of the sort. Why would I choose you?”

“That’s a question you should be asking yourself. I sure as hell don’t know what’s in that head of yours.”

“And you are in such trouble,” she shot back. “Do you know who my fiancé is?”

“Besides a horse’s ass?”

She made a sound of disdain. “He is from one of the first families of the city. He is heir to a publishing empire with ties to New York City. When he and my father find me, he will publish this account in every newspaper in the country.”

“If he finds you, there won’t be enough of him left to swab the decks with.” Tom shook his head. “Believe me, having my description published in the papers won’t cause me to lose any sleep.”

She stared at him inquisitively.

“What?” he asked, irritated.

“You have a strange manner of speaking,” she remarked. “It’s a combination of backwoods ignorance and educated formality. Why is that?”

“Quit prying and go below,” he ordered. He didn’t want her to know a damned thing about him. “And pray your father buys your freedom soon.”

She bristled imperiously. “Or else?”

“Or else you’re in for a long, cold winter.”

She twisted a diamond ring off her finger. “That’s worth a fortune. You may have it. Just take me ashore.”

He pocketed the ring without looking at it. “No.”

“You can’t hold me aboard this boat all winter,” she objected.

“You’re right about that,” he said, then grasped the ladder leading to the pilothouse. “We’d best get a move on.”

“You won’t get away with this,” she yelled.

He slowly turned to face her. “Don’t you get it, Princess? I already have.”

Chapter Seven

Deborah felt sick with the motion of the boat, but she willed back the waves of nausea. Shivering, chilled to the bone in her damp dress, she waited until Tom Silver disappeared into the pilothouse. The little French Indian called Lightning Jack spoke to him briefly. They seemed to be arguing about something. Then both men bent over a slanted table strewn with charts.

Good. They were paying her no heed at all. They probably assumed she would slink below to fling herself on a bunk and weep hysterically until exhaustion claimed her.

Which was exactly what she wanted to do.

But she refused to allow it, even though every instinct urged her to crumble in defeat. She tried to think what to do. Kathleen would take action. She was never one to sit still. Lucy would confront these men with righteous indignation and rail at them about the injustice of their crime. Phoebe would attempt to endear herself to them, and sweet-talk her way out of trouble.

Deborah came to a decision, the only possible course of action she could think of. Before she could change her mind, she set down the shaggy little dog and moved to the stern. She had watched covertly while Silver had hoisted the dinghy, and she thought she could figure out how to lower it again.

The eerie light from the city was bright enough to burn through the smoke and fog. But the farther they steamed away from Chicago, the fainter the light. She would have to work fast.

She found the mechanism that would release the winch and unhooked it. The chains made a terrible noise, reeling out with a metallic grating sound. The small rowboat smacked the water with a splash, then swirled in the wake of the steamer. The big boat was traveling a lot faster than she had imagined it would.

Glancing over her shoulder, she ascertained that the men in the pilothouse had not heard. She spared a thought for the dog, shivering in a corner of the deck, but it was all she could do to save herself. Then she stepped up on the transom, holding on to the ladder.

Deborah searched her soul for guidance and wisdom. She wished she could find just one measly drop of courage. She felt nothing but icy, breath-stealing terror. Before she could change her mind, she flung herself over the back and scrambled down the ladder as far as she could go. Cold mist, churned up by the propellers, showered her, nearly blinding her as she climbed into the dinghy. Wrestling with the knots, she managed to untether the small craft.

Within seconds, she was adrift on the gale-swept lake as the trawler steamed northward. She could scarcely believe it. She had escaped.

Cold waves slapped up and over the sides of the small wooden craft. Water sloshed in the hull. Letting loose with a laugh of elation, she fitted the oars into the oarlocks and began to row. The wild man had made it look easy, but the water felt as heavy as mud.

Still, her escape might have worked had she not made one critical error. She should have brought the dog.

The little beast put its forepaws on the side of the trawler and yapped piercingly into the night. She hoped the noise of the steamer would drown out the barking. She held her breath, praying the kidnapers would ignore the racket. But she saw the trawler circle back, chugging like the Loch Ness monster toward her.

On deck, a large figure rose with a grappling hook in hand.

Damp and fog shrouded the boat and the lake surrounding it. The cramped quarters where Deborah awakened had a very small portal, and a narrow louvered vent for fresh air. It wasn’t a proper stateroom and could not even be called quarters, but a storage room with a pile of blankets. She groped in the half light, finding coils of rope, a box of tools whose use she couldn’t fathom, a moldering shirt and two things that puzzled her—a child’s shoe and a copy of Les Misérables in the original French. She encountered an empty bottle, an illustrated Farmers’ Almanac, a jar of shiny, opaque green stones and a chamberpot.

Moving slowly and painfully, she availed herself of the primitive facilities, then put on her dress. At some point, which she could not remember, she had peeled it off to collapse in exhaustion. Her fingers worked clumsily over the buttons, but she managed to do herself up. She found her way on deck with difficulty. Where was she? She looked out at the lake. Nothing but fog. Chicago—indeed the shore—was nowhere in sight.

She ached in every joint and limb. She felt seasick, but there was nothing in her stomach to surrender. The little dog she had dubbed Smokey cavorted in friendly fashion around her feet, but she could not even summon the strength to pat his head. Traitor, she thought.

Tom Silver stood in the wheelhouse, steering the trawler through the impenetrable fog, ignoring her. Lightning Jack emerged from the galley holding a thick china mug. “Tea,” he said, holding it out. “It’s medicinal. Helps with the mal de mer.”

She felt too defeated to argue, and so she took the mug, wrapping her chilly fingers around its warmth.

“How does he know where to go in this fog?” she asked. Her voice rang hollow in the thick, hazy air.

“He follows my instructions,” Lightning Jack explained. “This is my boat.” He jerked his silver-streaked head toward the surface of the water. “The way is posted by buoys and channel markers. Fear not. You are safe aboard the Suzette.”

Safe. She did not even know the meaning of the word anymore.

The water appeared considerably calmer and flatter than it had been…when?

“What time is it?” she asked.

“You mean what day? You’ve slept for two days.”

She nearly choked on her tea. Dizzy, she lowered herself onto the bench. She forced her eyes to focus on something, anything, to keep from fainting. She stared at her shoes, scuffed and worn from her ordeal. For two days she had slept in her shoes.

How strange it now seemed that Kathleen used to take her foot between her knees to do up Deborah’s shoes with the button hook. She shut her eyes in despair.

There must have been some powerful drug in the tea, for everything swirled behind her closed eyelids, and then she knew nothing. With a vague, dreamlike awareness, she felt the mug taken from her hand. Powerful arms lifted her. The sensation startled her awake with a cry. Panic hammered in her chest, and she screamed.

“Shut up,” said Tom Silver through gritted teeth. “I’m taking you back to your bunk.”

“Put me down,” she yelled, horrified at his nearness, the lake-and-leather scent of him, the way he held her in his tree trunk arms.

“Fine.” He practically dumped her down the hatch. “Just don’t fall asleep in the pilothouse again.”

She was shaking when she returned to the cramped quarters, pressing herself back against the door. Different, she told herself, trying to still the crazed beating of her heart. This was different. This man, this Tom Silver, hated her. His hatred was supposed to keep him from touching her. She didn’t want anyone to touch her, ever again.

Deborah awoke again hours—or days?—later to the rattle and churn of the trawler’s engine and the murmur of masculine utterances. She lay perfectly still, trying to pretend this was not real. She refused to open her eyes. So long as she kept them closed she could pretend she was back at Miss Boylan’s, in her own bed of pressed Irish linens. In a few minutes, Kathleen would come with tea and milk on a tray, and they would discuss Deborah’s plans for the day.

But inevitably, the damp fishy smell of the boat and Smokey’s doggy odor chased away the fantasy. Once again, she struggled to the galley, finding Lightning Jack poring over a chart.

He offered her tea again.

“Just water, please. Your tea makes me suspicious.”

“You should be grateful for the sleep. This is a long and boring voyage.”

“And what is our destination?”

“That is up to your father. If he surrenders to our demands, we’ll put you on a train in Milwaukee.”

She felt a spark of eagerness. “Have you already sent a message?”

“We’ll wire from Milwaukee,” he said.

“Why are you and Tom Silver making demands from my father?” she asked. “What do you want from him?”

“Justice,” Lightning Jack said simply.

“I don’t understand. Justice for what?”

He stared out the window, pocked with spray. “For murder.”

An incredulous laugh escaped her. “You think my father murdered someone?”

“I know he did.” Lightning Jack rose from the bench.

“You know nothing of the sort,” she retorted. “My father has never harmed a soul. He’s a good man—”

“He is fortunate to have a daughter who believes in him. But that does not alter the truth.”

“Then tell me your version of the truth.”

“Last summer—”

“That’ll do, Jack.” A large and ominous shadow filled the doorway, obliterating the light. Tom Silver ducked his head and stepped into the galley. “Best check on the piston drivers. Weren’t you going to do that today?”

Lightning Jack nodded. He looked at Deborah briefly. “Find something to eat. You’ll need your strength.”

“But you—what—” Before Deborah could get the words out, he was gone. She glared at Tom Silver. “We were in the middle of a conversation.”

“I heard.”

“You had no right to interrupt.”

“You have no rights, period.”

She shot up from the table. Her vision swam, and for a horrible moment she feared she might swoon. She grabbed the edge of the table to steady herself. “I have every right to know why you took me against my will. I have every right to know why you forced me aboard this smelly boat and why you’re taking me far from home. I have every right—”

“You claim a lot of rights for someone who’s a prisoner.”

She tried to form an answer, but lost her grip on the edge of the table. The deck raced up to meet her, and she squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for a fall. But something stopped her. A giant male hand caught her, gripped her shoulder and steadied her. She opened her eyes, and a shiver of nauseating revulsion rolled over her. His touch was harsh, impersonal. It set off a reaction within her that made her sick.

“Let go of me,” she said, breathing the words through clenched teeth. “I beg you, let go.”

“Don’t beg. I can’t stand that in a female.” He gave her a shove, and she staggered back to the bench. “Do as you’re told and keep your mouth shut, and we’ll get along a lot better.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I don’t care to get along with you?”

“No, but it occurred to me that I could tie you up and gag you.”

Her jaw dropped. The utter cruelty of this man stunned her. She was accustomed to the little refined cruelties of ruthless social climbers, but not to the raw force of Tom Silver’s brutality.

“What’s this?” he asked, picking something up off the floor.

Deborah reached for the velvet pouch. “It’s mine. It must have dropped when I nearly fell just now. Oh, don’t—”

But he did, of course. He opened the pouch, and out fell her lavaliere. The blue topaz prism, set in silver filigree, was not the most costly of baubles, but its sentimental value to Deborah was beyond price. “That was my mother’s. Give it back,” she said, holding out her hand.

“Nope.” He stuck it in his pocket. “We’ll send it to your father—so he knows we’re not bluffing.”

It was the one possession that truly meant something to Deborah. “Please,” she said. “Not that. You’ve already taken my diamond engagement ring. That’s much more valuable.”

“And more likely to be stolen by the messenger.”

“My father might think you simply found that in the confusion of the fire,” she pointed out. Then, realizing her mistake, she covered her mouth.

“You’re right,” he said. “Maybe I should send an ear or a finger.”

“This is a nightmare,” she whispered. “This can’t be happening.”

He stared at her narrow-eyed for a few minutes, then took a wickedly sharp knife from the top of his boot.

Deborah gave a shriek and scrambled for the door. He grabbed a handful of her hair and used the knife to slice off a thick blond lock. “This’ll do,” he said, sheathing the knife.

She moaned, sinking to the bench and clutching at her ruined hair.

He left her sitting alone in the cramped galley, struck speechless and motionless by the fact that she had lost everything in the world and was bound on a journey into the wilderness with two madmen.

Chapter Eight

Smokestacks and grain elevators rose ghostlike through the mist enshrouding the city of Milwaukee. At the stern of the trawler, Tom felt the presence of the girl like the weight of an albatross tied around his neck. He understood all too well that long poem Frère Henri had studied with him one winter. A man had to wear the evidence of his deeds, and he could never go back to what he was before.

He had abducted the woman on impulse, but now she was his, totally dependent upon him. Holding the daughter of Arthur Sinclair as a hostage on the boat was sheer idiocy, but as a means of revenge it might just work. Lord knew how this would turn out. The whole damned thing made his head ache, a common occurrence since he had been whacked in the skull by Deborah’s father. The swelling had subsided, but not the pain.

His hostage was in the pilothouse, pacing back and forth, stopping occasionally at a portal to look at the city. He found himself thinking of a time, when he was a boy, that he had caught a butterfly. It had been beautiful, yellow and royal blue, with long-tipped wings and antennae as delicate as a silk thread. He had put the creature in a glass jar, adding a branch of honeysuckle for it to feed on and carefully poking holes in the metal top of the jar. In the morning he’d found the butterfly dead, its wings ragged from beating against the jar, the honeysuckle wilted and brown.

Deborah Sinclair hadn’t eaten in days.

He wondered why she hadn’t tried to escape again. After that first attempt, she seemed resigned, defeated. Either it was a ruse, and she was biding her time, or she had surrendered. He stalked across the deck and yanked open the door of the pilothouse. When he stepped inside, she turned a cool gaze upon him. The dog she called Smokey lifted one side of its mouth in a snarl, but otherwise didn’t move from its favorite napping spot on the galley bench.

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