The Mistress. Сьюзен Виггс
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was all for her husband. This week he had worked hard, laying in supplies for the winter—three tons of timothy hay, another two tons of coal, wood shavings for kindling from Bateham’s Planing Mill. Baking in the arid heat, the shavings curled and rustled when the aggressive wind stirred them. In this heat it was hard to imagine that winter was only weeks away.
She gave Patrick his supper of potatoes and pickled cabbage, wishing he’d had time to eat with her and the children. But families like the O’Learys did not have that luxury. Imagine, sitting down like the Quality, with enough room for everyone around the same table.
She took off her apron and kerchief. Pumping fresh water into the sink, she bathed her face and neck, and finally her sore foot; a cow had stepped on it that morning and she had been limping around all day. She drew the curtains and peeled her bodice to the waist, giving herself a more thorough washing. She braided her thick red hair, then went to check on the children. Scattered like puppies in the restless heat, the little ones lay uncovered on rough sheets she had sprinkled with water to keep them cool. There was another daughter, Kathleen, firstborn and first to leave the reluctant arms of her parents to work as a lady’s maid at Chicago’s finest school for young ladies. Perhaps in the turreted stone building by the lake, Kathleen suffered less from the heat than they did here in the West Division.
Ah, Kathleen, there was a fine young article, Catherine thought fondly. By hook or by crook, she’d make good. The Lord in his wisdom had given her the brains and the looks to do it. She wouldn’t turn out like her mother, overworked, tired, old before her time.
The sounds of revelry next door swelled, then quieted, mingling with the howl of the wind. Through the coarse weave of the sackcloth curtains, Catherine noticed a flash of light in the window.
“Let us to bed, Mother,” her husband said softly. Patrick kissed her and put out the lamp. Settling her weary head on the pillow, she listened to the rustling and breathing of her children. Then she nestled into the strong soft cradle of her husband’s arms, sighed and thought that maybe this was what all the toil was for. This one sweet moment of inexpressible bliss.
A knock at the door drew Catherine O’Leary back from the comfortable edge of sleep. The McLaughlins’ fiddle wailed on and the bodhran thumped out an ancient tribal rhythm. Two of the children awakened and started whispering. Frowning, she propped herself up on one elbow and prodded Patrick. “Are you awake, then?” she asked.
“Aye, just. I’ll see who it is.”
She lay still, hearing the low murmur of masculine voices followed by the sound of the door swishing shut. Her sore foot throbbed heatedly under the thin sheet.
“It was Daniel Sullivan with Father Campbell, come to call,” Patrick said, returning. “I told them we were already abed, and not in a state for entertaining company.”
“God preserve us for turning away a priest,” Catherine said, “but ‘tisn’t he who has to do the milking at dawn.” Feeling guilty for criticizing a priest, she drew aside a corner of the curtain to see the two men leaving.
Daniel often took an evening walk to escape the stifling heat of his cottage, even smaller and more cramped than the O’Leary place. He had one wooden leg, and as he walked along the pine plank sidewalk, his gait had the curious cadence of a heartbeat. He kept his head down, for his wooden leg tended to wedge itself into the cracks between the boards if he wasn’t careful.
She was about to settle back down for the night when she noticed a sweeping gust of wind lifting the priest’s long black cassock, revealing skinny white legs and drawers of a startling green hue. “Now there’s a sight you don’t see every day,” she muttered.
Outside the wooden cottage, high in the hot night sky, a spark from someone’s stove chimney looped and whirled, pushed along by the wind gusting in from the broad and empty Illinois prairie. The spark entered the O’Learys’ barn, where the milk cows and a horse stood tethered with their heads lowered, and a calf slept on a bed of straw.
The glowing ember dropped onto the hay, and the wind fanned it until it bloomed, then burned in a hot, steady circle of orange. The flames spread like spilled kerosene, rushing down and over the bales of hay and lighting the crisp, dry wood shavings. Within moments, a river of fire flowed across the barn floor.
It was full dark the next time Catherine awakened, once again by a knock at the door. More visitors? No, this knocking had the rapid tattoo of alarm. Patrick hurried to answer. Catherine drew aside the tattered curtain divider to look in on the children. Over their sweet, slumbering faces, an eerie glow of light glimmered.
“Sweet Jesus,” she whispered, racing to the window and tearing back the curtain.
A column of flame roared up the side of the barn. Firelight streamed across the yard between house and shed.
Catherine O’Leary opened the cottage door to an inferno. Her husband ran toward her, his face stark in the flame-lit night.
He said what she already knew, voicing the fear that made her heart sink like a stone in her chest: “See to the children. The barn’s afire.”
Chapter One
Under a French gown of emerald silk, Kathleen O’Leary wore homespun bloomers that had seen better days. She told herself not to worry about what lay beneath her sumptuous costume. It was what the world saw on the surface that mattered, particularly tonight.
Next Friday, she would go down on her knees and admit the ruse to Father Campbell in the confessional, but Friday was far away. At the present moment, she meant to enjoy herself entirely, for it was a night of deceptions and she was at its heart.
The mechanical gilt elevator speeding them up to the third-floor salon of the Hotel Royale was only partially responsible for the swift rush of anticipation that tingled along her nerves. She clasped hands with her two companions, Phoebe Palmer and Lucy Hathaway, and gave them a squeeze. “Think we’ll get away with it?” she whispered.
Lucy sent her a dark-eyed wink. “With looks like that, you could get away with robbing the Board of Trade.”
Kathleen would have pinched herself if she hadn’t been holding on so tightly to her friends’ hands. She couldn’t believe she was actually committing such an audacious act. Going to a social affair to which she wasn’t invited. In a dress from Paris that didn’t belong to her. Wearing jewels worth a king’s ransom. To meet people who, if they knew who she really was, would not consider her fit to black their boots.
The bellman pushed up the brake lever and cranked open the door. With only a swift glance, Kathleen recognized him as an Irishman. He had the sturdy features and mild, deferential demeanor of a recent immigrant. Phoebe swept past him, not even seeing the small man.
“Mayor Mason will not be seeking another term,” Phoebe was saying in a breathless voice that seemed fashioned solely for gossip. “Mrs. Wendover is having a flaming love affair with a student at Rush Medical College.” She enumerated the tidbits on her fingers, intent on bringing Kathleen up to date with the guests she was about to meet. “And Mr. Dylan Kennedy is just back from the Continent.”
“Remind me again. Who is Dylan Kennedy?” Lucy asked in a bored voice. She had never been one to be overly impressed by the upper classes—probably because she came from one of the oldest families of the city, and she understood their foibles and flaws.
“Don’t you know?” Phoebe patted a brown curl into place. “He’s only the richest, most handsome man in Chicago. It’s said he came back to look for a wife.” She led the way down the carpeted hall. “He might even begin courting someone in earnest this very night. Isn’t that deliciously romantic?”
“It’s not deliciously anything,” Lucy Hathaway said with a skeptical sniff. “If he needs to pick something, he should go to the cattle auction over at the Union Stockyards.”
Kathleen said nothing, but privately she agreed with Phoebe for once. Dylan Francis Kennedy was delicious. She had glimpsed him a week earlier at a garden party at the