The Mistress

And against all common sense, she stopped running and turned back. He was a convict, a thief and possibly a murderer, but was it for her to condemn him to the flames of eternity?

She trembled as she returned to his side, crouching down and tugging at the huge beam. Tears of hot sap spurted from the wood, burning her hand. She flinched, but kept pulling at the beam.

“Best get on out of this place,” the man said in a low voice.

She didn’t pause. “You can’t stay here,” she said. “You’ll burn like Saint Joan if you do.”

He managed to push one leg out from under the beam. His foot was clad in a cheap China canvas shoe with holes cut for his toes. His arms were still pressed to the ground.

“Can’t move,” he said with a rough sneer. “An’ that ought to make her ladyship happy.”

She swallowed hard, tasting a dry grittiness in her throat. “Hush up. I’m trying to help you.”

He eyed her with suspicion. “Help me what? Burn like the sinner I am? You done enough already, thank you very kindly.”

Realizing that she lacked the strength in her arms, Kathleen sat down in the roadway and pressed her feet to the beam. “Look, I don’t have time to argue with you. Push from below, and I’ll push with my feet until we move this thing off you. Unless you prefer to sit here and caterwaul like a bleedin’ infant until you suffocate.”

He seemed to respond to her sharpness more than her compassion. With a nod, he indicated that it was time to push. With him heaving from below and Kathleen pushing with both legs, the beam finally moved. Crawling inch by inch, the convict freed himself. Kathleen jumped up with a shout of triumph. Then, seeing that he might be injured, she stuck out her hand.

He closed his soot-blackened hand around hers, nearly pulling her down as he levered himself to a standing position.

“There now,” she said, “I’ll help you walk. But keep your greedy mitts off the necklace.”

“You’re no bigger’n a minute,” he said. “How you going to help me?”

She angled a glare up at him. “Didn’t I just? It’s not the size that matters,” she reminded him. “Come, and be as quick as you can.”

He settled a big, heavy arm across her shoulders and they started along the smoke-filled alley. Kathleen could feel him wince each time he put weight on his injured ankle. His bald head, shining with sweat, had a gash across the right side. Still, he drove himself to match her pace.

“Why?” he rasped, wheezing with the rhythm of their hurried footsteps.

She knew what he meant. “You’re a bully and a thief, but so are most men. That doesn’t mean they should all be burned alive.”

He coughed out a laugh. “I can name a dame or two who’d disagree.”

The injured man smelled, and he weighed heavy against her, but Kathleen just wanted to get the two of them to a place of safety. The fire pursued them like a deadly enemy with a mind of its own. The wind drove the flames to lick at their heels. They needed to find a place of relative quiet, where the air was at least breathable. They walked for what seemed like hours, encountering dead ends and blocked passageways. Sometimes the smoke blinded them utterly.

“Do you know where we are?” she asked the convict.

“Not a blamed notion.” He grunted as his foot struck a stray brick in the road. “My name’s Eugene, by the way. Eugene Waxman. Friends call me Bull.”

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

“Kathleen O’Leary,” she replied.

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

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

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

“So we don’t die among strangers.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The earnest man retreated, shaking his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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