Veiled in Smoke Read online

  Sylvie whirled to face him. “We are standing above a store full of paper!” If the fire reached them, they could lose it all. “There is still time to save some inventory. As much of it as we can.”

  Now it was Meg leaning out the window, calling to someone below. “Mr. Applebaum! Where are you taking that?”

  “To the train station!” came the answer. “Take your valuables to the train station, and the cars will roll it out of the city until the danger has passed!”

  Purpose surged through Sylvie. “That’s it,” she said. “Father, bring all the trunks and crates we own to the store. Meg and I will join you in a moment.”

  Footsteps trampled overhead as the Spencers rushed into action as well. For a fleeting moment, Sylvie’s thoughts winged toward her friends, but she had to trust them and their families to God’s care. Surely they were awake, packing, running. God save us all.

  Without another word, the girls rushed back to their chambers and dressed in their simplest shirtwaists and skirts. Hair still in their sleeping braids, they flew down the stairs and met Stephen.

  “Rare books first,” Sylvie instructed, pointing to the shelf that held them.

  When Stephen hesitated, Sylvie marched to stand before him and gripped just one of his hands in hers, holding fast even when he tried to withdraw. “Father, we need you now. Meg and I can’t save the store—our store, your store—alone. You’ve got to help us. We need every bit of you, all right? We can’t do this without you. Please help us.”

  Perhaps she only imagined it, but it seemed to her that her words brought a grounding to his restless spirit and a softening to the hard edges of his face. He looked directly into her eyes as if seeing her in truth for the first time in years. “I’m here for you, daughter. I’m here for both of you.”

  Sylvie’s relief was palpable but short-lived. Outside, horses pounded the streets as they pulled towering loads of goods. The urgency to be among them was overpowering.

  “I’ll get the paintings.” Meg fetched a ladder from the back room while Sylvie dragged another trunk to the counter.

  The cash register, the accounting books, the records of inventory purchased and sold, the list of vendors and customers—all of this went into the bottom of the trunk. On top she piled novels by Austen and Alcott, Brontë and Brontë, Dickens and Defoe, Homer and Hugo, until the trunk was nearly overflowing.

  Desperation flickered over her as she looked around the store. They had only three other trunks, one of which ought to hold Meg’s paintings, and four wooden milk crates to fill. Forcing herself not to agonize over the titles, she blindly pulled them from the shelves.

  Stephen lugged his burden of rare books to the front of the store. “I packed the repair tools too, as I’m sure we’ll have more need of that than ever before. We’ll need a wagon. . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked toward the window, and Sylvie could almost hear the protest sitting on his tongue. The people, the crowds, unnerved him. His reluctance was a tangible thing, a thickening of the air.

  Meg climbed down the ladder and placed a portrait of Jo March in a crate. “If that would distress you too much, I suppose I could—”

  “Don’t you dare,” Sylvie interrupted. All the times she had buried her disagreement in order to keep the peace seemed to gather with a building pressure in her chest. Anger burned through her, stunning her with its force.

  Once again, Meg was making concessions for their father, and once again, it appeared that Stephen would let her. Deep down, there was a better person inside Sylvie, a woman of compassion and sympathy. But right now she was wearied to death of how Meg protected Stephen. Right now, there was a great deal more than his feelings at stake. It was time for him to protect and serve someone else. He’d done it for soldiers in his regiment. He’d done it for the sake of slaves and strangers. Could he not protect and serve his daughters too?

  She swallowed the bitterness in her mouth before attempting to speak again. “Meg will be safer here with me, and more efficient too. While you’re getting whatever conveyance you find, we can finish packing the store and choose some valuables from the apartment.”

  Seconds dropped away from the clock, every one of them precious. Stephen stood rooted in place, maddeningly motionless, when on the other side of the glass, the entire city had sprung into action, heads bowed, hair and skirts and nightdresses billowing behind them. Dogs plowed between people as they fled the danger, smart enough to do what her father refused to do.

  “Go!” Sylvie shouted. “You said you would help us! Behave like a father for once this side of ten years!”

  “Sylvie! You go too far!” The color draining from her face, Meg looked at Stephen, when she would be better served to look outside.

  Guilt took aim at Sylvie, but she erected a barricade just as fast. “He will not go far enough, and you know it. He should go—not you, not me. He is stronger, and as a man, less likely to be taken advantage of.”

  At that moment, Karl Hoffman from the bakery down the block passed by the shop door. Still shocked at her own outburst—but not sorry for it—Sylvie rushed to unlock the door and burst outside.

  “Mr. Hoffman! Wait! Are you going to find a wagon or dray?”

  He turned but barely slowed his pace. “Ja, where else?”

  Casting one furious glance over her shoulder at Stephen, she told Mr. Hoffman, “My father will go with you.”

  Stephen swallowed, then stepped forward, and Meg pressed money into his palm.

  “Schnell! Hurry!” Mr. Hoffman called, his agitation evident in the use of his native tongue.

  The bell above the door shook violently when Sylvie slammed it behind Stephen. Still steaming, she turned back to her sister. “It’s only fitting he should go instead of one of us.”

  Meg moved between two shelves and out of view. “God will help us,” she said.

  “God will help Father too,” Sylvie whispered so quietly she could not be heard. And yet tears of shame pricked her eyes over the words she’d used as weapons. As she hoped and prayed for his return, guilt dug in.

  An explosion ripped through the night. Jumping, Sylvie covered her ears and stared in shock at Meg for a moment before running outside.

  “Look!” someone shouted, pointing at an enormous ball of fire in the sky and columns of flame soaring straight up. “The gasworks have exploded.”

  All at once, the little flames in the gas lamps along the street guttered and died out. There would be no light for those fleeing now except for illumination by fire. Worse, the gas released into the air was now fuel for an already raging inferno. Sylvie stared around her in dismay. How would their father, who could not handle crowds or loud noises, navigate this?

  Chapter Five

  Stephen’s heart felt near to bursting. Even after the explosion from the gasworks, his ears still rang. Bells pealed from every tower and cupola in the city, melding into a roar of indistinct clamor that made it nearly impossible to think. Even the wind was vicious, driving dust like needles into his face.

  He had no concept of time or distance, so he could not say how long he’d been straining to drag the store’s inventory in the handcart behind him. Nor could he judge how near the fire was, except that it was closer all the time. All he knew was that people had gone mad. In a vacant lot, fools drank liquor and fell to fisticuffs with each other. Looters broke into abandoned shops and businesses, piling wagons high with their goods. Thieves, families, and hotel guests with no sense of direction pressed from all sides, bogging him down in the road.

  “Make way!” he shouted. No use. They wouldn’t listen. More and more poured into the street, men and women in their nightclothes carrying baskets on their heads or lugging bulging tablecloths behind them. Several clutched birdcages the way their children clutched dolls. Rugs and mattresses rode on shoulders above the crowd.

  How long until the last train left the station with the city’s valuables? The question chewed at his mind, for his pace was horrifyingly slow. What wou
ld he do if he missed his chance? How would the girls react when they learned he’d failed them again?

  Cinders peppered the orange sky. And then came something else.

  Sparks.

  Live embers, blown by the howling wind from the fire raging to the south. The only thing that moved faster was his pulse. He felt trapped. Stuck. Imprisoned in a sea of people who had no sense of an orderly retreat.

  A sick feeling filled him for the people who truly were imprisoned. When he had passed the courthouse, he’d heard men screaming from the jail in the basement. What would become of those men? Would they be burned alive?

  Stephen’s nerves unraveled, his blood boiled. He was not so far removed from his own captivity that he could forget the overwhelming helplessness that came with it.

  Palms slick with sweat, he adjusted his grip on the cart handles and glanced behind him. Noticing a milk crate about to slide off the heap, he pushed it back into position and tightened the rope around it.

  “Keep moving!” Someone shouted at him from behind. “Move your blasted cart or get out of my way!”

  “We’re all in a hurry, mister!” Stephen yelled back. “I’ll move as soon as there’s somewhere to go!” A spark landed on his shoulder. He slapped it off before it had time to ignite.

  Children were crying somewhere, grating his nerves even further. As he circled back to the front of the cart and picked up the handles again, he managed to move a few yards before lifting his head and shouting, “Will you please shut your children up!”

  “You shut up, and leave my kid alone or I’ll—”

  The masculine voice faded beneath others, all angry, some threatening, each directed at him. More sparks fell, and people beat out small fires on each other’s backs and hair. Stephen heard everything as though through a tunnel, and he felt himself moving backward through the halls of his memory until he was no longer in Chicago, no longer a veteran, but back in the war that had ravaged the South and wrecked the person he used to be.

  He looked over his shoulder at the furious burning sky. Confusion shook him to the core. Was this a dream or a waking nightmare? Was he seeing things that were not really there? He shook his head to clear it. This was too elaborate to be a product of his imagination. He had known there was devilment afoot for months, hadn’t he? And now here it was. But who was behind this blaze?

  Boom!

  Stephen threw himself to the ground and covered his head. His heartbeat raged. No fire could have made that sound. He was under attack. A buzzing filled his head and limbs. Someone stepped on his leg, and he grabbed the offending foot, yanked off the shoe, and hurled it away.

  “Hey!” The man whirled on Stephen, pinned him down with his knee, and pummeled him in the nose.

  Stephen fought back, fists flying until the man stood up, kicked him in the side, and went to fetch his shoe.

  “Get up! Get up, you’re blocking the way!”

  Tasting blood, Stephen rose from the ground, gripped his cart handles, and moved.

  Boom!

  Stephen dropped to the street again, nerves afire, all senses on high alert. This time, he crawled beneath the cart and stayed there. Not five minutes had passed between explosions. The Rebels—it must be the Rebels—had brought artillery, and here he was, trapped.

  There could be Rebels around him right now. There could be spies or agents or soldiers planted among the fleeing throng. The idea was diabolical but not impossible.

  Devilment, indeed.

  “Joe, give me a hand with this, will you?”

  Two men began rolling and shoving the handcart of bookstore inventory to the side of the street. Stephen was too smart to come out from under it, but instead rolled his body to stay directly beneath it.

  “Say, I could get a lot of money for this cart right now,” came a voice from above him.

  Clever. But Stephen wasn’t about to let anyone steal his shelter. Coming out from under the cart, he pulled his Colt from his belt and aimed. He cocked the hammer. “Move along, Johnny Rebs. This cart isn’t yours to take.”

  “Take it easy!” Arms raised, the two men backed away, and Stephen lowered his gun.

  Boom!

  “Stay away from that crazy man!” a woman shouted. “He has a gun! He’s shooting!”

  Stephen looked at the revolver in his trembling hand. Had he fired it when that last burst of artillery fire startled him? He brought the barrel to his nose and smelled, then checked the rounds. One of the bullets was missing. He must have shot it into the ground.

  Those Rebs had been lucky this time.

  So had he. He didn’t want to shoot someone today. All he wanted—all he ever wanted—was to be left in peace.

  Knees weak, he tucked himself under the cart again, waiting for the next round of cannon fire.

  The Tribune building, at least, was fireproof.

  With enough information for a solid story about the early stage of the fire, Nate Pierce raced to the office, rattled out his article in the composing room, then passed it to editorial. The city might be burning around them tonight, but the Chicago Tribune would tell the tale tomorrow.

  “There’s no stopping the fire before it gets here,” Nate told the copy editor. The fire department was divided over the city, attempting to save a few important structures with what exhausted resources they had. “You going to stay?”

  The young man looked pointedly at the singed holes all over Nate’s clothing. The wind had stolen his ruined hat an hour ago. “Why wouldn’t I? This is probably the safest place to be.”

  Nate supposed he might be right. The exterior was granite, the interior ceilings were corrugated iron resting on wrought-iron I beams. Every wall inside was made of brick.

  “But the roof,” Nate said. “It’s tar over wood.”

  “The subscription team is on it already. We’ll be fine.”

  Nate took the stairs two at a time until he emerged onto the roof to see for himself. Several men from the subscription department were stomping out burning cinders, and one, a recent hire named Mike, was spraying the tar paper with a hose attached to their rooftop water tanks. Water evaporated dangerously fast off the roof’s surface.

  A spark landed near Nate’s shoe, and he stamped it out. “You men all right up here?” he asked, keeping his eye to the south. The wind, by now, sounded like the lake in a storm.

  One of them laughed. “It’s a better show than any I’ve seen at the theater, I’ll say that much.” A flaming chunk of fabric landed two feet from him, and he leapt upon it.

  Church and school bells rang endlessly over the collapse of brick buildings whose mortar had burned away. Timbers groaned, glass shattered. Then a new kind of explosion sounded from the south.

  Mike flinched but kept his steady stream of water over the roof. “What was that?”

  “Sounds like gunpowder to me,” one suggested.

  Nate agreed. “Enough to blow up a house.” There was no way to see through the smoke to be sure, but he told the young men his guess. “Last I saw of Mr. Hildreth, he was dead set on getting enough powder to raze a row of residences and form a firebreak. Sounds to me like he found it.”

  “A firebreak. Like the river?” Mike dashed to another spark and ground it beneath his heel. Five other young men danced over the roof, doing the same.

  Nate didn’t respond. He was transfixed by the flames marching down the block toward them. The acrid smell of gas from the gasworks explosion came with them, stinging his throat and burning his lungs. He ran to the other side of the roof and looked north at the masses clogging the streets. His boardinghouse was down there somewhere, beneath the smoke blowing ahead of the fire.

  With a final few words to the boys on the roof, Nate hurried back down to the street and fought his way to the boardinghouse on a side street off Clark. It was empty of people, thank goodness, and in a few minutes, his rented rooms were empty of his most valuable possessions too. All he took with him was what he could fit into his leather satchel: money,
his parents’ wedding rings, his mother’s Bible, his father’s pipe. These two rooms had held the last semblance of family he’d had.

  But there was no time for nostalgia. Nate fled.

  He’d never seen such disorder in the streets. Stoves, mattresses, and wagonloads of furniture had been abandoned, blocking the way for those trying to get around them. A riderless horse galloped by in a wild fury, its tail afire. One woman wore a fur coat and fox stole over her bedclothes, several necklaces glittering at her throat. Barefoot, she crushed her small dog to her chest.

  Nate tripped over a crate of chickens left in the street, wincing at the strike to his shin. After wiping ashes and dust from his spectacles, he paused at a water fountain long enough to quench his dreadful thirst, but there was nothing he could do for the searing in his lungs.

  A bright flare in a side street caught his attention. A handcart piled with wooden trunks and milk crates had caught fire from blowing embers. The man beside it swatted at orange sparks in his beard.

  “Mr. Townsend?” After an instant’s hesitation, Nate ran over to him. Whatever he was trying to carry would be ashes in minutes, if not sooner. “There’s no saving it, Mr. Townsend. I’m sorry. You’ve got to come away from there and get to safety.”

  Stephen didn’t acknowledge him, staring instead at the pages of books curling, crumbling, and scattering on the wind. Nate grabbed his arm, pulling him away from the flames.

  “Unhand me!” Eyes shot through with red, Stephen rounded on Nate and punched him soundly across the jaw.

  Nate staggered back a step, his lip split and swelling. A whisper of self-preservation urged him to keep running, to leave Stephen to his own fate. But his conscience wouldn’t give in without another try. “Mr. Townsend, it’s me, Nathaniel Pierce. With the Tribune. Come on, now, let’s go. Leave this and come with me. It’s time to go.”

  Stephen rubbed his eyes and shook his head. No recognition registered on his face. Only terror, confusion, and barely restrained hostility. Nate could only imagine the havoc this fire, this flight, was wreaking on the veteran’s battered psyche.