Veiled in Smoke Read online

  Meg wasn’t persuaded. “I doubt most reporters sought out their recent interview subjects last night.”

  He chuckled. “Perhaps not. But I wager I can still write a story to rival theirs.” He tapped the satchel still hanging across his body, fingers twitching as though eager to begin transferring his mental notes to paper.

  “We can’t thank you enough.” Sylvie let out a ragged breath. “But why didn’t our father come himself?”

  Nate rubbed his stubbled jaw, making an absolute mess of his face. But with some of the filth smeared away, Meg noticed for the first time the cut in his lip and a purplish bloom on his skin. “Let’s just say he was fighting his own battles last night, and not just against the fire.”

  Meg winced.

  Sylvie’s nostrils flared. “And those were more important to him than we were.”

  “He wasn’t himself. He didn’t recognize me.”

  “What did he say?” Sylvie’s words sounded dry and thick. “What did he do to you?”

  Nate didn’t respond right away. “The sounds, the smoke and fire. Part of him thought he was back in the war. As I said, he wasn’t himself. I cast no blame.”

  So Nate had come for them of his own accord, without prodding from her father. Stephen had punched him in a blind fury, if Meg didn’t miss her guess, and Nate chose to frame the story with compassion and understanding. She would bury the sting of rejection she felt from her father’s choices and concentrate on that.

  Sylvie drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, looking away. “I don’t know whether to be angry at him or angry at myself for insisting he go out into that chaos. All I know is that I’m angry that my father never came home. Not last night, not after the war. Our father just never came home.”

  It was excruciating, hearing her talk this way. Meg searched her exhausted mind for some kind of rebuttal that would mend her sister’s broken heart—and her own, for she could not deny the truth of Sylvie’s words. Stephen Townsend had never come home. But Meg’s loyalty would not permit her to admit such a thing aloud. Since she couldn’t make their trials go away, she would rather paint over them with a broad brushstroke of hope. But at a time like this, even that seemed a thin and garish varnish.

  “I’m sorry,” Nate said, placing his hand on Sylvie’s shuddering back. “Please try to rest, both of you.”

  Nodding, Sylvie curled onto her side. The ridge between her eyes remained even as her breathing took on the slow, steady rhythm of sleep.

  Meg lay down beside her, the pain in her hands competing with bone-numbing exhaustion. The last thing she saw before tumbling into a deep and unmoving slumber was Nate stomping out another small fire.

  When she awoke, it was fully dark again and her legs felt cold. And damp.

  With a start, she lurched upright and crawled out into the open air. Every muscle in her body protested the movement, especially her swollen and blistered feet. But she spread her arms wide and tipped her face to the heavens that had so recently been full of hell.

  “Rain,” she said. “It’s raining!” Her boots sank into the softening ground.

  “Thank God.” Rumpled and tattered, Nate came and stood beside Meg, his warmth a comforting presence. “Thank you, God, for the rain.”

  Sylvie staggered out of the piano box, her hair wild and grey with ash, and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “Is it really?” She held her hands up and watched moisture bead in her palms.

  Nate captured her and Meg both in a brotherly embrace, then released them. Water streamed over their heads, making a paste of the ashes in their hair, rinsing their faces, soaking their spark-chewed clothing to their skin. All over the park, the sound of rejoicing lifted in half a dozen languages. They had survived the fire. After the drought that had turned the city into a tinderbox, God had seen fit to send rain. They were saved.

  And yet Meg still felt lost. Rain mingled on her cheeks with tears of gratitude and sadness as both emotions tugged in equal measure.

  Stooping, Nate pulled his satchel out of the piano box and slung it over his shoulder. “Ladies, it’s time to get back to work.” His smoke-roughened voice managed a businesslike tone. “Now that it’s safe to go back, I’ve got to get to the Tribune. And I won’t leave you here unchaperoned to spend the rest of the night in the rain.”

  Bracing herself, Meg pushed her hair back from her face with her forearm. “You’re right. It’s time to find our way home.”

  The words held more optimism than she felt. Her thoughts ricocheted from relief at their survival to concern for Stephen’s fate and that of her hands, still thrumming with pain in their wrappings. But if she’d learned anything during the last several years, it was that the body repaired itself far easier than the spirit. Her flesh would recover from this ordeal. Could she say the same of her father?

  She stood on the line between Before and After. She had crossed such boundaries before, or so it seemed, as she counted the other markers in her life: Before the war, and After. Before Father’s imprisonment at Andersonville, and After. Before Mother died. After.

  After was always worse.

  “There won’t be much to go home to,” Sylvie said quietly. “But maybe Father will meet us there. I don’t know what I’ll do if he doesn’t.” She paused. “I don’t know what we’ll do, even if he does. Oh, Meg! What will we do now?”

  Afraid to ponder the answer, all Meg could think was that it had been years since Sylvie had asked that question of her. When was the last time? Meg painted over the monochromatic scene of Lincoln Park with watercolor memories instead. When had Sylvie stopped looking to her in a crisis? And why? Meg could not, would not look into the shadowy future just now, so she peered into the past.

  She could see herself and her sister on the canvas of her mind’s eye. Sylvie, fifteen or sixteen years old, was reaching for Meg. What do I do? What do we do now? Meg turned away from her to their weeping father, because he needed her more.

  Regret stung her eyes. Meg hadn’t known what to say then, and she didn’t have an answer now.

  This time, at least, she opened her arms to Sylvie and embraced her as best she could before falling in step with Nate.

  The fire changed everything in ways she wasn’t yet ready to imagine, and yet these two pillars remained: Meg had a sister beside her and a father beyond her reach.

  Chapter Seven

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 1871

  Stephen didn’t know where he was.

  His brain told him this was Chicago, but he found no evidence of it, nor could he discern which street he was on or near. Everywhere he looked were heaps of bricks, fragments of tin roofs, telegraph wires, the occasional standing wall, or an arched entryway rising over its fallen building. Houses and hotels had sunk into their cellars. One ruined block looked like another. But if he could just find the courthouse or even its bell amid all the rubble, he could find his way home from there. He kept walking.

  Some time ago, the streets had been raised between five and twelve feet above the original level of the city. Now they stood up like causeways, resembling the bones of a prisoner of war wasting away. It gave an eerie, gloomy impression.

  A crumpled one-page newssheet cartwheeled across his path. Catching it, he smoothed the paper across his shirtfront before reading it. Evening Journal—Extra, the banner read. It was dated October 9, 1871.

  The Great Calamity of the Age!

  Chicago in Ashes!!

  Hundreds of Millions of Dollars’ Worth of Property Destroyed.

  The South, the North and a Portion of the West Divisions of the City in Ruins.

  All the Hotels, Banks, Public Buildings, Newspaper Offices and Great Business Blocks Swept Away.

  The Conflagration Still in Progress.

  Fury of the Flames.

  Stephen scanned the rest of the sheet but didn’t possess the focus to read it carefully. Giving up, he folded it and stuffed it inside his trouser pocket. Perhaps later he would try again to understand what had happe
ned.

  Several children skittered over piles of brick, pulling out silverware fused together, glass bottles flattened, candlesticks bent in half. One boy found a mound of marbles melted into one colorful misshapen blob. Curiosities, they called them. Fire relics.

  Stephen felt like a relic too, a curiosity even to himself. A man whose spirit had been so flattened and misshapen, he had failed to care for his own children when they needed him most. His clothing still damp from last night’s rain, he shivered with cold and something else, something that might have been shame.

  He’d failed his girls. He’d lost everything they’d entrusted to him, and left them to fend for themselves. What would he say when he found them?

  What if he wouldn’t—couldn’t—find them on this side of heaven? Curiosities weren’t the only things people were unearthing today. Charred human remains were being carried away. His knees went soft at the realization that his own daughters might not have escaped the flames. What then?

  Stephen sat on a still-warm pile of bricks and held his head, trying to order his thoughts. But they refused to fall in line. They were more like a train that constantly decoupled its cars and derailed.

  He should have feared for Meg and Sylvie’s well-being long before this, and it disturbed him that he hadn’t. Even now, as he considered their possible fates, it was not with fatherly anguish but with a detachment, a numbness, that he felt sure would hurt his daughters if they knew.

  As if they weren’t already hurt by or angry about his absence.

  Something was wrong with him. He should be able to feel more for them than he did. But feeling was easier before the war. Now when he felt anything, it was usually fear, suspicion, or rage. If he could feel sorrow, he would probably feel sad about this.

  Gravel crunched beneath footsteps, and Stephen looked up to watch a pair of men carry another body from the rubble. This one hadn’t been burned. Could have been crushed by a runaway horse or wagon, he supposed. Or killed by a falling building.

  A snatch of memory flashed in his mind. During the fire, he had hurt people, or tried to. He remembered throwing his fists against flesh and bone. Someone—maybe more than one person—had bled beneath his hand. Then, just as quickly as he saw himself warding off his attackers, his recollections derailed from Chicago and took the track that always carried him back to Andersonville.

  To the hurt he had inflicted there just to stay alive. But no, to be fair, it was more than self-defense then. When he beat a man to death with a club, that was only to mete out a terrible justice in order to preserve the weakest among them.

  He closed his eyes, and he was there. He could feel the Georgia clay on his skin between the lice and scabs. The Raiders had gone too far. They were the ruthless band of prisoners who preyed upon unsuspecting fellow inmates, breaking bones, even killing men to get their rations or a place in the shade. The Raiders disgraced the Union uniform. They were the worst sort of men, and they thought they owned the whole camp. No one was brave enough to stand up to them until the prison guards secretly armed Stephen and several other men with clubs to beat the Raiders into submission. Stephen was a Regulator, that was all. He hadn’t meant to kill that Raider with his club, but he had.

  It was different from drawing a bead upon an enemy and pulling the trigger in a pitched battle. He’d killed a man—a fellow Yankee—in cold blood. And he’d been called a hero for it.

  He’d been called a hero ever since.

  But he wasn’t.

  “Hey, mister!” A boy about the age of twelve climbed over to where he sat, snapping Stephen back to the present. “Take a look at this fine specimen, why don’tcha? Wouldn’t you like to have this as a souvenir from ‘the Great Calamity of the Age’?”

  Stephen frowned. “What is it?”

  “Why, can’t you see? It’s a stack of ceramic coffee mugs welded together. Might even be from Wild Onion Café. Just imagine—there they were, all clean and shiny and ready to serve up some nice hot coffee to the next customers for Monday morning breakfast. Only those customers never came. The fire did. Now, what would you give me for such a token? Make me an offer, why don’tcha?”

  “You’re quite a salesman, aren’t you?”

  The boy grinned and shoved a hank of black hair from his eyes. “The name’s Louis Garibaldi. You ever need anything, you ask around for me, and you can be sure I’ll get it. I know everyone worth knowing. I got connections, mister.”

  Stephen was unimpressed. “No, thanks. I don’t want your useless stack of cups.”

  “Okay then, how about this? Just what do you suppose this was in its previous life?”

  Without bothering to look, Stephen pushed off the bricks to stand. “I have no idea.”

  “A revolver, of course!”

  Stephen glanced to Louis, then down to the relic he held. “Where’d you find that?” He patted his waistband in search of his own Colt. It wasn’t there.

  “Why, what’s it to you?”

  Stephen grabbed the gun, turning it over to inspect it. The barrel veered off center. The cylinder holding the bullets turned only with brute strength, and the walnut handle had burned clean away. As a weapon, it was useless. But it was his, and he told the boy so.

  “Not yet, it isn’t.” Louis snatched it out of Stephen’s grip. “But we can make it yours for the right price. How much will you give me for it?”

  “Kid, I don’t have a penny in the world anymore. But that shouldn’t matter because I’m telling you, that belongs to me.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Look closely at the side of the barrel. You’ll see initials scratched there. SJT. That’s me, Stephen James Townsend. That revolver and I have been through a lot together, and I’m not about to part with it just because it had a bad day. Hand it over.”

  Louis frowned, studying the initials Stephen knew were there. “SJT could mean a lot of things, mister. Could be Samson Jeffrey Talbot. Or Simeon Jason Thorndike. This here gun might be the precious property of one Surly . . . Jaw . . . T-bone.”

  “Surly Jaw T-bone?”

  The kid shrugged. “Code name. Whoever this belongs to would pay a little reward for its return, don’tcha think?”

  “Whoever steals property from its rightful owner will go to jail, how about that?” Frustration boiled beneath Stephen’s skin. The boy meant to take from him the only thing that had made him feel safe.

  A belly laugh erupted from Louis as he scrambled away from Stephen. “Oh, mister. You think the police care about something like this right now?” He shook his head, smiling gleefully. “You want it, you’re going to have to give me something for it. Ain’t nothing in this life for free, you know.”

  With that, the little street rat tore off, kicking up clouds of dust and limestone powder. After a few bounding strides after him, Stephen fell into a fit of coughing that crippled his pursuit. He’d never recover the revolver from that kid, and even if he did, he’d never use it again. A black mood possessed him.

  A steam engine hissed as a locomotive pulled into the train station several barren blocks away. Trudging in the opposite direction, he found his way to Court House Square. The courthouse cupola was gone, along with the enormous bell that had rung so incessantly for the past week. Some outer walls still stood, but the building was gutted. Stephen stared for a very long time. He felt a kinship with those ruins that he didn’t care to dwell upon.

  Nor did he want to consider where all the criminals from the jail were now. He hadn’t wanted them to be burned alive, but now . . . well, they were criminals, and they could be anywhere. Instinctively he reached for his gun, only to remember its fate.

  Around him, men with spotless white collars and frock coats gave orders to men with shovels, pickaxes, and wagons. The ruins from buildings across the street clogged the road. His gaze drifted to where Corner Books & More should have been. In its place, a pile of bricks and more relic-pickers roving over them.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Get away from there, you sc
avengers! If anything there is worth finding, it belongs to me!”

  One bedraggled gypsy woman gave a small cry at the sight of him, while the other covered her mouth with bandaged hands before lowering them. “Father!”

  Stephen felt a twinge of something to see his daughters in rags, hair bound in filthy scarves, but alive. He was sure he should have felt more.

  Sylvie hadn’t sent her father to his death after all. Speechless with relief at the sight of him, she stood rooted in place as he scaled the mound of rubble where the sidewalk used to be. Early this morning, at the church Nate had taken her and Meg to for refuge and rest, Sylvie had desperately prayed this reunion would take place. But she hadn’t rehearsed what to say.

  Meg found her voice first. “Father! You’re alive, and that’s all that matters.”

  In the span of eight words, she had excused his loss of their inventory, his failure to come back for them.

  All that matters? Sylvie twitched with irritation. Four solid miles of city had been decimated, miles which included their home, and Beth’s and Rosemary’s. State Street and Michigan Avenue were a barren wasteland studded with ruins to rival that of ancient Rome, not to mention the destroyed factories and lumberyards and ships that had been trapped by fallen bridges. The Palmer House hotel and Chicago Tribune buildings had only been fireproof until the water pumps stopped working and they could no longer keep their tar-paper roofs wet. Surely, all of that mattered too.

  Evidently forgetting his aversion to touch, Meg reached to hug Stephen. He winced as she closed the distance between them, and she drew back. He would not hold his daughter even now. Instead he sidestepped her and walked over to view the bookshop’s burned-out basement.

  With stunning speed, Sylvie’s relief at seeing him alive dissolved beneath her frustration. Meg was trying—far harder than Sylvie cared to. Could he not see how he pained Meg with such rejection?

  “We were so worried about you,” Sylvie began. “We thought we might have lost you.”