The Firebrand. Susan Wiggs

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      With a gentle bruise of remembrance, Lucy thought of her own father. The Colonel had issued directives. He’d demanded obedience. Insisted upon excellence. And in his own commanding way, he’d loved her with every bit of his heart.

      “I suppose,” she said, “that a papa teaches things to his children, and loves and protects and provides for them.”

      “Just like you do,” Maggie said.

      Lucy felt a surge of pride. What had she ever done to deserve such a wonderful child? Maggie truly was an angel from heaven. Lucy set down the stereoscope. “Come here, you. I have to get down to the shop, and you and Grammy Vi have sums to do this morning.”

      “Sums!” Her face fell comically.

      “Yes, sums. If you get them all correct, we can go riding on our bicycles later.”

      “Hurrah!” Maggie scrambled into her lap and wrapped her arms around Lucy’s neck.

      Lucy savored the sweet weight of her and inhaled the fragrance of her tousled hair, which had darkened from blond to brown as she grew. It was hard to imagine that there had been a time, five years before, when Lucy hadn’t known how to hold a child in her arms. Now it was as natural to her as breathing.

      The Great Fire had raged for days, though it had spared the block of elegant houses in the Hathaways’ neighborhood. Hundreds of people had shown up for the Colonel’s funeral, and Viola had received a telegram of condolence from President Grant. The day after they had buried the Colonel, Lucy had taken the baby to the Half-Orphan Asylum.

      She shuddered, remembering the bilious smell of the institution, the pandemonium in the rickety old building, the cries of lost children and frantic parents searching for one another, the stern wardens taking charge of those without families. She’d hurried away from the asylum, vowing to find a more humane way to look after the child.

      In the weeks following the fire, Lucy and her mother had been forced to flee the city to escape an epidemic of typhoid brought on by the lack of good drinking water. Even from a distance, Lucy kept sending out notices to find the child’s family, to no avail. No trace was found of the woman who had perished after dropping her bundled child from the window. Despite advertisements Lucy had placed in the papers and frequent inquiries at the asylum and all the churches and hospitals in town, she’d found no clue to the orphaned baby’s identity.

      As she straightened the kitchen and took off her apron, she reflected on how much their lives had changed since the fire. Every aspect of their world was different. It was as if the hand of God had swept down and, with a fist of flame, wiped out their former lives.

      After the smoke had finally cleared and a desultory, unreliable rain shower had spat out the last of the embers, Lucy, her mother and a fretful baby had gathered around a table with the bankers and lawyers, to learn that the Colonel had left them destitute. The fire had not only taken the Colonel, but his fortune as well, which had been invested in a Hersholt’s Brewery and Liquor Warehouse. Uninsured, it had burned to the ground that hot, windy October night.

      Her mother was lost without her beloved Colonel. As much as Lucy had loved her father and grieved for him, she’d also raged at him. His love for her and her mother had been as crippling as leg irons. He had willfully and deliberately kept them ignorant of finance, believing they were better off not knowing the precarious state of the family fortune. His smothering shield had walled them off from the truth.

      For days after the devastating news had been delivered, Lucy and her mother, burdened with a demanding little stranger, had sat frozen in a state of dull shock while the estate liquidators had carted off the antiques, the furniture, the art treasures. Lucy and her mother had been forced to sell the house, their jewels, their good clothing—everything down to the last salt cellar had to go. By the time the estate managers and creditors had finished, they had nothing but the clothes on their backs and a box of tin utensils. Viola had taken ill; to this day Lucy was convinced that humiliation was more of a pestilence to her than the typhoid.

      There was nothing quite so devastating as feeling helpless, she discovered. Like three bobbing corks in an endless sea, she and her mother and the baby had drifted from day to day.

      Lucy had found temporary relief quarters in a shantytown by the river. She would have prevailed upon friends, but Viola claimed the shame was more than she could bear, so they huddled alone around a rusty stove and tried to bring their lives into some sort of order. Not an easy task when all Viola knew in the world was the pampering and sheltering of her strong, controlling husband; all Lucy knew was political rhetoric.

      It was providence, Lucy always thought, that she’d been poking through rubbish for paper to start a fire, and had come across a copy of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, published by Tennessee Claflin and her sister, Victoria Woodhull, known in those days as The Firebrand of Wall Street. Since she’d appeared before Congress and run for president the year of the Great Fire, the flamboyant crusader had captivated Lucy’s imagination and inflamed her sense of righteousness. But that cold winter day, while huddled over a miserable fire, Lucy had read the words that had changed the course of her life. A woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.

      Suddenly Lucy knew what she must do—something she believed in with all her heart, something she’d loved since she was a tiny child.

      Everything had fallen into place after that epiphany. In the fast-recovering city, Lucy had taken a bank loan, leased a shop in Gantry Street, occupied the small apartment above it and hung out her tradesman’s shingle: The Firebrand—L. Hathaway, Bookseller.

      Running a bookshop hadn’t made her a wealthy woman, not in the financial sense, anyway. But the independence it afforded, and the knowledge that she purveyed books that made a difference in people’s lives, brought her more fulfillment than a railroad fortune.

      The trouble was, one could not dine upon spiritual satisfaction. One could not clothe one’s fast-growing daughter with moral righteousness. Not during a Chicago winter, anyway.

      Silky, the calico cat they had adopted a few years back, slunk into the room, sniffing the air in queenly fashion. Maggie jumped down from Lucy’s lap and stroked the cat, which showed great tolerance for the little girl’s zealous attentions.

      “Run along, then,” she said, kissing the top of Maggie’s head. “Tell Grammy Vi that I’ve gone down to the shop.”

      “And bicycles later,” Maggie reminded her.

      “Bicycles later,” said Lucy.

      Tucking the paper under her arm, she took the back stairs down to the tiny courtyard behind the shop. A low concrete wall surrounded an anemic patch of grass. A single crabapple tree grew from the center, and just this year it had grown stout enough to support a rope swing for Maggie. The tiny garden bore no resemblance to the lush expanses of lawn that had surrounded the mansion where Lucy had grown up, but the shop was just across the way from Lloyd Park, where white-capped nannies and black-gowned governesses brought their charges to play each day. When the weather was fine, Maggie spent hours there, racing around, heedless of the censorious glares of the governesses who were clearly scandalized by hoydenish behavior.

      Lucy allowed herself a wicked smile as she thought of this. She was raising Maggie to be free and unfettered. No corsets and stays for her daughter. No eye-pulling braids or heat-induced ringlets. Maggie wore loose Turkish-style trousers, her hair cropped short and an exuberant grin on her face.

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