Darling Jack. Mary McBride

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СКАЧАТЬ think of it, the manager of the St. Louis agency is a woman.”

      It was a lie, of course, albeit a small, off-white one, but it allowed the Misses Richmond to let out their collective breath. After another few minutes of quizzing and advising, the two spinsters left Anna to her packing. Miss Verna came back a moment later to present her with a going-away gift—“A volume of verses by Mr. Browning, dear. I know how much you like to read. And do be careful with your spectacles. Traveling can often bring mishaps. Or so I’ve heard.” The woman even kissed her on the cheek before retreating downstairs.

      All things considered, it had been an amazing day, Anna thought when she had finished packing, then donned her cotton nightdress and finally slid beneath the covers of her bed. She laid her spectacles carefully on the nightstand, as was her habit, closed her eyes and crossed her hands over the counterpane, with every intention of falling asleep instantly, as she always did.

      A second later, she was sitting up, staring wide-eyed into a moonlit corner of the room.

      “Dear Lord, how did this happen? What in the world have I done?”

      She knew precisely when it happened—that moment in Mr. Pinkerton’s anteroom this morning when Johnathan Hazard’s gaze met hers and sent her heart skittering up into her throat and her stomach plunging to the soles of her feet. It had been as if the man had hit her. She hadn’t been able to catch her breath; she had even feared she might faint. Then he had walked out of the office, and for a second Anna had been tempted to run after him. She had stood there, her fingers clenched in the folds of her skirts, every muscle in her body about to explode with motion, every nerve screaming for speed.

      Even now Anna wasn’t sure what she might have done if Miss Quillan hadn’t clapped her hands just then. “Ladies, it’s time to get back to business,” the secretary had proclaimed. Then, after conferring briefly with Mr. Pinkerton, Miss Quillan had added, “Oh, Mrs. Matlin. Would you be so kind as to remain here a moment, please? Mr. Pinkerton would like to have a word with you.”

      “Me?”

      She had felt her face burning then, believing that somehow her employer had read her thoughts, that Allan Pinkerton, master detective, had detected her explosive heartbeat and was about to fire her for such inappropriate behavior.

      But, instead, once Anna was in his office, the first words out of his mouth had been, “Mr. Hazard needs a wife.”

      After that, although he spoke at length, Anna had barely comprehended his meaning. She remembered nodding solemnly. She remembered saying yes and taking the railroad pass from Mr. Pinkerton’s extended hand.

      “Be at the depot at 8:30,” he had told her. “Hazard will fill you in on the particulars.”

      The rest of the afternoon was a blur. Word had gotten out in the office, despite the fact that Anna hadn’t breathed so much as a syllable. How could she have? She’d still been hard-pressed to catch her breath.

      “Why did he pick you?” someone asked. Anna could only shake her head.

      “Some people have all the luck,” Mayetta had said with an indignant sniff.

      Some people did, but Anna Matlin had never considered herself one of them.

      And this wasn’t lucky at all, she thought now as she stared at the packed trunk in the corner of her room. This was insane. Whatever had possessed her earlier, and made her agree to this preposterous adventure, suddenly and completely escaped her reckoning. And yet…

      Anna lay back and closed her eyes. There had been that magical moment this morning, when Johnathan Hazard’s eyes met hers. She couldn’t even have said now just what color those eyes were. Gray, perhaps. Or a deep, disturbing blue. They were beautiful, though, like all the rest of him, and they had sent a shocking, nearly electric message all through her.

      Even now, hours later, her heart began to beat erratically in her breast. Come, those eyes had said. Risk it Yes.

      “No.” The word left her lips as little more than breath as Anna dug deeper into the familiar warmth of her bed.

      The only risk she’d ever taken in her life had turned out badly. She’d come to Chicago with Billy Matlin, even when her father had warned her, “If you go, girl, don’t bother coming back.” She had married a young dreamer—sweet Billy—who had pursued his dreams beyond her and who had perished—somewhere in the mountains of Colorado in his quest for gold.

      She’d never been a dreamer. It didn’t make sense that now, at the age of twenty-six, she had suddenly allowed herself to be swept up in a dream. But she had been. In a single moment. At a single glance Come. Risk it.

      Not that she’d had much of a choice. Mr. Pinkerton had never said in so many words that there was one, though his manner had been hesitant somehow, and there had been enough pauses in his speech that Anna could have stopped him at any time. But she hadn’t. There she had been in Mr. Pinkerton’s office, not collecting papers before or after hours, or dusting, as she occasionally did when he was out of town, but having been invited in by the great Mr. Pinkerton himself. And there he had been, looking the way God might have looked sitting behind a desk, asking her to act, if only for a while, as a Pinkerton detective. She had been astonished beyond words and flattered beyond belief. It had never occurred to Anna to say no.

      Until now.

      Still…there was him. Johnathan Hazard. Mad Jack as he was so often called. As a file clerk, Anna was privy to a great deal of information about the Pinkerton employees. It wasn’t that she snooped, exactly. It was just that it was difficult not to read papers as she put them in their proper folders and files. She knew, for example, that Nora Quillan was thirty years old and divorced. And she knew that Johnathan Hazard was the fourth son of an English earl, and that he had come to America after being asked to leave Oxford for “behavior unbecoming,” whatever that meant.

      He had begun working for Mr. Pinkerton ten years ago, and by the time Anna started with the agency, Johnathan Hazard had already been somewhat of a legend in the Chicago office. Back then, of course, in 1863, the war had been going on, and most of the agents, Mr. Pinkerton included, had been working as spies for President Lincoln and the Union army.

      She remembered the day when word had come that Hazard and his partner, Samuel Scully, had been captured in Virginia and been condemned to hang as spies. A dark cloud had settled over the office, not to lift until the men received a stay of execution. Hazard had appealed to England, the country of his birth. It wasn’t known just what Scully had done to escape the hangman’s noose, but there had been talk of his giving information to his captors, especially when another Pinkerton spy was arrested and summarily hanged.

      After four years, the gossip had died away. So had Samuel Scully, Anna thought. No one, it seemed, knew for certain what had happened in that Virginia prison. No one inquired anymore. Mr. Pinkerton stood staunchly behind agents, whether they were dead or alive, and he would have fired anyone who dared to suggest that Scully had been a traitor.

      It had been after the war that Johnathan Hazard truly earned his nickname—Mad Jack. He had gone after and brought in the most daring of thieves and counterfeiters, all the while sending in the most outrageous expense reports Anna had ever seen. His file was thick with them, as well as with dozens of written reprimands from Mr. Pinkerton. They never seemed to hamper his career, however, or his dazzling reputation.

      Still, in the past five or six months, Anna couldn’t recall having filed a single paper in the Hazard file. A СКАЧАТЬ