Susan Wiggs - The Mistress

A knock at the door drew Catherine O’Leary back from the comfortable edge of sleep. The McLaughlins’ fiddle wailed on and the bodhran thumped out an ancient tribal rhythm. Two of the children awakened and started whispering. Frowning, she propped herself up on one elbow and prodded Patrick. “Are you awake, then?” she asked.

“Aye, just. I’ll see who it is.”

She lay still, hearing the low murmur of masculine voices followed by the sound of the door swishing shut. Her sore foot throbbed heatedly under the thin sheet.

“It was Daniel Sullivan with Father Campbell, come to call,” Patrick said, returning. “I told them we were already abed, and not in a state for entertaining company.”

“God preserve us for turning away a priest,” Catherine said, “but ‘tisn’t he who has to do the milking at dawn.” Feeling guilty for criticizing a priest, she drew aside a corner of the curtain to see the two men leaving.

Daniel often took an evening walk to escape the stifling heat of his cottage, even smaller and more cramped than the O’Leary place. He had one wooden leg, and as he walked along the pine plank sidewalk, his gait had the curious cadence of a heartbeat. He kept his head down, for his wooden leg tended to wedge itself into the cracks between the boards if he wasn’t careful.

She was about to settle back down for the night when she noticed a sweeping gust of wind lifting the priest’s long black cassock, revealing skinny white legs and drawers of a startling green hue. “Now there’s a sight you don’t see every day,” she muttered.

Outside the wooden cottage, high in the hot night sky, a spark from someone’s stove chimney looped and whirled, pushed along by the wind gusting in from the broad and empty Illinois prairie. The spark entered the O’Learys’ barn, where the milk cows and a horse stood tethered with their heads lowered, and a calf slept on a bed of straw.

The glowing ember dropped onto the hay, and the wind fanned it until it bloomed, then burned in a hot, steady circle of orange. The flames spread like spilled kerosene, rushing down and over the bales of hay and lighting the crisp, dry wood shavings. Within moments, a river of fire flowed across the barn floor.

It was full dark the next time Catherine awakened, once again by a knock at the door. More visitors? No, this knocking had the rapid tattoo of alarm. Patrick hurried to answer. Catherine drew aside the tattered curtain divider to look in on the children. Over their sweet, slumbering faces, an eerie glow of light glimmered.

“Sweet Jesus,” she whispered, racing to the window and tearing back the curtain.

A column of flame roared up the side of the barn. Firelight streamed across the yard between house and shed.

Catherine O’Leary opened the cottage door to an inferno. Her husband ran toward her, his face stark in the flame-lit night.

He said what she already knew, voicing the fear that made her heart sink like a stone in her chest: “See to the children. The barn’s afire.”

Under a French gown of emerald silk, Kathleen O’Leary wore homespun bloomers that had seen better days. She told herself not to worry about what lay beneath her sumptuous costume. It was what the world saw on the surface that mattered, particularly tonight.

Next Friday, she would go down on her knees and admit the ruse to Father Campbell in the confessional, but Friday was far away. At the present moment, she meant to enjoy herself entirely, for it was a night of deceptions and she was at its heart.

The mechanical gilt elevator speeding them up to the third-floor salon of the Hotel Royale was only partially responsible for the swift rush of anticipation that tingled along her nerves. She clasped hands with her two companions, Phoebe Palmer and Lucy Hathaway, and gave them a squeeze. “Think we’ll get away with it?” she whispered.

Lucy sent her a dark-eyed wink. “With looks like that, you could get away with robbing the Board of Trade.”

Kathleen would have pinched herself if she hadn’t been holding on so tightly to her friends’ hands. She couldn’t believe she was actually committing such an audacious act. Going to a social affair to which she wasn’t invited. In a dress from Paris that didn’t belong to her. Wearing jewels worth a king’s ransom. To meet people who, if they knew who she really was, would not consider her fit to black their boots.

The bellman pushed up the brake lever and cranked open the door. With only a swift glance, Kathleen recognized him as an Irishman. He had the sturdy features and mild, deferential demeanor of a recent immigrant. Phoebe swept past him, not even seeing the small man.

“Mayor Mason will not be seeking another term,” Phoebe was saying in a breathless voice that seemed fashioned solely for gossip. “Mrs. Wendover is having a flaming love affair with a student at Rush Medical College.” She enumerated the tidbits on her fingers, intent on bringing Kathleen up to date with the guests she was about to meet. “And Mr. Dylan Kennedy is just back from the Continent.”

“Remind me again. Who is Dylan Kennedy?” Lucy asked in a bored voice. She had never been one to be overly impressed by the upper classes—probably because she came from one of the oldest families of the city, and she understood their foibles and flaws.

“Don’t you know?” Phoebe patted a brown curl into place. “He’s only the richest, most handsome man in Chicago. It’s said he came back to look for a wife.” She led the way down the carpeted hall. “He might even begin courting someone in earnest this very night. Isn’t that deliciously romantic?”

“It’s not deliciously any thing,” Lucy Hathaway said with a skeptical sniff. “If he needs to pick something, he should go to the cattle auction over at the Union Stockyards.”

Kathleen said nothing, but privately she agreed with Phoebe for once. Dylan Francis Kennedy was delicious. She had glimpsed him a week earlier at a garden party at the Sinclair mansion, where her mistress, Miss Deborah Sinclair, lived when not away at finishing school. Kathleen had stolen a few moments from tending to her duties to look out across the long, groomed garden, and there, by an ornate gazebo, had stood the most wonderful-looking man she had ever seen. In perfectly tailored trousers that hugged his narrow hips, and a charcoal-black frock coat that accentuated the breadth of his shoulders, he had resembled a prince in a romantic story. Of course, it was a glimpse from afar. Up close, he probably wasn’t nearly as…delicious.

She spied a door painted with the words Ladies’ Powder Room and gave Lucy’s hand a tug. “Could we, please?” she said. “I think I need a moment to compose myself.” She spoke very carefully, disguising the soft brogue of her everyday speech.

Phoebe tapped an ivory-ribbed fan smartly on the palm of her gloved hand. “Chickening out?”

“In a pig’s eye,” Kathleen said, a shade of the dreaded brogue slipping out. She was always provoked and challenged by Phoebe Palmer, who belonged to one of Chicago’s leading families. Phoebe, in turn, thought Kathleen far too cheeky and familiar with her betters and did her best to put the maid in her place.

That, in fact, was part of the challenge tonight. Lucy swore Kathleen could pass for a member of the upper crust. Phoebe didn’t believe anyone would be fooled by the daughter of Irish immigrants. Lucy asserted that it would be an interesting social experiment. They had even made a wager on the outcome. Tomorrow night, Crosby’s Opera House was scheduled to open, and the cream of Chicago society would be in attendance. If Kathleen managed to get herself invited, Phoebe would donate one hundred dollars to Lucy’s dearest cause—suffrage for women.