The Firebrand

Lucy’s arms tightened around the child, who had stopped crying and was making soft cooing sounds. She pressed close to the bed.

Colonel Hiram Hathaway lay like a marble effigy, as handsome and commanding in death as he’d been in life. In flashes of remembrance, she saw that face lit with laughter, those big hands holding hers. How could he be gone? How could someone as strong and powerful as the Colonel be dead?

“He went out to fight the fire,” Patience said. “You know your daddy. He’d never sit still while the whole city was on fire. He was with a crew of military men, knocking down buildings with dynamite. They brought him home an hour ago. Said he got hit on the head. He was unconscious, never even woke up, and right after we put him to bed he just…just went to glory.”

A choking, devastating disbelief surged through Lucy as she sank to her knees. “Oh, Colonel.” She used the name she’d called him since she was old enough to speak. “Why did you have to be a hero? Why couldn’t you have stayed safe at home?” She freed one hand from the baby’s blanket and gently touched the pale, cool cheek with its bushy side-whiskers. “Oh, Colonel. Were you scared?” she asked, her hand starting to shake. “Did it hurt?” She couldn’t find any more words. What had they said to each other last time they were together?

She couldn’t remember, she realized with rising panic. “Patience,” she whispered. “I can’t remember the last time I told my father I loved him.”

“He knew, honey,” Patience said. “Don’t you worry about that. He just knew.”

Lucy wanted to throw herself upon him, to weep out her heartbreak, but a curious calm took hold of her. Resolution settled like a rock in her chest. She would not cry. The Colonel had taught her never to weep for something that couldn’t be changed. No tears, then, to dishonor his teachings.

“Good night, Colonel,” she whispered, pressing a kiss to his cold hand. He still smelled of gunpowder.

Her mother sat devastated by shock, rocking in her chair. “What shall I do?” she said. “Whatever shall I do without him?”

“We’ll manage,” Lucy heard herself say. “We’ll find a way.”

“I shall die without him,” her mother said as if she hadn’t heard. “I shall simply lie down and die.”

“Now, don’t you take on like that, Miss Viola,” Willa Jean said. She had a deep voice, compelling as a song. But it was a small, bleating whimper from the baby that caught Viola’s attention.

Lucy’s mother stopped rocking and stared at the bundle in Lucy’s arms. “What on earth—Who is that?” she asked.

Lucy turned so she could see. “It’s a baby, Mama. A little lost girl. I rescued her from the fire.”

“Heavenly days, so it is. Oh, Hiram,” she said, addressing her dead husband while still staring at the child, who stared back. “Oh, Hiram, look. Our Lucy has brought us a baby.”

Part Three

A woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.

—Victoria Claflin Woodhull

Chapter Six

Chicago

May 1876

“Where do babies come from, Mama? Really.”

Lucy looked across the breakfast table at her daughter and smiled at the little face that greeted her each morning. Having breakfast together was part of their daily routine in the small apartment over the shop. Usually she read the Chicago Tribune while Maggie looked at a picture book, sounding out the words. But her daughter’s question was much more intriguing than the daily report from the Board of Trade.

“I know where you came from,” Lucy said. “You fell from the sky, right into my arms. Just like an angel from heaven.” It was Maggie’s favorite story, one she never tired of hearing—or repeating for anyone who would listen.

The little girl stirred her graham gems and frowned. She was stubbornly left-handed, a trait that often reminded Lucy of the mystery surrounding her. “Sally Saltonstall says that’s an old wives’ tale.”

“I’m not an old wife.” Lucy gave a bemused chuckle. “I’m not even a young wife. I’m not anyone’s wife.”

“Sally says you can’t be my mama if you’re not nobody’s wife.”

“Anybody’s wife. And Sally is full of duck fluff for telling you that.”

Maggie passed Lucy the stereoscope she’d received for her birthday last fall. They didn’t know her exact birthday, of course, so they had chosen October 8, the date of the Great Fire that had changed so many lives. Each year, Lucy gave a party for Margaret Sterling Hathaway, commemorating the night they had found each other.

“Look at the picture in there,” Maggie said. “It shows a family, and the mama has a husband called the papa.”

Lucy obliged her daughter by peering into the two lenses of the stereoscope. The shadowy, three-dimensional image depicted an idealized family—the mother in her demure dress, the upright, proper, bewhiskered father in boiled collar and cuffs and two perfectly groomed children, a boy and a girl.

“These are just strangers dressed up to look like a family,” she said, ignoring a nameless chill that swept through her. “We are a proper family. I’m your mother, you are my daughter, forever and ever. Isn’t that what a family is?”

“But the papa’s missing.” Maggie thoughtfully wiggled her top front tooth, which was very loose now and about to come out. “Could Willa Jean be the papa?”

Willa Jean Washington, the Hathaways’ former maid, now worked as the bookkeeper of Lucy’s shop.

Lucy shook her head. “Traditionally the papa is a man, darling.”

“But you always say you’re rearing me in a nontraditional way.”

Lucy couldn’t help laughing at the sound of such a sophisticated phrase coming from her young, precocious daughter. “You know, you’re right. Maybe we’ll ask Willa Jean if she’ll be the papa.”

“Do you think she knows how?” Maggie asked. “What does a papa do, anyway?”

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.