Firehorse (9781442403352) (33 page)

She flipped back a few pages. “The friend I've been following most of the evening,” she explained, “thanks to woman's intuition … and a tip from someone familiar with fires.” She paused, allowing us to wonder just who that someone was, then went on. “Let's see, I watched you and your friend-accompanied by a dog—carry something that resembled a kerosene can down the alley behind Tebbetts, Baldwin & Davis. You loitered there from seven twelve until seven thirty-nine. Then you went separate ways. I followed your ‘friend,' who was no longer carrying anything, over to a jeweler's, where he broke the glass at seven forty-eight, let himself in, and emerged at seven fifty-two.”

“You're drunk!”

She shook her head and raised one hand. “Sober as a judge, Mr. Selby.”

“Well, you can't prove any of your fabrications,” he said.
“And if you try to sully my name with them, I'll have you brought up on charges of slander.”

“No one's looking to slander you, Mr. Selby. We don't need to.”

A weakened timber screeched painfully as it broke in two. Its thunderous collapse yanked one last rafter along after it, and a spray of orange sparks shot toward us. “We'd better move,” Mr. Stead suggested. “What are we going to do with this fellow?”

“I don't give a rap,” Father exclaimed. He looked ready to bolt.

Mr. Stead turned to Mr. McLaughlin. “Since you're willing to shoot him, I assume you'd surrender claim to him, is that correct?”

The man shrugged. “I suppose so.”

I shook nearly as hard as the colt, realizing what was going to happen. Mr. Stead turned to me. He tried in vain to hide his smile. “Is this another hapless creature you want to take on?”

Of course I nodded.

“Does she have your permission, sir?” he asked Father.

I looked in his direction, and the lady journalist did too. Father drew himself up. “She does not!” he bellowed. “She doesn't even have my permission to be here.”

“I'm taking him home anyway,” I stated firmly.

He settled one of his withering looks on me. “Your days of playing veterinary are over.”

“I'm not playing, Father; this is work. Yours may be to burn down and to tear down, but mine is to heal.”

Father vibrated like an overheated teakettle on the verge of exploding. Even Mr. McLaughlin took a step back, his eyes bulging, as Father roared, “I don't have to put up with this!”

The lady journalist calmly raised the ante. “Unless you want to read in Monday's
Pilot
what I witnessed tonight, maybe you do.”

“You can't blackmail me.”

“It's not blackmail, Mr. Selby. It's fact. And I know how you love your facts.”

Father ground his teeth. He looked at Mr. McLaughlin and Mr. Stead and the ring of stableboys. He even looked at me. “There was a time when women knew their place,” he growled. “Keep the colt, for all I care. But you,” he stuck his finger in the journalist's face, “had better keep out of my sight. Because I'm more dangerous than you know.”

“Then we're well matched,” she replied.

THIRTY

T
HE FOLLOWING
T
UESDAY
I
ATTENDED MY SECOND
funeral in two months. Turning sixteen seemed to have introduced death into my life, but I refused it more than a sideways glance.

Mother had found a small Episcopalian chapel in Lower Mills, south of Boston, that had a suitable graveyard behind it. As we stood shivering inside its iron fence, listening to the minister glorify the life of a woman he'd never met, my thoughts and eyes wandered. Rosebushes had been planted at regular intervals along the fence, and someone had tied their leafless arms to the uprights. I wondered what color the blossoms would be next spring. A stone angel larger than me smiled from above a neighboring grave. She stood darkly silhouetted against the thin light of a November sky. Looking past her to the rolling hills and listening to the soft rush of a nearby river, I knew Grandmother would have loved it here.

Few people marked her burial. Huddled in front of the minister were only Father and Mother and James and myself,
and for some reason Mr. Benton Lee, who'd asked to come along at the last minute. He sort of hovered behind and between Father and James, shifting his weight from foot to foot, restless as always. Mr. Stead had promised to join us, but although I kept an ear open for Balder's familiar
clip-clop
, the road leading up to the church remained silent.

Even this far outside the city, the odor of smoke still hung in the air. It seemed to have permeated our clothes and our hair and our very skin, and I wondered if we'd ever be cleansed of that dreadful night.

The cataclysmic fire had burned for twenty-four hours, all through the next day and into Sunday evening. Even with the flames finally cornered and extinguished, acres and acres of rubble that had once been Boston's business district still sent up white clouds of smoke. The newspapers that had managed to print editions on Monday stacked their headlines with exclamations:
BOSTON IN FLAMES! THE HEART OF THE CITY BURNED OUT! LABYRINTHINE STREETS CHOKED WITH A HORROR-STRICKEN MULTITUDE!
Notably absent was the popular and widely read
Boston Pilot
. Its offices on Franklin Street had burned to the ground. What was to become of the lady journalist now?

Yesterday I'd raced through every article I could find to see if investigators had discovered the cause of the fire. One witness claimed to have seen a disreputable character near Summer and Kingston Streets on Saturday evening but gave police only a vague description. Hooligans caught up in the frenzy of the presidential election had been setting small fires
in the past weeks to garner attention, and one newspaper laid the blame in their corner. But again, there were no faces and no names.

Father donned his coat of humility and wrote that he bemoaned the disaster, truly he did. Poor Boston! But before he reached the end of his column, he'd flung off that coat and was crowing. Hadn't he warned his readers that this was bound to happen? Hadn't he been saying all summer long that Boston wasn't prepared? Maybe people would listen next time. I squirmed at his vainglory, wondering if he'd boast so bravely if the lady journalist had been able to publish her findings in the
Pilot
.

While the journalists across the city scrambled to report the fire's epic devastation, the preachers went to great lengths to make sense of it. Summaries of their sermons were printed in the newspapers, and after reading them I believed every preacher in Boston saw the fire as neither arson nor accident, but as a direct message from God. Most said it was clear evidence of His wrath, a visitation on Boston for its sins, and how easily I pictured Grandmother nodding her head to just such a sermon. But the famous Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, preaching from his New York pulpit, said that if that were truly the case, then what city in the nation would deserve to stand?

“Fire,” the minister intoned, and I jumped to attention, “is a test of strength. Man can construct great buildings—four, five, and even six stories high—which Nature, in the form of fire, can destroy in an hour. Does that mean that we should stop building? That we, as humans, should give up hope? No. Because
fire, like death, is God's way of reminding us that our lives are temporary. All things material, He tells us, including our bodies, can be lost. But the soul—the soul that truly believes—will live on. Let us pray.”

The minister—Reverend Biggs, his name was—and his wife, Clara, as well as Mr. Lee, returned to our house for some cold lunch, followed by tea and cake. In hanging their coats on the hall tree I saw that more newspapers and some letters had been set on the table. One of them was addressed to me in Mary Grace's elegant hand, and I warmed at the thought of a piece of Wesleydale finding me here in Boston. I could almost hear her chatting on about her upcoming wedding, could almost see her curls bobbing as she eagerly detailed her dress and the flowers and the foods they'd serve at the church reception. I slipped it into my pocket to enjoy later.

Then I joined Mother to make small talk with Mrs. Biggs, who, ever since arriving, had been glancing from my scarred hands to my face and silently offering her most sincere pity. She and her husband, who was talking with Father, reminded me of a pair of salt and pepper shakers: identically stout bodies of average height, bland faces, he with a close-cropped head of white hair and she with a froth of curly black. They were even relating the same story, taking turns giving a lengthy account of the misfortunes of a son of one of their congregation's members who had lost his entire inventory of carpets in the fire, to which Mother nodded her head and murmured, “Such a shame” several times over. I'd never been more relieved to hear
a knock on the door, and I bolted to answer it before Mother could rise.

To my astonishment, the lady journalist stood there, her collar turned up against the cold. She leaned close with eagerness. “Just the person I was hoping to see,” she began, then, catching a glimpse behind me, “Oh, I'm sorry. You have guests. Perhaps—”

“No, it's fine.” I was happy to get outside, away from the formalities and artificialities. Away from the pity. I closed the door, having to hug myself to ward off the chill.

“The matchstick,” she said abruptly.

I couldn't help noticing how the harsh wintry light aged her features. She looked as if she hadn't slept in days. “Pardon me?”

“I didn't explain about the matchstick, about your father being a matchstick.”

My stomach plummeted. So he
was
guilty.

In that wild, unchecked way of hers, she grabbed my arm. “What you have to understand is that a matchstick can destroy—and it can kindle. It all depends on how you look at the fire it creates.”

“I don't understand. Did my father start the fire?”

Her eyes shot toward the parlor window. “Is he at home?”

“Yes.”

That appeared to give her pause. She released my arm to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, though the gusting wind
pulled it loose. When she went on, her voice was still urgent but lowered. “That's not what I came to talk about. What I want to tell you is more important—much more important. You see, when your father discharged me I thought he'd destroyed me, and for a while, I let him. That day when I spoke to you, right there,” she nodded toward the pavement at the bottom of the stairs, “was one of my lowest. But then I decided that being a journalist meant too much. So I pulled myself together and wrote some more stories, and I sold them to other newspapers, and one, the
Boston Pilot
, hired me on at an even better salary. That's when I began to see your father as a matchstick that had kindled a stronger flame in me rather than a matchstick that nearly destroyed me.”

“But the
Pilot
burned down. What will you do now?”

Her grin tipped sideways. “The building alone burned, sweetie, not the work.” Echoes of the minister's graveside sermon, delivered again.

“Are you going to print that my father started the fire?”

“I'm not completely convinced that he did.”

“But you said that night—”

“I said that I'd been following him and his friend, whom I believe to be Captain Gilmore, throughout the area where the fire began. I think their actions were quite suspicious, and I'm determined to learn more about what they were doing that night. But did I see either of them actually set match to kerosene? No. I did, however, see Captain Gilmore break the glass of and let himself into a jewelry store—that was after your father had
left—so if Mrs. Gilmore comes parading by in a new diamond necklace in the next few weeks, I'll alert the store's owners.”

Behind us the door opened, and James and Mr. Lee, in mid-conversation, crowded us on the top step. Trading apologies amid the jostling, we all four descended to the pavement. I felt it my duty to perform the introductions and even had my mouth open until it occurred to me that, although I'd spoken to her more than once, I still didn't know the woman's name. With a perceptive nod she extended her hand. “Mrs. Sarah Cornwell,” she said. “I already know Mr. Lee here, though not this other young man.” She gave James a flirtatious smile.

“James Selby,” he said, returning the smile.

That had the effect of squelching hers. “Oh … so you're another one of
his”
Wrinkling her face, she gazed up at the house. “Are there more?”

James shot a quizzical look at me.

“No, just James and myself,” I responded. “And our mother.” Why did she always come as an afterthought?

The door opened again and this time Reverend Biggs and his wife emerged, waving their good-byes. They cast suspicious glances at the four of us as they passed by, though they made an effort to nod politely. Hurriedly they climbed into their buggy and drove away.