Susan Wiggs Great Chicago Fire Trilogy Complete Collection Read online

  Revisit the beloved Chicago Fire trilogy in these three sweeping, romantic tales from New York Times bestselling author Susan Wiggs.

  THE HOSTAGE

  Deborah Sinclair is a beautiful, accomplished young heiress with a staggering dowry, but her fortune does her no good when, one horrible night, Chicago is engulfed in flames. Tom Silver will walk through fire to avenge a terrible injustice—and he may have to. Yet when he makes Deborah a pawn in his revenge, the heat of the inferno fades next to the attraction he feels for his captive.

  THE MISTRESS

  Kathleen O’Leary is a penniless maid, but tonight she takes a risk and masquerades as a glamorous heiress, thanks to a borrowed gown and her friends’ sense of adventure. To her surprise, the ruse succeeds—even Dylan Kennedy, Chicago’s most eligible bachelor, seems enraptured. But like Kathleen, Dylan isn’t who he says he is….

  THE FIREBRAND

  During her escape from the flames engulfing Chicago, Lucy Hathaway rescued an orphaned baby from a burning hotel. Five years later, Lucy walks into Rand Higgins’s bank and knows: the child she saved actually belongs to this ruthless financier. Now, to keep the child she’s come to love, she’ll have to give up her hard-won freedom and become his wife.

  Great Chicago Fire Trilogy Complete Collection

  The Hostage

  The Mistress

  The Firebrand

  Susan Wiggs

  Table of Contents

  The Hostage

  By Susan Wiggs

  The Mistress

  By Susan Wiggs

  The Firebrand

  By Susan Wiggs

  Praise for the novels of

  SUSAN WIGGS

  ENCHANTED AFTERNOON

  “A bold, humorous and poignant romance that fulfills every woman’s dreams.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Christina Dodd

  HALFWAY TO HEAVEN

  “Wiggs’ writing shimmers…. Her flair for crafting intelligent characters and the sheer joy of the verbal sparring between them makes for a delightful story you’ll want to devour at once.”

  —BookPage on Halfway to Heaven

  THE FIREBRAND

  “With this final installment of Wiggs’s Chicago Fire trilogy, she has created a quiet page-turner that will hold readers spellbound….”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THE MISTRESS

  “Susan Wiggs delves deeply into her characters’ hearts and motivations to touch our own.”

  —Romantic Times

  THE HORSEMASTER’S DAUGHTER

  “In poetic prose, Wiggs evocatively captures the Old South and creates an intense, believable relationship between the lovers.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THE CHARM SCHOOL

  “The Charm School draws readers in with delightful characters, engaging dialogue, humor, emotion and sizzling sensuality.”

  —Costa Mesa Sunday Times

  Also by Susan Wiggs

  HOME BEFORE DARK

  HALFWAY TO HEAVEN

  THE FIREBRAND

  THE MISTRESS

  THE HORSEMASTER’S DAUGHTER

  THE CHARM SCHOOL

  THE DRIFTER

  THE LIGHTKEEPER

  Watch for the newest historical romance from

  SUSAN WIGGS

  A SUMMER AFFAIR

  The Hostage

  SUSAN WIGGS

  For Lisa and Bruce, with love

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Barb, Betty, Alice and Joyce for reading and critiquing—you were right, as usual; to Alicia Rasley and Jill Barnett for particular insights; to Martha Keenan for superb editing; to the diva, Emilie Storrs, for extreme diva-tude; and to the Chicago Historical Society for information and technical assistance. Making up a story is so much easier than getting the facts right!

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Two

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Part Four

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  PART ONE

  And the wind raging, and the fire burning, and London and Paris and Portland outdone, and no Milton and no Dante on earth to put the words together.

  —Chicago Tribune (burned before distribution)

  PROLOGUE

  Chicago

  8 October 1871

  It was the hottest October anyone could remember. Less than an inch of rain had fallen in three months. Livestock died of thirst, their bloated carcasses splayed beside sun-baked mudholes. The unseasonable warmth made women regard baking day with special loathing and small children cranky with prickly heat. Laboring men paused in their work, looked up at the sky and remarked to each other that they’d surely welcome a breath of winter.

  Drought and dry windstorms kept the fire companies frantically busy; engineers and pipemen were called on to put out as many as six fires a day, battling the flames that fed on unpainted frame cottages, rickety shanties with roofs of tar and shake, and the endless supply of woodchips from Chicago’s lumber mills.

  Into the restless stream of hot prairie wind floated a single spark.

  Later, some would say the spark came from a stove chimney. Many believed the gossip that the unfortunate placement of a lantern near a cow in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn had caused the mayhem. Others would swear, in the terrible aftermath, that the hand of God himself started it all, while still others accused the Devil. Some even blamed a hail of comets that rained from the night sky. In the great charred ruin of the city, fingers would point and recriminations would echo across courtrooms, in the city hall and at hearings before the Board of Fire.

  But the fact was, a single spark, dipping and swirling like a drunken ballerina, rode an updraft of wind that night. It sailed high over a neighborhood of wood frame houses, barns packed with timothy hay, sheds full of coal and wood shavings for tinder, sidewalks constructed of knotty spruce and pine-block roadways.

  The West Division neighborhood was a rabbit warren of narrow, miserable alleys and makeshift shanties, a place no respectable person would ever visit. But it was home to day laborers and women with too many babies, to shopkeepers and immigrants, to drunks and dreamers, loose women and strict Catholics. And in the tacked-together neighborhood they bore their children, worshiped, ate, drank, fought, loved and buried their dead.

  The dry, blowing heat prompted some folks to find their beds early, while others tried to drown their discomfort in drink and song. The thin, lively whine of fiddle music and the thump of hobnail boots on plank floors emanated from some of the cottages. Noise flooded through open windows and caused flimsy walls to
reverberate with the hectic celebration.

  And high in the wild night sky, the spark looped and changed direction, pushed along by the wind blowing in from the broad and empty Illinois prairie.

  The spark entered a barn where five milk cows and a horse stood tethered with their heads lowered, and a calf lay curled on a bed of straw.

  The tiny ember dropped onto a store of musty hay, and when the wind breathed on it, a small circle of orange appeared.

  No one saw the pool of flame spread like spilled water, dripping down and over the stacked hay, igniting the crisp, dry wood shavings from Bateham’s Planing Mill. No one saw the river of fire flowing along the worn plank floor. No one noticed the horse’s nostrils dilate in fear or heard the animal emit a high-pitched whistle of alarm.

  Finally, a drayman with a wooden leg, who happened to be loitering across the street, noticed the deep-toned, unnatural light and headed clumsily for the barn. The cows, tied by their halters, stood unmoving even when Pegleg Sullivan came crashing into the barn and untied them. The calf, with its hide on fire and its tether hanging in the wood shavings, plowed into Pegleg and half dragged him out into the yard.

  Tall, graceful fronds of flame bloomed at the side of the barn. Stark orange light licked across the beaten earth of the yard between house and shed.

  Finally, a man’s voice broke the night. “Kate, the barn’s afire!”

  In Box Number 342, at the corner of Canalport Avenue and Halsted Street, the first alarm sounded.

  And over the sleeping faces of the children in the West Division of Chicago, a strange and rusty glow of light flickered.

  ONE

  “What’s the matter with Deborah?” asked Phoebe Palmer, standing in the middle of a cluttered suite of rooms at Miss Emma Wade Boylan’s School for Young Ladies. Lacy petticoats and beribboned unmentionables littered the divans and ottomans of the fringed, beaded and brocaded salon. “She won’t even let her maid in to attend her,” Phoebe added.

  “I’ll see what’s keeping her.” Lucy Hathaway pushed open the door to an adjoining chamber. Deborah’s dress, which she had worn to Aiken’s Opera House the previous night, lay slumped in a heap of tulle and silk on the floor. A mound of sheets lay scattered over the bed, while the smell of expensive perfume and despair hung in the air.

  “Deborah, are you all right?” Lucy asked softly. She went to the window, parting the curtain to let in a bit of the waning evening light. In the distance, some of the taller buildings and steeples of distant Chicago stabbed the horizon. The sky was tinged dirty amber by the smoke and soot of industry. But closer to Amberley Grove, the genteel suburb where the school was located, the windswept evening promised to be a lovely one.

  “Deborah, we’ve been pestering you for hours to get ready. Aren’t you coming with us tonight?” Lucy persisted. Though the engagement bore the humble name of an evangelical reading, everyone knew it was simply an excuse for the cream of society to get together on the Sabbath. Though weighty spiritual issues might be discussed, lighter matters such as gossip and romance would be attended to with appropriate religious fervor. Tonight’s particular social event had an added drama that had set tongues to wagging all week long. The intensely desired Dylan Kennedy was looking for a wife.

  “Please, dear,” Lucy said. “You’re scaring me, and ordinarily nothing scares me.”

  Huddled on the bed, Deborah couldn’t find the words to allay her friend’s concern. She was trying to remember what her life had been like just twenty-four hours ago. She was trying to recall just who she was, tallying up the pieces of herself like items in a ledger book. A cherished only daughter. Fiancée of the most eligible man in Chicago. A privileged young woman poised on the threshold of a charmed life.

  Everything had fallen apart last night, and she had no idea how to put it all back together.

  “Make her hurry, do,” Phoebe said, waltzing in from the next room with a polished silk evening dress pressed to her front. “Miss Boylan’s coach will call for us in half an hour. Imagine! Dylan Kennedy is finally going to settle on a wife.” She preened in front of a freestanding cheval glass, patting her glossy brown hair. “Isn’t that deliciously romantic?”

  “It’s positively barbaric,” said Lucy. “Why should we be paraded in front of men like horses at auction?”

  “Because,” Kathleen O’Leary said, joining them in Deborah’s chamber, “Miss Boylan promised you would all be there. Three perfect young ladies,” she added with a touch of Irish irony. She reached for the curtain that shrouded the bed. “Are you all right, then, miss?” she asked. “I’ve been trying like the very devil to attend to you all day.” The maid put out a pale, nervous hand and patted the miserable mound of blankets.

  Deborah felt assaulted by her well-meaning friends. She wanted to yell at them, tell them to leave her alone, but she had no idea how to assert her own wishes. No one had ever taught her to behave in such a fashion; it was considered unladylike in the extreme. She shrank back into the covers and pretended not to hear.

  “She doesn’t answer,” Lucy said, her voice rising with worry.

  “Please, Deborah,” Phoebe said. “Talk to us. Are you ill?”

  Deborah knew she would have no peace until she surrendered. With slow, painstaking movements, she made herself sit up, leaning against a bank of Belgian linen pillows. Three faces, as familiar as they were dear to her, peered into hers. They looked uncommonly beautiful, perhaps because they were all so different. Black-haired Lucy, carrot-topped Kathleen and Phoebe with her light brown curls. Their faces held the winsome innocence and anticipation Deborah herself had felt only yesterday.

  “I’m not ill,” she said softly, in a voice that barely sounded like her own.

  “You look like hell,” Lucy said with her customary bluntness.

  Because I have been there.

  “I’ll send for the doctor.” Kathleen started toward the door.

  “No!” Deborah’s sharp voice stopped the maid in her tracks. A doctor was unthinkable. “That is,” she forced herself to say, “I assure you, I am not in the least bit ill.” To prove her point, she forced herself out of bed and stood barefoot in the middle of the room.

  “Well, that’s a relief.” With brisk bossiness, Phoebe took her hand and gave it a friendly, aggressive tug. Deborah stumbled along behind her and stepped into the brightly lit salon.

  “I imagine you’re simply overcome because you’ll be a married woman a fortnight from now.” Phoebe dropped her hand and smiled dreamily. “You are so fabulously lucky. How can you keep to your bed at such a magical time? If I were engaged to the likes of Philip Ascot, I should be pacing the carpets with excitement. The week before my sister married Mr. Vanderbilt, my mother used to joke that she needed an anchor to keep her feet on the ground.”

  Deborah knew Phoebe didn’t mean for the words to hurt. Deborah was a motherless daughter, the saddest sort of creature on earth, and at a time like this the sense of loss gaped like an unhealed wound. She wondered what a young woman with a mother would do in this situation.

  “So,” Lucy said, “let’s hurry along. We don’t want to be late.”

  Through a fog of indifference, Deborah surveyed the suite cluttered with combs, atomizers, lacy underclothes, ribbons, masses of petticoats—a veritable explosion of femininity. It was the sort of scene that used to delight her, but everything was different now. Suddenly these things meant nothing to her. She had the strangest notion of being encased in ice, watching her friends through a wavy, frozen wall. The sense of detachment and distance hardened with each passing moment. She used to be one of the young ladies of Miss Boylan’s famous finishing school, merry and certain of her place in the glittering world of Chicago’s debutantes. It all seemed so artificial now, so pointless. She felt alienated from her friends and from the contented, foolish girl she used to be.

  “And what about you, dear Kathleen?” Phoebe asked, aiming a pointed glance at the red-haired maid. Phoebe took every chance to remind Kat
hleen that she was merely the hired help, there at the sufferance of more privileged young women like herself. “What do you plan to do tonight?”

  Kathleen O’Leary’s face turned crimson. She had the pale almost translucent skin of her Irish heritage, and it betrayed every emotion. “You’ve left me a fine mess to be tidying up, miss. And won’t that keep me busy ’til cock-crow.” Saucy as ever, she exaggerated her brogue on purpose.

  “You should come with us, Kathleen.” Lucy, whose family had raised her to be a free thinker, didn’t care a fig for social posturing, but she knew that important people would be attending. The politicians, industrialists and social reformers were valuable contacts for her cause—rights for women.

  “Really, Lucy,” scolded Phoebe. “Only the best people in town are invited. Dr. Moody’s readings are strictly for—”

  “The invitation was extended to every young lady at Miss Boylan’s,” Lucy, who was both wealthy and naive enough to be an egalitarian, reminded her.

  “Stuff and nonsense,” Kathleen said, her blush deepening.

  “Perhaps you should attend,” Phoebe said, a calculating gleam in her eye. “It might be fun to surprise everyone with a lady of mystery.”

  The old Deborah would have joined in the ruse with pleasure. Lively, intelligent Kathleen always added a sense of fun to the sometimes tedious routine of social climbing. But it was all too much to think about now, and she passed a shaking hand over her forehead. The celluloid hairpins she hadn’t bothered to remove last night exaggerated the headache that made her grit her teeth. The pain hammered so hard at her temples that the pins seemed to pulse with a life of their own.