The Firebrand (33 page)

"Aren't you even going to ask me about my plans?" she asked.

He picked up his razor strop. "I know what day it is." He sharpened his straight razor with long, rhythmic strokes on the leather.

Lucy's palms began to sweat. She had never seen a man at his ablutions before. He was giving her an unsettling and intimate glimpse of himself and she wondered why. Was it because he felt comfortable in her presence, or because he simply didn't care?

"It's the Fourth of July," she said, deciding to tackle the easier matter first.

After a moment, he stopped. "Stay home," he said. "A banker gets few enough holidays. Spend this one with Maggie and me."

"You know I can't. We've spent weeks preparing for the Centennial March." They had argued for days about her participation in the controversial event. "Come with me," she said, knowing what his answer would be. "You and Maggie are welcome to join the march."

He leaned into the mirror, drawing the straight razor along one cheek. "Maggie's not going anywhere near State Street this morning."

"How did you know it's on State Street?"

He paused in his shaving. "All parades follow that route. For those who oppose you, it'll be like shooting fish in a barrel. This whole business is absurd. You have no need to go crusading through the streets. Don't I keep a roof over your head, clothes on your back, food in your belly?"

"This is not about being comfortable." Lucy tightened her grip on the small, clothbound book. Ah, Pamela, she thought. Why did you have to die? He needed you so.

"Our nation has only one Centennial," she said. "One hundred years ago today, we declared ourselves a free and independent nation. Will you deny your own daughter the opportunity to partake of that freedom? Deprive her of a chance to witness a moment of history?"

"I'm depriving her of an opportunity to see rotten fruit and stones pelted at her mother."

"Let the fools do their worst," Lucy retorted. She'd received a few anonymous threats at the bookstore, but she'd concealed them from Rand. "They don't scare me."

He finished shaving and stalked into his dressing room. "Maybe they should."

The ominous note in his low tone struck her. "Why wouM you say such a thing?"

"Because you refuse to." Wearing dark trousers and a blue shirt, he emerged from the dressing room. "Damn it, Lucy." He grabbed her by the shoulders. "Your cause endangers you."

His touch disturbed her, yet at the same time made her want to touch him back, to feel the contours of his body, the texture of his skin, his hair. How could she want him so much, even now?

"If my cause dies because I'm too timid to support it, then all women will be in danger."

He dropped his hands. She could feel his disappointment, harsh as a spoken censure. "For the last time, Lucy. I'm asking you not to go."

She squared her shoulders. "And for the last time, I'm asking you to come with me."

He took a step back. "You know my answer to that."

She took a step back, too. "Then there's nothing more to say." "Just remember what's at risk."

"I'll be safe," she vowed. "I promise."

"You can't keep yourself safe from things flung at you in a rage. Damn it, there are consequences I can't even begin to—" He shoved his fingers in long furrows through his hair.

"What consequences?"

He regarded her with a dull flat stare. "Ever since I married you, I've faced daily threats from our depositors."

So, she thought, he had his secrets, too. "What sort of threats?" "To pull deposits from the bank."

She burst out laughing, then realized this was no joke. "That's ridiculous." "Men don't like leaving their money with a banker who can't control his own

wife."

"I am no man's to control."

"Exactly. If I can't keep you in line, why should they trust me with their hard-earned money?"

"My God. They are offended because you're married to me?" The old, old

shame crept up in Lucy. Once again she was the daughter who failed to please her parents, the last girl picked at every dance, an object of scorn and ridicule because she couldn't fit in. "You're lying," she said. But she could see from the look on his face that he was not.

She stared at the book in her hand. He would never understand why she could not abandon her cause for the sake of his bank. Still, she had gone to a great deal of trouble.

She handed him the small blue book. "I've been wondering if I'd find a right time to give you this," she said. "Now I'm beginning to think there isn't going to be a right time. But you should read it. Then you'd understand the sort of thing I'm fighting. And you might even learn to forgive." She went to the door between their rooms. "Getting married was supposed to make everything simpler," she said. "But it hasn't, has it?"

Thanks to his mother, Rand didn't finish dressing for two hours and wasn't ready when his visitors arrived. The moment Lucy had flounced from his room, he'd started reading, burningly curious about a matter she considered so important that she'd barge into his private chambers. Despite their antagonism, he was getting used to her lack of regard for propriety. But nothing could have prepared him for the contents of the book she'd delivered.

Seeing his mother's name printed on the title page sent a cold wind through all the empty places Pamela Byrd Higgins had left in her wake. He'd forced himself to turn the page, forced himself to start reading. The contents first startled, then infuriated him. This was no more than a litany of imagined slights from a discontented woman. What right had she, a well-off society matron living in a splendid house, to complain about her lot in life?

And yet, as he pored over page after page of the writings, he felt a reluctant affinity with the troubled writer. Like the sun warming a cold rock, understanding seeped into him.

"
I starve with a full belly and die of thirst in a deep well. I freeze in an overheated house. I strangle on a rope of Asian pearls..."
The haunting words on the page called across the years as Lucy must have known they would. As he finished the anguished essays and prose-poems, his fury died, replaced by a bitter comprehension. Trapped in a marriage of convenience, his mother had begun to suffocate. Lucy wanted him to see that a true marriage was not founded on creature comforts, but on mutual respect, genuine affection.
Love.

He and Lucy had never promised each other that. Was she now saying she needed it? Lucy had said something else, too. She'd told him he had to learn to forgive. It wasn't enough to simply understand that his mother's pain had pushed her to do the unthinkable. He had to let go of his bitterness and forgive her. He didn't know if he was capable of that. But Lucy seemed to think he was, and Lucy's convictions were powerful.

"Papa!" Maggie's voice called from downstairs. "Look who's come to call."

He started to fling aside the book, but some mad impulse seized him. He picked it up, shut his eyes and pressed it against his heart. Then, embarrassed, he set it on the mantel shelf and hurriedly finished dressing.

By the time he went downstairs, the foyer resembled a disturbed anthill. Tom Silver had arrived with his two little ones, Dylan Kennedy with his twins and the other two. The children were in constant motion, chasing and playing in the fountain, running up and down the stairs.

"We got your summons," Tom said.

"Would've come sooner," Dylan explained, "but rounding up this lot—" he indicated the children "—was like herding cats."

Shaking off the overwhelming weight of his mother's confessions, Rand found it within himself to grin. He invited everyone to the kitchen for something to eat, and Mrs.

Meeks obligingly filled the grubby, reaching hands of the children with biscuits and strawberries.

A consummate gambler, Dylan produced a deck of cards and slapped it on the table. "I don't suppose they'll leave us to play a hand," he said with a weary look at his red-haired son, who had just put a berry in his ear. "But we could cut cards. The loser changes Minnie's diaper."

Tom picked up the squirming toddler and passed her across the table to Dylan. "I don't like the odds."

Rand chuckled, enjoying an easy camaraderie with the others. While Dylan took his daughter to the back stoop, Tom set his elbows on the table. "I assume this is about the march today."

Rand's humor dimmed. "There's going to be a counterprotest."

"We expected that," Dylan called from the back. He herded the four older children outside to play and took a seat at the table. "What about this counterprotest?"

Rand told what he knew about the Brethren and their fiery opposition to women's suffrage. Lamott himself had organized the proceedings. The group intended to confront the marchers at the intersection of State and Madison. "I tried to convince Lucy not to go," he added.

"You'd sooner stop the tide," Tom said. "Men who call women 'the weaker sex' have never been married."

Rand stood and paced in agitation. "She wanted me to come to the march, and I refused."

Dylan and Tom exchanged a glance. "So did we."

Three seconds of silence filled the room. Then they all reached the same conclusion at once. "Get the children," Rand said. "Hurry."

The suffrage marchers met at Fairfield Park to organize themselves into lines that resembled battalions. Energy ran high, sailing over the multitude of women—and quite a few men—like the summer clouds over the lake. Ladies with tin drums and brass trumpets waited for the signal to begin the march down State Street. Half a block away, Patience and Willa Jean rehearsed hymns and chants with the participants.

Lucy had been busy for an hour, going over the route with the guest of honor and leader of the march, Victoria Claflin Woodhull. Her notoriety as the first woman to trade stocks and run a bank on Wall Street, the first woman to run for president and the first to address Congress on the suffrage issue made her an intimidating figure. Yet she was thinner than Lucy had pictured her, with skin as pale as an invalid's. But under thick, straight eyebrows, her gaze was as challenging as her radical ideas. Newly divorced from her second husband, she traveled alone with her young daughter, Zulu Maud, a quiet girl of fourteen who looked ill at ease amid all the activity.

"We're so honored that you came," Lucy said to Mrs. Woodhull, bringing her to the front of the crowd.

"I was honored to be asked. I've always enjoyed our correspondence, Lucy, and I wanted to meet the person who named her bookstore after me."

"It was you who inspired me to strike out on my own. Hearing you called The Firebrand of Wall Street gave me the idea for the name."

"I'm pleased you picked that moniker, for some of the others are not so flattering." She grinned. "Mrs. Satan or Queen of the Prostitutes would not have suited at all."

Lucy admired her for making light of something that must have stung deeply. Standing beside the most famous and outspoken woman in America, she felt a surge of pride. But it was a hollow, empty feeling, robbed of its sweetness by her quarrel with Rand. She couldn't escape the thought that her cause alienated her from Maggie's father. Lucy's husband. Was it possible to reach the pinnacle of triumph even as her heart was breaking?

"Why the long face?" Mrs. Woodhull asked. "It's a grand day for the cause."

"I wish I could be impervious to our critics," Lucy confessed. "Is it terribly weak of me to let their opinions matter?"

"Certainly not. Just because your cause is just doesn't mean you're not human.

What happened, Lucy?"

She flushed. "My husband's clients are threatening to pull their deposits from his bank," she said, slanting a sash lettered with the slogan I Will Vote across her chest.

"They probably will," Victoria said matter-of-factly. "Money is the most powerful weapon they have."

Lucy's stomach churned. "I could fix it," she said. "I could leave the cause to others, give up my shop—"

"You must love him very much, to be so concerned."

Lucy nearly choked. "I don't—it's not like that at all. In fact, ours is a difficult marriage."

"Trust me," Victoria said, "I've been married twice, and I can tell you firsthand that even a good marriage is never easy."

"There you are!" Kathleen Kennedy called, pushing through the crowd. She had Deborah Silver in tow, the two of them looking fresh and excited as they lifted their placards. Relieved to see her friends, Lucy introduced them to Mrs. Woodhull. The guest of honor stepped up to a horse cart draped in red, white and blue bunting.

"Your husbands didn't come, either," Lucy observed. "They're sulking," Deborah conceded.

"And minding the children," Kathleen added. "But they know better than to stop us today."

A drumroll sounded, and the lead cart rolled. Rag bearers lifted their banners high, and the marchers surged forward. Linking arms with her friends, Lucy found herself at the head of a column. Accompanied by drums and whistles, they chanted verses of freedom and independence. Spectators lined the street and waved from open windows in the tall buildings. The summer sun blazed from a blue sky, warming Lucy's face as she lifted her voice in song.

The noise crescendoed to a fever pitch. As the parade progressed, the crowd of onlookers thickened. Among them, she saw a few faces pulled hard and taut with aversion and felt the occasional thrown fruit whiz past.

"Watch out ahead," Kathleen said, gesturing at the upcoming intersection. "That lot doesn't look too friendly."

Dressed in somber, Puritanical black, a horde of men advanced in a straight, unbroken line toward the suffragists. In ringing tones, they sang some hymn or other, but Lucy couldn't make out the words.

She felt a sick apprehension. It was a game of nerves, then. Who would move out of the way first?

Patience whirled to face the others and lifted her arms like a choral director. "Louder, ladies and gentlemen!" she shouted. "Sing louder!"

The song of freedom swelled from their ranks, but the deep spiritual dirges of the opposition rolled forth like black thunder. Deborah faltered, and Lucy squeezed her hand. "We must not flinch," she said. "We must not— Oh, no."