The Pursuit of Lucy Banning (25 page)

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D
aniel stepped out of the carriage that had brought him from the train station to Prairie Avenue, after catching the last Sunday evening train from Riverside. An early Monday breakfast meeting compelled him to sleep at the Bannings’ that night, regardless of the late arrival. He would let himself in with his key and go directly to his bedroom, requiring no assistance from the household staff tonight. As he reached into his pocket for coins to pay the cab driver, a flickering shadow caught his eye, and he turned his head to follow its streak.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he told the driver. “Go around the corner over to Michigan Avenue, but take your time.”

The driver shrugged as Daniel reentered the carriage. Daniel’s eyes fixed on a shrouded figure he was sure was Lucy. On Michigan Avenue, the driver pulled to the roadside, and Daniel waited in darkness. She could not claim to be going to the orphanage at this hour, nor a class at the university, and he was quite sure she was not on her way to see Will Edwards. Audaciously leaving the house alone at this hour of the night meant she did not intend to be discovered.

He intended to discover her.

She got in a cab herself, one of the few still straggling along the avenue. Daniel saw her lean forward and slide the glass open to give an address, and he made the same motion.

“Follow that carriage,” he instructed his driver, “but stay back.”

His cab once again began to rock with forward motion. He watched out the windows as Michigan Avenue transformed along the southern route, shops and offices giving way to neighborhoods and businesses with less and less similarity to Prairie Avenue and transecting properties of factories and manufacturing plants. The stillness of the street, inhabited at this hour only by shadowed silhouettes, magnified the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves.

The forward cab turned a corner to the west and slowed. Daniel’s driver did the same.

“Stop here,” Daniel said. Lucy’s cab had come to a stop half a block ahead of him.

The driver descended to open the door for his customer and offer her a hand exiting the carriage, then waited humbly while she fished for the fare in her bag.

Lucy knew exactly where she was going, Daniel observed. Clearly she had been here before and did not hesitate to approach a less-than-modest narrow dwelling. She knocked on the door, and a curtain moved enough to fleetingly spill a yellow shaft of light onto the street. A moment later a figure allowed entrance. Daniel chided himself for not telling the driver to pull closer. Something was familiar about the form that greeted Lucy in the moonlight, but Daniel could not see the face.

“Are you getting out, sir?” the driver asked.

Daniel greeted the question with silence, then finally said, “No. Take me back to Prairie Avenue.”

“Miss Lucy, you shouldn’t be here!” Charlotte exclaimed. “What will Mr. and Mrs. Banning think?”

“It’s Henry, isn’t it?” Lucy said. “That’s why you haven’t come home.”

Charlotte gestured to the sofa, where Lucy recognized the quilt. Rather than being wrapped in its comfort, however, Henry lay on top of it, awake but listless and pale. On a nearby table sat a ceramic bowl filled with water, a small cloth hanging over its rim.

“Where’s Mrs. Given?” Lucy asked.

“I told her to go to bed,” Charlotte answered, her own face haggard. “She was up all night last night with him, and the twins too.”

Lucy undid the button at the neck of her cloak and flung the garment over a chair. Without it, she noticed that the fire in the grate barely warded off the outside chill. “How bad is the fever?”

“Very bad, since Saturday. If I don’t put water on him constantly, it fires up again. He screams and pulls at his ear, or he lies there like this. I don’t know which scares me more.”

“An ear infection perhaps,” Lucy suggested. “I’ve seen them at St. Andrew’s.”

“I don’t think he’s breathing right, either.” A sob caught in Charlotte’s throat. “I didn’t think what would happen if he got sick and I wasn’t with him.”

Lucy stooped and laid her fingers against the baby’s face. “Probably some sort of general respiratory malady.” She stuck her hand in the bowl of water. “This is lukewarm. Doesn’t Mrs. Given have any ice to cool him? She said she had ice when we first brought him here.”

“It’s gone. The iceman will be here before dawn.” Charlotte picked up her baby and sat on the sofa with Henry on her lap, and Lucy leaned over them both. “I try to spoon some water into him, but he spits out most of it. He won’t eat, he won’t drink.”

“We’ll keep trying.” Lucy picked up the bowl. “I’ll get some fresh water from the kitchen pump. It’s sure to be cooler than this.”

The kitchen was small and sparse, and an odd experience for Lucy. If not for the handful of times she had helped in the kitchen at the orphanage, it would have been an entirely foreign setting. But thanks to St. Andrew’s, she knew a small bit about a kitchen. She knew iceboxes had catch pans, for instance, for the water that drained off the melting ice. Lucy found the catch pan of Mrs. Given’s icebox and transferred the water it held into the bowl before returning to the sitting room, triumphant.

“I’ve brought the water in the catch pan under the icebox,” Lucy said. “It’s still quite cold.”

Charlotte held Henry upright in her arms, supporting his bobbing head against her chest, while Lucy put the spoon to his lips. When he opened his mouth to moan, she dropped the water in.

“He swallowed it!” Charlotte said.

“We’ll do this all night if we have to.” Lucy offered another spoonful of water. “You look exhausted. Are you sure you don’t want to rest? I can look after Henry.”

Charlotte shook her head emphatically. “I couldn’t close my eyes for a second knowing he was like this.”

“Come on, Henry,” Lucy coaxed, “another sip.”

“I can’t believe you came,” Charlotte said hoarsely, “to this neighborhood, at this time of night.”

“Of course I came.”

“Mr. Penard and Mrs. Fletcher must be furious. I was supposed to be home hours ago.”

“Don’t worry about them right now. You made the right decision to stay with your baby.”

“They wouldn’t see it that way. And I can’t tell them I have a baby.”

“No, of course not. We’ll figure something out.”

Henry took a deep breath and began to scream and cough. Charlotte sprang to her feet, holding him upright against her shoulder and patting his back firmly while she paced. Lucy dipped the cloth in the cool water, wrung the drips out, and placed it on Henry’s head, then moved it gently over his face as she followed Charlotte’s movements around the room. Henry drew air again and bellowed, and a second cry came from the children’s bedroom.

“He’s woken one of the twins again.” Charlotte sighed. “Mrs. Given has been up and down with them three times already tonight.”

“She can look after them,” Lucy said. “There will be time to sleep later. They’re not ill. For that we can be grateful.”

Henry’s face flushed red, and he writhed in his mother’s arms. Charlotte paced more quickly, patted his back more firmly.

For another three hours, the baby alternated between screaming spells and quiet times, but he did not sleep. Lucy spooned water in his mouth and kept the damp cloth fresh. Finally, deep into the night, his eyelids grew heavy and his breathing smoother.

Lucy put her hand on the baby’s face again. “I think the fever is breaking. He’s cooler.”

Henry slept at last. With her baby quiet in her arms, Charlotte sat in an armchair and put her head back, daring to close her own eyes. Lucy never closed hers. She laid the baby’s quilt over sleeping mother and child and watched an hour’s respite, praying with every breath.

Around four in the morning, Charlotte roused. “What was that?”

“What was what?” Lucy asked.

“I heard a sound, a horse in the alley, I think. It must be the iceman. He’ll come to the back.”

“I’ll see to him.” Lucy met the iceman at the alley door and made sure the new block of ice was installed in the icebox, a procedure she had never observed before. As she watched him leave, she knew she must soon follow. It would not help Charlotte for the Banning household to find Lucy missing as well.

Henry was still sleeping on his mother’s chest.

“I have to go now, Charlotte, or there will be such a fuss at home I’ll never explain my way out of it.”

Charlotte nodded.

“I’ll come back,” Lucy offered, “after my meeting for the women’s exhibit. I could catch a cab.”

Charlotte shook her head. “I think it’s over. He feels more like himself, and he’s breathing so much better. I don’t want to cause you any more trouble.”

“It’s no trouble,” Lucy responded.

But Charlotte shook her head again. “If he rests for a few hours and seems all right, I’ll come home.”

“Stay as long as you need to.”

Prairie Avenue was still shrouded in gray when Lucy got out of the carriage. It had not been easy to find a cab to take her home. Mrs. Given’s neighborhood was a destination for reluctant cab drivers, not the sort of place where they lingered in pre-dawn hours hoping for fares. But Lucy finally was home, and the household showed no signs of stirring. She turned her key in the lock slowly and opened the door as stealthily as possible, keenly aware that her parents’ bedroom was only down the hall and her mother was a light sleeper.

Safely in her suite, Lucy mussed her bed and changed into nightclothes. But she did not sleep. She couldn’t. She sat in the armchair and waited for dawn, and then for the avenue to awaken. At her normal rising time, she went to her vanity table and pushed the annunciator button.

“I’d like Charlotte to assist me, please,” she said.

“I regret Charlotte is not available,” Penard answered. “Will it be satisfactory if I send Elsie?”

“Yes, thank you.” Lucy snapped off the button. She couldn’t tell much from Penard’s tone, but she had accomplished her goal of maintaining a semblance of normalcy.

An hour later, Lucy entered the dining room. Leo, Richard, and Daniel were feasting on eggs and fried potatoes with dried apricots, toast and jam, and a robust tea. Bessie was attending to their needs.