Daring Time (11 page)

"Are you sure he should be out of bed?" Hope fretted. "I'm still not convinced it isn't the right thing to do to cancel his birthday celebration next week."

"Come, miss, Dr. Walkerton says there was nothing more to Mr. Stillwater's weakness than a bad head cold and overwork. Surely a party would do him some good if he's mended by then," Mary assured her.

Hope chewed on her lower lip doubtfully. "My mother died of
nothing more
than a case of the influenza, you know."

Mary's kind face collapsed. "Oh, miss, I didn't mean—"

"I know you didn't, Mary. I'm sorry for being so melodramatic. Forgive me," Hope said gently before she took her hat from the maid, giving the young woman an apologetic smile. She tied the velvet ribbons beneath her chin. "My father is undoubtedly right to recommend my usual activities. It will hopefully alleviate my boorishness. A brisk walk is precisely what I require."

"But, miss . . . you're not taking the carriage?" Mary asked as she opened the front door for her.

"I've asked Evan to follow. It's the exercise I need, Mary, to clear the worries in my head."

She marched down the limestone front steps, determined to see to her daily duties instead of hover over her father—who was clearly doing well following his spell of near fainting last night in his study— or to alternatively stare like an idiot into the mirror searching for Ryan.

What did Ryan think of her struggling to be free of him? Would he never try to reach her again? The thought was so unbearable that it made her pace quicken and her shoes tap more forcefully on the pavement. She gave a polite nod to a waving Mr. John Glessner as he proceeded sedately in his carriage down Prairie Avenue. Although she picked up her step, her anxieties and questions would not be so easily chased away.

She'd slept restlessly last night, haunted by dreams, tossing and turning until her bedclothes grew damp with perspiration and tangled around her legs like a snare. For some strange reason Ryan's warning that she was in danger had melded with the dread associated with her father's illness, creating a profound sense of foreboding that she could not shake.

Once she'd heard Ryan call out to her, clear as a trumpet's call. She'd gasped at the sound and sat bolt upright in the mussed bed.

"Ryan?" she'd answered shakily.

The fading light from the fire in the hearth had told her she was alone in the large bedroom, however. Although she'd left the wardrobe door open, the mirror remained impervious, reflecting everything it should and nothing she most desired to see.

The coachman Evan tipped his hat to her from where he waited on Eighteenth Street. He allowed her a head start down Prairie Avenue before he followed slowly in the shiny black brougham. Hope's breath created a cloud of vapor around her mouth as she progressed down the quiet, tree-lined avenue.

The silence was short-lived, however. She paused and considered crossing the avenue when she saw a young man trying to get into his carriage, staggering and laughing uproariously as he tripped and fell forward. His driver hopped down and drew the man up off the carriage steps. She knew she was too late, however, when she saw Colin Mason, the sole inheritor of the Mason Haberdasher fortune and known Prairie Street reprobate, had noticed Hope as she walked down the sidewalk.

"Well, if it isn't that rose o' purity, that angel o' the mount... or is it that angel every man in Chicago would like to mount? He'p me out, Agnew ..." Colin queried his driver as poor Agnew tried desperately to keep his wavering employer standing. Agnew winced involuntarily when Colin Mason exhaled an alcohol-saturated breath into his face. Colin pointed his walking cane at Hope, his action causing both men to lose balance again.

Agnew barely prevented his employer from causing them to spill headfirst into the carriage. "... Should a woman who looks like her be polishing the neighborhood's virtue or polishing her appreciative neighbor's cock with her tongue?"

"Sir"
Agnew exclaimed, turning bright red as he glanced around at Hope.

Hope's chest swelled with angry indignation. It wasn't the first time she'd been insulted by Colin Mason after he'd taken his daily gin bath. She felt nothing but pity for the frail, seventeen-year-old heiress from Schenectady who had married him earlier this year.

Hope was vaguely aware of Evan's concerned eye as he approached in the carriage but she wasn't worried about her safety from a drunkard louse like Colin Mason. She gritted her teeth as she neared him and his gaze rolled over her body, the effect similar to the crawl of a gin-soaked slug on her naked skin. She waited to speak until he finally looked up into her face again, his mouth slanted into a lascivious sneer.

"In your drunken state, Mr. Mason, it might be pointed out that the polishing of either your soul or the other item you mentioned would be an utter, dismal failure and therefore should be considered a waste of time, not only for me but for every individual alive on this planet. I will no longer detain you, sir, from an undoubtedly wasted trip to the Levee District."

Agnew made a loud choking sound and turned his wide grin into his shoulder. Hope spun around and continued her journey down the street.

"Frigid li'l viper," Colin yelled after her, ignoring Agnew's attempts to quiet him. "Take me to the Sweet Lash this instant, Agnew. I'll show every damn whore in that place the only good use for a female's mouth!"

Hope stewed in anger as she progressed down Prairie Avenue and then turned left on Seventeenth Street. Before Colin Mason's marriage had been arranged, Colin and his puffed-up, arrogant father had both approached Jacob Stillwater in an attempt to arrange a marriage between Hope and Colin. Hope's father had proclaimed in no uncertain terms, however, that the choice was his daughter's to make.

Hope had been shocked and highly discomfited when she'd turned down Colin's proposal to learn he'd actually believed she would agree to marry him. She'd known Colin since they were children. He'd always been a sullen, selfish boy. He'd begun being sexually aggressive with her when they both turned fourteen. Hope had never made it a secret how much she despised being in Colin's presence, so the realization that he genuinely seemed to think she'd agree to be his wife had left her stunned.

Colin Mason was the sort of specimen of manhood who might put a thinking woman off the concept of marriage forever.

Her temper had mostly calmed by the time she reached Indiana Avenue. It was foolish to waste one's energies on the likes of Colin Mason, after all.

Reaching Michigan Avenue was like making an abrupt turn from sleepy suburbia into the crashing liveliness of the proud, industrious city of Chicago. A parade of carriages progressed down the street, their ironclad wheels hitting the macadam pavement causing a ceaseless clatter. The chill of the November afternoon had set the city's coal furnaces to full-out action, inevitably deepening the gloom of an already cloudy day.

Visibility was so poor that Hope couldn't even see the thirteen-story clock tower of Central Station until she was a block away. Near Central Station the passage of trolley cars, trains and the calls of newsboys joined the cacophony of continual sound and movement.

Hope walked along briskly, as at home amidst the young, brash city as she was in the elegant silences of Prairie Avenue. Several of the mainstay families of Prairie Avenue had begun to migrate to the north shore to places like the suburban town of Lake Forest, disgusted by the industry and crass urbanization encroaching on their somber, august neighborhood.

Hope and her father were determined to stay in the midst of the city they both loved, however, even if some of their more elegant neighbors found their preference to be odd.

Many Prairie Avenue denizens already considered Jacob Stillwater to be an idiosyncratic gentleman, anyway, especially for the way he allowed his headstrong daughter to run free about the city, engaging in so many questionable, unladylike social reform activities.

And the Prairie Avenue matriarchs didn't know half of what she did, Hope thought wryly.

Hope's father was a new alderman of the ward, the first to he elected outside of the patronage of the crime boss Diamond Jack Fletcher. As a minister of the Second Presbyterian Church on Michigan and Cullerton, this was also Jacob Stillwater's parish.

Hope knew the Loop and the first ward as well as any young woman might know the sleepy avenues and Main Street of her small town.

Chicago was a city of industry, a town that knew where it was headed. As a young woman of determination and purpose, Hope innately understood and appreciated her place in the sprawling miasma of bustling humanity.

A shrill scream of terror suddenly pierced the loud clatter of the city. Horses neighed in panic. Hope turned in anxious dread. It was a horrible fact of urban life that on any single day, an average of two people were killed at rail crossings in Chicago's Loop or by merely stepping off the curb and being plowed down by a charging horse. She was extremely relieved to see that the screaming woman was very much still alive, grasping her elderly companion and looking shocked and whey-faced.

"Did you see him? Did you
see
him?" she shouted repeatedly. Every time her companion shook her head in rising confusion the woman asked the question more loudly.

"Poor unfortunate creature," Hope murmured under her breath. Progress marched triumphantly in the streets of Chicago, but so did its inevitable companions illness and mental stress. The rates of alcoholism and drug abuse were also rising alarmingly.

She paused in mid-stride when she realized that most people would think
she
was a "poor unfortunate creature" if they learned she had visions of a god in man form who made love to her through her bedroom mirror.

Not that Ryan Vincent Daire was a hallucination. Hope would never believe that in a million years. When she returned home later this evening she planned to prove it, too, by contacting Ryan again in whatever fashion she could contrive.

One did not become deflowered by hallucinations, after all. Even now she felt the slight soreness of her genitals, the pleasant tingling just beneath her skin that signaled her sensual awakening. Her cheeks heated as she recalled in a flash of detail her unlikely joining with Ryan. Strange such a thing should be termed "deflowering." Hope felt, in fact, that in some immeasurable, intangible fashion, she'd burst into full bloom beneath Ryan's touch.

She looked back one more time at the woman, feeling a tad guilty for assuming she was mad or drunk. Her companion appeared to have calmed her but she was talking nonstop and kept pointing to the middle of Michigan Avenue. She sighed as she crossed Lake Park Place, looking around to locate Evan and waving before she opened the wood-and-glass doors to Central Station. She would enter here and meet Evan at the drop-off, pickup port designated for carriages with her new charge in tow.

She lingered cautiously by the marble archway to the waiting room of the busy intercity train station. Sure enough she spied Marvin Evercrumb reading a newspaper as he sat on one of the polished wooden benches.

In her private thoughts, Hope referred to him as Marvin
Ever-scum.

Like Hope, Marvin had come to Central Station on this gray, dingy Chicago afternoon in order to meet the arrival of the Milwaukee Road, the southbound train that brought hundreds of people to Chicago daily, including the inevitable few young women interested in finding work as stenographers, typists or secretaries.

Unchaperoned, friendless women flowed into the urban center of Chicago in the year 1906 at unprecedented levels in history.

The Milwaukee Road was just one of many trains that Hope might meet on a given day.

Marvin was just one of many sleazy operators employed by Diamond Jack Fletcher who came to greet these vulnerable, wide-eyed women at Central Station.

They came from countless towns on several different trains. They immigrated from Missouri, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio or Kansas. Hope came to welcome them in her small way to a city she loved and to do her damndest to keep them out of the hands of men like Marvin. She took them to one of several respectable boardinghouses that she knew of and put them in contact with someone who could assist them in finding a job.

Marvin and his ilk lured their prey with enticements of high-paying jobs and luxurious, cheap housing. Sometimes the white slavers pitched their lines for the first time at the train stations and other times they utilized a network of females who befriended these women in other cities and towns; female operatives who told their companions of the glamour of Chicago and the high-paying jobs to be had for the asking. Guileless young women then boarded trains in St. Louis, Bloomington or Milwaukee, clutching their life possessions and a note with Marvin Evercrumb's or one of his oily peers' names on it.

Once they reached Chicago, Marvin proceeded to deliver these women directly to hell, taking them to one of several white slavery way stations in the city.

The victims were drugged and brutalized by men who were the equivalent of professional rapists. Afterward they were sold to the seedier Clark Street and Levee District brothels, forced into a life of degradation and imprisonment. Even the madam Addie Sampson, who was far more experienced in these matters than Hope, visibly shivered when she considered the fate of these young women once they were taken behind the closed doors of Levee brothels like the Sweet Lash.

Hope had been infuriated to the point of losing her appetite For a week when she discovered that Diamond Jack's reach extended to most of the police officers in the first ward and that very little if anything was done to stop this outrageous kidnapping and rutalization of young women. Once she'd gotten past her initial fury, however, Hope's practical nature had taken over. She left the speeches and lawmaking up to her father, deciding to counteract the white slavers in her own small way.

Perhaps she couldn't save everyone, but she could save a few. or now, that had to be enough.

Unfortunately, Marvin knew her by appearance and often did is best to circumvent Hope's circumventions. Hope had taken to coming to meet the trains earlier and earlier each time, but apparently Marvin was one step ahead of her today and had arrived even earlier than she. She frowned as she studied the criminal appareled in his expensive, sleek clothing. A portly gentleman entering the station caught her attention.