The Firebrand

by Susan Wiggs

  She suddenly wanted him to stop talking, for she didn’t wish to share his pain. Yet for Maggie’s sake, Lucy knew she had to hear everything.

  “This will sound odd to you, Mr. Higgins, but I truly do wish to know what your life has been like.”

  “Why?” he demanded. “Why would you care? Have you another sexual proposition?”

  She chose not to dignify him with an answer, but responded with another question, one she hoped would shift the mood from bitterness to honesty. “What happened after the fire?” She pictured them that night, handsome and golden, standing in the glow of everyone’s admiration. After her idiotic blunder, she’d stood back and watched, thinking them the most romantic, luckiest couple in the world.

  And an unholy envy had burned in her heart.

  “After we lost Christine, I couldn’t even be present to comfort Diana,” he admitted. “I lay unconscious while she made a full recovery. Her wounds were fortunately superficial—or so I was told. But something broke the night we lost Christine. In the worst moment of our lives I failed to console her. Perhaps that is why she left.” His face flushed. “Though on the legal decree she gave quite a different reason.”

  Lucy couldn’t bring herself to ask what that reason was. Not yet. His former wife had a side to this story, too, Lucy reminded herself. “A great tragedy can change the very fabric of life,” she said, thinking of her mother.

  He steepled his fingers together and held her gaze with his. “I had this house built for her, but it was an act of futility. With Christine gone, Diana and I had nothing to hold us together.”

  Lucy didn’t comprehend how love could simply stop in the face of adversity, yet she held her tongue, troubled by the idea that he had no wife. She’d come here today thinking to find a loving family. If she made her great revelation now, she would be making it to a bitter, wounded man who had lost the ability to love.

  Without a mother in the picture, she must proceed with care. Perhaps, she thought, this was a test of her true convictions. She had always claimed women and men to be equal. She had to believe a man could be every bit as good a parent as a woman.

  Agitated, she stood and went to the porch rail, standing with her back to him. It wasn’t too late to change her mind. He still didn’t know. He might never know. Oh, how she wanted to run away and never tell him.

  Silence hung between them as the moments passed, the lemonade glasses sweating and forgotten, the breeze scented with the blue freshness of the lake. Lucy tried to imagine how he’d felt, having lost his daughter and then his wife as he lay wounded.

  In the distance, Maggie and the dog skipped along the beach. The little girl waved at them, then ran in circles around Grace Higgins, who sat on a painted bench, watching Maggie’s antics from beneath the fringed parasol.

  Turning, Lucy contemplated Mr. Higgins and wondered why his sadness hurt her.

  He was too damaged, she thought in apprehension. Even learning the truth about Maggie would not banish the pain in his eyes.

  Then a thought struck her. Perhaps he and his former wife would reconcile if they realized they hadn’t lost their daughter after all.

  “She is quite a lively child,” he said at length, and she realized he’d been watching Maggie, too.

  Gathering her courage, she asked, “Do you disapprove of liveliness in a child?”

  His face closed. “It is not for me to approve or disapprove. My knowledge of child rearing is extremely limited.”

  “Maggie is the greatest blessing of my life.” In anguish, Lucy sat down and braced her hands on the arms of the chair. “Do you understand that? The greatest and most precious part of me. She is all my heart and soul.”

  He looked startled, then his expression softened. “Actually, Miss Hathaway, I do understand.”

  She caught her lower lip in her teeth, trying to keep in the request she knew she must make. And then she made herself say it. “Tell me about your child. Not how you lost her, but…how you loved her.”

  He fell still, and she sensed his hesitation. He turned his glass around and around in his hand. “Did you really come here to ask me these things? Surely you have better things to do with your time than to poke around in my past.”

  Lucy took a chance. “Can it make you feel any worse to speak of it?”

  He glared at her, and she feared she’d lost him. But then he began to speak. “The day Christine was born, I bought two dozen bottles of Sire de Gaucourt champagne. I drank an entire bottle myself in celebration, but I put the rest aside. I thought what a fine thing it would be to serve that champagne on the day she married.”

  Lucy felt the depth of his loss in each softly spoken word. “Do you still have the champagne?”

  He nodded. “After the fire, it was shipped from Philadelphia with the rest of our household goods. Now each year on the date of her birth, I make a fire in the study hearth, prop up a photograph of the two of us together and drink a bottle of that champagne.” His eyes, now dull with grief, didn’t even seem to see her. “I’m not sure why I do it. I suppose because the taste of the champagne always brings back the joy of that first day I held my tiny baby in my arms.”

  Lucy nearly reeled with his dizzying anguish. It seemed to pulse in the long silence. Until today, she’d never known her daughter’s true birthday. But this man had always kept the day in his heart.

  When she looked up at him, his image blurred within a shimmering veil of tears. But she did not shed them, and her chest hurt with the effort.

  Birds warbled in the trees as the breeze sifted through the chestnut leaves. Down on the lawn, Maggie brought Mrs. Higgins an offering in her cupped hands. They bent their heads together, Maggie’s brown curls a bright contrast with the old lady’s somber black bonnet. Maggie opened her hands and a frog popped out with a frantic leap. Maggie went bounding after the frog while Grace snapped open a fan and fanned herself as she sagged back against the bench.

  Lucy stole a glance at Mr. Higgins, and his expression shocked her. Far from the stern disapproval she’d expected, he was grinning from ear to ear, shoulders shaking with quiet laughter. “Now there’s something we don’t often see around here. How old is your daughter, Miss Hathaway?”

  “She is five years old.” Lucy paused and swallowed hard, plucking courage out of abject terror. Her next words would change all their lives forever. “She will turn six on…June 24.”

  She held her breath and watched his reaction. The smile that had lit his face froze until it was no longer a smile but a hostile grimace.

  “There’s no simple way to put this,” Lucy said, plunging ahead, afraid to stop. “So I must be blunt. Mr. Higgins, your daughter did not die in the fire.”

  Ten

  There was a sort of pain so deep and intense that for a moment it was indistinguishable from ecstasy. Rand knew this anguish with the same familiarity as others knew the sound of their own voices. Unlike ecstasy, the agony that came after the first shock had the power to crush his soul.

  Nothing changed outwardly at first. He still sat on the porch in the white wicker chair, watching the sunlight filtering through the trees. He still smelled the light peppery scent of the daisies that bordered the verge surrounding the porch. He was still aware of the woman sitting just a few feet away, watching him intently.

  Who the hell was this creature? She’d made him bare his soul to her. She’d drawn from him things he’d never told anyone, and when she’d excavated the weakest, most damaged part of him, she had moved in for the kill.

  With an iron control clamping down on the howling grief inside him, he set aside his glass. “Why—” His voice broke over the word. He had to clear his throat and swallow before starting over. “Why in God’s name would you lie like this?”

  Her jaw dropped. A small explosive sound of disbelief came from her. “I would never lie about such a thing, Mr. Higgins. What do you take me for?”

  Icy heat crawled over his skin, awakening vivid and searing memories of the dark, lo
st time after the fire. Upon learning of Christine’s death and of Diana’s divorce suit, he’d wished with unholy fervor for death. Only the propitious arrival of his grandmother, demanding in her imperious way that he look after her in her old age, had persuaded him to rise from his sickbed.

  But he had still wanted to die.

  “I take you,” he said slowly, “for a sadistic little radical who would go to any lengths to save The Firebrand. Get the hell out of my house.”

  She made her hands into fists on the arms of the chair. “You think I’m telling you this in order to get you to approve my loan?”

  He didn’t trust himself to reply.

  “Sweet, sweet heaven,” she whispered. Her eyes drifted halfway closed as if she might faint. It was a stunning performance; she looked appalled and devastated by his accusation, even as she hid her disappointment that the trick had failed.

  “Or perhaps—” He thought for a moment. “Perhaps you’re more clever than I give you credit for. It’s significant that you would broach the topic upon learning I’m no longer married. Could it be that you’re trying to trap me into marrying you?”

  “M…marry?” Her voice was little more than a squeak. “You?”

  He was well aware that he was considered hideous by women. His ruined looks, combined with the gossip in the wake of his divorce, had effectively driven off any prospects. It was just as well. He didn’t want to remarry. Ever. Why would he risk himself like that again?

  “I understand most decent ladies wouldn’t consider marrying a monster like me,” he said, “but I imagine at your advanced stage of spinsterhood, you cannot afford to be too particular.”

  “How dare you—”

  “Your bastard needs a rich father, no respectable man will have you, and so you’ve come to me with this cock-and-bull story. I have only one precious thing, Miss Hathaway—the memory of my daughter. Clearly you have no respect for that.”

  Her face was very white, a stark contrast to her dark hair and rosy lips. “How did you ever get such a low opinion of me?”

  “You earned it, Miss Hathaway.” He felt weary, drained, as if he’d been in a fight and lost. “Now take the little hoyden and leave. Please.”

  “Believe me, I’m tempted. If only you knew how hard it was for me to come here, to bring you the truth when it would have been so much easier to hide it from you forever.”

  He glared stonily out at the lake, where water and sky met in a hard, flat blue line. Lucy Hathaway rose from her seat and opened the leather bag she’d been dragging along. A small, soft parcel wrapped in tissue paper landed in his lap.

  “Take that away,” he snapped.

  “You’d best see what it is first.”

  He wanted to fling the thing aside, whatever it was, but when he grabbed it, the tissue fell away, leaving behind the faint scent of dried lavender and bergamot. The tissue wrapping drifted to the porch, and his big rough hands were suddenly filled with the softness of a woven blanket.

  Soft yellow lambswool fibers. A one-inch fringe all around. A carefully hand-stitched border—

  His head snapped up. “Where the devil did you get this?”

  She held up a sepia-toned photograph in a small oval frame and turned it toward him. “Your baby was lost that night, but by a miracle she did not die. That blanket was wrapped around her when she was dropped from a window of the Sterling House Hotel.”

  Rand studied the picture. His heart plunged, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. A terrible heat burned in his chest.

  Christine.

  It was his baby, holding the familiar blanket, wearing an unfamiliar little gown and a pair of tiny shoes.

  “I had it taken,” Lucy Hathaway explained with incredible gentleness, “a week after the fire. So I could circulate her picture to the papers.”

  Christine.

  He looked from the photograph in Lucy’s hand to the child laughing and playing on the lawn. Deep inside his head, he heard a roar, gathering strength as it spilled like a storm through him. During the explosion that had almost killed him, the all-encompassing light had imparted the sense that he existed somewhere outside of himself. That same sensation burst through him now, and it was almost like another kind of pain.

  And then he did the unthinkable. He pressed the woven blanket to his face and nearly exploded as he tried to take in the revelation. His baby had survived after all. He felt a searing regret for all the years he’d missed with her, yet sheer wonder shone through. She was alive.

  Lowering the blanket, he stared at the child in the yard, trying to reconcile her with the image he’d carried in his heart for nearly five years. But he was looking at a little stranger. How could he fail to recognize his daughter?

  He felt a tentative touch, like a bird alighting on his shoulder. Lucy Hathaway’s hand patted him awkwardly as she spoke in low tones. “Oh, Mr. Higgins. I can’t imagine the shock of this. I didn’t know how else to tell you.”

  “How long have you known?” he asked. “Goddammit, how long have you kept this from me?”

  She bridled, taking a step back. “I can’t believe you’d think me capable of carrying on a deception.”

  “I have no idea what you are capable of. Why would you come forward now?”

  “I only just found out myself. My first inkling was at our meeting in your office. Until I saw the picture of your child, I believed Maggie to be an orphan. The photograph proves she is not.”

  “It does,” he whispered, his gaze riveted on the child. Then he unfroze from his shock and leaped to his feet, striding across the lawn. Christine. Christine was alive! He could think of nothing but taking her in his arms, claiming her as his own.

  “Wait,” cried Lucy, racing to catch up with him. “What the devil do you think you’re doing?”

  “I am going to my daughter,” he said, the words tasting as sweet as young wine.

  She planted herself in front of him and grabbed his arms. He had no choice but to stop short or bowl the determined creature over. “What?” he asked, annoyed by the delay. Yet at the same time, her proximity was as profoundly unsettling as ever.

  “You will do nothing of the sort,” she said in a low voice so deadly serious that it cut through his agitation. “I’ve said nothing to Maggie. It would be cruel to deliver this shocking news with no preparation and no plan for what will happen next.”

  “There is no need for a plan,” he said. “Christine will return to the family where she belongs.”

  Lucy’s face turned paper-white. “No—”

  “Get out of my way,” he said.

  “Maggie is mine, too,” she said with a voice of steel. “You’re a stranger to her.”

  The blunt words hammered through his single-minded determination, and suddenly he understood what was at stake. She’d raised his child as her own. She’d been Christine’s mother.

  Like a slap, the realization cleared his mind. He couldn’t simply grab the child and claim her like a portmanteau left at the hatcheck. He forced himself to subdue the instincts screaming at him to seize the child skipping along the lakeshore walk.

  “You must think me a complete ass,” he said.

  “Well,” she said, “not completely.” She pulled him over to a granite garden bench, motioning for him to sit beside her. “If I thought that, I would never have brought Maggie to you. But I’m counting on you to be reasonable.” He started to say something, but she held up her hand, stern as a schoolmarm. “No, you will listen. I’ll tell you when it’s your turn to speak.”

  He forced himself to wait, conceding to her logic. This was too new; he didn’t want to frighten Christine. He took a deep, shuddering breath, catching the scent of the blanket again. He’d never lost control like this before, not even in private. He wondered why he didn’t feel more humiliated by his show of emotion, his rash behavior. Perhaps it was because Lucy was being so matter-of-fact about it all.

  He forced himself to stay seated. “Tell me how you found Christine.�
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  “I was making my way home through the fire,” she said. “I headed for the bridge in front of the Sterling House. The hotel was burning out of control, and I found myself quite alone.” A distant horror shone in her eyes.

  Rand remembered the young idealist she had been, and he could easily picture her standing alone before the inferno. Any other woman would have run. But not Lucy.

  “There was a movement in a window,” she continued. “I think it was two floors up.”

  “Our suite of rooms was on the second story.” He tightened his fists in the blanket. He kept staring at the little girl on the lawn across the way, expecting some magical shimmer to bond them instantly. But even to his searching, hungry eyes, she resembled any child of nearly six, not one special child in particular.

  “There was a woman holding a bundle of bedding,” she said.

  “That would have been Miss Damson, the nurse Diana had engaged to look after Christine.” He shut his eyes, imagining the scene. Becky, frantic, the baby wrapped up to cushion the fall. He remembered his annoyance at Diana for leaving Christine that night. But if Diana had stayed home, then she might have died, too, as poor Becky Damson had.

  “Earlier in the evening, I had seen stranded people dropping pets and belongings from windows when there was no other way to leave the building,” Lucy explained. “So when I saw the bundle, I didn’t even really think. I held out my arms to catch it. Immediately afterward, the building—” She paused and blinked fast, and he realized the fire had been traumatic for her, too. “The building collapsed. In seconds it went from a tower of fire to a pile of burning rubble. I ran to get clear of the flames, and then I—” She took a deep breath. “Then I discovered what—who I was holding. She was frightened but unharmed.

  “My only thought was to reach a place of safety. My parents’ home was spared by the fire. I brought the baby there.” She bit her lip. “When I arrived home, I learned that my father had been injured battling the flames. He died moments before I got there.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Hathaway,” Rand said. The night had held its terrors for her, too, then. Only hours before the fire, she had boldly aired her views for a well-heeled crowd and brazenly propositioned Rand, never flinching as she tilted back her head and regarded him with a sparkling defiance. It was hard to imagine anything bad happening to such a woman, yet she’d lost someone dear to her that night. And she’d found someone dear to him. She’d saved his baby’s life. He wanted to fall to his knees, kiss her feet, call her a miracle worker.