The Firebrand

by Susan Wiggs

  He picked up the bottle. “You can’t imagine what I’m feeling right now, Lucy.”

  The way he stared at her as he spoke made her whole body tingle. “I cannot,” she admitted. “Why don’t you tell me.”

  “I’m not used to this,” he said with rough-voiced candor. “I’ve grown accustomed to being alone.”

  “As have I,” she said. She understood all the things he would not say—he wasn’t used to closeness, to having a daughter who adored him, to having a wife again. Discomfited, she lifted her glass. “Here’s to you. You’ll drink this on your daughter’s wedding day after all—”

  He didn’t give her time to finish, but took away her glass and kissed her again, hard, pulling her up against him so that she felt his shape against her thighs. He was impulsive, aggressive, yet curiously unsure of himself, and for some reason that complicated her feelings for him. She had the sensation of drowning in some viscous substance—honey, perhaps—and a sudden panic shot through her. She was sinking, disappearing, turning into a slave to this man.

  Pushing her hands against his chest, she leaned back and studied his face, the scarred cheek and the trim moustache, the eyes with their unknowable depths.

  “Is something the matter?” he asked.

  “I have no idea.” She moved away and tried to organize her scattered thoughts. The moment of connection had disturbed her deeply, and she didn’t like feeling so vulnerable. To distract him, she asked, “Did you have something to do with Sarah Boggs’s husband being sent to work camp?”

  “He was owing on some debts,” Rand said. “He was sent up for failure to pay.”

  “I see.” She clung to a familiar thread of righteous resentment. “So a man may beat his wife and walk free, but when he defaults on a loan, he’s a criminal.”

  “You said he was a menace to his wife.” With a sharp movement, Rand tossed back his champagne. “I merely found an expedient way to separate him from her.”

  “I’m sure that’s appreciated,” she said grudgingly, “but it only helps one woman. Liberalizing the divorce laws would help ten thousand women like Sarah Boggs.”

  “And ten thousand who are nothing like her,” he said, his voice taking on the chilly, quiet tones of suppressed anger. He poured himself more champagne and took a drink. She felt both his anger and his desire rippling over her.

  Lucy stepped back, wanting to scream in frustration. Her body hungered for this man with a need that burned like wildfire, but he had the politics of a troglodyte. “We can’t seem to have a single conversation that doesn’t turn into a quarrel,” she said.

  He stepped closer, and dear Lord, he smelled like heaven, of the summer air and champagne and…just him. “Then we probably shouldn’t talk at all.”

  It took every shred of her willpower to duck down and step away before he could pull her against him. “I can’t do this,” she whispered, wanting him so badly she shook with it. “It’s not right. We’d be no better than animals, ruled by blind instinct rather than a true meeting of the heart and soul.”

  “Blind instinct is agreeable to me.”

  “Well, not to me.”

  “Then what is it your heart and soul need?”

  She ignored his sarcasm. “I suppose you could start by telling me about your mother.”

  A flash of fury banished the passion from his gaze and his fist tightened on the champagne flute. “You’ve been gossiping with my grandmother, then.”

  “Not gossiping. She was trying to help me understand why you’re so bitter, so rigid in your opinions about a woman’s place.”

  He finished his second glass of champagne and set it down too hard on the table. The delicate stem snapped, and Lucy winced at the sound. Rand scowled down at his cut hand, then negligently wrapped a handkerchief around it. “She had no idea of commitment, of permanence, of obedience—”

  “Obedience,” Lucy said. “She was a woman, not a hunting dog.”

  “She left like a prize bitch abandoning her litter,” he shot back. “A woman who becomes a mother is bound by every law of man and nature to serve her family.”

  “It’s frightening,” Lucy whispered, “how much you oppose freedom for women. Will you oppose it for your daughter one day, too?”

  “I’ll raise Maggie to accept herself as a woman rather than try to imitate a man,” he said, unwinding the handkerchief to check the cut. “What is it you find so fascinating about a man, Lucy, that you aspire to be one?”

  “I aspire to equality,” she said.

  “You want equality?” he demanded. “Fine, then I can give you equality.” He took a fat cigar from the inner pocket of his waistcoat. “You should learn to smoke. All men do.”

  “I choose not to adopt your bad habits.” Watching him rewrap his cut hand, she was reminded of a wild, wounded animal that would attack even someone trying to help. She amazed herself by wanting to help. He was angry, intractable and insulting. He showed no comprehension of her needs, her desires. His manhandling had the most peculiar, unsettling effect on her, and her reluctant fascination was growing harder and harder to deny.

  She forced herself to meet his challenging stare, but when she saw the anger burning in his eyes, she did something she rarely resorted to. She retreated from the argument.

  “Thank you for the champagne,” she said, then turned and hurried out of the room.

  Twenty-Two

  “I did it, Papa,” Maggie called, seated proudly in her pony cart. “I drove Roy all the way down to the esplanade and back, all by myself.”

  Rand beamed at her. “You’re an expert driver already. Bring him ‘round to the carriage house, now, and we’ll give him some water and a rest.”

  She clucked at the pony and concentrated on guiding him to the head of the drive, where Rand waited. It was a perfect Saturday afternoon of sailing clouds and dazzling sunshine, the lake a shifting, crystal mirror of the summer sky. Maggie helped him put up the pony and cart, laughing as Roy dipped his muzzle into the watering trough.

  As they worked, Rand watched Ivan and Silky from the corner of his eye. The dog lolled on the lawn, seemingly unaware of the cat slinking toward him through the shadows. The sneaky feline had lost all fear of her nemesis. She crouched, her emerald eyes held in a trance by the mastiff’s swishing tail. Then she pounced, sinking her claws into the tail.

  Ivan leaped up and spun around in a clumsy counterattack. Rand noted that the dog took soft-mouthed care not to injure the cat, even when she batted at his nose and sidled away, far enough to be out of reach but close enough to hold his interest.

  “I want to ride my bicycle now,” Maggie announced. “I want you to ride with me.”

  Rand scowled. He’d been dreading the request. Maggie had wheedled him into borrowing a large bicycle from Dylan Kennedy, and he had made a few attempts on it, but he regarded the contraption as a bone-crushing menace.

  “Maybe another time,” he said.

  “Now!” She grabbed his hand and sank to her knees. “Please, Papa. Mama’s busy with her old march, and you were so busy at the bank this week, you didn’t play with me one time.”

  “How about a game of catch?”

  “Bicycles,” she said. “Please.”

  He knew there was no point in arguing. Maggie could be as intractable as her mother when it came to getting her way. The fact was, he’d idly promised Maggie he would learn to ride, and he’d run out of excuses.

  “Only for you,” he muttered.

  “Hurrah!”

  Within minutes, Maggie was rolling happily along the broad pathway while Rand stood holding his machine by the tiller-bar, regarding it like a matador with a mad bull. “Get on get on get on!” Maggie yelled.

  Gritting his teeth, he rolled the cycle forward, resting one foot on the mounting-peg and propelling himself along with the other, but he resisted getting on.

  “Swing your leg over,” Maggie called, turning and gliding back toward him. “It’s easy. Mama says it’s easier than mountin
g a horse.”

  “Mama says, Mama says,” he grumbled. But the thought of Lucy provoked him into swinging his other leg up and over the saddle. He promptly fell off on the other side, banging his elbow on the hard ground. A strolling couple at the lakeside paused to watch.

  Maggie rode in a wide circle, roaring with laughter. “Try again, Papa. Try hard!”

  On the third humiliating attempt, he landed on the skinny seat. He was drenched in sweat and out of patience, but Maggie was so thrilled that he forced himself to press at the pedals. Every wobble and movement of the cycle went against all nature and instinct. When the thing leaned one way, he wanted to steer the wheel in the opposite direction, but each time, it resulted in a spill. Only his laughing daughter prevented him from wheeling the contraption down to the lake and pitching it to the depths.

  He managed a few wavering rotations of the wheel, but had no control over his direction. “Faster, Papa, it’s easier if you turn fast,” Maggie advised.

  He discovered that he had no choice. He had to speed up, or topple. As he rode boldly forward, he was glad Maggie was out of earshot, for he had nothing good to say about wheeled contraptions, staring pedestrians, hot summer days or women who bought bicycles for their daughters.

  “Look at you, Papa,” Maggie said. “You’re riding! You’re riding fast!”

  He was. Somehow, he had gained his balance and was actually rolling along at a good clip. Even the merest pebble or rise in the terrain intimidated him, but before long he learned to control the steering. He found a smooth rhythm, and laughed aloud with his success. Now he understood the appeal of this bizarre sport. It felt like flying.

  “All the way to the end of the lane,” Maggie directed, rolling past him. “Let’s dismount on the grass there.”

  “I’m an expert at dismounting,” he assured her, and demonstrated with a loud crash. Maggie followed suit and tumbled across the grass to him in a fit of giggles.

  As he watched his little girl, dappled by sunshine as she lay in the soft grass, he felt himself approaching that shining state of happiness that had always eluded him. This was the way things should be, he reflected. There was only one thing missing from the picture. But Lucy wasn’t likely to join them, not after their spat on Maggie’s birthday. He’d been on fire for her that night. He’d dared to touch and kiss her with the seductive command that had been so easy for him before the fire. The moment hadn’t lasted. His wife’s quicksilver temper and his own stony reserve had doused the brief passion.

  “You did wonderfully well,” Maggie declared.

  “Did I?” He inspected his shirt, torn at the elbow.

  “You have a scrape,” she said with grave concern. “When we get home, tell Mama to put Pond’s Extract on it.”

  Lucy would probably delight in telling him where to put the Pond’s Extract, he thought.

  “I came to say goodbye.” Dressed in a white gown decked with red and blue rosettes and ribbons, Lucy entered her husband’s room through the door that divided it from hers. That door had remained shut since the morning after their wedding, but today she felt brazen and self-assured.

  He hadn’t finished dressing, and his robe gaped open. She focused on the flash of bare chest, but he tugged the robe closed and turned his back on her. There was something almost furtive about the movement, and her confidence faltered a little.

  “Goodbye,” he said, and walked over to the washstand as if she weren’t there. While he stirred shaving soap into a lather, she glanced down at the book in her hand.

  At last, at long last, she’d found a copy of the works of the late Pamela Byrd. Lucy had stayed up past midnight reading the book. In searingly honest prose and poetry, Pamela Byrd had told her story. She had written of her ordeal as the object of an arranged marriage, likening herself to a bartered bale of wool, submerged and boiled in toxic dye in order to change her character, twisted into taut threads and woven into an unrecognizable pattern. It was a painful portrait of a fragile woman wed to a rigid, autocratic man who controlled her with threats only hinted at in the yellowed pages of the book. Lucy felt as though she’d unlocked an ancient and baffling puzzle.

  Rand would have been too young to understand his mother’s turmoil; all he knew was that she had left. She had spilled agony, fear and outrage into her writing, taking refuge in doses of ether and laudanum. According to a biographical note in the book, she’d died less than a year after leaving her family. Lucy had wept for her, and now she was bringing the truth to Pamela’s son. Lucy knew what she was risking by giving him the book. He would either thank her for it, or condemn her for stirring up bitter memories and exposing his late father’s cruelty. But she had to try. She couldn’t bear another day of this icy truce.

  “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 would 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?”

  Twenty-Three

  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.