Lawless (34 page)

“How far is Sebor Street?”

“Just a few blocks north.”

“We shouldn’t go out of our way, Gideon,” Julia put in. “The more bouncing and bumping the boy takes before someone looks after him—”

But Ericsson paid no attention. He turned away from Torvald and, with a curious shine in his firelit eyes, walked out of the barn.

His erratic steps took him toward the back of his cottage. Gideon and Julia exchanged startled looks.

In the yards on either side of Ericsson’s property, people were shouting at one another as they hauled furniture from their houses. Sparks were landing on the roofs of almost every building on the block.

Ericsson tottered up the back steps. Julia gaped. “What the devil’s wrong with him?
He’s going back inside!”

Gideon ran. He caught the big man just as he opened the cottage door. “Ericsson, don’t be a fool. These places will go up any minute. Help me get Torvald into the carriage!”

Ericsson swung around as a foot-long piece of burning wood went sailing overhead. It plummeted suddenly, struck the roof of the barn. Ericsson’s lips glistened. His eyes had an irrational light in them. He threw Gideon’s hand off. “Leave me alone.”

“Listen, you mustn’t—”

The big man shoved him. “There are things I have to save! Helga’s jewelry. Our wedding photograph. I have no other picture of her.”

“There isn’t time!” Gideon shouted, trying to drag the man off the stoop. Ericsson let out a deranged howl and clubbed him on the side of the head. Gideon sprawled in the yard. The rear door crashed. Ericsson vanished into the cottage.

Stumbling up, Gideon called his name one more time. Despite the noise around him, he heard Ericsson lumbering through the darkened house, overturning furniture and yelling unintelligible words. Names, perhaps. His son’s. His wife’s—

Well, first things first. He’d worry about Ericsson as soon as they moved the boy to the landau.

Back in the barn he smelled smoke. Wisps of it curled around the rafters. The roof was catching. The alley door banged in the wind. Gideon pointed at the floor. A snakelike path dampened by blood led to the rear entrance.

“Florian’s gone.”

“Good heavens!” Julia exclaimed. They both stared at the banging door, then at the trail left by Florian’s body. “He crawled out and I didn’t even notice.”

Gideon shrugged. “Good riddance.” He didn’t really feel as callous as his words made him sound. A man hurt as badly as Florian would be helpless out in that raging red darkness.

He handed Julia his revolver. “Hang on to it in case we have any difficulty. The street sounds like total bedlam. I need a long piece of your petticoat.”

She laid the gun on top of her reticule, lifted her skirt and tore the ruffle from her petticoat hem. He carefully wound the cloth around Torvald’s back and chest to soak up the blood. Then he lifted the ten-year-old and put his ear close to the boy’s mouth. He felt the warmth of Torvald’s shallow breathing. How long they could keep him alive was anybody’s guess.

They hurried down the passage between the houses. As they stepped onto the sidewalk, Gideon felt the heat of the wood walk through the soles of his boots. More fire equipment had arrived. Directly across Taylor Street, cottages were burning. Streams of water arcing from the east and west struck the flaming houses, but with little effect. The fire seemed to be consuming the entire block to the south.

People were pouring out of houses along the north side of Taylor. They carried articles of clothing, framed pictures, piles of books, small items of furniture. Most of the people rushed in the direction of the river.

A shirtless hairy man staggered out of Ericsson’s rental cottage with a heavy chair in his arms. A wizened woman followed him onto the porch. The man made straight for Julia’s landau. Miraculously, the vehicle hadn’t been stolen though it obviously was about to be.

The terrified bays stamped and tugged on their tethers, their rolling eyes huge and red. Julia marched up to the hairy man as he heaved the chair into the back of the landau.

“Get that out of my carriage!”

From the first cross street to the west, a four-horse steam pumper thundered around the corner and slowed to a stop. A two-wheeled hose cart came rolling right behind.

The hairy man paid no attention to Julia.

“Are you deaf?” she cried. “Remove that chair this instant! We’ll take your children if you have any, but we’re not hauling personal belongings.” She pointed at Gideon with Torvald in his arms. “We already have one wounded youngster to take. And Mr. Ericsson—”

The man eyed Gideon, then looked at Julia again. Her reticule was in the same hand as the revolver and hid it. The man scratched his stomach.

“Well, ma’am, I hear what you say. But it don’t appear either of you people can stop me from moving whatever I damn please. Martha and I got no youngsters. We do have some valuable pieces which we aim to cart away in that buggy whether you like it or—”

Calmly, Julia shifted her reticule to her other hand. She raised the LeMat and pointed it at the man’s brow.

“Take that chair out of my carriage or I’ll blow your head away.”

The hairy man looked as if he might swoon. He staggered to the landau, removed the chair and carried it to the cottage porch. Then, with one more terrified glance at Julia, he shoved his wife through the front door and vanished.

Gideon couldn’t suppress a smile as he laid Torvald on the backseat. Julia didn’t notice. She was in the street studying the sky, turning slowly from one quarter of the horizon to the next until she’d made a full circle. She walked back to him.

“Gideon, I’m no expert on such things, but this looks very bad. Just that one block of buildings between here and DeKoven Street is on fire. But the glare is already so bright, I can read the courthouse clock. And it’s a good mile to the northeast.”

She was right. From a few feet out in the street, the clock numerals were clearly visible. The houses on the other side of Taylor were crumbling and disappearing behind a rampart of flame more white than red. The heat was so intense, sweat poured down Gideon’s face. Paint was beginning to bubble on the front of the first Ericsson cottage. More fire equipment swung into the street from the intersection to the east. Soon two more pumpers were directing streams of water on the scorching, wind-tossed bed of embers that had replaced the houses on the south side.

Sparks rained down on Julia suddenly—a whole firefly cloud of them. Gideon leaped to her, jerked her against him, smothered the sparks with his hands. People kept streaming by, carrying everything from tabby cats to chamber pots. There were children fleeing with adults, and some by themselves, their faces confused and frightened. The din was incredible; he had to shout.

“I’ve got to find Ericsson.”

She nodded, then pointed. The roof of the front cottage was starting to burn. “Hurry!”

He ran along the side of the first cottage and in through the front door of the second. He glanced back, appalled at how quickly the fire consumed these wooden structures. Already almost the entire roof of the front house was ablaze—and as he stood in the dark hallway yelling Ericsson’s name, a scrap of blazing roof paper floated to the front stoop of this one. Almost instantly, the dry wood smoked, then burst into flame.

He thought he heard heavy trampling in a rear room.
“Ericsson?”

Wind-driven smoke poured through the house. He coughed as he staggered along a narrow hall and looked in each room. The heat inside the cottage had risen fifteen to twenty degrees in less than a minute. As the flames spread, the smoke took on a cherry glow.

He stopped at the last doorway, on the east side at the very back. Inside he glimpsed a hulking form holding something white. He swallowed and wiped his stinging eye.

The west side of the house began to burn, the fire leaping out both horizontally and vertically at incredible speed. Smoke poured through open windows on that side, but there was enough light for him to see Ericsson with a silver picture frame under one arm and a yellowed wedding dress in his big hands. As he fondled the lace on the dress, tears streamed from his blue eyes.

“Ericsson, you’ve got to come out of here!” Gideon yelled as smoke hid the other man for a moment.

“Is that you?” Ericsson shouted.

“What?”

“Is that you, Helga?”

Gideon whispered, “Oh my God.”

“Helga, we must go find my sister. She may be in danger!”

Gideon darted forward through coiling smoke, touched the wedding dress—

Ericsson went berserk. He dropped the picture frame and flung the dress behind him. He battered Gideon’s head with both fists. Gideon was hurled against an old wardrobe. He struck his temple so hard, he nearly lost consciousness.

Snorting, Ericsson aimed a kick at his groin. It missed only because Gideon pivoted at the last moment. Ericsson’s boot hit his calf. Everything—the rosy light, the smoke, his lumbering, demented assailant—grew more blurred. He was afraid Ericsson would land a solid blow and leave him unconscious to die.

But the big man picked up the wedding dress, secured the framed photograph under his arm and blundered back into the hall—just as the lintel of the room opposite burned in half and fell. A heavy piece of it struck Ericsson’s head.

He staggered. His hair caught fire, then the wedding dress. Gideon rushed to try to save the other man but flames leaped between and drove him back. Coughing and gasping, he ran to a window on the east side of the house. He leaped through headfirst, nearly breaking his shoulder when he hit the ground. He managed to gain his feet and run toward Taylor Street. Behind him he heard Ericsson screaming his wife’s name in a fading voice.

The first cottage on the lot, almost completely burned, was starting to collapse as he passed its rear corner. Its side wall bowed outward, the boards splitting and crumbling into red ash. Gideon leaped out of the way. He bounced against the wall of the adjacent house, which had not yet been consumed. Bits of burning board fell around him but he missed being inundated by the worst of the fiery debris. Guided only by his sense of direction, he finally reached the street. He had to jump over the fire shooting up between the planks of the sidewalk.

“Gideon? Here!”

He followed the cry and, in the center of Taylor Street, saw an incredible sight: Julia standing in front of the landau, reins in one hand, revolver in the other. In the carriage, crowding every inch of space except the seat where Torvald lay, were children from age three to early adolescence. There must have been eight, ten, a dozen, hanging off the back, clinging to the footboards.

“’Twas the O’Leary dairy barn. I heard that for sure,” one youngster shrieked to another as Gideon dragged himself up to the seat and seized the reins. There was no protest from Julia. She took her place beside him. She leaned her head against his shoulder and held his arm.

“I thought I’d lost you. I collected all these temporary orphans, but I thought I’d lost you. I’m so thankful you’re all right.”

She sounded ready to weep, yet at the same time there was overwhelming relief—even joy—in her voice.

Gideon whipped up the team. Julia brandished the revolver to drive off adults who wanted to take the children’s places. They drove a block east, then north toward the nearest bridge. The whole sky seemed alight, though only the area behind them was burning—no, there was a second large fire several blocks north. “That’s St. Paul’s Catholic going up!” exclaimed a boy in back.

“So it is,” Julia said in dismay. “It must be all the airborne debris—good Lord. I just remembered something else. The Bateham shingle mill is within a block of the church. Wood and more wood—”

Gideon veered the team and narrowly avoided a collision with another steam pumper racing in the opposite direction. They fought across a south branch bridge through terrified crowds. It took them the better part of two hours to reach the mansion on South State.

The servants helped unload the children. Some of them had been driven to safety with the permission of their mothers or fathers who had loaded them into the landau and then fled on foot. Others had lost track of their parents in the confusion and had just been plucked up from Taylor Street. Most of the youngsters were laughing and singing as if the whole outing were a lark.

Gideon carried Torvald to Carter’s bedroom. Ericsson’s son was still alive, but pale and barely breathing.

Returning downstairs, Gideon fortified himself with a good jolt of bourbon. He’d have laughed at Julia’s disheveled hair, sooty face and torn dress if the situation hadn’t been so grim.

“I’ve got to fetch this doctor of yours. Will you write the directions for me?”

“Oh, Gideon, it’s such a long way—”

“Yes, but the fire’s confined to the west side of the river.”

“So far.”

“Julia, the boy will die unless we get help!”

“All right, all right. I’m being selfish.” She avoided his eye as she added, “Thinking of you instead of him. Come into the library.”

He left his ruined waistcoat on a chair and rolled up the sleeves of his sweated shirt as he followed her. She sat down and began to write. He consulted his watch. A few minutes after midnight. He was exhausted. Parts of his hair and eyebrows had been singed away. His clothing and his skin smelled of smoke. He’d inhaled so much of it, his lungs hurt.

Suddenly a servant ran in—the man who’d been sent to the highest point of the house, the northwest tower, as a lookout.

“Madam, the fire’s leaped the river to the south side.”

Julia laid her pen aside. “You’re sure?”

“Yes, madam, I can clearly see something burning in the vicinity of the gasworks or Conley’s Patch.”

And the wind’s blowing northeast,
Gideon thought. Directly across the route he had to take to the far north side. Well, it would be a devil of a lively story for the
Beacon
if he lived to write it.

While the servant waited, Julia handed Gideon the directions and in the next breath said, “Don’t go. We’ll find another doctor somewhere close by.”