This morning, as she stood letting the pleasant sunshine bathe and warm her, she did resemble, if not a queen, then a woman of high station and good income. Her dress and matching hat were bright red silk; there were twelve yards of material in the gored skirt alone. Beneath it, supported by a canvas belt around her waist, a bustle formed by six springlike wires gave a provocative lift to the rear of the skirt. The bustle was a new fashion; very modish. It was hell's torture to put on and wear, but she certainly liked the way it enhanced her sexual appeal.
Unfortunately, on the fringes of Conley's Patch, she appealed to the wrong sorts. A seedy, bleary-eyed roughneck came weaving toward her from a lane between packing-box shanties.
"Hello, lovely." He blocked the plank walk, stinking like a whiskey works. His bloodshot eyes roved over her breasts. "I reckon from that dress you're a working girl. How much?"
Ashton's lips compressed. One delicate red-gloved hand whipped up her red parasol and laid it hard on his cheek. She shoved her other glove under his nose. The outline of a huge square wedding diamond showed through the fabric.
"You dirty, illiterate wretch. I'm a respectable married woman."
"You look like a whore to me." He reached for her.
Ashton jabbed the point of the parasol into his groin, hard. His eyes practically crossed as he reeled back, clutching himself. A couple of better-dressed gentlemen stepped between Ashton and the derelict.
"Thank you kindly," she said in her sweetest voice. They tipped their derbies while restraining the drunk, and she swept on by, bound for the Van Buren Street bridge. No doubt she was late, and she dared not be late on this important, not to say fateful, day.
Hurrying, she reflected on the clumsy assault. It was at least proof that at age thirty-one, she hadn't lost her looks. If anything, she believed, the passage of time was improving them. It wasn't improving much else. She detested the near-penniless life she led. Often, she couldn't believe how far she and the sometimes' curmudgeonly old man had gone as partners. Santa Fe to San Francisco, to Virginia City and then Chicago.
So much scheming, so much struggle. And so much of the future riding on those drawings of a piano that Will had made, and made over, scores of times, strewing their squalid room with tracing paper as his pencil flew, sometimes until three or four in the morning, as he searched his own experience, and obscure German and French books containing manufacturing diagrams, for ways to cut a dime here, another dime there.
It was all culminating today. Everything. The money brought from Virginia City, slightly over one hundred thousand dollars, carried in a satchel. The two loans negotiated locally to pay rent and the wages of Will's four workmen and the salesman he'd hired away from Hochstein's. To get one of the loans, Ashton had been required to spend the night with a banker, a dreadful man with a hog's belly who heaved on top of her for hours and never once managed to get it up.
After his first fifteen minutes of effort she had decided she didn't want one of the banker's trouser buttons for her box. For most of the night she lay staring past his head into the dark. She envisioned herself richly dressed, wealthy and powerful, thanks to Will's success. She saw herself returning to Mont Royal and confronting the arrogant Madeline with any number of choices, each designed to hurt her and drive her from the family land that was Ashton's by right.
Oh, she'd done a lot for Will Fenway and for their scheme, and almost being crushed to death by the fat, sweaty banker was only part of it. First, she'd seduced a records clerk in San Francisco. Not so bad; he was homely but virile. It took her only a week to pry from him a forged certificate of marriage, showing that she had wed Mr. Lamar Powell on February 1, 1864.
Although she now went by the name Mrs. Willard P. Fenway for convenience, she was actually married to a man who was, so far as she knew, still in Virginia City, Nevada. Ezra Learning was a red-faced, white-haired, sad-eyed widower with no family. He was shy, and a clod around women. Ashton had to arrange a seemingly accidental meeting — a little fainting spell on the street — and pretend to be shy herself, and destitute over the death of Mr. Powell. She did most of the courting, filling Mr. Learning with one full bottle of Mumm's to induce him to propose.
In bed Learning proved a reasonably lively husband. Much more lively than good old Will, who had tried just once, in San Francisco, and at the end of a half hour sighed, "That does it. I like to sleep with you to keep warm, if you don't mind, but I reckon I'm too old for the other part. We'll keep it at partners. What do you say?"
From Ezra Learning she purloined a fly button. He made fairly frequent use of her charms during the eight months of their marriage. He was chief of the local claims office, and naturally happy to assist his own dear wife in establishing her clear title to the Mexican Mine, her late husband's property. She had her marriage certificate, didn't she?
Ashton hired men to reopen the mine, which at first looked highly promising. The silver-bearing ore reduced to the equivalent of one hundred three thousand dollars before the vein ran out. She quietly withdrew the money from her bank account and late one night while Ezra Learning snored, she decamped on the stage with Will Fenway, who had been hiding out in a cheap room, impatiently sketching pianos.
Oh, yes, a complex, labyrinthine path to Chicago, all right. With many confusions and irritations. She posed as Mrs. Fenway but was still Mrs. Learning. She dared not show her beauty to posterity by means of a photograph. Will was adamant about that. When he first mentioned it, a day after they arrived in the city, Ashton threw a shoe at him. Next morning, to get back at him, she marched to Field, Leitner and Co., a fine department store on State Street. There, with money from their bank account — money reserved for the piano company — she bought the scarlet outfit, including the bustle.
Will was furious. He cursed her as she'd never heard him curse before. Ashton realized then that she'd met a man whose strength matched hers. Old and stooped and red-eyed as he was from all the worry and night work, he was neither intimidated by her beauty and haughty airs nor upset when she retaliated for his cursing with screams, saying she'd leave him.
Pushed past his limit, he slapped her. Just once, but hard enough to tumble her onto their mussed bed. Then he showed her his fist.
"You go ahead. I've put my whole soul and all your money into this scheme. If you don't care any more, if you don't want to go back to South Carolina the way you're always saying, you just walk out that door. I'll bank all the money we make, and then I'll find myself another woman."
Ashton was thunderstruck. She pleaded, begged, cried, humbled herself until he agreed to make up. She had not crossed him or defied him since.
This was the reason for her haste as she turned west on Van Buren to the wooden bridge over the south branch of the Chicago River. When strangers eyed the tight red silk on her bodice and the provocative bounce of her bustle, she tossed her head and glared. Her heart belonged to Will and what he was about to reveal today. Her heart was wrapped up in him, and so was her money, not to mention her unshakable determination to return to Mont Royal someday and make them pay — Madeline, Little Miss Goody Brett, Charles — every damn one of them.
West of the river, Chicago became an unlovely near-slum crowded with saloons, lumberyards, woodworking mills, boat jetties on the water, and the bleak, cheap residences of a lot of Irish and Swedes and Bohemians. Here, on Canal Street, a dark stairway led up past a crude depiction of a hand pointing to FENWAY'S PIANO COMPANY.
She dashed up, breathless, and into the loft, which was piled with iron frames, spools of different grades of piano wire, unassembled cases from Schoenbaum's in New Jersey, crates of actions from Seaverns's in Massachusetts. Nothing in the piano was Will Fenway's creation except the design.