The Firebrand. Susan Wiggs

noticed that they sat alone in the rear of the salon. She cleared her throat. “I beg your pardon?”

      “Please don’t. I was simply introducing myself. My name is Randolph Higgins.”

      “Oh.” She felt as gauche as a schoolgirl unprepared for lessons.

      “I believe the usual response is ‘How do you do?’ followed by a reciprocal introduction,” he suggested.

      What a condescending, pompous ass, she thought. She resented the marvelous color of his eyes. Such an arrogant man did not deserve to have perfect leaf-green eyes. Even more, she resented him for making her wish she was not so skinny and black-haired, pinch-mouthed and awkward. She was not an attractive woman and she knew it. Ordinarily that would not bother her. Yet tonight, she wished with humiliating fervor that she could be pretty.

      “Miss Lucy Hathaway,” she said stiffly.

      “Pleasure to meet you, Miss Hathaway.” He turned slightly toward her, waiting.

      She had the oddest sensation of being alone with this man. On some level she perceived people milling around the large outer salon behind them. Through the arched passageway, she vaguely noticed ladies laughing and flirting, men stepping through the French doors to light up their cigars in the blustery night. In the lecture room, people spoke in low tones as they awaited the next portion of the address. Yet a strange electricity stung the air around Lucy and the man called Randolph Higgins, seeming to wall them off into a place of their own.

      “Now you’re supposed to say ‘It’s a pleasure to make your ac—’”

      “I don’t need lessons in idle conversation,” she said. Lord knew, her mother had taught her that well enough. Ensconced in a North Division mansion, Viola Hathaway had elevated frivolity to an art form.

      “Then we should move on to meaningful conversation,” he said.

      “What makes you think you and I could have a meaningful conversation?” she asked. Her parents had spent a fortune to drill her in manners, but all the deportment lessons in the world had failed to keep Lucy from speaking her mind.

      She wished Mr. Higgins would go away. Far away. A man who produced this sort of discomfiting reaction in her had no possible use except…

      Lucy was nothing if not honest with herself. Perhaps she should quit trying to feel peevish and admit that she was most inappropriately intrigued. A sudden, sinful inspiration took hold. Perhaps he could be useful. As a New Woman who adhered fervently—if only in theory, alas—to the radical notion of free love, Lucy felt obliged to practice what she preached. Thus far, however, men found her unattractive and annoyingly intellectual. Mr. Higgins, at least, seemed to find her interesting. This was a first for Lucy, and she didn’t want to let the opportunity slip away.

      “You’re looking at me like a cat in the creamery,” he whispered. “Why is that?”

      She snapped her head around and faced front, appalled by her own intoxicating fantasy. “You’re imagining things, sir. You do not know me at all.”

      The lecture started up again, a boring recitation about the ancient founders—male, of course—of the Christian faith. She tilted her chin up and fixed an expression of tolerant interest on her face. She’d promised Miss Boylan not to argue with the preacher; her radical views often got her in trouble, tainting the reputation of Miss Boylan’s school. Instead she kept thinking about the stranger beside her. What wonderful hands he had—large and strong, beautifully made for hard work or the most delicate of tasks.

      Lucy tried to push her attraction away to the hidden place in her heart where she kept all her shameful secrets.

      Men were trouble. No one knew this better than Lucy Hathaway. She was that most awkward of creatures, the social misfit. Maligned, mocked, misunderstood. At dancing lessons when she was younger, the boys used to draw straws in order to determine who would have the ill luck to partner the tall, dark, intense girl whose only asset was her father’s fortune. At the debutante balls and soirees she attended in later years, young men would place wagers on how many feet she would trample while waltzing, how many people she would embarrass with her blunt questions and how many times her poor mother would disappear behind her fan to hide the blush of shame her daughter induced.

      In a last-ditch effort to find their daughter a proper place in the world, Colonel and Mrs. Hathaway had sent her away to be “finished.” Like a wedding cake in need of icing, she was dispatched to the limestone bastion called the Emma Wade Boylan School for Young Ladies, and expected to come out adorned in feminine virtues.

      Women whose well-heeled papas could afford the exorbitant tuition attended the lakeside institution. There they hoped to attain the bright polish of refinement that would attract a husband. Even those who were pocked by imperfection might eventually acquire the necessary veneer. Lucy found it bizarre that a young woman’s adolescence could end with instructions on how best to arrange one’s bustle for sitting, or all the possible shades of meaning created by a crease in a calling card, yet she’d sat through lengthy lectures on precisely those topics. To her parents’ dismay, she was like the wedding cake that had crumbled while being carried from oven to table. No amount of sugar coating could cover up her flaws.

      Whenever possible, Lucy buried her social shortcomings between the delicious, diverting pages of a book. She adored books. Ever since she was small, books had been her greatest treasures and constant companions, offering comfort for her loneliness and escape from a world she didn’t fit into. She lived deeply in the stories she read; caught up in the pages of a book, she became an adventuress, an explorer, a warrior, an object of adoration.

      And ironically, her many failures at Miss Boylan’s had endeared her to some of the other young women. There, she’d made friends she would cherish all her life. The masters at the school had long given up on Lucy, which gave her vast stretches of free time. While others were learning the proper use of salt cellars and fish forks, Lucy had discovered the cause that would direct and give meaning to her life—the cause of equal rights for women.

      She certainly didn’t need a man for that.

      “We stray too far from the virtues our church founders commanded us to preserve and uphold,” boomed the Reverend Moody, intruding into Lucy’s thoughts. She stifled a surge of annoyance at the preacher’s words and pressed her teeth down on her tongue. She mustn’t speak out; she’d promised. “The task is ours to embrace tradition…”

      Lucy had a secret. Deep in the darkest, loneliest corner of her heart, she yearned to know what it was like to have a man look at her the way men looked at her friend Deborah Sinclair, who was as golden and radiant as an angel. She wanted to know what it was like to laugh and flirt with careless abandon, as Deborah’s maid, Kathleen O’Leary, was wont to do belowstairs with tradesmen and footmen. She wanted to know what it was like to be certain, with every fiber of her being, that her sole purpose in life was to make a spectacular marriage, the way Phoebe Palmer knew it.

      She wanted to know what it would be like to lean her head on a man’s solid shoulder, to feel those large, capable hands on her—

      Exasperated with herself, she tried to focus on the mind-numbing lecture.

      “Consider the teachings of St. Sylvius,” the preacher said, “who taught that ‘Woman is the gate of the devil, the path of wickedness, the sting of the serpent, in a word a perilous object.’ And yet, my friends, it has been proposed that in some congregations women be allowed to hold office. Imagine, a perilous object holding office in church—”

      “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Lucy shot up as if her chair had suddenly caught fire.

      Moody stopped. “Is there some discussion, Miss Hathaway?”

      Unable to suppress her opinions any longer, she girded herself for battle. She’d promised Miss Boylan she wouldn’t make waves, but he’d pushed her too far. She gripped the back of the empty chair in front of her. “As a matter of fact, we might discuss why our beliefs are dictated by men like St. Sylvius, who kept paramours under the age of fourteen and