Into the Whirlwind (19 page)

He was overwhelming. She ought to take a step back and brush his hand away, but she remained in place, so close she
felt the heat radiating from his body. “It doesn’t even keep time anymore,” she whispered.

A hint of sympathy shadowed his eyes. “I expect you will fix that in short order.”

It would be her first task the moment she had a functioning workshop. She looked down, staring at the open collar of his shirt. She must not let him sidetrack her. This was exactly what Frank had warned her about.

“I am not moving in with you,” she said. “The city is building relief barracks that will be open in another week. The church is fine until then.” She hugged her cloak tighter and took a step back from him.

“Think of the advantages,” Zack pressed. “My mother will cook a hot meal three times a day. Anything you want. Pot roast. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Pierogis by the dozen.”

Now he wasn’t fighting fair. No matter how much bread or how many apples she ate, her stomach always felt empty. Mrs. Kazmarek’s meals were magnificently filling, and she could not stop dreaming about them. She turned to look up at him. “What is flaki?” she asked.

“Flaki? Why do you ask?”

“When we took your mother’s satchel to your townhouse the other day, she fed us flaki stew.”

Zack blanched. “She didn’t. She wouldn’t dare.”

Mollie almost laughed at his mortified expression. “She did. Since you are bragging about how wonderful it would be to have your mother cook for us, I am curious. What exactly is in flaki?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“That’s what she said. Oddly, I find myself intensely curious.”

Zack shifted and looked like he hoped the ground would open up and swallow him. “Did you know that flaki is the Polish word for
guts
?”

The mortified expression on his face made her want to double over with laughter, but she maintained a serene expression on her face. “Suddenly, the meager offerings from the relief wagon seem extra tempting today.”

Before heading back to the church, she let Zack buy her a round of cheese and a cranberry pie to take back to the others. The food was welcome, but best of all was knowing that Zack was now on her side. He would reason with Louis Hartman about the deed, and this disagreeable business could be put behind them once and for all.

Zack’s days were filled with insurance work and trying to contract with scarce workers to get the land on Columbus Street cleared and ready for building, but nothing would stop him from being beside Mollie as she got her workshop underway for the first time.

The attic smelled of the yeasty scent of beer and fresh pine resin. For the past two days, workers from the 57th had been building shoulder-high tables, and the salvaged watchmaking equipment had been installed that morning.

Pride mingled with concern as Zack watched Mollie prepare for her first task. He hovered nearby, fists clenched, as she set her father’s watch on the table and put a jeweler’s loupe to her eye. There was no way that waterlogged watch could be salvaged, and he ached at the thought of Mollie getting clobbered with yet another blow. She seemed undeterred. Using the tiniest pair of pliers Zack had ever seen, she opened the back cover, lifted away a metal frame, and then poked at a series of screws, gaskets, and springs. She had the concentration of a surgeon on her face. One miniature piece after another was removed, cleaned,
polished, and oiled; then it was all reassembled into the tiny compartment the size of a nickel.

Everyone in the attic stopped work and gathered around her table as she neared completion. She held her breath as she fitted the back casing into place and turned the winding stem. In the silence of the workshop, a distinctive
tick-tick-tick
filled the air. Mollie’s smile was so wide Zack thought her face would split in two. She took care to set the watch on the worktable before flinging her arms around his neck. He picked her up. The space was too confined to whirl her in circles as he wanted, so he buried his face in her neck.

“I’m so proud of you,” he whispered in her ear.

After that day, he came to the workshop each evening to walk Mollie and the others home. With Ulysses hobbling on a crutch and Frank being led by the hand, the group would be an easy target for the bands of troublemakers that still roamed the city. Not that Zack minded walking the group home each evening. He always mounted the brewery steps as quietly as possible so he could watch Mollie for a few moments. She was so passionate about whatever she was doing, whether it was assembling a watch or reviewing new designs with Alice. But his favorite part was when Mollie finally noticed him standing in the doorway. Her eyes lit up, and her hand inevitably flew to her hair. She had taken to wearing it down, which made her as beautiful as one of the pre-Raphaelite portraits that were all the rage in Europe.

The only cloud darkening his horizon was the deed to a half acre on Columbus Street. Zack knew Mollie still carried it tucked into her bodice, and sometimes he saw a hint of caution lurking in her eyes when she looked at him.

As well she ought. That scrap of paper was worth something, and he was letting the woman he loved work herself to the bone collecting scrap metal and bricks in order to earn a few dollars.

Convincing Louis to settle out of court was going to be a battle. The day after Mollie got the attic workshop in operation, he confronted Louis on the newly cleared plot of land on Columbus Street. The air was thick with dust and ash as hundreds of workers scrambled to load debris into wagons heading to the lake. Survey stakes had already plotted out the boundaries of their property, and an engineer was preparing to backfill the land to raise the elevation. Louis himself was helping to measure out the stakes, ensuring the foundation would be precisely as he wished it.

“Mollie’s deed can stir up a mountain of trouble if not properly settled,” Zack warned him. “The moment we start building, power begins shifting to Mollie. As the value of the land rises, so does her motivation to dig in her heels.”

Louis leaned over and jabbed a stake into the dirt. “I already paid for this land,” he snapped. “Every square inch of it. Make this problem go away, Kazmarek. I don’t care how you do it, but make it go away.”

“Two thousand dollars should do it,” Zack said.

“Make it go away without my having to
pay
for it.”

One of the land surveyors heard the simmering anger and stopped to stare. This was not the sort of conversation that should be overheard. Zack leaned forward and lowered his voice. “The longer we wait, the more likely her blind lawyer will figure out the real value of this land. Then you’ll be
begging
her to accept two thousand dollars.”

Zack could practically see the steam heating up inside Louis. “Fine,” he finally said through clenched teeth. “Tell her I’ll pay her once the New York bank releases a new set of funds to me. I’m up to my eyeballs in debt after paying to get the land cleared, so she’ll have to wait a few weeks for the money.”

A surge of relief shot through Zack like a bolt of lightning.
The faster he could get that deed away from Mollie, the closer he’d be to clearing the last remaining impediment between them.

The familiar grinding, clicking, and hum of watchmaking surrounded Mollie. The brewery attic was cramped, smelled like burned hops, and was a little too dim, but she was in
full production
! The technicians had jeweler’s loupes pressed to their eyes and tweezers in their hands as they assembled the delicate internal mechanisms. A steady punch and grind sounded from the corner where highly polished sheet metal was being stamped out to make new springs and screws.

But instead of making watches, Mollie pored over the latest newssheet from the
Chicago Tribune
. It was hard to believe, but Queen Victoria had heard of the devastation in Chicago and was shipping a thousand books from London in order to create a library for Chicago. Each day, the newspapers carried stories of people from far and wide who were sending help to perfect strangers. A town in Bavaria had raised two thousand dollars for their German brethren who immigrated to Chicago. New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. had all sent funds. President Grant donated a thousand dollars of his own money.

Mollie was grateful for the swell of goodwill flowing into their city that made it possible to keep body and soul together, but they could not subsist on charity forever. With Hartman’s wiped out, she needed to find other rich people who could afford to buy her watches. And quickly, before next month’s rent came due.

She picked up a watch that had been rescued from the fire. The watches were too valuable to be left unattended in the church, so she carried the sack of watches with her to the workshop each day and home at night, where someone slept curled around
them. Mollie ran her thumb around the intricate vines of wild roses engraved in the gold watch cover. Her business would go under unless she could convince one of the wealthy East Coast stores to carry these watches.

What about a watch commemorating the Chicago fire? If wealthy people were willing to write checks, would they be willing to purchase something from a Chicago company? Something that memorialized the fire? It was the sort of bold, audacious design that made many of their watches collectors’ items.

Alice pounced on Mollie’s idea. It would be an easy task to remove the current watch covers of rose vines, melt the gold, and etch a new design. Alice sketched some rudimentary designs within an hour. Mollie and Alice thought it was a grand idea, but Frank was skeptical.

“Why would anyone want a watch engraved with scenes of the fire?” he asked. “It sounds morbid to me.”

Mollie did her best to describe Alice’s sketch to Frank. “It is an oddly beautiful design,” she said. “The tongues of flames curl around the perimeter of the watch, and in the middle is the silhouette of the Chicago skyline. I suppose it might seem morbid to someone who lives here, but what about the people on the East Coast? I think they might buy a watch they knew was made by the people of Chicago and sketched by an artist who actually saw those buildings go down.”

“It is a risky move, but a good one,” Ulysses said as he rubbed his jaw. “We’ve got a ton of inventory and no one to buy it unless we can think of something to compete with the jewelers back East. No one has ever done anything like this. I say we go. Fast, while sympathy is still riding high.”

Alice estimated it would take a week to finalize designs and create a template. After that, they would disassemble the watches, melt down the covers, and commence engraving the
new design. In the meantime, the watch technicians would continue working at full steam on building new watch mechanisms.

Her decision made, Mollie donned a jeweler’s loupe and began the meticulous work of assembling the mainspring of a watch. She smiled in satisfaction as she fitted the narrow strip of metal into its case.

“Mollie?”

She let the loupe drop from her eye. “Yes, Declan?”

“We are out of diamond powder. I checked the inventory, and there is none left.”

Mollie remembered the day when Declan had spilled most of the diamond powder on the floor. Had it only been three weeks since that day? It seemed another lifetime ago.

“We always bought it from Hewitt’s Mill, but I hear they got burned out in the fire,” Declan said.

Mollie bit her lip as she considered the problem. Without diamond powder, they couldn’t get their metalwork polished as smoothly as necessary. It was the very first step in the watch-making process, just before they began stamping out screws, springs, and gaskets.

Before she could respond to Declan, the door flung open, and Mollie was surprised to see Zack, breathless and flushed from a dash up the staircase. “Mollie, love!” he said with a reckless grin. “Let’s take a walk.”

A thrill raced down to her toes when he tossed out casual endearments. She glanced at the others all working at their benches. “It is the middle of the day, Zack.”

A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “And we all know Miss Knox would never slack off in the middle of the day.” He strolled forward, his chip-toothed smile making her heart surge. “Well then, how about we go for a walk while we talk
business? I’ve got important news.” His gaze dropped to her bodice. “About a piece of paper you’ve been carrying about.”