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Darling Jack. Mary McBride
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Anna lay back and closed her eyes. There had been that magical moment this morning, when Johnathan Hazard’s eyes met hers. She couldn’t even have said now just what color those eyes were. Gray, perhaps. Or a deep, disturbing blue. They were beautiful, though, like all the rest of him, and they had sent a shocking, nearly electric message all through her.
Even now, hours later, her heart began to beat erratically in her breast. Come, those eyes had said. Risk it Yes.
“No.” The word left her lips as little more than breath as Anna dug deeper into the familiar warmth of her bed.
The only risk she’d ever taken in her life had turned out badly. She’d come to Chicago with Billy Matlin, even when her father had warned her, “If you go, girl, don’t bother coming back.” She had married a young dreamer—sweet Billy—who had pursued his dreams beyond her and who had perished—somewhere in the mountains of Colorado in his quest for gold.
She’d never been a dreamer. It didn’t make sense that now, at the age of twenty-six, she had suddenly allowed herself to be swept up in a dream. But she had been. In a single moment. At a single glance Come. Risk it.
Not that she’d had much of a choice. Mr. Pinkerton had never said in so many words that there was one, though his manner had been hesitant somehow, and there had been enough pauses in his speech that Anna could have stopped him at any time. But she hadn’t. There she had been in Mr. Pinkerton’s office, not collecting papers before or after hours, or dusting, as she occasionally did when he was out of town, but having been invited in by the great Mr. Pinkerton himself. And there he had been, looking the way God might have looked sitting behind a desk, asking her to act, if only for a while, as a Pinkerton detective. She had been astonished beyond words and flattered beyond belief. It had never occurred to Anna to say no.
Until now.
Still…there was him. Johnathan Hazard. Mad Jack as he was so often called. As a file clerk, Anna was privy to a great deal of information about the Pinkerton employees. It wasn’t that she snooped, exactly. It was just that it was difficult not to read papers as she put them in their proper folders and files. She knew, for example, that Nora Quillan was thirty years old and divorced. And she knew that Johnathan Hazard was the fourth son of an English earl, and that he had come to America after being asked to leave Oxford for “behavior unbecoming,” whatever that meant.
He had begun working for Mr. Pinkerton ten years ago, and by the time Anna started with the agency, Johnathan Hazard had already been somewhat of a legend in the Chicago office. Back then, of course, in 1863, the war had been going on, and most of the agents, Mr. Pinkerton included, had been working as spies for President Lincoln and the Union army.
She remembered the day when word had come that Hazard and his partner, Samuel Scully, had been captured in Virginia and been condemned to hang as spies. A dark cloud had settled over the office, not to lift until the men received a stay of execution. Hazard had appealed to England, the country of his birth. It wasn’t known just what Scully had done to escape the hangman’s noose, but there had been talk of his giving information to his captors, especially when another Pinkerton spy was arrested and summarily hanged.
After four years, the gossip had died away. So had Samuel Scully, Anna thought. No one, it seemed, knew for certain what had happened in that Virginia prison. No one inquired anymore. Mr. Pinkerton stood staunchly behind agents, whether they were dead or alive, and he would have fired anyone who dared to suggest that Scully had been a traitor.
It had been after the war that Johnathan Hazard truly earned his nickname—Mad Jack. He had gone after and brought in the most daring of thieves and counterfeiters, all the while sending in the most outrageous expense reports Anna had ever seen. His file was thick with them, as well as with dozens of written reprimands from Mr. Pinkerton. They never seemed to hamper his career, however, or his dazzling reputation.
Still, in the past five or six months, Anna couldn’t recall having filed a single paper in the Hazard file. A year ago he had been assigned to recover some jewels believed stolen by the Baroness Chloe Von Drosten. He had simply disappeared after that— from the office and from the files. There had been rumors. Rumors aplenty. That he had fallen into drink and dissipation. That he had retired. That he had been fired.
And then, suddenly—today—he was back. Dark and tall and elegant. Swaggering, even when he was standing still. Anna felt her lips curling up in a smile now as she pictured that. Johnathan Hazard’s absence seemed to have made all the secretaries’ hearts grow fonder. Maybe even her own.
She thought once more about her astonishing day. From the moment that man looked at her, it had been as if she were moving in some odd spotlight, being noticed by people who ordinarily ignored her. And not merely noticed, but cared for. She felt, well…quite special.
She had never wanted to be special, though. Quite the opposite. She had planned to live her life quietly, retiring from the Pinkerton Agency when her hair was gray and her bones were bnttle, moving to the seaside, perhaps, where she would spend her remaining days taking quiet walks on the beach and reading all the books she didn’t have enough time for now.
Of course, she still would. But now, when she retired, she would have one dazzling memory to savor. And that, Anna supposed, was worth a bit of risk.
In a month or so, she would be back in the file room, and invisible again. But no one would be able to take away the memory that for one bright and splendid month, she had been not only a Pinkerton spy, but Johnathan Hazard’s wife, as well.
She was going to have an adventure. After that Anna thought as she drifted into sleep, she would return—to this room, to her filing, and to her comfortable oblivion.
It was well after midnight when Ada Campbell, the madam of the city’s foremost house of pleasure, determined that all was well in the parlors downstairs and that she could at last retire to her personal quarters on the second floor, where Mad Jack Hazard was waiting for her.
Not that she was anticipating an evening of love, she thought as she climbed the ornate staircase, stopping once to peer at a nick in the oaken banister and then again to pick up a feather from the Oriental runner that led to her rooms.
Jack had been back for nearly a week. The handsome Pinkerton agent was one of the few men whom she permitted in her rose-brocaded sanctuary and to whom she gave her favors gratis. Only on this visit, Jack Hazard was behaving more like her guest than her lover. He hadn’t touched her once. Damn it.
Ada frowned as she neared her door, questioning her own abilities at seduction. She’d never had to seduce this man before, though. Not Hazard. Not any other man, for that matter, but particularly not Hazard. He’d always been more than eager to join her in her bed, and more than creative once there. Masterful, in fact. The best. What the devil was wrong with him now? And how was she going to fix it? For, if she didn’t, the madam decided, there was really no use in having him around.
She paused to adjust the frame of a French watercolor that had cost her a small fortune. If there was anything that Ada Campbell, the city’s foremost madam, didn’t need at this juncture in her career, it was a constant, live-in reminder that her personal charms were on the wane.
His head snapped up as soon as she stepped into the room, and he flashed her that cavalier grin she’d come to adore over the years. Good God, the man was handsome. It would be a pity to have to kick him out.
The bottle of sour mash—full as far as Ada could see—still rested on the draped and swagged table. Hazard’s fist was still clenched around it.
“Hello, love,” he said in a voice at once soft and sad and annoyingly sober. “All done downstairs?”
Ada sighed, fearing she was done upstairs, as well, unless she took some drastic action that would bring her former lover to his senses. She plucked her ear bobs off, tossed them in the direction of her jewel box and proceeded to take off her clothes.
With his fist tightening around the bottle, Jack swallowed a groan. Ada, it seemed, had reached