What the Lady Wants: A Novel of Marshall Field and the Gilded Age - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Renée Rosen is the author of Dollface and the young adult novel, Every Crooked Pot. She lives in Chicago where she is at work on a new novel.

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ALSO BY RENÉE ROSEN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER ONE

1871

She supposed she fell in love with him at the same time the rest of Chicago did. The Great Fire had raged on for two days, and the flames didn’t discriminate: they devoured businesses and residences, mansions and shanties alike. In the end, miles of streets and buildings were ravaged. But from this smoldering ash, a handful of men came forward to rebuild the city. Marshall Field was one of them.

The day before the fire started, seventeen-year-old Delia Spencer was walking down State Street in search of hair combs needed to complete an outfit for a party the following evening. She was strolling along when her heel got caught in a loose plank on the wooden sidewalk. Oblivious to the throng of horse-drawn cars, wagons and coaches rumbling by, she worked to free her boot. It was only the train whistle, from several blocks over, that seized her attention. She could feel the ground juddering as the locomotive barreled through town, coughing clouds of black, oily smoke. The soot remained after the train passed, clinging to the facades of the restaurants, tearooms and dime museums. Even the Nicholson paved roads were covered in a thin coating of locomotive residue.

She was moving again, and in the time it took her to walk less than a city block, half a dozen peddlers selling everything from chicken feet to slabs of lard tallow soap approached her. She crossed the street to get away from them, lifting her hem and watching her step to avoid the road apples left behind by the horses.

The whirl of chaos surrounding her reminded Delia of the time her relatives from Boston had come to visit, telling their friends and neighbors that they were going to a trading post out west. They’d been appalled by the fetid smells of the Chicago River and said that the city was a noisy, vile, dangerous place. But Delia argued that no other city could boast a three-tiered fountain like the one in Courthouse Square or the marble and limestone buildings along State Street that stood four and five stories high. She couldn’t imagine a more vibrant place to call home. The city was barely thirty years old and it was changing all the time, maturing, ripening with each new day. Her father was fond of saying that Chicago was coming into its own in 1871.

“The clover is upon us now,” he’d said to her just days before the fire as Delia had stood with him on their velvet green lawn that their gardener faithfully watered each day to combat the months of drought. “Yes, indeed,” her father had said again, “we’re in the clover now.”

Mr. Spencer was a proud Chicagoan and one of the men who’d built up the city in the very beginning, long before the boom began.

“When we moved here back in ’54, we were pioneers,” he’d told her. “You weren’t even a year old. There was a cholera outbreak that year and everyone—including your mother—thought I’d lost my mind, moving my family to this desolate place. They said Chicago was uninhabitable. And they weren’t entirely wrong,” he’d chuckled. “The roads were nothing but dirt and mud. Thickets of weeds were everywhere. The city was full of nothing but cottages and shacks. There were miles of marshland all around, and if people think it smells bad now, they should have been here back then. Hard as you tried, you couldn’t get away from the stench of sewer water.”

Standing next to him on their lawn, she’d followed the line of her father’s gaze toward the downtown horizon. “Didn’t you tell me once that you found fish in your drinking water?”

He’d smiled, giving her a nod. “You’d fill up your basin and there’d be fish this big”—he held his fingers an inch apart—“flipping and flopping right before your eyes.”

Delia had laughed. “Why did you want us to live here back then?”

“Because I saw promise in Chicago. I knew this swampland in the middle of the country was going to be the key to prosperity. This city has waterways and railroads, and we’re smack in the center of everything. I knew if anything worthwhile was going to happen in this country, it was going to have to go through Chicago.”

Her father had been right. Delia found it hard to believe that just twenty years before the Spencers arrived, Chicago had been a fur trading post, home to the Indians and just four thousand brave pioneers. Since then the Potawatomi had been replaced by more than ninety thousand intruders, come to seek their fortunes.

When Delia arrived at Lake Street and Wabash Avenue, a horse-drawn streetcar let dozens of riders off in front of a group of dry goods stores—one of which belonged to Delia’s father. Hibbard, Spencer & Company stood three stories proud, dwarfing the blacksmith, the umbrella repair shop, the cordage shop and the other merchants surrounding it.

Delia went inside and wandered up and down the aisles, letting her fingertips graze the different bolts of brocades, chambrays and gossamers piled one on top of the other. She lost herself among the white and yellow beeswax candles and spiced soaps when her father called to her.

“What a surprise. What are you looking for, Dell?” He removed his spectacles and gave them a polish on the bottom of his waistcoat.

“Hair combs.”

“Well,” he said with a laugh, “you won’t find them in this aisle.”

“I know, I know. I can’t help it, I got distracted.”

As a young girl, before her mother taught her to know a woman’s place, Delia had spent many an afternoon down at Hibbard, Spencer, hoisted up on the counter, watching her father ring up all the sales. Oh, how she loved the sound of the till each time the cash drawer sprang open. She had wanted to become a merchant like her father. She wasn’t afraid of hard work, or put off by the responsibility. She wanted the satisfaction of making her own way and had even thought of taking over her father’s business someday. But she was a girl and a Spencer girl at that. She grew up on the exclusive Terrace Row, in a rusticated stone block home with a majestic mansard roof and dozens of servants. She’d studied piano and dance and had attended the city’s finest finishing school. Her mother wouldn’t even allow her to take painting classes at the Academy of Design, let alone work in a dry goods store. No, her only job was to find a suitable husband and raise his children.

•   •   •

The night the fire started, on October 8, 1871, Delia was getting ready for Bertha and Potter Palmers’ party in celebration of the opening of their new hotel, the Palmer House. Sitting at her vanity, she gazed into the looking glass while her maid pinned her long brown hair and fastened it with the sterling hair comb she’d purchased the day before. This was the first party Delia would attend after having been formally introduced to society in September, and she wanted to make a good impression. She chose an emerald gown with forest green velvet ruches and beading along the bodice. It had been designed for her by Emile Pingat on her last trip to Paris the summer before.

“Quit your dillydallying,” Abby said, standing in the doorway.

“Don’t you worry, Augustus will still be at the party when you get there.”

Delia saw her sister’s cheeks flush at the mention of her beau. “It’s not Augustus I’m worried about. It’s Mother.”

“Oh, she must be...