An Heiress to Remember (The Gilded Age Girls Club #3) - Maya Rodale Page 0,81
to go—now. The fire was taking over.
Beatrice picked up her skirts and started to rush through each department, urging everyone to leave immediately. She tore through the ladies reading room, she interrupted the luncheon service, she alerted the staff in accounting. She was in the home furnishings department when she started to cough from the smoke and feel the heat on her skin.
Every fiber in her being screamed for her to leave. Her lungs wanted fresh air, her heart wanted to slow down, her brain told her to save herself.
She heard children crying.
The nursery! She had to get help evacuating the nursery!
The attendants were already lining up the children and carrying the babies. Beatrice ran to enlist shopgirls from other departments to assist their orderly evacuation and to console crying children and hysterical mothers rushing against the crowds and past the flames up to their darlings.
They made their way down the grand staircase. Step by step, with armfuls of wriggling toddlers, children clinging desperately to necks and skirts.
Beatrice couldn’t stop now, but she lifted her eyes for just a second to take one last look.
Flames licked up the central pillars. Flames recklessly devoured all the merchandise—gowns and gloves and tea sets and place settings. Double beds, twin beds. None of it mattered, they burned all the same.
She watched the fire devour the place where she and Dalton had first locked eyes. The spot behind the pillar where they had first kissed. The fitting room where he’d brought her secret fantasy to life. All the places where passion got the better of them and love had blossomed.
All the moments of her life, gone.
The monument of her ambition, gone.
Her gift to fellow womankind, gone.
As long as these women got out—with their brains and hearts and tireless hours of service to families—as long as they survived, no real damage done.
She rushed past millions of dollars of merchandise going up in flame. No matter.
This building, now crumbling around her, was her home. Her history. Her memories. Goodbye to all that.
She would find out who did this. Who stole her dream from her, who wrecked this safe space, who stole this temple of joy and pleasure from women. She swore revenge.
If she lived.
She’d almost reached the doorway, almost reached safety when the child whose hand she’d been holding panicked and broke free and got separated. In the smoke and flames, Beatrice struggled to see her. Though her lungs screamed for her to go outside, Beatrice turned back to find that young girl and save her.
Dalton’s Department Store
“Good morning, Mr. Dalton,” the shopgirl chirped at him as he walked past. He continued his stroll through the store with only the briefest nod of his head in acknowledgment.
He didn’t have it in him to wink or say more.
All he could see was pink silk. Loads of the stuff. He never wanted to see it again, yet his warehouse and account books were groaning under the weight of all the excess of it. It was the color of failure and rejection. It reminded him of the flush stealing across Beatrice’s skin as he made love to her, which reminded him that he would never behold such a sight again, which made him considering driving that automobile off the roof.
He turned to the nearest shopgirl.
“We need to get rid of this,” he said. “All of it.”
“Yes, Mr. Dalton. We’ll mark it on sale.”
“A public display of failure. Excellent.”
The poor woman didn’t know what to say to that other than, “Yes, Mr. Dalton.”
For the first time in his life, Dalton didn’t want to be on the sales floor in the midst of it all. Dalton could not find refuge in his office, either—the windows overlooked Broadway and Goodwin’s and the windows to her office.
He could not even go home, the emptiness there always such a stark contrast to the voices rising to the rafters here. Home now held memories of her that he couldn’t stand to remember.
He would have to sell it. Immediately.
Dalton had some idea of going downtown to Mrs. Claflin’s Orchard Street Settlement House. It was a good excuse to get out of the store. Surely, there were no memories of Beatrice there. He felt like a cad for continually putting off Mrs. Claflin’s invitation, and he had a notion that getting out of his own head would do him some good.
Some people had real problems. He just had a broken heart.