Hope had been shocked and highly discomfited when she'd turned down Colin's proposal to learn he'd actually
believed she would agree to marry him. She'd known Colin since they were children. He'd always been a sullen, selfish boy. He'd begun being sexually aggressive with her when they both turned fourteen. Hope had never made it a secret how much she despised being in Colin's presence, so the realization that he genuinely seemed to think she'd agree to be his wife had left her stunned.
Colin Mason was the sort of specimen of manhood who might put a thinking woman off the concept of marriage forever.
Her temper had mostly calmed by the time she reached Indiana Avenue. It was foolish to waste one's energies on the likes of Colin Mason, after all.
Reaching Michigan Avenue was like making an abrupt turn from sleepy suburbia into the crashing liveliness of the proud, industrious city of Chicago. A parade of carriages progressed down the street, their ironclad wheels hitting the macadam pavement causing a ceaseless clatter. The chill of the November afternoon had set the city's coal furnaces to full-out action, inevitably deepening the gloom of an already cloudy day.
Visibility was so poor that Hope couldn't even see the thirteen-story clock tower of Central Station until she was a block away. Near Central Station the passage of trolley cars, trains and the calls of newsboys joined the cacophony of continual sound and movement.
Hope walked along briskly, as at home amidst the young, brash city as she was in the elegant silences of Prairie Avenue. Several of the mainstay families of Prairie Avenue had begun to migrate to the north shore to places like the suburban town of Lake Forest, disgusted by the industry and crass urbanization encroaching on their somber, august neighborhood.
Hope and her father were determined to stay in the midst of the city they both loved, however, even if some of their more elegant neighbors found their preference to be odd.
Many Prairie Avenue denizens already considered Jacob Stillwater to be an idiosyncratic gentleman, anyway, especially for the way he allowed his headstrong daughter to run free about the city, engaging in so many questionable, unladylike social reform activities.
And the Prairie Avenue matriarchs didn't know half of what she did, Hope thought wryly.
Hope's father was a new alderman of the ward, the first to he elected outside of the patronage of the crime boss Diamond Jack Fletcher. As a minister of the Second Presbyterian Church on Michigan and Cullerton, this was also Jacob Stillwater's parish.
Hope knew the Loop and the first ward as well as any young woman might know the sleepy avenues and Main Street of her small town.
Chicago was a city of industry, a town that knew where it was headed. As a young woman of determination and purpose, Hope innately understood and appreciated her place in the sprawling miasma of bustling humanity.
A shrill scream of terror suddenly pierced the loud clatter of the city. Horses neighed in panic. Hope turned in anxious dread. It was a horrible fact of urban life that on any single day, an average of two people were killed at rail crossings in Chicago's Loop or by merely stepping off the curb and being plowed down by a charging horse. She was extremely relieved to see that the screaming woman was very much still alive, grasping her elderly companion and looking shocked and whey-faced.
"Did you see him? Did you see him?" she shouted repeatedly. Every time her companion shook her head in rising confusion the woman asked the question more loudly.
"Poor unfortunate creature," Hope murmured under her breath. Progress marched triumphantly in the streets of Chicago, but so did its inevitable companions illness and mental stress. The rates of alcoholism and drug abuse were also rising alarmingly.
She paused in mid-stride when she realized that most people would think she was a "poor unfortunate creature" if they learned she had visions of a god in man form who made love to her through her bedroom mirror.
Not that Ryan Vincent Daire was a hallucination. Hope would never believe that in a million years. When she returned home later this evening she planned to prove it, too, by contacting Ryan again in whatever fashion she could contrive.
One did not become deflowered by hallucinations, after all. Even now she felt the slight soreness of her genitals, the pleasant tingling just beneath her skin that signaled her sensual awakening. Her cheeks heated as she recalled in a flash of detail her unlikely joining with Ryan. Strange such a thing should be termed "deflowering." Hope felt, in fact, that in some immeasurable, intangible fashion, she'd burst into full bloom beneath Ryan's touch.
She looked back one more time at the woman, feeling a tad guilty for assuming she was mad or drunk. Her companion appeared to have calmed her but she was talking nonstop and kept pointing to the middle of Michigan Avenue. She sighed as she crossed Lake Park Place, looking around to locate Evan and waving before she opened the wood-and-glass doors to Central Station. She would enter here and meet Evan at the drop-off, pickup port designated for carriages with her new charge in tow.
She lingered cautiously by the marble archway to the waiting room of the busy intercity train station. Sure enough she spied Marvin Evercrumb reading a newspaper as he sat on one of the polished wooden benches.
In her private thoughts, Hope referred to him as Marvin Ever-scum.
Like Hope, Marvin had come to Central Station on this gray, dingy Chicago afternoon in order to meet the arrival of the Milwaukee Road, the southbound train that brought hundreds of people to Chicago daily, including the inevitable few young women interested in finding work as stenographers, typists or secretaries.
Unchaperoned, friendless women flowed into the urban center of Chicago in the year 1906 at unprecedented levels in history.
The Milwaukee Road was just one of many trains that Hope might meet on a given day.
Marvin was just one of many sleazy operators employed by Diamond Jack Fletcher who came to greet these vulnerable, wide-eyed women at Central Station.
They came from countless towns on several different trains. They immigrated from Missouri, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio or Kansas. Hope came to welcome them in her small way to a city she loved and to do her damndest to keep them out of the hands of men like Marvin. She took them to one of several respectable boardinghouses that she knew of and put them in contact with someone who could assist them in finding a job.
Marvin and his ilk lured their prey with enticements of high-paying jobs and luxurious, cheap housing. Sometimes the white slavers pitched their lines for the first time at the train stations and other times they utilized a network of females who befriended these women in other cities and towns; female operatives who told their companions of the glamour of Chicago and the high-paying jobs to be had for the asking. Guileless young women then boarded trains in St. Louis, Bloomington or Milwaukee, clutching their life possessions and a note with Marvin Evercrumb's or one of his oily peers' names on it.
Once they reached Chicago, Marvin proceeded to deliver these women directly to hell, taking them to one of several white slavery way stations in the city.
The victims were drugged and brutalized by men who were the equivalent of professional rapists. Afterward they were sold to the seedier Clark Street and Levee District brothels, forced into a life of degradation and imprisonment. Even the madam Addie Sampson, who was far more experienced in these matters than Hope, visibly shivered when she considered the fate of these young women once they were taken behind the closed doors of Levee brothels like the Sweet Lash.