What the Lady Wants Read Free

has the coach waiting out front.”
    It was half past eight on a Sunday evening. There was a chill in the air accompanied by fierce winds that whipped around their carriage. Delia noticed that even the gaslights, protected by glass domes, flickered from the wind’s force.
    They were nearing State and Jackson when they first heard the alarm bells sounding from the courthouse tower. Delia peered out the carriage window but saw nothing.
    â€œNot again,” her mother said as she adjusted her hat. It was the fourth time that week that the fire alarms had sounded.
    â€œIt’s to be expected,” said her father. “After all, we haven’t seen a drop of rain since July.”
    â€œLook,” said Abby, pointing toward the west.
    Delia turned and saw a sweep of red and yellow on the horizon, rolling in like waves on the lakefront. It seemed ominous to her, but her father didn’t appear concerned, so she pushed her misgivings aside and shifted her thoughts to the coming party.
    Bertha had been telling Delia and her sister about the hotel’s grand opening celebration for weeks. Bertha and Abby were both twenty-one and had been friends for years. Being younger, Delia had always tagged along, the unwelcome shadow. But this past year the awkwardness of their age difference seemed to have vanished. In fact, many now mistook Delia for the older sister, and in recent months, she’d become closer to Bertha, even closer to her than was Abby.
    Age obviously didn’t matter to Bertha, who had married aman twenty-three years her senior. And what would the richest man in Chicago give his young bride as a wedding present? If you were Potter, you’d give her a hotel with your name on it. It seemed like an odd choice to Delia, but the Palmer House was spectacular. Even the smallest guest rooms started at three dollars a night.
    The Palmer House had opened its doors less than two weeks earlier and everyone had been looking forward to the grand opening party. As the Spencers made their way around the corner, Delia saw the finest carriages in the city lined up out front.
    A uniformed doorman, imposing as a statue, greeted them, while another uniformed man inside helped the women off with their manteaus. Entering the lobby, Delia paused in the rotunda, eyeing the oversize chandeliers. The stenciled ceiling was breathtaking and the plush royal blue Axminster carpeting seemed to swallow her footsteps whole. At last she got to see the Carrara marble that Bertha had been talking about and wherever she turned she saw gold—gold trim on the portrait frames, along the wainscoting, the moldings, the winding staircase banister and the glowing wall sconces.
    The ballroom on the second floor was even more elegant with high-buffed marble floors that reflected every image from above. Delia guessed there must have been close to two hundred people in the ballroom and yet Augustus Eddy had no difficulty finding Abby and sweeping her onto the dance floor.
    Augustus had been courting Abby for the past three months, which pleased Delia’s parents. He was a good prospect for her sister. At just twenty-four Augustus was the youngest director the Rock Island Railroad had ever had. He was also the youngest man Delia had ever known to wear a monocle. She thought perhaps he did this to offset his boyish face, round and seemingly full of innocence.
    Delia remained with her parents, though she lagged a bit behind, testing her independence and very much aware of the newspapermen eyeing her and jotting down notes on their tablets. Abby had been mentioned countless times in the papers over the past several years and now it was Delia who was about to capture the reporters’ attention. For as far back as she could remember, her mother had stressed the importance of fashion. The Spencer girls, as they were known, made annual fall visits to Europe for their wardrobe consultations and fittings. For years Delia and her sister had