The Firebrand by Susan Wiggs

Just then an earsplitting explosion knocked her to her knees. Phoebe squealed and the cart lurched forward, disappearing into a wall of boiling smoke. Someone shouted that a varnish factory had just exploded.
    Lucy stayed down on hands and knees, trying to recover the breath that had been knocked out of her. Her lungs seized up, unable to fill. She was suffocating. Light-headed," half-mad thoughts shot through her mind, but her air-starved brain couldn't grasp them.
    The firelit images around her left a trail through the night sky, like the tails of bright comets. The wind had an eerie voice all its own, keening through the flaming row of doomed buildings. Flying debris—paper, clothing, sheets of metal—littered the air. Everyone else had disappeared. The last of the stragglers had gone to the bridge and there was no one in sight. Focus, she told herself. She stared at a burning building across the way. She'd gone to the very exclusive Sterling House for tea a time or two, her stomach in knots from the lecture her mother had given her on acting like a lady, sipping her tea demurely, nodding in agreement with anything a man cared to say, keeping her scandalous opinions to herself.
    She wasn't sorry to see the last of that place.
    What she saw next reinflated her lungs with a gasp of terror. The second-story window, the one she'd seen earlier, was now filled with flame—and a woman holding a bundle, screaming.
    Without any conscious effort, Lucy propelled herself across the street.
    The fire lashed out with a roar, its long tentacles of flame reaching for the hysterical woman trapped in the window, grasping her.
    Lucy stood alone under the window, the heat singeing her eyebrows and lashes. She had no idea how to help the poor woman. The hotel entry was impassable, its doors blasted out by the flames, the marble lobby melting in the inferno. She looked around wildly for a ladder, a rope, anything.
    The woman's screaming spiked to a shrill peal of hysteria. Her dress or nightgown had caught fire. A second later, the screaming stopped. Then something fell from the window.
    Simple reflex caused Lucy to hold out her arms. The impact knocked her to the pavement, and once again the air rushed from her lungs. A cracking sound, like the report of a shotgun, split the air. The walls of the hotel shook, and the roof caved in, sucking down the big glass dome, and then the flaming rubble of the building itself. The woman disappeared, swallowed like a pagan sacrifice into the devouring flames.
    Lucy sensed a movement in the bundle she held, but there was no time to check. She forced herself to scramble to her feet. Still clutching the bedding, she ran for her life, hearing the swish of raining glass and the boom of gas lines igniting. With a glance over her shoulder, she saw a geyser of smoke and sparks where the hotel used to be. Racing to the river, she hurtled down the bank toward the water. She slipped in the mud, landed on her backside and slid downward into darkness. Firelight glimmered on the churning surface of the water, but the immediate area was sheltered from the flames.
    Something buried within the bundle of bedding moved again.
    Lucy shrieked and set it down. Planting her hands behind her, she crab-walked away.
    Then she heard a sound, the mewing of a kitten.
    "Oh, for heaven's sake," she said, disgusted with herself. "The poor woman was trying to save her cat." What a noble deed, she thought. The woman must have known she could not survive the fire, and as her last act on earth she'd bundled up her pet and tossed it to a stranger for safekeeping.
    Hurrying now, Lucy knelt down beside the untidy parcel. The least she could do for the doomed woman was look after the cat. Firelight fell over her, and she felt a fresh stab of panic, knowing she'd best get over the bridge to safety.
    The bulky parcel had been tied with satin ribbons of good quality, a man's leather belt and a long organdy sash. A lady's robe or peignoir formed