Читать книгу The Drifter - Сьюзен Виггс - Страница 10

There wasn’t a goddamned thing he could do.

Like a caged beast, Jackson prowled the surgery. His gaze kept cutting to the enameled white door. Beyond that door, in a room lit so brightly his eyes hurt, Carrie lay bleeding. He might have looked his last at her as they brought her into the strange, foul-smelling chamber. She might never awaken again. He might never again see the color of her eyes, hear the sound of her voice, feel her hand grasping his.

Bitter guilt seared his throat. From the time they were children in the orphanage, he had promised Carrie he’d look out for her. But the deadly bleeding was a shadow enemy. He couldn’t beat it in a fistfight or run away from it. He had to put all his faith in an ill-tempered lady doctor who clearly had no respect for him and not a whole lot of compassion for Carrie.

Fear had become a familiar companion to Jackson. His life had been, for the most part, a series of horrifying incidents, from the moment his mother had abandoned him on a stoop in Chicago to the moment he’d fled Texas with a man’s blood on his hands. But this fear was sharper and colder than anything he’d ever felt.

He hated being in this position. Helpless. Without choices. Powerless to do anything. God, how long was this thing going to take? he wondered.

Grim silence shrouded the surgery. The lady doctor and her assistant weren’t saying a word. Carrie was under ether, blessedly senseless, thank God. The only sound came from a wood-cased mantel clock. The incessant ticking pounded out a hammer rhythm to Jackson’s anxiety, seized his mind and wouldn’t let go.

Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to stop pacing. The outer office was snug and painfully neat with apothecary jars lining one wall and shelf after shelf of textbooks. Above a woodstove hung a picture of a misty green-and-gold island with palm trees nodding over a calm bay. For a moment, Jackson stared at it.

Paradise. He could almost smell the perfume of exotic flowers, hear the call of colorful birds. He wondered if such a place actually existed.

Hungry for a distraction, he moved into the tiny inner office. Ah. Here, at least, was a bit of evidence that Dr. Leah Mundy actually had a life. That she was not some clockwork female sawbones who snapped out orders and intimidated people into getting better. Several diplomas lined one wall. Jackson had never actually seen one up close before, and he was fascinated by the scrolling script that spelled out high honors and important degrees.

She had attended institutions that sounded both imposing and exotic—Great Western, Beauchamps Elysées, Loxtercamp Hospital. She had read books such as Delafield & Pudden’s Pathology and Osteology of the Mammalia. Tucked between the medical tomes was one slim volume. He had to tilt his head to read the title: Ships that Pass in the Night: A Tragic Love Story by Beatrice Harraden.

An educated woman. Jackson was fairly certain he had never met one before.

He picked up a framed tintype of Leah and a bewhiskered gentleman. Jackson squinted at the image. A father. He had no idea what it felt like to have one; he’d been told he was sired by a Nordic lumberjack at a Chicago brothel.

He’d never allowed himself to care about not having a father. But he could tell from the expression on Leah Mundy’s face in the picture that she cared very much. Her hand gripped his arm. Her other hand held a rolled certificate—one of the diplomas on the wall? The bearded man exuded a chilly hauteur while Leah beamed with the eagerness of a pup.

Something had happened since then to beat her down. She was smart as a seasoned cardsharp. When she did her doctoring, she exuded competence and control. But she’d lost that bright sparkle in her eye. What happened to you, Leah Mundy? he wondered.

Was it the death of her father, or had something else soured her spirits? Whatever it was, it had turned her from a smiling, eager young woman into a somber, authoritative physician whose only pleasure seemed to be in work.

Was that what made Leah Mundy unique? What made her seem so very sharp, so special, so competent?

Or was it that she held Carrie’s life in her hands?

With a muttered oath, he started pacing again. Carrie. For years she had been his quest, his purpose; sometimes she was his only reason for getting up in the morning.

She had been no more than nine years old when he’d first laid eyes on her. He recalled the moment vividly, because it was the first time in his life that he’d dared to believe angels were real. Even standing in the dingy foyer of the Chicago orphan asylum, Carrie seemed to transcend the squalor, her eyes fixed on some point far beyond the busy roomful of orphans and wardens.

She reminded Jackson of a painting he’d once seen in church—a pilgrim filled with the quiet ecstasy of her first sight of God. The other children whispered that Carrie—as beautiful and delicate as a moth—was strangely empty, that she had no soul.

He knew he was the only one who could protect her. He had endured hell in her defense: bloodied nose, broken finger, twisted arm. The rewards were sparing, but he cherished them all the more for their scarcity. She’d smile or squeeze his hand or whisper that she loved him—just often enough to make him believe her. And with just enough sincerity to make him believe she knew how to love.

He glanced again at the surgery door. He tried to think of Carrie having a kid, but his imagination wouldn’t cooperate. She wouldn’t know the first thing about babies. Ever since that accident back at St. I’s when an infant in Carrie’s ward had died and she’d been sent in disgrace to the isolation room, she’d never spoken of babies, never looked at one, never held one.

Then one day, Carrie had disappeared from the orphanage. He remembered waiting for her outside the girls’ ward as he always did, the corridor stinking of piss and borax. But she hadn’t come out. Brother Anthony had informed Jackson—cuffing him on the ear for the impertinence of asking—that Carrie had been adopted.

He’d felt something implode inside him. Not from the blow; he was used to beatings. But from the news Brother Anthony had delivered. Jackson knew what it meant when a girl like Carrie was “adopted.” Pimps were always on the lookout for new, pretty girls. Brother Anthony and Brother Brandon were always on the lookout for ways to line their pockets.

What happened next came back in broken images, shattered by the violence that followed. Sharp fragments of remembrance stabbed at the back of his mind.

He had lunged at Brother Anthony, seized the portly man, shoved him against the seeping wall of the corridor. “Where is she, you son of a bitch? Who took her?” Jackson’s fierce, boyish voice echoed through the cavernous hallway of the tenement.

“Long…gone, damn you to the eternal fires,” Brother Anthony choked out, his eyes bulging as Jackson’s thumbs pressed on his windpipe. Jackson was a strapping boy despite the poor diet and poorer treatment he’d suffered over the years.

“Where?” he persisted, feeling an ugly pressure behind his eyes. Rage swept over him like a forest fire, burning out of control. The fury was a powerful thing, and his young mind absorbed its force. This, he knew then, was what drove men to murder. “Where?” he asked again. “Where? Where?”

“Already heading…down the Big Muddy—” Brother Anthony stopped abruptly. Strong arms grabbed Jackson from behind. Fists clad in brass knuckles beat him senseless. He’d awakened hours or days later—he couldn’t tell which—in a windowless cell in the basement. One eye swollen shut, a constant ringing in his ears, broken rib stabbing at his midsection. It had taken him days to recover from the beating, and still longer to ambush the luckless boy who brought him his daily meal. Then Jackson had burst out into the street—to freedom, to danger, to the desperation of an outlaw on the run.

He drifted from town to town, from logging camps in the northern woods to army forts and outposts in the West, from little farming villages where people pretended not to see him to big dirty cities where everyone, it seemed, was part of a confidence game. Jackson had mastered the trade of a cardsharp and gunfighter. He crewed on Lake Michigan yachts in the summers, learning the way of life that had captured his imagination. He was like a leech, finding a host, sucking him dry, moving on.

A six-day card game had taken place on an eastbound train, and without planning to, Jackson had found himself in New York City. He had no liking for the city, but a force he didn’t understand and didn’t bother to fight had drawn him inexorably eastward along the low, sloping brow of Long Island.

He’d gotten his first glimpse of the sea on a Wednesday, and he’d stood staring at it as if he beheld the very face of God. The following Monday, he signed on a whaler as a common seaman. The next three years consisted of equal parts of glory and hell. When he returned, he knew two things for certain—he hated whaling beyond all imagining. And he loved the sea with a passion that bordered on worship.

But the unfinished quest for Carrie held him captive. Eventually, he had traced her. In New Orleans, while celebrating a tidy sweep at the poker table, he’d found himself a whore for the night, oddly comforted by the mindless, mechanical way the services were rendered and received. But in the morning, he’d opened his eyes to a shock as disturbing as a bucket of ice water.

“What the hell’s this?” he’d demanded, yanking at the silk ribbon around the whore’s neck. “Where’d you get it?”

The whore had clutched the object defensively. “Lady Caroline left it behind, said it was a good-luck charm so I took to wearing it.”

He grabbed the charm, stared at it for a long time. It was the dove he’d carved for Carrie so long ago. “Lady Caroline,” he said, hope burgeoning in his chest. “So where is she now?”

“Gone to Texas, last I heard, with Hale Devlin’s gang.”

Texas. And that had only been the beginning.

The shattering of glass jarred Jackson out of his reverie. With a curse, he looked at the framed tintype he’d been holding and saw that he’d broken it. An ice-clear web of cracks radiated from the center, distorting the picture of Leah and her father. Her smiling mouth was severed as if by violence; the father’s hand on her shoulder had been detached.

Painstakingly, Jackson removed the broken glass. The picture went back to normal—Leah, smiling, aglow with pride. Her father cold, distant. The scroll of a paper diploma clutched in her hand.

An educated woman. But could she save Carrie?

He shuddered from the memory of what he had found in Texas.

Could anyone?

Bone weary, bloodied to the elbows and filled with self-doubt, Leah peeled off her patent rubber gloves. She pressed her forehead against the damp wall of the surgery and closed her eyes.

Nearby, she could hear Sophie’s movements as she placed soiled sheeting and gowns into a pail of carbolic solution, then emptied a large porcelain container into a waste pail.

“You did your best. I watched you like a hawk on the hunt,” Sophie said. “Those fancy city doctors in Seattle couldn’t have done better.”

“Try telling that to Mr. Underhill,” Leah whispered. “Oh, God, God.” She forced her eyes open, made herself look at Sophie.

Her assistant was broad of face; she had wise dark eyes and an air of serenity that governed every move she made, every word she spoke. Half Skagit Indian and half French-Canadian, Sophie had been educated in boarding schools that taught her just enough to convince her that she belonged neither to the white nor the native world, but stood precariously between the two. It was an uncomfortable spot, but Leah, a misfit herself, felt sometimes that they were kindred spirits.

“It is the great curse of doctors,” Leah said, “that while most people have to die only once, a doctor dies many times over, each time she loses a patient.”

Sophie pressed her lips into a line, then spoke softly. “But it is the great reward of healers that each time you save a life, you yourself are reborn.” She looked down at the unmoving, pale face of Carrie Underhill. “Yes, you lost the baby. But you also saved Mrs. Underhill from bleeding to death. She’ll live to thank you. Perhaps to bear other children.”

Leah swallowed the lump in her throat. She knew some babies were never meant to be, especially when the mother suffered such precarious health. There was something puzzling about Carrie Underhill’s condition, something besides the pregnancy. A chronic complaint, perhaps. But what?

Did she drink calomel? Leah wondered. The purgative was still a popular folk remedy; it had been her father’s favorite prescription. This was the sort of thing he caused, she thought resentfully. She intended to keep Carrie under close observation.

The task at hand was more pressing, though. She had to face this woman’s husband. The baby’s father.

With a leaden heart, she helped Sophie finish clearing up. After Carrie was clad in a clean gown and lying on clean draperies, Leah went to the door and opened it. “Mr. Underhill?”

His head snapped around as if someone had punched him in the jaw. Weariness deepened the fan lines around his eyes and mouth, yet a beard stubble softened the effect; he appeared deceptively vulnerable. “Is she all right?”

Leah nodded. “She’s sleeping, but will probably awaken within the next hour.”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Good,” he said between his teeth. “Damn, that’s…good.” He opened his eyes. “Jesus. I feel like I just got dealt four aces.”

Leah cleared her throat. “She might suffer a headache, possibly vomiting, from the ether. You must watch her closely in case the bleeding starts again, but I don’t think it will.” She forced an encouraging smile. Something tender and desperate lived in Jackson Underhill’s haggard face. She wished she knew him well enough to take his hand, to hold it tight for a moment. Instead, she said, “I believe your wife will be fine. She needs plenty of bed rest and good food, and we’ll see to that.”

“Yes. All right.” His eyes closed again briefly. His knees wobbled.

“Sit down, Mr. Underhill. I can’t handle two patients tonight.”

He lowered himself to the wing chair and cradled his head in his hands, fingers splaying into his thick golden hair. “Didn’t know I was wound up so tight.” He glanced up at her. She felt an inner twist of compassion at the turbulence in his eyes. Those gunslinger eyes. The first time she had looked into them, she had nearly fainted from fright. Now she felt a chilly reluctance to tell him the rest.

“Thanks, Doc,” he said to her.

She nodded, holding the edge of the door, waiting. Waiting. Waiting for him to ask about the baby. He didn’t. He didn’t even seem to acknowledge its existence. She swallowed hard. “Mr. Underhill?”

“Yeah?”

She took a deep breath, sensing the harshness of carbolic and ammonia in her lungs. “I’m afraid I couldn’t save the baby.”

“The baby.” His soft voice held no expression, no hint of what he was feeling.

“I’m sorry. So terribly, terribly sorry.”

He stared at her for a long time, so long she wasn’t certain he’d heard and understood. Then at last he spoke. “You did your best, I reckon.”

In her travels with her father, she’d met her share of gamblers and gunslingers. They were men without souls, men who killed in the blink of an eye. Jackson T. Underhill was one of them. Until this moment, she hadn’t realized how badly she’d wanted him to be different—better, more worthy, more compassionate. But his attitude about the baby proved her wrong.

“I did my best, yes,” she said. “But like every physician, I have my limits. Some things just weren’t meant to be.” She decided not to tell him her concerns about Carrie. Not now, at least.

“I see.” He steepled the tips of his fingers together.

Mr. Underhill, you lost a child today. She didn’t say the words, but she wondered why he didn’t react more strongly. Perhaps his way of coping was to deny the baby had ever existed. After all, he’d only known about it for a day.

“What about the tonic your wife’s been taking?” Leah asked. “I really must know its contents.”

“Yeah, I’ll give you the bottle. It’s some patented medicine. Helps her relax. She’s always been…a nervous sort.”

“I’ll write off to the manufacturer and inquire about the contents.” Based on the substances she’d seen her father dispense, she was not optimistic. A lot of the patented remedies contained calomel purgatives and worse. She tried to smile encouragingly. “After the recovery, there’s no reason you and your wife can’t have more children.”

“There won’t be more children.” He slashed the air with his hand and lurched to his feet, the motion at once violent and desperate. “She almost died this time.”

Leah had heard the same words from other frightened husbands. The vow rarely lasted, though. Once the woman was up and about again, their husbands generally forgot the terror of the miscarriage. Still, she smiled gently and said, “Make no decisions now, Mr. Underhill. Everyone’s tired, and your wife has a long recovery ahead of her. You have plenty of time to think of the future.”

His eyes narrowed. “What’s that mean? A long recovery.”

“Weeks, at the very least. She’s lost a lot of blood, and she was underweight and anemic to begin with.”

“I can’t wait that long.”

Anger hardened inside Leah. “Then you’re taking a terrible risk with your wife’s health, sir,” she snapped. “Now, can you help bring her to her bed?”

“Doc.” His voice was flat, neutral. “Dr. Mundy.”

“Yes?”

“I wish you’d quit looking at me like that.”

“How am I looking at you, sir?”

“Like I was a snake under a rock.”

“If you see things from the perspective of a snake, that is your fault, not mine.”

He muttered beneath his breath, something she didn’t even want to hear, but he cooperated, helping her with Carrie.

“Will you stay, then?” Leah asked as they carefully tucked Carrie into bed. “No matter how long her recuperation takes?”

Jackson T. Underhill dragged his hand down his face in a gesture she was coming to recognize as his response to frustration. “Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, I’ll stay.”

Like a morning mist, a rare, dreamy wistfulness enveloped Leah as she made her way back from the Winfield place. She had driven herself in the buggy since the weather was fine and the vehicle unlikely to get mired. Ordinarily, Mr. Douglas from the boardinghouse did the driving. But he was getting on in years, and she tried not to drag him out of bed too early.

Her father had insisted on a driver, claiming it bolstered his image of importance. The thought of her father took Leah back in time. She was nine years old again, done up in ribbons and bows, seated stiffly in the parlor of their Philadelphia house while he drilled her on her sums. Even now, she could recall the scent of wood polish, could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. Could see the chilly glare of her father growing colder when she stumbled over a number.

“I’m sorry, Father,” she’d said, her voice meek. “I’ll study harder. I’ll do better next time.”

And she did do better the next time. She perfected everything he demanded of her, but it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. Edward Mundy had done a splendid job of convincing his daughter that no matter how hard she studied, no matter how hard she tried, she would never please him.

He’d wanted her to be a doctor, yes, because he had no son to carry on in the profession. But he’d also expected her to marry, and marry well. There had been an endless parade of suitors arranged by her father, but they never stayed. The men she met had no idea what to do with a woman like her. They wanted someone who laughed and danced and gossiped, not someone who studied anatomy and voiced opinions that raised eyebrows.

Lulled by the creaking rhythm of the buggy wheels, Leah thrust aside the dark memories. Her father was gone. The past was gone. It was up to her to keep it at bay.

She watched the roadway unfold between the horse’s brown ears and thought about the Winfields. The birth had been an easy one; the baby had emerged healthy and whole into her eager, waiting hands. She would never tire of the warm, slippery feel of newborn flesh. The look of wonder from the father, the triumphant tears of the mother. But most of all, she loved the first gasp of breath as the baby inhaled, the lusty cry that said, “Here I am, world, alive and hale,” followed by the glorious rush of crimson as the child took on the flush of life.

Each time you save a life, Sophie had told her, you yourself are reborn.

On spring mornings like this, a week after Mrs. Underhill’s miscarriage, Leah could believe it. She had been called from her bed at five to attend Mrs. Winfield. Just two hours later, the baby had made his appearance, and Mr. Winfield, overjoyed, had paid Leah—immediately and well, a rare surprise since most of her patients tended to procrastinate when it came to settling fees.

So with pride in delivering Coupeville’s newest citizen and carrying a gold double eagle in the pocket of her smock, Leah was in excellent spirits.

She practiced the most glorious profession of all, that of healing, saving lives, relieving suffering. She had been an exemplary student, studying harder than her male counterparts, performing better than her father’s expectations for her, and in the end knowing the triumph of succeeding against all odds.

Yet inevitably as always, a shadow crept in on her, dimming her elation. Because even as she stood holding a newborn, the time always came for her to surrender the child to its mother. To watch the father gather them both in his arms while a glow of radiance surrounded them.

Some might claim the notion pure fancy, but Leah had seen that glow again and again. She wondered if she was the only one who recognized the magic, who realized what love and family could do. They could transform a plain woman into a vision of loveliness, could light the dark corners of the meanest lean-to hovel.

Perhaps it was her fate to be an observer, but dear God, there were times when she yearned to experience that joy for herself. Love and family. At quiet moments like this, with the clopping of hooves punctuating the silence, she could feel the fear growing inside her. It was like a fistula, a cancer. It was the horror that she would never know that kind of love. That she would grow old alone and lonely.

She released a pent-up sigh and turned the buggy down Main Street, clucking to the horse. The mare picked up her pace, but with a reluctant blowing of her lips.

Lined with shops and churches, the gravel road cleaved the hilly town in two and descended to the waterfront. Across the Sound, the rising sun burst with a dazzle over the jagged white teeth of the distant Cascade mountain range.

Some activity at the harbor caught her eye, mercifully distracting her from her thoughts. Peering through the light layers of mist, she saw Davy Morgan, the harbormaster’s apprentice, come out of the small, low office at the head of Ebey’s Landing. The youth stretched as he yawned to greet the day. The first rays of sunshine shot through his vivid red hair.

Davy shaded his eyes in the direction of the dock where Jackson Underhill’s schooner bobbed at its moorage. The disabled rudder hung askew like a broken arm.

An unpleasant wave of guilt swept through Leah. The steerage was damaged because of her, and apparently repairing it was quite a task. Though it was none of her business, she knew Mr. Underhill had been sleeping on the boat rather than at the boardinghouse with Carrie. Perhaps he’d taken his vow to avoid having more children very seriously.

Seized by a perverse curiosity, she went to check out the boat, pulling up the buggy at the end of the dock.

“Morning, Miss Mundy.” Davy Morgan bobbed his bright red head in greeting.

She nodded back. Like most people, Davy neglected to address her by the title “Doctor,” but in his case, there was no malice intended. Yet when his employer, Bob Rapsilver, stepped out of the office, Leah’s defenses shot up like a shield.

The harbormaster made no secret of his dislike for her, ever since she’d advised him that the liver ailment he was always complaining about would abate once he gave up his daily pint of whiskey. Instead of giving up drink, however, he’d turned on her, openly questioning her morals, her intentions and her skill to anyone who would listen.

“Mr. Rapsilver,” she said with cool politeness.

“Miss Mundy.” He lifted a battered sailor’s cap. “You’re out and about bright and early today.”

“The Winfields had a fine, healthy son this morning.”

“Ah. Midwifing is a proper business.” He checked his pocket watch with a bored air. “Good to hear you weren’t out trying to do a man’s job.”

“I never try to do a man’s job,” she countered. “I do better.”

Davy snickered. Rapsilver pointed with a meaty hand. “Boy, weren’t you supposed to be testing the steam engine on Armstrong’s La Tache?”

“Already done, sir,” Davy said. “And it’s not safe. Almost burned my hand off trying to shut it down.”

“Are you all right?” Leah asked, concerned.

Davy nodded. “Yes, thank you, ma’am. But Mr. Armstrong’s not going to be too happy about his engine.”

“Be careful, then.” She jumped down, buggy springs squawking, and wound the reins around a cleat on the dock. She frowned at the rusty noise of the decrepit buggy. Another task to see to. Another problem to solve. Some days she felt like Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again before reaching the summit.

Not today, she thought determinedly. She had brought a new life into the world and there were no other calls to make. She wouldn’t let worries drag her spirits down.

Lifting the hem of her skirts away from the damp planks, she walked to the end of the dock and peered at the schooner. It looked to be perhaps sixty feet in length. Its once-sleek hull had dulled, the paint peeling. Jackson had told her the boat was called the Teatime. Some long-ago optimist had painted the name on a fancy scrollwork escutcheon affixed to the stern. Now all that remained were the letters eat me.

Leah walked down the length of the boat. Even in its state of disrepair, the schooner had the classic stately lines of a swift blue-water vessel. Seeing it all broken and peeling made her a little sad, reminding her of a favored patient succumbing to the rigors of old age.

She wondered who had commissioned the ship. Had it called at exotic ports in distant lands? And how had it wound up in the possession of Jackson T. Underhill? What sort of man was he anyway? Where were he and his strange, beautiful wife going in such a hurry? North to Canada, she guessed, maybe to lose themselves in the wilderness.

The fact was, they were already lost. She could see that clearly. She wondered if they knew.

She hesitated on the dock. She did need to speak with Mr. Underhill. Her patient was agitated. She knew no easy way to tell him what Carrie said during her lucid moments. Perhaps she could ease into it.

There was a danger, too, of being alone with him. He was, after all, a man who had tried to abduct her. The harbormaster would be of little help if Jackson attacked her. But why would he? He needed her. From the first moment, even holding a gun to her head, he’d needed her.

Steadying herself by grasping a ratline, she stepped onto the boat. A gentle listing motion welcomed her. Moving across the cockpit, she went up a small ladder to the midships. The deck glittered with glass prisms set into the planks to provide daylight for the rooms below. In the middle of the deck was a skylight hatch angled open to the morning.

Bending, she leaned down to see inside.

“G’damned chafer,” said a furious male voice. “Chicken-bred bastard from hell—”

She clapped her hands over her ears. “Mr. Underhill!”

The hatch swung open and his head popped up. His face was flushed a dark red, brow and temples damp with sweat. “Hey, Doc.”

She cleared her throat. “I’m sure whoever you’re speaking to below would prefer that you keep a civil tongue in your head.”

To her surprise, he gave her a crooked grin. “I’m alone, Doc. Just having a little argument with this repair.”

To her further surprise, she felt her mouth quirk in amusement. “And is it working?”

“What?”

“Cursing. Is it helping to fix the boat?”

“No, but I feel better.”

She eyed a part of the rudder lying across the main deck. Ropes and pulleys lay scattered about. She had never done a destructive thing in her life until she’d sabotaged his boat, and despite the circumstances, she felt guilty.

“I’ll help you.” Without further ado, she clambered down the hatch. The heel of her boot caught the bottom rung of the ladder, and she lurched forward.

“Careful there.” Strong hands gripped her waist, thumbs catching just below her breasts.

He held her only a second, but it seemed like forever. Leah stopped breathing. It had been so long since anyone had touched her. His handling was impersonal, yet she couldn’t help acknowledging that no one had ever held her this way before.

She saw his eyes widen.

“No corset, Doc?” he observed. His frankness embarrassed her.

“Binding is terrible for one’s health.”

He lifted his hands, palm out, in a conciliatory gesture. “You won’t hear me objecting to a ban on ladies’ corsets.”

Self-consciously, she straightened her shirtwaist.

“Watch your step.” He indicated a tub of pitch and masses of coiled rope on the floor. He moved back and regarded her. His attention had an odd effect on her composure. Her face grew warm, her pulse quickened, and she felt completely foolish.

“So,” he said, his grin slightly off center. “You’ve come to help.”

“You look as if you could use it.”

“You’re not too busy?”

“I’ve already made one call today. If no emergency comes up, I’m free for the time being.”

“Well, thanks. That’s real nice of you, Doc.”

She shrugged. “I thought it was the least I could do, since…” She let her voice trail off.

“Since you’re the one who broke the steering,” he finished for her.

“You’re the one who tried to kidnap me,” she shot back.

He nodded. “You’re not one to own up to things, are you?” He handed her a wood spanner.

She snatched the tool from him. “And you’re not one to apologize for your actions.”

“Here, hold this steady. Yeah. Just like that.” He put a peg into a freshly drilled hole and tamped it tight with a mallet. “Some landlubber used iron bolts on this mast stepping and they rusted. I have to replace them with wood fastenings or the aft mast could come down.” He repeated the procedure several more times, but each time he tamped down a peg, the opposite one came up. He cursed fluently and unsparingly through gritted teeth.

She watched him for a while, holding the pegs and holding her tongue until she could stand it no more.

“May I make a suggestion?”

The mallet came down squarely on his thumb. He shut his eyes, jaw bulging as he clenched it. “Shoot.”

“Why don’t you cut the pegs a longer length, then after they’re all in, trim the wood flush with the deck?”

He stared at her for a long moment. She thought he was going to argue with her or ridicule her. That was what men always did when a woman dared to comment on their work. Instead, he said, “Good idea. We’ll do it your way.”

She still had to hold the pegs for him, and he had to lie on his side to reach all the fittings, but his mood lightened as the work progressed. He had a long frame, lean and sinewed, and appeared to be remarkably healthy. The human body was her calling, her obsession, and it pleased her to watch him.

More than it should have.

“So,” he said at length, and she started guiltily, certain he knew she’d been studying him. “How is it you came to be a female doctor?”

She let out a relieved breath. “How I came to be a female is by accident of birth.”

He laughed. “I guess I deserved that.”

“How I came to be a doctor is by reading, hard work, a rigorous apprenticeship, and ward study in a hospital.” And how did you become an outlaw? she wanted to ask—but she didn’t dare.

His eyes narrowed as he sealed one of the pegs with glue. “You sure talk a lot and say nothing.”

His observation startled her. “I suppose you’re right.”

“So what’s the real story?” He stood and brushed off his leather carpenter’s apron. She liked it better than the gun belt.

“Why do you want to know?” Why on earth would it matter to you? she wondered.

“Just curious, I guess. Is it some big secret?”

“No. I’m just not used to being asked.”

He swept a mocking bow, the tools in his apron clanking with the movement. “So I’m asking.”

She caught herself smiling at him.

“You ought to do that more often,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Smile. Makes you look downright pretty.”

“Looking pretty is not important to me.”

“That’s a new one on me. You didn’t have the usual kind of mama, I guess.”

“Actually, I was raised by my father. Since he had no son, I suppose you could say he pinned his aspirations on me.” She paused, gazing out a portal as she collected her thoughts. In the faraway past, she heard a voice calling, “Dr. Mundy, can you come?”

Leah, no more than ten at the time, went along with her father, holding the lamp in the buggy and then squashing herself into a corner of the sickroom at the patient’s house.

She could not bring herself to admit to this stranger, this friendly man with secrets of his own in his blue-gray eyes, that her father had been the worst sort of doctor, a quack, a purveyor of questionable potions that often did more harm than good.

“I learned much from being in practice with him,” she said. It was not quite a lie. She’d learned there was nothing more precious than human life. That people needed to look to a physician for hope. That a good doctor could do much to ease suffering while a bad one got rich from it. Her father had given her one gift. He had made her determined to succeed where he had failed.

She made herself remember the pain and the horror and the fact that even as he was dying, Edward Mundy had withheld his love. She swallowed hard. “He died of complications from an old gunshot wound.”

He gazed at her thoughtfully. “I take it that’s why you’re not real fond of guns.”

“A gun is the tool of a coward,” she snapped. “A tool of destruction. I’ve seen too often what a bullet can do.”

“Touché, Doc, as the Three Musketeers would say.” He changed tools, selecting an awl. “So you became a doctor just like your papa.”

“Not like my father.” She flushed and looked away. “We disagreed often about courses of treatment.” For no reason she could fathom, she added, “We disagreed about everything, it seemed.”

“Such as?”

The proper way for Leah to dress. And talk. And behave.

The way to snare a wealthy husband.

Where they would flee to each time one of his patients expired due to his incompetence.

“Well?” Jackson prompted.

She already regretted the turn the conversation had taken. Yet it was surprisingly easy to talk to him. Probably because she knew that he was only here for a short time; then she’d never see him again. He couldn’t use the things she told him to hurt her.

“He never quite understood my insistence on practicing medicine for the good of humankind rather than to make money. He thought I should spend my leisure time pursuing drawing-room etiquette. He was disappointed when I failed to marry well.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean—marry well?”

“My father thought it meant marrying a man who’d settle his bad debts for him.”

“And you? What do you think it means?”

“Finding a man who will l—” she didn’t dare say it “—esteem me.”

“So why haven’t you done it yet?”

“Because such a man doesn’t exist.” The old ache of loneliness throbbed inside her. “I’ve yet to meet a man who would give me the freedom to practice medicine. Men seem to want their wives to stay at home, keeping the hearth fire stoked and darning socks instead of healing the sick.”

“It all sounds like a damned bore to me.”

“Healing the sick?”

“No. Stoking the hearth and darning socks.”

She laughed. “Did your mother never teach you a woman’s place is in the home?”

All trace of pleasantry left his face. “My mother never taught me a goddamned thing.”

His tone of voice warned her not to probe an old wound. We both have our scars, she thought. We work so very hard to hide them.

“So who taught you about the Three Musketeers?”

“Taught myself.” His voice had gone flat, uninviting. Then he brightened, reaching up to lean the heel of his hand on a cross beam. Light from the deck prisms fell across him, striking glints of gold in his hair. “Now that I’ve got the Teatime, I can go anywhere.”

“Where do you plan to go?”

“Wherever the wind takes me.”

“It sounds rather…capricious. Do you never think of staying somewhere, settling down?”

He got back to work, swirling his brush in a bucket of glue. “I never think of much at all.”

Letting the wood glue set around a loose bolt, Leah fell silent for a time, thinking. She wanted to ask him so many things: what he had left behind in his past, why he never spoke of the baby Carrie had lost, what he expected of the future. But she held her tongue. At an early age, she had learned caution. Watch what you say to another person. Watch what you learn about him. Watch what you feel for him.

Once in her life, she had given her whole heart and soul to a man, and he had crushed her flat. That man had been her father. He was a charlatan, but he was all she knew, all she had, and she’d given him enormous influence over her choices. Now she had nothing but broken, bitter memories.

Wishing she could forget the past, she worked in silence alongside Jackson Underhill, studying him furtively. In her profession she had seen men from all angles, yet she regarded Jackson as uniquely—and discomfitingly—interesting.

Despite a demeanor she found more charming than she should, he seemed to be a man who expected—and usually got—the worst life had to offer. Yet he still clung to hope in a way that was alien and intriguing to Leah.

“I’m curious, Mr. Underhill,” she said, unable to stop her incautious questions in spite of herself. “How is it that you came to be in possession of this boat?”

“What makes you think I didn’t commission her?”

“Somehow I can’t picture you christening a boat Teatime.”

“It said ‘eat me’ last time I looked.”

“Then at least fix the lettering on the stern,” she advised. “If you didn’t name her, who did?”

He thought for a moment, no doubt weighing what it was safe to tell her. “Some English guy I met in Seattle. I won her in a card game. Her owner was down on his luck, but I’m told in her day, she sailed the Far East, plying the waters around the island groves, looking for rare teas. I mean to go there someday,” he said, almost to himself.

“Go where?”

“I’m not sure. Someplace far. Exotic. Maybe I’ll just follow the sunset until I find what I’m looking for.”

The gruffness in his voice caught at her. “And what’s that, Mr. Underhill?”

“Paradise. Like that picture in your office.” His ears reddened after he spoke. “I guess. Just something I’ve always wanted to do.” He shrugged dismissively. “Pass me that mallet, will you?”

She handed it to him, frowning a little.

“What’s the matter, Doc?”

“I find you quite hard to understand,” she admitted. “My profession is the motivating factor of my life. It’s what gives me direction and purpose. Yet you have no plan for your life beyond sailing to the next port. You’re like this ship, Mr. Underhill. You’ve got no fixed rudder. No fixed course. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“I’m a dreamer. You’re a planner. Who the hell are you to say your way’s better?”

She felt a flush rise in her cheeks. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I apologize.”

“You don’t need to.” He picked up a sanding block and got to work.

“How long will these repairs take?” she asked, eager to leave the topic of planning and dreaming.

He blew out his breath. “Weeks, according to Davy Morgan who claims to know such things. He was amazed I was able to get here from Seattle. He gave me a list of repairs a mile long. I can do the work myself, but I’ll have to go back to the city to earn enough money to pay for supplies.”

“How will you earn the money?”

He winked. “I’m a gambling man.”

“Is that why you’re on the run?” she asked.

“Who said I was on the run?”

“You didn’t have to.” She pressed her mouth into a wry smile. “I guessed it as soon as you tried to abduct me. You confirmed it when you warned me not to alert the sheriff.”

He squinted menacingly at her. “And did you?”

She forced herself to hold his gaze. “No. But if you give me a reason to, I shall.”

“I’m not looking for trouble.”

“I know.” And she did. She’d briefly considered a visit to Sheriff Lemuel St. Croix, but she hadn’t actually done it. St. Croix was a tough, humorless man who seemed out of place in Coupeville. A bachelor of middle years, he had a taste for fine things; even on his modest lawman’s salary he’d managed to acquire a Panhard horseless gasoline carriage. Keeping law and order in the town did not seem to concern him overly much. This was not a problem since crimes in the area tended to be petty and few.

Lost in thought, she watched Jackson work. When he spoke of the sea, a dreamer took the place of the gunfighter. There was something compelling in his intent manner. Passion burned brightly in his gaze; she was caught by it. She couldn’t remember the last time such a powerful desire had burned inside her. The rigors of everyday life had dulled her heart to dreaming, it seemed.

When had it happened? she wondered. When had all her dreams died? And why hadn’t she felt the loss until now, until she looked into the eyes of a stranger and saw the lure of possibility?

She shouldn’t probe into the life of this drifter. He was clearly on the wrong side of the law, clearly had much to hide in his past. The less she knew about him, the better. It was time to tell him what she’d come to say in the first place. “Your wife seemed troubled when I checked on her yesterday evening.”

“She lost a baby. I guess that might trouble a woman some.”

And you? she wanted to ask. Does it trouble you?

“Of course,” she said carefully. “But I fear it is more than that. She said—” Leah broke off. Were they a husband and wife who shared everything, or did they keep secrets from one another? “She seems agitated.”

“Yeah, well, she gets that way.”

“She’s been having some rather terrible attacks of panic, almost like waking nightmares. She speaks of blood and fire—a stain on the floor, a burning house. And she seems to have a horror of being closed in. Mr. Underhill, your wife suffers from a fear that someone or something is after her. Someone is hunting her down.”

She wanted him to laugh it off, to joke it away as he did so many things.

Instead, his eyes took on the metallic sheen they’d had the first time she’d beheld him. The dull gleam of gunmetal. Danger emanated from him, causing her to take a step back toward the skylight hatch.

“It’s all just her talk,” Jackson said. “And none of your goddamned business.”

“Anything that affects the condition of my patient is my business,” she retorted.

He squeezed his jaw, clearly fighting his own temper. She wondered what made him so angry, what he was hiding. She wished it could be as he said—none of her business. Unfortunately, it was.

“Carrie’s had a rough life,” he said grudgingly. “We were raised in an orphanage, and if she seems scared sometimes, it’s because her whole life’s been scary.”

She felt an unexpected thickness in her throat. Life had clearly been brutal to Carrie. “I see. I’m sure the orphanage was awful for you both.”

“Awful,” he echoed, putting a wry twist on the word. “I guess you could say that. All right, Doc. You ready to help with the mast?”

Surprised, she followed him up on deck. He’d put his outburst behind him. It was, she realized, the boat that seemed to save him. He forgot everything else when he worked on it.

“Here.” He tossed her a line. “Grab onto that. If I did this right, the top section should drop into place.” He struggled for several moments with his end, breaking out in a sweat and cursing. He paused to peel off his plaid shirt and fling it aside. Leah stared, caught herself doing so, then forced her attention to the task at hand.

As the tall fir topmast responded to the ropes and pulleys, she caught her breath. Jackson experimented with hoisting the sails, and with an unexpected thrill, she took heady satisfaction in the majestic loft of the canvas. She felt a curious tightening inside her, a sort of breath-held anticipation. Then, when the sail unfurled against the sky, the sensation uncoiled with a sudden warmth that made her part her lips to utter an involuntary sound of pleasure. How had she missed the excitement of seafaring when she lived right at the edge of it?

Shading her eyes, she admitted the answer. She missed everything important because she was an outsider. It took a stranger on the run to show her the wonders right under her nose.

She lowered her hand to find him eyeing her curiously. The sun glinted off the sheen of sweat on his shoulders.

“Is something wrong, Mr. Underhill?”

“You liked that, didn’t you?”

“Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I did find it…diverting.”

“I mean you really liked that.”

“Indeed. But how can you tell?”

He briefly touched the back of his hand to her cheek. “You look like a woman who just made love.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She turned her back on him. She shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be doing this, feeling this.

Yet her fascination with him grew each moment, became harder to cope with each day. Jackson T. Underhill was at once mysterious and seductive, shadowed by the weary indifference of a rootless drifter. She should keep a cool distance from him. Should keep her mind on his wife. Instead, she caught herself thinking forbidden thoughts, remembering dreams she had abandoned years ago, then despising herself for doing so.

“You say you did business with this Jack Tower?” Joel Santana spread the Wanted poster on the shop counter. With quick, furtive movements, the chemist swept the poster out of sight, glancing around to be sure the other customers hadn’t seen it.

Ratlike, his nose twitched. “I never said that, Marshal.”

Joel rested his elbow on the counter as a great wave of weariness overcame him. He’d tracked Tower across Texas and into New Mexico where the Santa Fe wind blasted a man’s face with red dust during the day and chilled him to the marrow at night. “Look, mister, if I say you said it, than you damned sure did say it.”

“But—”

“I don’t like your kind.” He glanced over his shoulder at the Indian sleeping on the boardwalk outside. “I don’t like the stuff you sell.”

The rat nose narrowed haughtily. “I assure you, my medicines are all of the highest—”

“Horseshit. I’m not real fond of selling folks stuff that makes them stupid, keeps them coming back for more.” Squinting, Santana scanned the shelves behind the counter. Peyote, powdered psilocybe, laudanum, morphine crystals and Lord knew what else. Jail cells without bars, as far as Santana was concerned. They robbed a person of freedom, dignity and eventually life.

Reaching past the chemist’s shoulder, he knocked over a stoppered bottle. The glass shattered, and a pungent herbal smell tainted the air. “Oops,” he said. “I’m just a bull in a lady’s parlor.”

“Hey, what the—”

“Just trying to read this here label.” Joel’s hand shoved another bottle off the shelf. “Damn! I don’t know what’s got me so clumsy all of a sudden.”

A matron who had been perusing an array of sleeping powders scuttled out the door.

“Now, how about this one?” Joel stretched his arm toward the shelf.

The chemist stepped back, spreading his arms, trying to protect his wares. “All right,” he snapped. “I sold him something!”

Santana lowered his arm. His shoulder burned, the bursitis kicking in. Too damned many cold nights under the stars, he thought. The quicker he found Jack Tower, the sooner he could retire. A place where the weather was mild, the scenery pretty. Find a woman who’d put up with an old saddle bum’s foibles…. Before his mind wandered too far, he stuck his thumb into his gun belt and regarded the chemist, waiting.

“He got me up in the middle of the night,” the man said. “Woke me right out of a sound sleep.”

Joel clucked in mock sympathy. “So what’d he want?”

“I couldn’t even hear him at first. The woman he was with—his wife or whatever—was screaming hysterically.”

Joel’s blood chilled. Even though he already knew the answer, he took out the photograph the sheriff of Rising Star had given him. “This woman?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s her.”

“And what’d you sell them?”

“A tin of tobacco, Underhill Fancy Shred, I think…and a whole case of this.” The chemist brought down a box of patented medicine called A Pennysworth of Peace. The label made outlandish claims of its restorative powers. The user could count on everything from a good night’s sleep and regular bowel movements to perfect spiritual contentment. Joel cracked open the blue bottle and sniffed. A mixture of low-grade corn whiskey, molasses and opium, he judged.

The chill in his blood moved into his heart. Jack Tower didn’t know about Caroline Willis. Didn’t know what she’d done in the past, what she was capable of.

But Joel Santana knew.

He had first heard of Caroline a few years earlier in the aftermath of a fatal fire in New Orleans. One of the more notorious French Quarter cribs had burned to the ground. The victim had been a local preacher who, it turned out, had a taste for dangerous games. At the time of the fire, he’d been dressed in leather chaps and nothing else. He’d been spread-eagled and bound to the bed with leg irons. And there, on a sweltering July night, he’d come to understand the true meaning of burning in hell.

The preacher had been Caroline’s client.

“Where’d they go after they left your shop?” Joel asked the chemist.

“Took the train straight out of town, swear to God. That’s all I can tell you,” the chemist said, clearly ready for the interview to be over. “Honest to Pete, that’s all.”

Joel lifted his hand to the brim of his hat. The chemist cringed, probably anticipating more breakage. “Mister, you’re a pretty nervous fellow,” Santana said. Spurs clinking, he walked to the door and cast an eye at the rows of potions. “You ought to take something for it.”

Troubled and restless, Jackson sat on the front porch of the big house and stared up at the night sky. He’d been studying the stars because a good skipper used them to navigate by. He took out a tin of tobacco, rolled a smoke, and lit up, watching the lazy strands of gray mist weave in and out of the moonlight. He’d tried to interest Carrie in astronomy, showing her the drawings in the tattered book he’d found on board, but Carrie wasn’t interested in much lately.

A small, forbidden whisper passed through his mind. Leah Mundy would be interested.

He shouldn’t be thinking about her, not in that way, yet he felt his gaze stray to the wing of the house where her surgery was.

A light burned in the window.

He gripped the arms of the rocking chair, willing himself to stay put. But part of him wanted to go, wanted to see her, to find out why she was sleepless, too. He moved quietly across the lawn, craning his neck to see into the lighted window. What the devil was she doing up so late?

Leah held a slim glass tube up to the gaslight. Crystals formed high on the tube; lower down she discerned a layer of inert substances. Her titration had worked this time even though it was a tricky business. She was lucky she’d gotten some results at last, for the bottle of Carrie’s tonic was almost empty.

Using a sterile rod, she extracted some of the crystalline substance. Now she knew for certain, but the knowledge didn’t ease her mind. She had to figure out a way to tell Jackson what she’d discovered.