Banner O'Brien (4 page)

Banner’s attention swung to the woman on the cot. She was so thin that her hipbones were clearly visible even through her blanket. Her eyes were sunken and shadowed, and her lackluster brown hair was matted.

Adam’s tone was gentle when he spoke. “Hildie, this is Dr. O’Brien. Will you please let her examine you?”

Hildie’s pain-haunted eyes assessed the healthy, neatly dressed woman standing nearby, then shifted back to Adam. “If you’ll go outside, I will,” she said. “My Fitz don’t want—”

Adam held up both hands in a concessionary gesture. “I know,” he broke in. “Your husband doesn’t want any man to see you without your clothes.”

“It ain’t decent,” muttered Hildie.

Adam made an exasperated sound, and for all its softness, it startled Banner. She’d been trying to identify the familiar, cloying odor that underlined the ordinary smells of cooking, tobacco smoke, and an unrinsed chamberpot.

“I’ll take the boys downstairs for a while,” he said.

Hildie half-rose from her dingy, coverless pillow. “Don’t you buy them nothin’, Doc, like you did the last time.”

Adam’s jaw tightened, but he drew the two children to the door with him with an eloquent motion of one
hand. Only a moment later he was gone, the stale air of the room stirred by the brief admission of the outdoors.

Banner and Hildie were alone, and the nature of the smell Banner had been chasing through her mind came home to her with dismal clarity.

“Open your nightgown, please,” she said, cloaking her despair in brisk professionalism.

Hildie hesitated, then grudgingly complied. “How’d you ever get to be a doctor?” she demanded.

“It wasn’t easy,” said Banner, keeping her features under strict control even though bile was rising in her throat like acid. Hildie’s right breast was eaten away by disease.

“My Ma’s leg got just this way,” confided Hildie, in hushed, shaky tones that betrayed her fear. “She went blind, Ma did. And then she died.”

Banner closed her eyes for a moment and longed for a breath of the crisp, bracing winter air outside. She cleaned the infected area with an alcohol solution and gave Hildie a stiff dose of laudenum.

When this had been accomplished, Banner helped herself to water from a kettle on the stove and scoured her hands with the lye soap she carried in her bag.

That done, she went to the door and opened it and swallowed great gulps of clean air.

Adam had been waiting at the base of the stairs, though Hildie’s children were nowhere in sight, and he looked up at her with eyes that betrayed an ache to match her own.

They met in the middle of the stairway, but Banner could not manage a medical consultation at the moment. She covered her mouth with one hand, made a strangling sound, and rushed down the steps to vomit into a pristine snowbank at their base.

Adam was ready with a clean handkerchief when the spasm of illness passed. “Cancer?” he ventured, like a teacher quizzing a slow child.

Banner shook her head and took clean snow from the stair railing, putting it into her mouth and then unceremoniously spewing it out. “Diabetes,” she said, and the word was a soblike rasp. “Her breast—there’s gangrene—”

Respect mingled with the sympathy in Adam’s blue eyes. “I know.”

“How?” croaked Banner. “How did you know, if she wouldn’t let you examine her?”

“The smell.”

Banner nodded distractedly. “She should be hospitalized.”

“Yes.” Adam paused, grinding his teeth and assessing the sky as though it had offended him. Snowflakes glistened in his thick hair and gathered on his eyelashes. “But—”

“But ‘her Fitz’ won’t allow it.”

“Right. He’s convinced that I merely want to get her alone so I can have my way with her.”

Frustration swelled in Banner’s mind, crowding worthy thoughts into shadowed corners. She had thought she’d encountered every form of ignorance during her training and her brief practice in Portland, but this was a new aspect. “She’ll die.”

“Yes.”

“And she must be in wretched pain.”

Adam only nodded, but his exasperation was visible in the set of his jaw and his shoulders.

It was then that Hildie’s boys appeared, laughing and flinging handfuls of powdery snow at each other, exulting in the weather and the brief escape from the grim quarters at the top of the stairs.

“What will happen to them?” Banner whispered.

Adam sighed. “God knows. Right now, Hildie is my main concern. I’ll have another talk with Fitz tonight and try to persuade him to bring her to the hospital.”

Banner had not dared to dream that there actually was a real hospital in Port Hastings. For all its vigor, it
was a relatively small town, and most such communities considered hospitals an extravagance.

Despite the weight of what they both knew would befall Hildie, Adam smiled. Again, it seemed, he’d read her thoughts. “Would you like to see my hospital, O’Brien?”

“Your
hospital?”

He nodded. “Since I run it myself, I tend to think of it as mine, yes.”

The idea engendered depths of weariness Banner had never felt before, even during the grueling days of her training. “By yourself?” she marveled.

Adam’s shoulders stiffened under the tweed coat. “I haven’t had much choice,” he said. “Henderson is the only other doctor within twenty-five miles, and I wouldn’t let that butcher near my horses, let alone my patients.”

Having imparted this information, Adam left Banner to go back to Hildie’s room and reclaim the cloak and medical bag she had left behind.

One of the little boys approached Banner, gnawing philosophically on the strip of dried beef Adam had been forbidden to buy. “You sure do got red hair till hell won’t have it, missus,” he said.

Before Banner could come up with a suitable response, Adam reappeared, carrying her things. Somewhere between herself and Hildie, he had shed his frustration and his anger, or hidden them, and he was again the unflappable country doctor.

Banner wasn’t certain whether to mourn or feel relieved.

Chapter Two

T
HE HILL LEADING FROM
P
ORT
H
ASTINGS PROPER
to Adam’s hospital was a steep one—so steep that Banner knew moments of alarm. At times, it seemed that the lightweight buggy would slide backward, all the way to the harbor, dragging the stoic little horse with it.

To distract herself from this image, Banner turned her attention to the houses rising on each side of the road.

They were sizable places with widow’s walks along their waterward sides and fashionable scrollwork edging their roofs and windows. Each house had a yard, and each a picket fence. The pruned rosebushes, in their traceries of snow, stirred a nostalgia for a vanished summer within Banner.

At the crest of the hill was an elegant two-story brick
house with many chimneys and dozens of glistening windows. Ivy vines, netted with snow, cossetted one end of the building like a gentle hand. At the other, a long, covered walkway annexed a one-story wing.

Banner thought surely they would pass the place by, but the horse drew the rig into the cobbled drive without any perceptible urging from Adam.

“This is your hospital?” Banner asked, thunderstruck.

He laughed, but the sound was mirthless, and his blue eyes were fixed not on the magnificent building or on Banner but on the mountain rising beyond. He seemed to see something there besides the countless evergreens in their lacy snow chemises. Something he prized.

After a second or so, however, Adam turned to Banner, and he was seeing her. Smiling. “This is my house,” he said. “Or, I should say, my mother’s house. That wing over there holds the hospital, my office, all that.”

Banner was impressed. “Such a big house,” she breathed. Was there a woman living behind those thick walls, a woman who wore Adam’s band on her finger? She had not considered that possibility before, and now, as it edged into her mind on sticky shoes, she found it distinctly unpleasant. “I suppose you have lots of children,” she said.

Adam laughed again, drawing the reins back and wrenching the brake lever into place in front of a small stone porch. Above this were massive, brass-handled doors. “I would like nothing better,” he said, “but propriety dictates that I take a wife first.”

Wild relief brought swiftness to Banner’s breath and color to her cheeks—color that had no connection at all to the biting December wind. “Are you such a respector of propriety, doctor?” she ventured, her eyes sparkling.

He chuckled. “Not normally. In most respects, in fact, I’m an unconscionable rake. However, when it comes to children, I have very provincial ideas.”

Banner felt an odd quickening in her womb, as though it were preparing itself to nurture and cherish this man’s child. Reprimanding herself for having such a fanciful and untoward thought, she bit her lower lip and squared her small shoulders. “It is quite cold,” she said stiffly.

The lie was so brazen that she thought Adam would surely challenge it; despite the weather, there was an unaccountable warmth under the black leather bonnet of that buggy. His face had drawn very near to hers, and for one wild moment she was certain that he meant to kiss her.

Before the quandary could be resolved, however, one of the two doors at the front of the house swung open and a pretty young girl appeared in the chasm, one arm looped through the center of the biggest holly wreath Banner had ever seen.

The sprite had wide, crystal blue eyes and hair as dark as Adam’s, and her face was alight at the sight of the buggy.

“Adam!” the woman-child whooped in unceremonious joy, bounding over the snowy steps in a tomboyish leap and scurrying toward the buggy.

Adam turned from Banner and, to her deep annoyance, climbed out of the rig to embrace the elfin enchantress and whirl her around, red-berried, prickly wreath and all, in exuberant greeting.

Banner felt the first real jealousy she had ever known, though she forced a patient smile to her mouth. After all, it wasn’t as though she herself had any claim to this man’s affections, and though he had said he was unmarried, he had
not
said that there was no one he cared for.

The girl’s eyes were on Banner the moment Adam had set her down, but no challenge leaped in their blue,
blue depths. Only a sort of mischievous speculation. “Who is this?” she chimed, letting the huge wreath rest against the skirts of her soft azure dress.

Adam held out one arm in a dashing gesture of introduction. “Melissa, meet Dr. Banner O’Brien. O’Brien, my sister, Melissa.”

Relief sang through Banner’s system, and her assumed smile became genuine. “Hello,” she said, as Adam helped her down.

Melissa’s delighted gaze swung from Banner to her brother, and an unspoken “Ah-ha!” rang in the air.

Adam tossed a look of mock sternness in his sister’s direction and then tucked Banner’s hand into the crook of his elbow before starting toward the open door of the house.

“When did you get back?” he asked of Melissa, who hesitated on the step to hang the wreath on a waiting hook.

“Why, Adam, how nice of you to ask!” retorted Melissa. “You were supposed to meet the steamer, remember?”

A look of exaggerated chagrin moved in Adam’s face and his broad shoulders as Melissa joined them in the entryway. “You’re here,” he observed expansively, “so I don’t see the problem.”

“You wouldn’t,” drawled the girl—Banner guessed she was about seventeen years old—rubbing her hands together as though the holly wreath might have left dust on them. “If it hadn’t been for Jeff, I would have had to walk.”

“Horrors,” said Adam, and his hand came up to touch Banner’s hand, where it still rested in the crook of his arm.

Melissa took pointed interest in the gesture and studied Banner with mischievous eyes. “Are you really a doctor?” she wanted to know.

Adam’s eyes linked with Banner’s as he guided her out of the entryway, with its black-and-white-tiled floor
and its tall clock. “Yes,” he said, in a voice that made his colleague’s heart cavort wildly between her throat and her midsection. “Shamrock is really a doctor.”

So he had accepted her, then. Inwardly, Banner rejoiced. “Could we see the hospital now?”

Adam nodded, ushering her through a massive dining room that boasted mahogany-paneled walls, a crystal chandelier that must have measured at least six feet across, and a fireplace big enough for three or four men to stand up in. The furniture here was heavy, but not ornate, and the overall impression was one of easy, longstanding wealth.

“Before Papa built this house,” Melissa announced, “he and Mama lived in a cabin right on this very spot.” She tapped the long, highly polished table with the knuckles of one hand. “He used to say that my brothers were all born right where Maggie sets the mashed potatoes.”

Adam paused and gave his sister a dour look. “Speaking of Maggie, why don’t you find her and tell her that Dr. O’Brien and I will want something to eat when we get back from the hospital.”

Melissa looked as though she was going to argue—she would obviously have preferred to tag along after her brother—but then her aquamarine eyes registered understanding and she turned, in a whirl of finely sewn skirts, to prance off toward a door on the other side of the room.

Grinning, Adam led Banner through an archway and onto the covered walk she’d seen from outside. It had glass walls and a smooth wooden floor, and snow whispered past on both sides.

At the end was a broad room boasting eight empty, immaculately made beds and a huge iron heating stove.

“This is the infirmary itself,” Adam said. “Usually, there are half a dozen patients here.”

Banner looked around, both impressed and puzzled. “Is there just the one ward?”

Adam’s eyes were as merry as the big wreath Melissa had hung on the front door. “You’re wondering whether or not women patients have to share the ward with men,” he guessed, quite accurately.

“Do they?”

He chuckled. “Of course not, Shamrock. We get very few female patients, given the backward attitudes of their husbands and fathers. When a woman is brought here, I usually put her in one of the guestrooms on the other side of the house.”