Courting Susannah (27 page)

He closed his eyes, made himself breathe slowly. Nothing—
nothing
was more dangerous than that.

Aubrey raised his head, met his own gaze in the mirror. Water drizzled from his hair, beaded on his lashes and his skin. Indeed, he looked as though he'd just been baptized by an old-fashioned preacher.

“Coward,” he accused, as his brother had done the night before. Then he snatched a towel from the rack and turned his back on his own image.

Susannah did not see Aubrey again that day or the next. She was busy the whole time, looking after Victoria, teaching more piano lessons, and helping Maisie as much as she could with the cooking and laundry. For all that, her thoughts were always chasing off in search of her future husband, like children scrabbling after butterflies.

The afternoon of the second day, she was taking tea in the kitchen while Victoria napped upstairs. The large room was steaming, the windows fogged, because
Maisie, disdaining the fancy washing machine, was boiling Aubrey's white shirts on the stove. She had acquired a permanent helper in the silent, awkward-looking young woman who had looked after Victoria during the party. Ellie was her name, and she listened stoically while Maisie issued orders in her gruff, kindly way.

“Ellie's man done lit out for the gold fields,” Maisie confided when the new employee had gone upstairs to gather towels in need of washing. “Poor thing. She really believes he's comin' back.”

Susannah set down her tea cup and put aside her own problems. “Maybe he is, Maisie. Maybe he'll return one day, with a bag of gold under each arm, whistling a tune.”

Standing there by the stove, minding her laundry, Maisie gave a snort. “You read too many books,” she said cheerfully. “She's got any sense, she wouldn't take the rascal back on any account. There's no forgettin' somethin' like that.”

Susannah thought of Julia and the hurt Aubrey had suffered at her hands. Once one person's trust in another had been shattered, it might be that there was no mending the damage. The idea filled her with sorrow, because she wanted Aubrey's trust as much as his love, and she knew one could not flourish without the other. “I don't suppose there is.”

Chapter 13

L
ooking back, Aubrey supposed it shouldn't have surprised him, what happened next, given the fact that Delphinia had threatened him just the night before at the engagement party, and he knew her to be a woman of her word, at least where vengeance was concerned. All the same, he was caught unprepared when, working alone in his office above the store the following evening, long after everyone else had gone home, he saw a flicker of movement in the open doorway. Before he could react or even credit that he had uninvited company, a pistol flared, and he heard the report, heard the lamp at his elbow splinter in a spray of glass. The light folded in on itself, disappeared; ducking behind the desk, he groped for the pistol he'd stopped carrying years before. After all, Seattle was a modern, civilized town by western standards. Few men went about armed.

He might have been blind, for all he could see in that dense gloom; the intruders were all around him, all over him, six or seven of them, small and wiry and fiercely strong. He put up a respectable fight, being a big man and handy with his fists, but he'd lost the battle before it began, and he knew it.

Fists came at him from all sides; it was like standing in the bottom of a rock-lined well while it collapsed, stone by stone. The pain went bone deep and finally wrenched him down and down, into a place where there was nothing but the sound of his own heartbeat.

Ethan reached the store first thing in the morning and was busy selecting various staples for his larder when Hawkins appeared at the top of the stairs, screeching like a monkey with its tail caught, his eyes round as stove lids behind his spectacles and almost bulging out of his head.

“Help!” he yelled. “Good God, somebody help—Mr. Fairgrieve—I think—I think somebody's killed him—”

The item Ethan had been holding crashed to the hardwood floor, and it seemed to him that everyone in the store came running, but he got there first. His boot heels hammered on the steps as he mounted them two at a time, and he shoved the secretary out of his way without breaking his stride.

Aubrey lay sprawled on the floor a few feet behind his desk, and he did indeed look dead. Ethan was on his knees beside his brother before he became aware of himself again, feeling at the base of his brother's throat for a pulse. It was there—he closed his eyes for a moment in abject relief—but just barely, and it was thin as thread.

“Get a doctor,” Ethan rasped. “Somebody get a doctor.” He glanced back over one shoulder, saw a crowd huddled in the doorway. Hawkins splintered off from the bunch, presumably to bring help. “I need some cold water and clean cloth,” he added. “The rest of you had better get back to your work.”

The doctor arrived within a few minutes; he was portly and middle-aged, with the smells of whiskey, sweat, and stale tobacco about him. Ethan, who had been cleaning Aubrey's wounds as best he could, sat
back on his heels, keeping a close watch while the stranger opened an ancient black bag and brought out a stethoscope.

“Damn near killed him,” the older man remarked. He looked Ethan over. “You do this?”

“Hell, no,” Ethan snapped. Had the circumstances been more fortuitous, he might have been flattered that anyone thought him capable of taking Aubrey, who was six inches taller and must have outweighed him by seventy pounds.

“Well, it's going to be a while before he can tell us who did,” the doctor said with a sigh. He ran capable, if none too clean, hands over Aubrey's ribs, his arms and legs. “I hope he's tough, this feller, 'cause he's got a long, hard road ahead of him, if he makes it at all.”

Ethan's stomach pitched itself against the back of his throat. Aubrey couldn't die, he couldn't. There were too many things still unresolved between the two of them, and besides, Aubrey was his brother, damn it. All the family he'd ever had.

“He'll make it,” Ethan vowed.

“Well, he belongs in the hospital. We'd better get him up there, soon as we can.”

“No,” Ethan said. In his mind, hospitals were frightful places where people went to die. Aubrey would go home, to the big house on the hill, where he could be looked after proper. “He'd want to be in his own bed, if he was given the choice. That's where I mean to take him.”

The physician shrugged, probably anxious to get back to a card game someplace. “Those ribs have to be bound—”

“You can do that right here, can't you?”

“Well—” The man took out his pocket watch, checked the time. Ethan considered sending him packing and fetching another, better doctor, but he was reluctant to leave Aubrey untended any longer. As it was,
he'd probably been lying there unconscious for most of the night.

“Get some sheets from the dry goods shelf,” Ethan said to Hawkins, who was hovering in the doorway again. The others had gone back to their usual tasks, as instructed. “I'll need some kind of litter, too.”

Hawkins gulped, nodded, and hastened away, obviously glad of an assignment. He returned shortly with a pile of crisp bed linens of the sort that sold for a pretty penny; Ethan didn't hesitate to tear them into wide strips. Then, working together, he and the doctor, who had stated his name as Horace Sutherfield, stripped Aubrey to the waist and bound his ribs. He didn't stir during the process, and while Ethan reckoned that to be a mercy of sorts, he would have preferred to hear a few moans and curses. That would have indicated that Aubrey was nearer to life than to death, but as things stood, there was just no telling.

Presently, two of the sales clerks clambered up the stairs with what looked like the weathered door of an outhouse. Ethan and the doctor put Aubrey onto the slab and strapped him to it with the remaining strips of sheeting. In his condition, a fall might well kill him. Or cripple him, Ethan thought gloomily, if that hadn't happened already.

A boiling rage filled him; he would find the men who had done this, whether they were traveling one by one or running in a pack, and repay them in kind for what they'd done. Maybe he'd throw in a bullet between the eyes, just for good measure.

“I had Simpson bring your wagon around front,” Hawkins said as Ethan and the stout German blacksmith summoned from down the street each took one end of the improvised litter. The secretary looked bloodless, and there was still a wild glint of panic in his eye.

“Thanks,” Ethan said quietly.

“If there's anything else I can do—”

“Just mind the store. And if you hear anything—”

Hawkins stood a little straighten “You can be sure I'll send word to you right away, Mr. Fairgrieve.”

“Ethan,” he corrected in passing. “I suppose the police ought to be told what happened.”

“I'll see to that, too,” Hawkins promised.

By then, Ethan was concentrating on getting his brother safely down the stairs, through the store, into the back of the wagon waiting outside. The doctor climbed into the box and took the reins without being asked, while Ethan crouched in the wagon bed beside Aubrey's inert, blanket-covered form. The blacksmith rode at the open tailgate, knowing his help would be needed when they reached the big house.

As they jostled and jolted up the steep, rutted road that ran alongside the store, fat, feathery flakes of snow wafted down from a burdened sky.

Susannah was on the porch, bidding an eager piano student farewell for the day, when the wagon appeared. Seeing Ethan kneeling in the back, she knew instantly that something had happened to Aubrey, and she went hurtling down the steps and the long walk, heedless of the slippery stones and the biting chill in the air.

She stood with her heart in her throat while Ethan and a burly man wearing rough clothes and a smithy's apron got out of the wagon at the rear and drew Aubrey after them, strapped to a wooden panel and oblivious to everything and everyone around him. Snow settled on his blood-matted hair, filled the cuts on his face, covered his lashes and his lips. Except for the bruises, he was colorless as a corpse.

“Lead the way,” Ethan said, and while he did not speak sharply, his tone was crisp. He expected to be obeyed.

Susannah fled back up the walk and into the house. The piano student, a moderately successful miner who called himself Snakebite Charlie, lingered lest his help be needed. The dissolute-looking man she assumed to be a doctor sent him scuttling with an order to bring back the first constable he came across.

It wasn't until she had thrown back the covers on Aubrey's bed, and Ethan and the doctor and the blacksmith had carefully maneuvered him onto the mattress, that Susannah dared to speak. “Tell me,” she demanded.

Ethan looked at her with all the sorrows of mankind showing in his face. “There isn't a whole lot to tell,” he answered. “Hawkins found him in his office this morning, pretty much as you see him now.”

She squeezed her eyes shut as the images assailed her. She indulged in a moment's shame, for she had listened for Aubrey the night before, had known that he hadn't come home. And she'd lain awake, twisting her engagement ring round and round on her finger, fearing that he was with Delphinia or some other woman of similar repute.

The doctor was working busily over Aubrey, lifting his lids to peer into his eyes, testing reflexes, and shaking his head a great deal. He did not look optimistic.

“Have you any idea who did this?”

Ethan's jawline went rock-hard as he looked down at his brother. “No,” he answered without meeting her gaze, “but I have a notion or two about who ordered it done.”

Susannah had worked her way from the foot of the bed to Aubrey's side, opposite the doctor. She drew up a chair and took one large, still hand into both her own. “Who?” she wanted to know.

“You needn't concern yourself with that,” Ethan said flatly. “I'll see that justice is done.”

Something in his voice, in his manner, alarmed Susannah almost as much as his words, though he had spoken quietly and without inflection. “I should think the police will consider that their provenance,” she said.

“To hell with the police,” Ethan replied, and shoved a hand through his hair.

The doctor looked up from his examination of Aubrey. “The lady is right, Mr. Fairgrieve,” he said. “You'd do well to leave this matter to the authorities.”

Ethan glowered at the older man. “They're more than welcome to whatever's left of the bastards when I get through.” His expression was cold enough to send a shiver skittering up Susannah's spine. The kind of vengeance Ethan was talking about could only lead to his own destruction.

The doctor shook his head and tossed an appealing glance in Susannah's direction. “If you've got any influence over this feller,” he said, “use it to talk him out of this foolishness.”