Firefly (22 page)

The newspaper snapped down.

"Wilhelm, please," Katharine begged.  "Don't wake Willy."

That, Julie calmly told herself, was the straw that broke the camel's back.

"Of course!" she shouted.  "Don't wake Willy!  Never mind what happens to Julie, so long as you don't wake Willy!"  She saw a pained look come across Katharine's face but ignored it.  She knew her mother too well.  "For once, just once, you're going to listen to me, and to hell with Willy!"

She got to her feet and faced her father.  She was shaking and flatly refused to listen to anything that resembled better judgment, but the consequences of her actions could hardly be worse than the consequences of inaction.

"I am not going to wear those ridiculous glasses any more," she announced firmly, her voice far steadier than her knees.  "I don't need them, and there is no way you can make me wear them.  If I did, Dr. Morgan would only want to know why, since he knows I can see perfectly well without them, and I don't suppose you want me to tell him the truth.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to bed."

She stormed out of the parlor, but at the bottom of the stairs Wilhelm caught her, grabbing her by the arm so harshly that she knew there would be bruises.

"You think you can fool me," he growled at her, "but I am not fooled.  For once you are the fool.  Go ahead and flaunt yourself at that man, but it will do you no more good than it did before.  And Morgan is less of a man than the horse-thief or any of the others."

"I am not the child I was nine years ago, Papa.  The dreams I had then died a long time ago.  And if they hadn't, Dr. Morgan is the last man to answer them.  He's still in love with his wife, and even without the precious eye-glasses, I would never be able to replace her.  I have enough self-respect not to make a fool of myself trying."

She pulled her arm free of her father's grasp, though she heard the soft tearing of worn fabric as he held onto the sleeve of her dress a second too long.  It didn't matter; she would have left the man's presence even if he had ripped the garment to shreds.  By the time she reached the top of the stairs and stormed into her own room, the tears were hot on her cheeks.  She slammed the door as loudly as she could, but it drew no angry retort from her father or complaint from Willy in the next room.

She had lied.  Guilt brought the tears, not only for the lie but for the shame of the truth.

In the dark of her bedroom Julie fought against the words. To speak them in her heart was bad enough, but if they came to her lips, however silently, she would never again be able to deny them.  Yet keeping them inside only added to the pain.

And the pain demanded release.  Involuntarily, her voice no louder than the breeze at the uncurtained window, Julie whispered, "I love you, Del Morgan."

Chapter Fourteen

 The word "if," Julie decided, aptly characterized the rest of that week.  As she went through each exhausting but satisfying day, the litany of circumstances chanted through her brain.

If she had not broken the spectacles, she would not have fought with her father.

If she had not fought with Wilhelm, she would not have admitted to herself that she was in love with Morgan.

 If she had not admitted to her emotions, she would have told Morgan about her promise to Hans.

If Morgan had known she was all but formally engaged, he might have gone ahead and found someone else to work for him, thus releasing Julie from her torment.

When she came to that part of the sequence, she felt a cold chill, for she knew that if Morgan had terminated their working relationship, she would have gone insane.

Although loving Morgan when she knew he would never return her feelings made her ache inside, Julie also loved her work.  She quickly got over the initial queasiness of surgery, and when Paddy McCrory, Clancy's fourteen-year-old brother, blew off three fingers on the Fourth of July, Julie's hands were as steady as Morgan's during the operation.  Two days later, he let her wield the needle herself, and she sewed Jack Brohagen's cut elbow with a row of fine, neat stitches.  The bartender twisted his arm to look at the work and grinned.

"Next time I lean on a broken bottle, I'll make sure Miss Hollstrom does the mending.  Looks just like embroidery!"

She had blushed--that was one habit she couldn't seem to break--but with pride rather than embarrassment.

If she had not taken pride in her work, Morgan would not have teased her about it for the rest of the afternoon.

"They really were nice stitches, weren't they," she commented while they cleaned the surgery.

"Oh, not bad.  I've seen better."

"You haven't either!  They were all exactly the same length and spaced exactly the same distance apart."

Morgan leaned against the doorframe and folded his arms across his chest.

"I remember an old bachelor doctor back in Cincinnati who did real embroidery on his patients.  On a cut like Jack's, old Sam'l Wooden did feather stitching so pretty that people hated to take it out.  He did a lot of work during the War, Union Army, of course, and he had a different stitch for each different kind of wound.  Satin stitch for amputations, French knots for bullet holes."

She knew he was lying by the smile and the twinkle in his eyes.

"Don't be silly," she retorted.  "You can't sew things together with French knots."

"You can't?"

His feigned disbelief was so guiltily exaggerated that Julie started to giggle.

"You don't even know what a French knot is," she accused.  "Now, if you had asked, I might have been able to put Mr. Brohagen's elbow back together with satin stitches, but not French knots."

"Well, Dr. Sam'l Wooden could!"

"He couldn't!" Julie insisted, caught up in the game.  "It just isn't possible.  Here, I'll show you."

Morgan tried to stop her, but Julie wouldn't let him.  Now it was her turn to tease, and she intended to see it through to the end.

"Men always think they know everything," she harped while she gathered the items she needed.  "And they think that when they don't know everything, they can still bluff a woman into believing that they do.  Men never bother to remember that there are certain things women know more about."

"Like French knots."

"Exactly." She got out the needles and thread they had just put away.  "I am going to demonstrate just how impossible it is to suture a wound like Mr. Brohagen's with French knots."

"All right, all right," Morgan laughed, taking up the spool of heavy black silk and replacing it on the cupboard shelf.  "I believe you.  My word, Julie, I was only teasing."

She smiled, but not directly at him.

"I know that.  I'm teaching you not to."

"Can't I just apologize?"

Julie shook her head.  She had the needle threaded and only needed some strips of cotton bandage material to sew together.  There were rolls of it on the top shelf, which she could reach with only a little stretch.

If Morgan had been standing six inches to his left, he would not have blocked her reach, and her sleeve would not have caught on the nail sticking out from the edge of the cupboard door.  In the single split instant it took her to realize she had snagged the sleeve, the fabric was already torn.

Her gasp of surprise and dismay brought concern from Morgan, who could not see the damage.

"Are you hurt?"

"No, I've just--"

If she had moved out of his way more quickly, he would have seen nothing and suspected nothing.  But the clumsy haste in which she clasped the torn edges of cloth together wasn't enough.  The tear gapped to reveal bruises, faded now to a purplish yellow but still dark enough for a doctor's eyes to see.

Morgan pried her fingers from her sleeve without a word.  When the rip fell open, his initial guess was confirmed.  The marks of four fingers and a thumb stood out too clearly to be mistaken.

All the laughter and teasing fled.

"Who did this?"

"My father."

"Why?"

"He wanted me to do something that I didn't want to do and I was too tired to argue with him.  I was going to my room, and he stopped me."

"Did he hit you?"

"No."

He believed her.  And after the first shock of seeing the bruises, he realized they were not serious.  But on her fair skin, they had seemed monstrous.

"What did he want you to do that you refused?"

He had no right to ask, but if he didn't, he wouldn't be able to live with himself.  He had tried not to think about what went on in that house when Julie was away from him, because he reasoned that her life could not be as bad as his distrust of her father made him imagine.  Perhaps the truth was worse yet.

She told him about the eye-glasses and her stubborn refusal to purchase another pair.

"If you don't need them, why does he want you to wear them?" He was beginning to think the whole family crazy.  Katharine lied about her health, Willy was spoiled like a rich widow's dog, and now Wilhelm the miser expected his daughter to buy glasses she didn't need.

"He thinks the spectacles will make me less attractive to men."

Morgan laughed just once, then, when he saw the expression on her face before she turned away, he apologized.

"I'm sorry.  I didn't mean that the way it sounded."

He curled an index finger under her chin and tilted it a fraction of an inch higher.

No boisterous nine-year-old interrupted him this time.  He kissed her very softly, feeling her fright in the quiver of her lips as his touched them.  But she did not pull away.

And he did not apologize.

*   *   *

The kiss was not mentioned Saturday morning.  Julie, either out of exhaustion or shock, had slept well the night before; Morgan, she was sure, had not.  At least he looked as though he had not.  But she had no time to question him, nor he her, because the office was filled with patients almost as soon as Morgan unlocked the door.

Winnie brought coffee at ten-thirty; they had no time to drink it before Katharine arrived with lunch from Daneggar's two hours later.  Julie urged Morgan to eat, which led to an argument, but in the end it didn't matter.  Lunch waited, as did the man with the boil on his face and the woman with the swollen ankle.  Marshal Ted Phillips brought in a gunshot victim.

Ted Phillips was a beefy man who carried his paunch proudly.  He stood as tall as Morgan, maybe an inch taller, but was twice as wide.  The man he supported nearly matched him in size.

"Found him on the road comin' back from Oro Flats," Phillips explained as he dragged the barely conscious patient into the surgery.  Julie was still cleaning up from the last case, Donnie Kincheloe's stubborn nose-bleed.  "Says a couple of old coots shot him before he could tell 'em he was lost, not tryin' to steal their mine.  I got a feelin' it was them same two that brought in the old man who died last week."