Courting Susannah (28 page)

Susannah swallowed a throat full of angry, despairing tears. Aubrey lay motionless on the bed, waxen where he wasn't bruised, his features so swollen as to be nearly unrecognizable. She didn't want Ethan to wind up at the end of a rope for taking the law into his own hands, but she understood his desire for revenge. Oh, yes, she understood it full well. “The Fairgrieve men make up their own minds,” she murmured in reply, “and from what I've seen, there's no changing them.”

Ethan had turned away by that time; he stood at the window, looking out, his broad shoulders rigid beneath his shirt. He wasn't wearing a coat and seemed unaware that smudges of Aubrey's blood marked his hands, his clothes, even his face.

“My name's Sutherfield,” the physician said, extending one hand to Susannah. “Horace Sutherfield.”

Susannah hesitated, then took the offered hand and shook it. She hated even to look up from Aubrey's face, lest he slip away while she wasn't watching. Intuitively, she knew that her hold on him, like that of the earth itself, was tenuous. “Is he in pain?” she asked, her voice fragile, brittle, like the thinnest glass.

Dr. Sutherfield answered by taking a brown bottle from his medical kit and setting it on the bedside table with a light thump. “Probably, but there isn't much we can do about it until he comes around. When and if he does, give him a dose of this laudanum—not too much, though. Just enough to take the edge off—a drop or two should do the trick—stuff gets hold of some people and doesn't ever let them go.”

Susannah nodded, smoothing Aubrey's hair back from his forehead with a gentle pass of her free hand. With the other, she clasped his fingers, still trying to anchor him to that place, that room, that bed.

“Send somebody for me if I'm needed in the night.” Sutherfield paused, cleared his throat self-consciously. “I'll be in the card room down at the Silver Eagle,” he added. And then he was gone.

Susannah forgot Ethan's presence, forgot everything but the broken man lying so still in the bed he had once urged her to share. She regretted her hesitation now, wished she'd given herself to him, if only that one time. As things stood, he might well die, and she would never know what it was to love him fully, with abandon, unfettered by the restraints of propriety. And never was a very long time.

A hand came to rest on her shoulder, and she remembered Ethan. Dashing a tear from her cheek with the back of one wrist, she straightened her spine and squared her shoulders. “We have to be strong for him,” she said.

Ethan gave her shoulder a light squeeze before he
withdrew his hand. “He's a strong man, Susannah,” he said hoarsely. “The strongest I've ever known. He might just hang on, if he knows you're with him.” He paused, as if weighing his words, then added, “My brother needs you, has for a long while, I reckon. That's why he gave you such a hard time when you got here. It scared him, since he probably figured he'd closed himself off for good.”

She raised Aubrey's hand to her mouth, brushed her lips lightly across the backs of his knuckles. “Please—tell Maisie I need for her to look after Victoria. I can't leave him.”

Ethan lingered a few moments, and she knew he wanted to say something more, but in the end, he didn't speak, and neither did she. Her gaze, her whole heart and spirit, was fixed on Aubrey.

Ethan kicked open the door of Delphinia Parker's stateroom on the steamer
Pacific,
due to set sail for southerly waters with the morning tide. She was sitting at a vanity table, powdering her face, and she was plainly startled by his arrival. She recovered quickly, though; he had to give her that.

“Why, Ethan,” she said, fluttering her fanlike lashes. “You've come to say good-bye. Isn't that sweet?”

It was all he could do not to grab her by the throat and jerk her to her feet. Instead, he stood behind her while she watched his reflection in the mirror. He felt the deck swaying beneath his feet, in time with the waters of Elliott Bay. “It almost worked,” he said instead. “You almost killed him.”

She rounded her eyes and her skillfully painted mouth, the perfect likeness of innocence itself. One slender, snow-white hand fluttered at her breast. “I declare, Ethan, I don't know what you could be talking about.”

Her chair was a swivel affair, like a bar stool. He spun her around and bent down, his face a breath from hers. “I'm talking,” he said, “about my brother. You remember him? Aubrey Fairgrieve—the man who's kept you in face paint and gewgaws for the last few months? Thanks to those thugs you sent, he's all but dead.”

Except for the slightest twitch at the corner of her mouth, Delphinia didn't react. “You're mistaken,” she said coolly. Then, to his utter disbelief, she slid her arms around his neck and tried to draw him close.

He jerked back as if he'd been burned, and she laughed.
Laughed
. Ethan closed his eyes, struggled to control his temper. When he trusted himself to speak, he clutched the harlot's creamy shoulders again. “Who were they?” he demanded. “I want names, Delphinia. And I'll get them if I have to shake them out of you!”

She got nervous then; maybe she'd finally gathered that he meant business. That he hadn't come to bed his brother's former mistress before she sailed on to new horizons. She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue and cringed a little in his grasp. “I didn't tell them to kill him,” she said, putting a faint whine to the words. “Just—just rough him up a little.”

Again, Ethan did battle with his lesser nature. Again, and it seemed something of a miracle to him, his better judgment prevailed. “Well, they did that, all right. He's unconscious, with one side of his rib cage caved in, and God knows what damage there is to his insides.” He took in her silk dressing gown. “Put on your clothes, Delphinia. You and I are going to pay a call on the constabulary.”

She retreated a step, pale behind her rouge. “I can't afford to get in trouble with the law, Ethan,” she fretted.

“I guess you should have thought of that before you had my brother beaten to a bloody pulp,” he replied,
opening one of the trunks that crowded the small stateroom, jerking out some sort of garment without looking to see what it was, and thrusting it at her. “Get dressed, or I swear to God, I'll take you to the police in that flimsy thing you're wearing now.”

She nodded toward a changing screen in the corner of the room. “All right, then, if you insist. But I don't want you looking at me while I change.”

He should have been suspicious of her sudden acquiescence, but in point of fact, his mind was on other things. Aubrey, mostly. Susannah and the baby, too. She stepped behind the screen, and when she came out, only an instant later, there was a derringer in her hand.

Ethan felt the bullet rip into his side as he stumbled forward, grabbed the gun, and wrestled it out of her hand. He was leaning against the cabin wall, one hand covering his wound, when two men rushed in. Seeing them, he allowed himself to pass out.

“Ethan is in
jail?”
Susannah echoed in disbelief after a grim Maisie delivered the news. She had vowed not to leave Aubrey's side, and she had kept her word, despite pleas and protests from her friend.

Maisie nodded. “Shot, too. In the side. There was a lot of blood, but I guess he weren't hurt too bad, when it came right down to it.”

Susannah felt ill. First Aubrey, now Ethan. She could not shake the feeling that she had somehow brought bad luck to both the Fairgrieve brothers, though she wasn't usually a superstitious person. “Wh-what happened?”

“According to Hawkins—he was the one what brought the news—that Parker woman claims Ethan tried to force himself on her, on-board one of the
steamers down at the harbor. She says she shot him to protect her virtue.” Maisie gave a disdainful harrumph.

“Nonsense,” Susannah replied. “Ethan wouldn't have done a thing like that. He probably found some connection between her and what happened to Aubrey.” The reminder brought fresh tears to her eyes; she took in his injuries once again and wished she could do something more than sit beside him, holding his hand, offering silent prayers and hoping.

“We know that,” Maisie agreed, “but I ain't so sure about the police. Folks around here tend to think of Ethan as somethin' of a hell-raiser.”

“Why?” Susannah asked, honestly puzzled. He had never behaved in anything but the most gentlemanly fashion in her presence.

“He got into some trouble when he was a boy; no worse than most, though. Then there was that Chinese girl. He wanted to marry her, and to plenty of people, that was reason enough to give up on him for good.”

“That's ridiculous,” Susannah muttered.

Maisie raised and lowered one bulky shoulder in a shrug. “Be that as it may, that was the way of it. Only thing worse than their bein' torn apart the way they was would have been for them to be together.”

Susannah had suspected all along that Maisie knew more than she was letting on, and here was the proof. It was small comfort, given the situations in which Ethan and Aubrey found themselves now. “What happened?”

“Her family sent her back home to China,” Maisie said in a gruff whisper. “She married some man over there, I reckon. There was never any word from her.”

“Oh, Maisie.”

“Ethan ain't been the same since, 'course,” Maisie reflected, her gaze resting sorrowfully on Aubrey.
“They've neither one had his rightful share of happiness, neither Aubrey nor Ethan.”

Susannah watched as her friend went around the room, moving from one fixture to the next, turning up the gas, setting bluish flames dancing. Dispelling some of the shadows—the outward ones, at least. “And then there was Julia.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Maisie agreed wearily. “Then there was Julia.”

The subject lay between them, a great gulf of secrecy and silence that neither woman wanted to breach just then.

“What will happen to Ethan?” Susannah asked after a long time.

“Hawkins'll get him a lawyer,” Maisie answered. “I sure hope he does better than he did when he went to round up that doctor feller.”

Alone in his cell, a clean bandage bulging beneath his shirt, Ethan lay stretched out on his cot. The doctor—not Sutherfield but some other stranger—had slipped him a flask full of whiskey after tending to his wounds, and he'd been taking regular drafts from it, but the stuff didn't do much to soothe the throbbing ache in his side. Still, it gave him something to do, and without it he probably would have flung himself against the bars, yelling like a wild Indian, until he collapsed in exhaustion or passed out from the pain. Being behind bars was too much like being shut in the root cellar as a boy—one of his pa's favorite punishments—though at least there was light in the cell and a modicum of fresh air coming in through a high, narrow window.

“Ethan?”

He recognized the voice, looked over to see John Hollister standing on the other side of the bars. Hollister
was a family friend, of sorts. He and Aubrey had gone to school together for a short while over in Montana, and they'd had their share of scrapes before and after class, bloodying each other's noses and blackening each other's eyes. While Hollister had read the law, Aubrey had returned to Seattle to seek his fortune.

“Hullo, John,” he said, easing himself upright with a painful effort. “What are you doing here?”

“I'm about the closest thing you're going to get to a lawyer,” Hollister answered. He cleared his throat, and Ethan saw strain in his face, and sorrow. He sighed. “It's what Aubrey would want,” he said, as though reminding himself, dragging up a chair, sitting down, and regarding Ethan through the bars. “What happened on that boat?”

Ethan sat on the edge of his cot, braced his elbows on his knees, and rested his face in his hands. “That should be obvious,” he said affably, “even to you. Delphinia shot me.” He raised his head. “No more than I deserved, letting her get the drop on me like that.”

“She says she did it because you were about to rape her. Is that true?”

“You know damn well it isn't.”

“Do I?”

Ethan stood with difficulty and crossed the cell to grasp the bars, taking so tight a hold that his knuckles went white and the joints in his fingers ached. “I went there to find out who she hired to beat my brother half to death. That's
all
I went there for.”

Hollister winced at the mention of Aubrey's beating, knew he might not survive. “And what did she say?”

“She admitted she'd hired the thugs but claimed she'd only asked them to rough him up a little. I told her I was bringing her here, to account to the police.” He paused, gave a humorless chuckle at the irony of that.
“Then I made the mistake of letting her out of my sight. She got a derringer from somewhere and shot me.”

Hollister gave a low whistle. “You've always had a special talent for getting yourself into trouble, Fairgrieve,” he said. “Some things just never seem to change. Your brother's bookkeeper, Hawkins, has given me free rein as far as your bail is concerned. Soon as Judge Silvertrees sets an amount, you'll be out of here.”

“How is my brother?”

“Holding on,” Hollister said with quiet sympathy. “I want your word on something, Ethan. When you're released, you have to stay away from Delphinia Parker and let the police figure out who assaulted Aubrey.”

“I can't promise you that,” Ethan said with some regret. “If I find those sons-of-bitches, I mean to rip their livers out.”

Hollister sighed and gave Ethan's bandaged middle a pointed glance. “In your condition,” he said, “you'd lose for sure.”

“Just get me out.”

“I meant what I said, Ethan. No promise, no bail.”

“You are one stubborn bastard.”

“So are you,” Hollister answered, but he was grinning. “I'll take you to my place when you leave here. We'll talk about what happened and plan your defense over a hot supper. You remember my kid sister Ruby?”