Marry Me (22 page)

Virginia Reilly shook off Duun’s hand, not feeling at all charitable toward him or his god at the moment. “May I see my husband, Dr. Monroe?”

“Of course. He’s still sleeping.”

Rhyne stepped aside to let Virginia pass and then followed her to Ezra’s side. Behind her she heard the door close and knew that Cole remained with the other men. “It’s all right if you want to talk to him,” Rhyne said. “Softly like. It might begin to rouse him.”

“Then he’ll be in pain,” whispered Virginia. “I don’t want that. How pale his sweet face is. Did the doctor bleed him?”

Rhyne shook her head. “He doesn’t hold with that, he says. Besides, there was a lot of blood lost because of the injury.”

Virginia pointed to the large swath of bandages around her husband’s left wrist. “Are you certain his hand isn’t in there? There’s so much gauze.”

“It’s not. But Dr. Monroe was careful to leave enough skin to pull over the stump. That will help it heal properly. And his stitches are as elegant as Mrs. Cooper’s. You won’t find any fault there.”

“What do you know about it?”

Rhyne ignored the challenge in Virginia’s voice. “Dr. Monroe talked to me about what he was doing the whole time. It’s how they did things back at the New York hospital. It helped him concentrate.”

Virginia bent her head and turned her cheek so she could feel Ezra’s gentle breathing on her face. She stayed that way for a full minute before she straightened. “When can I take him home?”

“I don’t know. Not tonight for sure. Maybe tomorrow. You’ll have to ask the doctor.”

Virginia nodded. “George said you volunteered to help right off. None of them had the stomach for it.”

“One of them would have done it if I hadn’t been around. It was just hard for them, being there and all when Ezra got hurt.”

“Will went back out to the site. No one’s sure what went wrong. Ezra’s always real careful when he’s settin’ charges.”

“I heard John say that. The others agreed.”

“Real careful,” Virginia repeated softly.

“I’ll go talk to Dr. Monroe.” She watched Virginia to see if the other woman even heard her. There was acknowledgment in the slight bow of Virginia’s head. Rhyne left her alone with her husband.

Ezra Reilly left the surgery late the following afternoon, carried home by his fellow miners with Cole directing the transport. Cole promised Virginia that he would come by as often as he thought necessary to change Ezra’s bandages and see to the splint. He gave her laudanum for her husband’s pain and told her he’d show her how to wrap the bandages once Ezra began to heal.

Cole went to see Ezra after dinner and returned to find Rhyne on her hands and knees in the surgery, scrubbing blood off the hardwood floor. “What are you doing?”

“And you with all that fancy schoolin’,” she scoffed.

“All right. A better inquiry is
why
are you doing it.”

It still seemed like a nonsensical question to Rhyne. She wrung out the rag in her hand and sat up on her knees. “There were bloody footprints all over the floor before I mopped it the first time. Now it needs a good scrubbing.”

“Leave it. I just hired Digger to clean up. He was happy to oblige me, probably because he thinks he’ll catch a glimpse of Whitley.”

“You trust Digger in here?”

“I’m not going anywhere. He can work around me, and everything’s put up that he could get into.” He held out his hand to Rhyne. “Let me help you.”

Rhyne dropped the rag into the bucket and gave him her hand. He drew her to her feet so quickly that she almost fell into him. She caught herself by placing her free hand on his shoulder.

Cole didn’t release her hand immediately. He stared at her upturned face and watched the rise of a soft pink color in her cheeks. She held his gaze, her gray eyes wide and wary. She was poised slightly forward on tiptoe, her mouth lifted so that with very little effort he might claim it. His eyes dropped to those lips, their shape defined now by the dark and narrow space between them. He felt a vibration travel the length of her, and had it been capable of sound he would have heard something as delicate and sweet as a plucked violin string.

She drew a shallow breath. It brought him closer.

Cole wanted to believe Rhyne understood there was an invitation in her raised mouth, in the parted lips, in the way she sipped the air. Her anticipation was palpable. So was her apprehension.

He stepped back, putting himself away from her, and released her hand. She dropped to her heels and no longer had any use for his shoulder. He resisted the urge to glance at the clock on the shelf behind him, but he saw Rhyne’s eyes dart in that direction.

Cole wondered if she was looking for confirmation that, indeed, time had not stopped; it only seemed that it had.

Rhyne smoothed her apron over her midriff and offered a brief parting smile as she picked up the bucket. “I need to check on Whitley. She’s supposed to be writing an essay.”

Nodding, Cole stepped aside to let her pass. His eyes followed her until she disappeared in the hallway. He remained rooted to the floor a few moments longer, then slowly shook his head. Amused by the wanderings of his mind, rather than concerned by them, Cole began preparing slides for the microscope while he waited for Digger Hammond to arrive.

Rhyne carefully counted out the coins as she placed them in Mr. Porter’s large palm. She appreciated his patience while she dug in her change purse for another five-cent piece. “One dollar and thirty-five cents.”

“And I thank you, Miss Abbot.” Douglas Porter placed the money in a coffee tin that he took from the china cupboard. Once he returned the tin, he picked up the basket of laundered clothes on the kitchen table and passed it into Rhyne’s open arms. “Maggie says I’m supposed to remind you that one of our boys could bring this around when the laundry’s done. That’d save you walking the length of town with it. Plenty of folks do it that way.”

“I don’t mind. Not today. Sun’s out.” The recently laundered clothes in her arms still smelled of fresh air. “Give Mrs. Porter my best. And thank her for the extra care she gives Dr. Monroe’s shirts. Whitley says he’s fussy, but I think she’s forgetting that she always scorched them.”

“I’ll tell her.” He reached around Rhyne and opened the door for her. “Ever since he treated my wife’s chilblains Maggie thinks the sun rises and sets by the doc’s word. I guess there are a lot of folks comin’ around to that thinking. Especially after he done what he did for Ezra.”

“That’s good to know,” said Rhyne. Ezra was still bedridden because of his leg, but his stump was healing well and he didn’t complain much about pain in a hand that was no longer there. Virginia was caring for him almost exclusively, with Cole dropping by to visit every three or four days. “I’ll be sure to tell Dr. Monroe that Mrs. Porter’s chilblains aren’t troubling her.”

Rhyne stepped onto the porch and was aware of Mr. Porter following her. He was a broad, sturdily built man. His cheerful face and gregarious nature were like opposing forces to the strength of his powerful arms and chest. She’d seen his wife and children swallowed whole by his good-natured embrace, and for no good reason that she could think of, she was always afraid that the same would be turned on her.

Where Runt Abbot would have stayed his ground, Rhyne took a step back. Even with the large basket of clothes between them, she was unable to keep herself from doing so. “I reckon I’ll be seeing you, Mr. Porter.”

He stopped basking in the sunshine and nodded at Rhyne. “Good day to you, Miss Abbot. Have a care that you don’t stumble.” He watched her cross the sidewalk. “Peculiar girl.” Then he went back inside.

* * *

Whitley looked up from her slate, a nub of chalk between her fingers. Rhyne was absently polishing a silver spoon–the same one she’d been polishing the last time Whitley glanced at her. Whitley finished solving the quadratic equation on her slate before she set down the chalk. The equation was one that Cole gave her when she told him she’d completed every one of Mr. Cassidy’s boring long division problems. He called it an assignment, but she knew a euphemism when she heard it. This was punishment. The problem she couldn’t quite solve, however, was reconciling herself to the fact that she was enjoying it.

“Do you think I’m peculiar?” she asked Rhyne.

Rhyne stopped polishing. Her slight frown put a crease between her eyebrows. “What prompted that question?”

Whitley sighed. “I must be, otherwise you’d have answered ‘no’ right off.”

“No. No, not at all. It’s just that Mr. Porter said the same thing about me this afternoon.”

“To your face?”

“No, as I was walking away. I’m sure he didn’t mean for me to hear him. He wasn’t talking to anyone. He said, ‘peculiar girl,’ like I was some sort of puzzle that he couldn’t quite figure out.”

“Oh, well that isn’t too bad, then.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No. It makes you interesting. Intriguing, I think is a better word.”

“You don’t think he will try to hug me, do you?”

Whitley laughed. “No. He wouldn’t do that. Did it seem as though he might?”

“He always looks on the
verge
of it.”

“That’s how Digger looks at me,” Whitely confided. “Like he’s on the
verge
of kissing me. What do you suppose stops him?”

“A finely honed sense of self-preservation,” Cole said as he walked into the room. “The next time he’s on the
verge
I want to know about it.” He sat down beside Whitley and drew her slate toward him. “How long did this take you?”

“Two minutes,” she said. “Maybe less. I don’t know. I wasn’t gawking at the clock, and anyway, why is it important? No, don’t answer. I don’t
care
if it’s important. I want to know why I should tell you if Digger’s thinking about kissing me.”

“He’s always thinking about it.” Cole used his handkerchief to erase the slate. He ignored Whitley’s heavy sigh when he picked up the chalk and wrote another equation for her. “I only want to know when he’s at the tipping point.”

Whitley accepted the slate and the chalk. “I don’t see why. If you ask me, Coleridge, wanting to know Digger’s tipsy point makes you downright peculiar.” She started working on the equation. “And you shouldn’t get your heart set on me telling you. You can give me quadratics until I choke on chalk dust and it won’t persuade me to confess.”

Cole glanced across the table at Rhyne. She was studying the spoon in her hand for smudges, but it was the faintly bemused smile curving her lips that let him know what really held her attention. He looked back at Whitley, watched her hand fairly fly across the slate as she scribbled out the solution to the problem. “Witch,” he said affectionately, slipping an arm over the back of her chair. “It’s not even a struggle for you, is it?”

“No, but you have succeeded in convincing me that I am the very definition of peculiar. And I don’t thank you, Coleridge. No, I do not.” She returned the slate to him. “Another, please. I am oddly fascinated by the idea that there are two solutions to every problem.”

“Here. This one will require the use of a formula.” He wrote it out for her at the top of the slate then presented the problem. “Chew on that for a while.” He wiped chalk dust off his hand. “And please find a bigger piece of chalk.” When Whitley ran off to get another stick, Cole addressed Rhyne. “What about you, Miss Abbot? What makes you peculiar?”

She frowned. “Just how long were you standing in the hallway?”

“Not long enough to hear anything bad about myself. And if you are thinking of comparing me to Whitley, remember that my sister is incapable of exercising the same restraint.”

“I’ve learned. She’s had her feelings hurt by comments never meant for her ears.”

“I know, but I’m surprised you do. She must have been talking to you about Caroline Erwin.”

Rhyne nodded. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all. She told you I was engaged?”

“Yes.” She rubbed a tarnished thumbprint from the bowl of the spoon. “Are there regrets?”

“No. Not on my side. I doubt that Miss Erwin harbors any.”

“But you loved her.”

“Did Whitley tell you that?”

“No, but isn’t that why–” She stopped. “I don’t know very much about it, really. About why people marry, I mean, and why they don’t. Othello strangled his wife. Romeo and Juliet were … well, I’m sure I don’t understand them. Lady Macbeth ruined her husband with her ambition.”

“The tragedies confuse a simple premise, don’t they?” “What simple premise?”

“That people marry because they find someone they can imagine sharing their life with. Love is part of it, an important part, especially in the beginning, but there must also be admiration and respect, a willingness to act in concert, and an appreciation that sometimes one must act alone. There are mutual interests and separate ones. I’ve always thought of it as a dance. A complicated one. Missteps. Mis-cues. But in the end, I am convinced if they both hear the same music, it’s a satisfying arrangement.”

“Did you and Miss Erwin ever hear the same music?”

Cole winced. He rarely waxed poetic and here was further proof of why he should never indulge. “If we did,” he said, “it was never at the same time.”

“But you’re sure people do, aren’t you? You said you were convinced.”

Wishing he could turn the conversation, Cole nonetheless answered her. “I’ve never forgotten the first time I saw my parents waltz. Whether it is accurate or not, that is the image I hold in my mind when I think of marriage. I suppose you could say that watching them dance shaped my beliefs.”

Standing just out of sight in the hallway, Whitley thought she should probably go in and rescue her brother, but first she had to swipe at the wash of tears stinging her eyes.

Rhyne woke abruptly when she heard the door to her room swing open. She pushed herself up, threw off the covers, and was waiting for the intruder with her rifle raised and cocked.

“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Cole muttered under his breath. He had come very close to clutching his heart. “Put that thing away. Didn’t I tell you not to point it at me again?”

Rhyne lowered the rifle and set it so it wouldn’t fire by mistake. “What do you want? Is it Whitley? Is something wrong?”