Banner O'Brien (11 page)

His broad shoulders moved in a shrug. “Loving Adam changes that?”

“Yes. I don’t seem to know what I think about anything anymore. I feel one thing and then I feel another—”

“And you think he has a woman.”

Banner searched her mind for something to say and found nothing. In the end, she only nodded.

Jeff’s eyes were faraway, seeming to see through the ceaseless snow to something beyond. Perhaps he was remembering the accident that had taken his father, and perhaps he was trying to frame the words to tell Banner that Adam did care for someone else.

She was never to know, for before he could speak, Adam himself suddenly loomed at the table side.

“This is enlightening,” he said, and the look on his face was quietly ferocious.

Jeff’s eyes met his brother’s intrepidly. “Don’t make an idiot of yourself, Adam,” he said. “Banner was thinking of moving here, now that Henderson’s back from his travels, and I’ve been trying to talk her out of it.”

The odd and awesome tension in Adam’s wide shoulders eased, and he sank heavily into a chair at their table. “Jenny told me about Henderson,” he admitted, having the grace to look a bit sheepish now.

Banner was bracing herself for an argument. He
would maintain that the hotel was too far from her work, or somehow unsafe, or—

“I think she should stay here.”

The announcement struck Banner O’Brien’s confused heart like a stone, and she was speechless.

Jeff suffered no such difficulty. “What?”

Adam shrugged with exaggerated nonchalance, his eyes avoiding Banner’s. “Most of the time, you and Mama and Melissa are gone. I live alone, except for Maggie. What would the townspeople say about Shamrock if she moved in?”

The logic was unassailable. Banner had used it herself in deciding to take a room at the hotel. Still, the cool matter-of-factness of his words was a wounding thing.

With remarkable dignity, Banner gathered her spinning emotions, excused herself from the table, and went to inquire about a room.

Half an hour later, her trunk was delivered, and she was just feeling free to sit down on her bumpy iron bed and cry when Jenny arrived.

“You belong with Adam,” the girl said flatly, slipping out of her oversized woolen coat and carrying it with her as she paced the rough board floor.

Banner sat down on the bed and slowly, sadly shook her head. “Where will you go now, Jenny?”

Jenny smiled and shrugged her plump shoulders. “Back to Miss Callie Maitland’s house, of course. I work for her.”

To her shame, Banner had not thought to ask about Jenny’s life—where she worked, what she did, what she hoped for and regretted. The girl had simply been a friend, there when she was needed.

Jenny’s intuition was in full play. “You thought Adam just conjured me up, didn’t you?” she teased gently. “Like a
tamanous.”

“I didn’t think at all. Jenny, I’m so sorry!”

The girl came to sit beside Banner. “Everything will be all right, you know,” she said reasonably.

Nothing had been all right since the moment she’d met Adam Corbin, but Banner didn’t say so. There was no point in burdening her friend with her low spirits. “Yes,” she echoed. “Everything will be all right.”

Jenny stood up and put on her coat again. “Miss Callie lives on Harbor Street,” she said quietly. “Number 5 Harbor Street. Will you come and visit me sometime soon, Banner?”

Banner squeezed Jenny’s strong, nutbrown hand. “Of course I will.”

A moment later, the door closed behind Jenny with a soft click.

*  *  *

Melissa was walking back and forth, the heels of her shoes clicking on the hard and splintery floor of Banner’s room. “Did you really like my writing, Banner?” she trilled. “You’re not just saying that so I’ll keep trying, are you?”

The child was a restorative; her energy was contagious. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Melissa,” Banner answered. “I think you’re very talented.”

Like quicksilver, Melissa moved on to another subject. “You’re not really going to live here, are you?”

“I have to live somewhere.”

“Live at our house. Jiggers, we could put up an army in that place!”

Banner shook her head, though there was a part of her that constantly reached for that very special house at the top of the hill. “It wouldn’t be proper.”

“Proper!” scoffed Melissa.

“Yes, proper,” insisted Banner firmly. “May I remind you that, once the holidays have passed, your brother and I would be alone there?”

“Maggie is always around.”

Again Banner shook her head.

“What a prig you are, Dr. Banner O’Brien! How is romance supposed to blossom if you and Adam are never by yourselves?”

Banner shrugged in a so-be-it sort of way.

Melissa looked very disappointed, but she brightened as an inspiration struck her. “I know! You could just stay until we all leave again! You could sleep in my room and—”

“Melissa.”

“Won’t you at least come to supper? Keith is waiting downstairs to drive us home, and Mama is so hoping you’ll come.”

There seemed to be no point in refusing just to avoid Adam. After all, she would be working with him on a regular basis in the coming days.

Besides, she felt lonely and cold in that little room, as though she’d been exiled to it.

“All right,” Banner said, and her heart gave a joyous little leap, just as though she, like Melissa, was going home.

*  *  *

Francelle’s father sat directly across from Banner, at the Corbin table, and smiled his senator’s smile.

“A lady doctor!” he boomed. “Well, well. Francelle told me, but I confess that I didn’t believe her.”

Banner felt like a carnival freak. A bearded lady! Well, well. Francelle told me, but I confess that I didn’t believe her.

Katherine had been badgering the dictrict’s representative to the territorial legislature about one thing or another throughout the meal. Now, she smiled at Banner and then Adam and then the senator. “Don’t you think it strange, Thomas, that a woman can practice medicine in this territory yet be refused the vote?”

Thomas Mayhugh looked pained, and one of his chubby hands went nervously to the watch chain stretched across his stomach. “Now, Katherine, I’ve
told you before. I myself presented an amendment that would grant suffrage to women and—women and—”

Katherine leaned forward in her chair. “Women and half-breeds, Thomas.”

Senator Mayhugh’s rescue was brought about by his daughter, who flashed a venomous look in Banner’s direction and said, “I think women should keep houses and have babies. Why should we bother to vote when our husbands would dictate our choices anyway?”

When no one spoke, Francelle shifted her gaze from Banner to Adam. “What do you think, Adam? Should women vote?”

Adam smiled. “Some women,” he said, in tones of sweet acid. “Furthermore, since I have to live in this house, that wasn’t a fair question.”

Katherine was watching her son with interest and a measure of wry humor. “You’ve missed your calling, dear,” she said. “Anyone who can utter so many words and still say nothing belongs in politics, not medicine.”

Adam lifted his wineglass in an amused salute.

Chapter Five

T
HE RIDE DOWN THE HILL TO
P
ORT
H
ASTINGS SEEMED
more perilous than ever that night, especially with Adam Corbin at the reins of the buggy. Typically, Banner made conversation to distract herself.

“Mrs. Corbin was right, you know,” she ventured. “You didn’t actually say whether or not you think women should vote.”

He looked at her—she knew that by the motion of his head—but his expression was hidden in shadow. “I’m not against suffrage, O’Brien,” he replied.

“But you’re not exactly in favor of it, either, are you?”

Adam appeared to be concentrating on navigating the steep hill. “Since women are held accountable under the law, I think they should enjoy the rights it provides.”

Banner frowned. “Most men don’t feel that way, though. Why is that, Adam?”

He was watching her again. “The issue is linked with prohibition. They probably envision an army of Carrie Nations converging on the polls, hatchets in hand. And when liquor is outlawed, prostitution won’t be far behind.”

Banner fell silent, and she huddled deeper under the lap rug as a snow-flecked wind howled around the bonnet of the buggy. How dearly men regarded their two favorite pleasures, she thought to herself.

“Talk to me, O’Brien,” Adam said as they reached the bottom of the hill and turned in the direction of the business district. Banner’s hotel was only about a block ahead.

“I was just thinking how selfish men can be,” she replied honestly. “Imagine denying adult people simple, basic rights just to drink rum and—”

Adam laughed and drew the buggy to a stop under a spill of golden light coming from the streetlamp in front of the hotel. “And what?”

She colored in anger and then realized, too late, how deftly he had baited her. And she had risen to the hook. “You know
what!”
she hissed.

Buggy reins draped between his right thumb and index finger, he lifted his hands in comical surrender. “Don’t shoot, O’Brien. Have pity. ‘And what’ seems to come into my mind a lot when I’m around you.”

Banner hurled back the lap rug and scrambled unceremoniously out of the buggy. “Go home!” she cried.

“Come with me,” he answered.

Banner went crimson, whirled, and stormed toward the warm sanction of the hotel, Adam’s laughter following after her.

*  *  *

The snow grew deeper with each passing day until the roofs of houses were groaning under its weight,
children were kept home from school, and ships were neither leaving nor arriving in Port Hastings.

Banner, for all that she was very busy with patients at the hospital and the occasional house call with Adam, felt uneasy. It was as though something was bearing down on her, something that would crush her the way the snow was crushing outhouses and chicken coops.

By contrast, the mood in the Corbin house was boisterously festive. Secrets were kept, holly boughs and evergreens were gathered, songs were sung. It turned out that Clarence King, the gambler who’d had a knife thrust through his hand, was possessed of a rousing baritone.

It was to escape this that Banner went to Maggie’s kitchen that stormy afternoon of December twenty-third.

A sturdy woman with merry eyes and unruly gray hair, Maggie McQuire was rolling out pie dough at a worktable near the fire and humming a yuletide hymn.

“No smile for old Maggie?” she asked, breaking off her humming to grin at Banner.

Banner helped herself to coffee at the stove and then went to sit disconsolately on the bench closest to the hearth. The warmth of the crackling, busy fire seemed to exist only on the other side of some invisible barrier. “I’m afraid I don’t feel much like smiling,” she said.

“Missing your folks?”

There were no folks to miss; Banner barely remembered her parents, and her grandmother, who had raised her, had died long before her marriage to Sean. “Isn’t it ever going to stop snowing?” she whispered, neatly skirting Maggie’s question and frowning at the white-trimmed windows.

“Yes,” said Maggie, going on with her work but lending Banner a gruff sort of comfort as she spoke. “It’ll stop and the sun will come out.”

The double meaning lifted Banner’s spirits a little.
“You’ve been cooking for days,” she observed. “Don’t you get tired?”

“I’m planning to be tired the day after Christmas,” quipped Maggie. “Until then, I don’t dare stop to draw a breath.” Her plump shoulders moved in a shrug. “I kind of like having all of the family around. Wouldn’t be Christmas if I didn’t have to chase one of those boys away from my blackberry cobbler every few minutes.”

Banner smiled, and it was a real smile, without effort, feeling good on her face. “You love them very much, don’t you?”

Maggie nodded. “Melissa, too, ‘course. But the boys are real special to me—especially Adam. We’ve had a time with that one right from the first. Near starved to death when he was a baby, Adam did. Guess that’s why I like to cook for him now.”

“Starved to death?” Banner repeated, staring.

Maggie nodded. “Mother’s milk didn’t set well with him, and we didn’t think Adam’d last through his first year. Probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for old Martha Washington.”

Martha Washington? Banner was about to voice her confusion when she remembered the custom of giving Indians the names of famous white people. “What did she do?”

“She came right up to the cabin door one day and said as how she’d heard we had a sick baby. Miss Katie was in tears and Daniel was away somewheres—that’s why I was around so much, though I had myself a husband then—and Adam was squallin’ fit to rouse the dead.

“Old Martha took him right in hand, she did. Once she found out that he wouldn’t take the breast, she boiled up a batch of fresh clams and gave him the broth. Lived on it until he was ten months old.”

Banner pictured the small cabin and the beleaguered young mother and thought how much things had
changed since then. “Daniel was Mrs. Corbin’s husband?”

Maggie nodded. “He was a handsome one, if something of a rake, and he had himself a knack for makin’ money. Time Keith was born, Daniel had four ships sailin’ the seas and the beginnings of the boatyard and the mill. They built this house right up around the cabin.”

Banner was still framing a response when the door leading from the dining room swung open and Adam came in. He spared one grin for his associate and then descended on Maggie’s peach pie filling, one finger curved to dip.

“You touch that and I’ll whack you!” Maggie threatened, brandishing the floury rolling pin in both hands.

Adam leaped back in comical alarm and then subsided to sit on the bench, beside Banner. “Shirking again, O’Brien?” he drawled.

Banner elbowed him in the ribs. “Shirking, is it? I, Dr. Corbin, have been in the hospital all morning, treating patients and cleaning instruments. You, on the other hand—”

Adam laughed. “It isn’t my fault that Jeff and Keith had to look at every pine between here and Portland before they could agree on a Christmas tree.”