Two Brothers (18 page)

“Don’t take another step,” he said.

The mean-eyed spinster, Cornelia, slipped in behind old Sawbones. “Put that dreadful thing away. This is my house, that is my brother, and he will be seen by my doctor!”

Tristan didn’t move, or lower the .45. “You’re right about one of those things, ma’am,” he said easily. “This is your house. But Shay is
my
brother—my face is proof of that—and nobody is going to lay a hand on him without my say-so.”

“Go on out, Cornelia,” the doctor said, with resignation and a thin shadow of something that might once have been dignity. “Leave us alone to talk this over.”

Cornelia fulminated for a few moments, then left the room, shutting the door smartly behind her. The doctor shed his coat, went over to the washstand, poured water into the basin, and began to scrub his hands with a cake of yellow soap taken from his bag. The sharp scent of lye filled the room, temporarily blotting out the other smells.

“You can put that iron away, young fella,” said the doctor. “I sized you up out there in the street, when you changed old Kyle’s looks for him. You might shoot off one or two of my ears, fingers or toes, but you won’t do me any lasting harm.”

Tristan cocked the pistol, but the rum-sodden old man still didn’t flinch. He did look back over one meaty shoulder, though. “My name’s Jim Yancy. St. Mary’s Surgical College, class of ‘65,” he said. “I mean to have a look at the marshal, whether you care for the idea or not, so you might as well do any shooting you’ve got in mind right now so we can get on with this.”

With a sigh, Tristan shoved the .45 back into its holster. “You don’t look like much of a doctor to me,” he said, but he had a grudging respect for the man’s courage.

Yancy laughed. “I’m not, but right now, I’m pretty much all young Shamus there has, aren’t I?” He took a brush out of his bag, gummed the bristles with soap, and began to scour his fingernails. When he was satisfied that they were clean, he rinsed his hands by dunking one and then the other into the pitcher, and dried them on a fancy white towel one of the McQuillan sisters had brought in earlier. “Move aside, and let me have a look.”

Tristan moved, but he didn’t go far. He watched as Yancy felt Shay’s ribs, ran his hands over his limbs, poked and prodded at his middle.

“Make yourself useful and fetch me the stethoscope out of my bag,” the doctor said.

Tristan found the requested item amidst a jumble of vials, a battered instrument case, a leaky whiskey flask and assorted tools of the medical trade. While Yancy was listening to Shay’s heart and lungs, the door opened, and Aislinn slipped in, big-eyed and defiant, as though she expected somebody to try to run her off.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Broken ribs,” the doctor answered, still bent over the
patient. “Going to have to bind them up tight. See if you can rustle up some clean sheets, sturdy ones, a sharp pair of scissors and one of those big, fancy brooches Miss Cornelia wears at her throat.”

“Are there—internal injuries?”

Yancy turned to look at Aislinn curiously, surprised by the knowledgeable question. “I don’t believe there are. Who might you be? You look familiar, though I can’t quite place you.”

She raised her chin and her eyes flashed and once again Tristan thought Shay was a lucky bastard, even if he had been bounced on the ground behind a horse with most of the town looking on. “I’m Miss Lethaby, from the hotel dining room,” she said. Her gaze went, pointedly and with an utter lack of apology, to his hands, and widened a little when she saw they were immaculate. “My father was a doctor.”

“Good,” Yancy replied, after studying her for a few thoughtful moments. “Well, get those things I asked for, and we’ll bind up the marshal’s ribs, you and I. I daresay he’ll be good as new, once those fractures knit themselves back together.”

Aislinn cast a despairing and tender glance toward Shay, one Tristan would have given his gun hand to receive from such a woman. Then she nodded and went out.

Hard words were heard from below, but presently she returned, with the linens, a pair of sewing shears and a shining brooch studded with little jet beads and bigger than any Tristan had ever seen. Aislinn’s resolute expression made him avert his eyes for a moment, like a man who’s accidentally stumbled onto some intimate and private scene.

She proved an able assistant to the doctor, cutting the sheets into strips that matched his specifications perfectly, holding the cloth while Yancy wound it round
Shay’s ribs and pulled it tight, like that cowboy’s rope out in the street earlier. Tristan stood back, out of the way, keeping watch over it all.

Shay strayed in and out of consciousness during the ordeal, and it was plain to see that he was suffering, but he never cried out, never did more than groan. When it was done, and the doc clasped the bindings shut with that fancy brooch Aislinn had surely wrested from Cornelia, Shay opened his eyes. Seeing Aislinn, he winked and grinned, and that was when Tristan knew his brother would be all right for sure.

“You’d better give him a dose of this,” Yancy told Aislinn, taking a brown bottle out of his bag and setting it down on the bureau with a thump. Laudanum. “He’ll be hurting real good for a day or two.”

Shay lifted his head off the pillow, saw the bottle, and shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. “Keep that stuff away from me.”

Aislinn crossed the room, sat down on the edge of the bed, and brushed Shay’s hair back from his face with a gentle hand. She was smiling, and there was a radiance about her that put a man in mind of a stained-glass window. Tristan made hasty excuses and left, and the doctor was close behind.

Aislinn leaned forward and kissed Shay softly on the forehead. She supposed she might regret such an impulsive action later on, but just then she was too glad that he was alive to care about proprieties. “How do you feel?”

Shay chuckled, a gravelly sound from his throat, and for a moment his pain-filled eyes were alight. “I’m not sure. Do that again, though. I think it helps.”

She laughed, but the tears came then, too, in a storm of terrified relief, and though she quickly put a hand to her mouth, it was too late. Shay reached up with one arm and drew her gingerly down onto his chest, where he held her.

“Here, now,” he said. “It’s over, and I’m all right.”

She sobbed. “For now!” she wailed. “Until those men come back—until something like this happens again—”

“Shhh.” He kissed her temple. “It was just bad luck, that’s all. The circuit judge will come through any day now—he’ll put Billy and the old man in prison, where they belong, and everything will settle down. You’ll see.”

Aislinn raised her head and looked into his eyes. “Nothing is ever that easy,” she protested. “Especially not when someone as powerful and rich as Mr. Kyle is involved.”

Shay brought her back down, brushed her lips with his own. “Hush,” he breathed, and she was, against all reason and rationality, comforted by that simple, silly word. By the warmth of his mouth and the touch of his hands.

It wasn’t until much later that the news reached Prominence: a peddler had found a man hanging, dead, from the lowest branch of an oak tree, several miles outside of town. The victim was soon identified as the circuit judge.

Chapter 9

A
ISLINN MANAGED TO KEEP THE NEWS
of the judge’s murder from Shay for almost four days, during which he slept a great deal and dutifully swallowed the beef and barley soup she and Dorrie spooned into him at every opportunity. At his request, she read aloud from the journal his mother had kept, long ago on a wagon train, and his gaze, distant and blue as a mountain sky, stayed fixed on the ceiling while he listened.

Experiencing Mattie Killigrew’s joys, tribulations and hopes for herself, through the fading, carefully shaped words inscribed on the thick vellum pages of that diary, Aislinn was glad Shay wasn’t looking at her. That way, she was able to wipe away the occasional tear without his knowing.

On the fifth day, Tristan appeared for his usual morning visit, wearing a badge and looking so much like Shay that it seemed no great wonder a lot of the townspeople were mightily confused. Aislinn knew there was still a lot of speculation concerning who was whom, and some folks even maintained there were actually
three
brothers, all of them just alike. The unmarried ladies of Prominence were especially fond of that particular theory, which at once amused Aislinn and caused her to guard
the door of Shay’s sickroom like a mother bear with a cub.

Tristan gave Aislinn an apologetic glance as he entered, reached for a chair, and turned it back to front beside Shay’s bed. He straddled the seat and regarded his brother with a cordial nod. “’Morning,” he said.

Aislinn stood with her hands knotted in front of her, holding her breath. Shay needed a lot more rest to recover from the injuries he’d sustained in the confrontation with the Powder Creek men, but the simple reality was that he’d been sworn in as a U.S. marshal, he had a job to do, and time had run out. If they kept the truth from him any longer, he would never forgive either of them.

Bare-chested, pillows plumped at his back, his bruised and abraded face cheerful, his hair in fetching disarray, Shay grinned. “’Morning,” he replied. “You know, that badge looks good on you. I might just let you keep it.”

Tristan made a show of admiring the star gleaming on the lapel of his dark coat. “Pretty thing though it is,” he said, “I’m not cut out to be a lawman. Too much politicking to suit me.”

Aislinn bit her lower lip and held her peace, but it was hard. She wanted nothing so much as to interfere, to remind Shay of how close they’d become in the past few days, to speak of the tentative plans they’d made and the secrets they’d shared, to ask him straight out to turn in the badge and make another sort of life for himself. For both of them.

Shay assessed his twin through narrowed eyes. “Had a run-in with the town council, did you?”

Tristan chuckled, but Aislinn, who’d taken care to place herself where she could see both men’s faces, saw that his expression was rueful. “The mayor paid me a visit this morning to suggest that we put the whole matter behind us. Forgive and forget, since old Will Kyle helped settle the area and found the town.”

“Son of a bitch,” Shay growled, already looking for his clothes. “It’s worse than I thought.”

“Much worse,” Tristan said, getting up from the chair, finding trousers and a shirt and stockings in the bureau drawers, tossing the garments onto the bed, taking care to avoid Aislinn’s eyes the whole time. “Somebody lynched the circuit judge.”

Setting his teeth, Shay flung back the covers and sat up. He was as naked as the day poor Mattie Killigrew gave birth to him, but again it didn’t matter, given the situation. Aislinn stood back, knowing there was nothing she could do to stop him from getting dressed and personally taking on every hooligan, drifter and outlaw on the Powder Creek payroll.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll give in now,” he said, grimacing with pain as he grappled into his clothes. Wisely, Tristan too kept his distance, even when Shay gained his feet, teetered like a fence post in a shallow hole, and righted himself just in time to keep from crashing into the washstand. “Billy and the old man
are
still in jail where I left them, aren’t they?” His blue eyes were snapping.

Tristan nodded, a grin playing at the corners of his mouth. “They are,” he answered. “I don’t figure they’ve drawn closer in their time of trouble, though. They’ve been at each other like a couple of castrated cougars since you locked them up.”

Shay got his gunbelt from under the bed with a little unwilling help from Aislinn—he’d insisted it be kept within reach during the whole of his confinement—buckled it on and drew the pistol, popping the cylinder open with a practiced thumb and giving it a spin. Even Aislinn, who knew little of such things, could see that the gun was fully loaded.

Only then did he allow himself to meet her eyes. The plea she would not offer aloud must have been plainly visible in her face, because he shook his head in grim
refusal. Then he was out of the room, clattering down the rear stairs.

Tristan waited in the doorway for Aislinn, who could not bring herself to follow just yet. He spoke her name as a gruff question.

She turned, looked at him. “Yes?”

“Pray,” he said. Then he, too, was gone.

She sat on the edge of the narrow, rumpled bed for a long while, mourning all that she had lost, and all that she might lose in the hours and days ahead. Then, with a sigh, she got to her feet and left the room where she had spent the better part of a week, and didn’t bother to close the door behind her.

She could not make herself go into the general store, knew she would only be underfoot at the jailhouse. Thus it was that Aislinn presented herself at the door of the hotel kitchen, where she found Eugenie on the step, enjoying a mug of the strong coffee she favored and a rare respite from hard work.

“How’s Shay?” she asked, with the rough geniality that was typical of her. “I don’t need to ask after you, ’cause I can see by your face and the way you carry yourself that you’re plum tuckered out.”