Two Brothers (5 page)

He polished the nickel star against his shirtfront before handing it over. “If you’re going to get yourself shot,” he said, a little hoarse all of the sudden, “make sure you get hit someplace where this badge won’t be marked up. I want it back looking just like new.”

Tristan pinned the star to his chest in precisely the same place Shay wore his, without looking. “I’ll need some practice at being you,” he said, letting Shay’s warning go unremarked, as usual. He cocked a thumb toward the far end of the street. “You’re clearly a man who likes his whiskey. What brand do I drink?”

“You don’t,” Shay said, with a grin that was all his own. He leaned back in the chair, his hands cupped behind his head. “You’ve decided to redeem yourself. Why, you might even want to go forward during Sunday’s church meeting and give your heart to Jesus.”

Tristan let that pass, drawing a cheroot from his shirt pocket, along with a match, which he struck against the outer edge of Shay’s desktop.

“I don’t use tobacco, either,” Shay pointed out. He paused, considering Tristan’s several allusions to his status as the elder brother. “What makes you so sure you were born first?”

None too cheerfully, Tristan shook out the match and tossed it, put the cheroot away. “I’ve got a birthmark on my right thigh. You don’t. According to my mother—the woman who raised me, that is—the midwife on the wagon train took note of the fact.”

Shay put his feet on the floor and leaned forward as a thought struck him. “Where’s your horse? Somebody must have seen you ride in.”

Tristan laughed grimly. “I hope it doesn’t take much longer for your head to clear, because, God help me, I’ve got to depend on you. It was pitch black outside when I got to town, and I was wearing a hat and a long coat. You’ll remember that I had a beard, too.” He made to stroke the absent whiskers with one hand, obviously a
habit of long-standing, then glanced ruefully toward the stove, where the sleep-addled barber had disposed of a pile of walnut-colored hair early that morning. “I told the man at the livery stable that the horse was yours, a gift from an old friend.”

“He must have been drunk, half asleep, or both.”

“He did say I put him in mind of somebody, though he couldn’t rightly think who it was.” Tristan smiled at the memory, then cast a glance toward the window. “It’ll be dark in a couple of hours. Start talking. Marshal. Who am I going to meet when I walk out of this place, and what will they expect from me? Are you a chatty sort, or a man of few words?”

“What do you think?” Shay challenged. He was hung-over, he couldn’t chase Aislinn Lethaby out of his head, and he was still getting used to the fact that Saint-Laurent existed at all. And then there was the implication that he, Shay, wouldn’t be able to bring the robbers to justice without his brother’s help. He didn’t have the patience to be cordial on top of all that.

“I think you don’t say much—you like to watch and listen and work things through before you put in your two bits. You’re at home on a horse, and probably fairly fast with that forty-five, when you’re sober. As a kid, you got good marks in school, but you spent a lot of time staring out the window, wishing you were somewhere else. You liked to read, still do, and you’re a good pool player, at least early in the day. Course, the way your hands shake, we’ll be lucky if you don’t get yourself killed in a shoot-out before this is over.”

Shay ignored the reference to his unsteady hands—mostly because it was true—and studied his brother with calm amazement. Tristan’s assessment had been uncannily apt. “How did you know all that?”

“Simple. Except for the pool playing—poker’s my game—and the liquor palsy, I could have been describing myself. You’ve got a callus between the first and second
fingers of your left hand, the kind left by the slide of a cue stick. Tell me about your sisters.”

It was Shay’s turn to grin. “They hate me,” he said. “Or, at least, Cornelia does.”

When the mosquitoes came out and the sun was going down, Aislinn reluctantly made her way toward the hotel. It was early evening, and bawdy music spilled out the back door of the saloon as she passed, but there was no sign of the marshal. She didn’t attempt to convince herself that the disappointment she felt was really relief.

For her, twilight was the loneliest part of the day. Folks were locking up their places of business and heading home to supper, and in the lull before the night’s revelry would begin at the Yellow Garter, she could hear the voices of women on the doorsteps of the town’s bare-wood houses, calling their children in.

She bit her lower lip, remembering her own gentle, harried mother, her hardworking father, a country doctor. They’d both perished in a hotel fire, during a rare visit to the city, where they’d gone to celebrate an anniversary.

Aislinn and her small brothers, Thomas and Mark, had been at home when the news came. She could still see the expression on the constable’s kindly face, when he’d stopped by, first thing one bright summer morning, carrying the weight of the news in his eyes as well as upon his shoulders.

They’d had no kin, she and her brothers, and there was very little money. The house was mortgaged, and even though Aislinn managed to sell it right away, it took all but a few dollars of the profits to pay their debts. Several men had come forward with offers of marriage, and she supposed accepting would have been the simplest solution, but something in her had rebelled against a loveless union, undertaken for the sake of expediency. Too, being a doctor’s daughter, she’d known what was expected of a
wife, and being just sixteen at the time, she hadn’t felt ready to give that.

In the end, she had enrolled her brothers in a boarding school in Portland, Maine, using most of the remaining funds to pay for their room and board, and then gone to an agency, seeking employment in the West. She planned to save her wages, buy a little piece of land, and send for Thomas and Mark as soon as she could put a proper roof over their heads.

She’d found work immediately, serving food in a railroad dining hall in Kansas City, and she’d left there only when a certain unwanted suitor had become too persistent. She’d been moving from one town to another ever since, traveling farther west each time.

She was nineteen now, with a fair sum saved, and she’d found an abandoned homestead a few miles out of town, and hoped to make an offer of purchase very soon. Once the transaction was complete, she would send for her brothers, who waited anxiously to join her.

She hoped to marry one day, and have children of her own, but life had made her wary, and the more independent she grew, the less willing she was to settle for anything less than precisely the right man.

Nearing the entrance to the hotel’s kitchen, she heard the clatter of stove lids and kettles and heavy china plates, the brisk, busy conversation between the cook and the serving girls, and, beneath it all, the bedrock of Eugenie’s authority. It was, in a small way, a homecoming, and Aislinn found herself smiling a little as she went inside, toward the wavering light of the lanterns.

“There you are,” Eugenie said, up to her elbows in a pan full of hot, soapy water. Beside her were stacks of crockery, waiting to be washed. “I was just about to send Mathilda out looking for you. Get yourself a plate of supper and don’t give me any sass, miss. I won’t have it said that we don’t feed our girls proper.”

Aislinn was hungry, and glad that someone had been
awaiting her return; that she belonged, however tenuously, in this place. The kitchen was warm, and so was Eugenie’s affection, and her spirits rose as she obediently helped herself to a slice of venison roast, a mashed turnip with butter, and a corn biscuit. She took a seat at the trestle table, within the golden glimmer of a lantern, and began to eat.

Eugenie was in an unusually talkative mood, even for her. “Shall I put on a kettle of hot water for you?”

“Please,” Aislinn said. Everyone knew she was fussy about cleanliness; each night, behind the rickety changing screen in the attic dormitory, she took a sponge bath. To the other girls, such behavior seemed as eccentric as going barefoot at every opportunity. “It looks as though the dining room’s been doing a lively business tonight.” She indicated the stacks of dishes with a nod. When she was finished eating, she would elbow Eugenie aside and take over the dishwashing task herself.

“Shamus’s boy was here,” Eugenie said, with much portent, and it was a moment before Aislinn realized she was talking about Shay McQuillan, the marshal. The word “boy” was a misnomer of monumental proportions; McQuillan was all man, with no apologies offered. “I believe he hoped to see you.”

Something foundered in the back of Aislinn’s throat and flailed its way to the pit of her stomach, like a bird falling down a chimney pipe and fluttering in the ashes of a cold stove. “Nonsense,” she said, shakily. “One woman is the same as another to him. Everybody knows that.”

Eugenie left her dishwashing to pump water into a large kettle and set it on the stove with a ringing thump. “Do they?”

She remembered looking up into those too-blue, too-knowledgeable eyes, and her throat closed so tight that she nearly choked on her food. After a few moments of recovery, she stood, meeting Eugenie’s challenging gaze directly. “I’m sorry,” she said, in even tones. “I guess the
marshal is your friend, and you’re right to stand up for him. But I’m entitled to my own opinion, and I think he’s bad news, pure and simple.”

Surprisingly, Eugenie chuckled. “Oh, he’s that for sure. But there’s such a thing as the right kind of misery, gal. I hope you find that out before it’s too late.”

The cook guffawed. “Lawd, Eugenie, you sure are right about that.”

Aislinn scraped her plate into the scrap bucket, which would be set out by the back step for a scrawny dog named Bert at closing time, and took over the task of washing the dishes. She had to wait for her bathwater to heat anyway. Eugenie and the cook busied themselves preparing for the morning, giggling like a pair of school-girls, and Aislinn just shook her head.

When she went upstairs, the attic room was sweltering, as usual, so she pried open the single window, being as quiet as she could, since some of the girls were sleeping.

She bathed, as always, put on a nightgown, unplaited her hair, brushed it thoroughly, and braided it again. She’d crawled into bed, and was silently repeating her nightly prayers, asking God to keep Thomas and Mark safe and well, when she heard someone weeping.

At first, she thought it was one of the other serving girls—the new ones, frightened and far from home, often cried themselves to sleep at night—but the sound was thin, and seemed to rise on the hot summer air.

No one else stirred, and Aislinn honestly tried to ignore the soft, snuffling sobs, but in the end, she couldn’t. She got up and went to the window, peering into the thick darkness. The night was a thrumming cacophony of saloon music, one or two barking dogs, a braying mule, the celebratory whoops of cowboys and even the occasional gunshot—she knew a moment’s piercing fear for the marshal’s safety—but underlying it all was the weeping, sorrowful and hopeless.

Far below, in the narrow space between the hotel and
the general store, a small figure crouched. Aislinn started to call out, then decided that would be a bad idea, for the girls sharing the room with her worked hard all day, and needed their rest. Exasperated, she pulled on a wrapper and made her way down the rear stairs in cautious haste. In the kitchen, now empty, she lit a lantern and unlatched the back door.

The brindle dog was taking a noisy supper from the scrap pail; he looked up at Aislinn and then went on lapping up leftovers. Hoping no one would come along and fasten the door behind her, she moved carefully around the corner of the building.

“Who’s there?” she called softly, holding the lantern aloft in an effort to make out the other person’s identity.

The figure was a small, trembling bundle, garishly dressed in purple and red taffeta and young, judging by her voice. “Go away and tend to your own business.”

Aislinn crept closer. “I’m afraid I’ve never been very good at that,” she said. “Are you hurt?” She had an impression of fierce, glittering eyes and terrible fury, barely held in check, and was reminded of a small animal, struggling in a trap. “Shall I fetch the doctor?”

“I told you, just go away. There’s nothing you or that rummy old sawbones can do for me.”

Light spilled over the tumble of taffeta and feathers and fear, and a small thrill of excitement went through Aislinn as she realized that the young woman was one of the dancing girls from the Yellow Garter Saloon. Her curiosity was overwhelming, and exceeded only by pity. “I’m not going to leave you. It’s obvious that something is wrong.”

The woman gave a hoarse, despondent laugh and wiped her nose with one hand. “You’re one of those women who pours coffee and serves flapjacks in the hotel restaurant, aren’t you?” she challenged.

It occurred to Aislinn that if she and the others could wonder and whisper about the soiled doves at the Yellow
Garter, the reverse might be true as well. “Yes,” she answered, crouching down beside the fallen woman. “My name is Aislinn Lethaby. What do they call you?”

Another bitter laugh. “You don’t want to know what they call me,” she said. “It would singe your pretty little ears.” She paused, then went on with a sort of forlorn defiance. “My mama and papa called me Liza Sue, but I’ve been somebody else for a long time. What kind of name is ‘Aislinn’? You a foreigner or something?”

Aislinn smiled, set the lantern down, and reached quickly to steady it when it tilted. “My mother took the name from a book. It’s Irish, I think. I was born in Maine, and so were both my parents.”

Liza Sue sniffled. “That’s a whole lot more than I asked you,” she said. In the dim, wavering light, Aislinn could see that the other woman’s face was badly bruised, as were her upper arms. Her cheeks were streaked with kohl, and the feather on her hat bobbed with a sort of pitiful gaiety. “Listen, I got beat up by a drunken cowboy. Are you satisfied? I’ll be all right by tomorrow.”

Aislinn gaped at her, horrified. “We have to go and complain to the marshal. Whoever did this should be arrested!”