Gambled Away: A Historical Romance Anthology

by Rose Lerner

  “I want no part of this,” Guy said, and sat down in one of the chairs at a table. “I look after Helen. That’s all.”

  Helen came back down, Delilah with her.

  “Oh no,” Delilah said, taking one look at the boy. “Where’s Kyle?”

  “No idea,” James said. “But I would prefer him not here. I also need some warm water and towels from the kitchen. Guy is not inclined to help.”

  Delilah gave the man a withering glare and vanished through the door to the kitchen, reappearing a few minutes later with a steaming bowl of water and plenty of towels draped over her arm.

  “I’ll handle Kyle,” Delilah said and went back to the kitchen.

  “You can go,” James said to Helen. All too aware of Guy’s presence. “I don’t need your help.”

  “I’d like to help,” Helen said, tucking James’s blanket around Davey’s legs. She glanced up at James, the feather of her eyelashes cutting through the blue of her eyes. “I used to be very helpful once upon a time.”

  James smiled. “Funny, so was I. I’ll clean his head,” James said to Helen. “Would you mind cleaning his arm?”

  “Sure.”

  “This might hurt, son,” James said to the boy.

  “I’m not scared,” he lied.

  One of his mentors in France had been wondrous with sick kids. James, who had very little interest in children, sick or otherwise, had always been slightly agog at the amount of effort Dr. Pierre Therault put into making the children he worked with less scared.

  “How about I tell you a story,” James said, surprising himself. But it had been a patented maneuver from Dr. Therault.

  “Is it scary?” Davey asked.

  “No.”

  “Too bad.”

  “I have a scary story,” Helen said.

  “Is it about a ghost?”

  “No.”

  “I only like ghost stories.”

  “You are a very difficult patient,” Helen said, giving him an arch look.

  “Once upon a time,” James said, pulling out small bits of wood and debris from the boy’s forehead, “I used to live in a stone house. Surrounded by other stone houses. At the end of my street there was a giant church with stained glass windows. Have you ever seen a church like that?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “It’s very pretty. But in the winter we got a lot of snow.”

  “There’s a large splinter in his arm,” Helen whispered.

  “I have tweezers in my bag,” James whispered back. “Let’s switch.”

  “I can do it,” she said and went rifling through his bag.

  “So, there I was,” James said, with one eye on Helen and the other on his patient. “Living in all that stone and snow, and one day I was cleaning the snow off my stoop and can you guess what animal walked down the street toward me?”

  “A cat?” Davey asked.

  “No. Not a cat.”

  “A dog?” Helen asked.

  “Not a dog.”

  “A wolf!” Davey was very excited about that prospect, and James chuckled.

  “Not a wolf. Though that would be exciting, wouldn’t it?”

  “I saw a wolf once,” Davey said.

  “Was it scary?”

  “Nah. It was skinny. I seen scarier things.”

  He used a small pair of tweezers to unroll a flap of skin. It was still intact and would help with the stitches. He prepared his needle.

  “What animal was on your street?” Davey asked.

  “A goat!” James said.

  “Like a wild goat?” The boy looked dubious.

  “A wild goat. On a stone street in Paris. I still cannot believe it, and I was there!”

  Davey smiled and then he chuckled, and Helen went digging through the slash on his arm with the tweezers like she’d been doing it all her life.

  “Did you name the goat?” Davey asked.

  “No,” James said. Davey made a very disappointed sound.

  “You should have,” Helen agreed.

  “Really? What would you have named the goat?” James asked.

  “Hmmm?” Helen said. “Davey, what is a good name for a goat?”

  “Goat,” Davey answered definitely.

  “Oh, that’s a terrible name,” Helen chastised the boy.

  “Yeah? You got a better one?”

  “Davey,” he said, needle and thread in hand. “I need you to lie very still. This is going to hurt.”

  “Go ahead,” the boy said in the way of a person used to a certain amount of pain.

  James pushed the needle through the thin skin at the boy’s forehead and Davey hissed, his eyes filling with tears.

  “What color was the goat?” Helen asked, speaking loudly and clearly, drawing the boy’s attention from the pain James was inflicting.

  “I don’t remember,” James said, distracted by the work.

  Helen kicked him and he turned to catch her wide-eyed stare. “Oh, ummm gray. The goat was gray.”

  “I would call him Fantome,” she said. “It means ghost in French. So there you go, smarty-pants. In the end you did get a ghost story.”

  It took Davey a second, but he barked with laughter. “Good one, lady.”

  “Bravo!” James agreed. “She got you, didn’t she,” he said to the boy, who no longer seemed in pain. He glanced over at Helen and found her staring at him. Pink in her cheeks.

  There was that dangerous sensation of the rest of the world falling away. Like the chloroform, but sharper. Fuller. Not quite as fuzzy.

  There was something in her face, in the nature of her gaze, that changed the air molecules around him.

  He could not remember the last time that had happened. If it ever had.

  “Helen,” he murmured. She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and glanced away. A schoolgirl maneuver he remembered with painful clarity from a boyhood spent staring at schoolgirls. Still very effective.

  Was this real, he wondered, or another version of her? Another of her many facets?

  “His arm is clean,” she murmured. She could have breathed it, she could have only thought it and he would have heard it—that was how deeply he was aware of her. “He won’t need stitches.”

  A blast of cold air ruffled the thin clothes on the boy’s body, and James turned to find Charles Park in the doorway, wearing a beaver-skin coat and a fine black hat.

  The coat, really, was quite nice. Park, it seemed, did not lack for wardrobe money.

  “What have we got here?” Park asked, stepping into the room, flakes of snow swirling around his feet. It felt, with his entrance into the room, as if the entire building was suddenly filled with winter air. “Is my songbird performing surgery? And on a colored child!”

  Helen put down the tweezers and stepped back from the bar. There was a smear of blood across her face and her fingers were pink with it.

  “The boy was hurt,” she said, her chin up, but she was not looking at Charles. James recognized a small rebellion when he saw it.

  “I can see that. And there is the good doctor, practicing his art. Which makes me wonder why you feel it necessary to be here.”

  “There was-”

  “You’re filthy, Helen. A mess. Imagine if someone else had come in. A man who would pay good money for a chance to win a night with you. What would he think upon looking at the mess of you?”

  “That she has a working heart and conscience and could handle herself in an emergency,” James said, tying off the last of his silk. The boy would have a scar to brag about in a few weeks.

  “No one asked you, Dr. Madison. Go, Helen. Clean yourself up.”

  For a moment she didn’t move, as if there was some great battle inside of her.

  “Guy,” Park barked. “I believe Helen needs her medicine.”

  “She doesn’t,” James said.

  “Excuse me, Doctor, but no one asked your opinion. Guy?” And predictably there was Guy, reaching for Helen’s arm and the red cape, and James could n
ot stand how useless he was.

  In one gliding step he was between Guy and Helen.

  “Do not,” James said with an implacable menace he’d never heard in his own voice before, “touch her.”

  Guy’s dark eyebrows arched in surprise, and instead of reaching for Helen, Guy put his massive hand around James’s shoulder, pushing him back against the bar.

  “I’m going,” Helen said. “Guy. Stop. I’m…going.”

  Helen left in a swirl of red cape and black hair, and Guy gave him a little parting shove against the bar before turning and following Helen up the stairs to her room.

  Davey was still lying very still on the bar, his eyes wide. “You’re all right,” James said. “Why don’t you go find Kyle. And your coat.”

  The boy was off the bar and gone before James even finished the sentence, leaving him alone with Park.

  “Your name isn’t on the chalkboard for the poker game,” Park said, pulling off his gloves.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “I’m surprised. You give the impression of being rather attached to my Helen.”

  “Do I?” James asked. “Perhaps you are confusing my concern over her treatment at your hands.” Even as he said it, it was a lie. He was attached. As if he was sewn onto her like a button—he was attached.

  “I am free to treat Helen however I see fit. She is my legal ward.”

  “Ward does not mean a woman you can abuse with impunity.”

  “You have known my songbird, what? Two days. You haven’t seen her in one of her fits. The stress, I believe from the war, it broke her mind. Having to lie and keep straight a thousand false stories, all while betraying her own father. Betraying the cause of her countrymen.”

  “It would appear to me as if she was upholding the cause of her countrymen.”

  “Ah yes, you are a Republican.”

  “And you a wealthy Southerner who made his fortune on the backs of slaves. Your day is done, and you are punishing Helen for her part in ending it.”

  “Punishing her? On the contrary, it is for her own good that I care for her in this way. She is so fragile. So very…distraught at times. Helen insisted on her independence once, did she tell you? Stayed in a lovely asylum just outside of Philadelphia. Although I’m not sure she would call it lovely. Her memories seem to be rather”—he wrinkled his nose—“unpleasant.”

  James folded up his packet of needles and slipped it into his bag. His hands were shaking with the need to break this man’s nose.

  “I find you rather unpleasant.”

  “The feeling is mutual, Dr. Madison.”

  Charles stepped toward the stairs as if he might go up to Helen’s room to further torture her.

  “I wouldn’t go up there if I were you,” James said.

  “Why not?”

  “Typhus. One of the girls is quarantined.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Am I?”

  Park stepped forward again, and the devil in James stepped in his way.

  “Truly, you’ll have to go through me,” James said. “And you don’t seem the type to do your own fighting.”

  James wasn’t either, to be honest. But he was bigger than Park and angry enough to do something about it.

  Finally Park pulled his gloves on with angry jerks. “I do wish you’d sign on to play with me tomorrow night.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I would enjoy putting you in your place.”

  * * *

  After Park left, it took James a few moments to get his breath back. To find his way back inside his body.

  With shaking hands he cleaned up the bar with the rest of the towels and warm water, and then put the bloodied cloth in the storeroom, where one of Kyle’s boys would take it, and the rest of the bed sheets and the girls’ dresses, to the laundry on the other side of town.

  He turned to go back into the saloon, but he sensed he wasn’t alone in the dark anymore.

  “Davey?”

  “It’s not Davey.”

  Her voice in the darkness was perhaps the most sexual thing he’d heard in all his years. Husky and warm, quiet and erotically feminine.

  “Helen? Where is Guy?”

  “Talking to Charles. I don’t have much time. You must stop poking the beehive.”

  “Park?”

  “Of course Park.”

  “I’m not scared of that loathsome little leprechaun.”

  She sniffed, part laughter and part haughty disdain, which again because he was broken somewhere inside, was endearing to him. “Then you are a bigger fool than I thought.”

  He grinned at her in the dark. “Probably.”

  The sunlight found the cracks in the door behind him, and he could see her in the dim, murky light. Pieces of her. One eye. A black curl over her ear. The red collar of her cape.

  She narrowed her eyes, and he’d been on the end of a scathing reprimand by his sisters and his mother enough times to know when one was coming.

  It suddenly occurred to him why he liked waspish women. They reminded him of his sisters. Of family.

  Of being loved.

  Interesting.

  Before he could follow the thought any further, Helen stepped forward again, until he could feel her in the dark. A warm breathing weight within touching distance.

  She smelled of tooth powder and winter.

  “Did he really put you in an asylum?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you really have paranoia?”

  He saw the small shake of her head and he exhaled slowly, feeling as if he were finally seeing the truth of her.

  “I would help you,” he said. “If you would let me.”

  “You cannot save me.”

  “I understand that, better than most. But I can try to help you save yourself.”

  Her mouth fell open, like he’d stunned her. Maybe he had. He felt sort of stunned himself.

  “I liked your story,” she said. “About the goat.”

  “It wasn’t mine,” he said. “I stole it from a doctor I knew in Paris. I think he made it up.”

  He expected her disappointment or perhaps her chastisement. Instead she clapped a hand over her mouth and laughed. A gorgeous, throaty chortle. She might have snorted.

  It was impossible not to laugh with her. It was that kind of sound.

  “And Fantome was a stroke of genius—”

  She kissed him.

  His body had been asleep to such things for so long he could only be still and stupid under her touch and then—all at once—he jerked as if his body were shocked back into life and he felt her.

  With warm lips, she kissed him. Her hands pressed against his chest, she kissed him, her cold nose against his cheek, her body trembling so hard he could feel it in the narrow ribbon of air between them.

  Like the thunder of cannon fire, he felt her through his entire body.

  His hands lifted to her hips, and at their touch she curled her fists into the folds of his shirt, holding on to him.

  Yes, hold on to me. Don’t let go, and I won’t either.

  And then, suddenly, she stepped away. He stumbled forward before catching his balance.

  In the slices and discs of fractured light, he saw her with her eyes wide and her fingers pressed to her lips.

  “I’m not sorry,” he said.

  “Me neither. I just…”

  “What?”

  “I just wish things were different.”

  And then she was gone.

  * * *

  Hours later, just as James was leaving his own room to go downstairs, Helen walked out of her room in a red dress, cut low across the bosom. The black cap sleeves looked like wings against her shoulders. The hem was cut to her knees, and the dress ran like water over her body.

  James watched as she stepped to the small balcony and the men in the audience gasped and hooted. Some idiot pulled off his hat and fell to his knees at the bottom of the staircase.

  James barely noticed.
/>   James barely breathed.

  It was wrong, feeling desire for this act. When he knew what it cost her. When what he really desired was the flesh-and-blood woman far below the pretense. The woman he had only barely seen.

  But she was an otherworldly vision. Carnal and elegant at once.

  That dress …!

  Standing outside his door, he put one hand against the wall and at the motion she turned toward him. Her eyes met his and for one awful, heart-stopping moment he saw the incredible depths of her shame.

  His desire vanished. Dried up.

  She flinched, as if away from him. As if away from the strange intimacy they shared. And he hated that the sight of him brought her any kind of pain. He would change that if he could.

  He stepped forward—like that might help—but she shook her head. One quick shake, denying him.

  Go.

  She was telling him to go.

  Quickly, as if she knew what she revealed, she turned back to the crowd of men waiting for her and she smiled, lifted her arms, played the part she was being forced into.

  He wouldn’t stay and watch tonight.

  He couldn’t. And she didn’t want him to.

  A few minutes later, he heard the rattle and squeal of the cage being lifted. He walked down the staircase, unnoticed by the throngs of men in the room who had come out for the last night of the Northern Spy’s show.

  At the bottom of the stairs he turned and looked up at her, and waited until she saw him. When he had her attention he gave her the best bow he’d been taught, his hat against his chest.

  All the considerable respect he had for her, he tried to reveal in that bow.

  And then he left, without seeking out Park or Delilah or anyone else.

  He went out the back door into the alley. The air was so cold it felt like it might break against his body. The wind was blowing down from the mountains, and for the first time since coming off the chloroform he wished he had some place to go besides the empty streets.

  Annie’s would be lovely. She’d light a fire, and they could have tea perhaps. He could apologize a thousand times. She could forgive him. Steven could glower and punch James when she left the room—as he deserved.

  But even a thousand apologies wouldn’t be enough. So he turned east and walked toward the river.