Banner O'Brien

by Linda Lael Miller

  Banner sank back against the cold leather seat, feeling as though she’d been slapped. “I see.”

  “Good.”

  “Are you going skating, Dr. C—Adam?”

  He flung one unpleasant, wondering look in her direction. “I never do stupid things, O’Brien. My brother—no doubt, both of my brothers—will look after you, so don’t give me another thought.”

  Banner again felt the need to strike this man, to strike him and strike him until he stopped hiding behind that wall of hostility.

  Instead, she watched the tugs and cutters and clipper ships interweaving on the stormy water.

  She wondered about the accident that had claimed Adam’s father’s life and the affect it had had on the one who had survived. She suspected that there was more to the incident than anyone had guessed—much more. For as brief a time as she had been acquainted with Dr. Adam Corbin, she knew that such a thing, however terrible, could not do such lasting damage to him on its own.

  He disappeared, Melissa had said, especially around holidays. And he was always in a nasty temper when he rejoined his family.

  Banner sat bolt upright as a most disturbing possibility struck her. Suppose Adam had another family hidden away somewhere, perhaps an Indian woman and several children? Many men did this, she knew. Some of them were even married to a white woman in the bargain.

  A feeling of desolation swept over her, and she closed her eyes, only to see visions of Adam making love with a beautiful, coppery-skinned woman. She even heard the cries that had seemed so ugly coming from Sean—the hoarse, beautiful cries that Adam would utter when his joy became too great to bear.

  One tear trickled down Banner’s cold cheek to shimmer in the folds of her cloak.

  “What the hell is the matter now, O’Brien?”

  She opened her eyes, looked into Adam’s arrogant, insolent face, and put out her tongue.

  He laughed as they reached the bottom of the hill and turned the buggy toward Water Street. “I’m sorry I asked,” he said, with a shrug.

  And I’m sorry I ever met you, mourned Banner, who had thought that she would never want a man again, after all she’d suffered with Sean Malloy.

  But she wanted this man, and she cared for him, too. Worse, one day she might even love him.

  A shudder rocked her, and Adam reached out, impatiently, to pull the lap rug up around her waist. The contact made that strange melting sensation start up again, and Banner was so annoyed by this that she slapped away his hand and barked, “Don’t touch me!”

  Adam stared at her, shook his head, and passed all the brothels and saloons Banner had noticed the night before to drive the buggy down over a hill, toward the water.

  Her eyes popped open when she saw the beached clipper ship there. It had been put into dry dock, and there were steps leading up its side to the decks. At its ornately carved bow was the legend, Silver Shadow.

  Along the railings of the vessel, prostitutes lounged, looking down at the approaching buggy or gazing off into the snowy skies. Somewhere on board a tinny piano was playing and exuberant voices were singing, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”

  A brown-haired, lushly curved woman near the bow smiled, patted her outlandishly styled locks, and shrilled, “Hey, Doc, did you bring Bessie her Christmas present?”

  Adam laughed and shook his head as he halted the rig and tossed back the lap robe to alight. For a moment, it seemed that he’d forgotten Banner existed, and no wonder. “Not now, Bess,” he called back. “Can’t you see I’ve got a lady with me?”

  Bess pouted. “Mind you don’t give her my present, sweetness.”

  Banner reddened and her back stiffened and she would not have gotten out of that buggy at all if Adam hadn’t rounded it, taken her arm, and forced her to step down.

  “You wanted to practice medicine, O’Brien,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, “so stop acting like an offended missionary wading into the heathens.”

  “D-Do you visit that awful woman?” Banner whispered back furiously, and though she pulled with all her might, her arm would not come free of his hand.

  He flung a look of evil mirth at Banner. “What the devil do you care?” he retorted.

  “I don’t!” lied Banner with spirit.

  “Good. The sweet young thing in room four has a boil on her backside. You go and lance that while I—er—while I examine another patient.”

  “Bessie, for example?”

  The perfect white teeth flashed in another dazzling smile. “O’Brien, O’Brien,” he breathed. “When will you learn? When I want a woman, I don’t have to pay.”

  For weeks afterward, everyone on Water Street talked about the way one doctor had slapped the other, right in the middle of the Silver Shadow’s boarding ramp.

  Chapter Three

  THE DECKS OF THE SILVER SHADOW WERE SLIPPERY with snow and the spittle of tobacco-chewing patrons, and Banner held her skirts above them, curling her upper lip.

  “People get sick everywhere, O’Brien,” Adam reminded her dryly in a crisp undertone. “Even in nasty places like this.”

  Banner stiffened. She’d been in worse places during her training—tenements and shanties where rats roamed free and broken windows were stopped up with wads of damp newspaper. Hospitals where alleged physicians smoked cigars over open wounds and sported a coating of horse manure on their shoes. “Thank you very much for that enlightening remark,” she retorted.

  Bessie, the prostitute, was sidling toward them with well-oiled hips, her thin taffeta dress leaving much of her body bare to the biting cold. She patted her hair again and dragged slumberous eyes from the toes of Adam’s boots to the top of his head, pausing once, with sympathy, at the flaming mark Banner’s hand had left on his face.

  Adam thrust an appalled Banner forward, in introduction. “This is my colleague, Dr. O’Brien,” he said. “Will you show her where Lou’s room is, please?”

  Bessie tossed her head and looked Banner over with tolerance. “This way, Red,” she said, after a long and rather unsettling silence.

  Too proud to look back at Adam, Banner followed Bessie down an inside hallway lined with numbered doors. Room four was at the far end, and the prostitute rapped at it with unsympathetic vigor.

  “Lou!” she shrilled. “Hey, Lou! You decent? You got company.”

  “Come in,” wailed a pitiful voice.

  After drawing one deep, preparatory breath, Banner clasped the knob and turned it. The room was surprisingly clean, though dimly lit, and it smelled of some flowery perfume.

  On the bed, in a tumble of pink satin, her patient waited. The woman—in this light, she hardly looked older than Melissa—was crouched on her knees and elbows, with her plump, lawn-covered posterior pointing heavenward.

  Bessie muttered something and left, closing the door behind her.

  “I understand you have a boil,” Banner said, setting her bag down on a bedside table littered with crystal atomizers, pleated bon bon papers, and copies of dime novels like Melissa’s. Amid all this were printed business cards that read, Miss Lou, Room 4, Silver Shadow. Always a gentle welcome.

  “Who are you?” whined the enterprising Lou, turning her head to peer at Banner with miserable lavendar eyes.

  “My name is Dr. O’Brien. May I see the boil, please?”

  Lou hiked up her nightdress and lowered beribboned drawers. “Are—”

  “Yes,” Banner broke in crisply, bending to examine the offending lesion. It looked sore indeed, and the flesh surrounding it was inflamed. “I really am a doctor.”

  With the inevitable question answered, Lou was somewhat at a loss. “Where’s Adam?”

  Banner bit her lower lip and turned away to open her bag and rummage through for cotton, alcohol, a scalpel, and carbolic acid. “Dr. Corbin is aboard somewhere. Would you like to see him?”

  “No!” Lou cried quickly. “At least, not like this. It’s kind of nice to have a woman tend me.”

  Banner suppressed a smile
and turned to look at the washstand on the far side of the room. There was a pitcher there, along with a basin and soap, but she doubted that the water would be hot.

  She took her own bar of soap from its wrapping of cheesecloth, after setting aside the items she would need for Lou’s actual treatment, and crossed the room to wash her hands.

  That done, she cleaned the scalpel carefully, with carbolic acid, and gave the boil a thorough dabbing with alcohol. “This will hurt a little,” she warned in a kindly voice.

  Lou’s bright purple eyes were squeezed shut in preparation. “I’m ready, Doc!”

  As gently as possible, Banner lanced the boil, drained and cleaned it, and then applied a clean bandage. While she disposed of the cloths she’d used, washed her hands, and then gave the scalpel another dousing with carbolic acid, Lou continuously bemoaned the fact that she couldn’t very well work with a bunch of gauze stuck to her backside.

  Banner’s lips were quivering with barely concealed amusement. “I would think a little rest would be welcome,” she observed.

  Lou stretched out flat, winced a little, and arched her tiny, featherlike eyebrows. “I’ll get lonesome, lying in here all alone. How long will it be till I’m better?”

  “A few days,” replied Banner, closing her bag with an authoritive click. “And don’t you try to—to work before that wound is healed. If you think having the boil lanced was unpleasant, just let yourself get an infection.”

  Glumly, Lou promised to refrain from enterprise.

  “I’ll come by again in a couple of days,” Banner told her patient in parting. She was only a little surprised to find Adam waiting in the hallway, his back braced against the wall, his arms folded.

  Banner immediately noticed that he wasn’t wearing his suitcoat. “My patient is doing fine,” she said stiffly. “How about yours?”

  Adam’s mouth twitched, just at one corner, and he straightened. “Recovery is imminent.”

  Banner yearned to slap him again, just as she had on the boarding ramp, but she didn’t dare. She sensed that, although he had endured it once, he would take firm issue with a second attack. “Shall we go?”

  His blue eyes laughed at her, and he came to strict attention. “Let’s,” he said, as the voices inside the strange ship’s window-lined saloon struck up a rousing rendition of “Good King Wenceslas.”

  On the deck another prostitute waited, clad in a blue satin garment that covered little more than her torso. She wore stockings of black net, a lace garter, and a smile, and she tossed Adam’s suitcoat to him with a practiced flourish.

  Adam caught the coat and shrugged into it, never noticing that Banner O’Brien’s face was the color of holly berries. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Thank you,” purred the half-naked creature before turning away to join the celebrants in the saloon.

  Adam offered his arm and looked only mildly confused when Banner proudly refused it and stomped down the boarding ramp on her own.

  They were inside the buggy and climbing back toward Water Street before he spoke. “What’s the matter, O’Brien?”

  She would not look at him, but fixed her eyes on the saloons and brothels ahead. They had a certain festive innocence, those buildings, in the cloaking of pristine snow. “Nothing is the matter—Corbin,” she replied.

  He gave an unsettling shout of laughter. “Good God, you think I was availing myself to the pleasures of the flesh back there, don’t you?”

  “I certainly don’t care, one way or the other.”

  “Yes, you do. Why don’t you admit it?”

  Banner took a stubborn interest in the evergreen wreath hanging from the door of a ramshackle card palace. A silent interest.

  “O’Brien.”

  “What?”

  “Look at me.”

  “I will not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you disgust me, that’s why. You’re supposed to be a responsible physician and here you were—”

  “There I was, examining Hermione’s tonsils.”

  Banner gave a little cry of exasperation and contempt. “Her tonsils! Do you think me an utter idiot? One hardly needs to disrobe in order to look at another person’s tonsils!”

  Adam laughed again. “The coat,” he said, in the tone of one experiencing glowing revelation. “Shamrock, I took off my coat because I was too hot. That’s all I took off, for your information.”

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  She felt his shrug rather than saw it. “Fine.”

  “Her tonsils!” railed Banner, under her breath.

  “If you went around dressed like that, O’Brien, you’d have sore tonsils, too. Not only that, but—”

  Before he could finish, a saloonkeeper dashed out into the road, waving his arms. “Adam!” the man shouted, “Adam, stop!”

  Adam immediately complied and was standing on the ground before Banner had even managed to toss back the lap rug. “What is it?” he asked, reaching to the floor of the buggy for his bag, finding it with unerring ease.

  “Somethin’ awful’s happened!” whined the barkeeper, slipping and sliding back toward the swinging doors of his establishment in his haste. “Get in here quick!”

  Banner took up her own bag and scrambled into the saloon behind Adam. As her eyes adjusted to the almost nonexistent light, she was aware of a circle of people crowding around one of the tables.

  There was spittle-strewn sawdust on the floor, and the walls were lined with curtained booths. Over the scratched and battered bar hung a gaudy portrait of a simpering, overweight nude.

  Men, thought Banner.

  “Damn it, get out of the way!” raged the barkeeper, elbowing his way through the muttering group around the table. “Let the doc through!”

  Banner was quick to step into the narrow swath that had been opened for Adam, but when her eyes fell on the subject of all the fuss, she devoutly wished that she’d run the other way.

  A young, fair-haired man sat at the table, his right hand pinioned to the surface with a pearl-handled knife. His face was pale with shock and pain, and spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. His eyes rose to Adam’s face, imploring, but he couldn’t seem to manage a word.

  “Jesus,” Adam breathed. And then he grabbed the hilt of the knife with both hands and drew it out in a quick, clean motion.

  As blood spouted from the narrow slit in his hand, the young man fell forward in a faint.

  At last, the spectators moved back, away from the table, mumbling among themselves. Banner took bandages and alcohol from her bag as Adam used the bloody knife to cut away the young man’s coat sleeve. He was applying a tourniquet when she began cleaning and binding the wound.

  Adam gave the rapidly saturated bandage a skeptical glance. “He’ll need stitches,” he said.

  “I know that,” Banner retorted, though the truth was that she’d been so overwhelmed by the horror and brutality of the situation that she’d forgotten.

  “Give him something for the pain,” Adam ordered, as he edged Banner aside and began unwrapping the wound. The boy was stirring now, moaning, low in his throat, like an injured animal.

  Stricken, not so sure of herself as she had been, Banner stared at the half-conscious boy and the doctor who tended him. “Laudenum?”

  “Morphine, O’Brien. He’s going to need stitches on both sides of his hand, and the wound probably hurts like hell as it is.”

  Chagrined, Banner helped herself to a syringe and vial from Adam’s bag, as she had no such items in her own. Her hands trembled as she filled the syringe and held it to the lamplight, pressing the bubbles out of the fluid with a pumping motion.

  Satisfied, apparently, with the decreased blood flow, Adam was loosening the tourniquet. “Alcohol first, Banner,” he said.

  Banner colored at the reminder of something so elemental. Then, holding the syringe in one hand, she struggled to cleanse the boy’s inside forearm with the other.

  Adam made an exasperated soun
d and wrenched the cotton out of her hand, soaking it thoroughly in alcohol before wiping a space over the protruding veins just under the patient’s elbow. That done, he claimed the morphine and administered the injection.

  Adam’s indigo eyes were ruthless as they shot to Banner’s face. “I trust you’re capable of sterilizing a needle?” he growled.

  Banner battled tears of humiliation and nodded, but she found the required needle, cleaned it with carbolic acid, threaded it with catgut, and handed it to Adam.

  “What the hell happened here?” he demanded of the general populace as he sutured the wound with deft, practiced flashes of the needle.

  No one answered, and it was obvious that no one was going to own up to the deed, either. Or point out the culprit.

  Adam tied off the stitches on one side of the hand and turned it over to close the gash in the other. The boy awakened, stared at the needle, and fainted again.

  Finally, Adam was finished. He put aside the needle, cleaned both wounds once more, and applied a thick bandage.

  The mood in the saloon was suddenly vocal again; it was as though everyone had let out their breath at once.

  “Who’s the pretty lady, Doc?” one man wanted to know.

  “She your new nurse?” demanded another.

  A third man assessed Banner’s womanly bosom with infuriating dispatch. “I’d like her to nurse me,” he said, and everyone in that place of degradation and ugliness laughed except Adam and Banner herself.

  Adam straightened, his work finished, and swung his eyes from one grizzled, dissolute face to another.

  A new silence fell.

  “We was just funnin’, Doc,” drawled a middle-aged sailor who was lounging against the bar and looking anything but contrite.

  Adam caught Banner’s elbow in one hand and thrust her toward the saloon’s swinging wooden doors. “Wait in the rig,” he said.

  She stopped, planting her feet, mortally afraid of what might happen to Adam if he dared to challenge so many tough-looking men alone.

  “No,” she said.

  Adam turned toward her in an ominous motion centered in his muscular waist. “Damn it, O’Brien—”