Banner O'Brien

by Linda Lael Miller

“How interesting?”

  “Two of their women, a horse, and all the canoes I could ever want.”

  Banner suppressed a smile. “Why didn’t you trade?”

  Suddenly, Adam’s eyes were serious. “For the same reason I didn’t press my advantage when we stopped on the way,” he said.

  “And what reason was that?” Banner blurted out, before she could stop herself.

  He held the reins in one hand, caressed Banner’s cold-pinkened cheek with the other. “I didn’t have the right,” he answered hoarsely.

  Banner lowered her eyes, but he only forced her to look at him again.

  “Did you think I didn’t want you?” he asked.

  Color pounded in Banner’s cheeks at her own brazen reply. “Yes,” she said.

  “You were wrong, O’Brien. So very wrong.”

  Banner was still confused, though the knowledge that he had wanted her was soothing. Had he restrained himself out of respect for their professional relationship, or because he thought she was a virgin?

  And what was she wondering such scandalous things for anyway?

  Banner had a sudden need to tell Adam about Sean—all about Sean. About the beatings and the heartbreak and the terrible fear. “Adam, I—”

  But his hand fell away from her face and his eyes were suddenly very faraway. Was he thinking of the woman she was certain he kept somewhere nearby, remembering that she loved him and trusted him to be faithful?

  Banner swallowed a cluster of tears, and neither of them spoke until they had reached the Corbin house again.

  Even there they were drawn into the boisterous celebration of the midday meal, and the few words they exchanged were polite, superficial ones.

  * * *

  It was foggy on Puget Sound, and the masts creaked in rhythm with the tide. The great sails of the Jonathan Lee were useless.

  Temple Royce grasped the railing and swore. Where the hell was the wind?

  The first mate was peering through the shifting gloom of snow and murk. “That’s a cutter, all right,” he said. “We’re in dutch, Cap’n, if they catch us with all them Chinks below decks. And what about the rum and them bolts of wool cloth?”

  What, indeed. “You’re sure that’s a revenue cutter?” Temple asked, wondering how the man could recognize any craft in that weather.

  “I’ve been runnin’ one kind of smuggle or another for forty years,” replied the mate. “And yes, sir, that’s a cutter for certain.”

  Temple sighed. His head ached and sickness churned in his stomach, rising and falling like foam on an unsettled sea. “Tell the men to dump the cargo,” he whispered.

  “All of it?”

  “All of it. And be quick, damn it.” With that, Temple hurried into his cabin and shut the door tight.

  Even so, he could hear the shrieks as the Chinamen were flung overboard, into the swallowing, frigid waters of the sound.

  Trying to console himself with the fact that some of the men would make it to shore, despite all odds, Temple found a bottle, opened it, and drank deeply. If there really was a hell, he thought, it would not consist of fire and brimstone. No, it would be a place where he was forced to relive this day, over and over again.

  * * *

  Stewart Henderson returned first thing Sunday morning. He was a small, plump, avid-looking man with moons of grime under his fingernails and a complicated system of wires holding his jaw in place.

  Because of this appliance, he spoke in a mumbling monotone. “You’re more than welcome to stay right here, little lady.”

  Banner drew back, her hand at her throat, and then recovered herself enough to smile. “I couldn’t do that,” she said reasonably.

  Dr. Henderson stomped the snow from his boots before stepping into the house, and his colorless eyes assessed Banner briefly, then scanned the spotless little parlor. “Somebody really cleaned the place good.”

  Jenny had vanished at the first appearance of Dr. Henderson’s buggy, and some instinct warned Banner not to mention her. Since she couldn’t very well take credit for the appearance of the house, she said nothing at all.

  Henderson sank into a chair before the fire, where Banner had been sitting reading Melissa’s epic adventure only moments before. With a grunt, he kicked off his boots and settled himself.

  Immediately a dense, cloying odor filled the room, and Banner stepped back, her oversensitive nose twitching.

  He smiled at her in a familiar way. “You’re a pretty one,” he must have suffered to say, considering his wiring. “Prettiest sawbones I ever seen.”

  Something within Banner rebelled at saying the expected “thank you.” She clasped her hands together and wondered when the boor had last changed his stockings. “I—I was given to understand that you would be away for some time,” she ventured.

  Henderson touched the wires along his jaw and tried to laugh, and the effort was painful to watch. “Takes more’n a little set-to with a whippersnapper like Corbin to run me off,” he said.

  Odious as this man was, irresponsible and even criminal as it had been to attempt surgery using opium as an anesthetic, Banner could not countenance the violence Adam had done him. “I’ve met Dr. Corbin,” she said, unwilling to express her private opinion.

  “I don’t wonder. Ain’t much happens in this town that he don’t know about.” Henderson tried to look gallant. “He didn’t bother you, did he?”

  “No,” lied Banner. “He didn’t bother me.”

  Henderson shook his balding head. “He’s got a wicked soul, that Adam Corbin. Wicked and hateful.”

  Banner knew better, but she refrained, of course, from saying so. And something inside her was overjoyed at the prospect of shocking this man. “I’ve agreed to join Adam’s practice,” she said.

  The little man glared at her. “That’s a mistake,” he said, after a rather disturbing interval.

  “I don’t think so,” argued Banner in moderate tones as she took her cloak down from a peg on the wall and put it on. That done, she found her bag and started for the door. “I’ll send someone for my things,” she said, and then she was, blessedly, outside, where the air was fresh and yet another snowfall was beginning.

  She hurried toward the center of town, on foot, mentally counting and recounting the few dollars hidden away in the bottom of her medical bag. They would be enough, she hoped, to rent a decent room.

  It was the very worst of luck that Banner fairly collided with Jeff Corbin in the doorway of the town’s one hotel. “Banner?” he breathed, squinting at her.

  Banner wondered distractedly if this dashing sea captain needed spectacles. “Hello, Jeff,” she said, trying to make her way around him and inside.

  He would not permit her to pass. “What are you doing here?” he demanded with typical Corbin directness.

  Banner lowered her eyes. “I plan to live here,” she said. “If there is a room available, that is.”

  Jeff caught her elbow in a grasp reminiscent of his brother’s and tugged her a little way down the board sidewalk, where those coming to have Sunday breakfasts in the hotel dining room would not overhear their conversation. “Here? I thought you lived—”

  Banner was wildly impatient. It seemed that she was always being dragged about or propelled these days—by a Corbin. “Dr. Henderson is back,” she snapped in a furious whisper. “Do you expect me to stay in his house with him there?”

  “Of course not. That’s ridiculous. Our house—”

  Banner shook her head. “No, Jeff. I can’t stay at your house.”

  “Why not? You work there, don’t you—in the hospital, I mean?”

  Honesty seemed the only viable course, though Banner would, under the circumstances, have preferred to lie. “Adam is there,” she reminded him miserably.

  Understanding registered in Jeff’s bruised face, along with a certain quiet pain. Still, he was obviously reluctant to give ground. “Let’s go inside and talk—please?”

  The hotel’s dining room was a mo
dest place overlooking the water, and the tablecloths and implements were clean. Banner breathed a little sigh as a waiter set heavy mugs of coffee before them.

  “Banner,” Jeff began gently, his hand coming to close over hers in a brotherly fashion, “do you love Adam?”

  She took distracted note of the scrapes on his knuckles and then forced herself to meet the ink-blue eyes. Eyes like Adam’s. “I don’t know,” she hedged.

  “But?”

  She blushed. For heaven’s sake, what did the man want her to say? “There are problems.”

  Jeff’s grin was rueful and totally disarming. “With Adam, there always are,” he said. “But he’s a good man, Banner.”

  She took in his injuries with pointed interest. “Look what he did to you, Jeff. For that matter, look what he did to Dr. Henderson.”

  Jeff smiled and the greenish-yellow flesh on his battered cheekbone nearly eclipsed his right eye. “It isn’t Adam’s temper that worries you, is it, Banner?” he asked with uncanny insight. “You must know that all brothers fight sometimes, and you’re a doctor yourself, so you surely understand how he felt, seeing someone die in terrible pain because of blatant ignorance.”

  “It’s the woman,” mourned Banner, unaccountably.

  “What woman?”

  Heat throbbed in Banner’s face. What had she said? Her suspicions that Adam had a woman and perhaps even children tucked away somewhere were woven of fancy and hearsay, not fact. And even if her guesses were correct, what right did she have, after knowing Adam not quite five days, to consider such things at all?

  “Banner,” Jeff prodded gently.

  To her mortification, she began to cry. “Please—I’m sorry—I had no right—”

  “You do love him,” said Jeff in gentle, decisive tones. “I’ll be a—”

  Ever conscious of her dignity, Banner took up a red-and-white-checked table napkin and dried her tears. “I am an utter fool,” she lamented, more to herself than to Jeff.

  He chuckled. “No.”

  “I was always so practical!”

  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

  THE RIDE DOWN THE HILL TO PORT HASTINGS 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.”