“I don’t care what my father—” Her words stopped abruptly as the needle pierced her skin. Seth felt the pain as surely as if he had stuck the needle into himself.
“Squeeze Ansel’s hand,” he told her. “As hard as you can. Ansel, talk to her!”
“So Emily wants to pick the name for the new baby,” Ansel said, obviously fishing for a topic that would engage his sister. “Whether I like it or not.”
“When you carry a child in your stomach for nine months, Ansel, then you can—”
Within Seth’s grasp, Abby’s hand was twitching wildly. He tied the final knot and told her it was over.
“Just two little stitches,” he told her. “Nice and clean, and see that you keep it that way. I’ll bandage it up, but you aren’t to get the bandages wet or dirty. And I want to see you tomorrow—”
“I want to see you, too,” she said, turning those big brights on him.
“I meant your hand,” he said, feeling himself color under Ansel’s scrutiny.
“You want my hand?” She was teasing him, right out in the open in front of her brother.
“Yes. Just send it over with Ansel tomorrow,” he joked back. It fell flat. Ansel was studying his face and Seth felt as if everything he felt for Abby was suddenly written there—the love, the doubts, the regrets. “I heard from a doctor at Massachusetts General,” he told them both. Best to get it all out on the table.
Abby tried to sit up, and he assisted her, the same as he would assist any patient, a hand behind her back, the other helping her with her legs as she swung about on the table.
“You should just sit here for a few minutes and rest,” he said. “I wouldn’t plan on doing anything with that hand for a while.”
“What about the doctor from Massachusetts?” Abby asked him. “What did he say?”
“He wanted to know about the town, the usual ailments, the facilities….” He had a hard time looking at her.
“He’d be interested in taking over your practice?” Ansel asked.
“Possibly. Not likely. It seems he’s a pretty important doctor at Mass. General. A senior resident. Maybe he just had a bad day and was looking for a way out. I’m sure the feeling will pass….”
“Will it?” Abby asked him, and it was clear that once again she’d turned things around on him. Having feelings for Abidance Merganser was like being in the eye of a cyclone—one felt perfectly calm, but everything just kept whirling around and winding up somewhere else.
“Maybe I’ll write your editorial for you,” Ansel said to Abby. “I could put in something about attracting a better quality of physician here with better facilities.”
“I could just dictate it and Jedediah could take it down for me,” Abby said softly.
“Yeah, and he could fly it over,” Ansel said sarcastically. “I don’t think it would be a good idea to get him involved in this, Abby. Pa’s already feeling ganged up on.”
“Doc? You in?” someone yelled from the outer office. Seth poked his head out the examining room door. “It’s Callie Jean. Her time’s come.”
“I’ll be right out there, William,” he said. “Tell her not to have it without me!”
“She wouldn’t want to Doc,” William said, his cheeks red, “but these babies of hers sure do have a way of hurrying into the world!”
“He’ll have to be pretty damn fast to beat me,” Seth said. With a quick nod at Abby and Ansel he grabbed up his bag and was on his way.
Abby watched him leave. He looked back at her as he hurried through the doorway, as if there were something he wanted to say to her, and then thought better of it.
“He’s going, Abby,” Ansel said softly, coming to lean against the examining table beside her. “If not now, soon.”
“And I’m going with him,” she said weakly. “I would follow him to the ends of the earth.”
“And would just following him be enough? He surely has no intention of taking you.”
Maybe he hadn’t now, but he would. She would make him want to take her with him. Somehow, she would make him.
“What makes a man love a woman, Ansel? What makes him want to own her, possess her, keep her for himself?”
“I suppose it’s different for every man,” Ansel answered.
She supposed it was. Ansel had married to get the newspaper, but she had nothing of value to offer Seth. Her mama’s father had run the best still in Iowa way back when her father had come to town. That had surely been inducement enough for him. Maybe she could become a nurse. But not before Seth was long gone.
“Love’s a funny thing,” Ansel said, his eyes focused somewhere beyond the room in which they sat together. “Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t make it happen. And sometimes it doesn’t really hit you until it’s out of your grasp.”
She knew the prospect of losing Seth made her want him all the more. Why couldn’t it work the other way?
“Would you help me write a short note to Armand Whiting?” Abby asked her brother. “I just want to congratulate him on finally winning Anna Lisa’s hand.”
“I have an awful lot to do,” Ansel said. “And you’ll be needing a bit of time off, it seems.” He almost seemed relieved at the prospect.
Abby got down from the table, cradling her bandaged hand. Pathetically she said she understood.
“All right, Abidance,” her brother agreed. “A quick note. And then I want you to go home and rest and I’ll come by later and see how you’re doing.”
Dear Armand, she wrote in her head. How wonderful for you and Anna Lisa! To think that our childish promises have finally come to fruition. To think of you in terms of love and marriage warms my heart and soul. You must write me back and tell me all about the plans for the wedding. How I would dearly love to get a letter from Mr. A. J. Whiting in St. Louis, Missouri!
And how much more wonderful it would be if Seth were around when it arrived!
AS FAR AS SETH WAS CONCERNED, THERE WAS nothing that compared to delivering a healthy baby into the world. It was the one thing he would miss about medicine, he thought as he strolled back to his office, his coat open to better enjoy the first spring breezes and the warm late-afternoon sun.
He went straight to The Weekly Herald to check on Abby’s hand. Strictly as her doctor, of course. It was his responsibility—as her doctor—to make sure that she was doing all right.
Ansel was busy setting type. There was no sign of Abby.
“She went home, then?” Seth asked, some small piece of him hoping that maybe she was waiting for him in his office, another piece praying she was not.
“Not much help to me here one-handed,” Ansel answered. “And she was looking kinda done in, so I sent her on home.”
“She get there okay?” Seth asked.
“You care?” Ansel answered.
So it was to be out in the open. So be it.
“I got the feeling you were annoyed just to be treating her this morning.”
“Don’t be silly,” Seth said. He remembered Abby herself chiding him for the way he would sometimes yell at Sarrie when she’d gotten out of bed, or done too much. And here he was, doing it again, this time to Abby. “I was happy to treat her. I mean, I was glad that I was here when it happened so that I could …”
“It never would have happened if you weren’t here, Doc,” Ansel said.
“Really? It seems to me with Abby’s vision being what it is, it’s amazing she doesn’t have accidents more often.”
“She wears her spectacles when you aren’t around,” Ansel said. He hadn’t for a moment stopped what he was doing. Apparently Seth wasn’t worth his full attention.
“And that’s my fault?” Seth asked. “You seem to be holding me responsible for everything today.”
“When it comes to my sister, I think you are.” Now he put down the tray of type, and set the rollers of the press in motion. “And I know you know it.”
“I know your sister’s sweet on me, if that’s what you mean,
” he said.
“My sister fancies herself in love with you, though it beats me why. Still, she does, and I get the distinct feeling that you’re feeding that fancy just enough to keep it alive.” Ansel cranked something on the printing press that made a good deal of noise and Seth had to raise his voice to be heard over it.
“I have told your sister repeatedly that I am not interested in her as anything but a patient and a good friend of Sarrie’s,” he shouted over the noise of the press.
“Well, pardon me for pointing this out to you, Seth,” Ansel shouted back, “but Sarah is dead. And Abby is still going over to your place, still cooking for you, still making the same goo-goo eyes at you she was when Sarah was alive. And don’t pretend you don’t know it.”
As if out of spite, the press became noisier still when Ansel fiddled with it. Seth raised his voice another notch.
“Not that this is any of your business, but I have told your sister repeatedly that I do not return the feelings that she thinks she has for me—that I—”
“Thinks she has for you!” Ansel was red in the face from shouting, and now he added a wagging finger to his arsenal. “You really are an ass, Seth Hendon. How could you be so condescending to that girl? A girl who saw you through your toughest time, who held your sister’s hand day after day as she faded away? Can you imagine what that makes her feel like?”
“No, but I imagine you can,” Seth shouted back. “And it seemed to work just fine for you.” It was something that he supposed he’d never forgive Ansel for. And now Ansel would probably never forgive him.
“Well, maybe it’s a Hendon family trait. Make a Merganser fall in love with you and then cut them loose. Let them go off somewhere to lick their wounds—”
“It didn’t take you long to rebound. You had Emily wedded, bedded, and carrying before Sarrie’s tears were dry.”
He could see Ansel’s Adam’s apple bob furiously as he swallowed years of regrets. Behind Ansel, the machine quieted. After all the noise, the silence felt unnatural, and Seth found himself lowering his voice to a whisper.
“I’m sorry. That was unnecessarily cruel.” Saying the words hadn’t felt nearly as good as he’d anticipated it would all this time.
“Are you getting back at me through Abby?” Ansel asked. “Because she doesn’t deserve that, Hendon.”
Seth shook his head slowly. “I don’t want to hurt your sister. The truth is I’m more than fond of her. If I thought there was a chance, I’d … Look at her, Ansel, and then look at me. She’s full of life, full of youth, full of potential. I’m thirty-six years old. I’m—”
“You sound too much like Sarrie. Only she was dying, Doc. I knew what I was seeing when I looked at her. But when I look at you, I see a man who is good, kind, and according to Emily, devastatingly handsome.”
“I’m nearly twice her age. I can only disappoint her….”
“You mean you can’t …” Ansel let his words trail off.
“I’m talking about her joie de vivre, her ability to see the best in everything while I rout out the worst.”
“But you can make love to a woman? …” Ansel asked.
“Yes, Ansel, of course I can. I’m only a few years older than you, and around Abby, well …” He realized a man didn’t want to hear his sister thought of in that way, and he didn’t want to discuss how Abby had put him in what appeared to be a permanent state of arousal at just the mention of her name, and so he moved on quickly to the heart of the matter.
“Ansel, I would destroy everything wonderful, wondrous, about her. I can’t bear to think what being with me would do to her. I don’t want my life to touch her—the things I see, the—”
“For all your schooling, you’re still an idiot, do you know that?”
Seth had no response, and after what seemed like hours, Ansel repeated himself. “A goddamned idiot.”
“Maybe,” Seth allowed.
“Abby tells me you are trying to find someone to take over your practice?”
Seth nodded.
“You’re leaving Eden’s Grove?”
Seth nodded again.
“There’s no chance that you’ll marry Abby and take her with you?”
Seth shook his head.
“Then stay the hell away from her.” Ansel, fairer than Abby, had turned red in the face and the pulse in his neck was throbbing.
Seth nodded.
“I’ll bring her by tomorrow so you can check her hand,” Ansel said, clearly meaning that there would be no opportunity for Seth to see her alone.
If Ansel thought that, he didn’t know his sister very well. Seth figured it wouldn’t take Abby long to find a way to defy her brother, her father, convention, and Seth himself.
And a tiny piece of him was full of anticipation at the thought. Several of his journals had been reporting on something called masochism lately—all part of the new field called psychiatry. In addition to a host of sexual implications, it described a person with a taste for suffering.
He seemed to fit the profile all too well.
Ansel was a pain in the neck. A royal pain. It seemed to Abby that it had become his mission in life to keep her from Seth, to point out every time Miss Ella Welsh went into Seth’s office (twice in as many days), and to repeatedly send her on errands (since she couldn’t write or set type, he said) to Frank Walker’s store and Emmet Sommer’s farm.
It was a good thing that Frank and Emmet were the only eligible bachelors in town, or her feet would have been too blistered to get into her boots.
Just the same, after reading “Dear Miss Winnie’s” latest column, she managed to slip in a visit to Seth on Friday. After all, she did want to see what he thought of her editorial.
“It was good,” he said. She noticed he didn’t stop what he was doing to talk to her.
“Would you like me to help with your inventory?” she offered, watching him count bottles and jars and bundles and mark down the totals on a sheet of paper he had clipped to a board.
“You aren’t supposed to write,” he said, still not looking at her.
“I can count without even using my fingers, I’m that clever,” she said, coming over to where he was and looking into the medicine cabinet with him. She heard him inhale and then move away.
“I’m done here,” he said. “Guess I better take a look at that hand.”
“Mmm,” she agreed. It was time to put Miss Winnie to the test. She cleared her throat. She crossed the fingers on her good hand. “Seth, do you think you might have a minute to write a letter for me? I don’t want to ask Ansel, and the rest of my family isn’t, well—”
“They still aren’t speaking to you?” he asked, apparently surprised. Well, he didn’t know how stubborn the Mergansers could be. And she was the stubbornest of all, she thought with just a hint of pride.
“At least this way I don’t have to hear what they think of my editorial,” she said with a shrug.
He finally met her eyes. “Your editorial was brilliant,” he said, and his words washed over her like a chorus of robins on the first day of spring. “You advanced arguments I hadn’t even thought of.”
“So then you don’t subscribe to my father’s theory that women shouldn’t have thoughts of their own?” she asked, drinking in those incredibly blue eyes, that nearly black hair with two stray gray hairs by his left temple. The dimples that appeared so infrequently, showed up and then were gone in a flash, like a peek of sun between the clouds.
“I’d make an exception for you,” he said, taking her hand into his and examining the bandages he’d replaced yesterday. Clean, clean, clean. Keep a cut clean, he’d said, and it’ll heal properly.
“Vegetable soup?” he asked, noting the stains on the edge of the bandage.
“I could bring you some,” she offered. “Patience says its better than what I brought you last week.”
“You aren’t supposed to be using this hand,” he chided her, carefully unwrapping the dressing. “You’re a slow heal
er. It doesn’t suit your personality, Miss Quick-to-Leap-without-Looking Merganser.”
“But it is healing all right, isn’t it?” she asked, examining her hand. It looked all right to her, even when she kept her spectacles on to inspect it. “I could stop by twice a day, like Miss Welsh….”
He shook his head at her, but there was a smile on his face. More and more he smiled at her, and each time her heart felt as though it would leap from her chest if her shirtwaist weren’t so tight.
“Your hand is healing just fine. Slowly, but well.”
“Will it be all better before you take off for Nome?” she asked.
“I’ve decided against prospecting,” he said, but before she could get her hopes up, he added, “in favor of fur trapping.”
She supposed she sighed, because he looked up at her and his smile melted. “Are you feeling all right?”
No, she thought. Her headaches were worse, despite her wearing her glasses for two days straight except for the short moments she was with Seth. And this morning she’d actually lost her balance the pain was so severe. But the headache powder she’d bought at Walker’s Mercantile had helped some, and she always felt better in the afternoon. “Oh, I bet I’m every bit as sick as Ella Welsh,” she teased.
“You look pale,” he said, tipping her chin slightly.
“It’s nothing,” she said, knowing that he would take her shyness to mean that it was just the time of the month that made her look pale.
He nodded as if he understood. It was tempting to tell him how awful she was feeling, but once she opened that door, she was afraid she might not be able to close it, and so she asked him about the Denton baby instead.
His shoulders sagged and his frown became a grimace. “I’ve got him on a mixture of cow’s milk and water. He’s not done well with his mother’s milk, nor with sugar water. I’m running out of things to try.”
“It must be hard for Caroline Denton,” Abby said. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a baby wasting away and not be able to stop it.
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