“Missed it by a hair. But it’s made a mess of his pectoralis major. Throw some thread and a needle into that hot water, miss. I’ve got some fine sewing to do if he’s to regain use of his left arm.”
Two hours later Geoffrey was bullet free. And still alive. Barely.
Doctor McNulty had probed and stitched additional wounds in his right arm, right leg, and between two broken ribs, dropping each bullet onto the table, where it promptly rolled off. The kitchen was as steamy as a laundry room. Beads of moisture dripped down Prudence’s face; her bodice was as soaked as the skirts she’d used to protect her hands against the boiling hot instruments. Dr. McNulty and his orderly had worked in rolled up shirtsleeves, tight collars torn off, blood and water drenching their thick wool trousers.
“He can’t be moved,” Dr. McNulty decreed when they’d carried Geoffrey to one of the empty beds in the former parlor. “If he makes it through the next twenty-four hours, he stands a chance of surviving.” He held out a small brown bottle of laudanum to Prudence. “You need something, young lady. For a job well done.” He thought she looked almost as spent as the patient over whom he’d labored.
Prudence pushed away the laudanum. “I can’t,” she murmured, not offering any further explanation, sinking down onto a chair beside Geoffrey’s bed to begin what she knew would be a long vigil.
McNulty used what was left of the hot water to steep tea leaves in a pot that looked as though it had never been used. Three heaping teaspoons of sugar for its restorative powers. He stood over her while she drank it, and only left her side when the cup was empty.
“Is there a law enforcement officer in town?” she asked, smoothing Geoffrey’s hair back from his forehead and temples.
“The shooting took place on the train, miss. Unless you know exactly where he was when your friend was wounded, my guess is nobody’s going to want to touch it. Jurisdictional problem. And I think the railroads have their own police.” Robert Carmichael had little or no faith that justice was ever done without a hefty bribe. People who wanted satisfaction for a wrong done to them generally took matters into their own hands. That was the way the town officials preferred it.
“I need to send a telegram.” Josiah had to be informed of what had happened. And Ned Hayes. Between them they’d know what needed to be done.
“You write it out and I’ll carry it back to town,” Carmichael promised. “We’ve got a telegraph operator at the station. I’ll get him out of bed if I have to.”
* * *
Dawn woke Everett Rinehart from the stupor into which he had fallen. He felt half frozen, the ground beneath him rocky hard, the sparse winter grass beaded with tiny icicles. He struggled to a sitting position, rubbing his hands together to get some circulation going, shaking his head from side to side to dispel the fog that seemed to be everywhere. He couldn’t see an arm’s reach in front of him, but he didn’t know whether that was nature or something he’d done to himself when exhaustion had taken him down. His mouth tasted like blood, but he had no saliva to spit out. It took him almost half an hour to make it onto his feet, every moment a fight against pain, undependable shaky muscles, and fear.
Fear was what he most needed to beat back. Fear was what could defeat him if he let it. He kept before him the vision of an abandoned cabin somewhere in the early dawn grayness out ahead of him, a sturdily built single room refuge with a pile of last year’s wood on the covered porch. And a box of safety matches sitting on the stove top next to a battered tin coffeepot. He could smell the coffee he’d brew from grounds left forgotten in a pantry. Maybe cornmeal, too, which he could fashion into cakes with a little melted snow. No fat to fry them in, but that didn’t matter. It was heat that counted, dry logs burning brightly in a fireplace and a stove. He could almost taste the coffee and see the corn cakes turning brown in the iron skillet.
He stepped off the edge of a high cliff before he knew it was there. One foot scrabbling atop thin air while the other tried and failed to stay on solid ground. He heard himself scream as he hurtled headlong down the rocky precipice, arms and legs windmilling but desperate fingers never letting go of the precious banker’s briefcase. It seemed to take forever, but when the ending came, it was sudden.
Everett’s head hit a moss-covered boulder, splitting open with a cracking sound that was swallowed up by the fog. The banker’s briefcase burst open, bundles of cash breaking out of their ribbons, scattering into the early morning breeze. Heavy gold coins rained down on the fragile paper. The velvet pouch containing the stolen Marie Antoinette diamonds rolled beneath his lifeless hands, spilling its contents. When the sun burned away the fog the precious stones would sparkle like drops of frozen dew.
Until the pack of wolves who had heard his cries loped near to gather round the dead man, waiting patiently for a sign of life before they moved in to feast on him. Then blood spattered the ground and the gems meant to adorn the neck of a doomed queen. Flesh nourished flesh, and eventually what had once been a man was carried away bone by bone.
The stones for which he’d died would sink into the ground and be covered over by leaves and dirt. The gold coins would lose their luster in the mud. The fortune in paper currency blowing across the mountainside would melt under winter snow and spring rain until nothing remained.
Everett Rinehart, once so promising a young man, was no more.
* * *
Amos Lang had caught the next Canada-bound train out of Grand Central Depot. At every stop he grilled the stationmaster, demanding to know if anyone answering to Geoffrey or Everett or Prudence’s description had gotten off. When he finally showed up at Dr. McNulty’s makeshift hospital, he had cabled Josiah and was driving a hired carriage fitted out with half a dozen mattresses and every pillow and blanket he’d been able to buy.
By the time they got him back to New York City, Geoffrey had regained and relost consciousness more times than anyone could count. But against Dr. McNulty’s dire predictions and all odds, he was still alive. A doctor from the Bellevue Emergency Pavilion who was said to be the city’s foremost expert on gunshot wounds visited him in his suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He declared he couldn’t have done a better job on the wounds had he probed and stitched them up himself, then said the words that drove a chill into Prudence’s heart.
“He’s in God’s hands now.”
EPILOGUE
“They never did find the exact spot where Everett leaped from the train,” Prudence told Geoffrey a few weeks later. “No body, no diamonds. Amos Lang says the locals believe he made it to Canada with the help of one of the mountain men living on the land back where it’s too steep to farm and too remote to attract anyone else.” She’d held off talking about what happened that night for as long as she could, but now that Geoffrey was no longer delirious with fever, he was demanding answers.
It would be months before he could walk without crutches on the shattered leg, and odds were good that he would always need a cane. But at least he hadn’t lost the limb to amputation or his life to gangrene.
Josiah had seen to it that his employer’s suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel was as medically well-equipped and staffed as a Bellevue Hospital ward. He’d hired the best help to be found in the city, relying on the contacts he had made during Senator Roscoe Conkling’s losing battle with exposure after the Great Blizzard. And every day, as regularly as he appeared at the offices of Hunter and MacKenzie, Investigative Law, he checked to make sure that Geoffrey Hunter’s continuing care met the high standards he had set.
Today, for the first time since the shooting, Geoffrey had hobbled from his bed into the suite’s parlor without the assistance of one of the nurses whose care had brought him back from the brink. For hours and days on end, as he thrashed in febrile delirium, they had bathed his fiery skin with cool cloths soaked in a mixture of alcohol, water, and tincture of willow bark. Forced beef broth and strengthening sips of diluted whiskey down his swollen throat, changed his dressings with exquisite tenderness, and replace
d his linen as soon as it became soiled.
Even Tyrus, standing behind Ned Hayes as they waited for the doctor’s verdict every time he visited his patient, had no complaints.
“They know they bidness, them nurses,” he reassured a pale, exhausted Prudence. “He gonna be all right, Miss P. Take my word on it.”
“Tyrus knows what he’s talking about,” Ned promised. “Lord knows I should have died half a dozen times, but he was just too stubborn to let me go.”
“More like a couple dozen, Mistuh Ned. You never have learned to count proper. That’s why I beat you at cards ever’ time we deal ’em out.”
“He cheats,” Ned confided. “I can’t catch him at it, but I know he cheats.”
Their bickering lightened the burden of concern that interfered with Prudence’s sleep, robbed her of appetite, and turned her thoughts toward the solace of laudanum. Whenever she felt herself begin to weaken, she only had to envision the look on Geoffrey’s face if he were to see dullness in her eyes or smell a telltale bitterness on her breath. The prospect of his disappointment and the need to prove to herself that she was stronger than her addiction strengthened her resolve against the temptation of giving in. Her step had faltered more than once when she passed the apothecary’s shop two doors down from the hotel, but then she’d picked up the pace and swept by as though the demons of hell were on her heels. Which they were—in the form of cork-stoppered little brown bottles.
Glancing toward where Geoffrey sat in a cushioned armchair, the bad leg stretched out in front of him on a hassock, she breathed a sigh of relief.
“You’re smiling, Prudence,” Geoffrey said. He thought the tightness of her lips was a little too grim to be expressing pleasure, but even the hint of a smile was better than some of the looks he’d caught on her face when she didn’t think he was watching. He’d been close to death before, but it was different this time. He hadn’t had much to lose then; now he had everything.
“We’ll be on our way,” Ned Hayes said, stooping to kiss Prudence’s hand in his exaggerated gentlemanly way. He cuffed Geoffrey lightly on the shoulder, as close as he could come to the loving gesture of a brother, then nodded to Tyrus, who was already getting to his feet.
“I’ll have the kitchen send up some tea,” Josiah offered.
He could have placed the order by phone, but that wouldn’t have left Geoffrey and Prudence alone for the first time since his bullet-ridden body had fallen into her arms. And they needed to be on their own for a change. No nurses, no friends, no witnesses to whatever they had to say to one another. Whatever had been held back for so long.
Josiah wasn’t sure that Mr. Hunter and Miss Prudence realized how close they had come, how near they still were to losing what neither of them seemed bold enough to claim, but he and everyone else around them understood.
Especially Lady Rotherton. Beautiful, powerful, British, and rich she might be, but Josiah suspected she’d step on her niece’s chance at happiness without a second thought. He wouldn’t go back to the office right away. He’d stop by the MacKenzie mansion for tea and the kind of chat that could go on for hours. And keep Prudence’s aunt from deciding to drop by the Fifth Avenue Hotel to poke her long, aristocratic nose in where it had no business being.
When Josiah slipped from the parlor into the corridor, he paused for a moment, the door open just wide enough to hear what Mr. Hunter and Miss Prudence might be saying to one another.
Nothing. A silence so profound he shook his head in as close to despair as he ever allowed himself to get.
* * *
A waiter had set the laden tea tray on the low table in front of them, then withdrawn when Prudence signaled that she would pour.
The door clicked shut behind him. The suffocating silence descended again.
One of them would have to say something. What had happened to the easy camaraderie they’d found at the end of the Bradford Island experience?
“You almost died, Geoffrey.”
“But I didn’t. Anyway, it comes with the territory.” He shrugged, then grimaced. His shoulder and chest muscles were knitting back together too slowly to suit him. Every time he moved he pulled something tender and still sore. “I accepted a long time ago that it’s the price I may have to pay for the way I choose to live my life.”
She poured tea into two cups, held one out to him. Seemed not to have heard what he had said. Kept her eyes lowered, refused to scale the wall he had flung up between them.
He thought he knew why she had withdrawn into a protective shell of her own creation. Hearing a truth put into words almost always brought with it a choice to be made. And that was something he feared Prudence was not ready to do. She had already lost too many people she loved. And now there was no guarantee he would heal into wholeness, no matter what the doctors optimistically promised. Was she strong enough to walk with eyes wide open into a future that seemed to promise more pain? More death?
Geoffrey had thought of nothing else in the long days and nights when he’d fought his way toward recovery, when it seemed to those caring for him that his mind was lost in incoherent nightmares. In reality, it had seldom been far from the young woman who had sat for hours at a stretch beside his bed, always there when a flicker of consciousness broke through the fever, never absent when he longed to call out for her but did not.
When the fever finally broke and he had longer periods of awareness, he had forced himself to study her through lowered lashes. If she believed him to be sleeping, she allowed herself to doze, and that was when she was at her most vulnerable. Revealed to his hungry gaze as she never was when on her guard against him. Or against feelings she would or could not acknowledge? He wished he knew for certain which it was.
He’d chastised himself for unforgiveable carelessness at the idiocy of standing backlit in a doorway and believing it would not bring him grave harm. It was the kind of thing a fledgling detective did—only once. A tough and sometimes mortal lesson to have to learn. Of the shots themselves or the pain of bullets piercing flesh, he remembered almost nothing. Just the first one. The first shot and the instantly humiliating realization that he’d bungled. Very, very badly. But then, what choice had he had?
Between studying a sleeping Prudence and steeling himself not to wince against pain that tore through him every time he took a deep breath, he had replayed the moments leading up to Everett Rinehart’s escape. And found there were gaps in his memory that he would probably never be able to fill. Gradually, he would come to accept those empty spaces, as he had had to do in the past when a case invaded his mind in ways against which he had no defense. It was something other Pinkertons hinted at over one too many drinks. Everyone in the business feared the black dogs and the emptiness; nobody talked about them.
Would it be fair to Prudence to ask her to spend her life with a man injured in both body and memory? Sometimes the mental balance shifted. For reasons no one could ever articulate, a detective or private operative took his own life. By rope or gunshot, liquor or opium. It didn’t matter the method. The end result was the same.
Society made outcasts of self-killers. Their loved ones might as well have died with them, forever sharing the burden of guilt. His inner eye shifted to the memory of Leonard Abbott’s body dangling from an attic beam. The ugly, desperate waste of it.
Geoffrey could not do that to Prudence. But nor could he give her up.
* * *
Had he realized what he’d said?
I accepted a long time ago that it’s the price I may have to pay for the way I choose to live my life. I accepted . . . It’s the price I may have to pay.
Over and over until Prudence despaired of ever getting Geoffrey’s words out of her head. To give one’s life in the service of one’s country or to risk death to save another was understandable. Laudatory. Commendable even. But to be willing to embrace death in pursuit of a criminal who contributed nothing to society was . . . stupid. Senseless. Irresponsible. Cruel to those who loved you. All o
f the things Prudence knew Geoffrey was not.
How could she love a man who would risk breaking her heart for the allure of heroic balderdash? How could she love a man . . . ?
How could she not love Geoffrey, no matter who and what he was?
All those hours by his bedside had taught her nothing if she could not accept the truth of the feelings that had been growing for who knew how long inside her. In her fragile, wounded heart, in her stubborn head, in every fiber of the body that had nearly betrayed her so many times.
She had only to close her eyes to remember what it felt like to whirl around the dance floor at Delmonico’s in his embrace, one muscled arm tightly clasped around her waist, his gloved hand holding hers. Flesh never touched flesh, but it might as well have. The fire that burned her had not come from candle flames or too many bodies pressed too tightly together in a small space. It could only have come from a hidden place where some hitherto untapped hunger had erupted at the sound of Geoffrey’s voice, the look in his dark eyes, the animal strength of a man in his prime.
One of them had to speak first. One of them had to open the floodgates.
“Aunt Gillian is sailing back to England.”
That wasn’t what she’d meant to say. Wasn’t what she wanted to tell him.
“She’s insisting that I go with her.”
Prudence waited. He had clasped her hand in the civility of a dance. Would he reach out to her now?
The silence stretched on. Excruciating. Unbroken.
Until finally Geoffrey forced himself to speak.
“Will you go?”
Slowly, Prudence raised her head from the cup she held in a hand that now trembled uncontrollably.
She needed to read her answer in his eyes.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The diamond necklace worn by Lena De Vries at the Assembly Ball held at Delmonico’s on December 12, 1889, is, alas, imaginary. No doubt King Louis XVI must have been overjoyed at the birth of the Dauphin in 1781, but whether he planned to celebrate the arrival of an heir by bestowing a spectacular waterfall of diamonds on Queen Marie Antoinette is pure speculation on my part.
Death, Diamonds, and Deception Page 30