Major followed Joshua and Robert, wagging his tail in anticipation of the scraps Madam Mamie usually gave him. As they approached, he ran ahead, inside, and up the stairs to the landing where Mamie surveyed her realm. She bent over to scratch behind the dog’s ears before coming down to greet them. “Well, if it isn’t Doctor French!”
Joshua felt himself blush. Maybe he should go ahead and grow a beard, if he couldn’t break himself of blushing. Madam Mamie had saddled him with that nickname because of his insistence on using French letters to keep from getting the French pox. Joshua had no wish to spread it to any of the prostitutes not already afflicted. And if, after all, he were ever to marry, that was one gift he would not be giving his bride. He’d been trying to convince the madam that her customers might have similar qualms, but he’d made no headway so far.
Mamie steered Robert toward the bar and ordered the barkeep to keep him generously supplied, then turned back to Joshua. “The room you used last time is occupied, but just head the other way at the top of the stairs and take the first room on the left. I’ll send the girls to you. I believe you’ll need to dose four of them, but you’ll be able to do your own count.” She cocked her head and winked at him. “Which one should I send in last?”
Joshua looked around at the bevy of smartly dressed ladies. Not for the first time, he wondered what the proper women of Cowbird Creek thought of them. Did a woman like Clara Brook catch sight of one of Mamie’s girls in the street and wonder how she had come to this? Or, perhaps, instead, try to imagine her life and how it seemed to her? If any respectable woman would do so, it might be she.
But Mamie was awaiting an answer. Some of the girls were tending to customers upstairs, but one of his favorites was chatting up the driver of the Wells Fargo stagecoach at the end of the bar, her auburn curls hanging almost as low as her inviting cleavage. “I’d take it kindly if I could finish up with Coraline.”
He gave the lady in question one more long look before heading upstairs. Business, of a kind, before pleasure.
When he made his way downstairs, the piano player was pounding out some dance music. So he stayed for some dancing, and had more drinks than he usually allowed himself, enough that it seemed like a good idea to show the ladies of the house some new magic tricks, but also enough that the tricks didn’t all go quite as they should. Abandoning magic, he headed back upstairs with the new girl, Adeline, who had come from a house back east and brought along her own sophisticated bag of tricks.
It was dark and the moon high when he and Robert made their way down the street arm in arm, keeping each other upright, Major trotting behind. Robert peeled off at the pharmacy, bowed with an extravagant flourish, and climbed carefully up to his rooms. Joshua planned to do the same.
Until he saw the man pacing back and forth in the street near his rooms, who ran forward gabbling about his little girl before Joshua could properly hear what he was saying.
Joshua took a deep breath of the cool night air. “Just give me a moment, and I’ll be ready.” Without waiting for an answer, he cut through the alley to the pump and stuck his head under the spout, running the cold water to shock the fog out of his head. Then he ran up to his rooms for his bag.
The man had ridden into town, so Joshua would have to ride out. It was a good thing Nellie-girl would follow any horse in front of her. He should be able to hang on, so long as he didn’t have to steer.
The following afternoon, Joshua went to see Mrs. Blum at her home again. She’d sent a boy to ask him to come look at her teeth. But he didn’t guess her teeth had as much to do with the summons as the gossip around town.
All right, so he’d fallen off his horse. He’d still managed to get the little girl’s shoulder back in its socket, even while her screaming made his head throb until it felt like it would fall right off.
Sure enough, she waved him into a kitchen chair and handed him a cup of hot tea with honey. When he started to gulp it down, she protested. “What’s the rush? Is the room on fire? Or your pants, maybe?”
That startled a laugh out of him. He took a slower sip of the tea while she bustled around the kitchen and then set a plate before him with some sort of rolled-up cookies. “Eat up, put some meat on your bones. So skinny, how can you keep up your strength?”
She hadn’t met his father. Joshua would be plump enough in twenty years, if he lived that long. He was in no hurry to acquire that shape.
He let her press one of the cookies on him — and it was delicious, rich and sweet and filled with some sort of seed paste — before putting his cup down with a firm “clink” on the table. “Now you sit down, and I’ll look at your teeth.”
She thumped down into one of the kitchen chairs and opened her mouth. Hmmm. She did have some tooth trouble, at that. “That molar should come out. And that premolar, as well.”
He pulled back his hand in a hurry when she started (of course) to talk. “Come out! Doctors, always doing nothing or doing too much. Can’t you just give me something to take until they feel better?”
“You could take laudanum. But those teeth will only get worse.”
“Enough of that.” She dismissed the supposed reason for his visit with a wave and a sniff and got back to her feet. “Would you like to see a picture of my Samuel? So when I talk about him, you should know what he looks like.”
Like many widows, she talked as if her husband were still hanging about somewhere. “Mrs. Blum, I have other patients to see —”
“Oh, it’ll just take a minute. And you can have another —” She threw out a confusing hash of syllables that must have been the name of the cookies. Sure enough, she waved him back into his chair and pushed the plate toward him, disappeared into the sitting room, and reappeared with a large, very fat book that when opened, proved to be a photograph album. She plunked it down on the table and opened it in front of him. “Here, my Samuel in his store.” He was surprised to see that the tall man in the apron, his foot on a barrel, was not much wider than Joshua himself. He must have had either a will of iron, or a constitution that burned up everything he ate.
“And here we are on our wedding day. Samuel looked his best that day. Not exactly handsome, not like my beaus before him, but the way he stood tall and proud and happy, you’d hardly notice.” She sighed, then went on cheerfully, “I made the dress myself. Before the year was out, I’d made four more just like it, almost, for other girls.”
In the photograph, Mrs. Blum, as she had just become, looked very much as she did now, minus a few of the pounds and the second chin. And while not even Mrs. Blum could hold a smile long enough for a photograph, the look on her face suggested she’d been thinking of something other than dresses, that day.
He was looking for a decent way to extricate himself when a woman’s voice sounded behind him. “Dearie, are you home? I’ve brought back the sifter you lent me.” Joshua stood and moved toward the sitting room, where a woman he’d met once or twice stood in the doorway. Rebecca Wheeler had come to town about six months ago and opened a boardinghouse. She opened round brown eyes and a pretty mouth. “Oh, excuse me, Freida! I didn’t know you had company. Doctor Gibbs, isn’t it?”
The hell she hadn’t known. Joshua knew a setup when he saw one. But he bowed. “Miss Wheeler.”
Miss Wheeler really did have a sifter to return, though it might well have been borrowed for that purpose. Mrs. Blum advanced to take it and pulled out a chair for her. “Sit, sit!”
Miss Wheeler sat. Their hostess fetched another teacup and plate; Miss Wheeler picked up one of the rolled-up cookies and admired it. “You must give me the recipe for these.”
“We-ell . . . . I suppose. Your guests would appreciate them, I’m sure.” Mrs. Blum actually winked at Joshua. “Doctor Gibbs here does.” Then she paused and snapped her fingers, something Joshua had never seen a woman do before. “And what an idea I just got! Rebecca, you should have Doctor Gibbs over to dinner at the boardinghouse. He travels so much, sees so many people, he could tel
l them what a wonderful —” (“vun-derful”) — “cook you are, and how happy your guests are at your dinner table.”
Miss Wheeler looked shy all of a sudden, even though the two of them had obviously, so to speak, cooked this up between them ahead of time. The shy look dampened his resistance to the conspiracy. And she was pretty, with a curvy but slim figure, and honey-brown hair tied back in a rolled-up bun that reminded him a little of Mrs. Blum’s cookies. And she must be a good cook, or Mrs. Blum wouldn’t have aimed Joshua at her table, matchmaking or no.
So he looked at both women and said, “If I were to receive such an invitation, I’d naturally be honored to accept.”
Three days later, Joshua made his way to the boardinghouse, dressed in his freshly laundered best and trying not to expect anything but a good dinner. As he passed the open meadow near his destination, he saw with a mixture of nostalgia and pain that some schoolboys were playing baseball. When he was their age, it had been mainly a sport for high society, but it had spread rapidly during the war as soldiers seized on it for exercise and diversion, while their officers encouraged it as a way to build morale and accustom the soldiers to working together. Joshua had discovered himself to be a powerful hitter and reasonably skilled pitcher. He thoroughly enjoyed the game until the day he was invited to take part in a match on a battlefield, so recently the scene of carnage that not all the corpses had been removed. The ball had landed in gore more than once. He had not played since.
Emerging from the memory, Joshua found himself at the door of the boardinghouse. He rang the hanging brass bell outside; Miss Wheeler met him at the door herself, in a violet dress that he would have bet Mrs. Blum had made for her. “Come into the parlor.” (The term raised unfortunate associations. Someone had better alert Miss Wheeler to the local usage.) “The other guests are there, except a couple of stragglers, and dinner will be ready in just a few minutes.”
He had not, though he should have, anticipated the need to make small talk with a roomful of strangers, nor to satisfy their understandable curiosity about his presence. He stammered out a summary of Mrs. Blum’s cover story and turned the conversation to where the various guests had come from and how long ago. They included, he learned, a man looking to buy some real estate and checking out the possibilities; a circuit-traveling judge who stayed at the boardinghouse whenever he swung through town; the newest deputy sheriff; an evasive fellow whose slicked-back hair and oilier manner might identify him as a card shark; and a spinster, sister to a local farmer and working at the bank. Joshua had not thought to find an unmarried woman living here, other than the proprietress. Did a woman like Miss Brook, apparently less than contented with life on her family’s farm, ever consider such an alternative?
Miss Wheeler was indeed a good cook. The guests even had a choice, fried chicken or roast beef, along with corn pudding and puffy rolls. Mrs. Blum’s rolled cookies appeared as dessert, though they were somewhat less of a hit than Mrs. Blum had predicted. Miss Wheeler urged everyone to eat hearty, though she tactfully stopped pressing the cookies on those who declined twice.
Joshua found eating more relaxing than chatting, and contemplated trying for some arrangement where he could eat here more often. But thanks to Mrs. Blum, his hostess would take that as signifying more than his approval of her table.
Which would be a problem, because, pretty as she was, as good a cook as she was, he wasn’t really interested.
Even if he’d felt ready to welcome a woman in his life, he didn’t need any more mothering than he was getting from Mrs. Blum. In fact, he could do with less. And though Miss Wheeler was Joshua’s age at most, she seemed like the motherly type. That no doubt made the boardinghouse a natural fit for her. But it didn’t make her a good fit for him.
He escaped after dinner, despite the hostess’s urging him to stay and listen to the card shark play the piano. And coward-like, he snuck around a back way to reduce the chance of anyone seeing how early he came home.
Joshua had not, by the next morning, come up with a suitable explanation of why he would not be courting Miss Wheeler. So when he saw Freida Blum a block away, he ducked into Li Chang’s laundry to escape being questioned. He had not looked inside first, and so was startled to hear Clara Brook’s voice, and more surprised that she was speaking something that sounded like Chinese. Neither she nor Li Chang was in the front of the laundry; he moved toward the back and found the two of them, too engrossed in conversation to have noticed his entrance.
The Chinaman was laughing. “That is not right, miss! I will not tell you what you actually said, but you would not be saying it. At least not to me. Try again.” He recited a stream of Chinese syllables, more slowly than his usual speech. Miss Brook repeated it, and apparently did a better job of it, as Li Chang smiled broadly.
It was Miss Brook who noticed Joshua’s presence first. “Doctor! Welcome to our language lesson.”
“I am impressed at your progress, Miss Brook. Is this your first attempt at speaking Chinese?”
Li Chang answered for her. “Yes, very first time, and she is doing well, as you see.”
Miss Brook laughed and said, “In that case, sir, it is your turn. ‘You look lovely this evening.’ Mind the l’s.”
Li Chang put up his hands and shook his head. “Ah, no, I must get back to work. I must wait for another time. Doctor, you come for your collars?”
Joshua had forgotten, when he sought refuge in the laundry, that he had an actual errand there. Relieved that he would not need to invent one, he replied, “If they are ready. I am in no hurry for them.”
“Yes, all ready. I go get them.” He headed farther into the back.
Joshua tipped his hat to Miss Brook. “Ma’am. I hope I find you well.”
Miss Brook’s mouth twitched. “Why yes, Doctor. You need have no fear of my following you to your office and requiring your services.”
Joshua, casting about for a response, came up with nothing but his curiosity. “How did this language lesson come about?”
Miss Brook looked him in the eye. “I have never, until now, met anyone from China.” Her chin lifted in something like defiance. “Do you not think we should take advantages of such opportunities to expand our knowledge?”
Her challenging air took him aback somewhat. He said quickly, “Indeed, there is much to be said for it.”
Miss Brook studied his face, and apparently found sufficient signs of sincerity. Her expression shifted toward what might have been approval. But before either of them could speak again, Li Chang was back, collars in hand. Joshua, after a moment’s uneasiness that he might have no coins in his pockets, found the one he needed and handed it over. He turned toward Miss Brook, unsure whether she would welcome an escort to her next destination; but she was already waving to them both and walking out the door.
Chapter 5
There were some patients that felt deprived at the thought of being tended by “only” a small-town doctor, and could be unpleasantly vocal about it. For such annoying folk, Joshua had reluctantly ordered what the vendor called a pulsometer. There might be gadgets with that name that actually helped a doctor calculate the patient’s pulse, but from what he gathered, they were unobtrusive and unimpressive. This supposed pulsometer commanded attention. A glass container shaped like a dumbbell held liquid of a vivid purple color. When the device was activated, a stream of bubbles would rise up and perturb the liquid. The doctor had merely to turn the device on as he handed it to the patient, and the patient could fondly believe that his or her pulse controlled the bubbles in some way the learned doctor would decipher.
The bank manager was one of these pompous patients. Joshua, standing in the man’s richly furnished and excessively decorated drawing room, watched the man’s eyes widen, though he soon caught himself and assumed an expression of calm, almost bored satisfaction.
Using the pulsometer always made Joshua feel a little soiled, even as he also experienced some malicious pleasure at gulling those who thought
themselves sophisticated. As soon as he left the house, he thrust the device deep in his bag and headed for the nearest saloon to drink away the emotional aftertaste.
But in the street in front of the saloon, he came upon first a crowd and then the reason it had gathered. A wagon, its horses groomed to within an inch of their lives, stood in the street with posters tacked all over its bonnet, proclaiming the life-saving, potency-enhancing, and teeth-strengthening powers of Dr. Burnside’s miraculously versatile patent medicine. The words “Dr. Burnside’s Elemental Elixir” were painted on the wagon itself in bright orange and green letters full of curlicues. The pitchman stood on the seat of the wagon, wearing a long-tailed coat, frilly shirt front, and shiny top hat, repeating every fraudulent promise on the posters in a sonorous bellow.
As a child, Joshua had seen a medicine show in one of Philadelphia’s theaters, and had been enthralled by the juggling and rope-spinning and magic tricks and fire-breathing, innocent of the dubious purpose behind it. He traced his interest in magic to that show. Now, he looked at the posters and listened to the charlatan’s pitch, and felt the weight of the pulsometer in his bag dragging him down almost to the pitchman’s moral level.
As Joshua stood staring, people in the crowd noticed his presence and turned to watch him expectantly. No doubt some of them were waiting for him to come forward and purchase some of this marvelous medicine to use in his practice — in which case they could save their money for the present. But if he failed to take advantage of this opportunity, they would plunk down their coins themselves, and dose themselves with the potion over and over while their symptoms grew worse and more difficult to treat. And given the time to do it, the pitchman might soon be telling these people that their local sawbones, while no doubt a well-meaning sort, hadn’t had the sort of success that this medicine would produce — guaranteed! . . .
What Heals the Heart Page 4