A Summer Affair

by Susan Wiggs

  “I think I’d like to hear her tell it.” What a strange and wondrous place this was, Isabel thought. The home of a man who devoted his life to healing people and rescuing women.

  What a shame, she thought, that she was in such trouble locally. Otherwise, she wouldn’t mind staying for a while.

  Eleven

  So she wasn’t a murderer, thought Blue. Rory McKnight had never been wrong before, and he knew better than to encourage his best friend to leave a dangerous criminal in the house. Rory had been adamant about letting her stay. “A woman with her looks might suffer worse than fever if she’s incarcerated,” he’d warned. “She’ll haunt you.”

  Rory knew him as well as he knew the inner workings of the city’s police department. They were as vengeful as he stated, and might not stop at rape, either. The idea of sending a patient away to die was beyond repugnant to Blue. It was unthinkable. At any rate, he had to trust his friend and his gut, and both were telling him that Isabel Fish-Wooten would do no harm.

  Yet even so, she unsettled him. There was something he saw in her, something that was going to throw him. He wasn’t certain why he got that feeling from her, but it was undeniable. For years he had dedicated himself to rescuing women in need, women who were sick or frightened or fleeing a troubled past. He wanted this one to be no different from all the others who passed through the Rescue League.

  But she was entirely different in ways he could barely explain to himself.

  For now, though, he had to let the matter go and give his attention to the emergency at hand. The frantic Mr. Peterson brought him to a neatly furnished house and directed him to a room that reeked of birth smells—blood and sweat, terror and hope. Mrs. Peterson lay abed, damp sheets twisted around her ungainly form while Leafy Bonner, the midwife, sat at her side, mopping her brow with a cloth. An older woman—probably Mrs. Peterson’s mother—sat in a window seat, stiff and pale with terror.

  Blue removed his frockcoat, then set his surgical kit on the table. Within moments of examining Mrs. Peterson, he understood why the midwife had sent for him. He, of course, was the last resort for the frantic young mother. Like most women, she was a modest, God-fearing lady who tolerated a physician only as an extreme measure.

  He tried to be respectful of her modesty while still doing his job for the unborn baby. Or, in this case, babies.

  “Twins, Mrs. Peterson,” he said, his voice neutral but encouraging as he reached beneath the sheets. “They’re going to need some help making their way into the world.”

  “I tried everything in my birthing kit,” Leafy said, indicating an open wooden box on the bedside table. It contained a medieval-looking array of clamps and tongs, vials of herbs, apothecary jars and a cloth parcel stamped Far East Tea Company. The midwife shut the lid of the box with a snap. “I gave her morphine drops, but it’s not helping. Do you have a syringe, Doctor?”

  “I’ll use some ether if it’s needed,” he said.

  “Morphine’s better. Quiets ’em right down. I hear it’s three times stronger than opium. Is that true?”

  “You ought to ascertain that before you administer it,” he pointed out.

  “Should’ve given her more drops,” Mrs. Bonner said, ignoring his cutting tone. She shifted the stem of her pipe from one side of her mouth to the other. Blue liked and respected most of the midwives he encountered in his practice, though this one was different. She was more experienced as an abortionist than a baby-catcher. He wondered how she acquired morphine. It was supposed to be dispensed only by a licensed physician.

  At least she had the sense to know when to send for help, he conceded. For the time being, he set aside his suspicions. And she was a helpful assistant, though clearly skeptical of his insistence on a sterile field. She proved to be a calming influence on the exhausted mother, urging her to marshal her strength for the labors ahead.

  Mrs. Peterson’s mother, on the other hand, was paralyzed by terror. She could not even pray and, indeed, had difficulty breathing. She simply slumped in the window seat with the curtains drawn, her face frozen into an expression Blue wished he didn’t recognize. It was the look of someone whose world was falling away, whose future was a well of darkness.

  “Get yourself a glass of sherry,” he said to the older woman. It wouldn’t make the fear go away but might momentarily dull the edges of the torture. That was what loving someone did to you, he reflected, eyeing the woman with both pity and understanding. It took you apart, piece by piece.

  Blue considered himself fortunate to have been raised in a fine family and educated well. But no one had ever taught him the most fundamental truth of all—that love was a form of exquisite torment from which there was no release but death. Of course, no one had to teach him that. He’d learned that lesson on his own as a gunshot wound had drained the life from Sancha ten years ago. The only way around it was to die together, and that generally only happened in tragic fiction.

  Clearing his head of thoughts that had no proper place at a birthing, he summoned an encouraging smile for the laboring mother. “Twin birth is less a matter of medicine than mechanics, but I’m glad you sent for me.”

  She didn’t smile, yet the firm set of her jaw indicated that she was prepared to face the ordeal. Blue had seen that steely determination before. It was something he respected and believed in, though no medical text had ever given a logical explanation for the phenomenon. Yet any physician attending a birth knew it to be so. A laboring mother possessed a special reserve of strength that gave her the power to move mountains.

  Within an hour the exhausted, frightened creature on the bed became a goddess as she pushed forth a smallish but healthy baby boy. Forty minutes later she brought forth his brother, who was even smaller and not quite so lusty with his cries. The midwife took a towel and rubbed the little arms and legs, and gradually the color of life bloomed over him, a gorgeous red flush radiating out to his extremities.

  Blue shut his eyes, momentarily savoring a sense of triumph that didn’t rightly belong to him. Yet it was impossible not to feel brushed by the sheer wonder of the event he’d witnessed. He knew his role in the birth had been vital, and a deep gratitude settled over him. Sometimes, even for the briefest of moments, he could admit that life was good indeed.

  Opening his eyes, he busied himself with the mother, inspecting the afterbirth to make sure there was no abnormal bleeding and checking her pulse and temperature. He spared a glance for the young woman’s mother. The older lady turned into a different creature, cooing and swaddling the infants as she prepared them to meet their father. Tears poured down her face and a profound joy radiated from her, as palpable as heat from a well-stoked stove.

  Finally, when the room was put back in order, the drowsy but triumphant mother propped in bed and holding an infant in the crook of each arm, the husband was brought in. Abject dread was replaced by the same radiance that possessed his mother-in-law. He bounded rather than walked to the bedside and fell to his knees beside his wife.

  “My darling,” he said, “look at you and our beautiful sons. We are better blessed than the angels in heaven.”

  Blue caught the mother-in-law’s eye. They both knew through bitter experience that more than joys and blessings lay ahead for the new family. Hell, everyone knew that, but people still carried on, still loved each other and hurt each other and got their hearts broken again and again. The only protection from the pain of loving was the knowledge that it was going to happen. The smart ones kept their guard up.

  Blue had learned to be smart.

  The new father gave him a generous fee. His eyes were bright as he said, “You saved them. You saved them all. Praise God. How can we ever thank you?”

  Blue let his gaze settle on the beaming mother and the two sweetly sleeping infants. “You have,” he said. Motioning to Mrs. Bonner, he stepped outside the room.

  “You did a fine job for a sawbones,” she said. “I’ll finish up here, look after the mother.”

  “I’
m curious, Mrs. Bonner. Where do you get your supply of morphine drops?”

  She gave a rasp of laughter. “You think doctors is the only ones who can get it? It’s down at the docks, or in Chinatown, any night you want. Just because I’m no sawbones doesn’t mean my patients have to suffer.”

  On his way back home, he decided to take a shortcut through Woodward’s Gardens, a large public resort where traders set out their wares on summer afternoons. Walrus tusks, wampum and whalebone etched with designs decked the draped tables. Silk scarves, brooches and tiny paintings on canvas drew tourists and natives alike. He slowed his strides at a display of hair combs.

  I look an absolute fright.

  He certainly didn’t owe the woman anything, yet he found himself picking up a shiny pair of celluloid combs. Then he put them back down. Good God. What was he thinking?

  “A perfect choice, sir,” said the woman selling the combs, pushing them toward him. “Handsome without being gaudy.”

  As he reached into his pocket for change, he told himself he was making the purchase simply to help out the vendor, who was thin and whose dress was threadbare. She took great care folding the combs in tissue paper and handing them over. He thanked her briefly, cursed himself for a fool and walked down a row of other displays.

  A familiar-looking hat caught his eye—it belonged to Abner Punch, half of the notorious team of crimps. Punch seemed more interested in the strolling shoppers than in the wares for sale. Scouting for his next victim, perhaps, Blue thought, raising his hand to get Punch’s attention. Perhaps he would shed some light on the night of the shooting. He might explain how an injured woman had fallen into his hands. But as soon as he spotted Blue, Abner Punch hurried away.

  He probably wouldn’t have told the truth, Blue concluded. With an unsettled air, he approached a draped table bearing a selection of firearms.

  “What can I show you?” the merchant asked, leaning forward over the table.

  “Have you any Confederate pistols?” Blue asked.

  “I’m afraid not, sir. Those are rare enough these days. Are you a collector, then?”

  Blue shook his head and moved on. It was a long shot, anyway.

  Down the block from the garden resort, he recognized a stately woman in a hat constructed of peacock feathers. It was Clarice Hatcher, making her usual rounds in the city’s fashionable district. She was shopping, which seemed to be her second-favorite pastime. Like attendants to a princess, her maid and two footmen followed at a respectful distance, laden with hatboxes and parcels tied with twine. The footmen made an odd pair—an Irishman of prodigious height and a Chinese man with a mustache so long he tucked it into a sash around his waist.

  As he approached her, Blue slipped the parcel with the hair combs into his pocket. He did not want to have to explain Isabel Fish-Wooten to anyone, but most particularly to Clarice.

  “Theodore, you cruel piece,” she said, pausing in her regal stroll. “Why haven’t you been to see me?”

  “My duties have kept me busy,” he explained, bringing her gloved hand nearly to his lips and bowing over it.

  The glare she shot him conveyed the silent message that he was an idiot for neglecting her. And he was, perhaps. Clarice Hatcher was every man’s dream of the perfect mistress. She was beautiful, widowed and wealthy. But Blue cared little for those attributes. She possessed a singular trait he valued above all others. She had absolutely no expectation that he would fall in love with her. All that existed between them was an agreeable sexual heat, coupled with a few shared interests including golf, horse racing and light opera.

  Neither of them yearned for more depth in their relationship, she because she enjoyed a lazy, feline contentment in her own life, and he because he had closed off that part of his heart after losing Sancha.

  There was something melancholy and disquieting in the thought. At times when Blue allowed a moment of self-examination and reflection, he wondered if he had lost the ability to feel anything deeply anymore. Then he had only to consider his son and the reminder clutched at his heart. Oh, yes, he could love. He could hurt and fall apart. That was why he was so careful not to look for true intimacy with a woman. The unprotected heart was nothing short of folly, a disaster waiting to happen.

  “Stroll with me,” she said, slipping her arm through his. At the height of summer, San Francisco pulsed with a festive atmosphere. Foreign merchants and travelers thronged the streets, and local tradesmen loudly vied for their trade. The strong, rich aroma of fish wafted up from the wharf area. Horns sounded from the steamers and ferries crisscrossing the bay, and the squabbling gulls and barking harbor seals added their voices to the shouts from the waterfront.

  “Is there anything so fine as San Francisco in the summer?” said Clarice.

  She didn’t seem to expect an answer, so he didn’t offer one. He both loved and hated the city. He loved its vitality, its rousing politics and the earnest promise of its citizens to create a world capital. He liked the hills and valleys of its neighborhoods and the misty beauty of the weather, even when the fog clung for days on end. Yet he hated the blights of crime and poverty, the staggering contrast between the wealth and ostentation of high society and the corruption of the underworld, the violent world that came alive each night, then left its victims to the dawn.

  Knowing Clarice, he was fairly confident she wasn’t interested in his views on the matter.

  She chattered on, flitting from one topic to the next—the weather, the new merchant block going up in Sutter Street, the scandalous behavior of someone he didn’t know at a soiree he hadn’t attended. She struck him three times on the arm with her fan. “You aren’t listening, Theodore.”

  “Of course I am,” he lied.

  “I wanted to know who chose the theme of this year’s charity benefit for the Rescue League.”

  “My stepmother and sisters,” he said. “They always do.”

  “And you let them?”

  “Why wouldn’t I? Without the benefit, the league would go bankrupt and cease to exist.”

  “But, Theodore, Arabian Nights? It’s so barbaric. Why couldn’t they have chosen the Roundtable of Camelot, something romantic and chivalrous? Honestly, dreaming up some sort of veiled costume is simply too taxing.”

  “Then you won’t be attending?” he asked, though he knew the answer.

  “I’d never disappoint you like that, Theodore.”

  He patted her gloved hand. “I’m afraid I must head straight back to my surgery,” he said. “I’ve a critical patient.” Ordinarily he would offer a detail or two to amuse her, but he stayed circumspect about Miss Fish-Wooten. He had no idea on what he was going to do about her.

  “You are a most exasperating man.” She tapped him on the arm again with her closed fan. “But I will forgive you if you promise to accompany me to the Shooting Club ice cream social this Friday. It’s going to be well-attended.”

  “I shall make every attempt—”

  “You will not make every attempt,” she cut in. “You will attend, Theodore.” As always, her temper flashed like a stiletto blade. “The mayor will be in attendance, as well as Senator Butler from Washington, D.C. And Mr. Hopkins, and Dr. Vickery—”

  “Fremont Vickery?” he asked, suddenly interested.

  “Yes. That is, if his wife doesn’t take sick again. She’s always been sickly, as I hear it.” Clarice Hatcher was a vicious gossip but, unfortunately, much of her information was correct. Blue felt a new empathy for Fremont Vickery. Like all public figures, he had a private life, too, and apparently Vickery had his troubles. If I lost my Alma, I’d be done for. Those had been his exact words. Now Blue wished he’d listened better.

  “Let’s hope she’s better in time for the gala,” he said to Clarice. He banished her pout with a whispered suggestion in her ear, which made her purr like a cat. Then he took his leave. He had one more stop to make before he went home, and he was in a hurry.

  Twelve

  Blue walked a few blocks to
St. Mary’s. The dim nave smelled of old stone and moldering masonry. He heard the steady drip, drip of the holy water font and found himself awash in memories. He had married Sancha in this church, amid booming music from the two-storey pipe organ. Together, he and his bride had navigated a sea of fresh flowers flooding them from a host of well-wishers. What a long time ago that was, and not just in years. He had been a different person back then. Happy and full of hope.

  He found Father Giacomo Sean Collins, known as Father Jock, in his office, alternately staring at the ceiling and fiddling with the ink pump on his fountain pen.

  “Working hard, I see,” Blue said, stepping into the office.

  Father Jock jumped up, all smiles. His towering height, along with a dramatic cloud of snow-white hair, made him seem larger-than-life. More than one young Sunday school student had mistaken Father Jock for the Almighty himself.

  “Heavenly saints, I need a sermon. I ask the Lord above for the proper words, and he sends me nothing but a blank page.”

  “Welcome to the human race,” said Blue. “I’m looking for the fruit of my loins.”

  “Ah, young Lucas. No finer lad in the city,” the priest declared.

  “The wine-stealing incident aside.”

  Father Jock waved his hand. “Harmless mischief, to be sure. I’m in need of help this summer, and I’m happy enough to enlist Lucas rather than that ee-jit O’Halloran boy who pruned the rosebushes to nubs last year.” His thick eyebrows descended. “But Lucas is home this afternoon. I’m certain the lad said he was needed at home.”

  Blue felt no alarm but a twinge of annoyance. Lucas had told him expressly that he’d be working in the church gardens today. “He’s not at home.”

  “Let’s have a look around, then. Perhaps I misunderstood.”

  As they walked through the gardens of St. Mary’s, more memories assailed Blue. The Montgomery family had funded a pergola in memory of their beloved daughter, and in summer, it bloomed with bright white stars of jasmine. Father Jock paused respectfully as they passed it. “May her dear soul rest in peace,” he murmured. Then he sent a knowing look at Blue. “But of course, she’s not at all at peace now, is she?”