Well, at least there had been no mention of what had occurred the previous night in Cabot's room. Tonight she would be sure to tell him she had a headache and needed to get to bed early. Tonight and tomorrow night and every night for the rest of her life if need be. And she'd hug herself until she broke before she'd answer another knock on her wall.
Ash spoke to the nurse at the front desk. She smiled up at him as if they were old friends, and rose to point the way down a corridor, her hand on his sleeve. It was a simple gesture, overly friendly, perhaps, but men and women did it all the time. "I heard your husband's aunt was ill. I'm so sorry," someone might say, adding a pat of the hand. Or "Let me help you with that," and arms would brush arms.
It was something she and Ash needed to avoid, that contact that set her on fire and made her think reckless thoughts. She envied the nurse who stood so close to him, leaning her head toward his as she pointed straight and left and right.
"They try to keep the burn patients together," he said when the nurse had finally let him go. He looked at Charlotte and stood just out of her reach. "I think you'd better just wait here."
"Don't be ridiculous," she said as if she spent half her days and all her nights at the hospital.
"Cab, I think you ought to make her wait here," Ash said, leaning over and whispering something to Cabot that she couldn't hear.
"You're so used to your damsels in distress, you've lost sight of just who this woman is," Cabot said proudly. "Despite that ridiculous haircut, this is one of the best lawyers in all of northern California."
She took off her hat and shook her hair, what there was of it, out. "Thank you very much," she said a little too sweetly, and forged forward down the hall.
From behind her she could hear Ash disagreeing with his brother. "Well, then, I hope she's got one of the strongest stomachs," he said finally, and seconds later he'd caught up to her.
"Left?" she asked him, trying hard to keep from seeing into any of the rooms, trying even harder to block out the sounds of moaning and the calls for help that echoed down the hall.
"Just follow the screams," he said, then shook his head tightly. "I think this is a mistake."
"She's hard," Cabot said, urging Arthur to push him faster to keep up. "She's tough as ice in winter."
"And she appears to be melting," Ash said, just as she began to feel the corridor tilt around her. This is hell, she thought, voices all around her calling out in pain, crying for help, praying to die. I'm in Dante's damn inferno.
She leaned against the wall and swallowed hard, the edges of her vision darkening, seeing two of everything, and all of it turning an unnatural yellow.
"I'll take you back to the waiting room," Ash said. He sounded miles away, though she could feel that he was close to her, touching her, holding her up so that she wouldn't slip to the floor in a puddle of serge. She inhaled deeply, trying to fill her lungs with the scent of him instead of carbolic acid and decay.
"Don't be ridiculous," Cabot said, ordering Arthur to her side. "Treat her like a woman and you see what happens?" he said to Ash. "Which room is it? This one?"
"Let me take you back," he said. His hand gripped her upper arm and one leg had her pinned against the tile wall where the cold was seeping through her coat and into her bones.
"No." It was all she could manage. She was afraid to try to say more. If she opened her mouth again, it might be a scream that emerged. Or her breakfast biscuit.
"For him?" Ash asked, backing away just a little as if testing whether she could stand under her own power. "Or for you?"
"I want to see Selma," she said. She pulled herself upright and stood squarely on her own two feet. "And Eli will need me. I'm all right."
"You're better than just all right," he said softly, moving his hand so that he now only guided her by the elbow. "I'll be right here."
Cabot coughed and held out the potted flowers to Ash. "Hold this. I don't want it to fall."
It seemed to Charlotte it was perfectly all right with him, however, if she went tumbling to the ground.
She grabbed the plant from his outstretched arms and tiptoed into the room, where Eli sat by the bed, his familiar back bent, his head hanging low. In the bed was a mass of gauze and padding that all but hid Selma's small body. A portion of her face was bandaged as well, and the piece of cheek still exposed was white and tight looking like a rubber water bottle about to burst. She appeared to be asleep, but her breathing was labored and heavy.
"Eli?" Charlotte whispered. "We came as soon as we heard. How is she?"
Eli's face when he raised it to hers was old. Deep lines ran like dried riverbeds down his cheeks, and the remnants of tears still glistened within the crags and ruts. His eyes were rimmed in red and he clutched a damp hankie in one hand. He shook his head slowly from side to side. "She's gonna be fine," he lied, loud enough for her to hear it in her dreams.
The back of Charlotte's throat itched, her nose did as well. Her eyes smarted as she fought off tears, and she bit on the inside of her cheek to concentrate on simply not going to pieces in front of her friend.
"She was awake a little while ago," Eli said. "They gave her enough laudanum to put a horse down, and still she was in pain. I had to sing her to sleep like when she was a little girl. We had an Irishwoman who watched her while I was at work and her favorite lullaby was 'Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral.' Imagine! An old Jewish fool like me singing Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral.' But she finally fell asleep."
He wiped at his nose with the wet hankie and then accepted a clean one from Ash, who put a hand under his elbow and tried to get the old man to get up. "We'll sit with her, Eli. Go get some fresh air and something to eat."
He shook his head at Ash's suggestion. "Never me," he said softly. "I pray to God let it be me, and he doesn't hear."
"That's because he's listening to me," Selma said, her eyes still closed, her voice a raspy whisper.
"I thought you were asleep," Eli said. "Charlotte's here. And the misters."
Selma's one visible eyelid fluttered and she raised her eyebrow as if it could pull her eye open. Her thick dark eyelashes were gone, the hair that was visible lay in short clumps. Her right eye opened and suddenly the woman in the bed was Selma again as she focused on Charlotte.
"I brought you some flowers," Charlotte said, holding them where Selma could see them. "Cabot tells me they're very special."
"All the donations," Selma said, her words interrupted by a coughing fit that racked her body. "I tried to get them, but—" Her words petered out, and she closed her eyes once again.
"It's swollen in her chest," Eli explained. "In her lungs there's fluid. We have to turn her soon." He pulled his watch from his pocket and winced as if he could see the time running out.
"The money," Selma said again between wheezy breaths.
"You rest," Charlotte ordered her. "And stop worrying about the money. On Monday I'm going to demand a hearing. You're going to have to hurry and get well so that you can cheer me on."
Selma didn't bother to open her eyes, and in her voice Charlotte could hear defeat settling in. "You win it for me, Charlotte," she said so softy Charlotte had to strain to hear her.
Tiptoeing in with shoes that hardly made a sound, a nurse appeared with a small bouquet. "Handsome gentleman sent you these," she said to Selma, and Charlotte looked up at the doorway. He was there for a brief moment only, and when she blinked he was gone. Had she not recognized him, even with all that pain etched on his face, a blink would have erased his face from her memory.
But his was one countenance she would never forget, since his actions were ones she could never forgive.
"Shall I read you the card?" the nurse asked, pulling it from among the flowers.
"I'll read it to her later," Charlotte offered, plucking the card from the nurse's hand and shoving it into her pocket. Good glory! If Eli only knew!
"Better," Selma agreed, and let the nurse help her drink a bit of water through a bent glass straw. As she s
at up slightly, Charlotte could see the skin on her neck, blackened and puffy as if it had been toasted.
"They've scheduled a second escharotomy," the nurse told Eli. "There's more flesh they'll need to cut down."
"You should go," Eli said, cupping Charlotte's chin in his hand. The next instant he was barking instructions at the nurse and ministering to his sister.
"We'll go now," Ashford said, putting a hand on Eli's shoulder. "You take care."
It was unclear whether he was talking to Eli or Selma, but it was Selma who responded. "I don't know what happened," she said, as the nurse held up her shoulders and helped Eli to turn her. "It wasn't half an hour after I saw you that the whole place was in flames."
CHAPTER 19
"Of all the stupid, senselessly asinine stunts you've pulled in the past, this one tops them all," Cabot said to him as they entered the foyer, Charlotte running ahead and hurrying up the steps so quickly that she nearly tripped on her hem.
It hadn't been easy just watching her all the way home from the hospital, sitting there with those small hands of hers folded stoically in her lap because his brother was too foolish to reach out and take them in his own.
Twice he'd asked her if she was all right, and twice she'd assured him that of course she was. But she hadn't fooled him for a moment.
"Are you going after her or shall I?" he asked when her skirts had vanished from the top of the stairs. It was clear that the reality of what had happened to Selma had crawled under Charlie's skin and she was fighting it with all the strength she had to keep it from soaking right into her bones.
Cabot looked at him blankly. "Oh. Charlotte," he said finally. "Let her be. A decent cry and she'll be good as new."
"Talk about stupid and asinine," Ash said, shoving his hat at Arthur and heading for the steps. He stopped on the lowest one and turned to his brother. "I'm going up there if you're not, because I don't think she can make it alone."
Cabot rolled his eyes as if he were talking to an idiot. "Do you have any idea what happened in that hospital room? Do you realize that woman put you at the scene of a second crime? In front of the nurse yet! You think I'm some kind of goddamn miracle worker? It's one thing getting you out of your little peccadillos. This could cost you years, Ashford."
Even with his brother's yelling he could hear it. Deafening. "Don't you hear how upset she is?" he demanded.
Cabot was quiet for a moment, then shrugged. "I don't hear a thing. In fact, she seems to be handling it well, I think." He headed for his office, apparently oblivious to the tears Charlotte had yet to shed.
"I'm going up." If Cabot was right—and when wasn't he?—soon enough he'd be unable to help her. While he could, he wasn't about to exile himself when she needed him.
Cabot stopped his chair again, waved Arthur off, and sat straining to hear in the silence. "I don't hear a blessed thing. Is she crying? I thought we'd conquered that. No doubt if we ignore it, it'll go away after a time and she'll come down right as rain with only a red nose to show for her time."
Ash wondered for a fleeting moment if there was some law against hitting a man in a wheelchair, wondered further if he cared. After all, they could hardly hang a man twice. "No, she's not crying," he said. "She's not doing a damn thing."
Cabot looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. While that was certainly a possibility, it seemed to him that if Charlie was in such a hurry to get upstairs, she ought to be doing something now that she'd gotten there. And all the silence said she wasn't.
And how did he explain that to his brother?
"Go after her," he begged, wishing he were free to do it himself. "She needs you."
"Arthur, would you ask Mrs. Whittier to see to Charlotte?" He looked up at Ash as if that settled it, and gestured for him to follow him into his office. Clearly, Mrs. Whittier never referred to Charlotte. "We've work to do I hadn't counted on," he said.
Ash had felt it from the first, but had kept the thought buried deep within him. It hadn't been any of his business in any event, but having been the one to put Cabot into his chair, he had a special obligation to look the other way.
Now obligations pulled at him from another direction and keeping silent meant abandoning Charlie Russe to a life of loneliness.
"You can't send your mother in your place. She's your wife, dammit, Cabot, not your ward."
Cabot never looked happy. His eyebrows had always curved down seriously and his mustache drooped. But Ash wasn't sure that despite the wry smile, Cabot had ever looked quite that miserable. "And you thought I never made mistakes," he said, with more of a snort than a laugh. "Come on. We've work to do. This is going to be hard to pin on Greenbough. If you hadn't been there, been seen, we could have made it work in our favor—after all, the new building wasn't yours. But, no, you had to go for a morning constitutional.... Ash, let's go. I don't know how much time Charlotte will be able to buy us."
***
Charlotte bit at her lip harder still. She would not cry. Crying had never helped anyone in the past and wasn't likely to help Selma now. It hadn't brought her mother back and hadn't kept her grandmother from slipping away day after day and leaving her all alone in the world with only Cabot Whittier, her mentor, to tell her what to do.
Kathryn, wringing her hands and getting smaller and smaller as the chair she sat in seemed to swallow her up, wanted to hear every detail of Selma's injuries and yet cringed with each one. When the knock at the door interrupted them, it was Kathryn who rose to answer it.
Charlotte could see Ash's face clearly over the top of his mother's head. Such a good, kind face, so full of concern for her, when what he should be worried about was himself.
"She's fine," Kathryn was telling him while he strained his neck to see for himself.
"I'll be down soon," Charlotte added. "I know we've got work to do."
"Just take care of yourself," he said, giving his mother's shoulder a soft squeeze. "See that she gets a little rest, will you? She's had a hard day."
"Me?" Charlotte said, her voice coming out a squawk. "What about you? Do you realize—-"
He cut her off with a knowing nod. "So Cabot's been telling me. Don't you waste time worrying about me. Get some rest, will you?"
Not worry about him? She spent her days and nights worrying about him in one way or another. How she would live with him around, how she would live without him.
"I'm fine. I'm coming now. Did you know that L and P Imports has been involved with the law before? And that Bekins had a fire that was ruled arson last year? We've only got a couple of days left and now there's more work to do than ever," she said, rising from the bed on whose edge she had been perched.
Kathryn shifted slightly so that she was blocking the doorway and, with it, Charlotte's view of Ash. "She'll be down later," her mother-in-law said.
Charlotte leaned to the left just as Ash leaned to his right, and once again their eyes met. If she could just look at him until she was a hundred, then maybe, she thought, that might be enough. Or nearly, anyway.
"I'll tell Cabot you're all right, then," he said, breaking the spell. "He was worried."
"Naturally," his mother finished for him. "And that's why you came up." Charlotte wondered if any of them believed it.
"I'll see you later?" he asked. He seemed to hang on her answer.
She nodded. "If you like," she said, looking down to see how badly rumpled she must look to him.
"I like," he said softly, almost as if his mother weren't there at all. Then, as if realizing it, he added, "You, too, Mother."
Kathryn shook her head sadly and closed the door behind her, leaned against it for a moment, and then walked slowly over to the wing chair that was set in front of the fire.
Her movements were slow and deliberate and resigned as she sighed heavily, sat, and pensively watched the fire. "Remember last year when I had that awful influenza? How death came knocking at the door and you barred the way?"
"I remember the only thing we could ge
t you to eat was your mother's apple leek soup," Charlotte said, coming to sit at the old woman's feet and letting the heat of the fire warm her face. "And you insisted that if I cooked it, you'd eat it."
"I knew you'd put love in there, dear one, and that would save me if anything would."
"I still think it was rather extreme of you to get me to try my hand at domesticity, Kathryn, but I'd hardly claim the credit for defeating death. That victory most assuredly was all your own."
"Maybe I shouldn't have fought quite so hard," Kathryn said thoughtfully, as she ran her fingers through the short strands of Charlotte's hair. "Maybe I defeated death only to have life defeat me."
"Are you afraid for Ashford?" Charlotte asked. "Cabot won't let him be convicted. You know that."
Kathryn looked into the fire as if she would find the answers there. If they'd ever been there, though, they had gone up in smoke. "I'm worried that Cabot has very little incentive to save his brother's neck," Kathryn said, addressing the glowing embers. "When saving his brother might mean losing his wife."
Charlotte swallowed hard. "I don't know what you mean. How could Cabot lose me?"
"The way any husband loses any wife. And you've more reason than most, my dear one."
"But I would never—" Charlotte began, stopped by Kathryn's raised finger.
"In some ways, Charlotte, you already have, despite your best efforts to the contrary. I only have to look at you, dearest, to know. And Cabot's crippled, child, not blind. No one this side of the bay can miss the way your breath catches when you're within ten feet of my younger son. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"
"There isn't anything to be done about it but try to hide it better until it goes away."
"Goes away?" Kathryn looked at her closely as if trying to decide whether or not she could be serious.
"No one feels like this forever," Charlotte said. If they did they'd never eat or dress or work. They'd spend their lives staring into each others' eyes and wishing on stars. They'd daydream about forever while holding on to now with all their might. "It'll pass. And then, too, Ashford will be off to sea again before you know it and life will return to normal."
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