Heart and Home
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Cassandra Austin
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15.8K
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15
Chapter One
Kansas, autumn, 1879
Dr. Adam Hart leaned against the unyielding back of the train seat. He had almost reached his destination; his chance to practice medicine in the Wild West was a few short miles away.
Only one thing kept him from feeling completely elated. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat and withdrew the letter Doreena Fitzgibbon had given him just before he boarded the train. “Don’t open it until you’re underway,” she had whispered. He had hugged her and kissed her and promised yet again to send for her once he was settled.
He didn’t read the letter now, but tapped a corner of it thoughtfully against his chin. She wasn’t coming west. “I’m confident,” she’d written, “that once you have served the year you must in that backward town, you will come home and we can be married.”
Hadn’t she listened to his descriptions of this land? Didn’t she recognize the wonderful opportunities that were here? Wasn’t she as eager as he to live surrounded by the unspoiled prairie?
Evidently not. Perhaps he had made the whole adventure sound a little too exciting. And the gunfights. He should never have mentioned the gunfights.
At least, he thought with a sigh, she had given him a year. The glowing reports he’d send home were bound to win her over, then she would consent to move here and become his bride.
The train slowed for the Clyde, Kansas, station, and Adam strained to see out the dirty window. A crowd had gathered on the platform under a banner that read Welcome Dr. Heart.
Adam grinned. He could ignore the misspelling with a greeting like this. As the train pulled to a stop, a brass band started playing…something. It was hard to tell what since the musicians were hardly together. Still, Adam was warmed by the sentiment. He gathered the two bags he had with him, stepped into the warm autumn air and received a rousing cheer from the crowd.
A rather stout man who couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall stepped away from the others, motioning them to silence. “George Pinter, at your service,” he said as the band tapered off. “Mayor of this fair city.”
“Mr. Pinter,” Adam said, “this is indeed a warm welcome.”
Pinter beamed. “My buggy is waiting to take you on into town,” he said, directing Adam along. “Your trunks will be delivered straight away.”
Adam climbed in beside the little man and they started toward the main part of town, a few blocks away. The band struck up again and the crowd followed.
“We have a house for you to live in that should serve well as an office besides,” Pinter shouted over the noise. “I’d suggest you eat next door at the Almost Home Boarding House. Miss Sparks sets a fine table.”
Somehow the particulars of living and eating had not occurred to Adam. He had always pictured Doreena keeping house. “Until my fiancee arrives, I might do that,” he shouted back.
The buggy stopped in front of a tidy little twostory frame house with a narrow porch nestled between currant bushes. As Adam stepped out of the buggy, he noticed the house next door, a much larger affair with a porch that wrapped around two sides. A few late flowers bloomed in the flowerbeds beside the steps. That house, he realized, would suit Doreena much better than his tiny one.
He shook off the thought. When Doreena came west, it would be because she loved him. Where they lived was immaterial.
Pinter had opened the front door and was waiting for Adam to join him. The house had obviously been scrubbed clean. Adam walked across the front room, furnished with a desk and a few mismatched chairs, and peeked into what looked like a well-appointed kitchen.
Turning back into the room, he discovered that
several of the townspeople had followed them in. More crowded the porch and street outside. The band began another tune.
“There’s a bedroom here you could use for examinations,” Pinter shouted, indicating a door. “Upstairs is another. Don’t worry about dinner tonight. I’ll be over to get you.”
Adam thanked him, setting the two bags on the desk.
“Well, come along, folks. Let’s let him get settled. Your trunks’ll be along.”
Pinter shooed everyone out. Adam followed, closing the door behind them. He then turned and leaned against it, closing his eyes. His dream of practicing medicine on the frontier was about to come true. The perfection of the moment was marred by a touch of melancholia. It might have been homesickness, but he was inclined to think Doreena’s letter was the cause.
He was reminding himself that Doreena would come around when suddenly the door behind him shook with someone’s forceful knocking. He swallowed a groan at the abuse to his shoulder blades and flung open the door. He. wasn’t sure what he had expected. The mayor again, perhaps, or the men who had promised to bring his trunks.
What he found was a tall young woman who seemed as surprised to see him as he was to see her. She was covered from neck to toe in a simple dress of blue calico dotted with brown flowers. Her dark brown hair was pulled savagely back from her face and bound at the nape of her neck. A few wisps of hair had escaped their confinement and curled around her face, softening the effect quite charmingly. Dark circles around her brown eyes made them seem too large for the pale face.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “I was looking for Dr. Hart.”
“You’ve found him,” he said, stepping aside and opening the door wider. She remained standing on the porch.
“You’re…younger than I expected.” She waved a hand as if deciding that was unimportant. “Grams is quite ill,” she said. “Can you come see her?”
“Your grandmother?” Were they both ill, or was this exhaustion he saw in the young woman’s face? Adam moved quickly to the desk and grabbed the smaller of the two bags. He joined her on the porch and closed the door.
“I’m Jane Sparks,” she said, leading the way. “I run the boardinghouse next door.”
In a moment they were inside the large house. She led him past a tidy parlor, through a dining room and into the kitchen. The smells that greeted him told him her dinner preparations were well underway.
She led him into a tiny room just off the kitchen. A narrow bed took up most of the available space. A woman Adam guessed to be in her sixties lay covered to her neck with a white sheet. As they entered, her body was racked with an agonizing cough. The granddaughter hurried to her side, supported her shoulders and held a handkerchief until the spell passed.
“Pneumonia,” Adam whispered. He didn’t need to see the pale skin and overbright eyes, or touch the hot dry brow. He could hear it in the sound of her breathing and the dreadful cough.
“Yes, I thought so,” Miss Sparks said. She showed him the blood on the handkerchief before she tossed it aside. She dipped a clean cloth in a basin of water, wrung it out and smoothed it carefully on the fevered brow. She must have left this task only a few minutes before. “Is there anything you can do for the pain?”
Adam set his bag on the edge of the bed across from Miss Sparks and found his stethoscope. He needed to know how far the infection had developed. He listened to the rattle in the woman’s lungs while the granddaughter made soothing sounds.
“When she’s awake, she’s in such pain it breaks my heart. I just want her to sleep.”
The last was spoken just above a whisper. The emotional and physical strain the young woman was under was clearly visible.
“I could give you something to help you rest,”
he suggested gently. “You could find someone else
to care for her.”
She didn’t look up from her task. “I can’t,” she said. “I have to be here.”
Adam slipped the stethoscope back into his bag. “Her lungs are full of fluid,” he said. “My recommendation is to drain them.”
“Drain them?” The dark brown eyes turned in his direction and he was struck again by how large they were.
“With a tube, uh, into the chest cavity.” Adam touched his own side. He knew it sounded pretty awful. Well, it was pretty awful. But he had seen it done successfully, and he knew he could do it. “She’s drowning, actually, in the infection.”
“This would…hurt her?”
“There would be some pain, yes, but she’s in pain now, and it could save her life.”
The young woman shook her head and turned her gaze back to her grandmother. “I can’t let you hurt her.”
“I don’t mean to hurt her,” he said. “I want to save her. If I don’t do it, she will die. It’s her one chance.”
Tears welled up in Miss Sparks’s eyes and she brushed them away. “Don’t you understand? It’s already hopeless, and she’s already had more pain than she can stand-than I can stand.”
Adam clinched his teeth as the dying woman took another rattling breath. “Is there other family I can talk to?” he asked.
“No. We only have each other.” She turned to him and spoke fiercely for the first time. “I won’t let you experiment on Grams. If you can’t help her sleep, then there’s nothing you can do.”
Adam hesitated. This wasn’t how he had imagined starting his practice. He had planned to save his patients. Especially the first one. “Miss Sparks, you don’t need to be afraid of modern medicine. I’m a trained physician. I want—”
“Thank you for coming, Doctor. I’m sorry I bothered you. If you’ll just tell me what I owe you…”
She had dismissed him. She returned the cloth to the basin, repeating a task she had doubtless done a thousand times. He watched her for a moment, then found the bottle of morphine. He poured a tiny measure of the powder into a folded paper and crimped the edge closed.
Handing it to her, he told her the price and said, “Dissolve this in a little water and see if she can drink it. I don’t think you’ll need more than that.” He hoped she understood the last as his prediction on how much longer she’d have to nurse her grandmother.
She reached for it cautiously. As soon as it left his fingers, he turned from the room. She caught up with him in the kitchen and paid him the money without another word.
He made his way back through the dining room and down the hall, wondering who would finish preparing the meal while she waited for the old woman to die. He knew he shouldn’t be angry with Miss Sparks. She thought she was protecting her grandmother. Still, he couldn’t help thinking that a dramatic rescue of such an ill patient would have gotten his practice off to a better start.
Jane returned to her seat beside Grams just as she heard the front door close behind Dr. Hart. What had she expected? That the doctor would tell her Grams wasn’t dying, that everything would be all right? Had she expected him to offer a miracle cure the other doctors had not?
She shook her head. Of course not. Grams had taken ill almost three months ago and had been unable to leave her bed now for several weeks. Even if she survived the pneumonia, she would never be well. Dropsy, the doctors had said. Her heart was failing.
All Jane had expected from Dr. Hart was something that would stop the pain when Grams awoke. Every breath was agony for her grandmother, and all she could do was cry.
Jane fingered the paper in her hand. That was what he had given her, something for the pain. Then why did she feel cold inside?
Because he had put it into words. Grams was dying. Not in a few months but now. And he had forced her to make the choice to let her.
“Oh, Grams,” she whispered. “Did I do the right thing?”
When she thought of the doctor poking a hole in Grams’s frail side, forcing a tube into her chest cavity, which hurt already, Jane knew she had been right. She had to believe she was right.
She refreshed the cloth on Grams’s forehead one more time, then went back to the kitchen. With the door open she could hear nearly every breath her grandmother took. It had become the rhythm of her life these past few days, the slow labored inhale and exhale. With both dread and longing she waited for the moment when the breathing would stop. How could Grams take much more of this? And - how could she?
Adam’s trunks arrived shortly after he returned. He set to work unpacking them immediately, glad for the activity. The steady stream of patients he had imagined didn’t materialize. He checked his front door a couple of times and finally left it open so he’d be sure to hear a knock. All the time he was upstairs he listened for a voice from below. He opened the windows, thinking he might hear footsteps on his porch. He finished unpacking and returned to the front room, having been uninterrupted the entire time.
Uninterrupted if he didn’t count his own thoughts. He kept seeing Jane Sparks with tears in her eyes and that poor woman lying beside her.
He could have saved her. He still could. There was probably still time. But how would he convince the granddaughter? She hadn’t been willing to consider the procedure. And he didn’t know how to convince her.
If he were more experienced, had seen a little more death and had saved a few more people, he would know what to say. But he didn’t, and his first patient in his new home was going to die, probably within the next few hours.
He was pacing the front room, seething with guilt and frustration, when he finally heard footsteps on his porch. He turned toward the open door to find Mayor Pinter there.
“Evening,” the little man said. “Did you get settled in?”
“Pretty much,” Adam said, forcing a smile. “I hadn’t realized it was dinnertime already.”
“We eat a mite earlier here than in the city, I suppose.”
“I won’t complain about that,” Adam said, realizing how hungry he was. Wonderful smells had been wafting through his open windows and door all afternoon, smells he had tried his best to ignore because he knew they came from Miss Sparks’s kitchen.
“It’s nice of your family to let me come to dinner,” he said, slipping into his suit coat as he joined Pinter on the porch.
“I don’t have a family,” Pinter said, preceding Adam down the steps. “I take breakfast and dinner at the boardinghouse. Got myself a permanent seat at her table. I recommend you do the same. Unless you got talents I don’t know about, it’ll likely be the best food you’re gonna find.”
The boarding house. So much for putting Miss Sparks out of his mind. Not that he would have anyway, Adam supposed, but he had been looking forward to a distraction.
“Miss Sparks has got four rooms upstairs that she rents out. If they’re all filled, she can accommodate only three more guests at her table. You gotta arrange ahead, like I did for you tonight. There’s money left in the fund we started to bring you here. It’s payin’ the rent on that little house, but there’s enough left to feed you. Besides,” he added, leaning closer to Adam’s shoulder, “the little lady needs the money. I should know-I’m the banker.”
As Pinter opened the front door of the boardinghouse, Adam noticed a small sign nailed to the siding an inch or two below eye level. The words Almost Home were painted across it in ornate script He had missed it during his earlier visit.
Inside, Pinter led the way to the parlor. The shades were open, filling the room with afternoon sunshine. Two women were seated at opposite ends of the comfortably furnished room.
“Ah, the Cartland sisters are here already,” Pinter said. “Ladies, have you met the new doctor?”
The women smiled and murmured their greetings. They were both in their thirties, Adam judged, and dressed rather elegantly, or at least more elegantly than Miss Sparks had been. He would have guessed they were sisters, for they had the same large nose.
Pinter took a few steps toward the window, putting him closer to one of the women. “This is Naomi,” he said, “and yonder is Nedra.”
Nedra’s hair was an odd shade of yellow, while her sister’s was…orange. Maybe unusual hair color ran in the family along with the nose.
“Come sit here, Doctor,” said Nedra, indicating the space next to her on the velvet settee.
Adam tried to smile graciously as he crossed the room to join her.
“The ladies are planning to open a dress shop,” Pinter said. “That will be such a welcome addition to the community, don’t you think?”
The question rang with a certain amount of desperation. Catching Pinter’s need for help with the conversation, Adam spoke up. “Where are you ladies from?”
“St. Louis,” Nedra, the yellow-haired one, said. “Our father left us a small inheritance, and we decided we could make more of it out here than in the city.”
“Our skills are needed here,” declared Naomi, as if she saw their move in a very different light. “ And I don’t just mean our sewing skills. These people are in desperate need of civilizing influences.”
“The good doctor will help us with that,” Nedra said, turning a radiant smile on Adam. “I understand you’re from back east.” She made it sound like a foreign country.
Before Adam could reply another guest entered the parlor. Pinter was quick to make the introduction. “Tim Martin, meet our new doctor, Adam Hart. Tim’s a salesman. He makes the boardinghouse his base whenever he’s in the area.”
Adam rose to shake the man’s hand. He was middle-aged, his thin hair slightly graying.
“Good to meet you,” Martin said. “I was out on a call this afternoon or I would have turned out with the rest to welcome you. Did the band play?”
Adam couldn’t resist a smile at the memory of the band. “Yes, it was quite a welcome.”
“Fine.” He gave Adam a hearty slap on the back. “I love that band. Brings tears to my eyes every time I hear ‘em.” The lilt in his voice made Adam wonder if he meant tears of laughter.
“It could use some civilizing, if you ask me,” Nedra said, tucking a strand of yellow hair in place. “I think they sound awful.”
“It’s their passion,” Martin said, taking a seat and motioning for Adam to return to his. “I heard an interesting story today,” he continued.
With the conversation in Martin’s capable grasp, Adam found himself listening for sounds in the rest of the house, from the direction of the kitchen in particular. He was unaccountably eager for Miss Sparks to make her entrance, and not just because he was hungry.
Jane carried the last platter to the table. She had heard some of her boarders come down and knew they were gathering in the parlor. There would be seven at the table tonight. She had moved the extra chair to a corner to give the guests on one side of the table a little more room. George, she knew, would notice and take a seat there. Tim would probably take the other. She wondered which seat the doctor would take and why she pictured him at the head, directly across from her.
A quick inventory told her everything was in order but didn’t banish the nervousness that had bothered her all afternoon. It was worry for Grams, she told herself for the twelfth time, not the prospect of eating dinner at the same table as the handsome young doctor.
The doctor unsettled her. The fact that his eyes and voice seemed kind and gentle didn’t mean he was. She tried not to think about what he had. suggested because it made her feel light-headed, but when she did think about it, she knew for certain that she had made the right choice. And Dr. Hart wasn’t kind.and gentle or he wouldn’t have suggested such a thing.
But dinner was business. If George hadn’t reserved a place for the doctor tonight, there’d be two empty chairs. Every meal meant that much more money toward the next house payment. Five more and the house would be hers. It would finally be a home.
Grams won’t be here to see it.
The realization made tears threaten. She forced them aside and headed for the parlor. Five people sat visiting in the warm little room, but Dr. Adam Hart was the first one she saw. He had been watching the door instead of participating in the conversation. Their eyes locked and the intensity of his blue gaze captured hers. Darn, he was every bit as handsome as she remembered. One lock of sandybrown hair fell across his forehead. She thought again that he seemed too young to be a doctor, though he was probably a year or two older than she was.
Tim Martin came to his feet, breaking the spell. “Ah, the lovely lady of the house has joined us.”
In spite of her worries, Jane had to smile. She was far from lovely, especially now when she had had so little sleep. But Tim was a salesman. Complete honesty wasn’t part of his nature. “May I escort you to dinner?” he asked, offering her his arm.
With a glance to make sure the rest of the guests were preparing to follow, she took his arm and walked with him to the dining room. He held her chair and she slipped into it. When the Cartland sisters were seated the men took their places.
“Mr. Bickford is late again,” observed Nedra, giving Naomi a meaningful look. Naomi was silent.
The guests hadn’t taken the chairs Jane had expected. Naomi, of course, had maneuvered her sister away from the center chair on the east side, ensuring the tardy Mr. Bickford would have to be seated next to her. But George had gone to the head of the table, and Tim had taken the chair beside him, leaving the doctor to sit at Jane’s right.
George made the introductions.
“We’ve met,” they said almost in unison. Now why should that completely fluster her? Her cheeks grew warm. Perhaps because she and the doctor had the attention of everyone around the table.
“I looked in on her grandmother this afternoon,” the doctor explained.
“How is the old girl?” George asked, reaching for the bowl of potatoes that sat nearby and scooping up a mound for his plate. The others started dishes around as well, and Jane tried to force herself to relax.
“Not good,” Dr. Hart answered.
Jane mentally crossed her fingers, hoping he would not describe what he had wanted to do. Fortunately, George didn’t give him a chance to go into detail. “Too bad,” he said, shaking, his head. “We’re all fond of Grams. Naomi, grab that butter dish there beside you and pass it on around.”
The guests fell silent except for the clink of silver on china and a few murmured requests or thanks. Jane would have been content for the meal to continue just that way.
“Miss Sparks,” the young doctor began, “I was wondering if I could arrange to take all my meals here.”
Why did that seem like a dangerous request? “ I can’t promise I’ll always have a place for you,” she heard herself say.
“Tomorrow morning?”
Jane pretended to think it over. Of course she had a place—two in fact. “Yes, you can come tomorrow morning. Beyond that, we’ll have to wait and see.”
He nodded. The table was quiet again for several minutes as her guests continued eating.
Tim was the next to speak. “You married, Adam?”
“Engaged,” he said.’
This created a minor stir around the table. Naomi expressed an interest in hearing about the fiancée, smirking a little at her sister’s scowl. Perhaps Nedra had done a little maneuvering of her own. She sat directly across from the doctor.
“Her name’s Doreena,” Dr. Hart began. “She’s very pretty, blond hair, kind of.well, I suppose petite is the right word.”
“Little bitty thing, huh?” Tim asked, nudging Hart with his elbow.
The doctor grinned, which made him look even younger than he did already. “About this high,” he said, touching his arm halfway between his elbow and his shoulder.
She was probably twelve, Jane thought uncharitably. Though she herself was an inch or two taller than the Cartlands, she had never felt overly tall. Never until now, anyway.
“She’s accomplished on the piano,” Adam added, obviously warming to the subject, to the neglect of the roasted chicken on his plate. “She paints a little and is a wonder when it comes to making all the arrangements for a party.”
“Throws a good bash, does she?” Tim queried. “Sounds like quite a catch.”
“Sounds like she’s rich,” Jane said. Just why she felt compelled to enter the conversation, she didn’t know. Was she trying to offend a paying guest?
Instead of being offended, however, the doctor laughed and nodded. “That, too.”
“Then she’s definitely a catch,” Tim said, joining in the laughter.
Jane forced herself to laugh, too, and wondered why she cared at all what the future Mrs. Hart was like.
The merriment died down rather abruptly, and Jane knew her final guest had arrived.
“Here you are,” Naomi said in a voice that dripped with sweetness. “I was beginning to worry about you.”
“The novel, you know. The term will start soon and there will be no time to work on it.”
“This is Lawrence Bickford, our schoolmaster,” George said. “Have you met Dr. Hart?”
Bickford shook his head as he took his seat. “I understand you’re from Philadelphia.”
“Dr. Hart was telling us about his fiancée,” Naomi said as she made sure all the bowls and platters were passed to the late arrival. Jane doubted if he noticed her efforts.
“Don’t get discouraged, lad,” Bickford said as he filled his plate. “Your year in the wilds will fly by and you’ll be together again.”
“Actually, I’m hoping she’ll join me in a few months,” Adam said. “I want to make a home here.”
Jane tried to work up some irritation toward the prospect of a piano-playing, party-planning neighbor. Instead she felt an odd pain at the thought of seeing the perfect Doreena at Adam’s side.
“A wedding,” Naomi cooed. “Isn’t that romantic?” She asked the question of the table at large, but her eyes had turned to the schoolmaster. He made no response.
Jane might have enjoyed Naomi’s attempts to gain Mr. Bickford’s attention if she weren’t feeling somehow ill at ease. Because of her grandmother, she told herself, though to be honest she had nearly forgotten the poor woman for a few minutes. Concentration seemed to be a casualty of sleepless nights.
“Please, excuse me,” she said, coming to her feet. “I must check on Grams. Enjoy your dinner and stay as long as you like.” Being careful that her glance never met the doctor’s, she left the room. She was afraid his eyes would be condemning. He knew she had chosen to let Grams die.
Grams was sleeping, but Jane sat down beside her anyway, dampening the cloth and returning it to her forehead. She lifted one of Grams’s hands, thinking how hot and brittle it felt. The old woman’s pulse seemed to flutter beneath her fingers.
“I shouldn’t have even sat down with them,” Jane whispered. “I should have stayed with you.”
Voices drifted in from the other room, George’s primarily. She didn’t try to understand what was being said. She wanted to be alone with Grams.
“Remember when we first came here, Grams?” she asked softly. “I wanted to go home. You said, ‘This can be home, Janie. Anywhere someone loves you is home.’“
Jane felt her eyes burn. She hadn’t come in here to cry. But she had fought the tears so often the last few days there was no strength left to fight them. “Don’t go, Grams,” she whispered, lowering her face to her hands. “Don’t go.”
