CHAPTER

22

I grasped the top of the dresser to steady myself and took a few deep breaths. The morphine had dulled the pain in my stomach but dulled my senses as well. My eyelids were heavy and the sight of the bed in the mirror was almost too enticing to ignore. I closed my eyes against it and shook my head. I needed to eat something, drink a cup of coffee, and regain my focus. The clock ticked ever closer to my time of departure, and I had many tasks to complete before I left.

I lifted my extra bottle of carbolic from the box of medicines Rosemond had given me and was returning to the kitchen when I heard a thump and scrape from Rosemond’s studio. She was awake. Best to tell her about the cowboy in the kitchen.

Lamplight glowed through the crack in the door. I reached out to push the door open when I heard a moan of pleasure. I pulled my hand back as if burned. I couldn’t imagine who she would be entertaining in such a way. She spent her time painting and working on the sheriff’s portrait and now Portia’s. Surely she wasn’t servicing the sheriff. I recoiled in disgust and turned to leave. The sound of a woman’s voice stopped me.

“Rosie, what are you doing to me?”

My heart hammered in my chest. Not the sheriff, but Portia Bright. Was Rosemond seducing her against her will? I moved forward and opened the door wider, not sure what I expected to see. It took a moment to understand there was no undue coercion on the part of either woman. Portia was against the wall, her face tilted to the ceiling, eyes closed. Her wild hair was unbound from its bun, framing her glowing face. Her shirt gaped open, baring one naked breast. Portia held Rosemond’s head against the other one.

Rosemond released Portia’s breast and said, “Loving you. The true you. Not the prim preacher’s wife you pretend to be.”

“I’m not pretending.”

“Not now, you’re not.”

“No.”

Rosemond kissed Portia deeply. Portia returned the kiss and let her hands move tentatively down to Rosemond’s hips.

I turned my head away, ashamed at my voyeurism, ashamed at the longing it ignited in me, but didn’t move away.

“I love you, Portia. I came all this way for you.” They kissed again, frantically, as if afraid their time was limited and they wanted to taste and feel as much as possible. Portia’s hands went to Rosemond’s shirt and worked at the buttons. Rosemond pulled Portia’s skirt up and pushed her hand between her legs.

Portia groaned and said, “Yes,” in a breathless whisper. Her mouth turned up into a smile of happiness and contentment, like returning home after a long time away. She opened her eyes and caught sight of me over Rosemond’s shoulder. Incomprehension morphed into horror. “Oliver!”

Rosemond followed Portia’s gaze, as did I. Oliver Bright stood behind me, staring wide-eyed at the sight of his wife in the throes of passion with another woman. For the first time since I’d known her, Rosemond looked terrified. Portia removed Rosemond’s hand from between her legs with one hand while the other tried to close her shirt.

“Oliver, this isn’t—”

The Reverend looked at me with dead eyes and said, “I’m going to find Hankins.” He walked out the front door without closing it and turned in the opposite direction of Hankins’s house and the Rollins House Hotel.

Quiet sobs turned my attention back to the studio. Portia’d covered her face with her hands. Rosemond reached out for her and pulled her into her arms. “Shh, don’t cry. It’s okay.” She rubbed Portia’s back. “We can be together sooner than we thought.”

Portia pulled away. Her striking eyes stared at Rosemond with incomprehension. “Be together?”

“Of course. That’s why I came west. Gave up everything. To be with you.” Rosemond caressed Portia’s face. “I love you, Portia. I’ve loved you since the first moment I met you. You love me, too.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Portia said, voice rising. “We’re deviants. Unnatural.”

“No. Stop it.”

“Did you think I would leave my husband for you? If I wanted a Boston marriage I wouldn’t have left Saint Louis.”

“He doesn’t love you. He’s a Calico Row john.”

“Of course he is. That’s why we suit. He has his whores, and so do I.”

Rosemond stepped back. “What?”

Portia turned away from Rosemond and buttoned her shirt. Portia’s face was in profile, but I could see her pained expression clear enough. It didn’t match the cold timbre of her voice. “You weren’t the first, or the last. But you were the best.” Portia grimaced with the last verbal dart; Rosemond’s expression behind her was one of astonishment and deep, deep pain.

“You’re lying.”

Portia faced Rosemond with a stony expression. “Good-bye, Rosemond.” She walked toward me, head held high. Her eyes met mine and, try as she might, she couldn’t hide her devastation. “Helen.” Her voice broke ever so slightly as she glided past and out the front door. Once on the street, Portia covered her mouth and ran.

I stared at the empty street, too stunned to move. I knew Rosemond had been lying, been keeping something from me, but this? The strange caresses and comments Rosemond had made in front of Portia took on a new light. Portia would have known immediately I wasn’t Rosemond’s sister. Knowing where Rosemond’s predilections lay, of course she would think I was her new lover. Rosemond had killed Cora Bayle not to protect me at Kindle’s behest but because she needed me to make Portia jealous, to win back the woman she loved.

Incredulous and disgusted, I turned in time to see Rosemond charging me. She wrapped her hands around my throat. The surprise of her attack and her forward momentum thrust me backward off my feet. I fell on my back and Rosemond’s full weight slammed into me. The breath I’d struggled for so recently was, again, pushed out of me. Rosemond squeezed my neck, her thumbs pressing into the hollow of my throat. Her face was red with the effort of strangling me. Weak from the morphine, I ineffectively clawed at her hands.

“You did this on purpose,” she said through gritted teeth.

I tried to shake my head, to say no, but could do nothing but slap at her hands and try to buck her off me. Panic welled inside me, but my energy ebbed. My hands were clumsy and heavy.

A thump and crash from the kitchen distracted Rosemond enough that my increasingly ineffective bucks threw her off balance and loosened her grip. She fell forward and I hit her in the nose. My punch was weak but it surprised her, and that was all I needed. I grasped her neck and rolled her off me and beneath me. I didn’t bother choking her. I pulled my fist back and punched her in the face one, two, three times, and would have kept going until her lying, manipulative, pockmarked face was a bloody pulp if the groaning from the kitchen hadn’t reminded me of Zeke. I sat back, shaking my rebroken right hand, the hand I’d worked so hard to rehabilitate over the last year. I looked at the knuckles, which were a bloody, pulpy mess. “Son of a bitch,” I said, knowing finally that surgery as a profession was lost to me. I lifted Rosemond by the shirt and punched her in the face again as I hard as I could. I had the satisfaction of hearing her nose break. “That’s for lying to me about Kindle.” I dropped her back down to the floor and stood on legs as weak as a newborn calf’s. I kicked her in the side. “That’s for Cora Bayle.”

I picked up the bottle of carbolic I’d dropped and went into the kitchen. Zeke was facedown on the ground, his broken arm beneath him. I rolled him over with difficulty. His compound fracture was bleeding freely now. I fashioned a tourniquet from a nearby dish towel, screaming in pain with my own injury. With his upper arm tied off, I felt for a pulse in Zeke’s neck and was relieved to find it strong. The trembling that had originated in my legs overtook my entire body. I staggered to the nearest chair and fell heavily into it.

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, vowing to never take breathing for granted again and to never, ever touch morphine or laudanum for the remaining days of my life. I touched my throat, confirming that Rosemond’s hands weren’t around it, though it felt like they were, still. A sharp pain shot through my broken right hand, too much for the morphine to mask. I stared at my hand, deformed once again, and chastised myself and my temper. The burst of satisfaction I’d received for punching Rosemond was dissipating with each stab of pain in my hand. Though I was hours from leaving Cheyenne and putting this behind me, Rosemond’s memory would haunt me every time I looked at my ruined hand—and I was afraid it was damaged beyond repair—every time the longing to be a surgeon returned. Nor would I ever forget the rage in her eyes as she strangled me and blamed me for Portia’s betrayal.

I tried to recapture the anger at Rosemond I’d nurtured since finding out she’d lied to me about Kindle’s death. I wanted to hate her, and a small part of me did. But the rage in her eyes … I understood it. I understood the tremble of emotion in Rosemond’s voice when she told Portia she loved her, the elation when she thought their path had been cleared, the devastation when Portia left. In the space of minutes, Rosemond had journeyed the emotional gamut that I’d traveled over the past year. I couldn’t condemn her reaction. Hadn’t my plan in staying in Cheyenne been to earn money? Yes. But to find a way to ruin Rosemond’s life? Now I had the perfect opportunity to tell the world about Rosemond’s Sapphic tendencies, and all I could think of was how alike we were. Could I ruin someone’s chance at happiness for my own revenge? What kind of person would that make me?

I love you. I came all this way for you.

I closed my eyes and turned my head away, ashamed at myself for spying on a private moment between two people who obviously loved each other, for not being disgusted by watching them.

Zeke groaned and shivered in the cold. I rose and left the kitchen. The entry hall was empty, save a puddle of blood where I’d left Rosemond. I went to my room, pulled the blanket from my bed, tucked my pillow under my arm, and returned to Zeke. Breathing through my teeth against the pain in my hand, I tucked the pillow beneath his head and laid the quilt over him. I needed to clean his wound and splint the arm, at a minimum, but I couldn’t do it alone.

I found Rosemond standing at her dresser, holding a wet cloth against her bleeding nose. She glared at me in the mirror, her left eye puffy and bruising. “You broke my nose.”

I moved through the studio, catching a quick glimpse of the beginning of Portia’s portrait and the finished painting of me on the train leaning against the wall nearby. I turned Rosemond to face me and tried to pull the cloth away. “Let me see.”

“No.”

“Don’t be belligerent.”

“Don’t try to be nice to me now.”

“You tried to strangle me, or have you forgotten?” Rosemond removed the cloth. I felt the sides of her nose with my thumb and forefinger of my left hand. “Hmm. I thought I did a better job than this.”

“Stop being glib, Laura. It hurts.”

I pulled my hands away. “Do you want me to help you or not?”

“Will my nose look like it did before?”

“That depends.”

“On?”

“If you can set your own nose.”

“What?”

I held up my ruined right hand.

“Serves you right,” Rosemond said, but her heart wasn’t in it. She sighed. “This is going to hurt, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “Are you honestly telling me you never had your nose broken while whoring?”

“There are whores and there are whores. I was the first kind. I need whisky.”

“Don’t be a baby.”

“Have you ever had your nose set?”

“Not while conscious, no.”

“When?”

“After Kindle rescued me from his brother.”

Rosemond studied me for a long moment. “What do I need to do?”

“Blow the blood out of your nose.”

“I just stopped the bleeding.”

“It shouldn’t bleed again.”

Rosemond didn’t look convinced, but she obeyed, ending the blowing session with a coughing fit. She held out the bloody cloth to me. “I don’t want it. Put it there.” I motioned to the dresser.

“Now what?”

I stood behind her, reached around, and felt her nose with my left hand.

“What happened to your arm?”

There was a large blot of blood on the inside of my shirtsleeve from where Drummond dosed me. “It’s nothing.” I found the break. “Put your left thumb where my thumb is, and your right thumb where my finger is. Do you feel the break?”

She nodded.

I placed my hand on her shoulder. “When I count to three, push your thumbs against your nose. You ready?”

Rosemond nodded again.

“Are you sure your fingers are in the right place? Do you feel the break?”

“Yes, Goddamn it. Stop prolonging it.”

“One … two … three …”

After a loud pop, Rosemond screamed. “Son of a bitch!”

I laughed, turned her toward me, and gently pinched the bridge of her nose. “Straight as an arrow.”

“Stop laughing,” Rosemond said.

“You’re going to have black eyes for a while.”

“I’ve seen broken noses before.”

“Now you know how to fix one.”

“Let me see your arm.” She grabbed my arm and shoved my sleeve up. The puncture was large and jagged. “Good Lord, Laura. What happened?”

“Drummond dosed me with morphine.”

“What? Why?”

I focused on remembering what Drummond had said to me while I struggled for air. I pulled my arm away and rolled down my sleeve and told her the story of Drummond’s attack, omitting the part where I insulted the man.

“Are you in pain now?” Rosemond asked.

“Thanks to the morphine, no. I need you to help me fix a compound fracture. I have a cowboy in the kitchen who needs his arm fixed, and I need another hand.”

“Why should I help you?”

“Because I’ve decided to let you live.”

Rosemond’s head jerked back, and she laughed.

“I know, Rosemond. I know you’ve been lying to me about Kindle from the beginning, that he’s alive. What kind of person does that?”

Her mirth died and was replaced by something like fear. She opened her mouth as if to argue but apparently thought better of it. Her shoulders straightened, and her expression turned defiant. “You would do the same thing to be with who you loved.”

“Of course I would. That’s why I’m letting you live. We’re both reprehensible people. Happy? Are you going to help me or not?”

“I need to go to Portia.”

“She’ll be there in the morning.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I saw the expression on her face when she left.”

The hope in Rosemond’s expression nearly broke my heart. It switched to skepticism in a flash. “Are you lying to me?” she asked.

“I’ll lie about a lot of things, but I wouldn’t lie about that. Will you help me?”

She smiled in relief and nodded. “First, I’m going to bandage your arm and broken hand.”

“It’s fine.”

“You don’t like being taken care of, do you?”

“Not particularly.”

“Too bad.” She grabbed my good hand and pulled me into the kitchen.