Territory (42 page)

“Doc!” Kate screamed above him. He smelled jasmine. He hoped it was her perfume, and not a fever dream.

Just as Kate Holliday reached for the doorknob, Jesse tasted something metallic, caught a scent like the air around an electrical generator.
Lightning.
“No,” he said, and reached to stop her.

Whatever it was went off, but it wasn’t lightning.

It hit him in the chest. He staggered and fell, and found himself sitting on the floor of the foyer looking out the door, past Mrs. Holliday’s skirt. He heard her shriek, saw her drop to her knees to clutch at the man lying in the doorway.

The man behind the fallen man, the one who stood outside with the rain lashing behind him, had done the thing. Not a shot, not a blow. Not a thing given, but rather something drawn off and gathered in. The force that had struck Jesse was the excess, whatever passed over the spillway because it wasn’t needed to fill the reservoir of power.

It was Wyatt Earp outside the door. He caught and held Jesse’s eyes. Then the second blow came.

Pain shot through his temples. His stomach flopped as if he’d been turned upside down. And he saw, for an instant, two things: Earp standing in the doorway, his eyes cold, one hand raised; and Earp crouching over Holliday, supporting his shoulders, his face twisted with concern. He saw them both at once, as if someone had put the wrong picture in one half of a stereopticon slide. In his memory, too, there were two versions of the last few seconds, and one of them had nothing uncanny in it.

Then he saw Mildred Benjamin. She was clutching the edge of the parlor table under the window. She was pale, and her eyes were wide and fixed on Earp. At the sight of her Jesse’s vision cleared, and his memory as well. The false versions were still there, but transparent as steam.

It had only been seconds since Mrs. Holliday opened the door. Jesse crouched and got his arms under Holliday’s shoulders and knees—his hands passing through the illusion of Earp’s arm—and hoisted. It didn’t take as much strength as he’d expected; Holliday was tall, but Jesse could feel his bones even through the layers of cloth.

“On the settee,” Mildred ordered, breathless. Kate Holliday held Doc’s hand as Jesse carried him across the foyer and draped him over the settee. He heard Earp’s boots on the floor behind him.

Mildred felt Holliday’s pulse and his forehead. “Give me one of your feathers,” she ordered Mrs. Holliday. When the other woman looked blank, Mildred reached out and plucked one of the peacock feather eyes out of Mrs. Holliday’s coiffure. “Do you have a match?” she asked Jesse.

He shook his head. She made an irritable noise, pulled a handkerchief out of her tiny purse, and used it to lift the chimney of one of the wall sconces. She held the feather’s tip in the flame until it smoldered.

She waved the smoking feather under Holliday’s nose. He jerked his head back, coughing, and his eyes opened. They focused on something over Jesse’s shoulder, widened, and closed tight again.

Jesse knew what Holliday had seen: Wyatt Earp.

Kate Holliday whirled from her place by the settee and turned on Earp. “He told you we were leaving!” Her fingers were curved and stiff like claws.

“Good God, Kate, he can’t travel like this!” Earp protested. He looked past Mrs. Holliday to Mildred, frowning. “How is he?”

“I don’t know. Get a doctor.” Mildred had never sounded so cold. “Good-fellow’s here—fetch him.”

Under other circumstances, Jesse could have laughed at the way he, Mrs. Holliday, and Earp looked at each other. Jesse wasn’t about to leave Mildred with Earp, with only Kate Holliday for protection. Kate wouldn’t leave Holliday, not being sure how much protection Mildred and Jesse would be. And Earp could go, but none of them trusted him to be quick.

“Go,” Jesse said to Mrs. Holliday. “I’ll look out for your husband.” She drew a sobbing breath and bolted for the tea room.

Holliday began to stir before the doctor arrived. “Lie still,” Mildred ordered him.

Holliday gave a little puff of a laugh and fumbled in his coat pocket. He could slide the flask out, but couldn’t lift it. Jesse reached past Mildred and held it while he drank. Mildred glared at Jesse.

Holliday lay with his eyes closed, frowning, but breathing more easily. All the while Jesse was aware of Earp standing silent behind him.

Goodfellow arrived as the sound of the musicians tuning filtered out of the ballroom. Kate Holliday followed close behind him. Mildred stepped back as the doctor took Holliday’s wrist. “He was unconscious for half a minute or so,” Mildred told him.

“Thank you, Mrs. Benjamin.” Goodfellow bent over Holliday, and Mildred came away from the settee.

Jesse saw her look from him to Earp and back. She walked up to Jesse and said, “I would like a glass of wine.” Her voice was firm but low, and Jesse knew it wouldn’t have carried to Earp.

Jesse held out his arm, and she twined hers in it. She leaned on him more than she had at the start of the evening.

The tea room was nearly empty, but there were still waiters tending the buffet, and two boys clearing away the used china and whisking off the tablecloths. Jesse led Mildred to a chair at a bare table and fetched two glasses of claret. When he handed one to her, she drank a third of it straight off.

“If they’d had brandy, I’d have brought that instead,” Jesse told her. Out in the ballroom the band struck up a tune.

“Thank you. Oh, the devil, is that the first dance? I had a partner …” She fumbled for her dance card, dropped it. Jesse picked it up and gave it back to her. “It’s Harry. That’s all right, I can apologize tomorrow, and explain—”

At that, she crossed her arms on the table and dropped her head on them.

“Mrs.—Mildred. Are you all right?”

“I think,” she said, muffled, “I might faint.”

And not a feather in sight. “Put your head between your knees,” Jesse ordered.

“Can’t. Corset.”

He could insist she lie down. Or he could be poised to catch her if she fell, which, he realized, he was. When she slowly straightened up, Jesse handed her her wine and felt helpless.

She took a sip. “I don’t want to be a model for one of your unrealistic heroines.”

It took him a moment to remember their conversation about authors. “You’ve been very realistic so far.”

“I don’t think I
can
explain to Harry,” she said thinly.

“Doc Holliday had the bad grace to pass out, you helped care for him until the doctor came, and as a result, you missed your dance.”

“It sounds so simple and normal, doesn’t it?” Mildred took another swallow of wine.

“Maybe it is in Tombstone,” Jesse said, hoping she’d laugh.

Instead she looked down at her wineglass. “I think … I don’t know what to think.” She pressed a hand to her forehead. “I’m sorry. What a fuss I’m making!”

Her smile was bright and desperate and false. He couldn’t think what it reminded him of … Yes, he could. His mother had smiled that way when she said that Lily was only suffering from nervous prostration and would be fine with rest. Lily herself had smiled that way when she’d said, “I’m just a little fevered, Jess. It’s nothing.”

Jesse leaned forward and laid his hand over Mildred’s on the table. “What did you see?”

She drew her hand away. “Nothing.”

“I think you saw two things that can’t both be true. You may convince yourself to believe one, and the other will fade out of your memory. Or you may decide you have a brain fever. Except that, now that we’re having this conversation, you probably won’t be able to do either.”

Mildred stared at him, fear in her face. She shook her head.

It required almost more nerve than he had, but he went on. “What happened out front was real. Knowing that, knowing there are people who can … can make you see things that aren’t there, or keep you from seeing things that are …. It’s like confidence games and horse-coping. Knowing gives you some protection against them.”

She sat silent, staring down into her wine, and his courage failed him. Now wasn’t the moment to tell her everything. Let her get used to it a little at a time.

At last she drank off the rest of her wine and said, “I’d like to go home.”

“Of course. I’ll send someone to tell Chu.”

Mildred went off to the ladies’ retiring room while he found someone to run to the livery stable. She didn’t come out until the buggy was at the door. Then she appeared, her wrap tight around her shoulders and her face pale and closed. He handed her in and took the reins from Chu.

The rain had slowed to a sputtering drizzle, but the streets were still like creek beds. He steered Sam to the highest parts, which kept him busy enough to excuse the silence between them. He wanted to say something, but everything he thought of sounded jolly and false in his head.

At Mildred’s lodging house, he put up the umbrella and handed her to her front door. His voice came out rusty when he said, “May I call tomorrow to see how you are?”

She paused with her hand on the latch. At last she said, “That won’t be necessary, Mr. Fox. I’ll be fine.” She opened the door. “Thank you for your escort.”

She went inside. The key turned in the lock with a sound like a bark of bitter laughter.

Mr. Fox.

What had he done? If he’d leaped to a false conclusion, if she
hadn’t
seen something like what he’d seen in the foyer, then she thought he was trying to hoax her. Or she thought he was insane. Which would he rather be: cruel, or mad?

He climbed back into the buggy and clicked his tongue at Sam.

“I drive,” Chu suggested as they splashed down the street.

“No, thank you.”

“I drive good!”

“ ‘Well.’ If you want to say you’re skilled at it, you say, ‘I drive well.’ And if I didn’t already know that, you wouldn’t have been driving Sam in the first place.”

“ ‘I drive well.’ Now I drive?”

Jesse shook his head. “I need something to do.”

“Huh,” said Chu.

 17 

Doc woke to the irregular ticking of rain on the window glass. The light through the draperies looked like six in the morning, which was a hell of a time to be awake. He fumbled at the nightstand for his pocket watch and couldn’t find it. He always put it on the nightstand.

“Doc?” Kate leaped up from the easy chair and leaned over him. “You all right?”

“Playing nurse after the fire has gone to your head. What time is it?”

The watch he’d bought her was pinned to her bodice. She consulted it. “Nearly noon. You want coffee, or whiskey?”

“I take it back. You must have gone to a pretty fair nursing school. Both.”

He struggled to sit up. Why was he so weak?

Kate had a spirit lamp burning on the bureau, and a little pot of coffee over it. She poured some into a flowered china cup, then held the whiskey bottle over the cup and raised her eyebrows. Doc nodded.

“Where’s my watch?” he asked as she poured.

“Right here. I took it off you last night with everything else.” Kate brought him the cup, and laid the watch on the nightstand beside him.

Kate had undressed him? He must have gotten uncommonly drunk. He prided himself on being able to get home and into bed no matter what.