The Outsider (40 page)

“SPREAD YOUR LEGS.”

Marilee shifted her hips on the black leather cushion, letting her knees fall apart. She hummed a breath out her tight lips and focused her eyes on the ceiling. As ceilings went, she supposed she’d looked at worse. At least this one was pocked with knotholes instead of bullet holes.

“Wider,” Lucas Henry said from between her legs. “And for God’s sake, try to relax. One would think you’d be used to this, the practice you’ve had.”

A pain stabbed at Marilee’s belly, a pain that had more
to do with the doctor’s words than with his probing fingers, which were actually rather gentle. She’d certainly been given plenty of rougher pokes of one sort or another in her young life. And he was right—she’d had plenty of practice at spreading her legs. The words had hurt her, though, because Luc had been the man to say them. She’d been knocked around by a lot of hard words as well. Men never thought a whore had feelings. She was only a hole to put it into.

“There ain’t no call for you to be so mean,” she said, and to her surprise the hurt she was feeling roughened her voice and stung her eyes. She was usually better at hiding her wounds.

The room fell quiet. It was so hot she could practically hear the heat, as if the very air were panting and sweating. He straightened up, going to a white porcelain basin to wash his hands. “Marilee, my sweet Marilee,” he said, weariness—or maybe just booze—slurring his voice. “That remark was uncalled for, and I do apologize.”

She lay there looking up at the ceiling, her bent knees still spread wide, even though the doctor appeared to be done with her. Sometimes he could go from behaving like a swine to being such a gentleman and then back again so fast he’d make her head spin. Yet she just went on loving him like crazy no matter what he did, no matter what cruel things he said. And she knew that made her a fool, because all she was to him was a fifteen-minute French Trick every other Saturday night.

His face appeared upside down before her eyes. His spectacles winked at her, and a swatch of fair hair slid across his forehead. His mustache quirked up at one corner, surprising her into a smile. “You are, by the by,” he said, “in an interesting condition.”

Her smile perished into a wail. “Aw, shit-fire!”

She sat up. Her stomach lurched, flopped, and threatened to erupt. She folded her hands over her middle, swaying dizzily. She held her breath.

He had taken a couple of steps back to lean against a glass-fronted cabinet filled with thick tomes, medicine bottles, and gruesome looking instruments. He had one arm folded across his chest, the other hanging loose with his spectacles dangling from his long fingers.

“Do you need the pot?” he said.

She pressed her lips harder together, shaking her head. Her belly churned, flopped, and settled; churned, flopped, and settled. When it seemed to have settled for good, she dared a breath, and then another.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “This is all your fault, Lucas Henry, damn your miserable hide.”

He lifted one finely arched pale eyebrow. “
My
fault? What fascinating quirk of womanly logic has led you to—”

“That female preventive you been givin’ us girls up at the Red House didn’t prevent nothin’. First Gwendolene and now me. Lord, Mother Jugs is gonna throw a pure hissy fit when I tell her.”

“Every occupation has its hazards and its failures.” He unfolded his arms and pushed himself off the cabinet. “While you put your lovely gown back on, I’ll put together an herbal infusion for your morning sickness.”

She twirled her finger in the air. “Whoopee. If it works as well as your preventive did, it’ll likely have me pukin’ clean into next year.”

He laughed, and the sound of it, deep and a bit ragged, made her chest ache sweetly. He wagged his finger at her. “Marilee, Marilee. Shame on you for your blasphemy. Don’t you know we doctors are God?”

As she slid off the tall, claw-footed examining couch, she
could feel herself smiling at him. She did so love the way he said her name:
Marilee
,
Marilee.

She jerked on her petticoat and knotted the tapes. She sucked in her belly until it felt pressed against her backbone, so she could fasten the sateen buttons on the front of her corset without having to loosen the back laces. She tied on her crinoline bustle, giving her bottom a little wriggle so that it settled properly. It was so blasted hot, and her corset stays dug painfully into her ribs, cutting off her breath.

She was already feeling fat and she wasn’t even showing yet. In a few months she’d be wide as the back end of a cow and twice as ugly. She thought of Gwendolene: that chippy hadn’t just swallowed a watermelon seed, it was the whole darned patch.

Fear cramped in Marilee’s belly, making her queasy again. She didn’t want to lose her looks; they were all she had. Marilee had figured out early where all her blessings, and all her miseries, would come from in this life. She had a face sweet and pretty enough to break a man’s heart and a body that made him want to howl at the moon. And she had beguiling ways. Someone had said that to her once, and she’d liked the sound of it. She’d liked it even more when she’d found out what it meant. And she practiced them, too, her beguiling ways. Even the other girls up at the Red House, who were all jealous bitches with each other, thought she was sweet as a sugar tit. But then her daddy, who himself was as mean as they came, always used to say that when his little Marilee called the tune, even the ’gators had to dance.

And everybody danced, except for Doctor Lucas Henry. She’d tried everything she could think of to beguile him. She’d even tried being herself, and a risk that was, what with him being an educated Virginia gentleman and her being pure ignorant trash from the Florida swamp.

But then, it didn’t take a lot of fancy words and genteel manners to make a good whore. When Lucas Henry, gentleman physician of Virginia, came to the Red House, he always picked her. She was the best at giving the French Trick, and everybody in the Miawa country knew it. He came to satisfy his carnal urgings, nothing more. She was the fool who’d fallen in love.

Oddly, it had only been lately, when she’d started just being herself around him, that they seemed to have progressed as far as being friends, or at least friends of a sort. They’d actually shared laughter, and had conversations outside the purview of their sexual transactions. And, once, he’d come upon her on one of her prairie walks and he’d given her a ride back to town in his buggy.

Marilee thought of that buggy ride with a smile as she carefully pulled her pink foulard dress over her head. She’d worn this dress for him. He must have noticed, for he’d called it lovely, and she smiled again to think of that. She loved the feel of the silk as it settled over her bare shoulders and arms. It put her in mind of standing naked in a soft summer swamp rain, which was how she and her sisters had bathed when they were young, since the only tub of any sort they’d owned had been used by their pa to brew his corn squeezin’s.

She’d come far since those days, thank the Lord, but not nearly as far as she intended. Luc had called her gown lovely and it was, for she believed in investing her earnings in herself. But then, he appreciated fine things, and he seemed to have plenty of East Coast money to spend on his appreciation. If he married her . . . Marilee went still, her smile turning into a soft hum as she became lost in the dream of being Mrs. Lucas Henry. If he married her, they wouldn’t live in this godforsaken bit of nowhere. She’d beguile him into
taking her to a big city, San Francisco maybe, or Chicago. They would live in a grand house, and she would have a dozen wardrobes full of lovely gowns. And a built-in enameled bathtub with hot-water taps so that she’d never have to bathe in the rain again.

Luc’s prodding at her insides with his fingers had left her feeling like she had to pee. She peeked behind the lacquered peacock screen that filled one corner of the room and was pleased to see he had one of those newfangled patent toilets, with a china bowl and an oak water tank. She lifted her skirts and squatted with a soft sigh, thinking that a patent toilet was one luxury she would surely enjoy as Luc’s wife. She finished and stood up, but then bit her lip in indecision over whether to pull the chain or not, since she’d never actually used a patent toilet before.

She gave the chain a jerk. Water gushed into the bowl so loudly that it sounded like a hundred geysers going off at once.

Marilee pressed her hands to her fiery cheeks, as the noise echoed and echoed. She listened, breath held, for some sound of him in the next room, but all she heard was a close, heavy silence. She crept out from behind the screen, feeling hot and shaky, but she also had to laugh at her own foolishness. To think the noise of a patent toilet could make her blush after the kind of intimacies that had passed between her and Luc—both acting in their professional capacities, of course.

Her fingers still trembled, though, as she put on her English straw bonnet, anchoring it to her pouf of curls with a faux pearl pin. She fastened her chatelaine pocket to the hook at her waist. She tiptoed to the door, slowly eased it open, and poked her head out into the parlor. It was empty.

She straightened her back and glided into the room with
her head held high, pretending for the moment that she lived here and was entertaining company for tea. It was a small house, consisting of only four rooms: this parlor, the room he did his doctoring in, his bedroom, and a kitchen. But the parlor was filled with so many fine and pretty things, it seemed to Marilee like a house from a picture in one of those mail-order wishbooks.

She trailed her hand along the back of a brown leather wing chair. She picked up a crystal pen holder, marveling at its weight. She caught her reflection in a glass-fronted cabinet packed tightly with row after row of books. The books frightened her because she sensed they were filled with things she ought to know and never would, and that this lack of knowledge would someday be her undoing.

A brown tweed frock coat hung from the arm of a bentwood coat tree. She lifted one of the sleeves and rubbed it against her cheek. It smelled fresh, with just a hint of sandalwood. It was one of the things she liked most about him, his clean smell. In her experience most men were filthier than rutting pigs.

A beautiful hide trunk with brass hardware stood against one wall, and above it hung an army officer’s sword. He’d once done his doctoring in the cavalry. That was one of the few things she knew about him.

Next to the sword a valentine had been hung on the wall in a gilded frame. As Marilee stared at the collage of gold lace and red velvet flowers, of pearl clusters and pink satin ribbons, she felt a sinking sensation in her belly. The valentine had been given to him by a woman, surely, a woman he must care for still to keep this token of her affection always within his sight. Perhaps she waited for him in Virginia, perhaps he’d kept her valentine and hung it on his wall to remind himself that he was going home to her someday.

Marilee heard a footstep behind her and swung around. He stood at the threshold of the kitchen, holding a small wicker tray of dried flowers. A shaft of sunlight from a window behind him cast him in shadow, so she couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw him smile. A blush warmed her chest and rose to her cheeks.

“I was fetching the chamomile for your infusion,” he said.

She could smell the sharp tang of the dried flowers even from across the room, and she couldn’t help smiling back at him. “You’re like someone’s old granny, you know that? What with the way you’re always growin’ them herbs and roots and such to make potions with, ’stead of dosing people proper with patent medicines like other docs do.”

He lifted one shoulder in an elegant shrug as he stepped into the room. “Dulling one’s pain with alcohol is certainly an option. But ounce for ounce, a bottle of Rose Bud whiskey is cheaper and far more effective.”

Her smile faded slightly for she hadn’t understood him; she never understood half of what he said. And as with the books in the glass-fronted cabinet, this frightened her.

He was, though, underneath his fine manners and educated ways, a man, and she understood men’s natures all too well. She heaved an exaggerated sigh that puffed her painted lips and lifted her bosom. The bodice of her dress was filled with an ivory lace jabot sheer enough to reveal the hint of the pink flesh beneath. She slanted a look up at him from beneath her kohled eyelashes, pleased to see that he was taking a good long look at her. Smiling to herself, she turned and lifted the cascade of thick curls off her neck and bowed her head. “I need your help, please, with hookin’ up.”

She heard his footsteps, a pause as he set down his tray of dried flowers, more footsteps, and then his shadow fell over
the soft pink bell of her skirts. His fingers brushed against her bare nape, and she shuddered.

“Still feeling a bit queasy?” His hands moved lower, pressing into the small of her back as he fastened the hooks.

“Oh, no.” She had to tighten every muscle to keep from trembling again. “It’s just been such a shock an’ all, findin’ out that I’m goin’ to have a baby.”

He finished with the last hook and turned away from her, but not before giving her bustled bottom a friendly pat. Marilee hid another smile.

She watched while he made up the potion for her morning sickness. He worked at a big rolltop oak desk which had bottles and jars and tins in all the cubbyholes and drawers where most men kept their bills and accounts.

“I reckon neither my belly or my head’s quite settled into the thought of it, of havin’ a baby, I mean,” she said.

“A damned inconvenience for you, I’m sure. So I suppose you’ll be wanting to rid yourself of it.”

She was still so caught up in looking at him—at the way the muscles of his shoulders bunched beneath the thin white linen of his shirt as he crushed the chamomile with a mortar and pestle—that it took a moment for his words to sink in. When they did, hurt punched into her chest like a blow.

“God, Luc. What is there about me that makes you want to do that?”