Crescent City Courtship (2 page)

J
ohn knelt beside his moaning patient and stared at the baby in his hands. For the first time in his life he uttered the name of God in prayer. He’d never lost a life before—at least not on his own.

He laid the stillborn infant on a ragged towel, then turned to the woman who had been quietly hovering behind him for the past two hours. He held out a shaking hand. “Give me that needle and suture.”

She handed him the implements he required, watching his every movement with vigilant, protective eyes.

He began the job of sewing up the woman’s torn body. “Here, hold this sponge.”

His provisional nurse knelt and followed his gestured instructions. “What about the baby?”

“You can bury it later. It’s more important to take care of your friend.”

Abigail gasped, dropping the sponge. “The baby’s dead? How could you let it die?” She picked up the infant and cradled it against her bodice. Her face twisted and silent sobs began to shake her thin body.

John swallowed against a surge of sympathy but kept stitching. Crying wasn’t going to bring the baby back to life. He finished the sutures, efficiently mopped the wound and sat back on his heels. He studied his patient’s chalky face. At least she was still breathing, harsh painful gasps between bloodless lips. Her eyes squeezed shut as he drew her dress down over her knees. She would live.

“Where’s her husband?” He got up to rinse his hands in a bowl of sterilized water, wiped them on the last clean towel, then opened his bag to stow his instruments.

“I’m not married.” The gritty whisper came from his patient. Grunting, she tried to sit up. “Abigail, let me see the baby.”

“Here, lie down or you’ll start the bleeding again.” John knelt to put a hand to her shoulder, which was almost as thin as the skeleton that sat in a spare chair in his boarding house bedroom.

The patient speared him with pain-clouded eyes. “I have to see him.”

“It’s—it was a girl,” John stammered. “She didn’t make it.”

“A girl. Please, let me hold her just a minute.”

John met Abigail’s eyes for an agonized moment. She looked away.

“Give it to her,” he managed.

His patient took the infant’s naked, messy little body against her own, cuddling it as if it were alive and ready to suckle.

What was a fellow supposed to do? He was no minister capable of dealing with these depths of grief. Inarticulate anger seized him as he took a deliberate look around. The tiny, shabby tenement room was scrupulously clean—ap
parently the lye soap had been put to use—but the odor of mildew and age infused every breath he took. This was no place for two young women to live alone, no matter what their morals.

Dr. Laniere would have known exactly how to deal with the situation. But back at the hospital, Crutch had interrupted the professor demonstrating the amputation of an infected finger for a ring of medical students. The professor had sent John, assuring him he was perfectly capable of delivering a baby.

Eagerly he’d accepted the assignment. John had always assumed he could do anything he set his mind to. But his confidence had diminished as he realized the breech presentation had left the baby in the birth canal too long.

Capable.
A crack of despairing laughter escaped him. Lesson learned.

Unfortunately, there was nothing more he could do here. Snapping the latch of his bag, he turned toward the door.

He’d taken no more than a couple of steps when he found himself deluged from behind by lukewarm water. It streamed down the back of his neck, plastered his hair to his forehead and nearly strangled him as he took a startled breath.

With a choked exclamation, he turned to find Abigail glaring at him, the cracked pottery bowl held in her hands like a battle mace.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded, looking as if she might fling the bowl at his head, too.

Speechless, John dropped his bag and swiped water out of his eyes with his sleeve. Intent on getting to the patient, he hadn’t properly looked at the woman who had summoned him. For the first time it dawned on him that the woman’s few words had been spoken in cultured tones,
rather than the typical Creole waterfront accent. And although she was dressed in a ratty brown skirt and blouse, she had the tall, sturdy build of a warrior princess. Nobody would call this woman beautiful, but it was a face a man couldn’t forget once he’d seen it.

A furious face. Light green eyes glittered with the flame of peridots set in gold.

John found his voice. “How dare you.”

It wasn’t a question. It was his equivalent of a bowl of water dumped over the head, uttered in a drawl cultured by a lifetime spent in the elite drawing rooms of New Orleans.

“How dare I?” She bared a set of lovely white teeth, but it was not a smile. She clonked the bowl down on the table and stalked up to him. He was a tall man and her eyes were on a level with his lips. “I’ll tell you how I dare. I prayed for you. Not for Tess and the baby, but for
you!
I could tell you were scared spitless, you stuck-up beast.” She sucked in a breath. “You
laughed.
”

Stung to the heart, John sucked in a breath. Of course he hadn’t been laughing at her or Tess, but at the irony of his own impotence.

“What do you want me to do?” he said through stiff lips. He could hardly let her see his humiliation, but perhaps he could redeem himself somewhat.

The girl studied him, taken aback, as though she’d expected him to either hit her or leave without a word. “You could at least help me bury the baby.”

“I’m a doctor, not a grave digger.”

“You’re not much of a doctor, either.”

John flinched at this brutal truth. “Is there a…graveyard nearby?”

The girl shook her head. “We’re nearly underwater here. The charity burial grounds is on the north side of the city.”

Tess began to cry, clutching the child closer.

John didn’t know what to do with this slide into helplessness. Despite her derisive words, Abigail looked at him as if she expected him to do something heroic. Clearly he had a maudlin trollop, a corpse and an angry Amazon to deal with before he could go home and go to bed. And he’d been up since before dawn.

With a sigh he walked toward a rusty sink in the corner of the room and activated the pump. He stuck his head under the anemic stream of murky water, rubbed hard, and came up dripping. His coat was ruined, but that was the least of his worries at the moment. Slicking his hair back with both hands, he turned. “Abigail, wash the baby and wrap her in a blanket. We’ll take Tess to Dr. Laniere. Then I’ll send someone from the hospital to take care of the burial.”

Abigail nodded, a rather contemptuous jerk of her severely coifed brown head, but moved to obey.

John knelt beside his patient. “Where are your clean clothes?” He touched her shoulder again, aware of the awkwardness of the gesture.

Her anxious dark eyes followed Abigail’s ministrations to the child. She shook her head. “I don’t have any.”

John sat back on his heels and looked around. Other than the cookstove, a shaky three-legged table shoved next to the far wall and the two straw-filled cots, there wasn’t a stick of furniture in the room.

His sister, Lisette, had two armoires stuffed with more dresses than she could wear in a year. Her shoes lined a dressing room shelf that ran the entire length of her bedroom.

The abject poverty of these women filled him with guilt.
Releasing a breath, he gathered Tess up in his arms, ignoring the blood on her skirt that soaked through his sleeve and the shabby shoes tied to her feet by bits of rope. He concentrated on rising without disturbing her sutures.

The girl let out a gasp of pain and clutched his neck.

“It’s all right, you’re all right,” he muttered.

“Be careful!” Abigail turned, clutching the blanket-wrapped bundle close. “Should I go look for help?”

The last of John’s patience fled. “Just open the door,” he said through his teeth.

Those light eyes narrowed. She gave John a mocking curtsy as he passed with Tess in his arms. “Your lordship.”

He was grateful to find the cart still tied in front of the building. Equipages had been known to disappear during calls in this part of the city, especially after dark. Thank God he had decided at the last minute to bring it. Riding would have been faster, but one never knew when a patient would have to be hauled to hospital.

Hitching her skirt nearly to mid-calf, Abigail climbed into the back of the cart with a lithe motion that gave John an unobstructed view of trim ankles and a pair of down-at-the-heels black-buttoned boots. She sank cross-legged onto the clean straw and opened her arms. “Here, lay her head in my lap.”

Swallowing a time-wasting retort, John complied. Later he would impress upon her who was in charge.

Abigail stroked Tess’s damp reddish hair off her forehead, a tender gesture at odds with her brisk, no-nonsense manner. She looked up at John, brows raised. “Let’s go.”

Scowling at her presumption, John climbed onto the narrow bench at the front of the cart and flapped the reins.
With a snort the mule jerked into motion. As the cart bumped over the uneven bricks of Tchapitoulas Street, John could hear an occasional groan from his patient, accompanied by hisses of sympathy from Abigail.

“Can’t you be more careful?” she shouted over the clop of the mule’s hooves and the rattle of the cart.

He stopped, letting another wagon and several pedestrians pass, and stared at her over his shoulder. “Would you care to drive, Miss—?”

“Neal.” Darkness had nearly overtaken the waterfront, but John detected a hint of amusement in her tone. “My papa often asked my mother the same thing when I was a little girl.” All traces of levity vanished as she sighed. “Forgive me. I know we have to hurry.”

“Yes. We do.” Surprised by the apology and puzzled by an occasional odd, sing-song lilt in the girl’s cultured voice, John stared a moment longer, then turned and clicked his tongue at the mule. He would question Abigail later—after the baby was buried.

A grueling ten minutes later, the cart turned a corner onto St. Joseph Street, leaving behind the waterfront’s crowded rail depots, dilapidated shanties, cotton presses and towering warehouses. Inside the business district, two-and three-story brick buildings hovered on either side of the narrow street like overprotective mammies. Streams of green-slimed water, the result of a recent rain, rushed in the open gutters beside the undulating sidewalks. Businessmen intent on getting home after the day’s work hurried along, ignoring the stench of decayed vegetation, sewage and shellfish that permeated everything.

John frowned, unable to overlook the city squalor. He had tried to convince his father that a platform of sanita
tion reform would solidify his mayoral campaign. The senior Braddock preferred more socially palatable topics of debate. If all went well, John’s father would be elected in November.

If all did not go well, the pressure would be on John to quit medical school, go into the family shipping business and try for political office himself. Phillip Braddock often opined that power was a tool for good; he meant to grab as much as possible, even if it had to come through his son.

Because John had no intention of becoming anyone’s puppet, he was concentrating on getting his medical diploma and staying out of the old man’s way. As much as John admired him, his father had a great deal in common with the new steam-powered road rollers.

As he guided the cart onto Rue Baronne, he wondered what his father would have to say about these two passengers. Probably shake his leonine head and expound at length on the wages of sin.

He glanced over his shoulder again. Abigail had rested her elbow on the side of the cart and propped her head against her hand. She seemed, incredibly, to be asleep, with Tess dozing in her lap.

What set of circumstances had brought the two of them to such a pass? He saw women like them often, when he and his friends did rounds in the waterfront, but he’d never before had such a personal confrontation with a patient. Or a patient’s caregiver.

“You just passed the hospital,” Abigail said suddenly.

“I thought you were asleep.” Annoyed to have been caught daydreaming, John flipped the reins to make the mule pick up his pace. “We’re not stopping at the hospital.
Dr. Laniere has a clinic and a few beds at his home. Tess will be better cared for there.”

“I see.” Abigail was quiet for the remainder of the trip.

The professor’s residence on Rue Gironde was a lovely three-story brick Greek revival, with soaring columns supporting a balcony and flanking a grand front entrance at the head of a flight of six broad, shallow brick steps. Wrought iron graced the balcony and the steps, lending a charming whimsy to the formal design of the house.

John bypassed the curve of the drive circling in front of the house and took a narrower path that passed alongside and led around to the back entrance into the kitchen and clinic. The house and grounds were as familiar to him as the home he’d grown up in. The Braddocks and the Lanieres had maintained social ties since John was a boy, despite the fact that the Lanieres’ loyalties to the Confederacy during the “late upheaval” had been in serious doubt. It was even rumored that Gabriel Laniere had been a Union spy and had fled prosecution as a traitor, leaving Mobile with his wife and a couple of body servants in tow. Phillip Braddock chose to discount such nonsense; ten years ago he had been appointed to the board of directors of the medical college, and remained one of its main financial contributors and fund-raisers.