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It was the coldest day he’d experienced since coming to Texas, but it was still nothing to what the weather would be like in his home state at this time of year. Back in Maine, there might well be a foot of snow on the ground and a bitter wind blowing. Folks would be swathed in heavy coats, hats, boots and knitted scarves. Perhaps he’d miss seeing snow eventually, but right now he savored the warmth of the sun on his face.
Then he felt Sarah shiver.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
“No, I—I’m fine.”
Nolan whipped off his frock coat again anyway and settled it around her shoulders over her shawl. She had sand, he thought—real courage and grit. She hadn’t given in to her faintness when many ladies would have, but he had to remember she’d just had a traumatic experience and had lost some blood.
Sarah blinked at the gesture, and a little color crept into her cheeks. “Th-thank you.”
They said nothing more during the short walk to his office. He ushered her inside, seating her in his exam chair which had a flat surface extending over each arm. He was thankful he’d had sense enough to clean and boil his suturing instruments last night, even though the hour had been late—after he’d finished taking care of a cowboy who’d been cut by flying glass in a ruckus at the saloon. The instruments lay on a metal stand, concealed by a fresh cloth, but he wouldn’t bring them out yet.
“I’ll be right back. I’m going to put a pot of water on for coffee when we’re finished,” he said, deliberately not giving her the chance to demur before he walked down the hallway that led to his living quarters. She’d need something hot and bracing when he was done.
Returning, he stepped over to a basin, poured a pitcher of water into it and began to scrub his hands and forearms with a bar of soap, remembering all the times the other field surgeons had made sport of him for what they called his “old maid fussiness” when he was preparing to operate. “I can amputate twice as many legs and arms as you can in half the time, Walker,” one of them had boasted. “And I don’t use gallons of carbolic, either.” News of the use of carbolic acid’s role in preventing infection had come from Europe in the last year of the war, but only a few doctors in America believed in it.
“Yes, and you lose most of them to infection days later,” he’d retorted, “while most of mine live to re cover. So I still come out ahead.”
He felt her curious gaze on him, watching as he scrubbed up and down, the harsh lye soap stinging his skin. Then he poured diluted carbolic acid over his hands. When he looked back while he was drying his hands on a clean towel, though, he found her staring at his open rolltop desk. He’d been looking at a small framed daguerreotype he normally left hidden in a drawer, and when he decided to stroll over to the mercantile, he’d absentmindedly left it out on the desk.
“That’s my wife and son,” he said, when he could find his breath. “They died the summer before the war began.”
Her eyes widened and grew sad. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said quickly, then seemed to hesitate, and he knew she was trying a polite way to ask the question.
“Cholera,” he said, sparing her the need.
“Oh…how terrible,” she murmured. “You had no other children?”
He shook his head, firmly suppressing the old pain within him. “No. Now you’re going to have to be brave,” he said, knowing his words would distract her from further questions. He brought the bottle of diluted carbolic acid and a basin to the armrest. Pulling a stool over, he sat, then carefully unwrapped the bandage around her arm. He held her arm over the basin, and caught her gaze.
“This is going to sting,” he warned. “You want a bullet to bite?”
He’d hoped his little attempt at humor would make her smile, at least for a moment. but she only shook her head and looked away, putting her other hand to her mouth.
“Go ahead,” she whispered.
He poured the carbolic acid over the wound, wincing inwardly as she gasped and clamped her free hand over her mouth.
“Sorry. I don’t want you to get blood poisoning or lockjaw from that rusty nail.”
After removing the basin, he rolled over the tray of instruments on its stand and unscrewed his jar of boiled catgut suture in alcohol, pulled out a couple lengths and laid them on the stand among his instruments. Then picking up a suture needle, he threaded it.
“This is going to hurt, too, I’m afraid, though not as much as that carbolic.”
“Do what you have to do,” she said, tight-lipped, her face as white as the unbloodstained part of her bodice.
He bent his head to his task. She couldn’t know how much harder this was for him than it had been to suture a soldier’s cuts, knowing his touch was inflicting more pain on the very woman he cared about so much. He had to steel himself to ignore her wince each time he inserted the needle into her flesh. Thanks to his experience in battlefield surgery, he was able to close this relatively uncomplicated wound quickly. When he was finished, he looked at his patient.
Her head lay back against the headrest of the chair, her eyes were closed. Pearls of sweat beaded her pale skin.
“I’m done,” he said, wondering if he ought to get out the vial of hartshorn he kept in his desk for swooning ladies. “You were very brave, Miss Matthews.”
She opened her eyes and smiled wanly at him. “Thank you.”
He saw her dart a glance at the neatly sutured wound before she raised her gaze back to his face.
“This may scar a little,” he said, “but not as much as if we’d just bandaged it. And you’re going to have to watch it for infection. Any red streaks or swelling or drainage, you come back to see me immediately. I’m going to rebandage it,” he said, and took up a roll of linen, which he circled around her forearm and tied by the ends as he had at the store. “Now I’ll get that coffee I promised you.”
“Oh, but you needn’t bother—” she began, but he cut her off.
“No bother, I want some, and I need to see a little more color in those cheeks before I let you out of that chair. If I let you get up now, you’ll collapse like a wilted lily.” Wishing he could invite her back to his kitchen but knowing it would seem improper to her, he left without waiting to hear any further protests.
He returned a moment later, carrying two sturdy crockery mugs full of steaming coffee.
“I took the liberty of putting sugar in yours,” he said. “I didn’t know if you take it that way, but you need the sugar for energy right now.” Then, a little less certainly, he said, “It’s probably a little strong for you. I could get some water—”
“No, it’s fine,” she assured him. “Josh, our foreman, always says it isn’t ranch coffee unless it’s so strong the spoon stands up in the cup.” She took a tentative sip, then another deeper one before he spoke again.
“Is this a good time to have that talk?”
“T-talk? What talk?” Sarah stammered. She should have known he would take advantage of being alone with her like this to claim the fulfillment of her promise. She could hardly refuse to talk to him, now that he’d played the Good Samaritan and taken care of her wound.
His expression told her that he knew she’d been playing for time to think, that she knew exactly what talk he meant. “The talk you promised me at the wedding, even said you’d look forward to, and have avoided ever since. The talk in which you’re going to explain why you don’t like me.”
“I haven’t avoided you,” she protested. “I’ve been very busy at the ranch, what with Milly being off on her honeymoon and all. I haven’t come into town except to deliver my pies and cakes, go to church and attend a meeting of the Spinsters’ Club.”
He raised an eyebrow as if to imply that if she could do all that, she could have made time to talk to him. “So why don’t you? Like me, that is. You seemed to like me well enough when we were corresponding, but as soon as you set eyes on me, you no longer did.”
Sarah sighed. She was trapped and there was no getting around it. She’d promised to do this and she had to honor her word. She owed him her honesty, at least—but now that it came down to it, and especially after what he’d done for her today, she didn’t feel as righteous about her dislike as she had before. Or as certain.
“Perhaps you find me a homely fellow, not much to look at,” he ventured, but there was a twinkle in his eye.
She met his gaze head on. “Dr. Walker—”
“Nolan,” he corrected her. “We’re not speaking as doctor and patient now.”
“I’m sure you have some sort of a mirror,” Sarah said, “so you know very well you’re not ugly.” Quite the contrary, she thought, looking into his deep blue eyes and studying his strong, rugged features. She took a deep breath. “All right, but remember you asked to hear this. I didn’t like you because you’re a Yankee.”
Understanding dawned in his eyes. “So you thought well enough of me until I spoke to you.”
“Yes, and that’s your fault. You never said you were a Yankee. By writing to me from Brazos County, you allowed me to believe you a Texan.”
“So you dislike me strictly because I come from the North,” he stated. “Doesn’t that sound rather arbitrary on your part, seeing as the war’s over? As I mentioned, it hasn’t prevented the rest of the townsfolk from accepting me. Why is it so important to you?”
Sarah sighed again, steeling herself to the pain of talking about Jesse. “I was engaged to a wonderful man before the war began,” she said. “Jesse Holt. He…he died in the war—at least, I have to assume that, since he never came back. The men who did come back said…” She looked down as she struggled to finish. “Sometimes when men were killed, they…they…couldn’t be identified.”
Nolan’s eyes, when she looked up, were unfocused, haunted, as if he was remembering that and worse.
“I loved Jesse,” she said simply. “I…I can be your friend, I suppose…that is to say, we don’t have to be enemies. But you came in town to court me, isn’t that right? How can I keep company with someone who fought with the Union, when they killed my Jesse? And don’t tell me that you were just a doctor, caring for the wounded,” she said, when she saw he had opened his mouth to speak. “You wore blue.” All the old grief swept over her, threatening to swamp her, and she bent her head, struggling against tears that escaped anyway. She put a hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I…I thought I was over it.”
Now it was Nolan’s turn to sigh. “I know,” he said, shifting his gaze to the daguerreotype on his desk. “Mostly, I only have pleasant memories about Julia and Timmy…but once in a while someone will walk like her, or a little boy will remind me of him… But I know they wouldn’t want me to mourn forever, Sarah.”
She noticed he had switched to using her first name, but she didn’t correct him.
“It’s been over five years now since they died,” he said. “I want to go on with my life. I…know it might be too soon for you.”
“I wanted to go on with my life, too,” she said. “Meet a good man, get married… That’s why I agreed to join the Spinsters’ Club when my sister started it.”
“But you didn’t want to meet a Yankee.”
She let the statement stand. “You’re free to court any of the other ladies in the group, or find someone elsewhere, you know.”
“I know,” he said. He raised his head to look at her, and it was a long silent moment before she found the strength to look away.
“We’re friends, at least. That’s something.” He gave her a half smile. “Here’s some bandages,” he said, reaching inside a box and taking out several rolls of bleached linen. “Keep the arm clean and dry and change the dressing every day. Will you come back in a couple days, so I can satisfy myself that it’s healing properly?”
She nodded, thinking she could bring him that cake then, and offer to pay him something, also. “Do you have to take out the stitches?”
He shook his head. “No, they’re catgut—made of sheep intestines, really—so they’ll absorb on their own inside, and the part that’s showing will disintegrate and fall out.”
She stared at the bandaged wound and shuddered. “Sheep intestines?”
He chuckled. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you that.”
Then he smiled at her, and she was so struck by what a compelling smile he had that she forgot all about sheep and their insides.
Chapter Six
“Oh, Sarah, that looks divinely delicious!” Prissy gushed two days later, watching as Sarah put the finishing touches on her blackberry jam cake with pecan frosting. “Will you teach me how to make that one for the New Year’s Day party?”
Sarah looked up from her work, pushing back a stray curl which had escaped from behind her ear. “What New Year’s Day party?”
“The one my parents are giving. Remember the afternoon party on New Year’s Day my parents always gave before the war? The whole town came, and everyone from the nearby ranches. Papa wants to start having it again as a sign that things really have gotten back to normal. I meant to mention it sooner,” Prissy said with an airy wave of her hand. “You know, it’s really the last big social event till spring for the whole town, if you think about it,” Prissy went on. “You can’t plan on anything big for certain, what with the unpredictability of winter weather, though we might manage something smaller with the Spinsters’ Club, if some candidates show up. Que sera, sera, as the French say.”
What Prissy was saying was true. The Spinsters’ Club had been started in the summer, when it was relatively easy for an interested candidate to travel to Simpson Creek. They had a taffy pull coming up, but that was all until at least March.
Oh, well, it didn’t matter to her anyway. Even before her sister had founded the Spinsters’ Club, Sarah had been a homebody, content to wait on the Lord to provide her a beau if He willed it so.
“But at least all the ladies of the Spinsters’ Club will be coming, and the ones who are being courted will bring their beaux. You never know who might bring an eligible man to the party as a guest,” Prissy said, still thinking out loud.
“Oh, and I told Mama we’d bring a couple of desserts.” It was a typical Prissy-style change of subject. “Why don’t you bake your cherry upside-down cake, and I’ll make one like this—” she pointed to the one Sarah was completing “—if you’ll teach me, of course.”
“Sure I will.” Sarah vaguely remembered attending some of those extravagant open-house parties the mayor and his wife had hosted in those halcyon prewar years, though she had barely been old enough to put up her hair before the last of them.
Mentally, she readjusted her plans. She’d been thinking of asking Milly if it was okay if she and Prissy came out to the ranch for dinner for New Year’s. Now, of course, she’d have to think about what she was going to wear, as well as making a dessert to contribute. Perhaps Milly and Nick would come into town for the party.
“Or maybe you should make the biscuits. I declare, yours are the lightest, the fluffiest…I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make biscuits like that.” Prissy let out a gusty, dramatic sigh.
“Oh, I don’t know…the ones you made this morning were…um, much better,” Sarah told her with a grin.
“You mean they were almost edible this time, as opposed to the lead sinkers I made last night for dinner,” Prissy said, with a rueful laugh. “Your sisters’ pigs probably wouldn’t eat them.”
“It just takes practice. You’ll be making fine biscuits before long, I promise.”
Prissy seemed reassured. “Is that for the mercantile, or the hotel?” she asked, gesturing at the cake.
“Neither. I promised to see Dr. Walker so he could check my wound, so I’m going to take it with me when I go to the office this morning.”
“Ohhhhhhh!” Prissy said, drawing the syllable out, her eyes dancing with glee. “So your heart has thawed toward the handsome Yankee.”
“It’s done no such thing,” Sarah said quickly. “At least not the way you mean.” She avoided her friend’s knowing gaze. “It’s just the polite thing to do. He was very kind to me that day.”
“Hmm,” Prissy murmured, clearly unconvinced by Sarah’s casual words. “It must be nice to have a knight in shining armor. Oh! You might as well deliver his invitation to him personally,” Prissy said.
“Invitation?”
“To the party, silly. Mama had asked me to take the invitations around town this afternoon, but you can save me that stop, at least.”
Before Sarah could say anything else, Prissy dashed into her bedroom and was back in a couple of minutes, waving the cream-colored vellum envelope with its handwritten invitation inside. Of course Dr. Nolan Walker is to attend the party like everyone else. Suddenly attending the party had become much more complicated. How was she to act around him?
“So what are you going to wear?” Prissy asked.
Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know…I suppose you have a suggestion, now that you’ve seen the entire contents of my wardrobe?”
Prissy giggled. “I think you should wear that lovely red grenadine dress with the green piping. Very festive. And men like red dresses.”
“I don’t give a fig what color Dr. Walker likes!”
“Ah, but I said ‘men.’ You applied my generalization to Dr. Walker.”
Caught. Sarah tightened her lips and glanced at the clock on the mantel as she reached for the cake cover. “This is a silly conversation, Prissy Gilmore,” she said primly, “and I’m going to be late if I don’t leave now.”
The sound of her friend’s giggles followed her out into the street.
Really, she was going to have to warn Prissy to cease and desist with her matchmaking efforts, Sarah thought as she walked down the street, avoiding ice-rimmed puddles—she didn’t want to fall again. She was not going to change her mind about Nolan Walker, she really wasn’t, and the sooner her friend understood that, the better. She didn’t want to be embarrassed at the party. Perhaps she would wear the red and green dress, but really, her selection had nothing to do with the town doctor… When she’d pointed out he was free to court anyone else, he’d simply said, “I know,” so surely that meant he realized she was never going to reconsider her position with him, and he was now considering other options….
She’d said they could be friends, hadn’t she? Had she been too hasty to indicate there could be nothing more? Even with all she’d had to do in the last few days because of her move into town, Nolan Walker had seldom been far from her mind.
So intent on her thoughts was she as she turned and strode up the walk that led to the doctor’s office that Sarah almost bowled right into a figure descending the steps.
“Oh!” she cried, tightening her grip on the cake plate and looking up at Ada Spencer. “I’m sorry, Ada, I didn’t see you. I’m afraid I was lost in thought.”
The other woman gave a short laugh. “That was certainly obvious!” Her eyes narrowed as they focused on what Sarah was carrying. “A treat for the good doctor? My, my, he’s going to grow fat with all the goodies the ladies of the town are bringing him,” Ada said archly. “Why, just the other day I brought him pralines myself. Have a nice visit with Dr. Walker. I must be getting home—we spent far too long chatting, the doctor and I. I don’t know where the time went.”
Sarah stiffened as the other woman stepped past her and went out into the street. So “all the ladies in town” were bringing treats to the doctor, were they? Or was it only Ada? Suddenly Sarah felt foolish and pathetic carrying the beautiful cake, like a schoolgirl with a silly infatuation. She could turn around now and take the cake back down the street to the mercantile and sell it. Yes. That’s what she’d do, and then return to the doctor’s office and have him check her wound, as she had agreed.
“Well, good morning, Miss Sarah,” Dr. Walker said, opening his door. Through the window, he’d seen her coming up his walk right after he’d just closed the door on Ada Spencer. Surely Sarah’s coming was his reward for being patient and kind during Ada’s unexpected visit, made under the pretext that she’d felt something was wrong with the baby. It had taken him an hour to calm her and send her on her way, and now here was Sarah Matthews, looking lovely in her loden green shawl and navy holly-sprigged wool dress. And bearing a gift, he thought, spotting the covered plate she carried. Well, well.
