A woman and a little girl, about eight, stood there.

“May I help you?”

“You the lady-doctor?”

“I am a doctor. Would you like to come into my office?”

“Sure

. Course.” She told the girl to sit and wait while she followed Blair.

“What seems to be your problem?”

The woman sat down. “I ain’t strong like I used to be, and I find I need help now and then. Not a lot of help, just a little.”

“We all need help at times. What kind of help do you need?”

“I might as well come out and say it. Some of my girls, you know, on River Street, have been sold dirty opium. I thought maybe, with you bein’ a doctor, you could get us some pure stuff from San Francisco. I figure you doctors got ways to check it to make sure it ain’t bad, and maybe you could afford to buy it in large quantities and sell it. I can find you all the buyers you need and—.”

“Please leave my office,” Blair said quite calmly.

The woman stood. “Well, ain’t you Miss High and Mighty? Too good for the likes of us, are you? Did you know the whole town is laughin’ at you? You callin’ yourself a doctor and just sittin’ here in this empty place and won’t nobody come to you. And ain’t nobody gonna come, either.”

Blair walked to the door, held it open for her.

With her nose in the air, the woman grabbed the child’s hand and left, slamming the outer door behind her, the bell falling with a thud to the floor.

Without a trace of anger, Blair sat down at her desk and picked up a piece of paper. It was a household account of expenses Mrs. Shainess had given her that morning. Blair was supposed to add the twenty-two figures and check that Mrs. Shainess’s total was correct.

She was looking at the paper when suddenly her eyes blurred, and the next thing she knew, she had her head on the desk and she was crying. She cried softly, tears that fought their way up from her stomach, before she lifted her head to search for a handkerchief.

She gasped when she saw Kane Taggert sitting in the chair across from her. “Do you enjoy spying on people?”

“Haven’t done it enough to know,” he said, looking at her with concern.

She floundered through desk drawers for a moment before snatching the big handkerchief Kane offered.

“It’s clean. Houston won’t let me out the door without an inspection.”

She didn’t answer his attempt at levity, but just turned away from him and blew her nose.

He reached across the desk and picked up the paper of accounts. “This what was makin’ you cry?” He barely glanced at it. “It’s seven cents off,” he said, as he put the paper down. “Seven cents make you cry?”

“If you must know, I got my feelings hurt, that’s what. Plain, old-fashioned, got my feelings hurt.”

“Care to tell me about it?”

“Why? So you can laugh at me, too? I know your kind. You’d never go to a woman doctor, either. You’d be like all the men and most of the women! You’d never trust a woman to cut you open.”

His face was serious. “I ain’t never been to any doctor, so I don’t know who I’d want cuttin’ on me. I guess, if I hurt enough, I’d let anybody work on me. Is that why you were cryin’? Cause nobody is here?”

Blair put her hands down on the desk, her anger, and energy, leaving her. “Lee once told me that all doctors were idealistic, at first. I guess I was worse than most. I thought the townspeople’d be thrilled to have a clinic for women. They are—if Leander is here running it. They see me and they start asking for a ‘real’ doctor. My mother has been here for three ailments in two days, and a few women I’ve known all my life have come. And, now, to add to my grief, the Chandler Hospital Board has suddenly decided that they really don’t have enough work for another doctor.”

Kane sat there and watched her for a while. He didn’t know much about his sister-in-law, but he did know she usually had the energy of two people, and now she sat there with a long face and eyes with no light in them.

“Yesterday,” he began, “I was in the stable without a shirt on—don’t tell Houston—and I rubbed up against the back wall and got a lotta splinters in my back. I can’t reach ‘em to dig ‘em out.” He watched as she lifted her head. “It ain’t much, but it’s all I can offer.”

Slowly, Blair began to smile. “All right, come into the surgery and I’ll have a look.”

Tags: Jude Deveraux Montgomery/Taggert Historical
Source: readsnovelonline.net