Diana Palmer - The Savage Heart

He was being fanciful, he told himself. Tess had been in Chicago a very brief time. Why would anyone want to kill her? No, it had to have been some renegade, perhaps a disgruntled husband or son who hated all women and found an outlet for his anger in attacking a member of the women’s movement. But why Tess?

BY THE TIME MATT LOCATED an elderly woman who made her living caring for the sick and infirm to sit with Tess, the patient was long since fast asleep on her pillows, still in her clothing. Matt looked in on her briefly and then left her with the sitter, Mrs. Hayes, confident from his knowledge of the woman that she’d take good care of Tess. It was much too late for him to be sitting in the room, and Tess still had to be put into her night clothing, asleep or not. He didn’t like leaving her, but there was very little he could do for her right now. He daren’t risk her reputation.

On his way back to his own room, he was intercepted by a flustered Mrs. Mulhaney.

“Mr. Davis, two of my tenants are very, very upset by all this,” she said worriedly. “Please don’t think that I haven’t every sympathy for your cousin’s wound, but these suffragists do bring such things on themselves…marches and torchlight parades, and working around hospitals and living alone. It’s so scandalous!”

Matt had to bite his tongue to keep from making a harsh reply. Mrs. Mulhaney was a victim of her own advanced age and her upbringing. She wouldn’t move easily into the twentieth century.

“She’s my cousin,” he said. “I won’t turn my back on her.”

He didn’t smile. At times he could look quite formidable. This was one of them.

“Well, and I wouldn’t expect you to!” she said, reddening. She made an odd gesture. “I’m sure that she’ll be discreet in the future—I mean, I do hope that she’ll be all right. If there’s anything I can do…”

“I’ve employed a woman to sit with her,” he said. “She’ll be taken care of.”

Matt Davis made her feel uncharitable, Mrs. Mulhaney thought. Those black eyes of his could chill her bones. She often wondered about his background. There were so many rumors about his origins. He didn’t have an accent, so she discounted those who credited him with European ancestry. However, the thought occurred to her that he might have studied English so thoroughly that he had no accent. She’d seen an African at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and he spoke perfect English with a British accent!

“If there’s anything I can do…” she reiterated.

Matt only nodded and went into his room, closing the door firmly behind him. Mrs. Mulhaney hovered, but only for a moment, then rushed downstairs, trying to put the troubling Matt Davis and his beautiful maverick cousin out of her mind.

SUNDAY, MATT SAT with Tess and Mrs. Hayes for most of the day, not caring what the other tenants or Mrs. Mulhaney might think. Tess was much worse, and quite feverish, as the doctor had predicted. She was pale as death except for her flushed cheeks.

Mrs. Hayes spent a good deal of her time wetting cold cloths to put over Tess’s feverish forehead.

“My husband was shot once,” she confided, “in a riot. Acted just like this, he did, delirious and tossing and turning and saying all sorts of crazy things. Poor child. She keeps muttering about birds. Ravens.”

He was not going to tell her that he’d once been known as Raven Following, or about the superstitions of his people concerning that large black bird.

“Delirious, I suppose,” he said, his eyes on Tess’s drawn face.

“She’s been like this for most of the night and a good deal of the morning,” Mrs. Hayes said. She put another cloth in place. “I’ll keep this fever at bay, don’t you worry, Mr. Davis. This child will be fine.”

He didn’t answer. One lean hand reached down to touch Tess’s flushed cheek.

Her pale green eyes opened, and she looked up at him through a mist of fever and laudanum. “My arm…hurts. Where is my father?”

Matt hesitated. “He isn’t here,” he said finally. “You’re going to be fine. Try to sleep.”

“I can’t…sleep. The birds come. They tear at my flesh.” She shivered as she looked at him. “The bullets,” she whispered frantically. “They tore the flesh like giant talons, and the people lay there, in the snow…in the snow!”

Wounded Knee. The fever would accentuate the horrible memories.

“Crazed in the head.” Mrs. Hayes nodded. “Birds and bullets and snow. Poor thing. Where is her father?” she asked Matt when Tess had slipped back into oblivion.

“He died,” he replied bluntly, “just a couple of months ago. She came here because I’m the only family she has left.” It made him warm inside to say it that way. It felt so true. She was the only family he had, too. They weren’t related—well, not by blood, at least—a fact that he didn’t dare share with anyone.

“Well, it’s good that you have each other,” Mrs. Hayes said. She frowned as she studied Tess. “Odd that she hasn’t married, and her such a pretty girl.”

“Yes,” he said.

She glanced at him. “No beau at all?”

“No,” he replied, hating the thought of Tess with another man. He’d often worried about what he’d do if she ever decided to marry anyone else. The situation hadn’t arisen, though, thank God. “She’s never mentioned a special man.”

“Would she, to her own cousin?” Mrs. Hayes asked. “But, then, perhaps not. It is a shame, though.”

Matt changed the subject adroitly by asking what Mrs. Hayes thought of President Roosevelt. She was good for an hour on that topic, as it happened, and Matt was able to avoid any more discussion of Tess’s love life.

THE NEXT MORNING, after only a few hours of sleep, Matt shaved and dressed for work.

He went in to see Tess, who was sleeping and still looked feverish. “I have to go to my office,” Matt said reluctantly. “Take good care of her. She’s a fighter, but it won’t hurt to remind her that she is.”

“I’ll do that.” Mrs. Hayes frowned. “That arm’s bleeding,” she pointed out.

Matt felt his stomach do an uneasy flip. “I’ll call at Dr. Barrows’s office on my way,” Matt said with a grim sigh. “She’s probably tossed and turned enough to tear the stitches.”

“T’ain’t but three stitches,” Mrs. Hayes said curtly. “I had to retie the bandage early this morning. That’s why it’s opened again.”

“What?” Matt’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Good Lord, the cut’s almost four inches long! It needed more than three stitches! I’ll speak to him about that, as well,” he said. He nodded, took one last look at Tess, and went out the door. His stride was enough to make two gentlemen on the street step right back to give him room.

DR. BARROWS WAS ON HIS way out when Matt caught up with him at the office he maintained at the side of his elegant residence.

“Tess is restless and has torn the wound open,” he told the physician curtly. “And Mrs. Hayes says that there were only three stitches to keep it from reopening.”

Dr. Barrows fidgeted, his black bag right in his hand. “Yes, yes, I know, I had barely enough sutures for that many stitches. I was sleepy, and it was very late… I have plenty of sutures this morning, though, and I’ll attend to it. Is she feverish?”

“Very.” Matt’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll take it personally if she doesn’t improve,” he added, and with an almost imperceptible movement of his arm, his jacket drew back from the bright paisley vest to disclose a leather belt that held a long, broad knife with a carved bone handle.

The doctor was used to threats, and he didn’t take them seriously. But this man wasn’t like those he routinely dealt with. And he hadn’t seen a knife like that since a boyhood trip out to the Great Plains. One of the cavalry scouts, a half-breed, had carried something similar. It was a great wide gleaming blade of metal with which, a sergeant told him, that very scout had lifted a scalp right in front of his eyes.