Mary Russell - Doc

“No,” Wyatt said.

Morg and Doc looked at him.

“Well, could be they was seeing each other,” he admitted, “but Belle Wright didn’t stake him.”

Morgan frowned, but Doc worked it out sooner.

“Never play poker, Wyatt,” he said quietly. “You are an open book.”

Morgan’s mouth dropped open. “Wyatt? But—where’d you get the money?”

Wyatt swallowed. “Borrowed it from James and Bessie.”

“ Why? ”

“Doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Oh. Oh, Wyatt,” Doc said, figuring the rest out. “You poor soul …”

For the past few nights, he had taken note of Wyatt’s technique over at the Alhambra, where the deputy now sat in when the regular dealer needed a break. Wyatt’s hands were big and that could be an advantage, but at his best he would never be as deft as Johnnie had been, for he was not as flexible in the wrist or as smooth on the pull. Still, the mechanics were the same, and now there was no question.

“You taught that boy to play,” Doc said.

“It was just something to take his mind off his parents,” Wyatt told them. “I didn’t know what else to do! Nobody else wanted him, and he kept crying … Faro’s easy to learn and he just took to it! When he showed up in Dodge, he made a little extra money—sitting in, you know? Then, last winter … I banked him.”

Morg looked stunned, and Doc’s eyes were full of bleak compassion.

Wyatt’s face was stiff. “I just wish—”

He couldn’t finish, but he didn’t have to. Usually it was his brother Morgan who could complete any thought. This time it was John Henry Holliday.

“Yes,” Doc said. “Yes, indeed. But it’s too late now.”

James was moving from table to table in the house saloon, collecting glasses on a tray, wiping up beer slops in the midmorning lull. He hadn’t done the count yet, but the night’s take promised to be good. The town was hopping, what with the Fourth of July festivities and midseason cattlemen splashing cash around.

“He’s a Southerner!” Bessie was saying, as though that clarified everything. She could see the look of exasperation on Kate’s face. “James, you explain it.”

Deftly delivering the clinking tray, one-handed, to the bar, he came over to stand next to Bessie’s chair. “Southerners out here? They’re like wandering Jews, Katie. They’re lonesome for a place they can’t be anymore. Even if they was to go back, everything’s different now. Wouldn’t be home—not how they remember it, anyways.”

Bessie reached up to slide her arms around her husband’s thickening waist and laid her head against his belly. “You’re gettin’ fat and bald but, honey, you ain’t so bad for a Yankee.” She sighed and looked into the middle distance. “Sometimes I think I’ll flat die for want of peonies and roses and sweet gum trees … Course, they’re all gone, back in Nashville. Dug up to clear ground for vegetables during the siege. Or cut down for firewood.”

“Doc ain’t no Jew,” Kate said thoughtfully. She lifted her feet onto the chair opposite her. “He could’ve cleaned up at a game last night, but he just wasn’t interested. Sometimes I think he don’t cares about money at all … He’s stupid about it, almost.”

“That’s Southern, too,” Bessie told her wryly. “Are his people planters, Kate? Mercy! Planters was the worst. Proud as Lucifer! Always in debt, always on the edge, but they still wanted the best of everything—”

That was when Kate figured it out.

“Aristocrats!” she said with a tone of bemused disdain that brought her father’s voice back as though he were standing behind her in the room. “Aristocrats!” he’d cry, throwing up his hands in defeat, unable to make sense of a phenomenon that science was helpless to explain. He was called upon nearly every day to treat aristocratic stomach pains and headaches and nervous disorders. In Dr. Michael Harony’s opinion, most of those ills were a direct result of the strain that comes from living beyond one’s means, as were the habits of gambling all night in hope of making a quick killing, and drinking in the morning to dull the fear of bankruptcy. “They spend like royalty on households and horses and hunts, on clothes and lavish parties and balls. Then they sneak out of their mansions to avoid bill collectors and insult their creditors in the street. It’s absurd!”

By the time Mária Katarina was thirteen, her father had already refused her to a Mexican grandee and a minor Austrian duke, each of whom had inquired about his eldest daughter’s hand, and both of whom kept making excuses about paying Dr. Harony for medical services rendered.

“If a man can’t pay me,” his daughter overheard him say in the rapid Magyar her parents thought she didn’t understand, “he can’t pay his tailor, his groom, his cook, or his butler. He’s mortgaged to the neck on everything he has. By God, he won’t use my money to service his debt and drag my daughter into the bargain!”

“What will become of the girl if you refuse every man at court?” Madame Harony demanded, for the notion of being mother to a duchess had been rather dazzling.

“I haven’t refused every man at court,” Dr. Harony pointed out, “just two of them, both wastrels, and both—” He lowered his voice and whispered into his wife’s ear a bit of medical information calculated to end the conversation. Certainly nobody in the household ever mentioned those two names again.

Not long after that conversation, the question of marriage to an aristocrat was rendered moot. The glorious reign of His Imperial and Royal Highness Archduke Maximilian of Austria—Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, by the grace of God: Maximiliamo Primero, Emperor of Mexico—proved to be somewhat shorter than the list of his accumulated titles.

His court physician was warned to flee Mexico City by a loyal servant just before the volleys of revolutionary firing squads began echoing off palace walls. The Haronys escaped the bloodbath, but it took every jewel, every silver peso, every last centavo they possessed to flee northward, across thousands of kilometers of wilderness, to a place called Davenport, Iowa. There were other Hungarians in Davenport, Dr. Harony assured his wife and daughters. They would, he promised, find shelter with that community. And indeed, they did, briefly, but the destitute family’s luck continued to crumble …

Now Mária Katarina Harony was just plain Kate, sitting in a Dodge City bordello after a long night, asking a madam and a barkeep for advice about the very sort of improvident petty aristocrat her father had despised.

Full circle, she thought. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose .

She was frankly mystified by how Doc ever managed to take care of himself before she’d taken him in hand. He had inherited property in Georgia when his mother died but sold it to support himself after he came west. That cash was long gone. He never heard from his father; if the old man had anything, the bitch stepmother would get it all. Doc’s uncle was pretty well off, but John Stiles Holliday had boys of his own. There might be a bequest someday, though probably nothing big. So Doc was on his own, same as Kate, but that didn’t seem to matter. He always stayed in the best room at the best hotel in town. He was vain about his clothing and ordered imported English suits through a haberdasher in Atlanta. Doc wanted Kate to look good, too, and bought her French dresses and silk underthings and pretty shoes. Kate herself would have been happier with cheaper clothes and more jewelry. You could sell jewelry.

Doc acted like she was asking him to walk naked down Front Street whenever Kate attempted to economize. That damn wake had cost far more than it needed to, but Doc would spend himself into penury rather than give the slightest public hint that he cared about money.