The Savage Heart

“Indeed!”

“I work in the Cook County Hospital,” she added.

“I thought you looked familiar. What a small world. And how fortunate that you knew what to do for this. I shan’t need to lecture you on how to tend it, shall I?” he added with a small chuckle.

He swabbed the wound with more alcohol, then began to take stitches while she recited the alphabet through gritted teeth.

“I have only a small amount of suturing material with me,” he explained. “That wound could do with a few more stitches, but I think the three I’ve made will hold just fine.” He applied a neat bandage.

“You’ll send for me if there are any problems,” he said, rising. “And you won’t work until the wound heals,” he added firmly.

“Yes, sir,” she said with a resigned sigh, wondering how she was going to earn her crust of bread. She still had a little of the nest egg her father had left her. Hopefully, she wouldn’t have to use too much of it. “You’ll send your bill?”

“My wife will,” he said kindly. “And now I’ll give you something to make you sleep.”

He left a bottle of laudanum with instructions on its use, gave her a polite nod and a smile as he snapped his bag shut and left.

Somber and quiet, Matt entered only minutes later. “The doctor said that he gave you something to make you rest.”

“Yes. This.” She indicated the cork-stoppered brown bottle.

“I’ll fetch a spoon.”

“Can’t I have it in water?”

“All right.”

There was a glass carafe near the bed. He poured water from it into its matching cup, mixed the drug for her and watched her gulp the bitter-tasting draft.

“If you have fever, and you probably will, you’ll have to be sponged down,” he said. “I’d prefer to stay with you myself, but it just wouldn’t be acceptable, Tess. You know that. Mrs. Mulhaney already has complained about your nursing and your work in the women’s movement. We don’t dare make matters worse.”

She felt very sick, and her arm was hurting badly. She looked up at Matt, only half hearing him. “I feel terrible.”

“No doubt.” He brushed wisps of hair back from her face. “I’m going to find someone to sit with you. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.”

Her hand caught his, and she held it to her cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered wearily.

His face was unreadable, but his fingers lightly caressed her cheek before he drew them away. “Try to sleep,” he said. “The laudanum should help.”

“Yes.”

He eased out the door and closed it behind him, his dark face taut with anger. It made no sense at all that someone should deliberately stab her, but that was the only logical explanation for what had happened. And he had a sick feeling that wounding her had not been the goal of her attacker. Far from it. She’d mentioned rolling away from trampling feet just before she felt the pain. Had he been aiming at another target on her body? If she hadn’t rolled over, would she be dead now?

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?”