The Drifter

“Just curious, I guess. Is it some big secret?”

“No. I’m just not used to being asked.”

He swept a mocking bow, the tools in his apron clanking with the movement. “So I’m asking.”

She caught herself smiling at him.

“You ought to do that more often,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Smile. Makes you look downright pretty.”

“Looking pretty is not important to me.”

“That’s a new one on me. You didn’t have the usual kind of mama, I guess.”

“Actually, I was raised by my father. Since he had no son, I suppose you could say he pinned his aspirations on me.” She paused, gazing out a portal as she collected her thoughts. In the faraway past, she heard a voice calling, “Dr. Mundy, can you come?”

Leah, no more than ten at the time, went along with her father, holding the lamp in the buggy and then squashing herself into a corner of the sickroom at the patient’s house.

She could not bring herself to admit to this stranger, this friendly man with secrets of his own in his blue-gray eyes, that her father had been the worst sort of doctor, a quack, a purveyor of questionable potions that often did more harm than good.

“I learned much from being in practice with him,” she said. It was not quite a lie. She’d learned there was nothing more precious than human life. That people needed to look to a physician for hope. That a good doctor could do much to ease suffering while a bad one got rich from it. Her father had given her one gift. He had made her determined to succeed where he had failed.

She made herself remember the pain and the horror and the fact that even as he was dying, Edward Mundy had withheld his love. She swallowed hard. “He died of complications from an old gunshot wound.”

He gazed at her thoughtfully. “I take it that’s why you’re not real fond of guns.”

“A gun is the tool of a coward,” she snapped. “A tool of destruction. I’ve seen too often what a bullet can do.”

“Touché, Doc, as the Three Musketeers would say.” He changed tools, selecting an awl. “So you became a doctor just like your papa.”

“Not like my father.” She flushed and looked away. “We disagreed often about courses of treatment.” For no reason she could fathom, she added, “We disagreed about everything, it seemed.”

“Such as?”

The proper way for Leah to dress. And talk. And behave.

The way to snare a wealthy husband.

Where they would flee to each time one of his patients expired due to his incompetence.

“Well?” Jackson prompted.

She already regretted the turn the conversation had taken. Yet it was surprisingly easy to talk to him. Probably because she knew that he was only here for a short time; then she’d never see him again. He couldn’t use the things she told him to hurt her.

“He never quite understood my insistence on practicing medicine for the good of humankind rather than to make money. He thought I should spend my leisure time pursuing drawing-room etiquette. He was disappointed when I failed to marry well.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean—marry well?”

“My father thought it meant marrying a man who’d settle his bad debts for him.”

“And you? What do you think it means?”

“Finding a man who will l—” she didn’t dare say it “—esteem me.”

“So why haven’t you done it yet?”

“Because such a man doesn’t exist.” The old ache of loneliness throbbed inside her. “I’ve yet to meet a man who would give me the freedom to practice medicine. Men seem to want their wives to stay at home, keeping the hearth fire stoked and darning socks instead of healing the sick.”

“It all sounds like a damned bore to me.”

“Healing the sick?”

“No. Stoking the hearth and darning socks.”

She laughed. “Did your mother never teach you a woman’s place is in the home?”

All trace of pleasantry left his face. “My mother never taught me a goddamned thing.”

His tone of voice warned her not to probe an old wound. We both have our scars, she thought. We work so very hard to hide them.

“So who taught you about the Three Musketeers?”

“Taught myself.” His voice had gone flat, uninviting. Then he brightened, reaching up to lean the heel of his hand on a cross beam. Light from the deck prisms fell across him, striking glints of gold in his hair. “Now that I’ve got the Teatime, I can go anywhere.”

“Where do you plan to go?”

“Wherever the wind takes me.”

“It sounds rather…capricious. Do you never think of staying somewhere, settling down?”

He got back to work, swirling his brush in a bucket of glue. “I never think of much at all.”

Letting the wood glue set around a loose bolt, Leah fell silent for a time, thinking. She wanted to ask him so many things: what he had left behind in his past, why he never spoke of the baby Carrie had lost, what he expected of the future. But she held her tongue. At an early age, she had learned caution. Watch what you say to another person. Watch what you learn about him. Watch what you feel for him.

Once in her life, she had given her whole heart and soul to a man, and he had crushed her flat. That man had been her father. He was a charlatan, but he was all she knew, all she had, and she’d given him enormous influence over her choices. Now she had nothing but broken, bitter memories.

Wishing she could forget the past, she worked in silence alongside Jackson Underhill, studying him furtively. In her profession she had seen men from all angles, yet she regarded Jackson as uniquely—and discomfitingly—interesting.

Despite a demeanor she found more charming than she should, he seemed to be a man who expected—and usually got—the worst life had to offer. Yet he still clung to hope in a way that was alien and intriguing to Leah.

“I’m curious, Mr. Underhill,” she said, unable to stop her incautious questions in spite of herself. “How is it that you came to be in possession of this boat?”

“What makes you think I didn’t commission her?”

“Somehow I can’t picture you christening a boat Teatime.”