Banner O'Brien Read Online Free

have brought a lap rug,” he said.
    The idea of being cosseted under a warm covering with this particular man was blatantly disturbing. “Your patients are waiting,” she said stiffly.
    He laughed that alarming laugh and slapped the reins down on the horse’s back and the buggy was moving again, jolting and shifting over the rutted road. The winter wind stung Banner through her coat and her dress, but not for all the tea in Wung Lo’s shop would she have admitted it.
    Their first call was routine; they visited a man who had fallen from a scaffold in the shipyard and broken his ankle. The patient was obsequious with Adam and openly curious about Banner.
    The second stop was sobering. Adam drew the buggy to a halt behind the merchantile, and they climbed steep, slippery wooden steps to reach a modest apartment where a woman lay groaning on a narrow bed that had been wedged between an iron cookstove and an unfinished wall.
    Two small boys in shabby knee pants and untucked shirts hovered at the foot of the cot, their eyes wide and frightened.
    Adam ruffled their hair in turn and drew two peppermint sticks from the pocket of his tweed coat. “I haven’t had time to eat these,” he said, with a serious expression that flailed against Banner’s heart like the wing of a trapped bird. “How about some help?”
    The children were eager to solve the dilemma, and they retreated to a pallet in the opposite corner of the room, whispering and measuring one stick of candy against the other.
    Banner’s attention swung to the woman on the cot. She was so thin that her hipbones were clearly visible even through her blanket. Her eyes were sunken and shadowed, and her lackluster brown hair was matted.
    Adam’s tone was gentle when he spoke. “Hildie, this is Dr. O’Brien. Will you please let her examine you?”
    Hildie’s pain-haunted eyes assessed the healthy, neatly dressed woman standing nearby, then shifted back to Adam. “If you’ll go outside, I will,” she said. “My Fitz don’t want—”
    Adam held up both hands in a concessionary gesture. “I know,” he broke in. “Your husband doesn’t want any man to see you without your clothes.”
    “It ain’t decent,” muttered Hildie.
    Adam made an exasperated sound, and for all its softness, it startled Banner. She’d been trying to identify the familiar, cloying odor that underlined the ordinary smells of cooking, tobacco smoke, and an unrinsed chamberpot.
    “I’ll take the boys downstairs for a while,” he said.
    Hildie half-rose from her dingy, coverless pillow. “Don’t you buy them nothin’, Doc, like you did the last time.”
    Adam’s jaw tightened, but he drew the two children to the door with him with an eloquent motion of onehand. Only a moment later he was gone, the stale air of the room stirred by the brief admission of the outdoors.
    Banner and Hildie were alone, and the nature of the smell Banner had been chasing through her mind came home to her with dismal clarity.
    “Open your nightgown, please,” she said, cloaking her despair in brisk professionalism.
    Hildie hesitated, then grudgingly complied. “How’d you ever get to be a doctor?” she demanded.
    “It wasn’t easy,” said Banner, keeping her features under strict control even though bile was rising in her throat like acid. Hildie’s right breast was eaten away by disease.
    “My Ma’s leg got just this way,” confided Hildie, in hushed, shaky tones that betrayed her fear. “She went blind, Ma did. And then she died.”
    Banner closed her eyes for a moment and longed for a breath of the crisp, bracing winter air outside. She cleaned the infected area with an alcohol solution and gave Hildie a stiff dose of laudenum.
    When this had been accomplished, Banner helped herself to water from a kettle on the stove and scoured her hands with the lye soap she carried in her bag.
    That done, she went to the door and opened it and swallowed great gulps of clean air.
    Adam had been waiting at