determined to smile.” I sighed. “Well, what now?”
“We get you out of town,” Camille said.
“With what? I have no money.”
“Yes, you do.” Maureen rummaged in the basket and pulled out a purple velvet bag.
“Oh!” I took the bag from her, opened it, and looked down on my mother’s jewelry, the last connection I had to a woman I didn’t remember. I’d done everything possible to keep from parting with the jewelry five years earlier when I had struggled to start my practice. Sentimentality was a luxury I couldn’t afford now. “I hoped to never be desperate enough to part with these.”
“It don’t get much more desperate than this,” Maureen said. She reached back into the bottom of the basket and pulled out a glass jar. “I also got the housekeeping money.”
“No, Maureen. You will need that.”
“If you think you’re going off without me, you’ve got another think coming.”
My eyes burned. “You would do that?”
“Now don’t you go to getting all sappy on me, Katie Girl. You know as well as I do that you wouldn’t survive one day without me there to do all those things you never think of.” Maureen looked at Camille. “If her head hasn’t been in a book, then her mind has been wandering off to I don’t know where for as long as I can remember. Thinking about veins and organs and wasting diseases, most like. Though why any woman would want to think of those things is beyond my comprehension.”
“Mine as well,” Camille said as seriously as her subdued amusement would let her. “So, it is up to us to take charge, don’t you think?”
Maureen eyed Camille. Despite her best efforts, Camille’s easy demeanor and beauty won my devout Irish Catholic maid over.
Clutching the velvet bag to my chest, I turned to the window while the newfound friends made plans for my escape. Leaving New York. Starting a brand-new life out West. It was incomprehensible.
I thought of Beatrice Langton’s daughter, Elizabeth, on her sick bed, of Mrs. Watson bedridden for the last three months of her pregnancy, of the drawer full of drawings from sick children I’d doctored, of little Edward Beechum, whose cast I would remove next week, of the women who thanked me profusely for merely listening and taking their problems seriously. How could I leave them? Who would take care of them?
“I cannot leave.”
“What? Why?” Camille replied.
“I have patients who need me.”
Camille picked up the discarded paper and held it up. The $500 reward jumped from the page. “Do you really think you will be able to help your patients from jail? The judge will make sure you rot in there,” she said with a great deal of bitterness. “Even if, by some miracle, you aren’t thrown in jail, do you honestly think any of your other patients will stand by you? That the male doctors you’ve displaced won’t crucify you in the press as well as the drawing rooms of Washington Square?”
All the energy left me. She was right. My career in New York City was over. My pang of remorse at abandoning my patients was pushed aside by Camille’s next question.
“Catherine, how does Texas sound?”
Daunting. Terrifying. Remote.
“Perfect.”
CHAPTER THREE
“We will be on solid land soon.”
Maureen nodded and inhaled deeply in an effort to tamp down the nausea that had been constant since we sailed out of New York Harbor three weeks before. Her already thin frame had become frightfully gaunt; her face had been green for so long I had almost forgotten her normal rosy complexion. I put my hand over hers and squeezed.
Her eyes were glassy and distant, as if seeing events from the past instead of the thin strip of land sliding into view. The ever-present guilt that her misery was due to me blazed in my chest. I should have argued with more force against her coming, but her presence was so comforting I did not. Nor did I consider how traveling by sea would bring back memories of her journey from Ireland twenty-five