The Drifter. Сьюзен Виггс

      Leah held a slim glass tube up to the gaslight. Crystals formed high on the tube; lower down she discerned a layer of inert substances. Her titration had worked this time even though it was a tricky business. She was lucky she’d gotten some results at last, for the bottle of Carrie’s tonic was almost empty.

      Using a sterile rod, she extracted some of the crystalline substance. Now she knew for certain, but the knowledge didn’t ease her mind. She had to figure out a way to tell Jackson what she’d discovered.

      Four

      “Mr. Underhill, if you hold that cup any tighter, you’ll break it,” Leah Mundy said.

      Jackson glanced down at his hand, saw that the knuckles had gone white. He stood in the doorway of the parlor, watching Carrie, and he hadn’t heard Leah approach him. He forced his grip to relax and turned his attention back to the parlor.

      Two weeks after Carrie’s illness—he’d trained himself not to think of it as a miscarriage—she appeared to be recovered. Surely she was feeling much better, for she had taken to holding court each afternoon in the parlor of the boardinghouse.

      Holding court was about the only way he could describe it. She liked to put on her prettiest dresses—she had a lot of them and wanted a lot more—and sit by the window on an old-fashioned fringed chaise and talk with the people who lived at the boardinghouse.

      Jackson didn’t know the folks too well, but they all took a shine to Carrie. People generally did. She was as pretty as the springtime, and when she was in a talkative state, people found her entertaining. Her rapt audience consisted of Aunt Leafy, who was no one’s aunt, but an avid student of everyone’s private affairs; Battle Douglas, a shrinking man terrified of his own shadow; Zeke Pomfrit, the aging vigilante and miner who made Jackson nervous; and Adam Armstrong, a timber baron who was said to be fabulously wealthy. He was a guest while his steam-powered yacht, La Tache, was being refitted at the harbor.

      Unlike Jackson, Armstrong didn’t trouble himself to do the work, but had hired a local shipwright to tinker with the engine and the wood-and-steel hull. Meanwhile, Adam spent his days wrestling with the unreliable telegraph at the post office, playing cards with the other boarders, or flirting with the girls at Nellie Morse’s dress shop in town.

      Jackson knew the type—fat on family money and not real interested in breaking a sweat over anything. He had the polished smoothness that seemed to be bred in the bones of men born to wealth and privilege. It was as if his family money and power had been applied to him like the clear oil varnish applied to a ship’s woodwork. Armstrong’s hair, lacquered by bay rum, tumbled down over his forehead in an apparently casual way, but he’d probably spent an hour getting it that way.

      Jackson shifted his gaze away from Adam Armstrong. The man didn’t interest him. There was nothing wrong with the fellow—except his unrelenting charm.

      At the center of them all, wearing an organdy gown she’d begged Jackson to buy in San Francisco, Carrie sat like a queen amid her subjects. Her eyes shone, her cheeks were flushed, and her voice had a piping, animated quality as she chattered of everything and of nothing at all.

      “…I had the most beautiful gown—it was tea rose moiré silk. And there was a woman who brought her little dog right into Antoine’s.”

      “Imagine that,” Armstrong murmured politely with a smile Jackson wanted to pound off his face.

      “I believe it was in New Orleans that I first heard ‘The Streets of Cairo,”’ Carrie went on. “Yes, as a matter of fact, it was New Orleans, at the Wildcat Club. The Cairo dance was so scandalous, but it couldn’t have been too evil, because my partner that night was a preacher. They had the most marvelous oysters there….”