At Doc’s she led the way up the stairs and into the small living room. Mam had done herself spectacularly, having laid the table with a roasted goose, a baked potato, and a loaf of fresh-baked bread with chokecherry jam. All of which, given the shortages and deplorable lack of fresh vegetables in the city, was a culinary miracle.
“Oh, my God,” Bridget cried, placing hands to her face. “This is a feast for kings!”
“Well,” Sarah admitted, “at least for a king and queen. I shall act as your squire and handmaiden.” She stepped around the table as Doc held Bridget’s chair, then she held his as he was seated.
Sarah poured Madeira from the last bottle surviving from the Angel’s Lair opening, and offered the toast. “To Mr. and Mrs. Philip Hancock. Huzzah! Huzzah! And may love and prosperity fill all the days of your lives.”
“Here! Here!” Doc and Bridget cried in unison.
Sarah served—a feeling of contentment warm in her breast. “I do wish Maw, Butler, and Billy could be here to see this.”
“Life didn’t quite give us the paths we hoped to walk, did it?” Doc asked, taking a bite of roast goose. “Oh my, that is wonderful. Mam just makes miracles, doesn’t she?”
“The way she tells it,” Bridget added, “slaves had to find ways to make do with almost nothing, so they figured out recipes that made food their masters wouldn’t eat into delicacies.”
“In the end, it’s always about making the best out of hard times, isn’t it?”
“You referring to my condition, Doc?” Bridget said hesitantly, her fork halfway to her mouth.
“Good God, no!” Doc replied in shock. “I was thinking of prison camp, and how men with nothing, not even hope, managed to hang on.” He took a deep breath, reaching across the table for Bridget’s hand. “We are having a child. Together. As a husband and his wife do. I love you, Bridget. More today than I have ever loved you. Events forced us to move with greater rapidity than perhaps I would have liked, but as I told you, I’ve been thinking of marriage for some time now. I could not be happier.”
Sarah watched them staring into each other’s eyes, at the way they smiled with such intimacy. Damn, she missed Bret. Too often she caught herself dreaming of his smile and laugh. At times she practically ached for his company, especially that wry amusement with which he viewed the world. For those months that she and Bret had been together, she’d had a fit mate for body and soul. In the aftermath of his murder, she’d been lonelier than even during those terrible days after she fled from Billy.
“What’s wrong, Sarah?” Bridget asked, sensitive as usual to her moods. “That’s the missing-Bret look.”
Sarah smiled, spread her hands wide. “Guilty. If the two of you have half, just half, of what we had, you’ll be daisies for the rest of your lives.”
“We’ll make do,” Doc said, thoughtfully watching her. “With a child coming, Bridget and I have been talking. It’s no longer just the two of us. The child will change things.”
“Doc and I will want to relocate,” Bridget said. “Sometime. After the child is born. We’re thinking maybe California. Someplace where Doc can establish a surgery where no one knows who we are. What we’ve been.”
Sarah gave Bridget a wink. “Were I in your shoes, I’d do the same.” She cut a thick slice from the breast. “My goals are compatible. I think we should sell the Angel’s Lair by next summer, Aggie. The new girls are working out. The playacting is popular, and we’ve added an element the johnnies have never known they were missing. If we were to push it to two years, I think the newness would be worn off, or someone is going to copy our action.”
“And then what are you going to do?” Doc asked.
“Property.” She glanced between the two of them. “I’ve been buying up lots in Cheyenne. Railroad should be there in a month or so. And believe me, the railroad is going to change this country like nothing else. You’d be surprised what a girl can learn when Big Ed, George Nichols, or Pat O’Reilly is whispering in her ear.”
“You worry me sometimes, sister,” Doc told her. “Your playmates are scary.”
She smiled wistfully. “Philip, my world started to crumble the day Butler and Paw rode off to war. Silly girl that I was, I thought all I had to do was marry the right man. Which, of course, Paw would see to. I only needed to look pretty and offer myself as a brood mare to produce my husband’s children. It wouldn’t have been on the basis of love as you and Bridget are doing, but a service in return for a place in my husband’s house, and the status I derived from his.”
“And how is that different from what you have now? You’re still depending upon men. A lot of them as they pass through.”
“Aggie and I own the house,” she told him with a deadly smile. “And we’re using it as a stepping-stone. But true power, brother, lies in money and property. I may be a fancy whore for the moment, but only until I can grow the value of the Angel’s Lair into enough capital to acquire the right property. And when I sell that, I’ll acquire even more property, until I can buy and sell the men who’ve bought and sold me.”
Philip looked at her through somber eyes. “That sounds hard and cold, little sister. You used to have a romantic side, almost dreamy eyed as you talked about the future.”
“That Sarah is long dead, Philip. Maybe it happened
