Doc - Mary Doria Russell [103]
By the time Mária Katarina was thirteen, her father had already refused her to a Mexican grandee and a minor Austrian duke, each of whom had inquired about his eldest daughter’s hand, and both of whom kept making excuses about paying Dr. Harony for medical services rendered.
“If a man can’t pay me,” his daughter overheard him say in the rapid Magyar her parents thought she didn’t understand, “he can’t pay his tailor, his groom, his cook, or his butler. He’s mortgaged to the neck on everything he has. By God, he won’t use my money to service his debt and drag my daughter into the bargain!”
“What will become of the girl if you refuse every man at court?” Madame Harony demanded, for the notion of being mother to a duchess had been rather dazzling.
“I haven’t refused every man at court,” Dr. Harony pointed out, “just two of them, both wastrels, and both—” He lowered his voice and whispered into his wife’s ear a bit of medical information calculated to end the conversation. Certainly nobody in the household ever mentioned those two names again.
Not long after that conversation, the question of marriage to an aristocrat was rendered moot. The glorious reign of His Imperial and Royal Highness Archduke Maximilian of Austria—Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, by the grace of God: Maximiliamo Primero, Emperor of Mexico—proved to be somewhat shorter than the list of his accumulated titles.
His court physician was warned to flee Mexico City by a loyal servant just before the volleys of revolutionary firing squads began echoing off palace walls. The Haronys escaped the bloodbath, but it took every jewel, every silver peso, every last centavo they possessed to flee northward, across thousands of kilometers of wilderness, to a place called Davenport, Iowa. There were other Hungarians in Davenport, Dr. Harony assured his wife and daughters. They would, he promised, find shelter with that community. And indeed, they did, briefly, but the destitute family’s luck continued to crumble …
Now Mária Katarina Harony was just plain Kate, sitting in a Dodge City bordello after a long night, asking a madam and a barkeep for advice about the very sort of improvident petty aristocrat her father had despised.
Full circle, she thought. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
She was frankly mystified by how Doc ever managed to take care of himself before she’d taken him in hand. He had inherited property in Georgia when his mother died but sold it to support himself after he came west. That cash was long gone. He never heard from his father; if the old man had anything, the bitch stepmother would get it all. Doc’s uncle was pretty well off, but John Stiles Holliday had boys of his own. There might be a bequest someday, though probably nothing big. So Doc was on his own, same as Kate, but that didn’t seem to matter. He always stayed in the best room at the best hotel in town. He was vain about his clothing and ordered imported English suits through a haberdasher in Atlanta. Doc wanted Kate to look good, too, and bought her French dresses and silk underthings and pretty shoes. Kate herself would have been happier with cheaper clothes and more jewelry. You could sell jewelry.
Doc acted like she was asking him to walk naked down Front Street whenever Kate attempted to economize. That damn wake had cost far more than it needed to, but Doc would spend himself into penury rather than give the slightest public hint that he cared about