Doc - Mary Doria Russell [41]
Her German was cultivated, though charmingly accented by Magyar, and her voice was wonderful—low and husky. “Please,” she urged, “do come in. I am so pleased you decided to join us—we had feared you might be too fatigued.” She offered her hand, still speaking his own mother tongue. “I am Mária Katarina Harony. Americans call me Kate.”
She was handsome, not beautiful, but she had a creamy complexion and flaxen hair, and her eyes were perfectly matched by the aqua watered silk she wore. To find such a creature in such a wilderness! His response was courtly and automatic: to straighten, heels together, to incline his head and bring her hand close to his lips. Only then did the astonishment hit him.
“Harony? But I know that name! There was a Michael Harony, a physician—he served at the court of Maximilian in Mexico, yes?”
“My father.”
“I met him twice, though I doubt he would remember me. My grandmother was his patient. How is Dr. Harony?”
Her head remained high. “He died some years ago.”
“I am so sorry to hear it,” he began. “Ach! The revolution, of course!”
Before he could say more, Kate turned and, with a practiced smile over her shoulder, led him inside. She was the only lady in attendance. The restaurant was crowded with men eating, drinking, talking, smoking, none of them startled by the intermittent gunfire in the street as gangs of horsemen charged by, whooping like savages.
Speaking English now, Kate began to introduce him, and those dazzling eyes sparkled with mischief, for she had recognized his family name, as he had hers. As she expected, the arrival of Prince von Angensperg created a minor sensation.
“Can a priest be a prince?” someone asked.
“I was rather a small prince, and for rather a short time,” Alexander said modestly. “Our lands are less than a county here in Kansas. The title is now my nephew’s.”
Names came at him from every side and, once again, Alexander was struck by the youth of everyone around him. Few appeared beyond thirty, and most were a good deal younger. Only one among them was approaching forty: Mr. Robert Wright, an unimposing man with an ill-considered walrus mustache that only made his receding chin look weaker. He was, however, the owner of the biggest store in town, the city’s postmaster, and a recently elected Kansas state representative who talked at length about his admiration for Johnnie’s gumption. (“Reading all the time,” Bob said. “That boy was trying to make something of himself. Real admirable, sir. Real admirable.”) A Mr. Hamilton Bell was also important in some way having to do with elephants. He seemed to feel responsible for Johnnie’s death somehow.
Before Alexander could ask about that, a man named Chalkie Beeson introduced himself. (“It’s really Chalkley, sir, but nobody says it right.”) He owned the Long Branch, whatever that was, and talked about a brass band that would have played for Johnnie’s funeral, except that the instruments hadn’t arrived from St. Louis yet. “I ordered the kind with silver trimmings,” Chalkie confided. “Cost me over two hundred dollars!”
Each of these worthies had handed him a drink. With no food to buffer the alcohol pressed upon him, Alexander was already working hard to appear unaffected when he was cornered by the town’s mortician, whose poorly fitted glass eye was almost as distracting as the moistness of his palms when he grasped and held Alexander’s hand between both of his own. “Thank you for coming so quickly,” the undertaker said earnestly. “I did what I could for the body, but it’s not easy to embalm remains when they’ve been burned. We put him on ice, but the weather’s getting pretty warm, and—”
A barber, whose name Alexander didn’t catch, mercifully interrupted the undertaker before additional detail could be supplied. The barber, too, had many nice things to say about Johnnie Sanders, as did everyone who’d known the boy, one way or another.
It was heartwarming but all rather overwhelming, and Alexander was relieved when