Doing No Harm (15 page)

Chapter 14

P
recisely how he knew that
, Douglas Bowden couldn’t have said. He did know this: the more thought he devoted to Edgar’s problems, the less his nightmares bothered him. Olive had said as much at the end of the week, with only a little tinge of rose to her complexion. She blushed and confirmed what he suspected.

“There has been no cause for me to keep half an ear open for you,” she had told him one morning as he finished his coffee and prepared to tackle his house again. “See there? Edgar is good for you.”

He nodded, although he did not agree with her. She saw that too, commenting, “You’re a wee bit too skeptical, Mr. Bowden,” as she retreated to the kitchen. He already knew she only called him Mr. Bowden when others were present or when she had a bone to pick. She was an easy woman to feel comfortable around.

Olive Grant had been as good as her word. In the time Douglas had taken to re-splint Tommy Tavish’s leg and compliment the lad on his courage and stoicism through the ordeal, Olive had assembled a working crew in the dining room. By the end of the week, he was ready to move in.

Douglas decided that “slightly haunted” was probably one of Olive Grant’s few attempts to stray to the shady side of truth. When he teased her about it, she merely smiled.

“I don’t object to a little fib now and then,” he told her. “The thought of ‘wee hants,’ as Mrs. Campbell said, apparently was enough to tip the scales in my favor.”

He had to admit that the house by the bridge suited his temporary needs completely. With the key safely in his pocket now, he felt a certain pleasure each evening after the cleaners left to walk through the rooms and realize that he had a place of his own, one that didn’t shift about at the whim of the ocean or the Royal Navy.

He even wondered if the long-empty house had been built specifically with a surgeon in mind, although Olive told him it was not. The small kitchen off the back of the house was perfect for compounding and rolling pills. To his surprise, the room he had designated for his combination office and surgery already had that wall of built-in shelves and drawers. Even the minister, perhaps chagrined that he hadn’t been Christian enough to say a few words of comfort over Tommy’s tiny sister, found a suitable desk and chair for that room. Once the man who had crafted crutches for Tommy finished the surgery table, the room looked like exactly what it was, right down to the smell of carbolic, part of his haul from Dumfries’ apothecary, which took him away for a day of scouring the town to furnish his surgery.

Between Olive, Mrs. Aintree, and other neighbors whose aches and pains he had addressed, he soon had chairs enough for a waiting room adjacent to the surgery, plus a threadbare but clean carpet underfoot.

Upstairs was his own area, complete with sofa that could easily convert to a bed, if he had a patient who needed closer supervision. Mrs. Aintree insisted she had no use for a handsome wingback chair and small table. “It’s a chair for a man,” she said, her tone of voice brooking no argument. (
What is it about Scottish women?
he asked himself.) “Mr. Aintree has been gone long years now. He’d be pleased to see it put to good use.”

After some rudimentary lessons on the management of crutches, Tommy made a halting beeline to Mrs. Cameron’s hovel and spent the afternoon with his mother. As shadows began to lengthen across Edgar, Douglas walked to the hovel to retrieve Tommy and to think about what he saw there. Only that day, Olive had told him more about the Highland Scots from the Duchess of Sutherland’s district who literally washed ashore two years ago, the Tavishes among that number.

He had gone to her kitchen to beg the loan of some tacks to anchor a rug that had appeared on his doorstep. A better rug than most, he wondered out loud if Lady Telford had seen to its arrival that morning. It was too good a rug to have crawled there to die, he had joked to Olive Grant as she kneaded bread.

“Please don’t use that phrase,” she had said, giving the dough an extra punch and wallop. “You are reminding me of the first of the Sutherland crofters only two years ago.”

“Tell me,” he said, wanting to know more.

Her gentle face still registering the horror of that day, she told him of the storm that had capsized a small vessel already dismasted by a fickle spring storm. “It happened at night, and none of us knew anything until the next morning.” She stopped her kneading and stood there, wrists deep in dough. She looked at him and her eyes filled with tears.

“Douglas, we could have used you then.” She passed her hand in front of her eyes, leaving flour on her forehead.

Douglas promptly took a damp cloth and wiped her face. He didn’t imagine that she would lean into his shoulder, and he didn’t object. He put his arm around her.
I have done this to many a patient
, he thought.
None of them smelled this good, though
.

She moved away so he released her. “Papa was still alive then. He opened the front door, and there they were, a few survivors, crawling down the street, too wounded and weary to cry for help.”

He shook his head, thinking that such sights had been his lot in wartime, but in England? “Where were they going?”

“They didn’t even know,” she said, giving the dough a savage punch. “Several of them spoke only Gaelic. My father could understand them, but just barely. From what he pieced together, these crofters from somewhere in the Grampion Mountains had been herded to Fort William and told they were going to Prestwick south of Glasgow, to take up the fishing trade. Fishing! They knew nothing of fishing.”

She slammed the dough into a pan and covered it, then sat down with a thump, her eyes bleak. “They had never even been on a boat before, so you can imagine the seasickness. And then a spring storm came up, and the captain was blown south and sought shelter in our estuary.”

She couldn’t say anything else. Douglas sat beside her. He fingered his taped ribs and felt sudden pity for Joe Tavish, one of hundreds overwhelmed by misfortune not of his own making. And if he was honest, and why not, he could remember some heavy drinking after he lost three amputees in a row.

Bless Olive Grant’s kind heart; she seemed to know what he was thinking. She nudged him. “Everyone has reasons,” she said.

“Yes, but my ribs still ache and my eye is almost as colorful as yours,” he teased. “Still, I wonder where Joe has taken himself.”

No one had stopped by his surgery, but he tacked a “Returning Soon” sign to his front door because he was conscientious. The fishing fleet still stood off the mouth of the River Dee, but the afternoon hour told him that soon the little boats would dock at Edgar and the women who cleaned the fish would arrive in force. After what Olive had told him, he wondered how many of the women were Highland cattle herders’ wives, transplanted unwillingly to strange southern shores.

The Tavish house looked even worse, with the front door flapping open, and someone’s chickens wandering through like spectators judging one family’s misery.

He knocked on Mrs. Cameron’s door.

“Come!” said a cheery voice.

He opened the door and saw what he had seen before, with one difference: There was food on the table, which had been covered with a neatly patched cloth. A loaf of bread sat almost proudly in the center of the table, with a knife placed just so, and a jam jar.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your meal,” he began, but Mrs. Cameron hushed him with an upraised hand.

“We’re eating later,” she said. “T’bread is there in case someone should stop by—thou, for instance.”

With sudden, blinding realization, he knew what he was looking at, and it humbled him. The coins he had left with Mrs. Cameron had been turned into Highland hospitality.

“You have other loaves and maybe some herring?” he asked, hopeful there was more.

“A wee dab of butter too,” she said, beaming at him. “Some eggs and some mutton and potatoes for a stew.”

He took her hand and she did not try to pull away. “Mrs. Cameron, you are a providential housewife and a kind neighbor to Mrs. Tavish. Where is she?”

She patted his hand and pulled him into the next room, where Tavish mother and son sat close together on the bed. Occupying the room’s only chair was Mrs. Aintree. His tail wagging hard enough to nearly overset him, Duke leaned against Tommy.

This was more than he had dared hoped for, considering that Olive had told him of bitter feelings of Edgar’s long-time citizens, trapped in their own more genteel poverty, against the Gaelic-speaking, mostly illiterate Highlanders dumped on them.

Neither a look nor a glance suggested that Mrs. Aintree suffered embarrassment to be found in such a place. A casual visitor who didn’t know better could have been forgiven for thinking that the two women were the dearest of friends.

Mrs. Tavish might not have considered herself a patient of his, but she offered no objection when Douglas touched her wrist to feel her pulse, and then rested the back of his hand against her forehead. He saw that she was clean and her hair tidy. She wore a nightgown that looked well worn, but came with a delicate sprinkle of embroidered flowers on the yoke. He turned inquiring eyes on Mrs. Aintree, who blushed.

“How many nightgowns does a widow need?” she asked. “Tommy said his mam had n’more than a shift, and that will never do. I found some other things, for when she feels better.”

“You’re a good neighbor,” Douglas said.

“It’s overdue,” Mrs. Aintree said simply. “Besides that, I had to tell Mrs. Tavish what a fine job her boy is doing of milking my Lucinda.”

Tommy smiled at that bit of praise. “Mr. Bowden, Mrs. Aintree says that I am ready to milk all by myself.”

Mrs. Aintree held up her hand with the fused fingers. “Mr. Bowden, you let me know when you are ready, because I will be too!” Her face fell and the worry returned. “I don’t know about Tommy lifting the milk pail, but …”

“We’ll find someone,” Douglas assured her. “Give me another day or two to make things right in my surgery, and we’ll do the thing.” He turned his attention to Mrs. Tavish, who lay in bed, her face composed and the strain gone from her eyes. He even thought her face looked less pinched and hungry. “You’ll be up soon, too.”

She nodded and said something in Gaelic, which made Tommy beam. It needed no translation. Douglas nodded to them all and returned to the front room, where Mrs. Cameron held a slice of bread—glory, but it was still warm—slathered with plum jam. She held it out to him, and he took it, enjoying the bread and jam, but even more, the kindness.

When he finished, he left more coins on the table. “Keep up what you’re doing, Mrs. Cameron. Your kind of nursing is the true balm.”

Satisfied, he left the hovel, wondering at what point it had turned from a miserable pile of boards barely holding its own against rain and wind into a home. He took a good look and understood what had changed.

He had.

He sauntered slowly past the row of hovels, suddenly understanding that inside each wreck was a family. Some had already been to see him in his temporary surgery in kind Miss Grant’s sitting room. Many more probably needed his help, but pride and poverty kept them indoors.

“Wait up there, lad.”

Douglas turned to see Mrs. Aintree making her deliberate way toward him. He waved a hand and waited, thinking of battles at sea and wounded men tumbling down the companionway to his overcrowded, overworked sick bay. That was one kind of medicine; this was another. Might as well do all the good he could here, before he found a better place to spend his days.
I’ll perfect my bedside manner, where never I had needed such a luxury before
, he thought with some amusement.
I’ll experiment on the people of Edgar
.

He nodded to Mrs. Aintree and decided to start with her. He offered her his arm, which she took with a blush. “You are kindness itself, Mrs. A,” he said. “I doubt Mrs. Tavish has ever worn anything with embroidered flowers.”

She pinked up further, probably amazed that a man would notice, and looked back. “It’s hard there,” she said.

“Not as hard as it was a week ago,” he told her. “Tommy is on the mend, and you have given him something to do. I will do what I can for you, and I think that is how things work on land.”