Doing No Harm (23 page)

D
ouglas decided that the
earth’s axis had somehow shifted under Edgar, and he was quite willing to give the credit to Flora MacLeod. He had mentioned that epiphany to Olive, who had looked at him a long time down her nose.

“I believe she must share the credit with you, Mr. Bowden,” she assured him the next morning when he stopped by to see Flora’s most recent crop of fancies. “The people of my village are already calling you their surgeon. I know! I know! You have no plans to stay.”

“I don’t,” he had said, trying to sound firm, but failing, in his critical estimation. “Thank you for understanding my own need for peace and quiet.”

“I understand perfectly, and they don’t need to know, sir,” she said. “You can vanish some night, once you have solved all of our problems.”

She was such a tease. They laughed together, and Olive even agreed to assist when he unfused Mrs. Aintree’s fingers.

“I can train you to be an excellent pharmacist mate,” he told her. “You can learn to handle any number of minor crises.”

The fishy look she gave him suggested that her heart wasn’t entirely taken up with medicine, as his obviously was, since he couldn’t even get through a Scottish village without stopping to heal its inhabitants and maybe walk on water.

He accepted the fact that he was an easy mark, which would have astounded his Royal Navy colleagues, who knew him only as a hard-eyed, single-minded surgeon lacking even a flyspeck of sentiment.

Fools, they have never met Flora MacLeod, Douglas decided as he walked across the street later for luncheon with Olive. The little girl had already burst into his house earlier that morning after the early coach had stopped at the Hart and Hound. She wore that yellow dress from an earlier decade, held in by a length of twine.

“Ah! Lovely!” he had said before she even had a chance to speak. “Twirl around.”

She did and then opened her fist to show him ten coins. “Mr. Bowden! Two charms to the same lady!”

“That’s what I thought might happen, Flora,” he told her. “Travelers want more than one to share with friends.”

He sent her on her way with little Pudding, who was bobbling about and disinclined to remain in the box where she had convalesced. “He needs that fine oatmeal several times a day,” was Douglas’s prescription. “Buy two pennies’ worth of oats at the greengrocer’s and feed Mama cat as well. I’ll be over in a few days to remove her sutures.”

Satisfied, he watched as Flora carefully picked up her kitten, wrapped her into a length of Gran’s shawl, and left at a more sedate pace. She looked back in the doorway and he gave her an inquiring glance.

“Mr. Bowden, you are good with kittens,” she said, her eyes kind. He looked for anxiety and distrust and saw none. He was no fool to think that Flora MacLeod would never have another nightmare or frightening turn, but he could not deny the gentle mantle of peace that had settled on her young shoulders. For now, he would count it as a blessing.

By the time he made the trip across the street to luncheon, Flora had found her way to Olive’s tearoom with the MacGregor sisters, who now had a dress apiece.

The smaller sister, introduced to him by Flora as Euna, stood on a table in the corner of the tearoom as Mrs. Campbell pinned the hem. “Euna and Sally MacGregor,” Flora said. “They will help make our little fancies. Miss Grant says we have formed a corporation.”

Douglas laughed. “You’ll have to declare a name, register it, and pay taxes to the crown.”

“We’re not paying the crown a single penny,” Flora assured him.

“I wouldn’t either,” Olive said. She sat hemming one of the dresses.

“A revolutionary,” Douglas warned. “
Aux barricades
!”

She shook her finger at him and returned to her hemming, looking as content as he had ever seen her. He looked round the tearoom, where Olive’s usual customers chatted quietly and ate what looked like venison sandwiches.
And when was the last time anyone here ever had meat
, he asked himself, pleased.

“The girls are paying me a penny each to alter their dresses,” Mrs. Campell said, speaking around the pins in her mouth, which made the surgeon in Douglas Bowden give a silent yelp. Why did women do that?

“Mrs. Campbell is a treasure,” Olive said softly, after clearing off a spot for him to sit. “I sold a lot of that venison haunch last night to some of my neighbors who don’t always stop in. I was able to buy some squares of cloth from the dry goods store this morning for more serviettes. Mrs. Campbell will hem those too.”

“I see commerce all around me,” he told her. “Flora, I have written to Plymouth and you will have more shells soon enough. Have you and your … your board of directors made more fancies?”

“Done and done,” Flora told him. As she turned around, Douglas noticed that the twine belt had been replaced by a lovely length of yellow cotton, probably bought at the same time as the material for serviettes by the kind lady he sat next to, the one with the deep red hair in its now-familiar disarray, pins poked here and there, because she was too busy thinking of others to give a minute to herself. He hesitated only a second before he tucked in one of those pins about to lose its moorings. She flashed him a smile that did something funny to his heart.

“We’re starting small, here in Edgar,” Olive said. “We need a bold stroke, Douglas. You can’t leave until we have one.”

“Leave? Who is … Oh, yes, I am.”

He ate his venison sandwich in thoughtful silence, watching the girls peacock about in dresses given to them by another kind lady. None of them wore shoes, but it was spring now. He doubted they had worn shoes this past winter, but some knowledge deep inside him assured him that they would have shoes by the time cold returned to Scotland. How he knew, he couldn’t have said. It was absurd to think that he was changing too. He was an adult quite set in his ways.

A brief consultation with the kind lady assured him that she would meet him in the surgery with Mrs. Aintree, once the dishes were done.

“Do you mind?” he asked. “I am starting to assume that you are a willing accomplice. Doesn’t everyone love surgery?”

She wagged her finger at him again. “Mr. Bowden, you’re stretching it.”

Stretching it or not, she knocked on his door that afternoon and helped in a pale Mrs. Aintree and a delegation that warmed his heart a little more.

Mrs. Tavish and her son came in too. Douglas closed the door firmly on Duke. “We will expect the beast to guard us,” he told Tommy. “Outside.”

He looked out the window to watch Duke turn around a few times and then sink down, as dejected as only a gregarious dog could look.

“We’re here to provide comfort,” Mrs. Tavish said, with nothing in her tone suggesting that she would leave until Mrs. Aintree was safely back in her own bed.

He made his own swift assessment of Mrs. Tavish, amazed at the difference a few weeks, a little hope, and a home of her own could make. “Do you feel able to tend Mrs. Aintree?” he asked, mainly because it was a doctor thing to ask.

She gave him a little smile, the kind of smile he never saw at sea, because he did not see many women aboard Royal Navy vessels. He had seen it enough in Edgar, though, the smile that suggested men had no idea what women were capable of.

“Aye, Mr. Bowden,” was her answer, delivered with sufficient steel to guarantee that although Mrs. Tavish had fallen on hard times, she had not remained in them. The set look to her lips and in her eyes reminded him of other Highlanders he had doctored through the years. He knew them as people who did not complain because they were already well acquainted with the cruelties of life.

“Sit here with your boy,” he told her and indicated the mismatched chairs in his waiting room.

He turned to Mrs. Aintree and took her by the hand. She looked at him with all the trust in the world. He had seen the look before, even in times when he felt less adequate than a barnacle. It had moved him the first time, and it did not fail to move him now.

She had brought along a nightgown as he had asked. “I just want you comfortable,” he had told her last night when he had spent time in her parlor.

She had asked last night why he could not separate her fingers in the ease of her own home, and he had explained about the light. He could tell she was skeptical but a polite lady. She looked around his surgery and nodded.

He had borrowed two lamps from Olive, who had talked the minister’s wife out of two more.

“I understand now,” Mrs. Aintree said, looking around with understanding. “There’s not much light comes into my chamber, tucked there under the eaves.”

“I like to give myself every advantage.” Douglas pulled the curtains closed. “Please allow Miss Grant to help you change. Knock on the door when you are ready, and I’ll come back.”

He went into the waiting room, surprised to see Mrs. Campbell and the minister’s wife sitting there, too, as well as two ladies he did not recognize. The press of well-wishers reminded him of an outdoor surgery in the South Pacific, surrounded by tribesmen all too close to their cannibal roots, watching every nervous move he made. He had been called up to amputate an infected leg of a sailor who had deserted the Royal Navy years earlier. He thought of the chorus of “Ah’s” from that unholy bunch as he pulled the diseased leg away and set it in a bucket. He had turned back to his patient to finish the job, peering around a few minutes later to find the leg gone, and the cannibals looking more than usually satisfied, if such he could divine from their expressions. The memory of that amputation made him smile.

But this was Edgar, and his patient was not a heathen but a lady. His tongue felt paralyzed. He was wholly inadequate to conduct idle chatter, which, he realized, with a sinking feeling, must constitute some necessary portion of a private medical practice. He sat there, ill at ease, aware that no one in his waiting room would appreciate his little South Seas story. Probably no lending library, even Edgar’s, owned a book that would explain idle chatter.

Olive’s knock on the door put him out of his misery. He bounded up, which made Mrs. Campbell chuckle, and began the business at hand, confident of his skills.

Wearing serviceable flannel and a solemn expression, Mrs. Aintree stood in her stockinged feet, her face rosy. “No man except Mr. Aintree has ever seen me in a nightgown,” she informed him primly.

“You’re fetching, my dear,” he said. “I know you wonder why this is necessary, but I assure you that you’ll be easy for me to carry across the street and pop you into your own bed, without having to suffer raising your arms to remove your garments then. Allow me, Mrs. Aintree.”

He took her hand, and with Olive assisting, helped his patient onto the surgery table, which he had earlier padded with Mrs. Aintree’s own blankets. He raised the clever hinged board that the author of Tommy Tavish’s crutches had crafted only last night. He situated Mrs. Aintree, stretched out her arm on the board, and then bound her to it with bandages.

He heard a muffled sob and looked back, startled, to see Olive in tears.

Mrs. Aintree looked too. “Olive Grant, you are made of sterner stuff!” his patient said. “Buck up.”

Pray don’t faint, Olive
, he thought. “You were a stalwart when I operated on Tommy Tavish,” he reminded her.

She nodded and chewed her lip. “I am no stalwart,” she said. “Af … after you finished with Tommy I went into the alley behind my tearoom and … oh dear.”

Mrs. Aintree raised up on her elbow. “Douglas Bowden,” she commanded, “give our Miss Grant a little cuddle!”

The advice was excellent and Douglas gathered Olive close. His good humor reasserted itself. “You’re a thousand times more fun to cuddle than a pharmacist’s mate,” he declared, which made her chuckle. She murmured, “I should hope so. Surely you never …”

“Certainly not, Miss Grant!” he said, which made him laugh out loud. He rested his hand on her neck, because she had a fine neck. “Just be a stalwart for ten minutes, and I’ll hold back your hair over the basin myself.”

“Such an offer,” she said, with some vestige of her sharp humor. “You don’t give a person a chance to back out or disagree, do you?”

“No.” He led her to the surgery table. “I never could afford to, then or now. Mrs. Aintree, meet Olive Grant, my excellent assistant. And here you thought she only ran a tearoom. She is going to hold your good hand and we will be done in less than ten minutes. Ten minutes. Keep that in mind.”

Mrs. Aintree nodded. She closed her eyes, which Douglas took as his signal to proceed. He poured a dab of laudanum on a bit of cotton and squeezed a few drops into Mrs. Aintree’s mouth. “It’ll take the edge away, but not much more.”

He watched a moment until her shoulders relaxed, knowing they would tense again when he made the first cut. He moved Olive across the table from him and put her hands on the widow’s stomach. “Just keep her steady.”

Olive turned terrified eyes on him, which meant he had to touch her face and look into those eyes.

“There, now.”

He opened the curtains, turned on the lamps, and began slicing between Mrs. Aintree’s ring finger and little finger, fused because there had been no surgeon anywhere near Edgar to offer sensible advice a year ago. Mrs. Aintree shuddered but Olive held her still. He cut and dabbed, secure in the knowledge that this little bistoury, a favorite of his, had been honed as sharp as he could make it.

“Syncope would be nice about now, Mrs. Aintree,” he murmured, when she moaned.

“What is syncope?” Olive asked through chattering teeth.

Suddenly Mrs. Aintree relaxed. Her shoulders drooped and her head drifted to one side as she fainted. “That,” he said.

He knew he had just a little pain-free time, so he worked faster, separating the two fingers and dabbing away, pleased with what he saw. He threw in several looping sutures, careful not to bind anything too tight, because there just wasn’t enough skin.

“My hope is that the area will granulate and eventually allow for skin growth,” he explained to Olive as he worked, talking her through what he was doing, simply to distract her from the blood. He had done this before with other pharmacist’s mates, but he had been teaching them. He just wanted Olive to bear up.