Doing No Harm (30 page)

And drat the matter, she was a reticent Scot, disinclined to ask advice of such an intimate nature from anyone. Just as well, because she could think of no one to confide in, the irony, of course, being that a woman ought to be able to talk to her doctor about anything.

The only solution in sight was to work harder. After the coach left, carrying away the man she adored, whose mind was completely occupied with finding a shipwright and saving Edgar, she went into the kitchen and banged away at bread dough. Maeve wisely made no comment.

Olive began to feel more satisfaction after lunch, in which she counted more Highlanders eating her beef roast, dripped pudding, and hot bread. The roast had been a gift from the butcher, who showed her the carbuncle Douglas had lanced only yesterday. “Look at that, Miss Grant,” he had said, until she was forced to look.

Once the butcher had left and relieved her of exclaiming delights over his carbuncle-free hand, her heart truly had lifted to see Joe Tavish hesitate at the door and then come inside, Tommy with him. He put down a conspicuous coin and asked for beef roast.

“I think our doctor overpaid me for a handful of sketches,” he whispered to her.

“He knows the value of your drawings, Mr. Tavish,” Olive assured him. “They will very likely tip the balance in favor of finding a shipwright.”

He nodded at that, shy now, but with a certain quiet pride that seemed to radiate from him. Olive felt certain such a feeling had not come his way in several years, if ever. She served father and son and calmed her heart.

Blissful afternoon. A quick visit to Mrs. Aintree found the widow sitting up and looking cheerful. Rhona Tavish had put the widow’s arm in a sling and sat by her bed, darning stockings.

“Joe and Tommy ate beef roast in my tearoom for luncheon,” she said.

“Our surgeon paid him well for those sketches,” Rhona said. She looked so kindly at Olive and taught her worlds about marriage. “I like to see them together, father and son. Nothing changes here right now, except that we’re breathing a bit easier, Miss Grant.”

Anyone would
, Olive thought,
who is not teetering continually on ruin
. She wished with all her heart that Douglas Bowden, Edgar’s “our surgeon,” knew what it was like to breathe easier.

All was equally well at the Hare and the Hound, with Brighid Dougall selling a fancy to a tall woman, all planes and angles. Brighid gestured her closer.

“Mrs. Fillion, this is the lady you have been inquiring about, Miss Olive Grant,” she said.

Olive curtsied, wondering where she had heard the name before. The unknown traveler took Olive’s hand in hers, to Olive’s surprise, but not her chagrin.

“Miss Grant, I was supposed to mail a box of sea shells from the Drake in Plymouth to a certain surgeon we know. My son reminded me that that I have not had a holiday since forever, and I am decidedly curious about what Douglas Bowden is doing. And so I am here.”

Ships pass in the night, Olive reminded herself. “He has mentioned you. We would let him tell you in person, but our surgeon has scarpered off back to Plymouth.”

Mrs. Fillion’s startled look was certain proof she was not a Scot. This was not a lady to hide her light under a bushel. “Well, take out me eyes, scrub them, and put them back in,” she exclaimed. She took a close look at Olive. “He wrote me that he looks more at the brown one than the blue one. Miss Grant, what is this man up to?”

“How is it that you know about my eyes?” Olive asked, her guard down as she listened to words spoken in the soft burr of the West Country, so pleasing.

“Miss Grant, he has written me all about you, and this village, and a sweet child named Flora, and … and …” She held up the little trinket she had just purchased and gave it a little shake. “… and Seven Seas Fancies. I have known that man for years, but not this man.”

Olive leaned closer. “Did he tell you about the man he struck with a stick and who thrashed him and gave him a black eye?”

“He didn’t!” Mrs. Fillion put her hand to her mouth.

Mrs. Dougall leaned over the counter and gestured Olive closer. “You should take her to your tearoom and give her an earful.”

“P’raps I should,” Olive said, curious to know what else Douglas Bowden had told this woman about her. And why should she seem so surprised about the man of action that everyone in Edgar knew? “Mrs. Fillion, may I offer you tea? My tearoom has turned into a factory for Seven Seas Fancy production, so you can meet Flora MacLeod and her confederates.”

She carried the box of seashells for Mrs. Fillion, who walked beside her with a traveling satchel to Olive’s tearoom, where Maeve was ready with green tea and biscuits.

“You’ll stay here too,” Olive said. “I don’t rent my rooms above, but I know it is quieter than the Hare and Hound. You will be my guest.”

Mrs. Fillion’s eyes were on the three little girls who had created workstations as soon as the luncheon eaters finished. They had looked up when Olive and Mrs. Fillion entered the tearoom. A quick glance satisfied them and they returned to aligning and threading the shells.

“Nonetheless, I will pay you,” Mrs. Fillion said, in a voice that brooked no disagreement. “You can call it my contribution to the drink and victual fund. Aye, miss, Douglas wrote me about that, too.”

Mrs. Fillion touched Olive’s hand. “I was wondering what he would find in Scotland.”

“He hasn’t found it yet,” Olive told her with a shake of her head.

“I rather think he has,” the woman replied. “Up these stairs?”

Midafternoon was Olive’s favorite time of the day. The luncheon rush was over, and whatever more modest items she had prepared for dinner—lately, these had been less modest—were either cooking in the oven or simmering on the hob. She had sent Maeve to the greengrocer with a list and a basket over her arm. After a shy introduction, Flora and the MacGregor girls had taken their own basket to hunt for driftwood. The tearoom was blissfully empty and the green tea the right temperature.

Mrs. Fillion understood the unspoken need to explain herself. She told Olive about the Drake, a three-story hotel and dining room located in Plymouth’s old Barbican, home to a generation and more of Royal Navy officers back from the sea, if only briefly. They both chuckled over the perpetual whist game that never seemed to lack for players.

“Was Mr. Bowden among them?” Olive asked.

“Never. He would watch and sit with fellow officers, but he did not play and he never gambled,” Mrs. Fillion said. “Douglas is a careful man.” She took a sip of tea and regarded Olive over the rim of the cup. “I cannot imagine him actually striking a man and engaging in any kind of rough and tumble.”

Her own tea grew cold as Olive told the interested woman of Tommy Tavish, bleeding with a compound fracture, carried by his mother, nine months gone with child, into the path of the coach.

“Those who saw it told me that Mr. Bowden was out of the carriage before it even stopped, tugging at his neckcloth to quench the bleeding.”

“That he would do,” Mrs. Fillion agreed. “I never saw a man quicker to react than our Douglas.”

She spoke with such a degree of familiarity that Olive wondered at the connection, then asked herself why it was any business of hers.

Mrs. Fillion seemed to know what she was thinking. She rested her hand on Olive’s for a moment, just a gentle touch. “Miss Grant, you must understand that these exalted officers were all my boys.” She swallowed and her eyes filled with tears. “They came, they slept in my hotel, they played cards, they drank, and they went back to sea where many died in battle or drowned in storms.”

She must have felt that the burden of those wartime years needed to be lighter because she laughed and shook her head. “And you tell me that Douglas beat the boy’s father? That is not our Douglas.”

Olive could tease in turn. She had to, because her heart was near to breaking, just hearing the wistfulness and affection in Mrs. Fillion’s voice for men gone too soon. “I rather believe it is the same man—tall enough, brown hair with considerable gray in it, brown eyes, and a flat East Anglia accent? He grinds his Rs?”

“The very one,” Mrs. Fillion agreed. “A true Anglian. The same one who assured me that he was going to find a village far from the ocean.”

“He will yet find it,” Olive said, keeping her voice light because she did not want to weep before this near-stranger. “He reminds me that all the good he is doing here will last until he feels satisfied that Edgar is a better place. Let me show you what this quiet man you speak of is doing.”

They walked to the dock and on toward the empty shipyards.

“Oh my,” Olive said as she looked upon a ragged little army busy cleaning the place, hauling off debris. Supervising the cleanup was the MacGregor girls’ father, dressed in rags but obviously in charge. He waved to her and walked in their direction.

“Miss Grant, our surgeon set me onto this work before he left.” He looked around and Olive saw the pride in his eyes, this man who had herded cattle in a Highlands glen and was now remaking himself. “Told’m we’d have it shipshape by the time he returned with a builder.” He touched his hand to his cap and returned to his equally shabby crew.

Olive took a deep breath. “And that quiet man you speak of has endowed my puny victual and drink account with enough funds to feed the workers and their families as a condition of their employment.” She dabbed at her eyes. “I was running out of my inheritance, seeing that the Highlanders dumped here and left to die at least had food.”

“I suppose I do know this side of him,” Mrs. Fillion said, her voice equally soft. “He saved my son Michael’s life, he did, when the boy developed pneumonia.”

“I’ll wager he did not leave the child’s side.”

“Not once, until he was breathing better.” Mrs. Fillion looked back where they had come. “My boy became a sailor, too, and those are Michael’s shells.”

“Please tell Michael how much we appreciate them,” Olive said.

“I wish I could. He died at Trafalgar,” Mrs. Fillion told her, holding tight to her hand. “My older son helps me with the Drake now. He stumps about on one leg, but he lives.”

The two women stood there with their arms around each others’ waists. They started back toward the docks, where the first vessel of the fishing fleet was tying up.

“All of your boarders—your sons?” Olive asked. Her heart was full as the entire cost of war landed on her. “You knew them better than most.”

“I felt that way about them,” Mrs. Fillion said, when she could speak. She tucked her handkerchief back in her sleeve. She stopped, faced Olive, and sat with her on a bench by the poorest end of town.

“I have never told anyone this,” she began and then looked down at her shoes. “I would walk the halls of my hotel at night. Well, the officers’ wives who were able to meet their husbands in Plymouth—I put them in quieter lodgings on the top floor and did not venture there. My, you can blush!”

Olive touched her warm cheeks. She had long resigned herself to spinsterhood, but she could see those rooms with closed doors. She imagined couples behind them, relieving themselves of worry and war, even if for a brief time, taking a moment to fall asleep in each others’ arms, and then leaving too soon, as duty called and the tides and winds made their own demands.

“I shouldn’t tease you,” Mrs. Fillion said. “I walked the other halls late at night, listening to sleeping men singing drunken songs, some of them. Others were in the grip of different nightmares. Some wept. Some seemed to be arguing with fate or the French. Douglas talked, quietly at first, and then louder. I think he woke himself up and managed to put himself back to sleep. Others did the same. There was no one to fix them.”

I touched his arm a few times and we kissed
, Olive thought,
but that is my memory and I will not share it
.

Mrs. Fillion looked up, her face so worn, telling Olive without words how much she must have cared for her self-declared sons of the Royal Navy through years of national alarm. It was Olive’s turn to take the woman’s hands in her own.

“I wanted to gather them up in my arms, every one of them, but it was not my place to do anything of the sort. I ran a hotel, after all, and not a hospital or a confessional. And so I wore myself out walking down my halls, cursing Napoleon and counting a cost so high that I could not see the end of it.”

They sat in silence then. Olive thought of all the ways that war had touched every small village and large city in Britannia. She thought of the indifferent cruelty leveled on the Highlanders, many of whose sons had served king and country through war. Her heart recoiled at all the evil in the world, and she was not surprised at her own weariness or that of the woman sitting beside her.

“We’ve pretty much forced Doug to pick up our burden here in Edgar,” she said, not caring that Mrs. Fillion heard the familiarity of his name. “All he wants to do is get away, and we haven’t let him. We are wrong, I suppose, but we are desperate.”

“He is used up,” Mrs. Fillion warned.

“I know, but our need is so great,” Olive said quietly. She waved her hand toward the shipyard, where change was coming. “He’ll be here with a shipwright, I have no doubt. There will be order, and he will leave us.”