Doing No Harm (33 page)

As she hurried to open the package—her delight so abundant that he wondered when anyone had ever given her a gift—he teased, “What, you’re not going to say ‘You shouldn’t have?’ ”

“Not I,” she replied quite stoutly. “I love presents.”

She sighed when she pulled out the paisley shawl, which looked like butterflies exploding into the misty afternoon. Wordless, but with her eyes expressing every particle of her gratitude, she handed him her old plaid and draped the pretty thing around her shoulders.

“I don’t know where I will ever wear it,” she said, “but, oh, thank you.”

“Save it for the christening of the yacht that Homer Bennett, his crew—they’re coming—and a lot of Highlanders are going to build,” he replied, wondering if he had every seen anyone as beautiful as Olive Grant.

She took his hand in hers so gently that he had to remind himself to breathe. “Douglas, you have done the thing.” She leaned forward and rested her forehead on his arm. “Come by tonight for supper, and I will tell you all about Mrs. Fillion’s visit.”

“I have some ideas. I stayed at the Drake and her son told me she had gone north. He told me you would have a sur …”

He was facing Olive, but now she was looking over his shoulder at the street. “Oh, dear, it is William Lacey from the
Maid of Galloway
,” she interrupted, back to business as she took her old plaid from him and draped it over the paisley shawl. “He has worry in his eyes and I think your village needs you again. Poor Douglas. You’ll tire of us yet.”

Chapter 30

T
his was hardly the time to hear
about Olive’s visit with Mrs. Fillion, not with the first mate of the
Maid of Galloway
lying near death, his skull fractured when a mainmast yardarm gave way in yesterday’s squall and landed on him.

It was the kind of injury that Douglas hated because the outcome was invariably death. He drilled a few small holes in the poor man’s skull, grateful that he was unconscious, but doubting that he would ever wake.

“His brain will swell, and this might relieve some of the pressure,” he said to Rhona Tavish, who had not hesitated when Olive asked her to help. “It might not, too.”

“What do you do now, Mr. Bowden?” Rhona asked as she gathered his medical tools. He had already extracted a promise from her to wash them in scalding water, dry them, and return them to their proper places in his surgery.

“I will sit here with our patient. Thank you for your help, Mrs. Tavish,” he said as he pulled up the chair closer to the bed. “You didn’t flinch and you don’t look green.”

She allowed herself a tiny smile. “We all know that Miss Grant is too tender-hearted for this sort of thing. I was glad to help.”

After a few quiet words with the poor man’s wife, Rhona Tavish, exiled Highlander and a woman with her own problems, let herself out of the house. Douglas covered his eyes with his hands, an old sea habit, that gave him a second’s worth of privacy. He knew no one ever bothered him when he did that, and it gave him time to work through everything he had done and ask himself if there was something more, some little thing he could do, to change the probable outcome. He could think of nothing, but he kept his hands in front of his eyes a little longer, enjoying the peace.

When he removed them, Olive Grant sat on the other side of Brian Hannay’s bed. She did look a little green, but her presence gave him heart. Maybe she had known it would. He knew she had no love for the sickroom.

“Am I the last person you expected to see here?” she asked, studiously avoiding looking at the dying man, even as she held his limp hand. “You know I am not much good for the cutting part, but I don’t mind the vigil part. Does he have even a chance?” She said this last in a whisper, because Brian’s wife stood just beyond the open door, her children clutched to her.

He shook his head ever so slightly. “I’ll be here until the end.”

Olive reached across the bed, and he held her hand briefly, giving it a squeeze.

“Why are you here?”

“You need to know what Mrs. Fillion did.” She looked at the unconscious seaman then, her gaze so tender. “She said you did not leave her son, during all the struggle for his life.”

He shrugged and looked away. “He died ten years later at Trafalgar. I wonder how the whole turn of events did not render her bitter.”

“You don’t know mothers, do you?” she asked. “She told me how grateful she was that you gave the two of them ten more years that they would not have had otherwise. And she invested eight thousand pounds in the Telford Boat Works.”

“Such a sum,” he said, when he had fully absorbed the enormity of her gift. He leaned back in his chair, his eyes on Olive, who looked back with the same tenderness. “I merely did what any surgeon would have done.”

“I doubt that, Doug,” she contradicted. “You’re just the best man.”

She said it with no sentimentality, as though she merely stated a fact. Her face had gone a bit rosy because it wasn’t something a woman without a commitment, tie, or promise said to a man. In a sense, she had opened her breast, removed her heart, and held it out to him. He had never been so flattered in his life, and humbled, at the same time.

“I’m sitting here, staring at failure, and you say that.”

“You canna cure them all, Douglas Bowden,” she replied, her tone a little sharp now, which was precisely what he needed. She gestured to the man lying between them. “If by some miracle he survives, what then?”

He lowered his voice even farther. “He will never be Brian Hannay again, not the Brian they remember.”

“Does he know you are here?”

He shook his head.

“And yet you stay,” she said in a voice close to wonder now. “I stand by my statement.”

Why he should suddenly feel better, he could not have told anyone, let alone himself. He thought of all the dreary watches just like this one that only ended in death. On the surface of it, this was no different. In actuality, he felt at peace simply because Olive Grant stood the watch with him.

“Stay here, will you?” he asked, feeling needy.

“That was my intention. I have finished all my chores in the kitchen. Anything else can wait for morning.”

Speaking quietly, he told her of his trip to Plymouth and finding Homer Bennett, retired and disgruntled. “I didn’t even have to mount a major campaign to get him to agree,” he told the woman seated across from him. “I perjured myself and promised him a tidy house.”

“No perjury there. The wives of the men who have been cleaning out the shipyards have done duty on the house. I had some furniture and Lady Telford had more pieces.” She couldn’t help her chuckle, there on Brian Hannay’s deathbed. “Yes, Lady Telford! She has even been to the Hare and Hound for tea.”

“My word,” he said, sufficiently amazed.

“Of course, the chairs and table in the shipwright’s house are from that horrible Egyptian period; you know, the one following Lord Nelson’s Battle of Abukir Bay.”

“Horrors,” he said. “I was there at the battle, a newly minted surgeon, but none of us encouraged the furniture.”

She was ready to laugh, but Mrs. Hannay, her face ghost-white, her eyes huge in her head, tiptoed into the room, one baby in her arms and a serious little boy grasping her skirts.

Without a word, Douglas relinquished his seat and found a footstool for the Hannay’s son. He walked around the bed and pulled up a chair beside Olive.

Mrs. Hannay looked at her husband, gently touching the bandage on his head, and then turned her attention to Douglas. “T’captain said t’mast was unstable. Drat the man! Why did he sail?”

The question couldn’t be answered by anyone in the room.

Mrs. Hannay continued, as if she were talking to her man lying there before, the one who couldn’t speak and would likely not make sunrise. “Brian, ye told me there was something owt with the mast and yardarm, and that Captain swore he would take the
Maid
to Dundrennan for repairs next week.” She sobbed out loud. “Because there is no shipyard here!”

She bowed her head over her infant. Olive motioned to the little boy, who came around the bed and climbed onto her lap. Olive kissed the top of his head and held him close.

They sat in silence. The only sound was the suckling baby, once Mrs. Hannay opened her bodice, after a look of apology in Douglas’s direction. When the boy in Olive’s arms slept, she carried him through the open door and into the arms of an older woman. Olive returned, standing behind Douglas and resting her hands so gently on his shoulders. Too soon, she gave him a little pat and sat down.

When Mrs. Hannay left to put the baby to bed, Douglas turned to Olive. “A shipyard would have made the difference,” he whispered.

“It will for others,” she assured him in her forthright way. “Don’t borrow a problem that never was yours.”

She was right. “Easier said than done,” he admitted.

“Tell me more about Plymouth,” she said, her eyes on Brian Hannay, who had begun breathing deeper and deeper, and then stopped, before resuming more shallow breaths.

“He will do this now until he dies,” Douglas whispered. “Plymouth? The most amazing thing happened. I paid a visit to Carter and Brustein’s Counting House, wanting to shift around some funds. I told old David Brustein himself about the shipyard, and do you know, he is now an investor too.” He smiled. “Obviously as certifiable as Nancy Fillion. I asked him why, and he said that Jews know something about being driven from their homes and killed. Ten thousand pounds, Olive. Ten thousand! And now Nancy’s eight thousand, plus some of my own. I believe we can do this thing.”

She took his hand, which meant he had to lean closer and kiss her cheek.

“Stay with me, Olive,” he said again.

She stayed with him until after midnight and into the middle watch, that time when, from his experience with death, fiercely wounded men seemed to give up. At Douglas’s mental two bells, a pause, and two bells more, Brian Hannay’s shallow breaths turned into one long exhalation that went on and on until it wore itself out.

Douglas looked at his timepiece from habit. “I call it at two of the clock,” he said to Mrs. Hannay, who had returned hours earlier, both children asleep. “I am so sorry I could do nothing.” He gestured toward her husband’s wide-open eyes. “You or me?”

When she shook her head, he closed the first mate’s eyes. As the new widow began to shake and weep, Douglas took his prescription tablet from his satchel and wished he could brush down the hairs standing tall on his back at the fearsome sound. He scribbled date, time of death, and cause, signing his name. Mrs. Hannay could take this around to the minister when she felt up to it, and he would record in parish records the conclusion of Brian Hannay’s too-brief life.

His services were no longer needed. In mere minutes, the female relatives of Brian Hannay assumed command. He assured the widow that she owed him not a pence, which news brought relief to her ravaged face. He stood another moment by the still form, wishing with all his heart that men did not have to die this way. He did what he always did and planted a kiss on the man’s forehead.

“It would surprise you how many men called out for their mothers at the end,” he remarked to Olive, trying to sound casual, even as his heart broke for the thousandth time. “I always do that.”

Olive took his arm as a matter of course when they left the Hannay’s tidy home. He looked up at the moon, the same moon he had stared at from a frigate’s deck. It had become his habit to come on deck when he could, after death, to contemplate the moon and stars and know that other surgeons like him probably did the same thing, wanting to howl out their frustration at too much injury, not enough skill or medicine. He couldn’t have explained the moon’s cleansing power to even someone as bright as Olive Grant. Only other surgeons like him, working in a tiny sickbay with death all around, could understand the curative powers of the moon.

She tugged him toward his house, but he tugged in the other direction, until they stood at the entrance to the shipyard, tidy now, free of debris and other decade-long clutter. Both massive gates to the graving docks were closed, keeping out the high tide. All it wanted was a shipwright, and he had found one.