Doing No Harm (5 page)

“Can you spare a sheet?” the surgeon asked. “I have bandages, but I need more.”

Olive sent Maeve to the linen closet. In a moment, Olive was ripping one of her lovely sheets into three-inch-wide strips. Working with sure hands, careful not to hurt Tommy, Mr. Bowden bound the splints in place, the smaller one inside Tommy’s leg, and the longer one outside, going all the way from his ankle nearly to his armpit.

“I can’t move,” Tommy said, fearful again.

“Precisely,” Mr. Bowden told him. “After a few days like this, if all is well, I’ll get a smaller splint for the outside.”

“But if I can’t … how can I …” Tommy’s face grew red.

“Not a worry, lad,” the surgeon told him. “I’ll take care of you.”

Olive felt her eyes fill with tears then, because she knew this stranger, this confident, capable man she hadn’t known an hour ago, would do exactly that. She couldn’t help her tears then, but Mr. Bowden took it all in stride. He motioned her closer. She stood up and walked right under his outstretched arm.

He hugged her, and then Maeve on the other side, both of them in tears.

“Watering pots,” he murmured. “Just watering pots. Do all Scottish women remain firm in the crisis and fall apart later? I like that order of things.”

Chapter 5

N
o argument; he did like
that. How Miss Grant managed to smell so sweetly of vanilla scent, even after embracing as filthy a little boy as he had ever tended and in a room awash with blood, Douglas couldn’t have said. Long experience had taught him to take what came, with appropriate rejoicing.

She freed herself quickly from his impromptu embrace, but she smiled, so he knew he had not offended her. She touched his heart when she went to Tommy with a clean cloth dipped in warm water from the brass can and wiped his face, his dirty neck, and then his arms, crusted with what looked like fish leavings.
Tommy must be a dock boy
, Douglas decided.

“May I fetch him some food?” she asked.

Tommy’s eyes had been closing. At the word
food
, they opened and he nodded. Douglas saw the hunger in them, which even eclipsed the pain of a compound fracture.
How to do this without shaming the lad?
Douglas thought a moment.

“Tommy, I know you hurt, and I am going to give you a sleeping draught,” he began. “When did you last eat?”

Tommy glanced at his silent mother. “I don’t remember,” he said finally, the words dragged out of him.

Douglas considered his little patient, an independent being, unlike the men of the Royal Navy, who had to take what he dished out. He looked into the boy’s eyes again, and suddenly knew what he was doing. It had nothing to do with him but everything to do with his mother.

“I know you’re hungry, and so is your mam,” Douglas told him. “If you can stand the pain for a little while, we can probably convince Miss Grant to bring up some food for you and your mother. Draughts and food don’t mix well.”

Douglas saw the deep gratitude in Tommy’s eyes and found it difficult to continue. Good thing he needed to make a slight adjustment to the splint just then, an adjustment precisely long enough to allow him to collect his feelings.

“That’s better. Can’t leave these little things untended,” Douglas said finally. “If you eat something now, you and your mam, you’ll have to wait another hour before I give you that sleeping draught. Personally, I think that best, if you can manage the pain, lad.”

“I can manage,” the boy whispered.

“Excellent.” Douglas knew better than to look at Miss Grant, so he fiddled with that splint again. When he finally looked in Miss Grant’s direction, she was gathering up bits of bloody lint that needed no attention at the moment.
What silly beings we are
, he thought, grateful for human kindness.

Miss Grant was obviously made of sterner stuff than he had thought, considering her reluctance around blood. She turned to Mrs. Tavish. “I have so much to do. If my scullery maid and I bring some food up here for you and Tommy, could you feed him while we are busy elsewhere?”

Perfect
, he thought,
perfect. The two of them can eat without an audience watching them wolf down a meal
. “I will echo that, Mrs. Tavish.” Douglas indicated the scissors, suturing needle, bistoury, and catgut. “I’ll take all this downstairs while you eat and I wash my instruments. They must be cared for immediately. Will you help us by feeding Tommy?”

Mrs. Tavish nodded, her eyes less haunted. He saw something in them of anticipation and maybe even hope. He doubted supremely that anything good had happened to her in years.
Let it be a handsome bit of food, Miss Grant
, he thought.

Miss Grant clapped her hands. “Brilliant! Maeve and I will only be a few minutes. I so appreciate your help, Mrs. Tavish. Come, Maeve.” She left the room with her scullery maid.

Moved to the depths of his heart, Douglas gathered together the untidy pieces of his profession and put them in the leather satchel. “I’ll be up in an hour with that sleeping draught,” he said, and he left the room. He gave a nod to Mrs. Tavish. “Mind he doesn’t gulp his food. I’m relying on you.”

He saw the poor woman straighten her back. “I can take care of my son,” she said with a touch of pride, probably another emotion in short shrift in the Tavish household.

Grateful for the ladies, he went downstairs slowly. His heart softened again to see a dining room full of people eating, served by what looked like friends who had come to gawk a bit, then stayed to serve meals to Miss Grant’s customers, in lieu of her absence. He went into the kitchen in time to see the proprietor dabbing at her eyes as she loaded two plates with more food than either Tavish had probably seen in donkey’s years.

“A little less on each plate. I try not to overfeed starving folk,” he admonished. Strange that he thought he knew her heart already, and so he told her. “Miss Grant, I have not known you outside of an hour, but I am confident you will find a way to give Mrs. Tavish more to eat. I hazard a guess that you are probably even a bit of a bully, when it comes to nourishing the starving.”

She nodded, tears in her eyes. “Do you ever want to help the whole world, Captain?” she asked.

“Only my entire life,” he assured her. “We’ll start small here in Edgar.”

What in blazes am I implying?
he asked himself, horrified, as Miss Grant and Maeve covered the plates with cloths and left the kitchen. Hungry himself, he looked in the largest pot and salivated to see meat, onions, and potatoes in a brown sauce. He found a bowl and spoon and helped himself.

“You’re useful and you cook,” he said softly. He finished and left a handful of coins on the serving table.

He stayed in the kitchen, nodding to the earnest ladies serving Miss Grant’s noontime meals to what probably constituted her usual clientele, older men and women of modest means who relied on the capable woman with the soft heart. He didn’t see more than small coins left on tables.

Miss Grant and Maeve came into the kitchen in short order. She quickly put the scullery maid to work gathering dishes from the dining room and then sat down at the serving table. He watched her struggle, and then handed her his handkerchief.

She kept the cloth to her face for a long moment and finally blew her nose. “Mrs. Tavish couldn’t even wait until we left the room. Oh, Captain, she almost fell on that food!” She put her hand to her mouth until she gained some control. “And Tommy—he’s in such pain, but he is hungrier.”

“It’s a poor village,” he said.

He took a liberty and got another bowl from the cabinet. He filled it with stew and set it in front of Miss Grant. “You’re an excellent cook, by the way,” he told her.

“Just a simple stew for the middle of the week,” she replied, but he heard the pride in her voice. “I cook mainly for pensioners, Highlanders who aren’t too prideful, and the odd visitor who drops by and saves a little boy’s life.”

“So I am the odd visitor,” he teased.

She laughed. “Oh, you know what I mean!” Her face grew serious and she set down her spoon. “I do not know where you are going, Captain, but I do hope you can remain here a few days for Tommy.”

“Certainly I will,” he replied, startled that she would think anything else. She blushed and he realized she had never had any dealings with doctors. “It’s what sawbones do, Miss Grant,” he explained. “I would no more leave now than walk barefoot on spikes.”

“Thank you,” she said simply and picked up her spoon again.

“Highlanders?” he asked. “Here?”

“They were dumped on Edgar two years ago, and no one quite knows what to do with them. I feed some, but the others are so proud, or shamed.” She shook her head and he saw her frustration. “We don’t understand them.”

Dumped here?
Douglas realized he knew nothing about Scotland. He left Miss Grant to eat in peace and went through the dining room, looking for the coachman. One of the diners told him the man was long gone. His luggage had been left in the tearoom’s snug entry hall.

He stood for a long moment in the open door, looking at Edgar, with its lovely pastel-painted stone houses and businesses. Just beyond, he watched the fishing boats near the mouth of the River Dee, but on the seawaters of the Firth of Solway. He saw the ruined castle on the hill and a mansion a little closer to the village. A bell in the church tower rang two times. He watched a woman pruning her roses, nodding to a passerby on the other side of the low stone wall surrounding her tidy house. He looked up at seagulls wheeling overhead, then swooping down to the dockside to join the squabble of other gulls waiting less than patiently for the fishmongers to gut and clean the catch.

It was a village ordinary and poor, if people like the Tavishes existed, and pensioners found it cheaper to eat at Miss Grant’s Tearoom than manage their own kitchens. Probably things were better in the approaching summer, when little garden plots could be tended and provide some variety from what he suspected was a diet of oats and fish. Winter would be the hungry time, but he imagined this village at Christmas, when there would probably be carols sung and some kindness shown to the poor from those only slightly better off.

He shook his head. Edgar would never do, of course, but he wasn’t going to leave until Tommy was better. He would find a more prosperous village farther on. Still, the apple trees were in bloom in Edgar, and he did like the sound of the gulls. He saw little girls skipping rope and chanting a rhyme he couldn’t quite hear but which reminded him of his own dear sister, dead from childbirth, these ten years. He noticed other little girls standing in the shadows, just watching, not invited to jump rope. Perhaps they were Highland children.

Captain Douglas Bowden, surgeon, late of the Royal Navy, looked around and saw a simple village, one of thousands he had done his best to keep safe from Napoleon, and it touched his heart. “We did it for you,” he said to the distant little girls. “We would do it again.”

Thoughtful, he walked into the street and then back the way the coach had come. Tommy Tavish’s father still lay in a sodden heap, snoring off a monumental drunk as chickens pecked around him. Douglas came closer and toed him. Nothing. He squatted by the man’s head and put practiced fingers to a filthy neck, hunting for a pulse. He found it, and thought it almost a pity that such a man would sober up and likely get angry because his put-upon wife committed some non-existent infraction that warranted a kick or a slap, never mind that she was greatly pregnant. Punishment would follow dreary punishment until the end of their already sorry lives.

He stood up and found himself looking at whom he thought must be the constable, from the truncheon he carried. “What do you do with a man like this?” Douglas asked.

“Lately I just leave him in the street to come to himself. Sometimes it rains—this being Scotland—and I hope he will die of t’lung ailment.” The constable shrugged his shoulders. “A man can hope, anyways. Hasn’t happened yet, though.”

“I have to salute your plain speaking,” Douglas said. “Can a man like this be put away somewhere to rot?”

“Sadly, no,” the constable answered, with a sorrowful shake of his head. “He would have to kill someone …”