Doing No Harm (2 page)

Improbably, the two miles to Plymouth through still-busy streets cheered him. He was unused to the nearly forgotten pleasure of walking and walking in any direction, unimpeded by a ship’s railing. True, he had walked up and down the deck, mulling over this wound, or that amputation, or that scrofulous tumor until he either solved the problem or wore himself out. He knew exactly how many steps in any direction were his allotment on the average frigate of King George.

Satisfied, Douglas watched people at work, laborers passing, children arguing, women hawking fish. He saw ordinary life through new eyes, since it was not ordinary to him.

Once back in the Barbican, that rabbit warren of medieval narrow streets and buildings so old they leaned, Douglas went directly to Carter and Brustein’s counting office.

He was ushered in with all usual politeness and welcomed in a few minutes by David Brustein, looking older and grayer than Douglas remembered, but didn’t they all? David introduced him to his son, Solomon, a youth still, but evidently learning the family business that began when the late Jonathan Carter took on a Jewish clerk, name of Ezra Brustein.

“Yes, another generation coming up,” David said. “How may I help you, Captain Bowden?”

Only a bare half hour served to assure Douglas that his prize money earned through the years was chugging along sturdily and growing his funds at a pleasant rate.

David leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers across an ample chest. “I predict that you will be able to live quite comfortably on the interest alone, Captain, until you are at least one hundred and twenty.” He looked heavenward. “God willing.”

They laughed, the satisfied sound that men of means can make. Douglas left a few minutes later, his inside breast pocket heavy with sufficient for his needs until such time as he found a permanent home. He bid them a fond good-bye, still amazed, somewhere down deep, that a cooper’s son could have done so well. Maybe Napoleon had been good for something, even if the price had been extraordinarily high.

He arrived at the Drake in time for late luncheon, which he knew Mrs. Fillion had held back for him. With fewer officers lingering about the premises these days, she couldn’t afford to be less than obliging to latecomers.

After a peek in the empty cardroom, where he reflected on the death of the perpetual game of whist that had lasted through a generation of war, Douglas seated himself in the dining room. Mrs. Fillion started him with her excellent soup, hot and flavorful and worlds better than anything on board ship.

“Leek soup?” he asked, supremely pleased.

“I know how you men like it,” she said.

She hesitated a moment, and while she hesitated, Douglas gestured to the chair beside him. Mrs. Fillion was no lady, but she had manners.

“Well, Captain?”

“I turned him down.”

“I thought you might.”

He appreciated the kindness in her eyes. Maybe they understood one another. Mrs. Fillion had begun her career at the Drake as the scullery maid, and now she owned the property. He had joined the Royal Navy as a loblolly boy, feeding the wounded and emptying urinals. He knew how far from his station in life he had risen, compared to some of the titled officers he had served with. His modest status mattered nothing to Mrs. Fillion, after he saved her second son from pneumonia. Too bad that he died at Trafalgar, but that was war.

He could unbend with Mrs. Fillion. “Trouble is, I have no particular plans, beyond finding a place to live far from the ocean.”

She had the same look on her face as Captain Brackett when Douglas had mentioned his miniscule plans.

He waved it away and beat her to the point. “I do not require a view of the ocean to be entirely happy,” he assured her.

“We’ll see,” was all she said.

Chapter 2

A
fter a beastly night, tossing
around because the bed did not sway from side to side and his dreams had followed him to Plymouth, Douglas packed his duffle. He folded the letter of resignation he had written to the Navy Board and placed it carefully in his inside breast pocket. He looked around to make sure he had forgotten nothing and closed the second of several doors on his Royal Navy career.

Over supper last night, Mrs. Fillion had agreed to keep his sea trunk in her storeroom until such time as he found an agreeable place to live, at which event she would send it to him.

The storeroom had turned him melancholy, lined as it was with other men’s sea trunks, dead men who had left the Drake for the Channel and died in the service of poor King George.

“What should I do with these?” Mrs. Fillion had asked. “When a relative contacts me, I send them on, but it’s been years now.”

I could easily have been one of these
, he had thought, as his neck hairs did a little piping jig. No surviving family, no wife, and no children. By the hand of Providence, he had survived the war a generation long.

“Hold an auction, and give the proceeds to the orphanage here.”

She nodded. “I expect to hear from you in a month with a direction.”

“Aye, Mrs. Fillion,” he said and kissed her cheek. “Count on it.”

He caught the mail coach two doors down and did not look back as the coach traveled up the hill, away from the Barbican and the port that had figured so prominently in his life and in the life of the nation. Instead, he thought of Plymouth’s history as a Royal Navy port and wondered what future surgeons in future wars would think about this cheeky little town that held so many of his memories.

He couldn’t ignore the semaphores lining the coastal road. He remembered when the arms on the semaphores wagged their signals up the coast and eventually to London and Portsmouth, bearing news of ship returns and departures, battles won or lost. The arms hung idle now. What was so important in 1816 that needed more speed than a man on horseback or the mail coach?

Douglas leaned back against the lumpy horsehair cushion and closed his eyes, wishing he had wings to fly him away from the tug and pull of Plymouth and the Royal Navy he was so bent on leaving. He felt a deep hole in his heart and knew that he grieved for the loss of many friends and companions, and many ships, and so many dead that he could not save. He hoped his face did not show his sorrow. The mail coach was full, and he did not relish pitying looks.

He opened his eyes to see an old woman sitting opposite, her expression so kind. As he returned her gaze, she leaned forward across the narrow space separating them and patted his knee.

“I lost a husband and son to Napoleon,” she whispered, tears glittering in her eyes. “I think you have lost too.”

He nodded, unable to speak, but reassured in a way he had not imagined possible. She did not pity him; she understood him. Maybe there would be a village somewhere that would understand and let him just be its surgeon. He closed his eyes and slept, worn out after a sleepless night, and countless other sleepless nights stretching back twenty-five years. When he woke, a Catholic priest sat in her place.

London was much as he remembered it, busy and crowded, the streets reeking with the stink of horse manure. That was one virtue of the sea life—yes, the ships smelled to high heaven too, but it wasn’t horse poop.

He secured a hotel frequented by fellow officers and took his letter to the Navy Board. The clerk sighed to see it and looked at him over smudged spectacles.

“Captain, who in the world will take care of our sailors?”

“Someone other than I,” Douglas said cheerfully. “I take it you have been dealing with many of these?”

“The number is legion,” the clerk said. “Sir.”

He was sent to another office, where a second overworked man stamped approval to his desire to sever himself from the Royal Navy; then he sent Douglas on to yet another functionary intent upon changing his mind.

“Captain Bowden, you have no idea how many surgeons have decided to swallow the anchor,” Captain Bracewood told him. With reluctance, as though the stamp was too heavy to lift, he suspended it over Douglas’s written resignation. When one pleading look went nowhere, Bracewood sighed the sigh of centuries as he stamped, initialed, and dated the letter.

I am a free man
, Douglas thought, even as he tried to look properly sympathetic. “Look at it this way, Captain: perhaps there will be another war soon.”

That didn’t go well. Captain Bracewood’s face turned an amazing color not ordinarily found in nature, and he pointed to the door. Douglas snapped off as fine a salute as he had ever executed, did an about-face, and took the hint.

He stayed another week in London, visiting a tailor recommended by his last captain. He commissioned three new civilian suits, more shirts, some ordinary trousers, and a low-crowned beaver hat that he thought looked stupid. He was so used to the intimidation factor of his lofty bicorn that he felt like a midget from Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre, which he also visited. He kept one good uniform to be buried in eventually.

A morning at a balloon ascension was followed by a visit to the shabby sheds that housed Lord Elgin’s famous marbles. He stayed a long time, walking around the pieces and remembering a visit to Athens when the statues were still in their proper places high up in the Parthenon.

A night in Drury Lane Theatre observing the great Edmund Keane portray Othello had charged his tired brain but mainly served to remind Douglas of his own time spent in Cyprus, doing what he could during an outbreak of diphtheria. Most of his patients had fared no better than Desdemona, which meant he added those Cypriot corpses to his never-ending list when he was supposed to be sleeping.

His most enjoyable bit of tourism took him to the British Museum solely to look at poor dead Sydney Parkinson’s magnificent watercolors drawn in Australia and South Sea islands, during one of Captain Cook’s voyages. He had to ask a bored clerk to let him see the delicate little beauties, stored in the nether regions of the museum. Douglas admired the exquisite drawings and felt some of the tension leave his shoulders. They reminded him of better times at sea, including a lengthy stopover in Otaheite, with its lovely women. They were not the stuff of nightmare, thank the Almighty; quite the opposite.

When he collected his new clothes at the end of the week, Douglas had to agree that even if he didn’t cut a dashing figure—too many wrinkles, hair too gray at thirty-seven—at least he was comfortable, especially in the trousers. Who knew that really good tailors could actually add a little extra fabric to whichever side where a man needed more room?

Then it was back to the mail coach, with his new clothing and the old smallclothes and nightshirt folded carefully into an equally new traveling case. He wore one of his new suits, since his navy days were done. His boat cloak remained useful and would probably never wear out. Back went his one good bicorn into its hatbox, and everything else into his duffel bag. He wore the beaver hat but with regrets.

As usual, he carried his capital knives and medical kit in the same battered leather satchel, which he rested on his lap when the coach was crowded, and set next to him when it was not. All his worldy possessions except for a trunk and box of shells were right there on the Royal Mail, going who knew where.

The rain had let up. He sat back and enjoyed the beauty of an English spring as the coach rocked its way north. The swaying never bothered him, even though one of the passengers turned green and threw up into his hat. This misdemeanor set off a small child and required the coach to stop and the driver’s assistant to sluice out the interior. Such was travel.

It was pain in his hinder parts that finally caused Douglas to surrender several days later at Pauling, a village high in the Pennines. He got out, stretched, and looked around, wondering if this was the place for him. Under the discreet protection of his boat cloak, he rubbed his backside, thinking that perhaps he could stay here a few days and make a decision. He had seen a quantity of pleasant villages in the last few days; when had he become so picky?

Wisdom acquired during his journey encouraged him to seek a public house away from the inn where the mail coach stopped. He found such a place in the next block, which fulfilled the requirements of relative silence, and from the odors emanating from the open door, good victuals.